Sidekick
Chapter Three
The Protectorate Headquarters was the sort of thing that took Taylor's breath away every time she saw it. Not to be too negative, but the whole of Brockton Bay ranged from mundane, to ugly, to ugly with a fresh coat of paint, and then the Protectorate Headquarters stood as a floating fortress of light and glory. That wasn't even an exaggeration. The forcefield shimmering around it made it seem like something magical, and the forcefield bridge leading to it looked like how she imagined going into Valhalla might feel like.
PRT troopers manned the onshore gate. They glanced at her as she approached, noting her black domino mask. Taylor wondered if they saw any action here. There couldn't be that many people crazy enough to break into where the heroes lived, besides the random insane fan, so ... actually, yeah, this might be one of the harder jobs.
"Hello," she said, trying not to sound nervous. "I have an appointment with Armsmaster. My name's Boost."
That sounded ridiculous. She felt ridiculous. She had no powers right now, and her "costume" was wearing her hood up with a mask she had slapped on at the last minute. Oh, with her glasses over it.
But one of the troopers spoke into a receiver, waited a moment, then asked, "Do you need a ride?" After that, she took shotgun in a PRT van across a forcefield bridge, and her day was just getting started.
The Protectorate HQ wasn't like the PRT building. The PRT building looked like a normal office building, but it had tours, a gift shop, and was open to the public in a "bureaucracy next door" sort of way. The Protectorate HQ was more of a military base. It looked incredible from a distance, but no one went inside except on official business.
And I have official business.
Her escort spoke with a woman at the front desk, who then gave Taylor a visitor card in a lanyard.
I have official business and a visitor card!
Okay, she really should not be geeking out about all this, but it was hard not to. Then, after being led further into the fortress, she met Armsmaster himself.
He sat at a table in the middle of a workshop wide enough to fit several cars inside. The walls were lined with devices and machinery she couldn't guess the use of, but everything was organized. Nothing was out of place. Everything had a place.
"You are the girl I spoke to on the phone?" Armsmaster said, standing up to face her. He was in costume, silver and midnight blue power armor with his matching helmet. Why? Did he need to be ready to move out in case of an emergency? Or was it just in case Taylor tried something?
"Yes."
He nodded toward her escort. "You're dismissed." Then he turned back to her. "Thank you for coming on such short notice. There are some ground rules before we begin. That section of the workshop is yours. You will find tools, materials, and power sources to get you started. Anything you build is yours to keep as long as it isn't too dangerous, so no weapons of mass destruction."
Taylor forced a chuckle. "Darn, there goes my plan." Armsmaster gave her a sharp look, so she added, "That was a joke." Maybe joking about WMDs to someone like Armsmaster was like joking about bringing a gun to school to the principal.
He gestured toward a computer on her side of the workshop. Her understanding of computers ended with basic programming, but six monitor screens looked impressive. "Over there," he continued, "you'll find access to a list of schematics of some of my own equipment. Nothing current for security reasons, and while PRT affiliate Tinkers have access to the tech of other PRT affiliate Tinkers like Hero and Dragon, you do not, and I do not have the authority to grant you those privileges. Now, you may be able to hack the system. That shouldn't be difficult with my power, but if you do, you may be required to sign a number of nondisclosure agreements."
Schematics too? "Okay." Dragon's tech? She had a mental image of herself going to school in one of Dragon's giant mech suits.
"And your legal guardian will be required to cosign for you."
She swallowed. "I'll be good."
"Good. I'm glad we understand each other." He held out his hand.
She stared at it. One touch, and she would get to borrow the powers of the best Tinker in the city. "Wait, is that it? Am I just doing my thing while you're doing your thing?"
He cocked his head. "Is there a problem?"
"No." And that was the problem. She was expecting there to be some sort of catch. She expected him to try to dominate their time together, insisting on them working on his project, with her maybe getting an hour at the end to scramble together something of her own. And, to be honest, part of her had been looking forward to working with Armsmaster as she figured out how his power worked instead of just working in the same room with him. But if this was how he wanted to do things ... "No," she said again, and as she took his hand, her mind exploded into focus.
It was like waking up from a dream where nothing made sense, only in reverse. Now everything made sense. The only thing she didn't understand was how little she understood before. Armsmaster's own power armor seemed like an open book to her. Strength amplification. Built in muscle sensors with rapid response time. Durability and protection. Varying compositions of titanium and carbon steel to maximize hardness and tensile strength. And what was that sheen? Not just paint, but a thin, built-in forcefield to inhibit corrosion and adhesion. Rust, acid, maybe even containment foam.
