Soar

by Glissadia

Summary:

Samantha Stewart is not the Simurgh. This is obvious.
It is also obvious that she is not one of the world's most powerful telekinetics, precogs, postcogs, Masters, and Tinkers. Sam is just an ordinary human with an ordinary job trying to live an ordinary life where she may or may not be mentally coerced into transforming into a fifteen-foot-tall angel and decimating a major population center every now and then.
It is fairly obvious that she needs therapy, though. Losing her job doesn't help, and neither does getting caught in the middle of a violent cape battle. But maybe, just maybe, this means that Sam finally has the opportunity to do some good for a change.

Soar is heavily inspired by Learning to Sing and lightly inspired by Case.
Full-Work Content Warning for major depression and self-hatred. Things will get better, but hoo boy do they start off bad.
Updates sporadically.

Chapter 1: Samantha and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Thirty-two minutes. That’s how long it takes to get from the university back to my apartment using public transportation, and also how long I’ve been holding my emotions in for. But, when the door clicks shut behind me something inside of me clicks as well, and I slump down to the hardwood floor of my apartment, drop the box of everything from my desk on the ground next to me, hug my knees, and cry. Fuck.

Six years. That’s how long I had had that job, and now I don’t. I loved that job. I made friends, got to do research, and was able to have some semblance of a normal human life. Fuck, if I’m thinking about my life, that job was most of it. My eighth birthday was exactly a week ago (not that I did any real celebrating), which was two weeks after the department chair had let me know that 'due to budgetary concerns, my position was being made redundant as of the new year,' which is absolute bullshit on the university’s part. At least I got to come in today after the semester break and say goodbye to everyone, but now I’m home and it’s barely noon and here I am. Sitting on the floor next to a box of memories, crying.

I wish I could say that these sorts of emotions are a rare event for me, that it always takes something as significant as getting laid off to reduce me to a blubbering mess, but it’s been happening more and more often as time has gone on. It used to be easier to cope with things, and it’s not like I’ve been doing anything differently in the past couple of years or making any big changes in my life, but I still find myself… handling things worse. Having bigger reactions to smaller things. Needing to work harder to push aside the impulses I can’t indulge in. Less able to handle the memories that flit through my mind every time I do something even remotely hurtful on accident.

For the umpteenth time, I acknowledge the fact that I am in desperate need of therapy, and then once again resolve not to do anything about it. I don’t need to let out the scream that I can feel building in my chest to know how badly actually talking to someone about my problems would go. I know, extremely healthy response, Sam, but what else can I freaking do.

The fact that I have been on the floor for around five minutes already is a relatively reliable indicator that I’ve already crossed the line into being mostly nonfunctional, which is just absolutely spectacular, since it means I’m going to have to take some shortcuts to do literally anything for the rest of the day and not just be a depressed mess on the edge of my living room for who knows how long. It’d be great if I didn’t have firsthand experience of exactly how uncomfy six hours of laying on the rug is, but the knowledge does come with the advantage of usually providing the bare minimum amount of willpower to prevent it from happening again. It doesn’t do anything about the self-hatred, but, y’know. You take what you can get.

I give myself another five minutes of wallowing, which is mostly to try and give my breathing a chance to calm down. Once that’s done and the remaining tears on my face join the ones that have already dripped onto my skirt, I count to three and lift myself upwards, pulling on my flight just long enough to get my legs under me before letting gravity kick back in. The box I brought home gently floats up from the floor with another twist of will and glides over to the kitchen counter for future me to deal with, and I kick off my shoes, though I don’t bother to use telekinesis to put them back on the little shoe rack by the door. It’s not like anyone else is here to see the mess.

Once I’ve crossed the living room and walked into my bedroom, I stand in front of my desk and stare at my laptop for a solid minute, my brain warring against itself thinking about what comes next. Despite the fact that a big part of me wants to get something done today and get the ball rolling on finding a new job, something that I probably should have started doing weeks ago, I eventually come to the conclusion that the best course of action is to once again screw future Sam and leave the resume-writing and job hunting and all that other stuff to her. Instead I, present Sam, will take on the noble and necessary task of continuing my mental breakdown face-down on the bed. This is marginally better than having a breakdown on the floor of the living room, so I’m going to consider this a win. God knows I need one, though best I can tell, there isn’t actually some sort of divine creator of the world that enjoys making my very existence a living hell. I still don’t know why I’m the way that I am, why I have to live with these chains on my soul, why the fuck I even exist in the first place, but rationally I can’t expect there to be some all-powerful being who delights in my torment whom I can blame for every bad thing that happens to me and perhaps one day punch right in the face. Still though, sometimes it’s hard to be rational about it.

I roll onto my side and curl up into a ball again, not even bothering to get under the blanket as I flip off the light switch with a mental tug. God, what am I going to do now? I have enough money saved up to cover things for a couple of months, so thankfully the financial side of losing my job isn’t a huge issue, but it’s not like I can just coast. Half the reason I originally tried to get a research position was to satisfy the portion of weird urges I get on a daily basis that wouldn’t be actively harmful to indulge, and the other half is that being alone all day with my thoughts is absolute torture. The weekends are already bad enough, I don’t think I could handle it long-term again. Things were manageable when I was still building my knowledge of Earth and normal human life, but that was years ago. I’m not functionally amnesiac anymore, which ironically makes things harder for me. At least back then I had direction. Right now my life is just… day-to-day surviving.

I lay there for a while, curled up, mind flitting through all the usual bad thoughts. I might have fallen asleep for a bit, I’m not sure, but either way when I finally look at my alarm clock it’s past 4pm, which means I’ve wasted half the day being a depressed mess instead of doing anything remotely productive. It also means I haven’t eaten anything in over eight hours, which my stupidly needy body is all too happy to bring to the forefront of my attention. The ironic thing is I don’t actually need to eat if I don’t really want to, it’s purely a consequence of keeping my body as human as I can pretty much all the time, so I’m perfectly capable of getting rid of the feeling for a day all for the low low price of retriggering eight years of trauma and causing a series of panic attacks that last for an hour on average, in my previous experience. So yeah. I need to get out of bed.

I am still in bed. I need to get out of bed.

I need to get out of bed.

I need to get out of bed I need to get out of bed I need to get out of fucking bed fuck you stupid depression fuck you human body fuck you Sam I’m going to slam myself into the fucking ceiling if I don’t get out of bed and then where will you be now you stupid fuck just move your lazy body you goddamn piece of shit and do something productive for once in your miserable life this is why I deserve to remember every single fucking person I aaaand I’m standing up.

Ten out of ten perfect success.

Unfortunately I did not account for the fact that eating means I have to actually, y’know, make food, and when two minutes of staring silently at the open fridge somehow fails to yield any sort of energy to do so whatsoever, I’m forced to acknowledge that I’m going to have to go and get takeout or something. Obviously a spectacular financial decision to be going out to eat the day I lost my job, but it gets me out of the apartment again and physical activity is probably something I can count as another success for today. I let the fridge door swing shut behind me as I turn and walk back out of the kitchen to the living room, picking up my work shoes from where some idiot left them on the floor and swapping them out on the shoe rack for my sneakers. After putting those on, grabbing my bag, and running my fingers through my hair in a semi-successful attempt to make it presentable after my four-hour flop, I am officially ready to head out.

I still don’t actually have a plan of where to go, though, so after stepping out of the building I start walking in the direction of one of the random clusters of restaurants in Brockton Bay that are both actually decent and within walking distance of my apartment. The early January New England air manages to perk me up a bit more, as even if my jacket is mostly just for appearance’s sake over comfort it’s not like I can’t feel the cold. I could try and decide exactly where my final destination is before I get there, but that would require thinking and my brain is not being cooperative about that right now, so instead I fish my headphones and MP3 player out of my bag, crank the volume up to a level that would probably be dangerous for normal humans, and hit shuffle.

It’s extremely ironic, but music is one of the few things that are genuinely, consistently successful at distracting me from my own thoughts. The urge to sing along to ones I know is of course super dangerous, but focusing on not absent-mindedly letting a line or two slip out requires the perfect amount of effort to occupy me while still letting me enjoy the song, and can always be mitigated by listening to something I don’t know. That’s part of the reason why I try to change around the songs on my MP3 player so much, and the other part of it is that discovering new music is just pretty much always enjoyable. My taste in music is the opposite of picky, something I’m very grateful for.

As I walk, the ambiance of the city I’ve lived in for most of my life surrounds me. The southern side of downtown Brockton Bay is far from indicative of the area as a whole, but what slice of any decently sized city is? My research position paid well enough to let me get an apartment in a nicer-than-average area, as long as I was relatively frugal otherwise, which wasn’t a problem for me. Though, being in Brockton Bay, 'nicer-than-average' didn’t really count for much. It at least avoided a lot of the problems other places in town had that I’d sometimes hear my coworkers talking about, like the frequent muggings and egregious lack of public maintenance, but there was still the Empire Eighty-Eight to worry about, as well as all of the other general problems that came with living in one of the most cape-dense cities in the US. At least looking pale enough to catch a sunburn on a rainy day reduces some of the harassment I get.

No matter which way you look at it, however, Brockton Bay as a whole is objectively a bit of a shithole. The economy has been in shambles ever since the port shut down, two racially-motivated cape gangs and a huge mercenary group operate in the city only partially checked, and even discounting the organized crime the general rate of low-level crime is way higher than the national average. Just stepping within the city limits is basically asking to roll a die to determine what sort of criminal injustice you have a chance of being caught up in. The sheer amount of background conflict suffusing the city is almost unnatural, and unfortunately that makes it one of the best places for me to live I could ask for.

I get a lot of… weird compulsions, on a regular basis. I can only assume it’s just part of the fucked-up package deal that comes with being who I am, because if not it’s a really freaking weird way for more aspects of my mental illness to present themselves. Some of them are more easily manageable, like the cravings I get for doing research and acquiring information, which my university job took care of nicely. Doesn’t matter the topic, just doing it at all is enough to scratch the itch and provide a tiny rush of endorphins, though I’m fairly certain I’m 'supposed' to be using certain other abilities to fill that void instead. The natural inclination to hum or sing when I’m not paying attention is something that I’ve worked hard to make a habit of not doing, and is also pretty understandable, as it and screaming are the things that actually take what I can do from 'more-powerful-than-average parahuman' to 'living WMD.' The one that would cause me the most problems, however, is my constant drive for conflict, and the only way to shut up the little sociopathic voice in my head constantly screaming at me to ruin that relationship or make that car’s brakes seize up or get that politician to just say a teeny tiny racial slur on national television is to immerse myself in enough conflict to satisfy it. Hence living in Brockton Bay. It took me seven months of searching to find this place, and just existing here is like a soothing, fucked-up balm on my soul made of gang violence and hate crimes. Is it a significant contributor to my depression and the source of a lot of the problems in my life? Yes. Is it worth it to never let my mental state slip to the point where I crack and decide to see how it would feel to go and decimate a major population center of my own volition for once? Also yes.

I’m startled out of my thoughts by someone walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk roughly shoulder-checking me as they go past, which is, y’know, absolutely wonderful and also kinda thematic with how much this town sucks. I turn around to maybe say something to them, but the guy is already like thirty feet away, full-on sprinting back the way I came. Great. Guess it’s my responsibility to get out of the way of people out for a run, and not theirs to actually keep an eye out for other people.

…Okay, maybe that’s a little disingenuous. I was pretty lost in my thoughts there, and the music is kinda doing the opposite of making me aware of my surroundings. I sigh and turn back around, only to immediately jump sideways to dodge yet another runner. Holy shit, okay, that one definitely wasn’t my fault, I was turned around and it’s not like I’m standing in the middle of the sidewalk or anything! I pull my headphones out and take a look around the street I’m on to try and see if there are any other members of whatever local jogging club this is that I need to get out of the way of and…

That’s a lot of people running.

And screaming too.

The crashing and roaring sounds coming from down the street are audible now too, and probably have a lot to do with the the general state of panic everyone seems to be in. Wow I really need to work on being more observant. Okay, normal human reaction to a violent cape fight happening in the vicinity. …Running away seems to be the obvious conclusion that everyone else has come to, so I think I’ll do that too. Great, good job, brain.

Course of action set, I start to turn back in the direction I was coming from, shoving my headphones back into my bag as I do so, only for my eyes to perfectly track a giant flaming metal monstrosity as it careens down the street, gouging a giant divot in the asphalt before crashing into a parked car around forty feet ahead of me in the direction I was about to run. The car ends up being the weaker of the two, half-compressing and half absorbing the momentum and being sent flying across the sidewalk and into the storefront directly opposite. The metal wreck left on the side of the road in its place roars, rippling with flame and scales and presumably very angry at whoever just smacked him down this city street like a baseball.

Okay.

Okay that’s Lung.

Okay that is an already partially powered-up and very pissed-off Lung right in front of me, cutting off the path I was just about to take to escape.

Fuck me I am having the worst day.

Notes:

Hey there! This is my first publicly posted work, so comments and feedback are very appreciated!
Soar is something I've had in my head for over a year now, inspired by reading pretty much every Ziz fic out there (most dead halfway through, of course) and some other stories, including the works of my good friend Thundamoo. If you liked this, go check out her stuff on AO3 and Royal Road. Anyway, stay tuned for more! Things do get better, I promise, but they have to get worse first.

Chapter 2: Mental Support

Alright. My body has apparently decided that "freeze" is the correct response to a giant angry on-fire parahuman yelling and melting parked cars in front of me, which, while understandable, is a very bad idea in the middle of an active fight scene. I really don’t want to get in the way of anything, because a single hit from whatever sent Lung flying would probably be enough to shatter every bone in my body and getting Brockton Bay quarantined because my stupid regeneration kicked in and turned me marble would be very freaking dumb.

Here’s an idea: how about I continue the whole 'running away' plan, just this time in the opposite direction of Lung? That does sound very appealing at the moment, and the instincts derived from millions of years of human evolution that I am shamelessly (that’s a lie) stealing seem to agree. I turn around yet again and take a single step forward.

The way the ground shakes when I do would probably be cool in an action movie or something, but it wasn’t me.

Because of fucking course Fenja and Menja are what has the metal dragon maniac all fired up.

They’re both about two blocks down the street, though the one with the spear (I can’t freaking remember which one is which) has apparently just started sprinting towards us, seemingly heedless of the light poles she is running straight through and knocking over to get here. The other one with the sword and shield is shaking herself out, armaments held out to the sides and down as she does. They’re both already around twenty feet tall at the moment, and wearing ornate steel armor that I could probably almost find cool were each set not covered in wings of all things. It’s way too close to me for comfort, both metaphorically and literally, as it looks like the sword twin has now followed her sister in running towards Lung, massive footfalls cracking the asphalt with every stride.

Okay! Staying here with Lung is bad, running towards him is bad, running away from him is bad. The other scatterings of people trapped in the middle of this seem to agree, by the looks of sheer panic everyone seems to be exuding. There… aren’t really many options here. As much of a favor to the internet it would be to heed it, the little impulse that urges me to join in and make this a four-way kaiju battle is quickly quashed, and with fight and freeze off the table, that leaves… flight?

It would be literal, in my case. I could just… take off and leave. It would be conspicuous as hell, sure, but still way less conspicuous than getting hit would be. I just have to hope that nobody is filming this very public fight and there aren’t any CCTV cameras pointed at the bit of sidewalk I’m standing on and that there isn’t anybody monitoring the air above the city and there aren’t already any fliers on their way to deal with this and probably a whole myriad of other problems that I can’t think of because I am freaking out hard enough right now that it feels like a public display of my powers is the best option I have. It sucks as an option. It sucks and I hate it and there’s gotta be something better that I’m not thinking of because I’m an idiot and holy fuck she’s right in front of me.

I jump back hard as one of the twins sprints past me, slamming my back and head painfully against the building behind me. …Right. The building behind me. Which looks to be some sort of storefront. The door of which is like six feet to my right.

God I hate decision paralysis.

I take a couple of quick steps sideways, watching the giantess on the road leap into the air, spear outstretched, presumably to try and skewer Lung on the landing. Thankfully I have no strong desire to witness this and instead grab the handle of the thankfully unlocked door, yanking it open and leaping inside.

It’s one of those little convenience stores, lights on but currently empty besides me, as far as I can tell. Any employees and customers probably fled a while ago, actually having been paying attention to the world around them enough to hear what was going on, unlike someone. Stupid stupid stupid.

The crashing and roaring coming from outside muffles a little as the door swings shut, and I lean back against a display of snacks, sliding down to the floor. I raise a trembling hand to the back of my head, feeling around where it hit the wall outside and…

Fuck. There’s a cold, hard patch on the back of my head, around the size of a dollar coin. Not big, and in a position where my hair will hide it for the hour or two it’ll take to go away, but I don’t know how much of the hair dye around my roots in the area will have flaked off. Fuck.

I slowly bring my arm back down and wrap them both around my knees, then drop my head down too. I can still hear the sounds from the fight and feel the vibrations coming through the group, but I’m probably safe in here, right? Probably. Not as safe as I’d be at home, though.

God, why the fuck did I go out today? Because I was a crybaby who couldn’t handle a single change in her life and completely broke down because of it? Because I was too lazy to eat any of the perfectly good food I had in my apartment and just had to go and get it from somewhere else? And now look where that’s got me. Trapped as soon-to-be collateral damage in the middle of a cape fight, too useless to actually do anything, the only injury I have being self-inflicted. How fucking pathetic is that?

A tear rolls down my cheek and drips onto my skirt, which is just wonderful. Isn’t this a familiar scene? Hugging my knees and crying on the floor for the second time today. A perfectly pathetic representation of my dumpster fire of a life, which I’m probably going to lose here today. One of the Nazi twins is probably going to send a car through the front of the building and crush me, or Lung’s going to light it on fire, or the whole thing will just come crashing down because this is a fucking supervillain fight and collateral damage from those is so expected and normal that it was an entirely separate rider on my renter’s insurance policy. Hope everyone around here got it.

I can still hear the capes duking it out in the street, and it kills me to not know what’s going on. It doesn’t sound like I’m lucky enough that whichever of the twins punted Lung down the street will do it again; if anything it sounds like they’re getting louder, not moving away. Has staying here put me in even more danger? Fenja and Menja definitely weren’t at what I remember of their maximum size when I saw them, and Lung only gets bigger and stronger as the fight goes on. Fuck, I hate this. I hate this I hate this I hate this I don’t know and I need to and my stupid brain is latching onto every single fucking tremor through the ground as a sign of an imminent explosion and I don’t know and I hate it and I just want to nooooooo no no no no no I am not doing that that’s insane and I am insane and I can’t fucking tell what’s going on and I am stronger than this and I don’t know what’s going to happen and this is bad bad really bad and I hate it and I don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m probably going to lose everything here and I need to stand up and run and I need to stay here and hide and I need to tear my fucking hair out to keep myself focused on anything but this and I don’t know what’s going to happen and I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t even do anything right and I’m stupid and weak and not fucking good enough to have even the tiniest bit of self-control and I’m going to cause myself nightmares because I’m a stupid idiot who can’t handle uncertainty and is going to retrigger every single ounce of trauma she has on a fucking whim but this sucks and I hate it and I hate myself and I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN.

Fuck.

I press my face even harder into my knees and break.

"O-oh I c-could hide, 'neath the w-wings,"

Some old song from the sixties, whatever was playing on my MP3 player before everything went to shit.

"of the b-bluebird as she sings."

The words were shaky, barely had tune, choked out between sobs, sobs that had intensified when my resolve broke.

"The six-o-clock alarm would never ring."

But they did the trick. Of course they fucking did.

Fenja had tried to launch Lung again, but he had dug his claws into the asphalt and she had been set on fire for the attempt. A lot of the vibrations I felt were her rolling around to put them out while Menja continued to wail on the metal dragon man, using the environment as a backstop to continually hit him into.

My breathing starts to slow a little as I intentionally deepen it. I fucking hate myself.

What was… huh. Velocity had shown up almost a minute ago, and was doing… something very fast, I wasn’t sure. Interestingly enough, it seemed like Armsmaster will show up in twenty seconds, accompanied by… Chevalier? Isn’t he supposed to be in Philadelphia?

I scrunch myself tighter. The edges of two minutes out are getting fuzzy again, since I barely sang and have been silent for a couple of seconds since. God I’m pathetic.

Thankfully I’m almost definitely going to be fine. The heroes arriving will draw the three villains more into the center of the street and away from the buildings lining it. Everything of what I can see is clear and I have plenty of time to go out the back entrance and get the hell away from here, which I should have done when I first got here instead of breaking down again. No cars are coming through the front wall, Lung isn’t going to set the store on fire, and the building isn’t going to spontaneously come crashing down.

The apartment building next door will, in ninety-seven seconds.

That realization gets me to jolt my head back up. I can’t physically see it from my current position, but the building is an older one, built with support relying on the exterior walls rather than a core structure like modern architecture tends to favor. Having a car thrown through the front of the facade had not done it any favors, and the kaiju fight occurring directly in front of it had generated more than enough structural damage to virtually guarantee a collapse of the front of the building, which will then cascade backwards.

Well, fuck. That’s… objectively not great. It still doesn’t seem like the store I’m cowering in is in any danger from anything besides superficial damage (at least in the next two minutes or so); the debris will stay relatively self-contained and I’ve still got plenty of time to run away. Which I should do.

I am still sitting on the floor of this convenience store.

Could I… could I warn the heroes somehow? Get their attention soon enough to do something about it? I can hear the sound of a motorcycle pulling up, maybe I can… nope, they’ll be too focused on trying to contain the battle that’s actively happening to react in time. There’s barely a minute now until the collapse, anyway, and while my precog range is still shrinking it’s doing so slower than time is passing, so I’m not actually losing anything I’ve already seen.

Fuck, maybe this entire line of thinking is unnecessary. The building’s fire alarm has been going off for at least five minutes, Lung’s involved so that’s basically a given, even though the structure itself hasn’t ignited yet. Ideally, everyone inside has heard it and evacuated by this point. An empty apartment complex collapsing is still sad, sure, but at least nobody would die. Yeah, that’s probably the case. It’s not even something I can check with my precog, since I didn’t sing anywhere near enough to extend it beyond what I could theoretically physically perceive and there’s no way I could actually get inside to check for anyone in the timeframe I can perceive. Nothing to worry about. There’s only a minute until the building’s structural integrity hits the point of no return anyway. Just leave.

…One of the limits on my absolutely ridiculous set of powers is that my telekinesis is Manton-limited, so I can’t lift or move people directly. And I can feel sixteen blobs of intangibility in just the two-thirds of the building that’s in telekinesis range. Well fuck. Thanks, brain, I was hoping to at least be able to be willfully ignorant. Fuck, does death by inaction count towards my total death toll? Probably doesn’t matter, I lost count a while ago, and sixteen is basically a drop in the bucket comparatively. Actually, scratch that, twenty-seven. There are eleven more I’d be able to feel (or rather, not feel) if I ran over to fit the entire building in telekinesis range. Wonderful.

Huh.

Hahahahaha no god no terrible idea wasn’t I just thinking about how disastrous a public display of my powers could be? And that was before the heroes showed up, doing so now would probably be even more noticeable. And besides, that’s an entire apartment building. I have no idea how much buildings weigh, but it must be an absolutely massive amount. Trying to lift one would be an impossible task.

…An impossible task which I’ve done before. Plenty of times. Multiple buildings at once, even.

Okay but also every single one of those times I was fully transformed and screaming. Even though I got a small power boost from singing, it’s actively fading, and the little patch of marble under my hair caused by my own stupidity is nowhere near the threshold for my physical state to have an effect on my abilities. There’s no way I could manage the sort of force I do while fighting right now.

Though I suppose, hypothetically, I wouldn’t have to. It’s one building, not half a dozen, and I wouldn’t be ripping it out of the ground or throwing it at someone or anything. Just… lifting a bit of it. Providing supporting force to the weakened points, just long enough for everyone inside to hurry up and get the hell out. Not long at all, probably.

The worst part about this whole line of thought is actually knowing I could do it, provided I got my lazy ass off the ground sometime within the next twenty seconds. Singing was a bad idea, it’s always a bad idea, this is why I never let myself do it, because now I know with certainty that I could fucking do something about this and I’m probably not going to because I’m a stupid piece of shit who’s never done anything good in her life so why the fuck would doing anything now matter I should just stand up and get the hell out of here. Walk away, run away, fly away, go home, go the coast, hide, whatever, just get the fuck away from the building and the heroes and the fight and stop ruining everything like I always do every single time I try to do anything. Go the fuck home, Sam.

My senses snap fully back to the present as the little infusion of horrible power my singing gave me finally fades out into nothing. A chip bag hits the floor next to my feet with a soft crinkle, having been knocked off the rack behind me when I grabbed it to lift myself up. Oh, I’m standing. Great, that makes leaving easier. I don’t ever remember everything my precognition gives me, it’s way too much information for a normal human brain to retain, but I usually keep the important things, like the fact that I’ll be fine to just duck into the alleyway behind the store and make my cowardly escape.

My hand touches the cold metal of the convenience store’s front door, the one I came through just a couple of minutes ago. Going out the front is fine, from what I can remember, everyone’s attention is on the fight and I can just turn right and head away from the action and I’ll be safe. Easy.

I push open the door, the little bing-bong of the chime playing as I do so. The sounds of the fight quickly come back into full focus, roaring of both the human and draconic variety filling my ears. Honestly I don’t really know what the heroes are expecting to be able to do here; it’s not like Armsmaster has a device that can stop the giant twin with the spear from repeatedly trying to stab Lung’s chest with it. …At least, I don’t think he does. Lung’s going to throw her off of him and stand back up in a couple of seconds anyway so it’s a moot point.

Alright, time to go. I turn left, which is the wrong direction, and start walking forwards, clutching my bag’s strap tightly and flinching a little with every loud crash from the street up ahead.

I… have run out of cognitive dissonance, I think.

Standing up when I did only gave me a margin of about five seconds, so I pick up the pace a little, upping my speed to a light jog and trying not to trip on the uneven sidewalk. I can see some chunks of brick and plaster tumbling loose from the edges of the gaping hole Lung made in the front of the ground floor, a little more every time another crash reverberates through the asphalt below. Ducking into the alleyway between the convenience store and the apartment building, I take a couple of steps in to make myself less visible from the street. I press my back to the brickwork and lay my palms flat against the wall just as another series of vibrations rumbles up through the ground. Only, these ones don’t come from the fight out front. I can feel cracks shooting through the building’s foundation, rebar snapping, concrete flaking apart as the pressure becomes too great and the rock turns into dust and fragments. A loud, horrendous groan of failing materials emanates from behind me as the building finally makes its intentions known.

I close my eyes

reach out

and pull.

Supporting an entire apartment building with my mind is nothing like lifting a cardboard box. I can’t trust any of the building’s existing structural components, so every floor has to be supported, every ceiling, every wall and door and window is pulled upwards through sheer force of will. My heart rate spikes, and I press my back harder against the wall. The building shudders. A pipe bursts somewhere. It holds, for now.

Okay, okay. Apparently I’m doing this fucking thing, and if I am, I have to commit. Twenty-seven people remaining in the building, in fifteen of the apartments. I think some of the blobs in my mind of 'thing I can’t directly lift' are moving, hopefully towards an exit, but definitely not all of them. How about…

I pick a fire sprinkler in every apartment that still has someone in it, away from anything that feels like papers or fabric or electronics if I can, and shatter the little glass bulbs inside each of them simultaneously, causing them to all start spraying water. Hopefully that gets everyone going, and gets them to grab anything important as they leave.

