In the end, I decided to keep working out. Changing between forms took a while, so being fit enough to move around even if I was 'out of costume' was probably a good idea. I'd still be able to fight for long enough to get into 'costume' plus, if I'm strong anyways, it will be easier to make the change since there will be less to do.
I sighed and sat down, reading the list of powers that Jenny had been working on over the last few days. A few had been circled as powers she wanted for herself, but she had been nice enough to leave the other ideas on the paper so that I could take a look at them.
She stared at me from the door, "Also, I was thinking…"
I looked up, "yeah?"
"Well, I was thinking of some of the powers, and well, you told me how you caught Panacea in the hospital."
"Hmm?"
"Well there's a lot of places where people go on the boardwalk for cape sightings, the Protectorate goes on patrols and they leave through the boardwalk a lot, so what if you left your mark over there?"
I considered it, "That's not a bad idea. I would probably have to make a few changes, but it's worthwhile."
"Also, did you know that Glory Girl posts selfies on patrol?"
I blinked quickly pulling up the account in my mind, "No, but this is useful. She's taking the selfies in app, so I can use this to finally tag the other half of New Wave. Thank you!"
She smiled, "You're welcome, just remember this when it comes to making my power."
I chuckled and got to work. A couple of threads quickly parsed Glory Girl's timeline, assembling a rough schedule for her patrols. They were fairly randomised, I could give New Wave that much, but they did generally patrol together most nights.
While I did that, my other threads began analysing the Boardwalk. Unfortunately, without a much larger range, seeding random spots on the Boardwalk was pretty useless. The force-field bridge that the Protectorate used to get to the shoreline could connect anywhere along the road that went alongside most of the boardwalk, so I would need a much larger target area in order to get something reasonable.
According PHO, catching Protectorate capes wor Wards on patrol was fairly common, though it was fairly spread out over the boardwalk. Any of the dozens of piers along the bay could connect to the Rig and Armsmaster could come careening down them.
But there was something else. New Wave.
Or, well Glory Girl. She and some of the other younger members of New Wave sometimes patrol with the Wards. Unfortunately, she was about as predictable as any girl, thankfully, she was self-absorbed enough that she tweeted about it whenever she did.
She did it most weekends, which was easy enough to check for, but as I considered things for a while and took stock, I realised that I wasn't really ready.
I had underestimated just how long it would take for me to copy an entire Tinker base. Even with Kid Win tinkering yesterday and helping me flesh out my connections to his database, I still didn't know how much more there was. Even as I learned more about how these databases were structured, I simply continued to learn more and more about the power. I had copied thousands of species from Panacea's database, and tens of thousands of gadgets from Kid Win. I'd found symbioses and even entire arsenals of matched gadgets.
Still, I was getting a lot out of it. Over a week, and my progress was only accelerating.
But it meant that my Power Scanner would be tied down for a lot longer than I was expecting. Without it, I couldn't even detect capes. Even if I could, the pictures my other lanes were still gathering from PHO showed that their patrol formations were all loose enough that my current edition of Projector wasn't going to cut it. A mere ten feet of range was decent enough, but it wasn't enough for this. Projector scaled in volume as I gave it higher and higher level charges, roughly tripling in terms of effective range.
At a third level charge that was pretty decent, but I was starting to get the feeling that it wouldn't be enough. Not for what I intended at least. So I started approaching the problem again.
I would probably want to make a better projector at some point, but a simple line-of-sight power, that let me select a point I could see was a significantly better option. It still had a range, but it would allow me to mark a point I could see anywhere within a mile.
I could just use my powers on that point but I could also Project from that point. A twenty foot wide sphere of influence anywhere I could see in a mile? That was significant.
And given that there was no change in cost for confirming the ability to see through my scanner, that wouldn't stop me.
What would stop me was the fact that I coudn't project from the target from a scanner I was projecting with Projector. Unless I had two Projectors, of course.
Or perhaps some other targeting option. Panacea's touch targeting looked like it would be pretty useful, since I could use it to tag things that weren't entirely within my Projector's influence. Spending a full charge on the power would let me tag fairly large objects. Perhaps not one of the buildings downtown, but I should be able to tag a room easily, or even my house, and it would only cost a single charge.
Two charges to significantly expand my capacities was worth it. Another charge into marks, perhaps two, would give me enough targets to fully mark the protectorate.
I had the charges to spare now, since the creation of my core powerset. Rebuilding was slow, but I was starting to see progress. Almost halfway there. Still, it didn't solve the first problem I had. I still relied on Power Scanner to detect capes.
Which sould have been fine, but I also used the power to copy tinker databases, and it was still solidly tied up there. Fixing that was a matter of either optimising the tinker database copying process, or a proper cape detection power.
I actually kind of wanted both. A dedicated Tinker downlink would probably significantly improve the speed I copied Tinkers at and I'd probably even be able to adapt it to copying the information behind other powers. I'm sure Eidolon had a list of powers somewhere in there, and Legend a list of what his lasers actually were.