The real question, though, was how Armsmaster could fit it all in. Could she do that? Well, sure, if she didn't need space for extraneous body parts like limbs and organs.
Armsmaster let out a sigh. "Ah, thank you, Boost. This should be most helpful."
Yeah, sure, no problem, she thought, her mind still reeling. She blinked a few times, focusing on the present. "Hey, where did the name Boost come from?"
"It's not official. You can change it whenever you like, but it was the simplest summary of your power based on Gallant's report."
Gallant? "What did his report say about me?" She had the sinking feeling that the phrase "danger to herself and everyone around her," might have come up more than once.
"First of all, that your powers don't have a Master component to them." He walked over to his side of the workshop and sat down. "Those are rare, but we still have to check for them. Second, when he reported in this morning, there were no residual effects of your power. Third, and most importantly, he had gained a significant enhancement to his own power, hence the name 'Boost.'" He had already begun taking apart his halberd, using a tool akin to a screwdriver except that it wasn't built in the stone age.
Taylor ran that over in her mind. It couldn't be right, could it? Sophia had never noticed, and if she had ... she would have behaved exactly the same way at school. "What kind of 'boost' did Gallant get?"
"Normally he can see emotions. Under the effect of your power, he could discern the reasons behind those emotions, as though he were constantly being fed information through his power. For example, he could look at an apprehended suspect and determine if said suspect was nervous because he feared false accusations or because he was guilty. The Blaster aspect of his power remained unchanged, and our research team could not adequately test his Master aspect."
Huh. That explained why Gallant had acted so quickly. It wasn't that her emotions had changed, but his ability to read them had. Whatever boost Sophia had gotten from her ... well, she probably never noticed it until after school when she went out in costume. "What boost did you get?"
"That," he said, and maybe she was only imagining the terseness in his voice, "is something I'm eager to find out."
Alright, I'll leave you alone then. Besides, she hadn't come here to talk. She had come here to work, and Armsmaster was giving her more time to work than she had expected.
She started by looking through the schematics on the computer. The forcefield bridge between the Protectorate HQ and the mainland wasn't a forcefield at all, but a hardlight projection, which should have been obvious from the start. A car would not have been able to drive over a forcefield without sliding off, but the coefficient of static friction between hardlight and rubber had to be at least point nine, depending on the frequency. And while a one way projection like Brandish's weapons might be hard to reverse engineer, a bridge between two points was incredibly basic. As for energy expenditure, the bridge took up quite a bit to turn it on, but hardly anything to keep it on.
What about the dome around the HQ? That was a forcefield, but she couldn't find the schematic. Either Armsmaster hadn't built it, or they were still using the original model. That made sense. Armsmaster wouldn't have needed to replace the forcefield generator unless it had failed somehow, and Taylor couldn't remember anyone attacking the HQ itself. The missile defense system, she noted, wasn't available to her either.
Phooey.
Though she had to admit, having her own missile defense system might not be the most practical thing to implement into her power armor.
She moved on to Armsmaster's power armor, which was the real gold mine. It went from model one to model seven-point-six with over a dozen versions in between. Her initial insight had barely scratched the surface. Between the different iterations, each one prioritized protection first and strength second, but each model introduced a new goal. Weight, flexibility, energy efficiency, battery storage, touch sensitivity, heat retardation, and ... was that muscle memory? In synthetic muscle? Good God, by model ten his suit would be walking around and fighting crime on its own while Armsmaster stayed home.
She was just about to get started with her own power armor when she realized something. How am I going to get this home? Even if she had her backpack with her, she'd be able to hide an arm inside, maybe a leg of the suit if she stripped it down to the basics. Maybe she could try that, build it piecemeal, hide it in the basement, and then put it together, but that was only if she could reattach everything at home without tools.
Second, ignoring that her dad would need to overlook an entire suit of power armor lying around, what about energy? Armsmaster had said that she could take home a power source, but how long would it take to recharge a battery from a one-twenty volt outlet? And that was assuming that non-Tinker Taylor could figure out how. Sure, it seemed simple to her now, but non-Tinker Taylor barely understood computers, and that was caveman tech.
But that was all for later. For now, she was not going to waste her time doodling in a notebook for what she was going to build later. Armsmaster was going to want to look at what she built, and she was not going to give him a handful of excuses.
What am I making? Something small, concealable. Simple. Energy efficient. Not power armor. Not based on power armor, though she could see the appeal of something bulletproof.