The far corner of the building trembles as a support column cracks into pieces, and I grimace and focus on shoring it up. I was right earlier, preventing the collapse is something I’m capable of doing, but it’s definitely not easy, nor is the amount of sheer force I’m using anywhere close to what I’ve used in recent memory. It feels like I’m holding my arms straight out with weights in each hand and seeing how long I can go until my muscles fail, except instead of my arms it’s my brain and what feels like my entire body too. At least some people are making their way out, but… oh god damn it.

There are a couple of blobs of intangibility that are pressed up against closed doors, not making any progress in opening them, and I realize what the problem is almost immediately. The building is definitely not fully intact at the moment, mostly held together by telekinesis and dreams, and a lot of the door frames have warped significantly, jamming the doors into place. I feel out the ones people are having trouble with and give them a mental shove, a couple in the opposite direction of the way they’d normally open if there’s someone in the way, then swear and catch some falling beams that I accidentally lost control of when the doors took my focus. Fuck, I don’t know how sustainable this is. I try to control my breathing, slow and steady breaths, focusing on that instead of the strain, but—

"Excuse me, ma’am, you really need to get away from here. It’s not safe for you to be here right now."

What? Who’s… fuck. I open my eyes to see Velocity standing in front of me, unmistakable in that bright red outfit. I didn’t want to be seen when I was doing this, my telekinesis range is down to my default so I especially can’t just leave, and now a member of the fucking Protectorate just snuck up on me and has both seen me and is trying to make me leave! God I really need to work on my spatial awareness.

There’s a look of concern on what I can see of the hero’s face, which might be due to the fact that my face is probably currently showing some blend of fatigue, fear, and outright frustration. What the hell do I do here? Fake an injury or something? I don’t remember if Velocity can carry people with him when he runs; he might try and carry me. Hell, even if he can’t he might pick me up and try to get me to safety at a normal speed. Say I’m just catching my breath? Feign ignorance as to what’s happening? How on earth do I get a superhero to leave me alone here and go focus on some other… fuck.

Today is just full of wonderful ideas that I hate so goddamned much, isn’t it.

"There are twenty-one people left inside this apartment building," I respond, cutting myself off with a grunt as a portion of hallway ceiling almost collapses before I mentally grab it and shove it back into place. "Five on the first floor, seven on the second, three on the third, six on the fourth, fifth is clear. The building is currently falling apart, about to collapse, I can give you probably four, maybe five minutes at this rate to get them out of there. I’ll be fine, worry about them."

Velocity stares at me, probably uncomprehendingly. Three more pipes burst, and I think the power for the top two floors goes out, judging by the people left on the fourth all suddenly slowing down at the same time as a couple of scattered fans stop spinning. I really hope the emergency exit signs have charged batteries.

"Go!" I shout at Velocity, and that finally seems to get him to move back into action. I turn my full attention back to supporting the structure behind me after he disappears. Sure enough, there’s another blob of untouchability in my mind rapidly moving through the building, stopping briefly by a person or group of people before zipping away to the next. I guess he can’t actually carry anyone with him, but everyone he presumably talks to starts heading toward an exit a whole lot quicker afterwards.

Deep breaths. In and out, in and out. You’re doing it. They’re going to be fine. You just have to keep supporting every square inch of this huge block of apartments with nothing but your mind, it’s just like back in—nope, don’t think about Madison that’s a horrible idea, just keep doing what you’re doing, in fact don’t think about it at all, just do it, just hold everything there and do it, just like that, it’s simple, there’s nothing to it, just do it and then you can go home and forget this ever happened and everything will be fine.

Eighteen people. Fourteen people. Nine. Velocity comes back and says something to me but I’m not listening and I just shake my head and wave him off. Seven. Five. Four. The entire structure shudders as the floor of one apartment crashes down into the one below it, my mental strength starting to fail. Some load-bearing walls scattered around the building follow its lead, though they’re honestly all load-bearing at this point. Three. Two. Someone has tripped, but Velocity’s already there to help them get back up. Bricks hit the sidewalk and so does one of my knees. I push a brick off of a collision course with someone’s head. Everyone needs to get clear. Did I shout that out loud? One. Half of the building’s roof smashes through the fifth floor, and the rest quickly follows. Then the fourth. Then the third. The last person exits the building, bursting through the space where an exterior door used to be at a dead sprint.

I run too, leaving the cacophonous sounds of destruction behind me.

Chapter 3: Extremely Reasonable Conclusions

I don’t release my failing mental grip on the apartment building all at once, instead letting it slip off in pieces like a handful of sand through my fingers. The cloud of dust and debris is smaller that way, though of course not completely eliminated, and the people standing right outside the building are hopefully less likely to be hit by anything. They rapidly slip out of my range as I run, though, and I can only hope that everyone is safe. The heroes are there, anyway. They’ll take care of things, and they’re why I need to get the hell out of here.

The buildings in this area of town are pretty densely packed, but that still leaves plenty of room for twisting alleyways and convenient corners. I’m glad I swapped out my work shoes for sneakers, because trying to run in those would probably just result in two marbled ankles and probably half my face as well, especially considering all the random junk on the ground I’m trying to dodge as I move. I pop out onto another street, cross it as soon as there’s a gap in traffic, and dive right back into the urban maze, only stopping to catch my breath once I’m half a dozen blocks away from the disaster of a fight. Only then do I let myself process everything that just happened.

Holy fuck.

I just… I just used powers in front of a bunch of superheroes. In the middle of a cape fight. In public. And talked to one of them. Without concealing my face or voice or any fucking thing about myself. I stopped short of throwing my ID at him and screaming who I was to the heavens but god, I might as well have! I was even precogging earlier but didn’t look far enough to see the one huge weakness in my stupid plan actually occurring, because I’m an idiot with no sense of self-preservation whatsoever or even self-control and I couldn’t do the smart thing and just walk away when I had every opportunity to do so. Going out was a mistake. I should have just stayed in bed and gone to sleep forever and maybe then I would stop ruining everything I touch. Fuck I’m so stupid.

Leaning back against a wall, I scrunch my eyes shut and gingerly press my head back against the brick, not wanting to make the slowly shrinking patch of marble on my scalp grow again. I do my best to hold back tears, because crying for a third time today is just ridiculously pathetic. Which is what I am, of course, but I don’t need yet another reminder of that little fact. God, the one time I thought I could fix something and I just went and fucked myself over for it. This is why I shouldn’t ever use my powers. Why I need to actually listen to myself when I think something’s a bad idea instead of just blindly following whatever impulses strike me, stupid idiot that I am. Now I’m exhausted, breaking down, probably being hunted by the Protectorate, and still haven’t eaten anything.

I’m tempted to just walk back to my apartment and curl up in bed and pretend none of this ever happened, but I really do not feel like walking that far right now. It’d take even longer if I gave the area of the fight a wide berth, which is probably the smart thing to do while they’re still dealing with the villains and looking for the moron who thought stepping in would be a good idea. As unappealing as the idea of moving is right now, I also don’t have any desire to hang out in a dirty alley for however long it takes for me to process my shit, so maybe the original plan of getting food isn’t the worst idea after all. Whoop de doo.

A minute of deep breaths later, after the shakiness has subsided, I’m on the move again, slinking behind buildings like some sort of disgusting little creature of the night, except it’s still twilight and I’m only little when compared to my other body. At the very least, my blind rush away from the scene of the crime took me somewhat in the direction I was already walking, so after taking a moment to reorient myself I’m on my way again. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, ignore, compartmentalize, suppress, bottle up every single rancid emotion, stick a rag in it, light it on fire, take aim at the back of future Sam’s head, and throw it as hard as you possibly can. Just like you’ve always done, just like you’ll always do.

Soon enough, I’ve made it to the little cluster of restaurants I was originally planning on walking to, and I pick one half at random. No thoughts, no real decisions, just the same sandwich I always get when I’m here. Nothing’s wrong, just an ordinary girl going about her ordinary day, engage in this ritual of capitalism with me and everything will be fine please and thank you. I can almost convince myself of it too, if I try hard enough. Get my food, sit down, grab my MP3 player, stick my headphones in, and eat. Everything is fine.

"Seven A."

"What num—"

I jab at the pause button so hard it feels like I was close to breaking it. No, nope, no thank you, I do not need to listen to Daydream Believer again right now. Music is usually a good source of distraction, but I guess not today. Unfortunately, my trance has already been broken, and I stare at my food, suddenly finding my appetite a lot smaller than it was a minute ago. Great, and I was ignoring things so well, too. Thankfully, forcing myself to eat when I don’t want to is a well-practiced skill of mine. I take the next bite of sandwich mechanically, chew, swallow, and do it all over again. Forcing myself to eat isn’t comfortable, but when has that ever mattered for anything I do?

God, what a day. Easily one of the worst I’ve ever had that didn’t end in a body count, and that’s not an easy achievement. Maybe when I get home I can go straight to bed and sleep for like twelve hours and then it’ll be tomorrow and this nightmare will be over. Job hunting can be a task for tomorrow Sam, and the Sam of the day after that and the day after that and who knows how long, with Brockton Bay’s economy being what it is. Today Sam just needs to get through this meal, go home, and be dead to the world for the night. Six in the evening certainly isn’t my usual bedtime, but it sure beats having to actually think about what I did.

And oh, look at that, I have finished eating and therefore have successfully completed step one of my brilliant plan. My next actions are just as automatic. Grab my bag, throw away the trash, walk out the door, start heading home, and do my best to clear my mind of anything at all, because whatever thoughts my brain tries to generate right now are bound to be negative. I can at least devote my full attention to not thinking about things (ironically), as walking home is something I can do pretty much on autopilot. I’m even doing pretty well at the whole 'don’t spiral into extreme depression over my mistakes' thing when the flashing lights of a fire engine catch my attention.

I’m an idiot.

My default route home is, of course, the same one I originally was taking to get here, the one that happened to have three giant supervillains beating each other up in the middle of it. And without any sort of conscious decision-making, even though I literally thought about this earlier, I have walked right back to where everything went down. Spectacular.

Fenja, Menja, and Lung are nowhere to be found, possibly captured but more likely having simply left. The aftermath of their fight, however, is very much still apparent. Parts of the street are entirely barricaded off, the massive gouges in the asphalt making them impassible for normal traffic. A handful of police officers are directing cars around the damaged portions, and more look to be talking with various bystanders along with what I assume are PRT agents. Half a dozen buildings are scorched, though I don’t see any active flames, and the fire engine that caught my attention is currently spraying water over the pile of rubble that used to be an apartment building, probably to control both dust from the collapse and errant embers caused by Lung’s power. The car that got thrown through the front isn’t visible through the layer of concrete and wood and brick, but plenty of other cars that were parked along the side of the road are, some looking perfectly fine while others look half-melted. I can see at least three ambulances as well, and though I can’t see anyone severely injured from where I am, the fact that they’re here at all doesn’t bode well. I wince and try to suppress the inevitable intrusive thoughts. I fail.

Well, not really anywhere to go but forward, at this point. I’m on the opposite side of the street than I was an hour ago, and while the sidewalk is mostly intact there are barricades directing people onto the street at times. I do my best to blend in with the other pedestrians navigating the temporary pathways. It’s not hard; pretty much everyone is staring at the aftermath of the fight, so my own glances aren’t out of place at all. While cape fights certainly happen a lot in Brockton Bay, they’re far from an everyday occurrence for people. Well, most people, I suppose. Speaking of, I keep an eye out for any of the responding heroes as I walk. Best I can tell, Velocity was the only one who actually saw me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried about any of the others, or the PRT agents for that matter. I don’t really stand out in a crowd, but he still could have given people at least a small description of me, like my hair color or ethnicity or my… clothes. Damn it I should have at least turned my jacket inside out or something. I have no idea if that would actually throw them off but it’s something. God I’m stupid.

I obviously can’t try and mess up my appearance now, though, so I just have to keep walking. No Velocity that I can see, and no Armsmaster either, but the motorcycle he and Chevalier rode in on is still here, so there’s a good chance he is as well. Not seeing any of them doesn’t exactly put me at ease, but it at least might mean they have more important things to worry about? I won’t have to worry for much longer anyway; I’m almost out of the immediate area of destruction, and with just a couple more steps I’ll be able to put all of this behind me forever.

Of course, that would require something actually going right for me in this horrible fucking mess of a day.

"Miss? Are you from around here?"

I freeze. Probably not the best response, but in fairness I wasn’t expecting someone to talk to me from five feet away in the complete opposite direction to the one I was looking. I do my best to calm myself as I turn and yep, sure enough, a suit of silver and gold armor stands facing me, a foot into the space between two buildings. I glance around, desperately hoping he’s somehow talking to someone else, but there isn’t anyone else close enough. Fuck.

"I was hoping you could help me out," Chevalier continues, seemingly unfazed by my reaction. His voice sounds friendly and casual, and he’s holding an actual notepad, like he really is just asking random passersby questions about what happened, but… "Do you know how far we are from Concord Street?"

I stare at him. I can’t help it. That’s… asinine. He’s not asking me about the fight, or who I am, or anything of significance. Just a random factoid about the city of seemingly little relevance, one that someone on the radio undoubtedly in his helmet could answer in a heartbeat. But could I be wrong? Is this actually just a normal conversation? No, there’s no way. The odds of him randomly picking me of all people to ask are astronomical, and his power is combining objects, not supernatural luck. He knows I was here. He must. What do I do?

"Six blocks northwest," I say slowly. "Though that’s if you cut through Heritage Park."

"Ah! Thank you," Chevalier nods. He looks down, realizes his pen is still capped, takes the top off, and starts writing at the very top of the page. "I’m not the most familiar with Brockton Bay, and I’m heading back to Philadelphia tomorrow. What a time for a gang brawl, am I right?"

My precognition has long since left me, but I don’t need to be singing to guess how this conversation is intended to play out. I make some sort of response that might give away how familiar I am with cape fights, he continues being oh-so friendly and fishing for information, I’m eventually supposed to leave thinking I’ve gotten away with it, while in the meantime someone’s pulling security camera footage and figuring out where I live, who I am, what I can do, and probably that any record of me existing prior to 2002 is shaky at best and completely nonexistent at worst, then I get the entire investigative force of the US government and the PRT coming down on me like Gavel’s gigantic fucking hammer. And frankly, this day is already shitty enough.

I step off of the main sidewalk, pushing past Chevalier’s hulking suit of armor and into the alleyway behind him. After a couple of steps I lean back against one of the walls, arms wrapped around myself and staring straight ahead. Look, I’m nonaggressive, I’ve put myself into a vulnerable position, and I’ve given us privacy. Chevalier turns around to track me, not saying anything, and though I can’t see his face through that silver-and-gold helmet, I’m sure I’ve earned myself a raised eyebrow.

"I didn’t like the way that conversation was going to end up," I start, half as an explanation and half as an intentional derailment.

"How were you expecting that to go?" Chevalier responds, and I think I can hear a hint of amusement in his voice.

"'Asinine' was the word I used in my head," I say, and I hear a strangled laugh, "ending with a lot more negative attention and consequences than I’d like."

"I’m curious as to why you’d think talking to me would be a bad thing for you. You helped people today."

I scoff and turn to face him.

"Because that’s what the PRT does? What, you’re telling me they don’t want to know every single detail of anything a parahuman does in this city? That they wouldn’t jump at the chance to potentially corner a villain out of costume?"

"You aren’t a villain, though," Chevalier responds. I open my mouth to laugh, but he holds up a gauntleted finger. "You are from around here, or at least know the area well. You didn’t participate in the fight on either of the villains’ side, nor did you try and fight them both as a third party. You’re not one of the local heroes, and none of the villains or rogues active here have a powerset that can do what you did. Rune comes close but you’re older and didn’t leave behind any of the markings she does, Parian is shorter than you and hasn’t ever demonstrated the ability to lift anything of significant weight, and Ziggurat doesn’t operate in North America. Thus, unknown non-villainous parahuman. Did I get that right?"

For the second time in as many minutes, I find myself staring at Chevalier in shock. That’s… wow. I doubt he did all that analysis himself, someone probably started working on it as soon as Velocity told them about me, but that’s still way more than I expected. It still goes to show that I gave away too much information about myself with my actions, but maybe this isn’t the end of the world. They didn’t figure out who I am, given that Chevalier is standing here talking to me rather than evacuating the city, and unknown independent is a much better conclusion than out-of-costume villain. Hell, maybe I can even convince him and the PRT to leave me alone and just pretend I never did anything?

"I… yeah," I say, unable to come up with a better response. "Look, I don’t really ever do stuff like this. I just got caught in the middle of things."

"Well, there’s a first time for everything, and stepping into a fight with Lung of all people is a hell of a way to get your start," Chevalier says warmly. "I’ve got to get back to helping with cleanup, but good job out there. The world could use more people like you."

If the world had more people like me, there probably wouldn’t be much of a world left.

"The building still collapsed," I say instead. "I wouldn’t really call that a good job."

Chevalier’s helmet tilts to the side, one of the limits of expression you get from full-body armor.

"That building was coming down either way, and that’s Lung’s fault, not yours. Velocity said you delayed it long enough for the families inside to evacuate. Without your help, a lot of those people would be dead right now. If that’s not a good job, then I don’t know what is."

"I guess?" I respond. He shouldn’t be praising me. I don’t deserve it. If he really wants to save lives, he should be picking up that sword of his and using it on me, instead of nodding like I’ve just said some sort of profound revelation. That’d be a net gain on the world, if it actually managed to kill me. I doubt it would work any better than anything I’ve already tried, though.

"Glad to hear it. Now, I don’t know what your current situation looks like, but if you’re interested in saving more lives, I’m sure the Brockton Bay Protectorate would be happy to have some extra help," Chevalier says like they’re not the most insane words anyone has ever spoken. He rips off the top sheet of the notepad he was writing on and holds it out to me. "In case you’re looking to shake things up. Either way, thanks for stepping up. I hope I’ll see you around sometime."

I take the paper almost automatically and look down to see an email address written on it, underneath Chevalier’s name. Below it is a line, then a street address in Brockton. It takes me a second to orient myself mentally, but I quickly realize it’s the address of the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters.

What the fuck.

When I look back up, Chevalier has already started walking back towards the street, just casually strolling off like he didn’t just give a recruitment pitch to someone who has tried to get him to instigate a mass-casualty event multiple times. I stand there like an idiot, clutching the paper he gave me in my hand.

I… genuinely have no idea what to think right now. Chevalier just told me I did a good job. Chevalier. Thanked me. For saving people. And then floated the idea of joining the fucking Protectorate. The notion is so insane that it takes me a solid minute of walking to start thinking about anything else at all.

Okay. The PRT knows I exist. That I have some sort of Striker power is an easy conclusion, and not inaccurate, though woefully short of the full picture. That’s certainly not great, but it’s not the worst-case scenario either. Maybe they really would be content to just let me be? Chevalier walked away without even an attempt at confirming anything about me besides that I’m from Brockton Bay and I’m not a villain. It’d probably be wishful thinking to assume they’ll leave it at that and there won’t be any sort of follow-up, but hopefully they won’t look too closely at anything. Just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. Hopefully with another ordinary job soon.

My MP3 player is kind to me and doesn’t let The Monkees shatter my mood again on the walk back to my apartment, the music sinking into the background and letting my conversation with Chevalier be the thing that plays over and over again in my thoughts. I guess his actions do make sense, from an outside perspective. He doesn’t have any real way of knowing who I am, and the heroes are probably all encouraged to give any new parahuman they see a pitch. That would explain why it was so short. They don’t really want me; he was just fulfilling an obligation. It wasn’t anything special that I did. Though heck, if I were anyone else joining the Protectorate might not even be the worst idea. But I’m me, so of course it is.

My apartment is just how I left it, and I have just as much inclination to work on job hunting right now as I did earlier this afternoon. Still, first things first. After hanging up my jacket and putting away my bag and shoes, I walk into the bathroom and pull out a box of hair dye from under the sink. An inspection of the back of my head using a hand mirror and the big mirror over the sink doesn’t reveal anything at first, but when I lift my hair up there’s a defined area of white right around where I hit my head. It’s not obvious, thank god, but if you’re looking right at it it’s very clearly not just my roots growing out. Ugh.

I mix together a bit of color and developer and start applying, concealing the evidence of my lack of self-control and bringing it back to the same dark brown the rest of my hair pretends to be. Just another necessity of living my shitty life. Sure, I might look a little young to already be going gray, but it’s not the type of thing people question. All-white hair is, though, and blending in is more important than my occasional annoyance at having to do this. Suck it up and dye, Sam.

Once I’m done I rinse the excess dye off of my hands, put everything away, and take a deep breath. With a twist of will, marble smoothly climbs up my fingertips and palms, slowing and stopping at my wrists. The stains flake off of my pale skin as it transforms, leaving behind nothing but smooth white. I stare at myself in the mirror, then look down at my hands, slowly turning them this way and that. My flesh feels as soft as ever to itself, but tapping a finger on the countertop makes a soft tink. It’s not a sound I’m used to hearing, nor one that my brain associates with touching something, no matter how many times I do this. Another mental tug has the white giving way to beige again, leaving my fingers dye-free and my thoughts wandering.

Why am I like this? I didn’t ask to be born or made or spawned or whatever the hell I was. I didn’t ask for Lausanne, for my first days on Earth to turn so ugly. I didn’t ask for London or Cape Canaveral or Madison or any of the other colossal disasters I’ve personally caused. I didn’t ask to live in constant fear of the next time I’ll be forced to cause another one.

I didn’t ask to care.

Maybe if I was like Behemoth or Leviathan things would be different. Going dormant for months at a time, doing nothing but destruction. Maybe I would spend my time back on the moon, or in orbit or something. I’d probably have fun, then. Raining down death and destruction wherever it was needed, staying unthinking and unfeeling when it wasn’t. I wouldn’t have to deal with finding a job, or dying my hair, or pretending to be human and living a normal life and acting like I couldn’t snap at any moment and ruin everything and everyone around me. I wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt, the memories, the nightmares and waking up covered in wings, barely not screaming. I wouldn’t have to deal with the intrusive thoughts that I could be doing more, fixing things, making the world better instead of worse.

Or the thought that I did, even if it was just for twenty-seven people. That, in retrospect, ignoring what a bad idea it was, I liked it.

That I kind of want to do it again.

My mind wars with itself as I shower and get ready for an early bedtime. Part of me doesn’t want to acknowledge these thoughts, preferring to just bury them forever and ignore everything that happened and continue to live my life as usual. It would be easy. Let all this be a blip I can attribute to stress and losing my job and being caught in the middle of a supervillain fight holy shit hahaha. The other part of me keeps me awake, staring at the ceiling for far too long when I could and should be sleeping. My thoughts are a jumbled mess, full of what-ifs that can’t be answered with three lines of a song.

I used my powers in public, and it wasn’t the end of the world. The heroes thought I was just a regular parahuman. One thanked me and told me I did a good job. The PRT isn’t coming after me. I… I helped people. I, Samatha Stewart, helped people. Without any real negative consequences. If I wanted to, I could just go back to my normal life and everything would be fine.

I don’t want to.

When the seven-thirty alarm rings, I rise and wipe the sleep out of my eyes. I go through my normal routine, getting dressed, eating breakfast, doing my hair, life as usual. The cold January air is welcomingly fresh to my senses and I take deep breaths to calm myself as I walk. I go past my usual bus stop, heading deeper into the heart of downtown Brockton Bay, eventually hitting Lord Street and turning to follow it. I had half expected myself to walk slowly, trying to prolong this as much as possible, but my pace is smooth and quick. It’s something simple I can focus on, rather than what I’m about to do.

Eventually, I reach the right block. Nearly the entirety of it is taken up by a single large building, set back from the street a bit, glass covering the exterior all the way to the very top. I stare up at the shield logo on the front, contemplating my actions. Last chance to turn back. I can pretend all of this never happened, go find a normal job, and keep living as I was. Or I can step through those doors and shake things up.

Being the beginning of working hours, the lobby of the PRT ENE headquarters is relatively bustling, with employees streaming in alongside me. A handful of officers stand guard around the edges of the room, probably more for show and general peacekeeping than any expectation of real combat. It would be pretty stupid to attack the PRT building, especially in broad daylight. The PRT employees seem to make up most of the crowd here, and there only seem to be two or three other regular civilians like me. One is currently being helped at the front desk, and I wait for him to step away before walking up.

"Hi there!" the receptionist greets me with a smile. "Are you here for a tour?"

"No, actually," I say, taking a deep breath. "I’m here to join the Protectorate."

Watch out, world. The Simurgh is going to be a hero.

Notes:

Watch out, world (oh god) (you should probably run)

Thanks for reading! I'm going to try to continue posting as often as I can, it's just all dependent on how often I can get myself to sit down and write the darn thing. If you have any comments or feedback, they're always appreciated.

Chapter 4: Questioning Things

Notes:

Hey everyone! The response so far to Soar has been absolutely amazing, and I'm really glad you all like it! In light of that, I'd like to apologize for how long this took so long to get out. The story is unfortunately beholden to my executive function, and while I don't ever plan on abandoning it, you shouldn't be surprised to see a decent chunk of time in between chapter releases. When I say 'Updates sporadically,' I hope it's now obvious that I mean it :)

The receptionist, to their credit, does not have any sort of visible reaction to my statement in the slightest. Of course, neither do any of the people around us. The morning crowd fills the lobby with a din of chatter that my words blend right into, and I think I’m even managing to tamp down my anxiety about this whole situation enough that it doesn’t show visibly. At least, not enough to draw any attention to me. I’m just a normal visitor, having a normal conversation, making a normal request, and the receptionist seems to agree with that pretense.

“Have a seat, wait five minutes, then take one of the elevators in the hall behind me. Someone will be there to meet with you." The instructions are punctuated with a polite nod, and the receptionist turns away to type on their computer.

Oh! Well okay then. I don't really know what I expected, but alright. I return the nod and step aside, sidling through the crowd somewhat self-consciously and finding one of the benches lining the lobby walls. Nothing to do but wait, I suppose.

I’m still not entirely sure why I’m doing this. On a certain level, sure, talking to the PRT and the Protectorate makes a degree of sense. Even if it’s just to, I don’t know, debrief from last night and see what my options are or something like that. It’s not like I have to commit to anything, right? Of course, that degree of sense doesn’t entirely take into account the fact that I’m a fucking Endbringer and deliberately exposing myself to and interacting with heroes is probably one of the worst possible things I could be doing to keep my little constructed life intact.

…But I guess that’s not really as much of a possibility anymore, huh? For as much as I can see the past, there’s nothing I can do to change it. I still lost my job. I still got involved in that fight. I still talked to Chevalier, and did a pretty horrible job of even attempting to keep up a pretense while doing so.

And worst of all, I still got a taste of what it would be like to not be me. A minute or two where I was helping, not hurting. I wanted to put it out of my mind and forget all about this, but that kind of self-control has never been something that came naturally to me. And hey, it’s not like I have anything else going on at the moment! If I wasn’t doing this I’d probably still be rotting in bed and trying to brainstorm some way to turn off my regeneration, if how I am when I’ve gotten bored in the past is any indication.

