My thoughts were racing as I continued to watch the fight rage outside. Bitch was slamming and mauling Hookwolf repeatedly with her empowered dogs, and Hookwolf kept trying to dodge away from them and towards the dog that Bitch was riding. They essentially seemed to be running around the block opposite me, and I wouldn't be surprised if the PRT and Protectorate were on their way by now. If the Wards came here it'd be much worse because Gallant and Vista could probably detect my presence, but I thought that unlikely given the violence of the fight. I was in high-stress thought mode, and I dumped all my specialisations in stealth technology.
The key aspect was to avoid hiding in a way that made it obvious I was trying to hide, and was also extremely quick to implement. Right now, the biggest risk of discovery was from noise, so I pushed my tinker power for noise reduction technology. The solution came quickly to me - I could use a similar technique to that which allowed me to make my bed to make noise cancelling blocks of foam out of the still remaining chunks of metal, which thankfully I could do extremely quietly and rapidly, given that I already knew how to make it with even more rudimentary tools than I had at the moment (from fugueing to make the hair-removal machine). My hands twitched rapidly with the tools I had and some remaining metal - there wasn't that much left now but foam was extremely low density - and went to work, nerves high. Within barely a minute or two (thank you, Tinker 10 rating, you are serious and total bullshit) I was carefully placing potent sound cancellation foam all across the walls of my surprisingly cozy tinker lair that I really hoped would not get pulped along with me inside it. Of course, I was not going to be reckless with noise - I guessed that Bitch's dogs might have various enhanced senses and I didn't want to tip them off.
I went back to anxiously watching the fight outside, which Bitch was clearly winning by this point. Two of her dogs had managed to pin Hookwolf to the ground and his blades were being smashed apart faster than they regenerated, and he simply couldn't get up at all. Eventually he fled much further down the street the moment Bitch realised he would do so if released, and she walked over to the building I guessed was the dogfighting ring she was after. About 20 minutes of anxious waiting later, and Bitch was carefully moving bedraggled, terrified dogs into a van she'd apparently driven up to a couple minutes walk down the road. She loaded all the dogs in the van, and I seemed to be in the clear, but as she was moving the last dogs to her transport, one of her main three (the one missing the eye, which if I recalled correctly, was Angelica) walked over to the door of my little warehouse and whined at it while I desperately tried to make shooing motions with my hands at her through the keyhole (which obviously didn't work, I was just panicking). For a second I thought Bitch wouldn't notice, but she's a pretty attentive person when it comes to dogs and came over to my tinker hideyhole to see what was up, and looked kinda pissed that her dog was upset.
Sweating profusely and uncomfortably from anxiety, I ran over to the bed and hid under the cover, which obviously wouldn't work but it's kind of my natural response to personal space being violated so I did it anyway, Bitch barged the door open and stomped over to me while my eyes went everywhere in the room except at her and I froze (again!) from fear. Of course, I knew logically that she probably wouldn't actually physically hurt me, but that does not change my instinctive reaction to people acting in a domineering manner around me in my personal space and so, with Bitch hovering over me aggressively and me in a state of unmitigated terror, she almost growled at me the question "Did you hurt the dogs?", to which I managed to squeak out, just barely, a "No" in response.
She didn't stop frowning, but she did frown less with a muttered "Good", which I considered a reasonable start, somewhere between the other thoughts that were just internal screaming. She didn't move to leave though, and started moving around the place, and I was too afraid to ask her to stop while she explored my home. She moved to touch one of the bits of metallic enzyme emulation, but I managed to squeak out a "don't, that's not safe" before she gave herself blood contamination or something like that. That stuff was seriously dangerous without appropriate tools to contain and manipulate it. That did remind me, I needed a way to safely use it in my body which required at least two things - sterile tools and a blood vessel integration component that would let testosterone through to be processed but not allow any metallic compounds to leak into the bloodstream.
Before I could dive too far into thinking about technology though, Bitch moved to leave. I decided (somewhat impulsively) to give her some information on Coil's power because honestly she and the Undersiders (most especially Tattletale, in my view, given the nature of her recruitment) deserved to know and frankly I like talking about information I have to other people. So I told Bitch, quietly and without looking even near her, "Coil has a power in which he has two timelines and drops one at will, and you should probably tell Tattletale that if you meet her or whatever, cus it's useful".
Her only response was "What do you want?" and a deepening frown because I'd apparently forgotten about her feeling like stuff comes with obligation. The answer of course, being "I like sharing information, probably way too much for my own good sometimes", which simply got a grumbled "too much like Tattletale" and her finally leaving my hideyhole with her three main dogs and driving off her van - presumably to a shelter. I slumped and my heart stopped racing quite so fast, sighing in some amount of relief.
Not that I was out of danger - far from it - but the immediate threat was passed. And so, the depression sank in again, and it took all my willpower not to just flop on the bed and mindlessly run through the tinker blueprints in my head while feeling like shit. But I could now tinker again in peace, and I pushed through and completed the metallic, structural enzyme emulation material, which took another three hours in fugue - this was highly complex structured nanomaterial being created with literal fucking wrenches, after all, and there's only so much even a Tinker 10 power can do to enable that ridiculous level of disparity in scale and precision. Carefully coming out of fugue with a container with an indented biohazard warning symbol in one hand and a wrench in another, I then moved onto the next problem with a specialisation of "biochemical filtration", which apparently let me use even more structured metal to prevent the traversal of any enzyme-replicating metallic structures but allowed standard carbon-based molecules through. Another hour in my tinker fugue and I had a tube with the ends enclosed - about the size of the main artery in my right arm - containing a powder of metal-emulated aromatase (the hormone converting testosterone into estrogen).
One more shift into even a low-level Biointegration specialisation and I had my hormone conversion module - I still needed sterilisation though, and for that I converted some of the lasers in the hair removal machine to UV light and was finally, finally ready - with a sterilised scalpel and highly improvised metal-derived bandages and stitches (a simple technology from the biointegration specialisation, apparently). I went into fugue to perform the surgery, and this time I actually screamed in pain for several minutes (a worrying thing but the sound damping I'd placed around earlier should have prevented anyone more than a few metres away from hearing), eventually dropping out of fugue with a metal bandage wrapped tight around my right arm. As darkness approached and I grew tired, I felt satisfied even if the thing I was satisfied about was successfully completing sketchy, back-alley tinkertech surgery on myself.
I curled up on the bed and despite being exhausted and hungry, despite being alone on a completely different (and distinctly more depressing) world, despite the impending apocalypse and constant threat of enslavement and murder as a independent queer tinker, I managed to fall asleep with the first smile on my face since getting here.
[end of chapter - nya~]