But I've been bulletproof before.
Could she reverse engineer Shadow Stalker's power? Maybe a belt or something, and if she pressed the button on the buckle, she'd fade from reality for a few seconds. How much power would that need? No, that wasn't the issue. The issue was becoming solid again. She could easily get stuck in the shadow state and dissipate entirely. Could she get the tech to work properly when it was no longer subject to the laws of physics? Maybe, but she couldn't test that easily, not without Shadow Stalker's power.
She looked through the rest of Armsmaster's schematics for inspiration, and got lost in the fifteen iterations of his halberd. If his power armor was his business suit, his halberd was his one true love. That thing could do everything. Change shape, teleport, stop time? She wouldn't be surprised if the next version could create a black hole.
No, cross that. She understood the principles enough to know that a handheld black hole generator was worse than impossible. It was impractical.
Then lunch came. A PRT trooper knocked on the door with a foot long sub and a Dr. Pepper for each of them. That surprised her, but not as much as the fact that she had been in Armsmaster's workshop for the past three hours and had accomplished nothing!
Meanwhile Armsmaster was Tinkering away like a machine, hardly slowing down to eat. Okay, it doesn't matter if it sucks. Just build something!
A weapon. Small. Concealable. Nonlethal, or Armsmaster might not let her keep it. Tasers were like that. Cops used tasers to subdue criminals all the time. The fact that Shadow Stalker was vulnerable to electricity was beside the point.
It would look like a glove. She scanned her hands in a fabricator, and it printed out a pair of gloves for her. A thin battery chip, a charger, an electrode. The closest thing to complicated about it was programming the glove to prevent friendly fire.
Now she had a weapon. What else did a hero need? Anything she could think of for defense would have to be as big as she was, and would be too bulky to bring home with her. What else? Transportation?
She went over the designs of his motorcycle. Some people on PHO called it the Armcycle, but it wasn't labeled as such. It was just a basic motorcycle with a few necessary enhancements. Increased thrust, less weight, better traction and maneuverability. Nothing to write home about, but it got the job done.
Of course, if her dad saw her on a motorcycle, he'd freak out more than if he found out that she was planning on using it to fight crime. Besides, she didn't have a driver's license yet.
So, what could she build instead? A souped up bicycle? No, people stole bicycles all the time, and if a thief found out hers was Tinkertech, that would lead to questions. Something smaller. A scooter? A skateboard?
Skates. Skates disguised as shoes. She had seen something like that before, but she could modify the base design. Motorized, of course. It should reach thirty, thirty-five miles per hour. Much more than that wouldn't do her any good in a city, and could easily get her killed. Shock absorption. Larger wheels to handle bad roads. Wheels that would flatten when not in use. Controls she could access by wiggling her toes. And ... tron lines? They weren't practical, but they looked cool. But they weren't practical.
Well, maybe she'd install them in MK II, when her costume was more put together and she wanted people to see her.
She checked the time. How long would Armsmaster let her stay? How long before her dad got worried? But she was making progress! Think, what else could she make? She thought about Shadow Stalkers powers again, but that would be a job and a half. Gallant's powers, though, his Thinker power ... how hard would that be?
The theory behind it was simple. Brain function emitted oscillating electric voltages known colloquially as brainwaves, and Gallant's power translated them into color. She could build that into a helmet. No, a visor. No, a pair of glasses! She began sketching out a design on a piece of paper. For all the advanced equipment in Armsmaster's workshop, nothing beat the intuitive flexibility of paper and pencil.
So, glasses. She would need to squeeze everything into the frames, so it would be thicker than what she was used to wearing. Programming them to recognize brain waves was easy; the only issue was getting them to ignore everything else. Brain waves ranged from point five hertz (asleep or dead) to nearly a hundred (every anxiety in the book) and had the electric potential of a few millionths of a volt. Anything else was a distraction.
Then came the hard part, programming her glasses to interpret the complex patterns of overlapping brain waves as emotions, and translating those emotions into color. Much of that had to be put in manually. She wanted anger to be red and fear to be yellow, but fear wasn't necessarily a higher frequency than anger was, and there were many types of fear, and far more emotions than the primary and secondary colors could account for.
How had Gallant's powers done it? Through patterns as well. Jagged edges, smooth curves, all representing different nuances of emotions. She picked at it endlessly, trying to replicate the same overwhelming yet intuitive flow of information she had experienced yesterday, and when she finally put on the pair of glasses and looked at Armsmaster, she saw ...