So instead, here I am, making what is definitely one of my stupider decisions, and I’ve made a lot of those in my comparatively short life. I don’t even have the excuse of clear mental impairment like I do for my little out-of-town trips. This is just plain old idiocy, fucking myself and my future over just to chase some idealistic fantasy of being able to dilute an ocean of blood with a drop of water. Oh god, what the hell am I even doing here? I had the chance to get away from this, to slip into the metaphorical crowd and just become another ordinary, unremarkable person trying to live their life, but no, even if I didn’t mess that all up last night, I certainly did the second I walked through the door. Cameras, the receptionist, all the PRT troopers and employees hanging around the lobby, they’ve all seen my face now and any anonymity I used to be able to cling to has blown up faster than a hero when the government decides they’ve spent too much time around me. Oh my god they’ll probably glass the city when they find out who I am. It’s only a matter of time, with how careless I am. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who’d become collateral damage, you can’t be too careful when it comes to dealing with me. Kill the civilians, kill the heroes, kill literally everyone but I’ll probably be the only one who survives because my life is a curse and if I was dead then who else would go around fucking everything up someone’s gotta do the job and why not me I’m the perfect mix of an insane idiot and a nuclear bomb you can set off again and again and again and again and never stop until the entire world is killing each other because I thought it would be funny because I’m a horrible person who doesn’t deserve to feel a single goddamned ounce of happiness and could never hope to even think of making up for the tens of thousands of lives she’s oh wow it’s been five minutes already.

The big hand on the wall clock advancing snags my thoughts and snaps me back to the lobby. Okay! It’s been five minutes, you stupid piece of shit. Time to face the music. I unclench my fists, stand up, and walk across the room and down the indicated hall. Nobody stops me, which I suppose is a good thing, though I realize as I approach the bank of elevators that I don’t have any sort of badge to scan, nor did the receptionist even tell me what floor to go to. Maybe there’s signage? I turn around to go look, but then turn back around as one of the elevators dings open. Nobody emerges from it, but the doors don’t close, even after waiting around ten seconds. I guess that’s probably for me, then?

The inside of the elevator is rather sleek, with a screen instead of buttons and almost every surface covered in a layer of shiny chrome. The screen itself displays only "Lobby" and "4," so… four it is, I suppose. The doors slide smoothly shut as soon as I tap the screen, and—woahmygod.

My telekinesis isn’t limited by line of sight, and that affords me the minor side power in addition to my already bullshit bouquet of them of a limited form of... echolocation is probably the closest word for it. It’s how I could count how many people were in the apartment building yesterday and support the entire thing with my eyes closed. I try to ignore the feeling most of the time, as even putting aside the privacy concerns it’s a lot of information for my brain to process when I’m small and the sensation can be kind of distracting. Like, for instance, when I feel the entire rest of the building outside the elevator suddenly accelerating into freefall. I stumble, grabbing the handrail on the wall and trying to suppress a sudden wave of nausea. What the hell is happening? Why am I not… oh. Fucking Tinkers. Fucking god damned inertially dampened high-tech hoooooo don’t throw up don’t throw up don’t throw up.

The whole ordeal lasts maybe three seconds before the elevator slows to a stop, my body still not feeling the deceleration and once again loudly voicing its complaints about the sensory mismatch. It still leaves me white-knuckling the rail, half bent over and breathing heavily. Delightful. Tinkertech elevators. The Simurgh’s newfound greatest weakness. God I hope nobody… oh who am I kidding there are like five cameras hidden in the walls of course somebody saw.

"Hi th— oh, ma’am, are you alright?"

Or maybe somebody’s looking at me right now. Didn’t even hear the goddamned doors open. I raise one hand to wave whoever spoke off, taking a deep breath as I do so.

"Sorry, I’m fine, power didn’t like the elevator. Just give me a moment."

I take the aforementioned moment to collect myself, swallowing down most of my remaining nausea and pushing myself back upright. Standing outside the elevator is a man, probably in his late twenties, dressed in a white polo and slacks, sporting a very concerned look on his face. I do my best to give him a reassuring smile, though I can’t imagine it does much. God, what a terrible first impression. At least it’s probably not physically possible for me to look any paler than I already do naturally. Small mercies.

"Okay, good to go," I say, stepping out of the elevator. "Sorry about that, it took me a bit by surprise."

"That’s completely fine," the man says with a slight chuckle, holding out his hand. "I’m Joel. I understand you’re here to talk to someone about recruitment?"

"Samantha," I respond, shoving down my hesitation and shaking his hand. "Sam. And uh, yes. Yes I am."

"Chevalier mentioned we might have someone coming in," Joel says with a wink. Damn, was I that predictable? I didn’t even know I was going to do this, and I’m a precog! "If you’ll follow me, I can tell you a little more about the Protectorate and we can get the process started, if it turns out you’re interested."

He starts walking down the hall, and I do indeed follow. The fourth floor of the PRT ENE headquarters is quieter than I’d expect, more hallways and conference rooms than cubicles and activity. Most of the day-to-day work is probably done on the other floors, if I had to guess, and the part of the building I’m in now is for meetings and, well, bringing outside people in. Joel leads me to one of the conference rooms and steps inside, sitting down at the middle of a long, oval-shaped table and inviting me to take the seat opposite him. It’s a pretty standard conference room, all things considered, maybe a little more updated than the ones back at the university but otherwise oddly familiar. Projector with a screen on the wall, speakerphone in the middle of the table, gray-blue patterned carpet paired with walls equally as basic. As I sit down, Joel picks up a couple of sheets of paper that are already sitting on the table, but he doesn’t look at them.

"So!" he starts. "I’d like to hear a bit about you, Sam. What brought you here today?"

Geez, starting off with the hard ones, huh? What the hell do I say to that? Joel’s smile is friendly, disarming even, but this is undoubtedly the start of an interview, not a casual get-to-know-you conversation between two strangers who just met. Is there a right answer here? What happens if I say something he doesn’t like? The best outcome I could hope for is a return to the status quo, back to my shitty life, but almost certainly with someone keeping an eye on me for the rest of it. Worst case scenario… well, they’d be idiots to put me in the Birdcage, that’s for sure. Buried in concrete a mile under the Earth’s surface, perhaps? I have no idea if that’d work, but it’s something I never got around to trying, so it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot. Maybe throw in a nuke for me to hug for good measure. Set it off if I so much as breathe the wrong way. You can’t be too careful when it comes to dealing with me. God, I’m being so stupid. What the fuck did I think I could accomplish by doing this? What am I even doing here?

What brought me here today?

"I… I’ve spent most of my life trying to be the kind of person who… doesn’t make waves," I start off hesitantly. Hopefully my delay in response is interpreted as thoughtful rather than… anything else. "Keeping my head down, being unobtrusive, do my best to live and get through the day without stepping on any toes. It always seemed too easy to mess up and do something bad that would make things worse for everyone else, so I guess I made it my goal to… not do that, and if I succeeded then that was a job well done. Objectively better than the alternative, really. And that’s how I hoped my life would always go. It seemed like it would be better for everyone. But… I’m guessing you were told what happened yesterday?"

"I’ve been given a basic overview," Joel responds, nodding and looking at me attentively. I take a deep breath before continuing. God this is hard. But… weirdly good at the same time, I think? I’m just going to keep taking it one thought at a time.

"Yesterday was… a combination of decisions and chaos," I say, for lack of a better explanation. "And I found myself in a situation with two choices, really. I could keep my head down and walk away, playing it safe like I always do, or… there were twenty-seven people who were most likely about to die or get seriously injured. I was the only one who could prevent that, and I could do so without any real physical risk to myself."

My gaze drops downward to the table as I recall the events of yesterday. Sitting on the floor, pure possibility flowing into my mind, debating with myself whether or not I should actually do something. If I was even capable of helping. If the only thing I really was, deep down, was… me. If I even wanted to know the answer to that question.

"I had an opportunity. No personal consequences if I didn’t take it; nobody knew I was there. I guess I didn’t expect Velocity to see me, so… no real personal consequences if I did take the opportunity, either. It was a neutral test, really, with myself as both the examiner and the subject, and twenty-seven people waiting to see if I got the answer right."

A laugh chokes its way out of my throat, followed by a couple of more intentional deep breaths. Joel stays silent, which I’m thankful for. I need a moment to get through this.

"I didn’t want to. I tried everything I could to convince myself it was a bad idea. I suppose it’s a good thing I failed, isn’t it? Because now, those people…"

I trail off, thinking about the two major paths I explored yesterday. The one where I walked away, and the one that actually happened. I only sang enough to get a couple of minutes of precognition, but it’s not difficult to extrapolate outwards to the ends of those paths. I could have walked away, gone home, and hated myself for hours until falling asleep. I’d wake back up in the morning, roll over, and probably try and smother myself with a pillow until my entire respiratory system turned marble. Following it up with more self-loathing, rotting in bed, and the tiniest chance I’d actually get to making a new resume and finding a job. Continue ad nauseam until I return to pretty much the exact same life I had before, broken up by the occasional bout of mass destruction and psychological torture on a citywide scale.

But I didn’t walk away. And perhaps talking to Chevalier brought something up out of me that I was never going to consciously think about, ever. That I never could, without some miraculous series of decisions and chaos leading me to that exact situation. Maybe this had to happen, for whatever comes next in my life to follow. Is there some remote, slim possibility that I set myself up for this? That during every incident over these past eight years, there was some part of me buried deep down that sent a few butterflies off years into the future just to land on me and wake me up? I… I can’t believe that. I wish I could, but… that would be a nice thing to do. And whatever fucking thing does this to me leeches every single nice thought out of me and leaves nothing left but her. And she detests me.

No. This isn’t predestination, or some minor plan I didn’t see fit to remember, or anyone else’s fault but mine. This is me. Samantha fucking Stewart. Finally taking control.

"My life is boring. My unobtrusive, better-for-everyone, don’t-make-waves life is killing me every single day with death by three thousand cuts. But yesterday I did something that actually meaningfully contributed to the world for once, and Chevalier… he made me realize that I could do it again. That I had a way out from the bottom of this pit I’ve dug for myself. That’s what brought me here today."

Silence follows. I don’t really know how to follow that up, and I’m afraid that if I talk about it anymore my voice might start breaking. Thankfully, I’m not the one who has to pick the conversation back up.

"Was yesterday when your powers first exhibited themselves?" Joel asks after a bit. The words are probing, but his tone is soft and kind. I suppose my response wouldn’t change either way.

"Oh, no, I’ve uh… I’ve had them for a while. Yesterday was just the first time I, y’know, did any heroing or anything with them." Not even a lie, really. Just a little misleading.

Joel nods in acknowledgment, then picks up a pen and moves it to one of the papers he has lying on the table in front of him.

"Could you specify what exactly your powers are, for me? It’s helpful for us to know so we can find you the best fit."

I can know everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ll ever say, and make you see, hear, and do almost anything I want. I can throw a skyscraper at you from a thousand feet in the air and reduce you to a red smear beneath the rubble. I can be any Tinker and any Thinker. Shooting me only makes me stronger and meaner. I am a fifteen-foot-tall angelic monster who has the third-highest casualty count of any single entity in human history and I. Cannot. Fucking. Die.

"Nothing fancy. Just telekinesis," I lie, giving Joel a slight smile and a shrug. Obviously I’m not going to be honest about my powers to the PRT, but the question of how exactly I do want to present myself to them is a bit of a challenge, especially considering what they already know from last night. "I can’t directly affect people or other living objects, but I’m not limited to line of sight, so I can also kind of get a mental sense of all the objects around me as well as the rough locations of people."

Joel began writing as soon as I started talking again, and he gives me a slight chuckle when I finish.

"I suppose that’s what gave you trouble with the elevators here? I imagine it could be a bit of a strange sensation if you have an outside point of reference."

"Ugh, yeah," I shudder. "I can’t say I was expecting it."

"Sorry about that. I can take you down the stairs when you leave, if you’d like." Joel pauses his scribbling, then looks up thoughtfully. "So, telekinesis. Would you be willing to give me a quick demonstration? It makes the process a bit easier if we can confirm things prior to doing in-depth testing."

Oh! I probably should have expected this, but it’s not a big deal. Let’s see.. yeah, that should do it. The conference table we’re sitting at is clearly meant to be able to accommodate a lot more than just two people seated across from each other, with other ten chairs pushed in under the table. I mentally grip each one, pull them outwards, and then slide them all one position to the right. Of course, two of the chairs are blocked from doing so by the ones Joel and I are sitting in, so I elect to lift them up and float them over us, gently arcing back down on the other side. Once they’re back on the ground, I push all the chairs back in, and the conference room looks just how it did before. Barely even a fraction of my capabilities, yet Joel is still looking at me with a moderately surprised expression.

"Well, color me impressed," he says, making another quick note on the paper. I can’t help but smile just a little.

"I did an apartment building yesterday. This is a lot easier, in comparison."

"I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ll do in the future!" Joel responds, laughing again. He puts the pen down, apparently done writing for now. "Well, if you’re willing, I’m sure the PRT would greatly appreciate a more detailed account of the fight yesterday from your perspective, but that’s not something that needs to happen right now."

He places the papers he has to the side and looks back up at me.

"Okay! One thing I should tell you is that Protectorate membership is not automatic. It’s conditional on the completion of the vetting process and the approval of the PRT department that you’d want to join. I personally don’t make any of the decisions in the recruitment process, I just work in HR, but I think I can tell you that the Brockton Bay department would be thrilled to have a new member, and as long as you don’t have multiple felonies or some other severe extenuating circumstance you’re likely to breeze right through the background check, best I can tell."

Does being an Endbringer count as severe extenuating circumstances? I don’t think I’ve ever actually been charged with any crimes, though, probably because the government doesn’t know I exist as a legal entity. Guess I’m good to go, then.

"I don’t have any interest in leaving Brockton Bay, so that’s not a concern," I say. A career derailment due to letting the conflict jitters build up too much and going off like a chaos bomb is not something I ever want to happen.

"One less obstacle, then!" Joel smiles at me. "Alright then, the pitch. Conditional on departmental approval and all that yada yada, you will be offered a junior membership position within the Protectorate. We have an onsite lab, so fitness and power testing can be taken care of right here, and the PR and Branding teams would also meet with you during your first two weeks to establish your identity as a hero. You would also be introduced to the local Protectorate and Wards teams during this time, and go through departmental training. Oh! I almost forgot, do you have any other obligations that you’ll need to manage at the same time as this? Dependents, employment, things like that?"

"I uh… no, I don’t," I answer, fidgeting in my seat a little. "I got laid off from my job recently, so I guess that’s probably another reason why I’m looking for a change."

"Ah, I’m sorry to hear that," he responds. "If you don’t mind me asking, where were you working previously?"

"UMass Brockton," I say, shoving my emotions down from where they try to well up. "I did research for the Humanities and Fine Arts department. Um, no other obligations outside of work, either."

Joel grabs his pen and makes another quick note, then leafs through his stack of papers and pulls one out, referencing it as he talks.

"Well, that should hopefully make the transition a bit smoother, should you choose to join up. If you do happen to be looking at Protectorate membership as a replacement for full-time work, the PRT does like to provide the opportunity for members to take on additional responsibilities relating to their skills and previous employment, if they can contribute meaningfully to the organization, and I’d have to check to be sure but I do think a university researcher position would qualify. Those responsibilities come with an additional salary increase on top of base pay, which I believe for Brockton Bay junior members is currently set at…"

He runs a finger down the paper in front of him, stopping when he gets to the right line.

"…eighty-six thousand, seven hundred and eighty dollars annually."

Holy fucking shit. I stare at Joel, but he’s not even looking at me as he keeps reading off the paper.

"This increases to one hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred and ten dollars when you get promoted to full Protectorate membership, which happens a year after your start date provided you remain in good standing with the department. Let’s see, additional salary for S-Class and Endbringer threat response, Tinker technology development, leadership positions, Thinker contracting… ah, yes, 'and on a variable basis dependent on skill-based contributions to PRT departmental operations.' So that’s up to departmental discretion, but research is a big part of what we do here on a daily basis, so I can’t imagine they wouldn’t take you up on it if you wanted."

Joel puts down the paper and looks back up at me, a friendly smile with just a touch of amusement on his face.

"The benefits are pretty good too. Health insurance with in-house treatment options, dedicated space at the Protectorate ENE headquarters, 457b plan, all that jazz. Do you have questions about any of the specifics?"

Double my previous salary. Triple in a year. Plus more just to spend time satiating my drive for research, and I’d get to stay in Brockton Bay, using just a single one of my least-egregious powers. I’m not exactly hurting for money, given that I never really deserve things enough to buy them, but still. Holy fucking shit.

"Why the hell doesn’t every parahuman join the Protectorate?" I manage to croak out.

That earns me my biggest laugh yet from Joel.

"I think that goal is why they make it so lucrative," he chuckles, then leans forward slightly. "So, I take it you’re interested?"

"Yeah," I nod. “Yeah. I’m in."

Notes:

This chapter was originally going to be even more, but I got halfway through what I had planned for this chapter and realized it was already at 4.3k words, so I decided to split it into two. On the plus side, that means I already know exactly what's going to happen in Chapter Five, so fingers crossed it takes less than a month to come out!

Chapter Five will also hopefully have a little bit more excitement than just talking, but what I have written here is still something that's personally very interesting to me. I've never really seen a fic cover the Protectorate recruitment process before, because like 95% of wormfic protagonists are teenagers and even then only a fraction of those actually join up with the heroes, so I wanted to do an exploration of what the process would be like. Next chapter will still be a continuance of that, but with a bit more going on, and some new characters (hopefully not new for you all, though) for Sam to meet as well.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the chapter! Please don't be afraid to comment and let me know what you think; my body is a machine that turns reader reactions into writing energy.

(P.S. I try to be as canon-compliant as possible with my details where appropriate, so all of the numbers and pay details here are sourced from the PRT Master Reference Doc by Wildbow, plus a flat $8k for Brockton Bay specifically as I figure they have to offer slightly higher pay than average due to the environment there.)

(P.P.S. Also yes I am officially declaring Brockton Bay to be in Massachusetts by naming the university Sam worked at, because Brockton's gotta be somewhere and Massachusetts is as good a place as any.)

Chapter 5: The Knight Of The Oval Conference Table

Notes:

"It just so happens that your author here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do."
"What's that?"
"Go through her notes and look for unfinished drafts."

Hey everyone! Sorry this took so long to come out! I had a lot going on these past two months, including travel, personal things to take care of, accidentally letting myself write 2k words of a chapter that's going to happen at the very end of this story, and starting a new job! As a consolation, this chapter has over seven thousand words, so hopefully you enjoy them. Maybe if you leave a comment the next one will come out faster! Who knows? Certainly not me!

Name: Stewart, Samantha Aylin

Because my younger self was brazen as hell and probably thought it would be funny or something.

Date of Birth: December 27th, 1981

Fuck, I’m legally almost thirty. I really don’t want to think about trying to fix that once the difference in my appearance gets to the point of implausibility. I guess the silver lining is that if this whole stupid Protectorate plan goes up in flames I’ll have to get a new identity anyway.

Place of Birth: Lausanne, Switzerland

One of my younger self’s decisions that was only half-stupid when I was establishing an identity for myself. It draws attention, but it’s also a very easy way to shut down conversation whenever someone asks about my family or childhood. Going to college in America, entire family is bombed to hell by the government while I’m gone, bada bing bada boom now you feel horrible too.

Nationality: Dual Citizenship, Switzerland and United States of America

Coming over to the US in 2003 wasn’t a bad call either. Turns out faking a citizenship record is a lot easier when you can mentally coerce anyone into doing whatever you want and don’t yet have the experience to know how fucking horrible of a person that makes you. Plus, saying my nonexistent dad was an expat living abroad explains my American accent.

Gender: Female

That one seems pretty obvious.

The oddly organized forms I am currently filling out were given to me by Joel before he left me alone in the conference room, who apparently will be my HR representative through the entire Protectorate onboarding process (conditional on departmental approval and successful completion of blah blah blah). He’s currently off… somewhere, leaving me with the assurance that someone will be in to check on me and presumably now setting in motion whatever processes require every scrap of personal information I can remember, and some I’m probably expected to look up when I’m able. I enjoy filling out forms as much as the next monster, but the level of detail they’re asking of me here certainly isn’t doing anything for my anxiety levels. Sure, when I answer stuff like 'List every country you’ve traveled to in the past five years’ I know I can match the government’s records of me, but this still means that someone’s going to check, and that means there’s every opportunity to catch something small that I missed. I can reluctantly admit that I have some faith in my younger self’s ability to put together a fairly solid foundation for a fake identity, but if anything in this process is going to be the death of my little adventure here there’s a good chance it’ll be these forms.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that registering as a hero is so bureaucratic. This is the United States government we’re talking about, not some plucky band of do-gooders tied together with tragic backstories and a dream. I don’t really harbor any illusions about superhero work being like anything depicted in a comic book, anyway. The Silver Age fell out of fashion decades before I was born, and even the modern stuff is so idealistic that I’d hope anyone past middle school would take it with a couple thousand grains of salt. Real life isn’t glamorous. It’s shitty and it sucks and trying to change that is an exercise in futile stupidity.

I sigh and put down the pen after putting a dash through every line asking for my immediate family members’ personal information. Should I be thinking so cynically about this? I haven’t even started yet and already I’m mentally dumping all over what I’m about to do. Shouldn’t there still be some glamor left over, after all the politics and public interest and business sides of things strip it all down to the core? Heck, yesterday I was saving people from a burning and collapsing building. That’s classic superheroism right there. It’s not punching bad guys, but I don’t enjoy the thought of doing that anyway. I am joining the Protectorate to help people. Me. The freaking Simurgh. I’m going to use my powers for good, and nobody can stop me, and I’m not going to fuck up because if I fuck up Brockton Bay will probably get quarantined because of me and that would be bad so I’m not going to do it! This isn’t going to be hard at all. There’s a fire, I’ll show up, pull everyone out, and hopefully feel better about myself for a couple of hours. Well, not pull everyone out, I can’t do that. Clear the way for firefighters, maybe? I can at least hold the building up if there’s another one that’s going to collapse. Maybe that could be my schtick, Structural Support Woman. Hahaha fuck there’s no way that’s actually what the PRT would have me go with, right? Besides, I can do other stuff too! There’s… uh… search and rescue would probably be a big one! I can find people pretty easily if I’m close to them! So probably not the Coast Guard kind of search and rescue, but if there’s a building collapse or something and someone has to dig through the rubble then I’m your girl!

Oh my god collapsing buildings really are going to be my thing.

Okay no shut up calm down structural failures aren’t even that common, that can’t be my thing. What do heroes do, what do heroes do… they patrol a lot? Walking around, that’s easy, I can do that. Although, half the reason they patrol is to catch crimes in progress. I can’t exactly restrain anyone with telekinesis, not unless I get really creative with whatever furniture happens to be available. I guess I could take away stolen items and big guns, but small ones and knives are out. Fuck, what if someone tries to shoot me? I have no idea if I can catch a bullet like this, and getting shot would be disastrous. The PRT would give me body armor, right? They’ve gotta, if heroes are facing villains and people with guns all the time. …Though come to think of it, Battery’s costume is pretty skin-tight. So is Challenger’s. And Miss Militia just wears normal clothes oh god they don’t give the women body armor they’re trading safety for sex appeal holy shit I’m going to get shot and go marble and everyone’s going to figure out who I am and

"Samantha?"

I’ll have to quit but I probably won’t even get that luxury because they’ll send all the heroes after me to try and take me down but that won’t even work because even if they go for capture over killing me there’s no way the Birdcage (ha) would actually be able to keep her in there when my next turn to be a monster comes around and all the other villains there would just all become me-bombs and be way more deadly than they were beforehand because

"Samantha?"

knowing exactly how to make a situation worse is my fucking specialty and having access to that kind of firepower would be like throwing gasoline on a metal fire fuck and now that I’m thinking about it I’m surprised that that hasn’t happened already because who cares about a stupid little major city when an entire prison full of supervillains could be sent off every which way to go out and turn the entire world into my own personal

"Samantha!"

I jolt, slamming my foot into one of the table legs while accidentally sending the pen that was resting under my hand flying. Damn it shit fuck I can’t keep doing this!

"H-hi sorry I was just… hello?"

My gaze whips around the room, and I expect to see Joel or someone else who came in while I was distracted, but the room is completely empty save for me. There’s no one in the hallway directly outside, either, according to my telekinesis.

"No, I should apologize for startling you," says the unknown voice again, and I belatedly realize that it’s coming from the speakerphone sitting in the middle of the conference table. Some part of my brain tells me it’s vaguely familiar, but the rest of my brain is screaming so that’s not really my top priority. "I was asked to check in and see if you needed anything, and I heard you hyperventilating. Are you alright?"

Oh. Oh hell I really was freaking out, huh. I take a moment to get my breathing under control and unclench my fists, looking down at my palms to find… yep, four little crescents of white adorning each one. I elect to press my hands down flat against my thighs to try to both ground myself and conceal my fingernail-induced fuckup. Damn that was a bad one. Hoo okay gotta act like a normal human being and respond and pretend I didn’t just have a panic attack in the middle of the PRT building like an idiot. It’s fine this is fine everything’s fine.

"Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry anyone, I’m alright," I say. Deep breaths. In and out. "Just got a little overwhelmed for a second, it’s nothing. Sorry, um, hi!"

"If you’re certain," the voice responds, though maybe a bit hesitantly. "In any case, hello. I usually prefer first introductions to be a little smoother than this, but that’s not always a luxury we get in our line of work. My name is Dragon. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Samatha."

The wave of muted anger that roils up inside of me is entirely unexpected and more than a little disconcerting. It’s also, unfortunately, not inexplicable. I usually consider it a blessing that my memories of my… violent episodes tend to be incomplete, probably because the sheer amount of data that my precognition generates when I’m fully powered up would be way too much for any normal person to remember. What remains is a general recollection of events, thoughts, and flashes of precognition that I do my best to keep shoved into a little corner of my memories that never ever gets accessed unless my brain is feeling particularly inclined to mentally revisit the darkest points of my life. So… pretty much every day.

Dragon herself features quite prominently in the memories I’m unlucky enough to keep, and if I had to guess that’s mostly because my other self completely fucking hates her. Some of the strongest emotions she ever felt were due to Dragon being one of the few people who’s actually capable of coordinating an effective defense against her attacks. The AI’s efforts started off as an annoyance back when she was first getting entering the hero scene, but quickly escalated to a royal pain in the wing with each encounter, and the threshold system that Dragon monitors and facilitates is one of the things that pisses her off most of all. I’m fairly certain the only reason that Dragon hasn’t earned Canada a visit is that her digital nature means there’s no easy way to kill or subvert her, even with all the power at my disposal. Dragon is one of humanity’s single most effective counters to my other self.

Is it any wonder I’m a big fan?

"O-Oh, hi! Dragon! It’s a pleasure to meet you too!" I babble, telling all the negative emotions associated with the dredged-up memories to take a hike. An awestruck reaction is probably appropriate for a normal person meeting a hero of Dragon’s fame for the first time, and it’s not even entirely a performance. "Sorry, I really wasn’t expecting this! Um! What can I do for you?"

"I expected to be the one asking you that question," Dragon laughs, and I relax a little. Jokes, okay, this is good. Normal conversation, not about my freakout. Don’t think about the fact that it’s with one of the world’s most famous superheroes. "I know the onboarding process can be a little much. How are you finding things?"

"Good so far, I think!" I say, trying to add a note of cheer to my voice. "Paperwork is… paperwork, of course, but that’s unavoidable. The three constants in life, death, taxes, and paperwork."

Dragon laughs again at my exceptionally awkward joke, even putting in the effort to make it sound genuine, which means I’m doing well. I can do this. Just gotta take things one step at a time.

