CLANG.
A forty-pound chunk of steel slammed into the ground, still smoking at one end where I'd sliced through it with a plasma torch. I turned off the white-hot flame and pushed up the welding mask to let the somewhat cooler outside air blow through the tarpaulin-covered area that had evolved into my workshop over the past few weeks. The scrapyard tended to be a quiet place for most of the time, exceptions being on delivery days when thousands of tons of assorted metal were dumped in a huge pile in the center, workmen swarming all over to sort the stuff into different piles.
Today was one of the more quiet days, and I saw Bill lounging about with several of his employees on top of stacks of car transmissions, trading jokes and cigarettes. Maybe he felt my gaze, because he waved me over, patting a flat-topped chunk of machinery next to him.
I set down the plasma torch, checking that it was turned off before I left it alone. "Dave!" Bill exclaimed as I walked over. "Allow me to introduce you to these fine gentlemen!" He pointed around the circle. "That's my grand-nephew, Samson." A tall, burly man, arms laden with tattoos, nodded. "—Next to him is Adam, he also works in the steel mill sometimes." Adam was a middle-aged black man, bald as an egg with a thick beard. He waved hello. "And then there's Jake- he works the crane when we need it." Jake was the smallest, with carrot-colored hair and a deluge of freckles. "And last but certainly not least is our resident wise guy, Jason." Jason was around my age, I suspected. He also outweighed me by somewhere between a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds, all of it muscle.
"Pleasure." He rumbled, and extended a hand to shake. I took it, and he was at least merciful enough not to break my fingers, though it was a close thing. I sat down on the indicated engine block as the conversation resumed— something about football.
"Dave!" a Bill called abruptly. "Who are you rooting for this weekend?"
I didn't know there was a game. I signed. Who's playing?
"He didn't know there was a game." Bill translated. There was a round of good-natured laughter, and the six of them set about the task of explaining the intricacies of professional football fanhood. It took a little bit of time, with Bill providing translations for my signs, but the others caught on faster than I would have believed, and even as I learned about football, it turned into a game of "guess what Dave is saying."
"Want one?" Jason asked me at one point. I looked down to see him holding a cigarette out to me. I hesitated.
"Once won't kill ya." Bill advised. "Just don't make a habit like the rest of these idiots." That got a laugh from Samson, Jason, and Adam, all of whom had a lit cigarette between their lips.
"I took the cigarette with great care, holding it like I was afraid it would burn me. Jason applied his lighter to one end, and I touched it to my lips and inhaled. It was like taking a deep breath of a recently-used fireplace. Hot, choking gases flowed down my throat, and I doubled over, coughing.
"Jason chuckled. "You'll get used to it."
Not sure if I want to, I signed, a little clumsily since I was still holding the cigarette.
"Fair enough. You gonna finish it?"
I shook my head, and he hooked the cigarette back out of my fingers and took a long pull. "You're in college, right?" he asked.
I nodded.
"And you're in Brockton for an internship that the boss says isn't going so well, yeah?"
I nodded again.
"So why don't you go to the city, find some friends? Why's a smart kid like you hanging around in a scrapyard?"
How would I talk to them? I signed. I pointed at the whiteboard I sometimes still used. That's too slow for a conversation.
"I dunno. But it oughta be more fun than staying here, with whatever project you're working on."
I like working on this stuff, I signed.
"He shrugged. "Your call, I guess."
The sound of a truck backing up cut through the small gathering, and everyone but me groaned and stood up.
"Damn truck is late again." Bill grumbled. Then, louder, "alright, you loafers! Go do your job!"