Nothing. Not a hint of color around his head. That couldn't be right! Her glasses might have shown her the wrong color, but they still should have shown her something! Unless ... was it his helmet? No, unless it was a perfect Faraday cage, which she knew it was not, although ...
"Armsmaster?" she said, speaking for the first time in hours. "Do you have something in your helmet that blocks brainwaves?"
"A psychic shield, of course," he said without looking up. "I installed it to counteract the Simurgh, starting with version ... five point eight, I think. No, it was five point nine."
She stared at him. "You have anti-Simurgh tech?"
"Of course. I have countermeasures against all the Endbringers." He wasn't bragging. He made it sound obvious, like tying one's shoes before going outside. Suddenly her own stuff seemed far less impressive.
But ... this was Armsmaster she was talking about. He had years of experience, nearly a decade. When she was a cape for that long, she might try fighting an Endbringer too. Preferably with more than skates and a shock glove.
Regardless, she stepped out of the workshop to test her glasses on someone who didn't have a psychic shield—and nearly ran into Assault and Battery.
The pair of heroes glanced her way as they walked down the hall, colors dancing around their heads. She couldn't tell if they were the right colors without getting them to stop and talk about their feelings, but it was something.
"Hold on," Battery said, stopping. "Were you just in Armsmaster's workshop?"
Battery wasn't a Brockton Bay native. The only local heroes were Dauntless and the Wards, but Battery had transferred here back when Taylor was in the sixth grade, around when she was first old enough to follow heroes. Battery's costume had tron lines, which yes, did look good, and they even glowed when she was charging up.
Taylor blinked, realizing that the woman had asked her a question. "Uh, yeah. We're collaborating." Which was a stretch by any definition, but close enough. She held up her visitor card that hung around her neck.
Flickering black and white flashed around their heads. Confusion. "Wait, Armsmaster's collaborating with someone?" Assault asked. He peered closely at her, a serious expression on his face that did not match his colors. A shade of yellow too light to be fear. If she had calibrated her glasses correctly, he was about to make a joke. "Dragon? Is that you?"
"Assault," Battery said, pulling him back. Her tone was annoyed, but according to her colors ... Taylor couldn't tell. But what was annoyance, anyway? It was a combination of emotions, so no single color would stand out.
"What? It's not like we've ever seen her in person," Assault said. "Dragon could be anyone."
"Ignore him," Battery said. She glanced down, reading the visitor card around her neck. "Glad to have you on board ... Boost." Taylor winced at the name. She wasn't planning on keeping it, and she didn't really want it spread around. "And good for Armsmaster, too."
Taylor watched them leave, colors dancing around their heads. Good for Armsmaster? What did Battery mean by that? She shook her head and went back into his workshop before she saw something in the building that could get her in trouble.
She spent the rest of her time polishing her glasses. Well, the tech in her glasses, not the glasses themselves. She turned on her gloves by pressing against the palm of her hand, she turned on her shoes by extending her toes upward, turned them off by flexing downward, and controlled the speed by leaning forward or back. To turn on her glasses she would ... wink? Sure, she would wink.
"Armsmaster?" she said when she had done all she could. "It's getting late. I should head home." No, what she should have done was call home six hours ago. She hadn't told her dad where she was going or when she would get back, but she could have done that at least.
Armsmaster sat up. "What, already?" he said, as though Tinkering for nine hours straight was nothing to him. "Well, alright then. Let me see what you've been working on."
He looked at her gloves first with a frown on his face that she couldn't read. "Well, you aren't likely to kill someone accidentally with these." He didn't even say a word while looking at her skates, but after he turned her glasses over a few times, he took off his helmet.
"Your face!" she blurted out.
"Yes, I do have one," he said dryly, putting on the pair of glasses. "Are you planning on doing anything nefarious with this information?"
"N-no."
"Hmm." He winked at nothing, turning them on. "Now this is interesting. Crude, but interesting." Taylor flinched at the backhanded insult, but considering some of his tech, that was fair. "The biggest issue is the vast amount of sensory feedback, and very little of it is useful. A simple lie detector would give you nearly as much practical information while being far less distracting."
She hadn't considered that, but he had a point.
"Secondly, none of your devices have biosensors or trackers, so any thief could use them and you would not be able to track them down if they were lost."
"Oh," she said. "There wasn't any room." She hadn't thought to include those either, but that was beside the point."