"Well, that’s certainly true. I’ll warn you in advance about some of the forms you’ll be filling out on a more regular basis. I’ve done my best to get the PRT to implement better procedures, but…" she pauses, as if to imply a sigh, "I can only do so much in the face of bureaucracy. I hope that doesn’t scare you off, though."

"Not at all," I assure her. If I’m being honest with myself, the paperwork is probably one of the lesser minefields I’m going to have to navigate if I want to make this work. "I used to work at a university, so I’m not really a stranger to it."

"Oh? What did you do?" Dragon asks. "I imagine hero work must be quite the prospective career shift."

"I was a head research assistant," I respond. "Working with faculty and library staff, sometimes students, coordinating resources, setting up interviews, helping to write articles, that sort of thing."

"Any fields of particular interest?" she asks.

"Well, I did work for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, but really anything on the anthropology side of things. That’s what I got my degree in," I explain. My fake, verifiable-but-technically-nonexistent degree, anyway. "I’ve always been fascinated by the history of, well, humans! There’s thousands of years of culture to explore since the dawn of civilization, and it’s all interesting to me."

"You’ve definitely got my agreement on that," Dragon says. "Is there any chance I’ve read anything you’ve written?"

"Oh, no, I didn’t really contribute in that way. Not enough to call anything we’ve put out mine, at least. I was doing more data gathering and whatnot."

"Still, data gathering is an important part of the process! Come on, there must have been a favorite project of yours or something?"

"Well… okay, how much do you know about bronze?"

We continue to chat for a while, which is actually rather fun, all things considered. Take that, prejudiced memories, I’m holding a conversation with Dragon and it turns out she’s really nice! You just have a problem with her because she stops you from turning people into guided missiles, which I think is very understandable of her. Plus I get to talk about the research I’ve done, something that I get to do not nearly as often as I’d like. The whole experience eases my anxiety a bit, as an added bonus. It’s… great. It’s genuinely great.

Unfortunately, great things can’t last forever, and while I’m in the middle of complaining about both Indiana Jones trilogies there’s a knock at the door, which opens a moment later.

"Hey there!" Joel says, poking his head in. "How’s everything going in here?"

"Quite well, Joel," Dragon answers through the speakerphone, beating me to the response. "Though I apologize for distracting Samantha here; I suspect she hasn’t made much headway on those forms."

"Oh! I wasn’t aware… that’s alright, ma’am, we’re not in any huge rush," Joel says, apparently a little caught off guard by Dragon addressing him. "I just came back to check on things and walk her through scheduling."

"Ah, I’ll let you have her back, then," Dragon responds. "I should probably get going, as well."

"Oh fuck, sorry, have I been keeping you?" I ask. Damn it, she’s Dragon and I’ve been rambling to her about history for twenty minutes, there’s no way she has time for this!

"Not at all," she assures me. "It was nice to have the distraction, and believe me, I’m quite skilled at multitasking."

"Still, though," I say, doing my best to not show any amusement at the joke that was probably only meant for herself. "I shouldn’t keep Joel waiting. It was very nice to get to talk to you, Dragon."

"Likewise, Samantha. I hope we’ll get to do so again sometime soon. Good luck with your onboarding."

"Thanks!" I respond. And then, emboldened to take a bit of a risk, "And please, call me Sam."

"Sam, then," Dragon says, and I think I can hear a bit of a smile in her synthesized voice. "I look forward to working with you."

And with that, the speakerphone beeps, signaling the hero signing off. Wow. I really can’t say I was expecting that this morning.

"I guess I should probably get this finished, then," I say, picking up the pen again.

"Well, like I said, we’re not in a rush," Joel says, rallying himself as he sits back down across from me and places a new set of papers on the conference table. "We do need the information, yes, but it’s still pretty early and HR will prioritize it once you’re done. On that note, I don’t actually have anything else for you to complete today after this. I mentioned earlier that I don’t have any doubts you’ll be receiving an offer, but the background checks and departmental approval are still required formalities. With that in mind, however, I think we can still get the ball rolling on setting up some of the other meetings that will need to happen, if that sounds alright to you?"

"Uh… sure!" I reply, not really having any reason to object. "My schedule is pretty clear this week, so… what have you got for me?"

"Tomorrow I’d like for you to come back in around ten, if that works. We can go over the results of your screening, assuming Watchdog has completed their part by then, but I expect they will and if we need to delay I’ll just give you a call. Does that work for you?"

"Sounds good," I smile. I can’t say I’m not a little nervous at the prospect of Thinkers investigating my background, but hey, if all the work I did eight years ago holds up against the PRT’s best then things will probably be smooth sailing from there.

"Great! I think we’ll go ahead and see if we can’t find some time in the director’s schedule for you to meet her tomorrow as well, since I have a feeling she’ll want to have at least a quick chat before signing off on your membership. After that your official offer should be ready, and someone will be by to talk policies and procedures. Legal will probably have some additional things for you to sign as well. Then, if you’re up for it, fitness testing and power testing on Thursday. We have a lab onsite, so you won’t have to fly out to another department for that."

"Wow," I say, a little surprised at the pace. "Does the onboarding process always move this quickly?"

"We are moving a little faster than average in your case," Joel admits, "but that’s due to a number of factors. The PRT ENE department—that’s Brockton Bay—is, quite frankly, really eager for new members, so they’re going to remove as many bottlenecks as possible. You also said that you don’t currently have any other obligations, so that means there’s a bit less to work around, and thirdly we did have a bit of forewarning, since Chevalier mentioned he gave someone a pitch, which gives us time to at least make sure things were prepped and in place."

"That happened yesterday evening."

Joel shrugs.

"We work fast. You kind of have to, here."

"I… suppose that makes sense," I concede. "So, be here tomorrow at ten, meet the director, power testing on Thursday."

"Yep," he nods. "That usually takes most of a day, but assuming everything stays on track, you should have a three-day weekend. Strategy will need Friday to do their analysis and the PR and Branding teams will also need time to put together their proposals for you."

"PR and Branding?" I ask. "Are they not the same thing?"

"Surprisingly not!" Joel laughs. "They’re both under the Public Image umbrella, but Branding is going to be giving you name and costume proposals. They’re the what, and PR is the how. They’ll walk you through, well, public relations of course, but also things like how you interact with civilians and the media, your internet presence, and potential licensing opportunities. I expect someone will be flying out either Monday or Tuesday to meet with you for that."

"Huh, alright," I say. I guess both aspects are important for superheroes. I have to assume they’ll give me some input into the creative process, at the very least. If I’m going to be doing this, I’d rather not be stuck with something overly sexualized or just plain stupid. Or, god forbid, angelic. The PRT wouldn’t be stupid enough to try something that heavily associated with an Endbringer, right? They couldn’t.

"You’ll most likely be meeting various members of the team throughout the week, and we’ll try to at least say hi to everyone by next Friday," Joel continues, spreading out his stack of papers to look through them. "Assuming the standard schedule, you’ll start training next week as well, which should continue as Branding finalizes your presentation. Then you’ll debut, start pair patrolling, and it’s off from there!"

"That’s… okay, wow, yeah," I say with a bit of a nervous chuckle. "I think that all sounds good."

"It’s a lot, I know," he acknowledges with a compassionate smile. "We can always take things slower if you need. Everyone’s going to be eager to have you on board, but your comfort is a big priority here too."

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, grounding myself in the room. This is what I want, right? This is why I came here this morning, why I entertained talking to Chevalier, why I left that convenience store in the first place. I want to do something with my life. Help people instead of hurt them. Make a dent in the mountain of bodies that can be attributed to me over the years.

Try to not be her.

"I don’t want to wait," I respond. "If the PRT doesn’t want to wait either, then that’s all the better."

True to Joel’s word, there isn’t much left for me to do today. I finish filling out the veritable autobiography the United States government wants me to record in all the neat little boxes (and a good chunk of what I put down isn’t even a lie), and Joel graciously walks me down the stairwell to the lobby, which I’m very thankful for. By the time I exit the building the sun has barely reached its highest point in the sky, so I still have a good ten or eleven hours to kill. It’s an odd feeling, not having anything to do on a Tuesday. I’ve had the same schedule for years, but now everything about my life has been thrown out of whack. I just signed up to be a superhero, for goodness sake. Me! Joel seemed to think I’d be accepted no question (well actually, a lot of question, that’s what today and tomorrow are all about), and I suppose I don’t have any reason not to believe his assessment, but it still all feels more than a bit surreal.

There’s nothing I can really do about that feeling, though, so I simply head back home. The Brockton Bay PRT headquarters isn’t that far a walk from my apartment, and a twenty-minute commute would be a welcome change from a thirty-two-minute one, especially if I wouldn’t even have to take the bus. Though, the Protectorate doesn’t really operate out of the downtown building, right? That’s what the big oil rig in the bay is for. I wonder how the logistics of that work? The middle of the bay surely can’t be a good location for rapid response, and as far as I can recall the only fliers on the team are Dauntless and Aegis. I guess tomorrow I could just… ask someone. That’s weird.

When I get back to my apartment, after hanging up my bag and coat I decide to do at least the bare minimum of research and actually fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the local heroes. This is probably something I should have done last night, or anytime in the past couple of years, but hey, better late than never. The information available on the internet is… simultaneously specific and vague. The Protectorate website has official bios on each of them, of course, but that doesn’t tell me much I don’t already know besides the fact that Challenger transferred across the country as of the beginning of this year. Which might work in my favor, actually. If Brockton Bay just lost a Protectorate member, the PRT will probably be especially eager to bring on someone else to pick up the slack. Hopefully eager enough to not notice any oddities in my history, if I’m lucky.

The wikis and discussion forums I find have a bit more information, at least, and despite questionable reliability it’s better than nothing. Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Velocity, Assault and Battery (that seems in poor taste from a PR standpoint, but I can’t say it’s not amusing. Wait, no, that’d be Branding, right?), and Dauntless. Then the Wards, with Triumph, Aegis, Vista, Clockblocker (come to think of it, if Branding suggests stuff like this, maybe I do have to worry about them proposing something angelic), Gallant, Shadow Stalker, and Kid Win. The people I’ll be working with, if tomorrow goes well. The heroes I’ll be working with. Gosh this is daunting. …But not as scary as it was this morning.

I end up wiki-walking a bit, which eventually takes me through Chevalier, a lot of the other Protectorate members, the Triumvirate, and eventually even the Guild. Dragon’s name catches my eye, so I click on the link, because why not? Once again, the information is simultaneously specific and vague. Debuted a little over five years ago, followed by a meteoric rise in reputation and capability. Runs the Birdcage, uses remote-controlled 'suits,' frequently works with the Protectorate, and while the full extent of her contributions isn’t publicly known, there seems to be a lot of speculation that the fact that the PRT started using containment foam not long after she started working with them isn’t a coincidence. My own memories don’t serve to fill in many of the gaps, despite the additional understanding granted by knowing that she’s not human either. Hah. I guess the Protectorate is about to have two capes who secretly aren’t human.

I find my mind wandering back to the conversation we had earlier today. Dragon is the second cape I’ve ever met as Samantha Stewart, normal human person (well, third if you count the six sentences I yelled at Velocity as 'meeting him'), and I have to say, interacting with her outside of the context of trying to avoid getting my wings blasted off by heavy artillery and parahuman powers was actually rather nice. As much as I wished the lie was true, I wasn’t doing alright when we first started talking, but… I suppose I was afterward. She even seemed genuinely interested in my work, an opinion I have no doubt most other people wouldn’t share. I felt normal, funnily enough. Like for just a couple of minutes, I was someone else, not me. I almost dare to dream of another opportunity to just chat like that, but I know better than to get my hopes up. She’s doubtlessly extremely busy, and even if I do join the Protectorate I can’t imagine there’d be any overlap in our work. Maybe if I was presenting myself to the PRT as a Tinker instead, piggybacking off of someone’s abilities whenever they’re within my range, but that ship has sailed.

The rest of my afternoon is surprisingly relaxing. I cook, I read, I watch recorded wrestling matches on my computer to scratch the little itch in the messed-up part of my brain that can’t handle a day or two without conflict. Sleep doesn’t come quickly, but that’s par for the course. I feel apprehensive, about tomorrow and Thursday and next week and the week after and all the way on for however long I can manage to keep up this charade for. But… not necessarily in a bad way. It still has a massive potential to go wrong and blow up in my face, but there’s a chance it doesn’t do so right away. And in that window of time between now and the end of it all… maybe I can make a difference for someone. That wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t have to be at the PRT building until ten o’clock, but I still wake up at seven-thirty like I usually do. More time to prepare is always better than less, right? Though I don’t actually have anything particularly different I need to do, so I probably could have actually gotten a bit more sleep. Oh well, I know how to wait.

When I do finally arrive downtown, the PRT HQ lobby is a lot less busy than it was yesterday. I start to head over to the reception desk again, but change direction when I notice that one of the few people waiting here in the lobby besides me is Joel.

"Sam! Hey! Right on time," he greets me as I approach, which is a bit silly since I know I’m at least ten minutes early. "Ready to get going?"

"As I’ll ever be," I respond, doing my best to let nothing show through but enthusiasm. "I hope you have good news for me?"

"I do indeed! Though maybe we should head upstairs first?" Joel says brightly, causing a little bit of my tension to ebb. He probably wouldn’t be saying that if my background check had come back negative, so that’s one worry alleviated. Unless this is a ploy to get me into custody, but there’s gotta be easier ways than that, right? Plus, here, easy evidence, the building hasn’t been evacuated, so nobody actually thinks that the Simurgh’s here. Stop fucking catastrophizing. It’s going to be fine.

"Lead the way, then," I say, and indeed Joel does, taking me back up the stairs to the fourth floor, which is very considerate of him. We walk down the same stretch of hallways as yesterday, and Joel starts talking to me, but I don’t pay attention to him. This area of the PRT building has security cameras spaced evenly throughout the hallways and at junctions, and while that isn’t as dense as in the lobby, I have to assume they still provide full coverage, mainly due to the sheer amount of electronics packed into each little dome. My telekinesis tells me that the lensing array itself is barely half a centimeter thick, but somehow the curvature of the glass would probably provide… fuck, thirty times magnification? Forty? Wait, no, not glass, acrylic, which makes sense because you could probably make aspherical elements a lot more easily than with plain glass. I really don’t know enough about light refraction, so I couldn’t say how it messes with the wavelengths, but given the presence of those little diodes scattered around and flush with the casing it probably has infrared capabilities, which is of course useful for night vision but that must mean somewhere in front of the photoreceptor there’s an IR filter so the picture doesn’t get washed out, but I can’t feel anything obvious so either I’m missing it or they’re somehow correcting for it in software which would be—

"Sam?"

I blink and look around. Joel is standing about ten feet away from me, with a concerned look on his face. I’m not walking either, because… because I had stopped to stare at a camera on the ceiling for the past fifteen seconds. Oh. That’s… probably not a great look for me. I’m grounded back in the present again, at least, so it’s not hard to figure out what just happened. The sudden fugue that occasionally accompanies having a Tinker in my radius is, ironically, a damn sight easier to snap out of than a panic spiral, but maybe I can use that to my advantage to play this off. Pretend it’s just nerves or something. Fuck, where did that even come from? I get my bearings as I recompose myself and… there, Tinker. In the conference room where I spent most of my time here yesterday. Which Joel has his hand on the door of. Alright, okay, most likely one of the heroes. Gallant and Kid Win are both Wards, so I don’t know why they’d be here, which means it’s probably Armsmaster. It makes an unfortunate amount of sense that the leader of the local Protectorate would want to meet with me, their newest candidate, so now I just have to get through a conversation with him without nerding out over his power armor or something. I guess I should have known what I was getting myself into with this, since of course I’m going to be spending time with Tinkers in range if I’m working with superheroes. Hiding the full breadth of my abilities might be even harder than I thought.

Hmm.

"Sorry, just a weird feeling for a second, I’m fine," I assure Joel, then continue walking. Okay, think it out. I’ve got maybe ten seconds to decide.

I copy the abilities of Tinkers and Thinkers in my power radius. That’s at least three of the Brockton Bay heroes, definitely some of the villains, and possibly some independents too. Can’t control whether or not I pick up a power unless I’m singing or big, which is obviously not an option. Tinker powers are definitely the more egregious of the two categories, due to how much of an effect on my mental state they can have. If I join the Protectorate, my boss will be a Tinker. The chances I have access to Tinker powers on a regular basis for an extended period of time and don’t slip up are… slim, knowing myself. Probably should have thought about this beforehand, but it’s too late now, so worry later and focus now. I’m not sure how good I’ll be at hiding it.

Could I not hide it?

There’s precedent for capes having multiple unrelated powers, sure. Just look at any Alexandria package, or a whole heck of a lot of others. As far as I know, Tinker isn’t usually only half of a powerset, though. But unprecedented doesn’t necessarily mean impossible, right? The main problem with that is I told Joel yesterday that I was only a telekinetic, and being a Tinker seems like the kind of thing that you’d know about.

Unless you weren’t a Tinker all the time.

Don’t pretend to be a Tinker, pretend to be a Tinker-copying Trump. Hell, it wouldn’t even be pretending, that’s my actual power! It’s not at all a stretch to assume that someone could go their whole life without getting close to any parahuman, let alone a Tinker, so saying this is my first time meeting one in person, which then activates a latent power that never had the right conditions to do so before… fuck, this could work. God, doesn’t Dragon even do something similar, just with the technology instead of the Tinker themselves? It’s a risk, sure, but I think it might be too perfect of a solution not to take. Okay, fuck, decision made. Now I just have to execute it.

"Well alright, if you’re sure," Joel continues after a moment’s hesitation, pushing open the door to the conference room. "As I was saying, we’ve got a couple of meetings lined up for you today, the first of which…"

I do my best to play the part of someone who didn’t expect to see the most famous hero in the city standing in full costume on the other side of the table. No signature halberd, but his full suit of blue-and-silver power armor is plenty impressive all by itself, and my mind is already racing through the different components I can see to try and figure out how they work, though the suit is too close to his body for my telekinesis to be able to get a proper read on the internal components. I suppose I should just… let it happen?

"M-Mister Armsmaster, sir!" I say in greeting. Okay, that’s a bit too much nervousness, tone it down a little. "I… wasn’t expecting to meet you today!"

"I just got back from the hospital, so I figured I’d stop by," he says warmly as he walks around the table, which throws me for a bit of a loop.

"I’m… sorry to hear that?"

"Oh, no, not for me," he clarifies, extending his gauntleted hand. "The PRT checks up on people who go through certain categories of traumatic events, which requires the periodic hospital visit."

"Ah," I respond eloquently as I accept the handshake. Great, ten seconds in and I’ve already derailed the conversation. Nice going. "Um, Samantha Stewart. Sam. It’s very nice to meet you!"

"It’s nice to put a face to the deed," Armsmaster says. "I’m sad that I didn’t get to do that the other day."

"L-likewise!" I say. Tone it back again, damn. It’s time to focus. "Sorry, wow, this is… your armor is really cool!"

"I appreciate that," he says with a laugh. Okay, what should I… ah.

"I hope you don’t mind if I ask, but is the blue color because of heat treatment or a pigment?" I ask. I sincerely doubt it actually is a pigment, as most anything applied to the surface of metal would be likely to flake off if damaged in battle and need to be reapplied. There isn’t much else I can think of that could get that vibrant a color on metal, though.

"It’s an intentional side effect of copper electrolysis, actually," Armsmaster answers with a surprised tone. Good. "Powder and ceramic coating in the past, but that was too liable to damage, so when I started adding copper sulfate it was a nice bonus."

"Ah, for EMP shielding!" I say, because that seems obvious. "So it just needs to be charged inversely to…"

"To the field generator in the halberd, yes," he finishes, sounding impressed. "I have to say, you know your stuff. I wasn’t expecting us to get another Tinker on the team."

Okay, all set up. I just need to follow through.

"Oh, I… I’m not a Tinker," I laugh shyly. "I do telekinesis, not… that."

"Really?" Armsmaster says, tilting his head. "Mind giving me a demonstration?"

"Uh, sure!" I say. I’m about to just move the chairs around the room again, but before I can do so Armsmaster has pulled something out of a compartment in his armor and tossed it into the air. Oh! Okay! I easily catch it and bring it down to hover in between us, taking a look to see… hmm! A small metallic device, vaguely egg-shaped but with visible paneling. It looks like there are parts of it that are supposed to open up, but I don’t… oh that’s very cool. Those internal screws probably are turned by a magnet normally, but I can just mentally rotate them to separate the two halves. Then I can get a visual of the insides, which are extremely tightly packed, ultrasonic transducers squeezed up right against environmental sensors touching… oh, the shiny bits on the casing are to allow light through to thermal cameras. A myriad of other sensors line the walls of the egg, hugging a central core that looks to house a battery and transmitter, but if this little device is constantly transmitting the data it’s collecting then how on Earth would it not interfere with the radio antenna looped around the other shell? Okay, maybe if when assembled the interlocking metal itself acts as—

Armsmaster clears his throat, and I snap back to focusing on him. Then, to my horror, I realize his device is in about fifty different pieces, floating in a small cloud between us. That wasn’t even intentional! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

"Oh my god, I am so sorry," I apologize, quickly fitting all the components back together. He could probably save some space if he used a central bus for wiring instead of individual connections, but there’s no way I’d actually change anything about the layout without his permission. I feel bad enough that I took it apart right in front of him. Fuck, this is probably one of the worst possible first impressions I could have made. "That was… I didn’t mean to do that."

"Please, it’s not a problem," he says for some reason as I drop the little egg into his waiting hand. He turns it over, looks at it for a moment, then nods and tucks it back away into his armor. "What do you think it does?"

For the second time in as many minutes, Armsmaster throws me for a loop. He doesn’t seem mad, though, weirdly, so…

"I guess… reconnaissance grenade is the best term I can think of for it?" I hedge. "Toss it into a room, get instant readings of sonar, sound, heat, light, location of objects and people, that sort of stuff?"

"Exactly right," he nods approvingly, and I officially have no idea what’s going on. "And you just stripped it down and put it back together in about ten seconds. It still works. Sam, are you sure you’re not a Tinker?"

Oh. Damn. He was testing me. Which… well fuck, task failed successfully, I guess!

"I… I’m a lot less sure than I was a minute ago," I answer, and I don’t even have to try to make my voice sound like I just got my world rocked. "I guess that isn’t normal?"

"No. No it’s not."

Welp. No going back now. Fingers crossed I didn't just royally fuck myself.

Notes:

Writing the Tinker mindset is interesting, because there's a fine path to walk that blends real-world engineering with just the smallest bit of physics-breaking science you can get away with. I've always wondered what it would be like to experience that from a first-person perspective, so here's my best attempt!

In other news, I've been reading Foxfire, Esq. lately, which is a delightful supernatural legal drama written by an actual lawyer. As you can probably tell by my writing, I love it when stories get down into the realism of fantastical elements, and Foxfire does that brilliantly. Go check it out!

Chapter 6: Final Review

Notes:

Maybe I actually am dead and I just haven't realized. That would be messed up, but also a compelling premise. But hey, if I can keep posting while dead, that's certainly an achievement.

Hi everyone! This isn't an April Fool's prank; I'm back! Soar's back! The boys are back (in town)! Backstreet's back! Alright! I hope you all didn't miss this story too much (oh who am I kidding, I hope you did, I thrive off of everyone's reactions so please please please keep giving them to me).

In potentially exciting news, I am participating in a WriMo! 50k words would probably kill me, so I've set a goal for writing 20k words in the month of April, which I think is much more doable. Not only will this hopefully build a habit of constant writing, but if I manage to pull it off that means that after this chapter, I should complete at least three more chapters of Soar within the month. We'll have to see if it actually happens, and if it does I probably won't post them all right when I complete them, but it'll still be a lot more frequent than I'm currently posting. Exciting stuff! Anyway, let's see how revealing her Tinker abilities has worked out for Sam, shall we?

Twenty minutes later, I’m about sixty-five percent sure that I’m in the clear. The parts of me that feel good about this are mostly working off of the fact that my whole 'I actually have Tinker powers too and didn’t know it' charade didn’t cause anyone to run off and sound an alarm or immediately detain me or even act like I had just told an incredibly obvious lie. Instead, it just led into a lot more questions. I think I’ve successfully managed to truly convince Armsmaster I didn’t know about that aspect of my powers, and with just a little subtle directing and a brief trip down to the end of the hallway and back we 'discover' the fact that I’m only a Tinker when there’s another one within my range, which puts things right about where I want them. I feel bad about monopolizing a second world-famous superhero’s time in as many days, but this one can’t really be helped if I want to sell the pretense. Thankfully, everyone so far seems to have bought it.

The thirty-five percent of me that isn’t sure I’m in the clear stems from the fact that the latest series of questions Armsmaster is asking me is… not what I expected.

"Do you know anyone personally with similar abilities to yours?"

"No." And I hope it stays that way. A second Simurgh would be… cataclysmic.

"Have you ever had repeated interactions with a hero or villain, especially one that seemed to take an interest in you in particular?"

"No." I do see a lot of the same people at Endbringer fights, but somehow I don’t think that’s what he means.

"Did you notice a significant shift in your personality, behavior, or preferences when you first gained powers?"

"No." As far as I know, I didn’t even exist before 'gaining powers,' so it’s not like I had a personality that could have changed.

"Do you ever experience odd or repetitive dreams?"

"…Define odd?"

"Repeatedly involving the same people or environments, unusual amounts of lucidity, or conveying confirmable information you did not previously know."

"Then no, not that I can recall." I don’t think my flashback nightmares fit the criteria.

"Do you yourself have any sort of extreme animosity towards or affection for another parahuman?"

Annoyance-filled memories of draconic mechanical suits briefly flash through my mind.

"No."

Armsmaster does not immediately follow that up with another question, so hopefully that means that my responses haven’t brought up any cause for further alarm. He’s still staring at me, though I can’t tell if I’m actually what he’s looking at, as he’s still wearing that eye-concealing helmet and I have to assume he’s got some sort of display in there that he’s been reading off of. I genuinely have no idea what those questions were about, but I think this is a situation where it would be better to play things defensively than to try and pry. After a couple of seconds, though, Armsmaster speaks again, his tone a bit less impersonal than it was a moment ago.

"I can’t say your particular set of powers is one that I’ve seen before, but that is how it tends to be with capes," he starts. "In my opinion, I think we can mark this down as a pleasant surprise and move forward. I’m certainly happy to have another Tinker on the team, even with the limitations your power seems to come with."

That… seems promising!

"I’m happy to help out any way I can," I say, putting on a relaxed-but-engaged facade. "If that includes being a lab assistant sometimes, that’s fine by me."

"Hm," he responds neutrally. "Well, I probably shouldn’t take up any more of your time. I’m sure the PRT has you on a busy schedule today and I’d hate to disrupt that. It was good to meet you, Sam."

"Oh um, you too, sir!" I say, standing up with him and once again shaking his proffered hand. "I’m looking forward to joining the team."

"I’m excited to see what you’ll be capable of," Armsmaster says with a smile, and without further ado walks to the door and departs. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, remember that Joel is still in the room, and quickly sit back down and turn to face him.

"Sorry about all that," I apologize, because I think that’s what a normal person in this situation would do. "I really didn’t expect any of it to happen."

"No… worries… at… all," Joel assures me, though he barely tilts his head up from the paper he’s been quickly writing on. I wince. Gosh I hope I haven’t created too much extra paperwork for him to do. He doesn’t say anything beyond that, and the awkward pause stretches out long enough that the speakerphone on the conference table stops calling to me with its little electronic secrets, Armsmaster finally leaving my power-copying range to go do real superhero things. It’s as good of a disruption as any to get me to do something, though.

