The boxing class was informative to say the least. Using Savant, I was growing at a rate much faster than anyone else in class. It reached the point where James basically set me aside to do some muscle training rather than wasting my time rehashing points that I already knew. And I remembered why I had never hit the gym in my previous life.
God was it tiring. James set me up with a basic PT plan to follow which felt like ass to complete. Bench pressing, curling, blah blah blah. Everything to build up my arms and chest first. Then we could work on core muscles and legs in another session. Although I very much hated every second of it, I gritted my teeth and pushed through since the payoff of True Hero Potential was too good to pass up.
Grabbing a bottle of water, I took a drink and curled my lips slightly at my sweat-drenched shirt. James dismissed the rest of the students before walking over to me. "How was your first lesson?" He looked a little smug when he said it.
"More PT than I expected." I stretched my arms, hoping to work out the soreness in them. Despite the fact that I spent a good hour working out, I was slightly surprised that I didn't feel as tired as I should be. "I expect this would be a regular thing?"
James shrugged. "At the rate you're going, it's better that you build your muscle compared to practicing your movements. You should also probably keep up this training outside of my lessons as well."
Nodding, I said my thanks as I made my way to the showers. Rinsing myself off, I washed the sweat off my clothes, squeezing them dry and then rinsing it again before I pulled them on. The waterlogged fabric clung to my skin and weighed me down. Perfect. It was time to conduct a little experiment. With Painted On, I made them completely sheer, which meant they were now perfectly translucent.
Painted On only affected the clothes I was wearing and it controlled things like how form-fitting it was, the way it supported my body, and the thickness. Not entirely useful, being little more than a cosmetic power but they were some applications I could think of with more durable fabrics. Right now, I was testing specifically its thickness-altering ability.
With completely sheer clothes, fabric had to be removed. That was simply how sheer clothes were, the fabric had to be so thin that light could pass through. Now with that I had turned my clothes sheer, all that water that was absorbed into the fabric suddenly no longer had fabric to hold it. And it all splattered to the floor.
An unconscious smile came to my face. Forcing Painted On into overdrive, I made my clothes as thin as I possibly could. Water splattered to the ground until there was nothing left then I released the power. Immediately my clothes popped back to their normal size and the remaining water was spread through every fiber. Suddenly instead of an incredibly wet and clammy shirt, I had one that only felt a little damp.
Though now I had to explain how my clothes became so dry…
I wetted my back and armpits with water and pulled on the shirt again. Eh. Good enough.
Walking out of the gym, I checked my phone for any notifications. Claire had sent me an address again, this time set somewhere down South, close to Captain's Hill. It was also at this moment that I forgot that I didn't have a way to contact Amaya. A grimace formed on my face before I put it out of my head.
I still had a bit of time before my meet-up so I went back to my home. When the bus stopped, I took a brief glance around for any suspicious figures who were hanging around. It wouldn't be too out of the question to find some plainclothes PRT trooper stalking me or something. But I didn't see anyone. Looking up, I didn't see anyone else either so I made my way inside.
Amaya glanced over to me while she fiddled with the excess components from yesterday's shopping run. I raised an eyebrow as she flicked a switch and her finger slowly and rather jerkily extended. For a moment, I wondered why she was working on Regent's bodyjacking instead of Laserdream's blasts. Then I remembered she didn't exactly have the components to make a prototype of Laserdream's powers while also having my taser prototype lying around. Shutting the door behind me, I took a moment to take a deep breath. "You tinkered with my prototype?"
"Mhm." She nodded before flicking the switch again. Immediately, the tension in her finger dropped and her finger went slack. Flexing the muscle, she shook her hand before turning her attention back to me. "The target can still resist it so I'll have to refine it." Her voice was a little calmer, without much of the lilt or tone that she had used to tease me earlier. Raising her arm above her head, she arched her back as she stretched out.
"Huh." At a glance, Hammer Jammer could tell what she had done to refine my prototype, altering the components in order to increase its precision. "How did you manage to make it target the nerves so precisely?." Stepping past her, I went to the closet to grab a fresh set of clothes.
"I didn't. I made it target my nerves specifically. Much easier than trying to compose a method of mapping out a target's nervous system and–" As I pulled off my shirt while listening to her explanation, I suddenly felt a cold aura grasping onto my back.
Shooting a glance at her, I suddenly felt a chill run down my spine. Licking her lips, she looked an awful lot like a snake who caught sight of her prey. Looking up at me, she laughed slightly. "And I'd like to think that I'm quite brazen." An almost too-wide smile broke across her face. "Are you perhaps… inviting me for something?"
