[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm - cw ableism (basically the kind of people applying to be hired thugs aren't exactly part of the neurodivergency movement, who knew?)]
Pulling myself up from the floor of my cozy, comfy, safe pocket dimension, I moved to lie on my bed and start thinking about how to deal with things. Given the way shard powers worked, I knew that even my low level interdimensional ability (with my pocket dimension) would be a serious boost, but every time I opened a portal for any extended period of time I was making myself vulnerable to attack. Perhaps I was paranoid (OK, I was definitely paranoid) but I had zero doubts the PRT would willingly smash their way in here given the chance, let alone villains or Cauldron. I was feeling vulnerable at the moment, much more than usual, and I was half-tempted to just hide in here forever, except I did unfortunately need to eat, and I wanted to actually effect change on the world.
To get food and clothes and a laptop, I would have to open a portal somewhere, step out, grab cash from a cash machine using the card and pin I got from that Nazi, and go to some shops. It was a worrying testament to my mental state that the thought of doing this made me so intensely afraid. Self-reflection at the very least meant I was aware of what to do in such a situation - so despite lacking my usual hot chocolate, I curled up in bed and touched the walls of the corner of my comfortable, safe pocket dimension I was situated in to try and ground myself, which helped despite the constant sense of body dysphoria. I was tired, and so tempted to sleep, but I needed to get more food, so after about half an hour of self-care, I dragged myself back out of bed, grabbed my portal device, and began making microportals high above Brockton Bay and slowly moved them closer to locate the boardwalk.
Once I found the boardwalk coordinates, I took a look around through the microportal. No Tattletale this time as far as I could see, and as funny as that would be - her facial expression last time was oddly amusing - I was also glad I didn't have to worry about her trying to force an interaction. I found a cash point near the middle of the boardwalk, and then found an alleyway about 10 metres away that was in a fairly hidden spot. As such, I pointed the portal remote to the coordinates of a wall in the alleyway, and ripped open a portal on the inner wall of my home.
Quickly moving out of the portal and closing it behind me, I went to the cashpoint and took out about $800, in 3 separate goes to avoid the cashpoint limit. Bundling the cash in my pockets, I moved down the boardwalk towards a clothes shop, the Boardwalk Enforcers looking at me warily. My clothes must look much worse than they did the last time I came down here, I thought, as I entered into a clothes shop, and was immediately hit with the dysphoria from binary-gendered clothing because of course they had to do the same thing here as on my primary Earth that made getting clothes so difficult and uncomfortable. With some degree of frustration, I made my way through both the men's and women's section, picking out some simple clothes and some more pretty ones that I could make into various pride flags because I now had a pocket dimension and could flaunt my queer-ass self and not get beaten by Nazis whenever they felt like it! hah!
Coming out of the clothes shop, I saw some Enforcers start trailing me. It seems they did not trust me, for whatever reason. Anyway, I thought, let's go grab a laptop and a fibre router. So I did, walking down the boardwalk some more, admiring the sort of grey and underwhelming ocean, the shipwrecks of the Graveyard in the distance, and came across a simple laptop shop, and bought one with decent specs for the tech level on Bet, though it was pretty bad compared to the one I had before.
All was well, until all wasn't well and the Enforcers moved towards me, brandishing their bats in my face from in front and behind me. "Your kind ain't welcome here," one said, clearly withholding the urge to hit me immediately, "We'll give you a beating, then you'll know not to come back," - I was still sort of half processing this when the guy in front of me snapped his fingers at me, "are you even paying attention to me, boy. Fuck off or get beat!" while another muttered "probably a mental case or a druggie," and then my brain finally caught up with what was going on, I grabbed my pocket dimension portal generator, and fell through the floor onto my bed, comfortable and safe. I guess people were just more dickish here about my attention problems huh - Brockton Bay was Nazi central after all. Apparently they were willing to beat me because I looked poor and couldn't pay attention so well sometimes, and they probably just assumed I was a thief - or maybe not, they might have just felt like it - without even checking. God, what a load of arseholes, I thought, literally just corporate-backed thugs. Mentally pulling myself out of my annoyance and anxiety, I decided that distracting myself with tinkering was probably a good idea.
The thing I probably needed most - other than the food I apparently forgot about in the hubbub with the Enforcers - was Internet, water, and electricity access. As such, I thought about the kind of specialty that would let me interrupt and uninterrupt those kinds of resource lines efficiently. A bit more thinking and I finally came up with the answer - shifting all of my specialty towards Temporary Infrastructure Siphons, I pushed on my powers for various ideas on interrupting water, ethernet, and electricity lines. No point in fiddling with routers if there was someone you could steal internet from, after all.
Shifting one charge towards Modularity, I mentally constructed a blueprint for a device that would operate three feeds simultaneously - the aforementioned ethernet, water, and electricity (the last plugged directly into the grid) - when provided with portals appropriately close to the relevant cabling. Entirely electromechanical, too, no processors required at all, it was one of the most simple and effective devices I'd actually built, in my view. Or would build, I supposed to myself, a task which ended up taking barely an hour of effort given how genuinely simple it was in comparison to some of the other tinker bullshit I'd made before.
It was with great pleasure that I opened portals to the inside of Medhall's server room, and the water and electrical mains that fed into the building.
[end of chapter (and of the arc) - nyaa~]
So, "me in worm" is finally set up with internet access and basic resources, with a safe place to retreat to, and the arc of Initialisation is complete ^.^
There will be significant fun times ahead.