"So, what’s up next for me today?" I ask, trying to sound cheery. Joel scribbles for another couple of seconds before finally clicking his pen and setting it down, scooping up his stack of papers with the same motion and tapping them on the table to align them.

"Well, you were going to meet with the director in about five minutes," he starts, and while I do try to look apologetic (not hard, since it’s an accurate representation of how I feel) I don’t get a chance to apologize verbally before he continues, "and that meeting is still happening, but I’ve got to run to Legal, Research, HR, and Accounting to let them know about your new classification and give them a chance to revise the offer they’ve drafted for you."

While it’s not a complete surprise, the fact that the PRT already has a contract drawn up for me is still a little unexpected to hear. I suppose I should have trusted Joel’s confidence. It also doesn’t escape my notice that this almost definitely confirms that, against all odds, my Thinker-supported background check came back clear. Somehow. Which… probably doesn’t reflect well on the PRT, now that I think about it. But hey, fuck it, I’m gonna be a superhero! Who cares? Let’s focus on other stuff!

"Wow, that’s… a lot," I say, hesitantly. "Does having another power really change all that much?"

"A lot of the time there’s not much a difference, logistically, but your case is a little unique," Joel responds, actually looking at me this time. Yay. Being unique has never caused any problems for me ever. "Yesterday we talked about the opportunity to take on additional responsibilities relating to your skills and previous employment, and some of the research teams did express interest in giving you assignments during your off time. If you’re going to be doing Tinkering as well, that’ll take up some of your time, so they’ll need to adjust their estimates of how much they can utilize you. I assume you are still interested in that work?"

I nod. Being able to keep doing things adjacent to my old job was one of the things that excited me most yesterday. Tinkering taking time away from that is an unfortunate consequence of my split-second decision, but it’s not like I can take that back now.

"And I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear that, at the very least," he continues. "Now, spending less time with Research affects that element of your compensation package, so Accounting and HR have to know about that. Conversely, though, Tinkers get a stipend for materials and payment for technology created for use by the PRT, so depending on what you end up making this will probably be a net benefit for you. Your Tinker power only manifesting around other Tinkers is different, sure, but I can’t imagine it’ll add much to the standard wording. And lastly, because your contract is changing at all, someone on the legal team has to review and approve it. That all make sense?"

It’s an onslaught of information, but I nod again anyway, because it does indeed all make sense. I’ve certainly set myself up to be a slightly more complicated case than usual, but it doesn’t seem to be too bad. Plus, getting to build things that probably aren’t going to be used to tear open a hole in the fabric of reality or twist the laws of thermodynamics for an entire city will be fun, hopefully! I just need to get through these meetings and not decide to reveal any more of my powers in the process. Which is apparently harder than I thought.

"Okay! I’ll let the director know we’ll be a little delayed and run these out to everyone," Joel says, standing up and tucking the papers under his arm. "You sit tight and I’ll be back to bring you up as soon as I can, alright?"

"I can do that," I respond with a smile that hopefully isn’t too strained. "Sorry to throw a wrench into the schedule like this. I didn’t mean to put this much more on your plate."

"Oh, please, don’t be," he reassures me as he opens the door. "This is the fun part of the job! I was worried today was going to be boring."

He can’t actually mean that, right? The door shuts behind him before I get a chance ask, though, and I feel him briskly walking down the hall back towards the elevators. So… sit tight, huh? Joel didn’t give me an estimate of how long this will take, and I’m not exactly inclined to find out the precognitive way. Hopefully it won’t be too long. Maybe if I’m lucky someone will get Dragon to check in on me again, though the idea is laughable. She’s not going to waste time on me again. No, it’s just gonna be me and my own thoughts to occupy myself, which is always a blast.

I wonder how my old coworkers are doing? I have faith in the capabilities of the little group of rotating staff I worked with, though come to think of it I don’t actually know how many others got caught up in the same budget cuts that ended my own position. Ugh. Probably should have asked that. Probably should have talked to them at all about my departure, instead of leaving it up to the department chair and then a few rushed goodbyes on Monday as I cleaned out my desk, and it’s not like I was paying very close attention to who was there and not. Should I reach out to some of them? Not to tell them what I’m up to, obviously, since both of my identities now count as secret, but to just… check in, I guess? See how they’re doing? Is that what friends do? I don’t know if I was friends with any of them. I don’t know how to do friends; the few that I’ve had all made friends with me, not the other way around, and I lost those to a transfer, a car crash, a retirement, and Behemoth. I don’t even remember if I have any of my coworkers’ phone numbers. If any of us did happen to be friends, I don’t think I was a good one.

Maybe… maybe this is an opportunity to change that. Not with my old coworkers, but perhaps with my new ones? I know superheroes are teammates, but does that lend itself to friendship? That’s stupid, of course it does, one of the biggest strings that can be pulled to manipulate someone is their interpersonal relationships, and while I may not really recall the exact dynamics between different capes, heroes from the same location definitely tend towards being friendly with each other. It’s not at all a stretch to look at that data and expect something similar to happen to me, either, since I can’t recall any reason why the Brockton Bay heroes wouldn’t all be friends with each other and I’m going to be acting as one of them for the next… however long until I mess up, I guess. How long does it take to make friends? A couple of months, maybe? Less than a year? I… fuck, do I even have that long?

One of the fun little bits about my life that make it that much worse is that I don’t actually know when I’m next slated to go turn a city into my own personal guided missile salvo. Leviathan, Behemoth, and I don’t exactly have a set rotation (sorry for messing up that little bit of predictability with my arrival, world), and the only thing it seems like I can count on is that I’ll get a couple of months of reprieve after each of my events. Behemoth was last, back in November, so that means either I or Leviathan is next up. Fifty-fifty chance, assuming it’s random, which I don’t actually have any indication one way or another on. A coin toss, one that I have no idea when is going to happen, and if I lose it means I get maybe half an hour of warning to get the hell out of wherever I am and as far away as I possibly can before things turn ugly. And by things, I mean me.

So yeah. That’ll probably be when this all falls apart.

Joel returns after what I estimate to be around half an hour, entirely unaware of the thoughts I’ve been letting myself marinate in. He still seems to be doing well, at least, if the slightest bit disheveled.

"Alright! That took a little longer than expected, but everything should all be good to go now," he declares as he steps into the room, having apparently decided to switch things up and use a manila folder to carry what is presumably a new set of papers. "Everything alright in here?"

"Just fine," I lie, shooting him a double thumbs-up before I stand and grab my coat and bag from the chair next to me. "Anything else I should know going into this?"

"Besides the obvious? Be respectful, be truthful, if she seems annoyed it’s probably not you, she’s just like that."

"That’s… helpful, I suppose?" I say, following Joel out of the conference room and down the hall.

"Honestly, I think you’ll handle yourself just fine," he says. "I don’t think you’re the type of hero the director would have a problem with."

"I’ll try to take that as a compliment."

"It’s not a bad thing," he shrugs, pausing before the stairwell door. "We’re going up to twelve. Are you feeling up for that?"

I hesitate. Eight flights of stairs isn’t going to take all that much out of me, but it should, and there’s a chance he could notice the fact that I’m not as tired as I should be. Plus, Joel’s been great, and while I feel like he’d be willing to, I really don’t want to make him take the stairs all the way up just for me.

"Let’s do the elevator," I decide. "I think I can manage."

"Alright then!" he says, walking over to the elevators and pressing the up button. One arrives quickly, and Joel scans a badge as we walk in, the screen lighting up with a lot more numbers than it did for me. Okay, how about an experiment? When he selects the floor, I grab the handrail and ever-so-subtly engage my flight, floating half a millimeter above the ground. I get a bit of a false start as the elevator starts moving and immediately rises up to meet me, whereupon the weird inertial-dampening-fuckery starts affecting my body in a way that’s more than a little disorienting. My stumble does probably help to sell the illusion that I’m not doing anything, though, and I try again, doing my best to fly upwards at exactly the speed of the elevator. I manage to do pretty well, all things considered, and I don’t think Joel notices. Hooray for superpowers fixing problems caused by other superpowers!

The doors open to reveal a floor a lot more lively than the one I’ve spent most of my time in the PRT building on, with actual desks and cubicles and a normal amount of other people. A few glance in our direction, but besides that we don’t draw much notice. I hold a hand to my mouth as I softly touch back down and walk out.

"How are you feeling?" Joel asks, looking over at me.

"I think… I’m okay," I respond, intentionally taking a deep breath. "It’s better when I’m expecting it."

That’s not even a lie! Joel nods and begins leading me through the vaguely mazelike layout, occasionally giving someone a nod or wave of greeting. Gosh there are a lot of people here, and this is just one floor of the building. I can feel a lot more in the areas below us as well. I know that Brockton Bay is the second biggest city in the state, but it’s still kind of crazy to grasp the sheer scale of the PRT’s operations here. I suppose we do have a significantly higher number of supervillains than the average city, too, but still. There really are a lot of people working behind the scenes here to make the PRT function.

Eventually, desks transition into offices and finally an executive suite, which contains some seating, mild decor, and a secretary whom Joel has a few quick words with before she picks up the phone and makes a quick call. After a moment, she gives him a nod, and he beckons me over to the door next to her, pushing it open and leading me inside when I approach. A quick glance is enough to read the nameplate on the wall next to the door. Emily Piggot. Director, PRT ENE.

Director Piggot’s office is somewhat similar to but not exactly what I was expecting. It’s about the same size as the conference room downstairs in terms of area, and the large windows on the far wall show a very nice view of the city, but the overall appearance is somewhat hampered by the stacks of paper strewn about the room. On top of filing cabinets, the desk, the side table, even parts of the floor have piles of paperwork and reports covering them, and if I had to guess it’s not due to a lack of organizational ability on the director’s part. The poor woman must be swamped.

Speaking of the poor woman, Director Piggot herself is seated behind her desk, though she pushes herself up to standing as I enter. She’s a larger woman, dressed more professionally than I’ve seen from a lot of the other workers in the building, and the look she gives me is the kind that feels like it would remind me of my time in middle school, had I ever actually had that. She holds it for probably less than a second, though, and then extends her hand.

"Ms. Stewart, it’s good to finally meet you. I hear you’ve had an eventful week."

Her voice is the platonic ideal of professional courtesy, with just barely enough warmth to land on the polite side of curt. It’s honestly kind of impressive. I step forward to return the handshake, doing my best to give her a respectful nod. Thankfully, Joel’s confidence in me probably isn’t entirely unfounded. I’ve worked in academia for long enough to learn what the best ways to interact with executives are.

"It’s very nice to meet you as well, Director," I say. "I’ve heard a lot of good things about the work you and your team do here."

"Hm. Please, sit," she instructs, and I pull out one of the chairs facing her desk and do so. I also notice a slight pursing of the corner of her mouth, though. Maybe flattery is the wrong approach, then? Different kind of deference? "Joel, what have you got for me?"

"Assessment, incident report, background, Watchdog report, and contract," he says, pulling the manila folder out from under his arm and placing it on her desk. "Some of it’s been updated."

Director Piggot lifts an eyebrow at him, then flips the folder open and scans the first page. She looks back up, eyebrow a little higher.

"A Tinker power as well?"

I shift in my seat a little.

"I wasn’t aware of it until this morning. I don’t really spend time around Tinkers normally."

"Hmm," she hums. "Well, I’m sure Armsmaster has opinions on this. Joel, could you give me and Ms. Stewart the room, please?"

"Of course, ma’am," Joel says, nodding and shooting me a subtle thumbs-up. The door clicks behind him as he exits, and the director and I are alone together. Hopefully this is the last make-or-break moment I’ll face in this whole nerve-wracking process.

Director Piggot doesn’t speak up immediately, instead continuing to read through the files she was given. I have to assume it’s at least partially a power play, right? There’s no way she wouldn’t have seen most of this already, especially with how she knew my powers were ’supposed’ to be just telekinesis. Do I just wait? She’s not looking at me, so I can’t imagine she’s waiting for me to be the one to start talking. This is an interview, after all. Waiting is probably the best option. Thankfully, I don’t have to do so for long.

"Lausanne?"

The question catches me off guard, as much as one word can be a question. It’s the first time she’s looked at me in a minute, and while I was expecting a lot of different things, that wasn’t one of them. I have an answer to what she’s asking, though.

"I spent a lot of my childhood in the states, and was attending college at the time," I say, putting just the barest hint of eight-years-dulled emotion into my voice. "Flying home for the holidays wasn’t always the most economical option, so… I wasn’t there for it."

"I’m sorry for your loss," Director Piggot says after a moment, actually sounding sincere. "Would I be correct in assuming you’ve had your powers since then?"

I tense slightly, hopefully not enough for her to notice, and then nod. It’s not an unreasonable conclusion to make (that the psychological trauma of 'losing my entire family at once in an Endbringer attack' would cause superpowers, not that I’m secretly said Endbringer pretending to be a human). I’m well aware that, with certain exceptions, powers come from reaching a threshold of stress, pain, trauma, or other mental states like that, usually stemming from what is one of the worst days of someone’s life. My little cover story certainly fits the bill, so what need is there to pretend it was something else? Lies are strongest when they’re self-contained.

"Eight years. Why haven’t you done anything with them since then?" the director asks, tapping one of the papers in front of her. "No heroism, no villainy that we can find, not even independent work."

Ah. That is the obvious follow-up question. Coming up with an answer for why I didn’t do something isn’t that hard, though.

"Because having telekinesis didn’t really change anything for me," I say, weaving another strand onto the web. "It didn’t give me a reason to change my degree, or abandon any of my plans outright. There wasn’t anything I wanted to do with my powers. They didn’t make me special in any way that actually mattered. I didn’t think I was capable of making a difference anyway, so… I just moved on with my life. Lived it how I was already going to."

"Hmm," the director hums again, though this time she sounds almost… intrigued? "So what changed that led to you being here in my office today? It wasn’t the Tinker abilities, if you really did find out about them this morning."

"I learned I was wrong," I shrug.

"About?"

"Not being capable of making a difference. It was a snap decision, but it turned out better than I had hoped. And then Chevalier talked to me, and… things seemed obvious, in retrospect."

There. That should hopefully be convincing enough.

"What does making a difference look like to you?" she asks. Which… wow, okay, that’s a big one. She doesn’t seem impatient, at least, so I can probably take a second for this.

What does making a difference look like? I obviously can’t undo any of the damage my other self has done. I can’t bring anybody back to life or fix the cities or just travel around, trying to deprogram everyone who was influenced who the heroes didn’t catch. I can’t fix what the Simurgh has done. So… maybe it looks like the opposite of ruining a life.

"Twenty-seven people are alive today, because of me," I start slowly. Chevalier said it, and maybe he had a point. "That’s not a lot, in the grand scheme of things; I think twice that many people die over the course of a normal week in Brockton. But to those people, that’s basically infinite possibility that would have just been… snuffed out like that. Gone. I have no idea how many people I can save, and I doubt it’ll compare to what other heroes can do, but… saving a life is the biggest kind of difference you can make, right? If I did that once, it would probably be worth it. I just did it a lot more than once, and I want to keep doing it. I want to use my life to actually help people. And if you asked those twenty-seven people, they’d probably say that what I did made a difference."

My answer surprises me a little. Mostly because none of it is a lie. Director Piggot holds my gaze for a moment, then nods.

"Good answer," she says, closing the folder back up again. "I’m sure you’ve heard that the PRT can’t afford to be picky about the heroes we get, at the moment. That’s not entirely true. Brockton Bay is struggling, but that doesn’t mean I’m just going to give my approval to any cape that happens to walk in the front door. Other departments are hurting for heroes too, so transfers are an option, and until you sign on the dotted line you can just walk away from all this. You can walk away afterwards, too, but that creates a headache for me and my team, so I’d rather you quit beforehand if you’re going to."

She adjusts herself in her seat, leaning forward.

"As far as I can tell, you, Ms. Stewart, are the kind of cape I’d like to have in my city. You don’t cause trouble, you want to contribute to society, and you seem to have a healthy view of what your powers should and should not do for you. Additionally, on Monday you demonstrated a willingness to help out when it was needed, and you weren’t showy about it. I like that. As far as I’m concerned, if every parahuman was like you, I would be out of a job."

That’s… not at all what I expected to hear from the director. It’s bittersweet, in a way, since there’s still a part of my brain that feels the need to point out that she’d be saying quite the opposite if she knew who I really was. But other than that… wow. I genuinely don’t know what to say in response, so I suppose it’s a good thing she isn’t finished.

"Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. So while you’re the kind of cape I want in my city, the kind that I need is someone who’s willing to be more than that. I need people who are willing to step up again and again and again, doing what needs to be done for the good of the city. I need people who understand that being a hero is more than just the flashy costumes and PR stunts and flying around the city pulling cats out of trees. I need people who can work not only with the Protectorate, but also with us regular humans, be it the PRT, law enforcement, or anyone else. I need people who are not only willing to put in the work to make this city a better place, but want to do that, more than any other part of this job."

The look Director Piggot gives me is the most intense so far.

"Do you think you’re that kind of person?"

The answer is obviously no. I’m not a hero, I’m a monster. I don’t help cities, I destroy them. This entire idea is ludicrous and will probably end in death and destruction and the city being turned into a quarantine zone. I’m an Endbringer. Everything she’s asking for is antithetical to my existence.

…But there’s more to it than just that, isn’t there? There’s more to me than just that.

"I want to be," I tell her, and it feels like the most honest thing I’ve said all day.

"Well then, Samantha," Director Piggot says. "Welcome to the Brockton Bay Protectorate."

Notes:

And now it's official! Our little girl is going to be a hero! I'm so proud of her. Next chapter is going to pick up a bit in terms of action, so hopefully I haven't bored anyone with all the talking. Though don't worry, there's still lots more talking to be had. I'm looking forward to this next stage of the story!

I originally planned to use this chapter to shout out Magical Girl Mechanical Heart, my good friend Thundamoo's new novel. I suppose I'm still doing that, so if you like robot girls and magic and awesome worldbuilding and really good stories in general you should go check it out!

What I really want to shout out, though, is KarenAndVega and her fic The Inevitable Fallout of something that you have no control over, because HOLY SHIT IT'S SOAR FANFIC??? AND IT'S REALLY GOOD??? OH MY GOSH??? Words cannot properly convey how incredibly flattered I was to receive the notification that someone had liked my story so much that it inspired them to write fanfic of it. It's emotional, it has great prose, it made me Feel Things, and I desperately hope she writes a follow-up. Thank you so so so so much! Go read it!

Anyway, that's all for now! I hope you all enjoyed the chapter! See you all in June if my current posting pace keeps up, much earlier if this WriMo thing actually works out. Bye!

Chapter 7: Rate of Acceleration

Notes:

Yes you can believe your eyes! A second chapter in the same month! With a third on the way, hopefully! Turns out setting writing goals really does work, who'd've thunk it. I'm at eleven thousand words for April, way ahead of my 20k target, though it hasn't all been Soar. Some of it was Soar omake, thank you very much. End notes are gonna be long, so look out for those.

For the third morning in a row, I find myself walking into the lobby of the local PRT headquarters. This time, it’s not as a visitor or candidate, though. As of midday yesterday, I am officially, legally a junior member of the Brockton Bay Protectorate. Which is an absolutely insane statement, and despite yesterday’s hour-and-a-half-long meeting with the PRT legal team to go over the minutiae of what exactly I have signed myself up for, it still doesn’t feel real. I suspect it won’t for a long time yet.

Still, just because I haven’t internalized the feelings doesn’t mean that the PRT will sit around and wait for me to catch up. Apparently, even with yesterday morning’s surprise reveal of my Tinker powers, I’m still on track to do power and fitness testing today, which is why I’m here at eight thirty in the morning today. Thankfully, that’s still an hour after I usually get up, so that wasn’t really any added effort. What was is the fact that I was asked to bring athletic clothes with me, which required a detour after I left the building yesterday to actually go buy some. I’ll begrudgingly admit that having a supernaturally unchanging physique that doesn’t require exercise to maintain can be nice at times, but it’s not always the best for maintaining my thin veneer of humanity. Fingers crossed that today’s activities don’t poke any further holes in it.

It doesn’t take long to spot Joel in the lobby, since he’s standing right where he was yesterday morning. I adjust my bag’s strap on my shoulder and walk over, weaving through the early-morning crowd of employees arriving to work and giving him a wave as I do so.

"Sam!" Joel greets me. "Happy first day of work, technically. Here, a gift, courtesy of all of us in HR."

He holds out an ordinary badge, and I can’t help but laugh a little. It features my name, the picture that was taken of me yesterday, the clearance level appropriate for a junior member of the Protectorate, and my PRT job title: Research Analyst. Apparently this is to be the first of two ID cards, both functionally the same, but one for while I’m acting as a civilian employee and one for my superhero persona, once we’ve actually figured out what it is. It’s honestly really smart, in my opinion. No need to change in and out of costume just to drop by the office for some reason.

"It’s just what I’ve always wanted," I joke. "How thoughtful."

"Only the best, for the girl who has everything," he quips. "Now, you’ve got another big day today, so let’s get going."

Joel turns around and starts walking, leading me not to the elevators but to a door just past them. He gestures for me to scan my brand-new badge and I do so, which is kind of a fun feeling. Behind the door lies a hallway which… well, it just looks like the rest of the PRT HQ. I guess it makes sense that most of the ground floor isn’t public-facing; this is a government building, after all. Our destination turns out to be yet another conference room, though this one is a bit smaller. Sitting at the table inside is a tallish woman, semi-casually dressed, with the kind of bun that looks like it should have a pencil stuck in it. She looks up from the papers she’s reviewing when we enter and waves.

"Hi!" she greets, standing up as she does so. "You must be our newest superhero!"

"That she is," Joel says. "Sam, this is Gemma. Gemma, Sam. She’s going to be taking over for me, at least for today."

"That I am!" Gemma says, picking up the forms and pushing in her chair. "I’ve heard a lot about you, Sam, partly because I’ve been reading your entire medical history since it’s my job to make sure nothing we’re going do today will put you in the hospital, among other things."

"H-hi," I respond eloquently, not expecting the sudden high-energy conversation. "Is that… likely?"

"Well, you don’t have any heart, blood, or respiratory conditions, so nope!" she declares. "The worst you should expect today is mild exhaustion and a headache, and we’ve got treatments for that. Did you have any caffeine this morning?"

"Um… no?"

"Great!" she declares, pulling out her phone and shooting off a quick text message. "Alright, if there’s nothing else, we should head out. Car’s downstairs."

"Car?" I ask. "I thought the PRT had a power testing lab here."

"'Here' as in Brockton Bay," Joel interjects. "The downtown building is, well, downtown, so space is at a bit of a premium. The basement levels are already closer to infrastructure than the city would prefer."

"That… does make sense," I concede. "So, where are we going?"

"The PHQ, of course," Gemma states casually, then starts walking out of the room. "Now come on, we’re wasting daylight."

PHQ… wait, the Protectorate headquarters? The big oil rig sitting smack-dab in the center of the Bay? I’m going there? I turn to Joel with a questioning look on my face, but he just gives me an amused one in return.

"You heard the woman, hero. Don’t keep them waiting."

Well, fuck! I guess he’s not wrong.

"I’ll… see you tomorrow, then," I tell him.

"Monday," Joel corrects. "You’ve got tomorrow off, remember?"

"Monday, then."

Gemma is waiting for me in the hallway and immediately starts walking back the way we came, forcing me to pick up my pace a little to keep up. Geez this woman is fast. At least she pauses when we reach the door leading back to the lobby.

"You don’t do elevators, right?" she asks bluntly.

"Not the ones here," I respond, to which she nods approvingly.

"Good. Stairs are your friend," she informs me, turning ninety degrees and pushing open the stairwell door. "The garage is just down one floor."

"It’s mostly because of motion sickness," I explain, following her down. "Telekinesis plus inertial dampening isn’t great."

"Well, that’s your body telling you what it wants," Gemma says, already at the landing and barely giving me enough time to catch up before exiting into the underground parking garage. It’s rather large, and I can tell there are at least a couple more levels below us, though interestingly enough we’re not actually under the PRT building itself, but the one next to it. There’s a black SUV waiting at the curb, and Gemma wastes no time pulling the rear passenger door open for me. Honestly, I doubt she wastes time doing anything.

The driver doesn’t bother to introduce himself when I get in, placing my bag on the center seat. Gemma walks around the car and takes the seat behind the driver, then starts talking almost as soon as the car pulls away from the curb, which happens the instant I get my seatbelt buckled.

"So, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that we’re starting with power testing, and how long that takes will depend on how exactly you perform. Fitness testing will be after, so you get to show off your powers while you’ve actually got gas in the tank. There’s no right or wrong answer to any of these tests, we’re just here to try and find the full extent of what you can do, but I think neither of us are going to be happy if your mile is over twenty minutes. Got it?"

I stare at her. Gemma’s energy is scary intense, unlike most anyone I’ve worked with in the past, and I don’t quite know how to respond to her. After a second, though, the right half of her mouth twitches upwards in a smile.

"Relax, it’s a joke. We’re establishing a baseline; wherever you are at the moment is okay."

She looks down at the papers she’s been carrying with her as the car pulls out onto Lord Street and into workday traffic. I’m glad I’m not being asked to drive there myself; while I technically do have a driver’s license, driving has never been something that’s held my interest. Aside from buses, taxis, and the occasional use as a projectile (thank you intrusive memories, very cool), I haven’t really had much need for cars. Downtown Brockton Bay is relatively walkable, especially if you don’t get tired easily.

"So, I’ve got a bit about your powers written down here, but I’m curious if you could fill in some of the gaps for me," Gemma says, looking back up at me. "Telekinesis. Subject to the Manton Effect, though obviously not by any line-of-sight limitations. What about distance? Weight? Number of objects? Speed? Anything you already know will give us a helpful starting point."

Okay, I guess we’re getting into details. According to my cover story, I don’t use my telekinesis all that often (which isn’t too far from the truth), but it’s still been long enough that I’m bound to at least know some of its limitations. Honestly, it’ll probably be safest to just go with my normal baseline. There’s less of a chance of slipping up if I don’t have to remember to impose an arbitrary limitation on myself. Of course, I still would need to if I’m singing, but I have no plans of doing that while acting as a superhero, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

"A couple hundred feet, distance-wise?" I hedge. I genuinely don’t know my exact power range off the top of my head, but that feels roughly accurate. "Weight… I don’t really know. I haven’t made a habit of testing that. Same with the number of things I can lift at once. At least a hundred, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was dependent on how big the objects are. Speed… I don’t know. Probably also dependent on size. Sorry, I know that’s not very helpful."

"Don’t apologize, any information is good information," Gemma says. "Can you lift yourself?"

Well, yes, but flight is a different power.

"No, I can’t lift living things," I say. I’m pretty sure she already knows this. "They just feel like a blob of space I can’t affect."

"So you can feel it, interesting," she states. "But no, I mean more like standing on something that you then lift with your power, or something you’re holding onto. Same goes for all living things."

I blink. That’s… I’ve genuinely never thought of trying that before. If I ever need to fly I can just fly, no telekinesis tricks needed. But, now that I think about it, it would probably work, right? A person being inside of or on top of something doesn’t prevent me from being able to pick it up, as long as it’s big enough. There’s a reason parahumans learned to stop wearing extremely bulky power armor while fighting me. Shit, I mean, on Monday I was supporting that apartment building while people were inside it. That wouldn’t have worked if I couldn’t lift the floors they were standing on.