Everyone stood up and headed off to the loading bay, where a new load of scrap had arrived. Bill clapped me on the shoulder as he moved off to supervise, leaving me standing in an empty circle of flat-topped machinery. For a second, I had the reckless urge to chase down Bill and explain everything. But it passed, and I realized what a dumb idea that would be. I barely knew these people, why on Earth should I trust them? Every cape and non-cape knew that your real name and face were a terrible weapon to give your opponents. Bill knew my name, and where I worked. It could be worth his while to ask a few questions back with my boss if a villain would pay, especially once I got into the Protectorate. Feeling somehow more alone than I had before the gathering, I headed back to my work space and started up the plasma torch once more.
The machine I had started on in the last few weeks was coming together. For the moment, only the lower half was even near to completion— Four wide sets of treads, one for each corner. They were driven by an equal number of powerful electric engines, with heavy-duty suspension and hydraulic brakes. The power supply was half-done— twenty rechargeable car batteries hooked up together into the beginnings of the autonomous navigation system I was devising. I was still working on how I'd disguise what I was making from Bill, so for the moment I'd just told him it was a private matter. Covered in a thick sheet every night, it could have been anything, and I trusted that politeness would overrule curiosity for a paying customer.
The tricky part at the moment was the turret. I'd need something nonlethal, obviously, but I also wanted enough power to get a villain who wasn't impressed by normal weapons. So I had settled on a variable-input system. Using a system of magnetic coils, the main gun would accept damn near any solid object of the right size, and could propel it from anywhere between the speed of a baseball thrown by a third-grader up to and including Mach 3. The downside of such a mechanism was, of course, its complexity. Tinker devices are notorious for being high-maintenance, so this went double for my new system.
So I armored it. While it would have been easier and lighter (and way cheaper) to use simple aluminum or low-grade steel, I hand-cut every single piece of the gun's action from high-carbon steel, mixed with a few other elements in order to create an alloy of my own devising. It was a weird, eerie experience as every pice slotted home flawlessly. Usually even the best-machined parts need a little cajoling to stick in place, but every single component slid home like it had been done a thousand times before. Almost in a trance, I worked until I heard the good-natured joking of Bill and his crew as they returned from the loading dock to clock out. I slid the cloth back over the Thunderstorm Mk. 1 and set about putting my tools away.

The following day saw me back in Lesterton's office with my laptop open while he bullied, begged, and bargained his way into a variety of smaller shipments of processed scrap to feed the company's smelters.
"—Five thousand is perfect. Pleasure doing business." Lesterton set down the phone for the fourth time in an hour and leaned back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. "God, what a bunch of idiots!" he groaned. He had all of four seconds to relax before the buzzer went off on the phone once more. "What?" he demanded, holding down the intercom button.
"Mr. Lesterton, the tour group is here." Mrs. Temmell, the secretary, said.
"The tour-" Lesterton cut himself off and rubbed his forehead. "Dammit. I forgot I'd agreed to lead that stupid tour." He heaved a sigh. "Dave, go fetch me a coffee and meet me in the foyer. Grab one for yourself as well."
I nodded and headed off at a quick pace. When I got back to the foyer, it was crowded with old people. I counted around twenty, with a mean age of, say, sixty. Lesterton was in one corner of the room, speaking in quick and urgent tones to Mrs. Temmell.
"Dave, good." He said, snagging the coffee. "These are all managers of metal working businesses in Boston."He explained, sotto voce. "They're considering buying pre-smelted metal from us to ship it into Boston, where the environmental laws are a bit stricter. During negotiations, I offered to give them a tour of the facility. Not my best idea."
I nodded, and he clapped me on the shoulder. "Send me more like this one." He said to Mrs. Temmell. "No whining, no questions, just does what he's told." Without waiting for a response, he turned to address the crowd at large.
"Ladies and Gentlemen!" he called. The group of gossiping geriatrics quieted and shuffled around to see who was talking. "We'll be starting the tour now," Lesterton continued once the sound had died down a bit."Since we're heading out to the main smelting floor, I need everyone to take a hard hat before we set out."
