My power granting power was something I had discussed with mom and Jenny ever since I had thought up the power. At the base level, the power just let me give powers I made to people and take them back.
But that alone left enough space in the level two charge I was forced to use that I could do more. I could recall powers at will, instead of needing to target the individual again, I could set conditions on the power granting to automatically recall the powers. I could do so much with it. Any number of things really.
Being able to give out powers was dangerous, but it wasn't as rare as you might think. A lot of trumps could give people powers, at least temporarily. Granting power permanently was much rarer, I only really knew of Teacher that could do that.
There were rumours, online, of more of that kind of Trump. Apparently, the CUI had capes that could permanently share powers with other capes, and there were rumours of a group that sold powers. I couldn't find much information on that group, but they were secretive.
However, there was one other Trump that caught my eye. Dauntless, here in Brockton Bay. I had finally managed to tag him a little while ago, and his power was kind of similar to mine. His power formed a charge, slowly building up over about a day, and once the charge filled up, he could put that charge on an object. From what I could tell, he couldn't store up multiple charges.
The objects he empowered would first be 'prepared' being turned into a projection of some sort before it would start gaining powers. His charges were weaker than mine, so it took about twenty or so for them to start gaining something other than the durability and ease of use that being a projection implied. Though he got a new charge every day, so it was just a matter of time for him.
He was effectively giving powers to items, he just gave them a weird breaker state first.
I mentally made a note not to limit powers that way. I could fairly easily set up a mechanism that would let empowered objects be wielded, so I made sure to include empowering items as a part of the set.
In the end, I ended up with a fairly straightforward power. It let me grant powers to anything - human, animal or inanimate object, with a few set conditions. The conditions were interesting since they implied that powers could read minds to some extent. I could even set conditions, like causing the power to return to me if they did anything they felt was against my best interest. Unfortunately, I couldn't do anything more complex than if-then conditions. I couldn't do 'revoke the power if they act against Halcyon's interests but not if they are attempting to save their own lives' or something.
And of course, I could revoke the powers whenever I wanted, no matter where they were. It sort of felt like my powers were regardless of who was using them at the time. Maybe that was why they were so much easier to grant to other people, the powers I made were mine, and I could do anything I wanted with them. The powers also seemed to naturally snap back to me if the host died.
I considered it, and put the power into practice, feeding the charges that were necessary into the power.
As the charge flowed into the power, forming into an intricate filigree of power, I reached out and tapped mom on the forehead.
I didn't really see much need to impose many restrictions. Or really, any beyond what was already there. I'd be able to recall the powers if anything major was going to happen. I did make sure that the powers could stack with each other, just in case there was ever a reason why I needed to give all the powers to a single person. Maybe double shields if mom or Jenny were in more danger for some reason.
Mom slowly picked herself up, staring in wonder at how smoothly and effortlessly she was able to pick herself up.
"Easy now, Just move slowly, you're a lot stronger now, so if you try and move quickly, you might damage something. It probably won't hurt, but We should probably avoid leaving evidence of your empowerment in this park."
We were in the forests around Brockton, further out than the storm drains that I used to sneak off to the mall, and quite far away from where mom and I had parked the car.
She pulled herself up to her feet and hopped in place. Or, well, tried to hop in place.
She found herself launched clean into the air as he put more than the bare minimum of force into the action. I quickly caught her in a forcefield, but to make sure that she didn't launch herself over the trees.
Jenny watched and took notes as mom worked out a little, getting used to her new body. If I did this right, it wouldn't take all that much longer to get her to fully acclimate to her new circumstances.
Her new muscles were laced with little ganglia, and the connections to her brain and central nervous system were reinforced a bit - not enough to show up on anything but dedicated MRI scanning, which I wasn't really expecting since I could heal them if anything was going wrong.
The adaptations worked, allowing mom to start moving around fairly comfortable after a few hours. What really became tricky was when we decided to actually test the changes, and had her try and jump.
Without my forcefields to catch her, she went straight up, clear over the treeline, but she managed to get the hang of her mid-air manoeuvrability power and guide herself onto a sturdy branch instead of all the way back down to the forest floor.
I flew up to meet her.
It took a moment to find her among the trees since the brown colour of the undyed armour I made for my suit blended into the shadows under the leaves quite well. "How was that?"
"That was terrifying!" Mom yelled at me, "Catch me next time!"
"Mom, it's fine, you could have hit the ground face first and all you would have is a broken nose. Plus, you caught yourself pretty well."
"Don't you dare!" She shook her hand at me, before grabbing the tree trunk tightly, "Now get me down from here!"
I laughed, before wrapping her in a forcefield and floating the pair of us back down to the forest floor. "Okay, so now that you have an idea of your strength, why don't we get some practice in," I pointed roughly northward, "There are some hills that way where we can get rocks for some strength testing, so why don't we see how fast we can get there?"
Mom nodded as I picked Jenny and myself off the ground. She started jogging first, and I floated along to keep pace. It took a little while but she started to speed up, first running, but eventually, jumping forward and guiding herself around the trees.