"Would you believe me if I said I’ve never actually tried it?" I tell her. "Though if I had to guess, probably? I suppose I have been able to affect things that had people on them, before."

"I wouldn’t be surprised, on both counts," Gemma responds. "Part of the PRT’s job is to think of power applications that the capes haven’t. We’re gonna try everything, so maybe today’s the day you learn how to fly, Sam."

I fake a hopeful smile for her. That day was eight years ago, but she doesn’t know that.

"Besides that we’ve got launching projectiles, directing containment foam, shielding, arresting momentum, and a whole lot of other exciting stuff," she continues. "Plus, a good old Tinker testing set. I’m assuming you don’t have as much to tell me about those powers? Any epiphanies or experimentation last night?"

"No, apparently I’m only a Tinker when there’s one near me, and it’s not like there’s one in my apartment building, obviously."

"Well, it’s a good thing we have an Armsmaster for you to use," Gemma says. "You say 'near' you. Any idea what the actual range on that is?"

"I… I don’t know, probably around the same as my telekinesis?" I hedge. That’s a lie; I know for a fact it’s exactly the same as my telekinesis, but the version of me who just discovered this ability yesterday wouldn’t know that.

"We’re going to test that too, as well as if there’s any falloff," she tells me. "Oh hey, we’re here. Get your badge out."

Huh? I turn my head and look out the windshield to see that we’re pulling up to guard booth, fences on either side of the road and a boom arm blocking our path. The eponymous Brockton Bay is visible beyond it, the surface of the water sparkling in the morning sun. That’s… wow. I’ve never had any reason to come out to the waterfront in the morning, so this is a novel experience for me. It’s really pretty.

As the car stops, the driver rolls down both windows on his side and pulls a badge from his hip to display to the PRT officer who walks up to the car. Gemma does the same, and I scramble for a moment before realizing my new badge has never actually left my hand. The officer takes a moment to look over us and the car, then gives us the ok sign.

"Agent Ellison, Dr. McGuire, Ms. Stewart, you’re clear. Crossing starts in two minutes, so good timing."

"Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Tom," Gemma says, putting her badge back and rolling the window up. The boom arm starts to rise at the same time and we pull forward, driving a short distance before stopping again, this time at the back of a line of even more cars. Some are black SUVs identical to this one, some are more civilian-looking, and there are even a handful of motorcycles. The cars at the front are waiting in front of another boom arm, beyond which is ten feet of concrete and… literally a drop straight into the bay. Huh.

"That was… surprisingly quick," I observe. "I would have expected more security."

"Oh, there is, you just can’t see it," Gemma responds. "Lotta sensors built into the road and whatnot, transponder in the car, even the traffic cameras on the roads leading here are tied in. Plus, we’re expected, so that always makes things smoother."

"Interesting," I say, then look at the clock on the dashboard. "Okay, second question, eight fifty-six? Not nine o’clock or something?"

"The exact times are slightly randomized every day, just for that little extra boost of security, but if you ask me it doesn’t matter all that much when it’s always pretty close to the top of the hour and we’ve got local villains who can fly. Still, I can see where the brass is coming from. And don’t worry, the schedule gets printed out every week and you’ll be able to see it on your phone once IT hooks you up with gear."

I hadn’t been worrying about that, but now I kind of am. If I’m working at the Protectorate HQ instead of downtown, it’s not like I can just walk there. I doubt the PRT is going to want to have someone pick me up and drive me every day, either. Am I going to have to get a car? God, I hope not. Maybe if Gemma’s right about the— woah.

My thoughts are interrupted by a flicker off to the left, and I lean forward to look out of the windshield again. My eyes land on the Protectorate East-North-East Headquarters, the retrofitted oil rig that serves as the local heroes’ base of operations. And now mine too, I suppose. I realize that the flicker that caught my eye was the round forcefield that normally surrounds the structure turning off. It’s tricky to make out the base itself from here, but my gaze is quickly drawn away from it by the iridescent ribbon painting its way across the water, starting from the south side of the oil rig and curving west towards the shore, crossing the distance between the PHQ and us in the span of barely ten seconds.

God damn that’s showy.

…Probably not the kind of thing you get tired of seeing, though.

Shortly after the forcefield roadway completes its journey, the boom arm ahead of the line of cars raises, and the cars at the front start to pull forward. Eventually it’s our turn, and as the surface beneath the tires transitions from concrete to… whatever Tinker bullshit the forcefield is made out of, I’m mostly impressed by the sudden, almost complete lack of vibration I feel.

"Yeah, it’s pretty cool," Gemma says with a smirk, accurately guessing my thoughts. "Uber and Leet tried to do a Mario Kart thing on it a year or two back. Rainbow Road, and all that. They ended up in the water pretty fast."

"…'Mario Kart?'" I ask, voicing my confusion. "I’m not familiar."

Gemma stares at me for a couple of seconds, an unreadable expression on her face.

"That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard in my entire life."

I elect to ignore her comments and focus on the world outside the car. The roadway is wide, wide enough for two lanes of cars going each way, though I can’t imagine there will be that many people coming back to the mainland at this time of day. It’s probably for the best that the bridge isn’t pushed to capacity, as it notably lacks any sort of markings, barriers, or guardrails on either side. Combine that with the fact that the forcefield is already semi-transparent, and I’m quite glad that the speed limit seems to be about twenty miles an hour. Doubly so when the car starts to tilt slightly to the left, since apparently this curving path is banked. The experience isn’t all anxiety-inducing, though. Literally driving over the waters of the bay kinda reminds me of the good parts of flying, especially with how little the SUV vibrates on the perfectly smooth surface, and the early-morning sun continues to be very pretty. What really ends up drawing my attention, though, is the PHQ itself.

Despite living in Brockton Bay for years, I’ve never had much occasion to actually look at the local Protectorate headquarters. It’s only really visible from the coast or some of the skyscrapers downtown, and it’s not like I have anything in my life drawing me to either of those. My coworkers have said that the best view is from the Boardwalk, and I can probably count the number of times I’ve actually been to the Boardwalk on both hands. This isn’t my first time seeing the structure; it still is the most notable landmark in the city I’ve lived in for most of my life and I do have the internet, but now, from up close, actually taking the time to look at it? It’s imposing.

Everyone knows that the Brockton Bay PHQ is built on a refitted oil rig, but that wording doesn’t really convey much about the structure as a whole. 'Refitted' probably isn’t the most apt term either, since that seems like it would imply only moderate changes, with the oil rig being recognizable as such. And indeed, while you can still see the skeleton of the construction this once was, with steel trusses and four big columns extending down into the water, that’s where the similarities end.

The multi-layered platform is dominated by a series of buildings that blend together into one large complex, facades clearly designed not just for utility but also for aesthetics. Curved exteriors and inset arches contrast the hard edges of the metal upon which it rests, though there’s enough variety in the design that keeps it interesting while still implying cohesion. Windows band the outer walls, while balcony railings and safety netting become more apparent at both the highest and lowest points as we drive, implying open spaces with what must be amazing views of both the city and the ocean. The curve of the roadway straightens out as we get closer and I can make out more of the finer details. The place is absolutely covered in technology, probably Tinker-created, with energy conduits tracing support beams, communications equipment sprouting out of the upper reaches, what must be defensive emplacements aimed outward, and so much more that I can’t even begin to guess the purpose or nature of, at least not until I get up close.

Eventually, the car’s roof starts to cut off my view of the upper levels, and I finally sit back and look ahead again. The forcefield bridge ends in an enclosed space on the middle level of the platform’s base, with thick support columns holding up the levels above. The first of the vehicles in our little convoy have already reached the end and pulled off, joining a number of other cars, trucks, and bikes already parked here. It could almost be mistaken for one level of a normal parking garage, if not for the significantly more futuristic design and the fact that it’s separated from the surface of the ocean by two hundred feet of open air and a couple of maintenance levels, based on what I can feel with telekinesis. The car falls into shadow shortly after we cross the threshold and I blink, trying to force my eyes to adjust to the still-bright but much less intense lighting of the parking area.

"Welcome to the PHQ," Gemma says when the car stops, already unbuckling her seatbelt. "You’ll have time for sightseeing later, but for now we’re on a bit of a schedule so let’s not waste time."

I dutifully obey, unbuckling and slinging my bag over my shoulder before opening the car door and following her out. There are a few sets of stairs leading up to the platform above and Gemma briskly leads me to the closest one. As soon as I reach the top, the morning sea breeze starts blowing my hair around, and I have to grab it with one hand to stop it from getting in my eyes as I look around. It’s… not at all what I was expecting, even having seen the buildings in the drive up. The space here feels less industrial and more like a city block, one a lot nicer than what you’d normally find in downtown Brockton Bay. There are walkways between the buildings and one that seems to run around the perimeter of the platform, hedged in by a solid railing that comes up to mid-chest height. There are trees dotted around, breaking up monochromatic shiny glass and metal with splotches of green, somehow still vibrant in early January. People mill around the open areas, more than I’d expect to see if the only people working here were support staff for the Protectorate. This isn’t just a superhero base, it’s a veritable miniature city. Which, speaking of…

"Is that a Subway?"

"A staple of government facilities everywhere, so I’m told," Gemma responds to me. "It’s not the worst lunch option, but you can do better."

I don’t really have a response to that, so I simply let her lead me into the complex. The wind dies down abruptly as we walk, cutting out as soon as the forcefield bubble that normally surrounds the PHQ turns back on. It’s an interesting effect, like being inside of a soap bubble. The sunlight immediately changes with it, subtly but still noticeable, and after another second I realize that the sounds of the ocean have been significantly muted as well. We’re abruptly, completely cut off from the outside world. It’s weird, but… peaceful, somehow.

I wonder if a forcefield bubble like this could contain me? I’m not at all familiar with the tinkertech being used to generate them but clearly it can happen at a distance, as shown by the roadway, so maybe if the bubble was high up, separated from the generator and anything else by a couple thousand feet? My maximum range is a lot further when I’m big and screaming, roughly a mile, so that has to be taken into consideration. They’d probably need multiple bubbles, layered to provide extra soundproofing and prevent anything from getting within my range. It’s an interesting thought, and while I have no idea how feasible it is, it might still have merit. Maybe I should ask Dragon or someone about it.

The fantasy of someone finally figuring out a way to permanently contain me puts a bit of spring in my step. Gemma leads me to a building on the far side of the oil rig, shorter than some of the others but still a good thirty or forty feet tall. Walking inside (after a swipe of my shiny new badge) and down a short hallway, the interior of the building opens up to reveal a massive open space taking up almost the entire rest of the building. It feels part warehouse, part indoor sports field, though with a floor made out of some sort of high-friction material instead of artificial turf. Forcefield-tinted sunlight streams in from windows high up, mixing with the artificial lights hanging from the rafters. A handful of people are already here, milling around a number of tables set up along one wall, holding a lot of different objects and equipment with more piled on the floor around them. Okay. I guess it’s time to see what the PRT thinks I should be able to do.

"Right, like I said, power testing first, then fitness testing," Gemma says, clasping her hands together and turning to point them at me and the bag slung over my shoulder. "I assume you brought clothes appropriate for exercise? Probably should have asked that back on the mainland, actually."

"I did, don’t worry," I respond. Forgetting to do so would have been mortifying.

"Good. You can change now, if you want, locker rooms are over by where we came in, but that’s not really necessary until the back half of this. Oh, did you want a domino mask? Civvie-mode is all fine and good out there but everyone in here is gonna know you’re a superhero."

"I… guess I don’t really care?" I answer after a moment’s hesitation. Maybe if I hadn’t already been walking around the PRT and Protectorate facilities for two days unmasked, but I can’t really see much point in doing so right now, especially while my existence is still relatively unknown. …My existence as Samantha Stewart, aspiring superhero, I mean. "Everyone’s under an NDA already, right?"

"Great, makes my life easier," she says, then starts briskly striding towards the other people assembled here. I follow, because what else is there to do? When we get closer, she sticks two fingers in her mouth and whistles sharply, drawing everyone’s attention and quieting the conversations that preceded our arrival.

"Alright, welcome everyone, big day today," Gemma announces. "As a refresher, because while you should have all read the bulletin I don’t want anything fucked up because someone hasn’t, we have a new Protectorate member joining us today, and this one happens to be actually local to us. We’re testing Manton-limited telekinesis and a Trump-Tinker power today, so that’s a standard materials kit plus some of the better ideas Strategy has been saving up. Any questions?"

I have quite a few, but none that I think are directly relevant. It seems like none of the other staff here are confused, at least, and after a bit of silence Gemma speaks up again.

"That better be because nothing I just said is news to you and not that you’re holding anything back. Up first is projectiles. I want to see nets, targets, and tennis balls now and ball bearings on deck."

A couple of people turn and start grabbing big gray storage bins from the piles next to the tables, while a few others push what looks like regular sporting equipment into the middle of the room. Gemma spins to face me.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, fractionally more subdued than she was a minute ago. "Ready to get started? First stuff is easy; I’m just going to have you pick up things and throw them."

I swallow. This is all moving really fast, but that shouldn’t be any reason for me to slow everyone else down, right? If I want to be a hero, I’ve gotta learn how to speed up.

"I’m good to go," I tell her, putting on a smile. "Let’s not waste time."

"That’s what I like to hear!" she responds cheerily. "I want you over in the middle by where they’re setting up the bins, got it?"

I do indeed got it, so I nod to her and start walking towards the center of the room. Gemma loudly clears her throat, though, so I stop and turn to look at her.

"Your bag?"

"Oh! Right! Sorry, I just… yeah," I ramble, sliding the strap off of my shoulder and grabbing it with both hands. "Um, where should I…?"

"By the wall is fine," she informs me. I nod again and turn to jog past her to drop my bag, but once again she clears her throat. "Stay here and put your bag by the wall."

Huh? What does she mean 'stay here and put my bag by the wall?' How am I supposed to bring it over if— oh I’m an idiot. An idiot telekinetic who’s here to do fucking power testing. I let go of my bag and mentally catch it at the same time, floating it over to the wall at a reasonable pace and dropping it. When I turn back to Gemma, she’s giving me double finger guns.

"There we go. Now come on, let’s get started."

Seems to me like we just did, but who I am to question this woman and her non-stop energy? Finally walking over, I can see what my power has already informed me of, namely multiple storage bins filled to the brim with hundreds of bright green fuzzy tennis balls. I reach down and pick one up, feeling the weight. I can see why these would be the testing projectile of choice. They’ve got a bit of heft, but they’re still light and squishy enough to hopefully not cause any injuries if you get hit with them. Gemma’s helpers have finished setting up the requested nets and targets, which just look to be painted metal panels on stands, with the nets acting as a backstop for if I miss, presumably. There are six, spread out at even intervals along the length of the room. Gemma herself returns shortly after I finish taking this all in, carrying some sort of tablet, safety goggles, and… a bathroom scale?

"So! Tennis balls. Targets. Pretty self-explanatory. First off, though, I want a base reading of how much force you can put into something."

She sets the scale down, gives it a quick push to turn it on, then grabs a tennis ball from the bin and places it on the center. She then hands me the googles and a set of earplugs.

"Are these really going to be necessary?" I ask. "It’s just tennis balls."

"Power testing is a 'better safe than sorry' sort of environment," she explains.

Fair enough. I strap on the safety goggles and insert the earplugs. Either they’re not very good or they’re extremely good, because I can still hear Gemma’s voice pretty clearly when she speaks.

"Just use the ball to push down as hard as you can."

That seems… relatively simple. I take hold of the ball with my telekinesis and start applying downward force, with no visual change except the ball deforming slightly and the number on the scale shooting upwards. That’s… wow. I’m obviously aware that I’m powerful, but seeing the recorded weight climb past four hundred as I push down harder and harder certainly drives it home. I adjust my mental grip on the ball a couple of times to prevent it from fully compressing, since I don’t want to actually break the thing and I’m fairly certain I’m strong enough to do so. The scale ends up maxing out at six hundred pounds, which is higher than any other bathroom scale I’ve seen go, and I still feel like I’ve got a good bit left in me. It makes sense; I literally lifted an entire apartment building a couple of days ago so of course the amount of force I can exert on a single object is going to be pretty damn big. I hold the weight there for a couple of seconds, then back off, lifting the ball up and dropping it back in the bin. Gemma gives me a low whistle.

"Well, we’re definitely going to need a bigger scale," she says. "Not entirely unexpected, but it’s good to get out of the way. Okay, actual target practice. You see those targets?"

Pointing them out to me is a bit redundant, since they’re the only other things in the middle of the room, but she does so anyway and I nod.

"I want you to start off by just punching a ball to the closest one, as hard as you can, without letting go of it. We’ll move down the line, switching over to launching when you hit the edge of your range. Which ones are out of your range, by the way?"

"Uh… none of them?" I inform her hesitantly. "I can feel the back wall, and a little bit beyond it."

"God damn, girl," Gemma says, and I shrink in on myself slightly. "Okay, well, I guess we’ll just try doing both on all of them. We’re looking for acceleration, top speed, force, and accuracy here."

She holds up the tablet with one hand and wiggles it a bit.

"We’ve got force sensors in the targets and cameras tracking your throws, so whenever you’re ready."

Whenever I’m ready, huh? The closest target is about thirty feet away, and I don’t think I’ll have any problem just telekinetically pushing a ball at it. I reach down and pick up another tennis ball from the bin, then let go of it in midair and keep it hovering. Then I just… move it over to the target really fast. It hits pretty dead-center, since I can feel exactly where that is, and bounces off in a way that feels kind of weird to my mind’s grip on it. As I bring the ball back I look over at Gemma, who’s reading something off the tablet. When she glances back up at me, though, she looks offended.

"Seventy-four Newtons. What the hell was that?"

I can’t help but cringe back a little.

"I… didn’t want to break anything?" I explain, and somehow Gemma’s expression gets worse.

"Sam. What are we here to do?"

"…Power testing?" I say. "But—"

"Power testing," she cuts me off. "Which means no holding back. We can’t know the full extent of your power if you don’t use the full extent of your power."

"Look, I get that," I tell her. "But I genuinely don’t think that the target—"

"Break my fucking target, Samantha."

God damn, alright lady. I take a deep breath and steady myself, tennis ball floating in midair next to me. She wants to see the full extent of my power? I can juggle semi-trucks like they’re toys. With a thought, I could tear apart the foundation of the platform keeping up all from falling into the ocean. I threw the London fucking Eye at Alexandria when I was eight months old. If I used the full extent of my power, there would be nothing left except corpses, wreckage, and me.

I launch the tennis ball. The sound it makes vaguely reminds me of artillery fire, like the kind used to try and beat me back before the cape response is fully coordinated, though the earplugs take it from turning-my-eardrums-marble level down to risk-factor-for-tinnitus level. A fraction of a second after the burst of air blows my hair back, the ball makes contact with the target. Three-quarters of a second after that, the weighted and reinforced metal target embeds itself in the concrete wall two hundred feet away. The net is pinned between the two, torn, the metal frame that supports it severely warped. I don’t know where the tennis ball is. The horrible clanging noise made by the impact and the lingering cacophony caused by accelerating the ball to Mach Whatever-The-Fuck reverberates throughout the vast space, taking a full fifteen seconds to fully die out. I realize that I’m panting, though I didn’t actually tire myself out at all.

"What was that, fifty-pound target?" I ask after catching my breath, staring straight ahead. Nobody gives me a response, but I don’t need one. "And let’s call that fifty meters, too. Three-quarters of a second, that’s sixty-six and two-thirds meters per second. You’ll probably have to check the cameras but let’s say… contact over ten centimeters. Starting at zero, acceleration to that speed, fifty pounds, which is roughly twenty-two kilograms… I don’t know what the maximum is but the integral should be a little under five hundred thousand Newtons."

A lot of the values are just guesses, but I don’t think I need to be precise here. Precision isn’t something you really have to worry about when you’re probably the most powerful telekinetic in existence.

…Which I might have just demonstrated that I am.

Shit.

Notes:

Does anyone know how big an oil rig is? I don't, but I also don't really care about realism in this one specific instance, because if I don't care then I get to make the cool superhero base be whatever I want!!! Mostly because Wildbow does an absolutely horrible job describing it in Worm, so there's practically no data to go off of. It has arches and spires, cool, now Wibbles please tell me what's actually on it or what the layout looks like or literally anything please.

A lot of the stuff about the forcefield roadway comes from a chapter of Ward, Heavens 12.none. At least there's a tiny bit of detail in that, though it still doesn't tell us what Challenger's power actually is, either. Popping sick wheelies, maybe.

Right, power testing! I know a lot of people can find it boring, and if you're one of those people then too bad, I like it <3. I'm going to make it interesting, at least, because Sam is still going to have to actively engage with it and also it's going to be a lot of stuff she hasn't tried before, so this isn't just going to be a recap of what the readers already know about her power, like in other fics I've seen. If that still doesn't convince you, I don't expect it to take more than this chapter and the next, so all you have to do is wait.

On the note of power testing, it makes sense to me that the limit on the Simurgh's telekinesis isn't really a matter of how much force or acceleration or speed she can bring something up to, but the rate at which she can put energy into it. Smaller things accelerate faster, heavier things accelerate slower, doing things like supporting a building without moving it are relatively straightforward. I think that Sam's math at the end there is roughly correct, and I had help with it from some advance readers, but there's always a chance I'm wrong. There's always a chance you're wrong, too, but let me know if you're confident :)

Speaking of advance readers, I actually finished this chapter two days ago! I wanted to give it some time to cook which is why I waited to post it here, but wowee maybe consistent, frequent updates for Soar are actually achievable. No promises or anything, but I can't say it wouldn't be cool.

Last thing is something that's been brought up a lot in comments and discussion, and that is that Sam has seemed relatively upbeat for the past little bit, which is true! Sam has major depressive disorder ('classic' depression), and I'm trying to portray it as realistically as I can based on my own experiences (with dysthymia, which is like depression's shy little sister) and those of people I know. What I've found is that depression tends to be cyclical, with highs and lows, especially in new and changing environments. Sam has suddenly found herself in a very new and enriching situation, which staves off the depression for a bit as she reacts to it! Don't worry though, it won't last forever :3

Okay, I think that's all for now! Leave a comment, go outside, bask in the beautiful spring weather if you're in a place that has it, hug a friend, tell them to read Soar, and live your life, you beautiful creatures.

Chapter 8: On The Fly

Notes:

“An author is never late, nor is she early, she posts precisely when she means to.”

So, I didn't end up hitting my 20k words goal for April. Unfortunately, some personal circumstances got in the way and I only got to 17.5k, which is still pretty awesome in my eyes. Two chapters in April and another one right at the beginning of May? That's way better than I was doing before. Here's hoping the momentum keeps up!

"Three-oh-four, three-oh-five, three-oh-six, three-oh-seven, three-oh-eight, three-oh-nine, three-ten, three-eleven, three-tw— dropped one."

Shit. I spare the tiniest bit of concentration to search the floor around me, finding the single ball bearing slowly rolling away from me and lifting it back into the cluster orbiting around me. The metal balls that are still levitating wobble a little as my focus shifts, but I manage to not drop any more as I recover the one.

"Everything good?" Gemma asks me, and I nod, the field of balls surrounding me bobbing up and down at the same time, since somehow that’s more straightforward than just moving my head. "Great, let’s keep going."

And with that, her assistants resume throwing ball bearings at my head. It turns out that there are a surprisingly large number of different ways one can do what feels like fundamentally the same test, and a surprisingly large number of different tests one can do that involve having things thrown at them. We didn’t start with this, of course, this whole catching-and-hovering thing being proceeded by picking up a mass of balls from a bin, from multiple bins, from the ground, from the ground while they’re being rolled at me, from the air while they’re being thrown straight up, away from me, to the side of me, and now at me. Gemma hasn’t been testing my maximum carrying capacity with every single test, but what we have done has turned out to be pretty interesting. Picking up a large clump of balls is way easier than spreading each one out individually like this, and we ran out of test objects before I even got close to dropping the big pseudo-sphere of balls I had collected in the air. Holding tennis balls spread out like I am with the ball bearings, though, I could only reliably get to around four hundred, and when I tried to move them in any way other than a large group all at once…

A handful of balls thud against the floor, followed by a few more as I try to pick up the ones that I dropped. More fall as my focus shifts, and eventually I give up after losing almost fifty and raise them all into a cluster above my head, letting myself rest with the relative ease of holding 'one' object with telekinesis rather than hundreds.

"Three-forty," Gemma states, typing on the screen of her tablet at the same time. "Fewer than the tennis balls again. Interesting."

"It feels like they’re harder to… I don’t know, get a grip on?" I say, not entirely confident in my description. "Not because of the weight or anything, I don’t think. Maybe it’s the size?"

"Size could be a likely cause, along with texture," Gemma agrees. "Okay, I think we’re done with the balls for now."

One of the researchers makes a comment to another, but I’m not close enough to hear it. I obligingly funnel them all back into their boxes, then lift each one and stack them to make them a little easier to put away. Gemma hasn’t had me just working on this the entire time, though; it’s been interspersed with other tests to keep things fresh. A tub formerly full of water sits with a third of its contents splashed onto the floor around it, evidence of the fact that while apparently I can move water and probably other liquids, the way my telekinesis affects them is less 'solid control' and more 'overfilled water balloon spilling out of my arms.' Speaking of balloons, the ones I was supposed to try and deform by pushing around the gas inside of them are resting on the ground as well, having entirely refused to respond to my efforts. Not exactly a surprising outcome, but good to know. Same with the fact that I can use my telekinesis as a shield against low-velocity projectiles. I have, of course, used telekinesis to block and catch things many times in the past, but that’s when I have the brainpower to actually focus on and consciously intercept everything coming my way. If I focus on an area of empty space, though, trying to control whatever’s in it, as soon as something is in it (like a thrown tennis ball, for example) I can catch and stop it without really thinking about it.

This, of course, immediately led to five minutes of Gemma and her crew of scientists throwing shit at me as fast as they could. Well, 'around me,' according to her instructions, but I still got hit by one or two tennis balls that managed to slip through the field of control I was trying to exercise. They only seemed to get more excited when we figured out that my power gets even more effective when I close my eyes and focus only on my sense of the objects around me. All in all, I guess I can’t deny the strategy’s effectiveness. I doubt many villains will be throwing sporting equipment around, but it’s nice to know I’ve got a defense against that.

"How about we give you a bit of a break and try something a little simpler?" Gemma states like it’s a question. She has, in the time I was thinking, somehow managed to acquire a couple of different items, including a folding chair, rain boots, and a wooden dowel, about four feet long. "Self-levitation. One of the things we talked about in the car."

Oh! Her theory that I could functionally 'fly' using telekinesis and something else supporting me. Yeah, okay, why not? I make a show of stretching and try to look intrigued.

"What would you like me to do?"

"None of this matters if it’s not something your powers are actually capable of doing, so that’ll be the first test," she says, unfolding the chair and placing it on the floor in front of me. "Sit in it, lift it up an inch or two, maybe move around a bit, come back down. For safety’s sake we don’t need to go any further than that to confirm."

That’s… probably for the best. While falls aren’t any danger to me physically, they’re certainly not great for the thin veneer of humanity I’m desperately trying to keep intact. I sit down in the offered chair and feel it out a bit. The seat and back are within the little buffer of space around me that I can’t affect (which is apparently a consistent two point two centimeters, according to Gemma, a ball bearing, and a ruler pressed to various points around both my body and hers), but if I raise my legs up a little a majority of the chair’s frame is perfectly accessible to me. I just have to make sure to keep it balanced, and… there we go. Easy.