I took a moment to consider the options. I decided that the touch-range and eye-sight range powers were worth the one charge each and made those powers right off the bat. The big question, however, was what I was going to do to let me sense powers while still making progress on copying Tinker repositories. After a while, the decision became obvious. I could still jury rig a cape detector with Power Scanner, I didn't need it. I would almost certainly be meeting more Tinkers, and a dedicated tinker downlink would let me copy them faster.
The only question left was the level of charge I was willing to put into this. Even as my other lanes started to put together a more formal power detection thing, I considered what I wanted. I wanted a power that would let me copy information from a power I pointed it at. I wanted it to be fast. I've been copying Panacea and Kid Win for weeks now and there is still so much left.
I considered how many charges I had, and nodded. A third level charge would be thousands of times faster than my current system and with what I had learned, it meant that I would be able to copy databases in days, even if I broadened it to include any information the power was storing.
As the power formed, I considered my plan of attack. The Protectorate did patrols every night, but with my line-of-sight, I could watch a large part of the boardwalk to pick out capes as they travelled down the force-field bridge and tag them as I saw them.
But I would need more Targets. The ten I had were already filled up, between New Wave and the Wards. I considered it for a moment before I decided that two charges for thirty targets was sufficient. Target didn't seem to scale as well as other powers did with higher level charges, reaching merely a couple thousand at most even at a ninth-level charge.
My loadout settled, I got to work. My lanes scanned the skyline as I made my way over to the gym and worked out. Eventually, I saw the bridge take shape. Manipulating my 'eye' I got a better lock on him and made him a Target.
Instantly, Downlink started pulling from his power.
I was inundated with new technologies, a third stream joining the two lanes of data coming from other Targets. I saw my repository shift, a new organizational tier added to the system, matching component functionality.
Even the information I downloaded from the internet began to categorize itself. Entire coding libraries, online parts catalogues, materials databases, everything.
I let a lane ride shotgun on Armsmaster as I made my way home. I watched as he fought muggers and various mundane criminals. No capes, unfortunately. Eventually, I gave up, letting the cape detector run in the background. I laid in bed and checked my mail, before finally getting around to looking up laws.
Leyton had mentioned that he wanted me to learn more about law enforcement before I did any crime fighting, so I had, My lanes read over major cape cases and various papers written about them adding more and more legal expertise to my understanding.
But it was getting boring. My lanes had improved focus, not a perfect focus, and while I had learned a lot, I still relied a lot on his advice.
Eventually, my Power detector pinged and I looked through my Mark again. Armsmaster was somewhere in the Rig, from what I could tell of his surroundings, and in in front of him were several protectorate capes. I quickly tagged Miss Milita, Assault and Battery. It seemed that the other capes weren't here at the moment, so I kept watch, switching between the different capes I tagged. Armsmaster quickly disappeared into his lab, so I could drop him for the moment, and continue waiting. Miss Militia led me to Velocity, who was working in some sort of command centre.
Targetting, him, I let my powers play out over the system, careful to simply observe for now.
As I let my electronics control power learn from watching Miss Milita using the computer, I took some time to study the new powers I had access to. Assault, in particular, was the most interesting, given that he had something I hadn't considered. An energy absorption power.
Unlike The other powers I had examined so far, Assault's power didn't make its own energy I think. Or at least, not beyond the energy that made the power work. Instead, it absorbed energy and stored any energy he got hit with. He could then release that energy. There were probably limitations, but it gave me an idea for reasonable brute power.
Something like an inverse of Effector, that could harvest energies of the world around me.
I… don't actually know how to do that. I mean, just throwing 'absorb everything into power-energy" at Evaluator told me that it was a level 8 charge, but just trying to copy the kinetic energy absorption Assault has is only a level one, and more realistically, it evaluated at half that.
Part of that was that it didn't try and convert the kinetic energy to anything else. Instead, Assault had a reserve specifically for kinetic energy. His reserve was actually fairly large and by itself a little more than a single charge. It seems that specialising the power to use kinetic energy specifically meant that the reserve was more powerful.
Should I create a Reserve for energies I used a lot of? Like light and kinetic energy? I mean, I wouldn't even have to have them make their own energy since I could fill them up from my main Reserve…
Actually, why the hell was Reserve making its own energy? Splitting the two powers apart would make it significantly more powerful. Hell, it would make the scaling way better, since I was more or less happy with the rate I was producing energy even with the Level three reserve.
I sighed.
I put that as part of my little mood board for different ideas to improve my powers. I would probably give this iteration of my Projector and Reserve to someone else as a power, honestly. Maybe as a sort of hard-light power.
Honestly. I had actually learned a lot. I mean, I probably couldn't make a top-tier brute power now, but I think between everything I've learned I could probably create something decent enough. Better than most at least.
Probably not good enough to protect my family long-term, but decent enough that I probably wouldn't feel too bad about using them as a short-term solution and then giving them to some of the capes I'm going to make for my hero team down the line. They would probably be pretty decent in a fight, instead of just a defensive measure.
I spent a little while continuing to examine the various powers the protectorate had. Velocity's power was really interesting, because it seems like his speed is a side effect of 'interact weakly with the world' breaker power rather than anything else. He didn't have anything that made him fast.