I swallowed hard. Thank god, I had Carnal Artist. Even if I wasn't exactly prepared to have sex with a woman that the Forge practically created for me, at the very least I didn't become a blushing mess whenever something sexual comes up. A response formed on the very tip of my tongue. Literally my power helped me to come up with a perfect response to get her riled up as well.
And I knew, for a fact, that if I said it, my neighbours would not be having a good night's sleep. Amaya… was clearly attractive but it wasn't exactly like I was in love with her. I basically knew her for all of half a day and let's not get into the existential crisis of fucking a woman that literally didn't exist until I got the Lab Partner perk. However, my dick saw a pretty woman and my brain had to take a back seat. But I had other and more important things to do than sex. Like getting more funds and building my tech.
A look of amusement crossed her face as she watched my inner turmoil between using Carnal Artist and seeing how far we could go, and swallowing my horniness. Eventually, I called upon my Solar memories to cool myself off, though it did nothing for downstairs. "I'll take a rain check on that. Maybe a date first?"
Amaya looked fairly amused at my response, with a slight grin dancing across her face. Getting off the seat, she wrapped herself around my chest, her arms snaking around my back and one hand running up through my hair. "Is there no way I can convince you~?"
Okay, now she was definitely fucking with me. There was no way she couldn't feel it pressing against her chest just like how her breasts were pressing into my chest. Clearing my throat, I carefully extricated myself from her grasp. "I got a meeting with Cranial in a bit. And there's no way I'm making it if we start."
Laughing, Amaya covered her mouth slightly with her fingers. "Sure then. I'll be sure to hold you to that." She took a step back. "Anyway, to continue my explanation, before I was so… rudely interrupted." Amaya flashed a smile. "It's much easier to make the prototype target my nerves specifically. Rather than dealing with the monumental task of generalizing it to many many tiny variations throughout every human for now."
Huh. I nodded in understanding. That made sense. If the device was a little off, that might cause some other nerve to fire rather than the one being targeted. And there was currently no real way to differentiate between things like sensory and motor nerves so– Wait a fucking minute.
Did that mean Amaya knew the position of her entire nervous system? I shot a look at her and she simply smiled back. Blinking, I narrowed my eyes slightly. No, that made no sense. She probably just did something similar to a TENS unit. I took a breath. Let's go with that. Much less headaches that way.
"What about the laser gloves?" I asked.
Amaya leaned back and hummed slightly. Reaching over to a stack of papers, she handed them to me. "Here you go. I have most of the calculations done for generating the hard light constructs. Unfortunately, these are all theoretical for now. Anything further would require a practical design." She stated matter-of-factly as I was busy processing her papers. "Unless of course, you can let me into the Toybox dimension to do some testing?"
I paused for a moment. If I could convince them to recruit or at least let Amaya come along, she would have a proper research environment that would vastly increase her effectiveness. On the other hand, they had literally just recruited me so I doubted I could call in such a big favour without some amount of suspicion.
"Best not to. Perhaps once I earned a little more trust from them." I replied. "But if you wanna go out in general then I'm not opposed to that. Though that hair might stand out."
Amaya twirled a lock between her fingers. "I'll handle it." She winked as she kept her prototype into… a hidden compartment? When did that get there? Catching my look of surprise, she slid it shut. "It's part of the table design." A moment passed as the two of us stared at each other. After realizing that she wasn't going to elaborate, I turned and opened the door. Stepping out, Amaya followed me out which made my heart rate skyrocket.
Grabbing her wrist, I pulled her back inside before shutting the door. Taking a few deep breaths, I took a look at her. She was pressed against the wall, her wrist in my hand as her crotch pressed against my thigh. Judging by the look on her face… this wasn't exactly entirely accidental.
"Amaya…" I took a deep breath… I could feel my eyebrow twitch as my annoyance bubbled to the surface. "What are you doing?"
Amaya had a sly grin on her face. "Nothing, Master. I'm just heading out like you said I could." Releasing her, she rubbed her wrist with her other hand. I thought I had gripped her too hard but she didn't seem to mind it, still keeping that self-assured smile on her face.
I took another deep breath. "You're definitely screwing with me." I shook my head as I tried to leave and yet again Amaya followed right behind me. Cursing quietly, I shut the door and stared into her eyes. "What are you up to? Seriously."
"Well… since you have so graciously allowed me to go out," She leaned in closer. "I was thinking of heading out with my favourite Master." She still had that light smile dancing across her face.