"What do you mean?" he said, still wearing her glasses. The thick frames didn't suit him at all. He had an action hero face with his strong jawline and trim beard offset by his messy helmet hair, and the glasses clashed horribly with his look. Besides, they were girl glasses. "You could just overlap the processor with the scanner, then squeeze the tracker into the gaps. And since the scanner and the biosensor share enough of the same parts, you would still have enough room to increase the battery capacity by forty to fifty percent."
She blinked. "What?" If she tried that, she was pretty sure the processor, the scanner, and the biosensor would stop working entirely. Or explode.
"You just ..." he started, then he took off her glasses and looked down at her. "Boost, when you copy someone's powers, do you get the full set, or a weaker version?"
She hesitated. Her tech clearly wasn't on Armsmaster's level, and Gallant had been able to read her far better than she had been able to read him, but how much of that was due to experience and her own enhancement? On a normal day, were Gallant's blasts as powerful as hers had been? When Shadow Stalker went out, did she take as long as Taylor did to dissipate and reform? Did she share Taylor's weakness to sunlight and electricity?
"I haven't tested it," she admitted.
"Well, that might explain a few things. In any case, you're free to go."
She gathered up her things, but stopped when she reached the door. "Did you figure out what kind of boost I gave you?"
"Oh, yes." A bit of enthusiasm entered his voice. "Now how to explain this? What do you know about Tinker specializations?"
She hesitated. Tinkers had specializations? "Not much."
"I have three. The first is efficiency, which you seem to have. The second in miniaturization, which you do not. The third is hybridization. Kid Win might be able to reverse engineer my tech, but I can take his tech and combine it with my own. But that hybridization is often clunky, like a sentence changing its language halfway through, and I cannot make his tech smaller or more efficient. Your boost changes that."
"Oh." Kid Win was one of the Wards. He made ray guns and antigravity devices. "So what of his tech were you integrating?" She had a mental image of Armsmaster flying in antigravity power armor while shooting lasers out of his halberd.
"What? Oh, I was just using his name as an example. No, I was integrating Hero's polymorphic Higgs field compressor into my halberd. It might be more effective and less frustrating than my nanothorn project."
Hero. The first Tinker. He had died when she was five years old, so the name didn't mean much to her. But Armsmaster ... he had been a member of the Protectorate for years by then. Maybe they had worked together once or twice.
"That sounds good," she said. "So, will you want to work together again?"
"Of course. You would be an asset whenever you have time."
She grinned awkwardly. "Okay. I'll see you later then." She left his workshop before she could say anything else, but as she walked out through the Protectorate HQ, she thought about what had happened. What she had built, how her powers worked. The way Armsmaster had called her an asset.
For a while now, she'd had a, a fantasy. It went something like this. There'd be some villain, Lung or Hookwolf. It didn't matter who. The bigger the better. Anyway, they'd be wreaking havoc and no one could stop them. There would be people screaming and running and buildings on fire. Then Taylor would run headlong toward the villain, touch him, and then match him blow for blow. She couldn't beat him, of course, but she wouldn't lose either, and she'd hold him there until one of the heroes arrived to make the difference. And then the hero would congratulate her, people would cheer, and ...
And it was never going to happen. If she ever tried that, she would just make the villain stronger. Anyone she fought would be stronger than her, and anyone she worked with would overshadow her. At the very most, she'd never be more than second best.
She took a deep breath as she pushed down the negative emotions. Today was a good day. She had built something, three pieces of genuine Tinkertech. It was the start of her hero career, the start of a new life. She switched out her normal shoes for her Tinkertech ones and skated down the hard light bridge, wind blowing through her hair. The smell of the sea was strong, and waves crashed against the shore beneath her.
Today was a good day.
WWW
A/n And that's the end of the chapter. Was a lot of it meaningless techno jargon as I pretended to sound intelligent? Yes it was, and I'm not ashamed.
I have no idea how long it takes a Tinker to build anything. I get the impression that Armsmaster spent years refining his tech, but how long it took him to make his first halberd is anyone's guess. But Taylor doesn't know how long it will be before she gets to borrow his powers again, so she's rushing for something basic and functional instead of something polished.
But anyway, thanks for reading! I've been overwhelmed by the feedback I've been getting, so thanks for that! I'd also like to thank my editor, Eschwartz, for looking over this, and my Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Hubris Prime, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Lord of Edges, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, Kurkistan, Christopher Harris, Luminant, Jan, Jamie Hayes, Ian, Ryan Cosly, and Elayda for being just simply awesome. See you all next chapter!