[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
I woke up tense, just after noon, and dragged myself out of bed. My clothes were pretty disgusting and uncomfortable at this point but I put them on anyway - I needed to do something about getting new clothes and a way to wash them - then remembered the debit card and pin I took from a Nazi yesterday and went to leave after getting some water to drink from the taps in the warehouse.
However, as I looked out of the keyhole, I saw flashing lights and several PRT troopers patrolling the area next to vans. Shit, I thought to myself, how the fuck did they find me already! Heart racing, I ran back to my bed, lay down, and tried to think more about the situation before I got distracted by some other thing or just froze. They hadn't immediately barged in, which implied that either they didn't know I was there, or they were waiting for me to come out and talk to them. Or they thought I was too dangerous to approach without cape backup, I grimly noted, remembering the adage of "don't attack a tinker in their workshop".
I hated when people wanted to barge into my personal space, even if they wasn't strictly aware I was here, and I was already starting to panic from feeling trapped. I knew I had to get in and out somehow without being noticed, but I'd forgotten to make my tunnel drilling machine dig in a direction that would make it build an escape tunnel, dammit Zychi, so all I had on that front was a 100m deep 45 degree tunnel into the Brockton Bay aquifier (which come to think of it, was a problem I really had to deal with, I doubted it would be dry that far underground). Hey, at least I had massive piles of elemental resources now. I almost went to disable the drilling machine but then realised that if they detected me via electrical demand or seismic activity then they would definitely realise someone was here right now if something changed. Which meant I really needed some way to get out of here without being noticed. It didn't need to be too quiet - thank fuck for the soundproofing I added - but it needed to be doable with the admittedly massive piles of elements I now had from the ground.
Midway through thinking about the problem I realised that if the PRT knew of a new tinker, that also meant Coil knew, which was really fucking bad. Whatever the PRT had in store for me, Coil was worse. Who knows how many of those moving around on the street outside were his agents! Trying to suppress my rising panic, I continued thinking on the immediate problem to avoid just shutting down again. I could push a stealth specialisation and leg it, but there was only so much I could carry and I'd be pretty upset if I lost all the resources I had just accumulated from the ground below. It was an option I seriously considered, given the situation, but I was sure I could do better than that given the chance.
I wracked my brain, significantly less effectively than usual due to my tension, and realised that leaving the warehouse didn't require going through the door. This was Worm. This world had bullshit multidimensional capabilities, which meant, for me, a good option was pocket dimensions. I switched my specialty to 3 charges of Pocket Dimension tinker (now I was stealing Toybox's shtick instead of Coil's! hah!), and 2 charges of Scrapyard tinker, then gulped at the power requirements. While pocket dimensions took no power to maintain and only a trickle to open a Doormaker-style portal to, the burst of energy needed to make one in the first place was absolutely fucking obscene.
But I had an idea. I now had massive piles of resources - in raw element form anyway - which I could use to generate power. I was thinking some kind of graphite-based supercapacitor (I had enough carbon for a pretty massive one) attached to a hydrogen-powered fusion reactor (since I was a tinker and that meant I could apparently make nuclear fusion happen from mostly-raw elements as a construction base, and once again I was reminded of the sheer level of bullshit involved), and attached to a pocket dimension creation and access device. The fusion reactor itself would take a concerning amount of electricity to jolt it to start by electrolysing some water into fuel - which was bound to be noticed - along with the heat inherent to transmission of the kind of power I was considering messing with here.
As such, I wanted the pocket dimension generator and access device available first, before running through and generating power. Shifting my specialty over to Nuclear Fusion and Scrapyard, I estimated the resources to build a primitive fusion reactor and compared it with the pocket dimension initialisation device. I had a problem - insufficient processors. I had these absolutely wonderful CNC processors, but I needed at least two to manage both the fusion reactor and the dimension generator (the access device was simple enough that I could manually mess around with the coordinates and it automatically anchored to Earth's rotation unless I designed it not to - thank you, shard-bullshit-powered-tinkertech!), but I only had one available processor, from my customised CNC machine that I had been using to construct drill bits beforehand.
I considered giving up and trying to sneak out - I really wanted to stop panicking so badly, and those PRT troopers seemed perfectly content to continue patrols until something came up - but frankly my desire for a personal space that no-one could touch was really pushing me to make a pocket dimension rather than running. Within a few minutes I had come up with a solution - if a sketchy as fuck one - that involved me charging up a graphite-based supercapacitor with the fusion reactor, then taking out the chip, reprogramming it as fast as possible, putting it in my pocket dimension initialiser, and dumping the supercapacitor's output into that as fast as possible.
The final part of the (very rushed and questionably safe) plan was figuring out how exactly to reprogram that chip quick enough. I dumped two charges into Pocket Dimension tinkering, and 3 into small-executable programming, and pushed my power for a program that could manage the pocket dimension device I wanted to build, a program structure in my mind that I would remember details of so it would come back to me quicker. I didn't even need to write it to be able to pull it back from my power with just a rough outline, as far as I could tell.
And so, I went to work building devices in tinker fugue, my hands nearly a blur and my last, custom, CNC machine running at full pelt. Silicon carbide and graphite casings around the fusion core, disassembling the custom CNC machine for pocket dimension machine frames, and ripping some bits of sheet metal off the warehouse ceiling, and within three hours - at about mid afternoon - I had completely done making all the components. The fusion reactor would probably only survive a few hours, but it only needed to last a few minutes. The supercapacitor was sufficiently simple that it would actually work fine for an extended period of time. The pocket dimension generator was essentially a one-time device that would probably explode if I tried to use it a second time. I had only enough carbon left to construct a miniature battery-like supercapacitor in my handheld pocket dimension opener that would hold enough charge to last for millions of portal openings (pocket dimensions had extremely low energy costs for opening portals to and from the universe they were constructed from).