"I'm your only Master." I stated dully. "And you–" I pinched the bridge of my nose. "You… want something." Loremaster was definitely picking that up. As well as something sexual underneath that… "For fuck's… If it's something sexual again, I'll tie you down to the bed." Amaya tried her best to look innocent but Loremaster saw right through her.
"Fu—" I took a deep breath. "Fine. Whatever." I shook my head. "I'll deal with it later tonight." I started. "Will that be good enough?"
Amaya looked satisfied with that and nodded. Coughing lightly, I took another breath. "In that case, wait for a while after I leave before you do. And before you ask, please don't stalk me." Amaya nodded her head while still wearing a smile on her face. Narrowing my eyes, I wondered for a moment if she did all of that just to get my word to deal with her urges. The very next question was if she actually liked me enough to go on a date or if she was 'programmed', for lack of a better term, to do so.
However, I was spared from that very philosophical debate when the Celestial Forge awakened. The length of energy was about as long as it was when I got Machine Madness and Lab Partner so hopefully I got something good.
And it was. Latching onto a Star in the Safety Quality Constellation, the perk I got was extremely relevant since I was just on my way to Toybox. 'Qu-it It' allowed me to black box my technology, in a manner of speaking of course. It wasn't a complete denial of any attempts to research my tech but I could easily implant failsafes into tech that I made, allowing me to remotely destroy it and deny people access to them.
And it wasn't just 'my' tech. But also anyone who derived their tech from me. So even if they did reverse engineer it, I could still disrupt its function since it was still 'my tech' in a sense. This would be… extremely useful.
It also meant I had to redesign the taser and goggles to accommodate the new features. Maybe not the goggles since they were my mask but the taser definitely.
Amaya snapped her fingers in front of my face. "Are you done reviewing your new perk?" She leaned her back against the wall. "You still need to meet with Toybox, right?"
"Ah." I quickly checked the time. It would be cutting it close, but I could make it if I rushed. "Good call. I'll see you later– Ah. Before I forget." I hurriedly wrote down my phone number and passed her some money. "Here. In case anything comes up. See you!" I exited my room and made my way down to the bus stop again.
Captain's Hill. It was originally supposed to be a suburban area for the rich, having a good view of the cityscape and docks from its position. However when Leviathan appeared and investors started pulling out rapidly from the economy, suddenly the mayor had to pull funding from somewhere to keep the city afloat. And Captain's Hill was one of the first on the chopping block.
Outside of the initial houses and some stores, much of it was barebones infrastructure along with the flattened land that was supposed to be used for houses. I had the briefest idea of setting up the would-be 'Celestial Forge team' here and immediately killed it. That was so far out into the future that it wasn't even funny. For now at least.
Glancing around, I spotted Claire leaning against a lamppost. Walking over, she gave a short wave. "This way." She jerked a thumb to one of the temporary storehouses that was built for the construction workers. Slipping between the buildings, she pressed down on Dodge's portal maker and a new hole of reality was torn open.
"After you." I shot her an unimpressed look and walked in. Following behind me, we entered Claire's office, rather than heading through the living room. Sitting on the opposite side of her desk, she finished out a piece of paper and handed it to me.
"Straight to business?" I remarked as I looked over the contract. It was signed by both Toybox and the client, a cape by the name Steelstrike. They hammered out much of the fine details, including the specifications of the equipment they wanted which was really the most important part of it. A large-scale signal disruptor… with a mile radius and pseudo-portability. It didn't have to be a handheld thingamajig, but it needed to be moveable by a person.
"Anything to tell me about Steelstrike?" I cocked my head. "General history… incident reports?"
Claire raised an eyebrow. "Seriously?"
"I need it to know how much effort I should put in." I shrugged. "And besides, you probably did your own background check right? I doubt you would take a special contract for any Tom, Dick, and Harry that passes through your email."
A wry smile appeared on her face. "Here you go." She pulled out another file. This time it was labeled as 'Iron Fist'. Skimming through it, I got the gist of their operations. A small-ish villain team out in Charleston with the ideal of 'ruling through power' and vying to be the Al Capone of their city to hopefully reduce crime rates.
Well… I doubt they would succeed but more power to them I suppose.
Steelstrike was their leader, along with a Thinker, Shaker, and Blaster. I briefly skimmed their profiles, I didn't think they would be too important.
"Noble cause though a questionable way of doing it." I curled my lip. "You said I could work in your workshop for the time being?"