"That looks like a confirmation," Gemma observes, and given that I’m currently bobbing up and down a foot in the air without specifically using my flight, I’m inclined to agree. "How does it feel?"

"Mostly stable, I think?" I try some experimental moves and almost immediately grab the sides of the seat to hold on. "Okay, mostly stable when not moving. Though I could probably compensate with tilting?"

"Could be an interesting path to explore, but I doubt you’ll want to use a chair to get around. Come back down and we’ll try something that might be more controllable."

I obligingly lower the chair and myself back onto the floor, then stand up. Honestly, part of me finds this really funny. I’ve been so worried about letting on more about my powers than I wanted, but apparently the PRT has somehow stumbled onto another one of them by accident. Another part of me is increasingly worried because it feels like things are constantly creeping towards 'suspiciously powerful,' though. Me being an Endbringer isn’t an easy logical conclusion to come to, best I can guess, but shit, telekinesis, 'flight,' and Tinkering? I might be one socially obligated karaoke night away from someone connecting some dots I would really rather they not.

Gemma puts the boots down next to the chair and hands me… gloves and looped fabric straps? She grabs one of the longer rods and holds it up.

"Now, this isn’t exactly gymnastics, but we still can some use out of the equipment. Gloves go on your hands, of course, and then we’re going to loop the straps over your wrists, under the bar, and back on top of your hands. That way if you’re hanging off and you slip, you won’t immediately fall."

That’s really smart, actually, and it gives me a pretty good clue about what she has planned. When I slide my wrists through the straps and get the gloves on, she hands me the rod and positions my hands a little wider than shoulder-width apart before looping the other sides up, helping my grip to feel a lot more secure.

"Still not doing fitness testing yet, but can you do a pull-up?" Gemma asks me.

"I… don’t actually know? I haven’t tried in a while," I respond. I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever tried to do a pull-up in my life, but I don’t think I’m exceptionally weak by any means.

"Time to find out, then," she says, taking a step back. "First part is pretty simple, just put your hands above your head and lift up the bar while hanging on. Enough of it is far enough away from your body to lift, right?"

I nod and do as instructed, holding the rod above my head first with my hands and then with telekinesis. Continuing to lift it is a bit of an odd feeling as I am pulled upwards with it, my shoes dangling a couple of inches above the ground. Flying without flying. The straps take a lot of the effort required to hang on off of my fingers, at least, though I am not at all confident in my ability to actually pull myself up with my arms.

"Okay, now try a pull-up," Gemma says, somehow reading my mind. "Try to keep the pole as stationary as possible while you do it. It’ll be good to see how it moves when you do."

Easier said than done, but I give it a shot anyway. Five seconds later I am sure Gemma is looking thoroughly unimpressed with me, but screw that, I’m trying. The temptation to cheat a little by flying for real is only barely outweighed by the desire to engage with the test genuinely (well, as genuinely as one can when hiding her identity, powerset, and full scale of abilities). Though, I guess I don’t really need to, since after straining my arms to their absolute limit I manage to finally make progress, slowly pulling myself up to chin-level with the bar and lowering back down significantly faster.

"Not the most stable, but we can work with it," she muses, half to herself. "Okay, move around a little bit, then back down on the ground."

Moving the rod around while I’m hanging off of it results in quite a bit more swinging than I’m comfortable with, and I pretty quickly lower myself down to the safety of the floor.

"It worked, I guess, though I think I might almost prefer the chair," I say honestly, anticipating her questions. "Dangling isn’t really that comfortable, and the straps feel like a necessity, which would be really inconvenient."

"It looks silly as hell, too," Gemma comments, which is a little odd given that she was the one who asked me to do this in the first place. She leans down to pick up the rain boots of all things, then tosses them at me, apparently not realizing that it’s kind of difficult to catch things with your hands strapped to a wooden rod. The most I manage is blocking the boots before they hit me, which I follow up with a perplexed stare. She responds with an exasperated one.

"Did you not just spend the past two hours demonstrating your telekinesis?"

Oh.

"Okay, that’s on me," I say, trying to mask my embarrassment. "But… rain boots?"

"Rain boots with a two-inch platform sole, because they make those for some reason," she clarifies. "That should give you a little over an inch to work with, which should be plenty. Lift yourself up by the soles, use the rod for stability."

"Did you just… have these on hand?"

"Telekinesis isn’t exactly a hard-to-imagine power, Sam," Gemma says. "We prep for some things in advance."

…Fair enough. I kick off my shoes and do my best to put the boots on using just telekinesis and a liberal amount of foot-wiggling, which ends up being more of an exercise in creativity than expected. I do eventually get them on, feeling a little precarious in shoes this tall. Alright. Weird-telekinesis-imitation-of-flight attempt number three.

Attempt number three is aborted approximately half a second after I start, since I apparently need to consider the fact that having my feet able to move independently of each other while doing this means that gravity will almost immediately try to make me do the splits, a feat which I am pretty damn certain I am not capable of. Making sure I hold the boots together, though…

"This feels unstable in entirely new ways!" I observe. I am once again floating above the ground, and being pushed up by my feet is indeed a lot less strain than hanging off of the bar, but it’s also still not easy by any means, not like my normal flight. That’s just… will, direction, and orientation. This is tricky!

"Engage your core and use the bar for support!" Gemma instructs. There’s probably a joke somewhere to be found about my actual core in one of my wings, but I am too busy trying to stay upright to think about it. …Or about the fact that I don’t actually have any idea where my core goes when I don’t have wings. Huh.

I flail around for a little bit, doing my best to figure out how to move smoothly like this. It’s certainly possible, I know I don’t have any trouble moving things around normally, but when I’m moving around with it things get a bit weirder. I think I get a handle on things after a couple of minutes, floating at a relatively sedate pace around the wide indoor space without wobbling around too much. I land a little hard, bending my knees to absorb the impact and just barely avoiding rolling my ankle in the weird tall boots, but another application of telekinesis to stabilize myself does the trick.

"So, what’d you think?" Gemma asks, glancing up from the tablet she’s been furiously taking notes on. I wouldn’t have thought that my wobbly attempts to float around would generate so much noteworthy data for her, but who am I to judge?

"It was… weird," I answer truthfully. "It works, I guess? But it’ll take some getting used to, probably. And I still don’t think strapping myself to a piece of wood every time I want to move around is going to turn out super well."

"Once you get your grip strength up the training straps won’t be necessary," she states like it’s an inevitability. "And no, it isn’t. You and Image will be getting copies of our report next week, but one of the things I’m going to add is a suggestion that your costume includes solid elements that you can easily manipulate yourself. Thick-soled boots, gloves that can lock into specific grippable objects, maybe even melee weapons or tools that are large enough to serve double duty for this, if it fits your fighting style."

My fighting style? God, I don’t want to think about how I’ll be fighting. My usual style is extreme psychological warfare while dropping buildings on people, and I have no desire to pull out that little strategy here in Brockton Bay. I don’t want to be fighting at all. I shouldn’t have to punch people in the face to do good, right?

Gemma helps unstrap me from the bar and I pull the gloves off myself, shaking out my fingers a bit. Same with the weird boots, and once I’m back in normal shoes the ground feels a lot more steady.

"So… what’s next?" I ask.

"Next is a break," she informs me. "Sit down, fuel yourself, take a breather. You’ve been going for two and a half hours now."

Holy shit has it already been that long? I don’t have a watch, so I can’t check the time, but that’s got to put us at close to noon. I know we’ve been doing a lot, but wow.

I grab the folding chair that was used for the original test and bring it with me over to the wall, putting it next to a couple of other that have been set up and sitting down. Truth be told, I’m not actually all that tired. It’s not like I’ve been doing a lot of physical activity, aside from the pull-up, and I’ve never once gotten to the point where my telekinesis itself felt overexerted. Maybe a normal person would get mentally exhausted from using their powers for this long? I guess it wouldn’t hurt to pretend like that’s the case. I’m already letting myself be pushed way beyond the middling impression of power I wanted to give, so I should probably be looking for ways to rein that in where I can. Especially after breaking the sound barrier in the span of thirty feet. God fuck why did I do that? I’m lucky that apparently this building is partially soundproofed and a quick word from one of the researchers to some of the PRT agents who showed up shortly after the incident was all it took to clear things up. On all levels except physical, at least. The target is still partially embedded in the back wall.

Not for the first time, I wonder if this whole thing is actually a good idea. It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that I am bad at not being the Simurgh. My plans to just present myself as a telekinetic went right out the window the second I met a Tinker, and there’s a not insignificant chance that crack in my mask will widen further when I next meet a Thinker, depending on their powers. I just spent the past couple of minutes straight-up flying, though via a slightly different method than usual, and even without singing I’m making tennis balls go supersonic. It feels like at this rate, the rest of my powers are bound to be revealed sooner or later. With my luck, after this break Gemma’s going to pull out a piano to test my vocal range and then immediately follow it up by asking me to guess what number a die is going to land on.

One of the staff hands me a water bottle and I down a third of it in one go. Okay. Okay. Stop thinking about that. What’s done is done, but it’s not the end of the world yet. The PRT seems to have bought my explanation. I haven’t even done Tinker power testing yet, and there will surely be plenty of opportunities to sandbag there. I’m almost definitely going to bomb a lot of the fitness tests. To the PRT and the Protectorate, I am only superhuman in completely normal ways. And I’m going to do my best to make sure that belief never changes.

I’m just worried my best won’t be enough.

Around fifteen minutes later, Gemma breaks from a conversation with three other researchers and walks up to me, grabbing one of the other chairs and swinging it around so she can sit facing me. She still seems just as energetic as ever, which indicates a level of emotional stamina that frankly boggles the mind.

"So! How are you feeling?" she asks, crossing a leg and resting the tablet on her lap.

"Good, I guess?" I respond. "Normal?"

"I’ll take that as a positive," she says. "We’re going to take a bit of a break from TK for now, though I definitely want to come back to it later today. We do power testing for a lot of the northeast, and your power is one of the most versatile in application I’ve ever seen. Plus, you’ve got the force behind it to back things up. I’m not saying you could go toe-to-toe with the feathery fuck, but hell, I don’t think anyone else has you beat in this niche."

Hahahahaha. I really hope she doesn’t notice my flinch.

"Anyway, your Tinker abilities," Gemma presses on. "Tinker testing itself is usually a pretty standard process, but your situation makes things a bit more exciting, thank god. We’re going to go through things a couple of times, first without anyone in range and then with. Armsmaster’s on site today, though mobile, and Kid Win and Gallant should be arriving soon."

"Isn’t today a school day?" I ask. I know the college I worked at started the new semester back on Monday, and it’s still the middle of the day. "I don’t want to make any of the Wards miss class just for me."

"Arcadia is a vocational school, which means the kids have the option of a half day for work or internships," she explains. "It’s good experience, so I’m told, and it’s a great cover for the Wards that go there to head downtown for the rest of the day. Or here, in some cases, like today. And don’t worry, they’ve both got other things to do here too."

"Okay, that’s good," I say, once again impressed by how much the PRT thinks these things through. "So are you going to have me building things, or…?"

"That’ll come in a bit. First up is psychology," she tells me, holding up her tablet again. "Which my degree is not in, but that just means I wasn’t the one to write these questions, so feel free to judge them."

"Fire away then, I guess."

"First off, can you list any of your previous creations? I don’t think they meant this as a yes-or-no question, but it might be in your case."

"I’ve coauthored a handful of papers?" I hedge. I am not about to tell her about my time in Madison or any of the other fiascos, so deflection is probably the way to go. "Though that was mostly on the history and anthropology side of things, not engineering."

"Not even any arts and crafts? Hobby projects? We can include things that you don’t think are relevant, since sometimes they do end up being so without you realizing."

"That’s… not really my sort of thing."

"Then we’re just going to put down 'N/A,'" Gemma says, tapping a couple of times on the screen. "This one might be tricky too, so feel free to say as much or as little as you can. What does the process of Tinkering feel like to you?"

That is a tricky one. I guess I could just go with how I got yesterday when that side of my power was active?

"It’s… it was like every piece of technology was a magnet drawing my attention," I start. "Not just what I could see, but what my power could feel. I don’t think I’d call it overwhelming, but it was definitely… I don’t know, focus-grabbing? Tunnel vision? Both times I got really into it, it took someone else saying something to bring me back to the present."

"That’s pretty standard for new Tinkers, as far as I’m aware," Gemma tells me. "It’s likely you’ll enter a similar fugue state when in the process of building something, though interruptions will still be able to pull you out of it, as well as hitting milestones or completing the project. I’ve been told setting alarms to remind yourself to take breaks is good practice. Now, you say the tech was 'drawing your attention.' Could you elaborate on that?"

"I guess? It was like… I wanted to take everything apart to see how it worked, even while I was already able to feel out the internals. I did end up taking apart one of Armsmaster’s gadget things, without even really realizing I was doing it. It went back together just as easily, and I almost wanted to change it to make it even more compact? But there’s no way in hell I was going to mess with his stuff even more."

"One of his… 'gadget things?'" she prompts.

"I don’t know, it was a metal egg with sensors in it."

"Hmm," she says, making a note. "Do you think you’d be able to describe it better if your power was active?"

"Well, I…" I start, then pause. Huh. That’s a jarring feeling. I can remember remembering the intricacies of the device, how each and every part fit together and what it does, but thinking about it now is like trying to remember the fine details of a dream. One that isn’t just constant flashbacks, I mean. "That’s weird. I’m not sure if it’ll come back to me, but I could definitely recall it better when I was still near Armsmaster."

"Another thing to test, then!" Gemma says cheerily. "That’s also enough to answer the question about memory retention, at least for now. How would you go about building a radio?"

"Um… search the internet for instructions and a list of parts I’d need? Assuming I can’t just go to the store and buy one, for some reason."

"…Right," she responds, tapping down the screen a couple of times in quick succession. "I’ll go ahead and assume your answer would be the same for the rest of these examples. Materials not applicable, other Tinkers’ work still needs to be tested, aptitudes need to be tested, though it’ll be interesting if we find variability in that."

As she speaks, Gemma makes quick notes on the tablet using her index finger, which is interesting. I’ve never actually used a tablet like that before; the university’s level of funding didn’t exactly lend itself to getting the latest and greatest technology as it comes out. This tech definitely seems advanced, though, more than just a tool for taking notes. I can feel at least two different kinds of environmental sensors tucked into the bottom, a wide-spectrum radio receiver, a normal camera next to one that’s… oh, it’s probably a rangefinder! Expandable internal storage, that’s always a good thing for computers, so I can definitely appreciate it. I wonder what kind of connectivity it has? The port on the bottom seems pretty standard, but there are contacts on the backside that—

"Sam?"

I flinch, my eyes jumping from the device in Gemma’s hands up to her face, one of her eyebrows raised.

"Sorry, I think I zoned out for a second," I apologize. "I’m not sure what… oh. Hmm."

"The kids are here?" she asks like a statement.

"Probably, yeah," I nod. "Or Armsmaster, I guess. I don’t know if I’d be able to tell the difference."

"Another thing to test, then," she says. "Good timing, too. I think we’ve pretty easily proved that you’re not a Tinker, at least up until twenty seconds ago. We’ll still get you in front of a workbench to be sure, but I don’t expect any grand revelations on that front."

"Sounds good," I respond with a slight smile. Giving my telekinesis a bit of focus, I notice someone walking down the hallway that leads into this massive room. Someone in body armor, in fact, based on the small bits of paneling I can feel around the edges of them. I turn to look at the door as Kid Win himself walks in, indeed wearing a set of red and gold body armor. It’s well-made, if relatively simple, mostly defensive while providing power to— no stop it bad Sam no getting distracted again.

"Kid Win!" Gemma calls out. "Glad you could make it. Been a couple years."

"Um, yeah, it has," the teenage superhero says, sounding a little startled. He glances around the room a little. "Power testing, right?"

"Right," she nods affirmatively, then gestures towards me with her head. "Which is also what’s happening today, but not yours."

I give him a small wave.

"I’m Sam," I say by way of introduction. "It looks like we’re going to be coworkers, sort of."

"Nice to meet you, Sam," Kid Win says, then looks between Gemma and me. At least, I assume he does; the opaque red visor makes it a little hard to tell. "So, gotta be honest, nobody really told me what I’m supposed to be doing here?"

"You’ve got the easy job, Kid. You are going to stay within a hundred feet of Sam here."

"…That’s it?" he asks, sounding confused.

"That’s it," Gemma confirms. "Where’s Gallant, by the way? With Armsmaster?"

"Yeah, getting his suit looked at."

"Perfect. We’ll pull him over in a bit," she declares, turning back to me. "Alright, let’s take this from the top. Close to it, anyway. What does the process of Tinkering feel like to you?"

Kid Win tilts his head slightly, and I take a moment to think about the answer.

"I think my answer’s still the same. The tunnel vision happened with your tablet this time, and if there were any differences then I can’t really tell."

"Definitely interesting," Gemma says, marking something down on said tablet. "Tell me about Armsmaster’s gadget that you took apart."

"The reconnaissance grenade," I say, thinking out loud. "Probably not very much battery capacity, iron-chromium alloy plating, wait, that’s just stainless steel, isn’t it? Seemed to be intended for throwing like a grenade, and would then transmit data back to his suit, presumably. It was really, really compact. I have no idea how he packed so many sensors in there."

"Even though you reassembled it yourself?"

"Yeah I… huh." I can remember putting every single component back together, fitting them all in neatly in just a couple of seconds despite panicking about how Armsmaster was going to react to my perceived faux pas. But now, trying to think about how I did it? "It seems impossible, now. I understand it a lot better with Kid Win here, but it doesn’t feel like I could do it again."

"Hmm," Gemma responds, making another note. "Kid, could Sam borrow one of your guns for a sec?"

Both of us look at her.

"Not to use it, she says, rolling her eyes. "Sam’s a Tinker. I want to see if she can figure out what it does through observation."

"…Sure, I guess?" Kid Win says hesitantly, reaching behind him and unclipping something from his armor. "Just, leave the safety on?"

"Don’t worry, I’ve never actually fired a…"

I trail off as he holds out a large pistol. Parts of it are red, matching the color scheme of his costume, but a lot of it is unfinished steel, clearly a constant work in progress. I lift it and spin it around, noting the slight visual asymmetry and the oddly-shaped grip. Oddly-shaped because it contains a small power core that can be easily swapped out for a different one. Plain old Phillips-head screws instead of Armsmaster’s fancy magnetic ones, which he probably only uses for certain devices anyway, if I had to guess. Whatever, I can turn them just the same. Oddly enough, the gun has no space for ammunition and no internal chamber besides the barrel, which itself is rather thick, the casing hiding an embedded electromagnetic rail wrapped around it in a helix shape. Taking a look at the interior of the barrel, the rifling seems to be incredibly fine, barely visible to the naked eye, arranged in such a way that… oh holy shit.

"Hard electricity," I breathe in wonder. "Spun into an ellipsoid concurrently with the firing sequence. That’s incredible. You built this?"

I look up at Kid Win, then follow the direction of his head back down to the pistol-turned-cloud-of-parts in front of me. Shit shit shit fuck I did it again!

"Oh my god sorry sorry sorry this is a problem I should have said something," I panic, reversing my disassembly faster than I did it in the first place. What the hell, Sam. I cannot keep doing this!

Kid Win’s expression is unreadable when I float the gun back over to him, screws all perfectly tight, power core slotted in, and everything hopefully back together just how it was. He doesn’t say anything as he looks the gun over, then aims it at the floor a couple of feet away from us and pulls the trigger. The sound is significantly less loud and significantly more sci-fi than the one from a regular pistol, and the flash of blue that leaps from the end of the barrel and impacts the ground with a thud is quite brilliant. It also causes me, Gemma, and the other staff to flinch away.

"Fucking hell, Kid, safety!" Gemma shouts.

"I had to make sure it still works!" he protests. "And isn’t the floor energy-absorbent?"

"That doesn’t mean you can use it as a firing range when it’s not set up for that!"

"…Right. Sorry."

Gemma sighs, rubbing her forehead.

"It still works, though?"

"Oh, uh, yeah. It does," Kid Win says, which reassures me just a little. "That was cool, but just… warn me next time?"

"Yeah, I’ll do my best," I sigh, cringing in on myself a little. "Again, I’m really sorry. I did it with Armsmaster too."

"Wait, so that was your power, not a device?" he asks, sounding surprised. "I thought she said you were a Tinker."

"Tinker-Trump, it’s looking like," Gemma answers for me. "Main power is telekinesis, like you just saw."

"Woah. That seems like it would make things so much easier," he says, which I guess isn’t wrong. "What things do you make?"

"Messes?" I halfheartedly attempt to joke. "Apparently I’m only a Tinker when there’s another Tinker near me? Which I just found out yesterday, so I haven’t had the chance to make anything yet."

"Huh. Haven’t heard of anything like that before, but that’s really cool," Kid Win muses, glowing an intrigued orange-tinged yellow.

What.

I glance around and find that he’s not the only one. Gemma is giving off more of a pale yellow, the faintest wisps of maroon betraying her fading annoyance, probably at Kid Win, though it’s quickly being overtaken by interest. Which I know, somehow. The other researchers hanging around have similar glows, though not all the same colors or intensities. And as far as I can tell, not a single person besides me is reacting to this sudden light show. Which means I’m the only one who can see it.

Thinker power.

Okay, keep calm. I literally have to keep calm, there’s someone who can read emotions nearby and I absolutely cannot let the PRT know that I can copy Thinker powers too. A little bit of power-testing jitters are probably okay, so that’s the most realistic goal to shoot for. Deep breaths, in and out. In and out. I am not going to freak out about this. I am going to be fine as long as I can keep control over my emotions.

Hahahahahaha.

Now that I’m feeling for them, it’s not hard to pick out the person who just came into the building, following in Kid Win’s footsteps as they walk towards us. When they enter the room, I see a tall man with blond hair and broad shoulders, dressed in a smart-casual outfit straight out of the business school at UMass Brockton. The domino mask on his face makes it a little tricky to pinpoint his age, but probably early twenties? He’s glowing a bright, steady yellow, floating around him like a cloud of happiness and confidence. Almost definitely the mystery Thinker. As he approaches, Gemma and Kid Win both give him a quick wave.

"Gallant! Glad you could join us," Gemma greets him. Gallant? I thought he was a Tinker! …Which was probably the point of having him here for my power testing, to see how my power reacts. Unless the PRT genuinely does think he’s a Tinker and he’s tricking them just like me? No, that can’t be it, I’d surely be getting some hint of nervousness from him if that were the case. Which is… greenish, I think, and I see none of that around him at all. No, the PRT has to know about this. Which means I’m expected to figure out that he’s not a Tinker. Okay. That’s easy enough, as long as I haven’t come to the completely wrong conclusion and am about to blow everything up.

"Glad I could be here," he says with a warm smile. "I understand we have a new hero in our midst?"

"That’s me," I say, offering my hand and smiling in a way that hopefully doesn’t entirely clash with the amount of green I’m doubtlessly emitting. "I’m Sam."

"It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sam," he responds, returning the handshake. "I’m Gallant. Armsmaster mentioned that you’re a Tinker?"

"Sort of," I confirm with half of a chuckle, then tilt my head to the side. "Sorry, this might be a weird thing to say; I was under the impression you were as well? But…"

I trail off, leaving a bit of silence for someone else to pick up. Thankfully, Gemma takes the bait.

"You’re able to tell?" she asks, a bit more orange flowing into the air around her.

"Not… for certain," I say hesitantly, then turn back to Gallant. "But it doesn’t… I don’t know, feel like Armsmaster and Kid Win? Nothing changed when you walked in."

"'Sort of' a Tinker indeed," he says, then gives his teammate a clap on the back. "And guilty as charged. Kid Win was the one who built my armor. I’d be hopeless in a Tinker lab."

"So what do you actually do?" I ask, since that seems like the type of thing someone who didn’t already know would say in this situation. "If that’s something that’s okay to ask."

"Ah! Well, I happen to actually be able to sense emotions," Gallant readily informs me, the yellow around him paling with pride. And… the faintest greenish wisps of fear? I do my absolute best to feel surprised. "And influence them, to a certain extent. I’m sure you can understand why the PRT would rather that be kept under wraps."

Hahaha what nooo who would ever want to keep their Master power a secret in fear of how people would react when they found out? That’s crazy.

"I can certainly guess," I say, forcing a laugh to try and explain away my emotions. "So, I’m assuming they brought you here to test if I could catch the lie."

"More or less," Gemma hums, still hovering around a mild yellow-orange that seems fitting for a scientist exploring an interesting subject. "There are a weirdly large number of powers that work more off of the cape’s perception of reality than reality itself. If your power activated when you thought you were in the presence of a Tinker, that would have fun implications. It was a long shot, though. And now we know!"

"Now we know," I echo her. "So, what now?"

"I’ve got some more questions for you while we’ve got Kid Win here, and then it’ll be time to let you loose in the labs!" she tells me, the cloud around her shifting even more towards an excited orange. "Then we’ll really see what you’re capable of."

Oh. Well, I guess things could always be worse. Now I just have to keep up the facade while doing tasks that have been proven to capture my complete focus to the exclusion of all else. With an empath nearby for most likely the entire time.

I’m sure the joyful yellow is just dripping off of me.

Notes:

So, according to Wildbow, Gallant is a Master/Blaster (that's fun to say), which makes sense for his emotion beams and blasts, but I've always personally thought it doesn't really fit with how he can see emotions. So, I'm going with that aspect of his power making him a Thinker, which means that Sam copies that part of it! Also, I couldn't find any information on what colors Gallant sees for each emotion, so I may have just kinda sorta taken it directly from Magical Girl Mechanical Heart. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Anyway, yeah! Soar! I'm thinking I might stabilize at one to two chapters a month, which is a lot more frequent than once every two months, thank goodness. I might work on some other writing projects as well! I guess we'll just have to see.

Chapter 9: Tinker Tailor Simurgh Cry

Notes:

Remember what I said at the end of last chapter about stabilizing at one to two chapters a month, which is a lot more frequent than once every two months? Hahahahaha.

Anyway, hey everyone! It seems like both AO3 and I are alive once more. Sorry it’s taken so long, life is… well, you know, life. Half of this chapter was written in May, the rest was just this past week. But! It’s here now! And as a bonus, I’m doing another WriMo! I’m planning on actually hitting my 20k word goal this time, which hopefully means more than one chapter this month! Wowzers!

The more time I spend on the PHQ, the more obvious it is that this was a structure built with a lot more ambition than its current use has it living up to. Sure, it doesn’t seem apparent on first glance, since the space is utilized. Though it’s called the Protectorate Headquarters, which implies that you’d just find the Parahuman Response Team and its subdivisions, apparently other government agencies have space here too. Most of the sensor equipment sprouting out of the roof is run by NORAD, but the FAA and military make use of it too. The DoD and DoE both keep some staff here, and there’s probably even more smaller departments claiming office space. Gemma, my impromptu tour guide for the moment, freely admits that she isn’t anywhere near sure about the full list of groups with a presence here. It’s a big facility, and the United States government does seem to like keeping certain things under wraps.