The power itself was actually pretty expensive, I'd need at least a fifth level charge to do what he does and I'm not even sure what that is. I could tell that it was doing something? To the space wrapped around velocity, changing the area itself somehow.
I was just getting back around to Miss Milita, checking to make sure that my download of her weapon database had actually completed, when I noticed something strange in her power.
There was a part of her power that was always active, messing with her brain. Not like the part that made people more aggressive or tried to make them do weird stuff, but it did stuff to her brain. It took a while, examining the chemicals and parts of the brain it was working with. Even though I had dumped enough chemistry knowledge into my Mental Computer to give me the rough names of everything, I had to search through various long winded reports before I could say that it had something to do with sleep.
So, I looked it up, and apparently, there were a bunch of parahumans that just… didn't need to sleep. A lot of them still did - out of boredom or whatever, but they didn't actually need to sleep, and looking at this power, I could kind of see why. Their power was doing most of the stuff that sleep did, cleaning out various chemicals, repairing certain damage.
I don't think it was doing the whole 'processing your memories thing' I'm guessing that while she didn't sleep, she probably should every once in a while to let het brain sort the information that it had accumulated over time.
Though I wonder if she could. Was she the kind of noctis cape that didn't need to sleep? Or was she the kind fo noctis cape that couldn't sleep. I really hoped it was the first kind. She was one of the nicer ones, and despite her power, i hadn't managed to find any times where she was responsible for accidental injuries like Triumph.
The power was actually pretty simple, less than a single charge to make, but I could probably get away with adding it to a set of other brain related powers, like the unlimited focus one and the improved willpower one. I'd have to think of a few more extra powers like that, but between all of those, I should have a solid mental booster.
Eventually, though it was time to wrap up. My download from Miss Militia was already done, but I still hadn't had a chance to tag Triumph. I took a moment to look around Miss Militia when I noticed her getting up from the terminal.
Intrigued, I watched as she handed off the console to someone from the PRT, I think, they weren't a cape at least, and headed down a series of corridors. I tried to get the general layout of the place, but it seemed designed to be confusing. She turned through various corridors until she eventually entered a room marked with only the numbers 367.
It opened into a fairly spartan looking apartment. A small one, but it seemed to be fairly private. Did the protectorate live on the rig? Or was Miss Militia different?
She grabbed a bag and headed out of the room, heading along the corridor and entering an unmarked door. And entered a clean white room. She began stripping amost immediately. Her mask came off quickly, and her boots and flack jacket were quick to join it on the long bench in the center of the room.
My mind froze at the sight of the smooth dark skin that appeared from under her clothes. My pants tightened as she pulled it over her boobs. I quickly moved my Eye as she leaned over, sliding her pants over her toned ass. Her underwear was simple, a sports bra and some panties, but damn did she make it look good.
I absently undid my own pants as she folded up her and put them on her shirt. I abently started stroking my dick as her dark nipples fell out from under her bra. She chucked her bra onto her folded clothes, and started to shimmy out of her panties. The plain black cloth stretched over her ass, revealing a glinting green gem sitting there between her cheeks.
My hand sped up as she reached behind herself and wiggled the plug moaning as she did so. Determined not to miss out on any more, I altered my Eye to include a small component that scanned pressure, allowing me to hear her as she tugged on the plug and gasped.
My cock grew harder in my fist as she continued to gingerly tug the plug out of her ass, moaning as the small bulb spread her open until it popped out. I could see her pussy glisten as it dissapeared between her thighs. I watched her muscles move as she grabbed her bag and walked over to one of the stalls.
The PRT had hot water on demand, apparently, because it quickly became steamy as she turned on the shower. She leant against the wall, her hand slipping between her legs. I watched as her fingers entered her pussy, first rubbing along the lips, and then slipping in. my hand pumped as she grabbed one of her tits and started pinching and pulling at her nipple.
She paused, and looked up reaching over to her bag and pulling out a slim green toy of some kind - a vibrator, I realised as she set it going. The wand disappeared between her lower lips as she put it to work, pumping it and out of herself with two fingers. Her other hand left her breast and took over even as she reached into her bag and grabbed a deep green dildo.
She reched behind herself, placed the tip against her ass and rammed it in, "Fuck yes! Fuck me!" she continued to shout and moan as she rammed the dildo into her ass again and again, She kept going, and I was forced to use my biokineisis to keep my stamina up as I pumped in time with her, imagining myself ramming her ass with my dick.
I heard her moans grow louder and begin to hitch as she began to shake and shudder, I let go of my control over myself, letting myself cum as she collapsed onto the floor, the two toys still sticking out of her lower holes.
We both panted as we caught our breath, and began to clean ourselves off. Me, by turning my biokineisis into the cum stains on my shirt and sheets, breaking the complex particles into various safe and simple compounds and her washing herself and her toyes, taking car to carefully clean out her asshole as she wiped down her plug.
The shower came to the end as she reached into her bag once more, grabbing a small bottle of what I quickly realised was lube as she spread it over the bulb of her now clean plug. My dick shifted a little as she moaned, the plug spreading her easily as it slipped in.
I lay there in my bed, panting as I thought of what to do next.