Claire nodded. "Yea. Until we can get yours, up and running." She was already heading to the door when I remembered something.
"Ah, that reminds me." I snapped my fingers. "What do you mean by that?" Claire glanced at me in confusion. "Preparing my workshop. I doubt you would be creating an entirely new workshop for me from scratch right? That would be extremely expensive for all the specialty machines and materials…"
"Oh that…" Claire nodded. "You're right. We instead grab one of our old workshops from a previous tinker and pull out all the tinkertech that will screw you over using Toy Soldier's suits. It'll take a day or two but you'll have your own personal lab soon enough."
"And what if they rejoin Toybox?" I frowned. I didn't know what I was expecting but this wasn't it.
Claire shrugged. "Then we move another workshop's tinkertech out and move theirs in." She shook her head. "Though when people leave, they usually bring their stuff with them. We just do a cursory scan to ensure that no remnant tinkertech remains. And if there is, we'll chuck them into a temporary dimension and contact them to see if they still want it" She said with a slight laugh. "Anyway, come on. I have to point out what you can and can't touch."
Following a step behind Claire, we headed to the workshop hallway, saying a few greetings to some of the other tinkers who were relaxing. Including Grace who was making another cake, this time looking more like a sunset rather than flowers.
Stopping in front of a door, Claire walked in and showed off her workshop. "Welcome to Casa de Cranial." The first thing was that there were a surprising amount of wires and seats with an electric chair helmet above them. Lining the close wall was a massive desktop with six screens in a two-by-three set up with the desk a little farther back to encapsulate the entire thing.
The screens were flickering, showing off a dizzying amount of code as command prompts were open, ran, and closed. Catching a brief look, I saw a few lines of text but they were all pretty much gibberish to me. "What's it doing?" I pointed at it.
"Scanning and reformatting memories." Claire replied. "Think of it as generalizing memories, making it a little more natural during implantation." Making a 'ehh' face at her, she sighed with a small smile and continued. "Like… it won't feel like the memory was slotted in but simply bubbling up to the surface. Lesser problems that way."
Following the wires, the computer was connected to a room filled with several servers, all busy humming away. Judging by the cables linking the two, I guessed that it was her database of extracted memories. Speaking my findings to her, Claire nodded. "Kinda. Half of it is for memory storage and the other half is for personal use."
"What would you need that would require a set of servers?" I asked in confusion. Glancing at her face blushed a little before she awkwardly continued.
"R-right. So ground rules. Don't sit on any of the seats with a neural scanner above them." She pointed at the torture helmet. "Don't touch any panels connected to a seat with a neural scanner. Don't touch the computer either." She glanced around the room. "That should be it… but if there's anything you're unsure of, ask me first. Got it?" I nodded quickly.
"That's nice and all, but what's that doing there?" I pointed to the far corner of the room where a seat was lying under a massive mess of machinery and wires. If the other looked like torture chairs, this looked like something out of a supervillain's lair, where the hero would be strapped in while the evil scientist stood in his observation deck, monologuing about how the hero had come so close yet utterly failed.
"Itsh not that bad…" Claire murmured. And I realised I said that last bit out loud. Pouting at me, she stared into my eyes and I suddenly felt really bad.
Coughing awkwardly, I pointed to the evil superweapon. "So… uh. What's that all about?"
"It was supposed to be a machine that could extract a person's entire mind out of their body and turn it into a… digital copy of sorts." She let out a sigh. "It was supposed to be a massive accomplishment and sort of… usher in a new age for Toybox but I couldn't get it to work."
That sounded… awfully familiar. "So you wanted to sell… immortality." I summarised while having a completely unimpressed look.
Claire tilted her head from side to side with a sheepish smile on her face. "When you put it that way…" She cleared her throat awkwardly. "Well… I couldn't get it to work anyway. There's far too many parts in it to even start figuring out what's wrong with it so it's there collecting dust."
That's… that's the Soulkiller. I wasn't sure if it killed the original after making the copy but it was effectively the same thing. It would have been more of a surprise if it didn't make so much sense. Of course the tinker that specializes in neurology, brains and memory would make the goddamn Soulkiller. Why wouldn't they? It was simply the logical extreme of such a tech tree.
Though in creating digital copies of human brains, you were effectively turning them into AIs. Or I guess the better term would be Digital Intelligence rather than Artificial? And the entities didn't exactly like having AIs running amok and screwing with their experiment. Just look at Andrew Richter and Dragon.
It was probably a good thing it was never completed. I doubt the Simurgh would take such a device very lightly.
