Night fell, morning came, and Taylor was still awake. Despite the many things that could maybe have gone wrong at the army surplus store, in the end it had been predictably anticlimactic: she walked in with her costume, told the guy behind the counter which items she'd already purchased, and walked out with a backpack full of milspec. Revolver perfect for Russian Roulette? Check. Small tactical shield that could be strapped to her arm without overly hindering her? Check. Three musketeers style rapier? Inexplicably, check. Who even carries these as just normal gear? Well, not her problem. She'd grabbed a couple really nice rifles the guy had on the "sold" shelf in the back (not that it was an issue - she just told him she was the one supposed to be picking them up, and everything was copacetic). Maybe she'd feel worse about how his clients would probably be upset at a few thousand bucks of hardware disappearing after they'd already paid for it, if the store owner's bald head and racist surface thoughts didn't give her the sneaking suspicion he deserved every bad thing coming his way.

The past 16 hours had been quite productive. Taylor had been forging quietly through the night. Come morning, Taylor "left for school", her dad left for work, she snuck back in and got back to work. If someone had asked her to explain just how she'd managed to melt down steel and reforge it into a ring, using only the materials and power sources available in a commercial home, she couldn't have succeeded if her life was on the line. Nonetheless, there it was, sitting pretty.

Taylor slipped her new best friend onto her middle finger and admired how it caught the light. This little beauty took care of most of the indignities and wastes of time that take up so much of one's life. Eating, pooping, sleeping, it was all (mostly) a thing of the past. She could eat if she wanted to (and in fact, had several dishes in mind that only she could cook right), and she still needed to sleep a bit each night, but an extra 4 hours a day was nothing to sneeze at. That was enough wiggle room that she could stay crafting most days with just free time, even if she kept going to school in the future. She frowned, glancing at her mediocre setup. It had served its purpose, getting her extra time in the years to come, but it had her crafting things at a third of the rate she was (theoretically) capable of. She needed a real forge, and then she needed to enhance that forge with her magic TinkerTech, and then she needed to make all the lovely silly designs she'd spent the night fantasizing about. Always something else to do!

The phone rang. Taylor hesitated a moment, before clearing her throat and answering. "Hello?" she said, in a lower register than usual.

[Success!]

"Mr Hebert?" Ugh, Blackwell. "I'm calling to let you know that Taylor hasn't come into school today. And uh..." she trailed off, and Taylor could somehow tell ([Success!]) that she was trying to think of how to tactfully bring up the whole locker situation.

"Oh! I'm so sorry, it completely slipped my mind. Taylor got home from school yesterday sick as a dog, and she wasn't any better this morning. I'm not sure if she caught something there, or just something from over the break finally catching up with her. I'm handling work from home as best I can to keep an eye on her." [Success!] "Was there anything else?"

"Actually, there was. Yesterday there was some kind of...accident with her locker. I'm afraid the damage is rather extensive...as is the smell."

"She didn't mention anything about it to me, so I can't imagine she knows about it yet," Taylor lied, already getting kinda bored with this conversation. Suddenly, an idea struck her, and she sat up. "Wait, was this her old locker, or her new locker?"

"...what? New locker?"

"Yes, new locker. I got an email about this just last week, something about a lot of students not returning this semester? I wasn't aware that was very common before college. Well anyway, it said Taylor's locker was getting changed over break to a new one."

[Success!]

"Yes, it's quite unfortunate but sometimes life gets in the way of our charge's educations. I'll check the system on our end, see if I can find out where Taylor got reassigned." Taylor bobbed her head to the elevator music in her head, while Blackwell muttered and typed on the other end of the call. "...I'm not seeing anything about that in our system."

Taylor chuckled. "Not too surprising there. I can't imagine anybody's priority in the week between holidays was dotting i's and crossing t's," she lied, trying to not think of how often her father had been distracted with paperwork during that week. "Tell you what, you said there was a problem with the locker?"

"Yes. Uh, the old one, I suppose."

"Right, okay. Well since that one's heavily damaged, and she was on track to get a new one anyway, and you're already looking at all that, how about we just get her a new one now?"

[Success!]

Taylor wrapped up the call on autopilot, making note of her new locker number while promising to pass it along to herself. Blackwell made no mention of the PRT being involved in anything, and they weren't busting down her door, so it seems Sophia had kept her suspicions to herself! Good for Taylor.

Now back to her problems, which were far more important than Blackwell's problems! She needed a place to forge other than her own basement. She needed a place to store her crafting materials, and her trophies, and herself if she needed to hide from the law all of a sudden. Her basement was fine for now, but there was an old adage about not shitting where you eat (not that she ate anymore): you don't want your tinker lab in your house, that's an easy way to have nowhere to escape to if your tinker lab gets discovered.

Taylor consulted her memory of the history of every cape in the Bay, and recalled an important fact: Brandish had captured Marquis and kidnapped Amy from a rather large estate in one of the nicer neighborhoods. That "estate" was the most accurate word meant it would serve her purposes well, so long as it wasn't occupied anyway.

[Success!]

Knowledge/Local said it was currently unowned despite being surprisingly cheap. Apparently people got nervous about supervillain lairs. Was it the possibility of death traps, or releasing terrible experiments, or encountering deathly-loyal ex-minions who were keeping the place well-kept? On reflection, maybe it was just too much house for most people. The sticker price was well outside what she could afford, but she'd be a disgrace to her 20-hour villain career if she paid for something nobody was even using, when she could just take it. Really, the only difference between squatting in some abandoned warehouse and this abandoned mansion is that the mansion would be comfier.

[...]

A quick disguise, some bus tokens, and a quick ride across town saw her standing before an imposing building. She took in the view with a deep breath, before retrieving her trusty pen. She'd been joking to herself before about traps, but Marquis hadn't made it alone by being foolish. The likelihood of such traps even existing was low, and the odds of them still being armed and functional a decade later was similarly unlikely. But Taylor needed to make it alone, so she resolved to checking the house over properly. It was only noon, she had at least a few hours before questions would start getting asked. Time to get to work...

[Taking 20.]

[...]

Painstakingly searching a whole mansion for TinkerTech traps at a rate of 30 square inches per second turned out to be an enormous waste of time. She hadn't even found any that were disarmed or nonfunctional, there was just nothing. If Marquis had still been around, she would almost have been insulted at the lack of care if his domicile was invaded. Although in retrospect, the fact New Wave had broken in when they had nowhere near her skill was probably the best indicator there was nothing to find. Taylor supposed it was at least good to know - and it wasn't entirely fruitless, she'd found a few secret doors leading to secret parts of the house! She'd figure out their contents later, though. For now, she needed to make tools. And that's what she spent the rest of the day doing.

Her magical crafting was already out of the way; she'd spent several hours working on her ring, so she couldn't work on another magic item today anyway. But she could at least get the start of a proper forge set up. She tore apart the fridge that had been left to rot, ignoring the smell just like she'd ignored the smell yesterday, and repurposed everything she could to put together a basic anvil and a nice set of metalsmithing tools. It was a little working that metalworking, armorsmithing, and weaponsmithing all needed their own toolsets, even though basically all of them needed a forge to work. Similarly, it was weird that she'd rolled Armorsmithing to make her costume (which had been left at home today to avoid attracting undue attention), even though Weaving seemed more appropriate. Taylor shrugged and continued working; it's not like powers had to make sense, after all, especially tinker powers. Still weird though.

Within the hour, she had a nice little anvil and some really good metalworking tools. She stored them in one of the secret rooms (it was full of racks of wine, so probably still good?) and then left, locking all the doors behind her.