It’s not all that hard to read between the lines, if you make a couple of educated guesses. The PHQ is pretty damn extravagant for a base intended solely for Brockton Bay and the surrounding areas, even taking into account the drastically higher-than-average supervillain presence here, and oil rigs are floating platforms, usually able to be towed around to any marine location deep enough. There’s no real reason to deal with the logistical hassle of completely refitting and supporting one unless that was an intended part of the design. A mobile superhero base, traveling up and down the northern Atlantic coast as needed. It’s an idealistic thought, one that probably came out of a time when superheroes were a lot more idolized than they are currently. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess, it’d be right around that sweet spot when Leviathan’s presence started shaking up the economics of anything maritime-related but before things really ramped up. If you were the government looking to get your hands on an unused oil rig, that wouldn’t have been a bad time for it.

Then, of course, things did really ramp up, and it’s not hard to guess why parking the PHQ in Brockton Bay’s… well, bay, would seem like a more reasonable option than constantly towing a multibillion-dollar installation through the ocean. Fewer Protectorate heroes are subsequently stationed there, the PRT has a lot of empty space they don’t know what to do with and aren’t receiving funding to handle the upkeep of, and other agencies move on in, drawn by the location or advantages of having a presence on the structure or whatever other reason they might have had. Years later, here we are, a floating mixed-use government compound that serves as a lot more than just the local superheroes’ base of operations or mobile command center. I’m not a hundred percent sure about any of this, of course, but if you’re looking for it, the evidence is there.

Like, for example, the fact that the PHQ apparently has eight dedicated spaces for Tinker labs, despite Armsmaster being the only local hero who uses one. I suppose Kid Win is set to make use of one once he graduates into the Protectorate (assuming he stays in Brockton Bay), but it seems like the only real use they’ve seen so far is the occasional visiting hero needing to do some maintenance on their tech or whatever. Other than that, they’ve just gone unused for however many years, waiting for the Protectorate ENE to get another Tinker.

Enter one Samantha Stewart.

The workshop that will apparently be mine is located next to Armsmaster’s, separated from it (and everything else) by a couple inches of steel, soundproofing, fireproofing, and what might be honest-to-god ballistics shielding, in case anyone gets the idea to test a new firearm without just walking down to the firing range, which is apparently what the large building I was doing power testing in is frequently set up for. Makes sense, I guess, since what else are you going to use that much space for? Indoor soccer? That’s… not that far-fetched, actually, now that I think about it.

Anyway, aside from a bit of dust that recent cleaning and the extremely robust filtration and ventilation system failed to catch, the room is tidy, spacious, and very well-stocked. The desk in the corner by the door is probably meant for administrative duty and design work, but the rest of the room is split between open space and many work surfaces. Half of an entire wall is covered with mounted bins and tools, with a lot more in the cabinets and drawers below the counters. I’d barely even know what half of the tools are for normally, though the overlapping effects of having both Kid Win and Armsmaster in my range are making my mind leap to different possibilities I could use them for almost too fast to keep track of. A place like this must be a Tinker’s dream.

"Table, miter, band, and scroll saws are down the hall in Lab Eight, along with the lathe, waterjet, EDM, electrolysis tanks, and the rest of the equipment that takes up too much space or would do better in a controlled environment," Armsmaster continues to explain to me. "How much experience do you have with shop tools?"

"None?" I answer truthfully. It’s not like I took a shop class in high school. Or went to high school. "The Tinker thing is throwing ideas at me, though, so I might be able to figure them out."

"I’ll… put together some safety training materials," he responds after a moment’s pause. "For now I’d say stick to what’s in here and use common sense."

"I’ll certainly do my best," I say. "I don’t think there’s any need to get adventurous today."

I think that reassures him a little, since the bits of concerned green energy I can see floating off of him due to Gallant’s power lessen somewhat. Not entirely, of course, but he’s probably used to working with people who like to live a good deal more dangerously than I do. As far as I know, Tinkers tend to be able to push the boundaries of safety a lot more than normal humans can without incident, but even with my borrowed abilities, this is a better safe than sorry situation. I really don’t want to accidentally cut off a finger and then have to explain why it grew back in less than a minute, stone-white.

"Give that this is your first time doing original work, you’re gonna have to get a little adventurous," Gemma says, checking something on her tablet. "The hands-on bits of Tinker testing have to be pretty freeform by necessity. I’m gonna ask you to try and keep it under… let’s say three hours. Aside from that, go nuts, don’t blow anything up."

"Three hours?" I ask, a little incredulous. "That seems like a lot."

"Won’t when you’re working," Armsmaster says matter-of-factly. "If you’re ever on a real time limit, set alarms. Multiple, probably."

"Good to know," I respond, turning to Gemma. "So, what exactly do you mean by 'go nuts?'"

"The colloquial definition," she deadpans. "Freestyle. Improvisational jazz solo. Whatever the hell you want. Armsmaster’s here, Kid Win’s going to stay nearby, you know where all the materials are kept. Build whatever comes naturally."

"Haven’t we determined that tinkering comes entirely unnaturally to me?"

This earns me an eye roll.

"You’ve had plenty of ideas, just give one a shot."

Something that’s easier said than done. Not for lack of ideas; my power is all too happy to throw a myriad of nebulous ideas at me, but none of them are obvious. I don’t need a ray gun, or a copy of Armsmaster’s sensor sphere, or a weirdly intricate sword. Nothing that I came up with during a subsequent round of questioning by Gemma while Kid Win was in my radius is something I truly think would be good. And besides, I’m not a real superhero yet, I haven’t actually done anything, so how am I supposed to know what would even be good or useful in the first place? It’s not like I have much experience with tinkering, either. The most significant thing I ever built was during the Madison fiasco, and that was mostly just scaling up some of Professor Haywire’s existing designs, best I can remember. Originality isn’t my strong suit. But sure, I can give it a shot, I guess. Worst case scenario, I just waste everyone’s time and they all resent me for it. Haha.

I can at least take a look around the room, try and get a better feel for things. I do a lap around the island countertop in the middle, letting ideas turn over in my head and searching for one that might actually be worthwhile. One of the drawers holds at least forty different kinds of screwdrivers, which seems entirely redundant even ignoring the fact that I can just turn screws with my mind. In fact, I could probably make something with entirely internal screws holding the casing together, preventing non-destructive disassembly by anyone without some way to spin things without touching them. There are bound to be a lot of linkages like that, actually. Pins might be even simpler than screws, but there’s a chance they’d be susceptible to being jarred out of alignment by—no, stop it, you have to focus. I need real ideas, not some random proof-of-concept. This is supposed to be impressive, right? Demonstrate what I can do? I’ve got to come up with something good.

Continuing to idly poke through drawers and cabinets, while probably looking like I know what I’m doing, doesn’t yield any new revelations. Most Tinkers who join the Protectorate have probably already built lots of things before coming in for power testing, since most Tinkers don’t 'discover' their abilities while in the PRT building, scheduling power testing for something entirely different. Sure, I knew about mine beforehand, but it’s not exactly misrepresenting the truth to say I don’t have any usable experience in it. Taking things apart is one thing, but this is a vastly different experience. I’ve never just… built something for the sake of building something. I don’t even know where to start.

I don’t need to actually go around opening things to know what’s in this room, of course. Every object in here (and all the surrounding rooms, and the ones beyond those) is easy to sense with telekinesis, shapes laid out as plainly as if I were holding them in my hand. Still, it gives me something to do while I think. Allen wrenches, hex sockets, monkey wrenches, pliers, wire cutters (why are those here instead of with the circuitry supplies?), regular wrenches. Soldering iron, rework station, heat gun, induction heater… wow, it’s like they shoved all the hot stuff in one cupboard. Which I guess makes a certain amount of sense? But less so when you think about the fact that the counter over on the other side of the room is clearly set up for precision electronic work, so why would you keep the soldering iron over here? I grab it and the rework station for good measure, walking them over and placing them next to the heatproof mat. Okay, there should be tweezers here too… but I don’t need tweezers, I can pick things up all on my own. No, stop getting distracted, plug them in. The LEDs on the rework station light up, but there’s nothing from the soldering iron, even though the power switch is on. Great. I unplug and flip the base over, spinning the screws holding the case on and floating them aside. I can’t feel anything obviously amiss, but maybe looking at it… ah, yep. One of the capacitors on the power supply is soot-black. Shoot.

I probably can’t build anything without a working soldering iron, so fixing that is priority number one. Pulling the old one off should be easy once the rework station heats up and I can blast it with some hot air. Even better, something in my head is telling me that kind of capacitor is relatively common, so there should be some in one of the drawers filled with random bins of components. They’re not even difficult to find, so I grab one and float it next to the screws while I work on pulling the bad one off. Which… isn’t budging. Shit. I try again with more heat, then more, up to the point where I’m worried I’m going to damage something, but it’s not loosening. Damn it! I could just snip it off but then I still wouldn’t be able to get the solder melted to put the new one in and aaargh. Okay, fine, new plan. Time to improvise.

Copper wire, coiled. Tip of the soldering iron comes off and goes inside. Rework station comes apart, heating element pulled out, connect it to the wire, hold everything in place with telekinesis because this would be massively dangerous to touch, and… wait, no shit, it’s not going to have enough power. I need a different power supply. Supercapacitors in parallel, acting as a buffer for a battery. Yes, I’m liking this. Okay, better solution to hold the tip. Screw-in? No, magnets. Magnets are great. Where were those copper contacts?

I was right, this workshop really is a Tinker’s dream. It’s got everything I need. Some of it probably isn’t meant to be used as materials, per se, but so what? This is important. Efficient, too. Bend the casing around, press form it with telekinesis, that’s a new enclosure. Check the fit, yep, now it just needs holes for a charging connector and power switch, so gotta snag a drill bit and… and…

I stare at the disparate collection of materials in front of me, half spread across the counter and half suspended in midair. This is… was I just… I think some of the floating cloud of components is the soldering iron I was just trying to fix. Probably. That is what I was doing, right? But what’s supposed to come next? Holes, I think? No, but why would I… what the hell is going on?

I turn around to see Gemma leaning against the desk on the far side of the room, watching me intently while tapping out some notes. She gives me a quick little wave.

"Everything alright? You froze for a bit there."

"I think so?" I answer hesitantly, and only then do I notice what’s missing. "Where’s Armsmaster? I thought he wanted to watch me."

"With Kid Win, slightly outside your range, as of about thirty seconds ago," she informs me, making another quick note and then pulling out her phone. "Which answers the question of whether or not your power can coast, so to speak. I’ll let them know to come back."

Oh. Well, that explains the disorientation. Having Tinker powers turned off in the middle of using them is a really weird feeling. Looking at Gemma as she sends a text message, I also notice that there’s no cloud of color surrounding her, which likely means that Gallant is gone too. I’m not supposed to have any way of knowing that, though, so I keep it to myself.

"So, whatcha making?" Gemma asks after she puts her phone away.

"I’m not entirely sure," I admit, turning back to the mess of electronics in front of me. "I think I took apart the soldering iron, to make a soldering iron… so I could fix the soldering iron."

That’s certainly what seems to be happening, anyway. The power supply I was trying to fix is sitting intact on the counter, but besides that the tool is basically gone, along with the hot air gun thingy. Some of the cabinets around the room have been left open from when I apparently pulled stuff out of them without thinking. It’s all been stripped to component parts and reformed to build… whatever this work-in-progress in front of me is.

It’s roughly cylindrical, a size that would fit comfortingly in my hand. One end has rounded edges, with a seam about an inch in… that allows the end to be rotated like a dial for controlling power output, which is obviously important for these kinds of tools. I’d like to put some sort of indicator on it but that’s a later project since it’s probably going to require some circuit design. The indent on the side is around where my thumb would rest so that’ll be perfect for a button, and the other end is flat, with wires trailing out of the end of it. Those need to be connected to contacts on the endplate, surrounded by the ring of alternating magnets. Normally weak and strong when energized, which makes the tip easy to swap on and off when it’s unpowered and lock solidly on when it is. Shouldn’t be too hard to punch out holes in the disk of insulating plastic, fit it on, tug the wires through with a bit of TK, coil, press fit, done. The end pieces now. One tip as a soldering iron, that’s a no-brainer. If I take the blower from the rework station and reroute the air channels… it’s tight but that is not a problem, boom, there’s a second attachment. Hot metal and hot air, on demand. I’ve got two more caps already fitted with magnets and contacts, so how about… oh, yeah, induction heater, duh. I’ve still got enough wire left from the power cable, just got to reinforce it, make another coil, fit it into the holes, done. Last one… ooo, that’d be good. I think there’s a laser pointer around here somewhere… there. One of the drawers in the island. Pull that out, unscrew the end, put aside the batteries, I just want the diode. Actually, hmm, I really like this button. Okay, uncap the tool, pull out the capacitor and battery array, detach the button I took from the rework station, put in the laser pointer’s, oh yes. Reverse that, seal it up, put it aside, back to the diode. I’ve got plenty of space, an entire cubic inch or so to work with, so why not throw in another capacitor and a reflector chamber based on Kid Win’s pistol? I’m working with light here, not hard electricity, but If I change the diode around to make pulses instead of a continuous beam… hahaha holy shit this thing could spot weld sheet metal from six inches away. I’m confident even though I haven’t tested it yet, but also I kinda want to charge it up and see—wait, shit, I was gonna punch holes for a charging port. You know what, scrap that idea, grab the other power cable, can’t use the power supply from the rework station since it’s in twelve different pieces right now but I’m already working with electromagnets, I don’t have to build an inverter if I just filter for polarity, that’s basically the same thing. Wireless charging by necessity, don’t want it touching the contacts for the tips, just reverse the magnet alignment and gosh that’s a cool effect. And… holy shit I think I’m done? Am I done? It feels done, for now at least. God damn.

As awareness of my surroundings returns to me, I find myself breathing hard, a very light sheen of sweat on my forehead. I was barely even using my hands to do anything, but I still feel kinda tired after that. Also… good? Tired in a good way? That was… that was fun.

Holy fuck I had fun doing that.

"I… okay, I’m done," I declare in between breaths, letting all the remaining unused pieces fall back to the counter in semi-organized piles.

"You need a break before you finish?" Gemma asks from behind me. "We can do that."

"No, I mean, like, I’m done. Finished it."

"Really? You can take more time if you need," Armsmaster says, causing me to jump slightly. Right, he came back. "Forty-eight minutes isn’t very long for a project."

That was forty-eight minutes? God, it felt like five. Which is equally insane, of course, but wow he wasn’t kidding about it not feeling like all that much.

"I don’t know, it just feels complete," I tell them, turning around. Oh, Kid Win’s here too. Still no emotion-clouds, which probably means Gallant left left. "There’s more I could add, but I’d need to take better stock of the materials here. Also I think I might have used all the five-by-two-millimeter magnets, so… probably should get more of those."

"Who are we to tell the Tinker when to stop?" Gemma, who indirectly and intentionally shut off my Tinker powers mid-build, quips. "Alright then, theory time. Arms, Kid, over there. I want you two to tell me what it is, what it does, and how it works without Sam explaining it."

All three of us shoot her a look, but the two of them walk over anyway to inspect my work.

"Can you put it down?" Kid Win asks, and it takes me a second to realize what he means.

"That’s not me."

"Oh," he says. "So why is it floating?"

"It’s—" I start, then think better of it. "Actually, I think Gemma will get mad if I tell you."

She gives me an approving thumbs-up.

Part of me feels an urge to float right behind them and look over their shoulders, but I manage to get myself to lean back against one of the counters to rest and take a break. A normal Tinker would probably need one after completing a project, right? Plus, I know I don’t have to worry about them breaking it or anything; they’re professionals. My flinch when Kid Win picks up two of the tips to look at them is an entirely unnecessary instinctual reaction. It’s fine.

"It appears to be a multitool," Armsmaster says after a couple of minutes. "Well-designed, considering the parts available. You’ve got a nice power setup here."

"Everything’s focused on heat," Kid Win chimes in. "The attachments do slightly different things, but they’re all different kinds of heaters. Metal, air, light…"

"Filling in the gaps in your ability, I like that," Armsmaster comments. "A normal screwdriver or pair of pliers isn’t gonna do much for you, so this is a good starting point. It shows a lot of promise."

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t think I’m supposed to respond here, since I wouldn’t know what to say. I wasn’t really thinking about that, or really planning any aspects of the design while I was building it. It just kinda… happened. And besides, I’m not doing anything more than using their powers. I don’t deserve the praise.

"Hey, those grooves look familiar," Kid Win says, holding the laser attachment up to his visor to peer into it. Ah. Shit. "Different material, obviously, and spinning up photons, not electrons, but. Did you base it off the spark pistol rifling?"

"It was more of an inspiration?" I say, cringing slightly. "I wasn’t really thinking about it, sorry, I didn’t mean to copy your design."

"Oh, no, it’s cool," he dismisses absentmindedly. "I wish I was better at using parts of my gun designs in other builds. I might have to copy it back for something."

"So," Gemma interjects, "does that mean you feel like you have a solid understanding of the tool and how it works?"

"I mean, yeah?" Kid Win responds. "Nothing about it feels too complicated, no offense."

"Like I said, it’s well-designed," Armsmaster says. "I’d have to disassemble it to be sure, but it’s not hard to get."

"Then, why was it floating, Kid Win?"

He thinks for a second.

"You’ve already got magnets at the end of the handle, right? And coils of wire inside it around the capacitors, so that’s basically perfect for wireless charging. But for the purpose why… gotta admit, I’m drawing a blank. It’d do the same thing with just a regular charging dock. Did you not want it to touch the contacts or something?"

I look at Gemma for permission and she gives me another thumbs-up.

"That was a bit of it, yeah. Mostly, though… I think I just thought it looked cool?"

Kid Win slowly nods in understanding.

"Alright," Gemma says, making a few notes on her tablet. "Kid, how does it feel like it compares to your own designs?"

Both of them take a moment to contemplate this. I don’t, since I can already see where she’s going with it, and unfortunately she’s correct. I do in fact copy the specialties of Tinkers along with their powers, and it’s not like that’s all that much of a secret, especially after the portals in Madison. Hahaha this is not great for my cover!

"I guess it sorta feels like something I could have built?" Kid Win answers. "Like yeah, I get it more than other Tinkertech I’ve looked at. Like I said, though, it’s not too complicated."

"And Armsmaster?"

"It might compare in certain ways," Armsmaster says. "I don’t think I could tell you one way or another until she’s built other things."

"Something to note for the future then, Sam," Gemma hums. "You’ve already displayed a more intuitive understanding of other Tinkers’ work than we normally see, at least while your powers are active. If you can accurately replicate or build off of their work as well, then that’d be pretty damn useful."

"I’ll keep it in mind," I say, trying to sound nonchalant. Okay, maybe I’m good for now? It’s not exactly where I want things, but it definitely could be worse.

"Right. Does that feel like everything you want to do with it for the moment?" she asks, and I nod. I can feel ideas for improvements and alterations vaguely floating around, but none of them are particularly strong or pressing. "Okay then, no reason we can’t end this early. I think we’ll let you two get back to it. I’m sure you’ve got patrols or something to do."

"I mean, they had to clear my schedule for this, so…" Kid Win shrugs. "Armsmaster, if you’ve got time, could we look at the thrusters for my hoverboard again? I made the changes you wanted but it’s still not as stable as I’d like."

"I can probably spare some time," Armsmaster allows. He doesn’t sound particularly enthused about it, for whatever reason, but that doesn’t seem to deter the Ward.

"Cool!" Kid Win says as he starts heading for the hallway, Armsmaster following. "Nice meeting you, Sam!"

"You too!" I call out as they leave. And it was, actually. He seems nice, which is good because the PRT will probably have us spending time together when Armsmaster isn’t in his workshop or otherwise available, if I had to guess. Well, alright then! That’s tinkering done. I turn back to Gemma. "So, what’s next?"

"Since you have graciously ceded your Tinker testing time," Gemma says, a wicked glint in her eye, "that’s two more hours we can devote to fitness testing. So… let’s get going!"

Oh. I wonder if it’s too late to get Armsmaster and Kid Win back in here.

Fitness testing turns out to be not as much of an ordeal as I had feared. It’s physically grueling, sure, but running on a treadmill with a breathing mask or doing a bunch of standard exercises while Gemma watches and calls out counts isn’t really all that difficult. The hardest part is judging when would be a good time to start feigning exhaustion, since my weird-ass body apparently starts feeling better after a certain point of exertion. I sweat, thank god, so at least I don’t have to figure out how to fake that.

Despite her threat, Gemma declares us done around two hours ahead of schedule, and she gives me the promise of a full report on Monday, as well as an exercise plan she apparently dearly wishes she could declare mandatory. Changing back into my street clothes in the locker room attached to the PHQ’s rather large exercise facility gives me a bit of pause, as I should probably actually shower after that much physical activity. There’s no one else here besides me right now, I know there isn’t, and even if there was no part of my body is physically inhuman right now, so I shouldn’t have a problem with just a quick rinse, right? Unfortunately, knowing something so rarely stops my brain from screaming about it, and I resolve to get the entire experience over with as fast as possible. My only other option would be to rapidly turn all my skin to marble and back again, which would make all the sweat and other gross stuff fall off, but even I am not stupid enough to do that in the middle of a fucking PRT facility, other people around or not.

When I come back out, bag slung over one shoulder again, Gemma’s waiting for me, holding a small black box.

"Hey there. You’ve got about twenty minutes until next crossing, so no big rush. Also, someone from IT came with this while you were changing."

I don’t recognize the contents, not until she hands it to me and I slide the Protectorate-logo-embossed lid off. It’s… an honest-to-god smartphone, with a touchscreen and everything. Holy shit. I know they’re getting more popular, but wow. The PRT is just… giving one to me? To use?

"Standard-issue for heroes and a couple of other positions, apparently. Have fun with it."

"I… alright," I say, putting the lid back on and unzipping my bag to slip the box into it.

"I’m gonna stop by Strategy," Gemma says, gesturing with her tablet. "Do you think you can find your way back to the parking garage in time?"

"Probably, yeah," I answer. The PHQ is big, but it’s still a bounded area, and I doubt it’ll be hard to feel things out if I need.

"Great, don’t be late."

She turns around and abruptly walks out of the building, and after a moment’s hesitation, I follow. The late afternoon sun is bright, even filtered through the forcefield, which makes every lit surface seem to shimmer ever-so-slightly with color. There are fewer people outside than this morning, though it looks like that’s slowly changing. PHQ employees don’t all stick to a standard 9-5 shift, from what I can tell, but it seems like at least a decent chunk of the workforce does something vaguely approaching it. People chat, look at their cellphones, power-walk, stroll, or just take a moment to admire the setting sun. Most are bundled up, as even with the forcefield cutting off the wind for now, it’s still January in New England. I’m glad to have my coat, just for the sake of blending in.

It doesn’t take all that long to walk to the south side of the structure, the entire length of which has a couple dozen feet of relatively open space before the buildings, set up almost like a miniature park. I wander left along the railing, stopping when I hit the corner to look out towards the open ocean. It’s… calming, for some reason. I wouldn’t say I have the best feelings about the ocean, not through any fault of its own, but because despite living in a coastal city, pretty much the only time I see it is when I’m flying over it, on my way to ruin a couple thousand lives. But now, I’m going to be spending a lot of time working a couple hundred feet above the ocean’s surface, trying to do the opposite of ruining lives.

Fuck, am I actually sure about this? Really, truly sure about it? I signed the forms and everything, but Director Piggot said I could still walk away if I really needed to. With every passing day, that option becomes less and less feasible. Is this really what I want to be doing with my life, at least for the foreseeable future? Flying around, rescuing people from collapsing buildings, building derivative Tinkertech, and doing whatever the hell else the PRT thinks the specific aspects of my powers they know about could be used for? Is there something better I could be doing with my life, something with significantly less risk of shattering everything I’ve worked towards with a single slip-up?

What have I worked towards, anyway?

The education of a couple hundred students, I guess, the ones that cared enough to actually use department resources to complete their classwork. Some co-authored articles. Twenty-seven lives.

The idea of being able to keep doing the first two is nice, certainly, but that’s out of my control, not unless I want to try and find another place to live that quiets the urge for violence just as much and also has a university that would hire me. I miss it already, but that bit of my life is over now. And the third thing…

The car ride back to shore is much the same as the one this morning, just in the opposite direction. I’m dropped off down the street from my building, with a few parting words from Gemma and a firm reminder to stick to the exercise plan when I get it. The elevator ride up is as non-disorienting as it usually is, and my apartment is just how I left it. Shoes go on the shoe rack, jacket gets hung up, exercise clothes go in the laundry basket, and bag goes in the closet after I take the box out of it. Well, I’ve got nothing else to do, so…

Removing the lid again reveals the same shiny black device, wrapped in plastic protective film. The electronics inside it are extremely intricate, and it feels like even if I had a Tinker standing next to me I’d still have a difficult time even starting to make sense of how it works. Under the smartphone is an instruction manual, which I set aside for later study, a charger, and a set of headphones in a little plastic case. Neat.

The phone, as it turns out, is already mostly charged, booting up as soon as I plug it into one of the outlets over the kitchen counter. Following the step-by-step instructions to set the thing up is easy, at least, with a good chunk of it being personal questions to verify that I am indeed Samatha Aylin Stewart, PRT 'Research Analyst' and as-of-yet-unnamed superhero. Pretty soon the phone gives me relatively free rein over its functions, most of which I’m definitely going to have to study the instruction booklet for. There is, however, a little red bubble that seems to be trying to get my attention, over what looks like a messaging function. Tapping it reveals…

Dragon: Hi, Sam! I heard your power testing started off with a bit of a bang. I hope you had fun! Let me know if you’d like any help copying other Tinkers’ designs. I’ve got a lot of practice ;)

Ha. That’s… sillier than I would have expected from her. I almost want to decline out of instinctual politeness, but… if she’s offering Tinker advice, she probably has time for it, right? And it’s gotta be a standard thing she does for all new Tinkers, I’d imagine. Make sure they’re up to speed and everything. I guess it couldn’t hurt.

SStewart: Sure, that’d be great! Thank you!

Actually, wait, that’s probably too eager, I don’t want to come off as weird. Does this thing let you edit messages? Wait, shit, she’s an AI, there’s no way she hasn’t—

Dragon: Wonderful! I’m looking forward to seeing you in action.

If only you knew.

Despite the thought, though, I feel… oddly optimistic. This… this could be really good. Both for me and hopefully the world at large. I definitely can’t fix everything, but maybe I can fix something.

I don’t know if there’s something better I could be doing with my life. But I sure as hell could be doing a lot fucking worse.

Notes:

Woo, chapter! I know enough about engineering and circuitry and whatnot to disdain technobabble, so while writing this I shot for decently realistic with added flair for speed, compactness, and a little bit of physics-bendery. Hopefully that comes across well.

Alrighty, maybe a recommendation or two. I recently read through The Complicated Love Life of Ivil Antagonist, a delightful story by RavensDagger in which Ivil Antagonist, the all-powerful Empress of Mars, tired of her boring overpowered life, sets out on a quest to find true love. It’s a silly premise, and it is indeed full of light and fluffy moments, but the premise and plot is actually taken very seriously, with super cool and detailed worldbuilding, an interesting cast, and a neat power system. As a bonus, it’s fully finished as of a month ago, so you can read the whole thing right now!

Wupwup's Ants In My Brain is a Butcher Taylor fic, but unlike Inheritance or Here Comes The New Boss, Taylor can't push down the voices in her head, and pretty rapidly loses her grasp on sanity. It's really well-written, it's got a lot of fun OC capes, and it's a fun new take on an existing concept!

I'm sure there's more that I'm not remembering at the moment, so I'll save it for the second chapter coming out this month. Hopefully. Definitely. Remember to leave a comment! The more comments there are, the faster the story will update. Is this true? Who knows!