Walking to the back of the room, Claire unlocked the door to the actual workshop portion of the workshop and there was all the high end stuff too, not just a simple manual lathe, or drill press. We were talking about plasma cutters, CNC machines, 3D printers, injection molds, and more. I licked my lips in anticipation.
"I don't suppose my final workshop will look like this, will it?" I raised an eyebrow. Claire gave me a knowing smile that told me everything. "Thought so."
"I'll leave it to you to figure out how you want to fulfill their order." Claire started heading out. "I've also sent you a file that has the instructions to use all the machines here. Try to follow the safety guidelines and don't lose any fingers." She shook her phone and gave me a smile before ducking through the door.
A notification pinged on my phone and it was a pdf file containing exactly what Claire told me. Giving it a brief skim through, Savant automatically filed all the information away. Taking a deep breath, I cleared my mind to focus on the task at hand.
The request wasn't… too difficult. I had Leet's own signal jammer as a jumping off point to start from. Hammer Jammer drew quite a bit of insights from it, though due to how tinkertech was structured with Space Worm Bullshit the exact mechanics was still out of my reach. Ah well, I should be able to fulfill their request anyway.
The Celestial Forge spun up again. The shortened length of energy reached and missed a Star on the Smut Tech Constellation. Unfortunate.
Even though it was part of the Lewd and very Smutty Constellations, I much preferred having more perks rather than less.
Anyway, the idea was simple enough that I didn't spend too much time working on it. Hammer Jammer did most of the heavy lifting providing the design for such a contraption. Picking up a pencil and paper, I started sketching out the outline for the device. It would be on the larger side, being more of a tower that would be set up at a location rather than an easy gadget. In fact, the gadget version of it should only be able to disrupt a single room rather than several blocks.
In order to have it reach the ranges specified, it would require a size similar to a backpack or a suitcase that unfolded into the jammer tower. Of course it would also require some method to transmit the jamming signals and a way to receive incoming signals… And of course a method to bypass common protection methods against signal jammers.
It wouldn't be much of a tinkertech signal jammer if a bit of modern ingenuity could render it useless, would it? The final bit was a remote failsafe… A small grimace broke out. I would need some way to trigger my own failsafe without having my own creation disrupt the signal. Some sort of special frequency that it didn't disrupt? But then if someone stumbled upon it, they could use that to send signals out.
Hm. Well, let's think about it later.
An hour or so to finalise the design and I was wishing very hard that I had a design power. I did look up some articles on how to make my design look more aesthetically pleasing to look at. However, Hammer Jammer still won out in the end. Ah well, so long as it worked I guess it would be fine…
Taking a deep breath, I let the memories of my Solar self wash over me instead of drawing a thin line dividing the two of us. Using Solar Me's experience in a similar workshop environment, hopefully I could get into a better head space for creating my contraption. I could feel my perception subtly but also very distinctly shift from a more 'human' viewpoint, to a more 'Solar' view. Immediately, my lips curled in disgust as I looked upon the workshop.
"Primitive." Blinking, I took a deep breath as I immediately started pushing those thoughts away. "Okay… Maybe that's a bit too much integration." Eventually, I settled on an uneasy sort of balance before I cracked my joints to relax myself. Pulling up a modelling program, I started creating the CAD for all of the important parts to allow it to fold into a small, dense package to be carried around.
While that was being worked on, I also drafted up a list of components and their specifications to be requested from Toybox. Once it was approved, I could get to work on the internals while the frame was being milled. Oh and I guess since I actually had some money, given that Steelstrike paid an upfront fee, I also ordered some metal plates and sensors to create my arm shield and phone.
A soft sigh escaped my lips. Compared to the taser or goggles, this was certainly a step up in complexity. Yet it didn't feel too bad, I suppose. Saving the first file, I opened a new one and started working on the rest of the pieces.
A/N: Finally tinkering.
Also a lot of Amaya's own research and development will be happening off-screen. Just a little heads-up.
New Perk:
-Qu-it It (Irredeemable/Incorruptible) (300CP)
Your understanding of the technology that you have created or understood to the point where you can consider it 'yours' is so great that you find it almost trivial to come up with methods to use that understanding to deny the benefits of that technology to others who have either appropriated it or developed it in parallel. Your understanding of your own created teleportation technology may be so great you can destroy an entire galaxy spanning network of teleporters based on your tech all with the push of a button. However you cannot do this for technology in the hands of those who were the source of the technology, no matter how well you understand it or feel possessive of it, not by the means of this perk at any rate.