"There was another commotion as the hard hats were passed out. Lesterton gave me a shove, indicating I should go around and make myself useful. I helped pass around hard hats, then put one on myself. Although I couldn't say I had much fondness for the leadership of Empire Recycling, I was curious to see where the real work happened.
"We passed through a series of reinforced doors plastered in the usual warning signs, before passing out into the huge open space that was the smeltery. For safety reasons, Lesterton explained, the tour wouldn't be going down to the main floor itself, where workmen scuttled back and forth among the tangle of conveyor belts, smelters, and pipes. It was hot and stuffy, with the constant, loud drone of the machinery as it ground away through copper, aluminum, and a round dozen other metals I could name.
"Watching the smeltery work gave me an odd feeling. I saw the processes in my head: the kinetic action of the conveyors, the heat-convection of the furnaces that blazed. New ideas and designs poured into my head like the Niagara pouring into a bucket, and I winced. Here, I could readjust the furnace to power the conveyor belts with waste heat. A system to increase the heat tolerance of the runoff grooves by 182%. Increase the impact resistance of the no. 12 sorter by 34%, adjust the alloy mixture to include 0.003% more chromium. Step down voltage on the M57 electric motor to reduce waste heat and decrease belt wear by 4 mm 14WIncreaseaemngularmomentumofthedrivebeltby14radianspersecondformaximized…
Lesterton snapped his fingers under my nose. "Hey, cut that out."
"I blinked, to see most of the tour group staring at me. "Is he all right?" someone at the back asked.
"I looked at Lesterton and gave him a nod. "He's all right." Lesterton said. He gave me a false smile and patted my back. "Dave here is a part of our disability outreach program, he's on an internship as my assistant. He has these attack sometimes, but he's otherwise a very good helper. Why don't you head back to the office for a bit, Dave."

"Humiliation warred with anger, but I did my best to not let it show. I gave Lesterton a curt nod and headed back to the office. Inside, I saw his computer still turned on. In his haste to go to the tour group, he'd left it unlocked. I sat down in the chair behind the desk and looked at the spreadsheets and emails it displayed. Pretty much all of them weren't of much use to me, I didn't have the skills to hide an order of pure platinum or something inside his own work. But I could hope that my Tinker ability gave me just barely enough tech-savviness to use the computer as a stepping-stool to the larger company network. After a good deal of hunting around inside the servers, I found the connection between the company's network and the computers that sorted the scrap and sent it to the smelters. I made a few adjustments, and left an instruction that for every five hundred batches of whatever the smelters were making, there would be one batch of my own, custom alloy. I gave it a rarely-used area as the collection point, where the ingots of finished metal would be deposited for me to ship out when needed.
"I suppose what I'd done was stealing, but I was too angry to really care much about that. As far as I was concerned, it wasn't going to steal too much of their profits, and I was entitled to a little bit of compensation for what they'd put me through. Besides, if they ever did catch me, they'd probably thank me— the alloy I'd designed was lighter than aluminum but ten times stronger than steel. It would be perfect for the Thunderstorm Mk 1. All I had to do was get it shipped from the warehouse here to Bill's scrapyard.
"I put everything on the computer back where it belonged, and resumed my seat, taking up my laptop. A few minutes later, Lesterton reentered the room and flopped into his chair. "God, what a bunch of morons!" he sighed. "I set all this up for them, busting my ass for weeks to try and get them to bite, and all I get from the lot of them is 'we'll think about it'. Bunch of self-entitled shitheads, I hope the next Endbringer goes to Boston."
"I raised my eyebrows at that, and Lesterton saw my look. "His eyes narrowed. Look, kid, you take what the world gives you. The truth is, I'd be better off if Boston got hit by an Endbringer, so that's what I'm gonna hope for." He sighed. "You couldn't have had your little fainting spell somewhere else, could you? I had to take another twenty minute just talking about the stupid diversity program because of that."
"The last bit of guilt about stealing company property left me. I shrugged at Lesterton and smiled. I'll work on it, I wrote.