With some trepidation, I started the electrolysation process of incoming water, feeding hydrogen into my hack-job of a fusion reactor. I pulled the lever, and a shuddering jolt of electricity exploded through the wires, melting the cable I had used to initiate the fusion process, emitting a loud bang. Fuck, they probably heard that.
Perspective - PRT Trooper Michaels
Michaels had had a fairly uninteresting patrol. Orders from above stated that this was one of five locations potentially home to the tinker laboratory of the biotinker, codename Appleseed, around which extra patrols had been assigned. So far, it had been an uneventful afternoon - just how he liked it. Whenever things got "interesting" around parahumans, he mused, we tend to be the ones to have to deal with it.
Of course, that was when he heard a shuddering bang from within a warehouse across the street, and gruffly talked into the radio "Officer Jones, reporting an unusual noise from warehouse 5, sounded like some kind of explosion, sir". The response he got was simple and professional. "Orders are to stay back and do not engage. That is likely a tinker workshop. I've already notified our superiors, the Protectorate should be here to handle this in about 8 minutes."
"Thermals indicate a high temperature in the warehouse. Continuous, not decreasing. It seems like something high-energy is going on, sir", he curtly stated. Something was definitely going on - the explosion hadn't been the end of it - and continuous maintained high temperature was something the Protectorate definitely needed to know about. For now, though, his job was done, and he ran into the PRT van that had brought him here to move further away in case of another explosion or something more serious.
Perspective - Zychi in the warehouse
c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, I thought to myself, pacing and jumping and generally being a fidgety, anxious mess, hurry up and fill the fucking capacitor already. It had been about 3 minutes, and the capacitor was about 95% full. 20 seconds later and the indicator light turned green. I ran over to the fusion reactor, slammed the extremely hot "off" button and ripped out the processor as fast as possible without bending any of the legs. Then I half ran, half bounced over to the program, heart racing, instinctively pushing my specialty charges to those that I required and my fingers were a painful blur as I punched in the program on the chip programmer as fast as I possibly could, the one I'd designed to be fast to enter, and it took almost 4 minutes. I could hear the faint sound of a motorcycle approaching - Armsmaster, I noted grimly - as I ran to my pocket dimension machine and nearly broke the damn CNC processor putting it in the slot I made. I felt like I was going to fucking explode, as I finally heard Armsmaster stop right outside the door. My thoughts were an even more jumbled mess than usual, as I heard a gruff "Open the door, or I will enter myself in 10 seconds."
fuck fuck FUCK where did I put the button on this FUCKING THING I half-muttered to myself in blind panic.
Five seconds later (it was not 10, Armsmaster lied to me!), and I heard a resounding crash on the other side of the warehouse as the door folded in the face of Armsmaster's admittedly pretty cool armoured boot. And then, groping my hands around the pocket dimension initialiser, I found the button and absolutely slammed it as hard as fucking possible. A deep rumble permeated the machine and the warehouse, as Armsmaster asked in his almost expected manner "Come quietly for a chat with the PRT. We will be forced to treat you as a villain, Appleseed, if you fight me", while marching toward me, every one of his thuds on the warehouse floor reminding me of the deep shit I was currently in.
I almost froze, but this time my flight response won out as the indicator on my handheld pocket dimension remote turned a blessed, blessed fucking green, and I pointed at the floor next to me, hit the button to see the most wonderful sight this entire morning - a purple-edged, swirling portal - on the floor big enough to fit me through at full height. Armsmaster reached his arm out towards me when I literally jumped straight into the portal and slammed the close button on my remote, hitting the floor of my pocket dimension on my arse with a muted, mildly bruising thud.
Lying down, I shook violently. That level of anxiety is not good for anyone. My thoughts were fuzzy and fragmented, my body was weaker than noodles, and I could swear my heart was still running at some 180 beats per minute. But I was safe. I was in my own space. No-one could attack me, not here.
The size of the thing was a roughly 10mx 10m x 10m cubic area - my shard ensured that pocket dimensions I constructed had air in them (unless of course I used more advanced tinker blueprints and specified otherwise), and the edges were a rich, deep purple that made me happy to look at, and didn't hurt my eyes. But I couldn't collapse yet, not really. I needed to grab my resources from the warehouse that used to be my personal space but got trampled all over by the PRT and Protectorate. Luckily I didn't need to actually go there myself, I could just think with portals, so to speak.
Still shaky from the adrenaline, I began fiddling with my portal opener, experimentally trying out my initial coordinates. The portal opener allowed me to control the portal size, which meant I could make a microportal to look through before doing anything - which is what I did. I could see Armsmaster examining at the remains of the CNC machine and the disabled fusion reactor, and in a bit of minor spite at him basically shoving his way into my personal space I opened a portal right beneath the reactor, let it fall through, then immediately shrank the portal to see Armsmaster's irritated face. It didn't take me long to drag my bed into the pocket dimension along with the driller and elemental separation device, and the remaining resources from it (which made it mildly cramped in here but I liked it that way).
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
This was extremely thrilling to write, and hopefully it's decent to read too :3