We reached the rockier parts of the forest in about an hour and a half, mom still wasn't super graceful, but she was leaping through the trees and making good speed. Still, we soon had plenty of rocks, so after a short break to catch her breath, I started working mom through some exercise with some of the larger boulders.
We even managed to figure out a neat little trick with the leverage portion of her force-field powers and her super-strength, allowing her to stick to walls, since the leverage allowed her to get a 'grip' on even a flat surface and she could use that to hold herself up.
Eventually, it got dark and we needed to get back to Brockton. "Mom, I was wondering if you wanted another tweak," I asked. At her interested look, I motioned to my eyes, "Well, I have night vision because I kind of cheat with some of my powers, but I just realised that there is nothing stopping me from giving you bio-tinkered night vision. Do you want it?"
Mom stared at the dark forest ahead of her, "You know what, I will."
A few minutes later I lead mom back to the car.
As we climbed in, we heard a crunching noise from the driver's seat. I turned to look forward as I saw mom sheepishly holding up the crushed remains of the steering wheel in her hand. We switched seats, and I quickly used my Tinker ability and a few other powers to fix the steering wheel, before I drove us back home.
Still, by the time I got home from healing the next day, mom had gotten to the point that she was better at holding more fragile objects like eggs, or glasses. On the plus side, I also learned that I could melt glass fairly easily with my powers and I could make new glasses from the broken shards that covered the kitchen floor.
By the time we got back from school the next day, it looked like she was able to get a hang of it, and she was able to get her work done for the day without breaking anything.
I, on the other hand, had to meet with my new security guards.
Debra had found a few veterans who had just gotten out of rehab. They were freshly sober but basically unemployed and homeless.
Jefferson, Virginia and Reynaldo were all fairly competent, having fallen to drugs, mainly due to the chronic pain they still experienced because of injuries they suffered from their various missions. Which made my signing bonus all the sweeter.
I left them to marvel at the lack of pain - and in the case of Reynaldo, the new hand - as I carried out their new uniforms. I still didn't want to let the full extent of my biotinkering work be known, not until I was a little more well established. Maybe in a month or so, once the hundreds, maybe thousands of testimonies filtered out and established a reputation.
I took a moment to clear up the employee area in the back again, just to make sure that they had a place to sleep and stuff during the night shift - I promised them homes once the rebuilding of the residential spaces was complete, but until then, I was 'turning a blind eye' to them sleeping in the back when they weren't on duty. Or making use of bathing facilities that were ostensibly there just for patients to clean up after healing.
But I also had something else to do.
According to Leyton, I needed to have someone on the city council on my side in order to get a jail I could more easily access, so I arranged for one. After talking with Debra, I put her in touch with Taylor's dad, to hire Isabel Berry. She was a lobbyist for some of the businesses on the docks back when the Graveyard didn't exist, but she had been through some hard times.
She was very grateful for the paycheck.
She had gotten to work as soon as possible, drafting a proposal to take to the city council. Since I was redeveloping this land, they were suddenly flush with a lot more resources than they ever had. And now that I had someone there to talk to them, they knew how to get more.
They sold me a few more lots to buy out the remains of a small bank branch that I had picked up, and set to work, turning some of the funds they got form my recent purchasing spree to turning that into a new police station.
I also happened to make a donation towards restoring the run-down public park near the residential areas that were finally being torn down for redevelopment. I needed the place to be cleaned up anyway. The modular homes would be shipped in soon, and once they were properly set up, I could start taking residents. Sure, I'd be saving some of the housing for my employees, but I needed enough actual tenants to turn a profit on all of this.
Pre-fabs were cheaper than proper construction, but not that cheap. They would do for the first apartment block, but I really wanted to be able to start selling 'power constructed goods' soon.
Jenny had found out about the classification after doing more research into Parian. Apparently, since she made stuff with her powers, but the stuff she made wasn't actually power-related, it fell into another category, that was less regulated than normal. Hopefully supplying the capture-line I used to the wider world, with an additional weakness to something mundane to make it more usable, I'd finally be able to afford Reclaimers.
Those guys could rebuild this entire neighbourhood in a few weeks, tops.
I checked my email to see what the next thing on my schedule was. And surprisingly, it as another healing at Brockton General.
This was the last of the healings I had scheduled there, but I was looking forward to it, since I knew Panacea would be there.
So, after mopping up the re-filled hospice and oncology wards, I floated over to Infectious Diseases and waved at Panacea. She waved back and we got to work. This time, we worked together, and I watched as she healed someone, and i returned the favour, showing her what I did differently.
She looked at me strangely as I played around with how I healed things, sometimes I would simply erase the infection from the body, before repairing the damage done, in other cases, I would set up a counter-viral agent, especially for the bacterial infections.
As we made our way out of the hospital, our work done for the day, Panacea turned to me, "Do you always do that?"
"I mean, not always, but I get bored sometimes, so I like to play around. Plus, if I can make something that kills off the disease without my intervention, then maybe I could just make something to make that, so that I could still help those people but not have to do the same thing all the time."
She stared at me, "You think that will work?"
"Wanna come over and try it out?" I asked, I laughed at her dumbfounded expression, "If we don't involve actual people, then there's no need to get the PRT involved. My clinic is empty right now, and we can try out a few things. Maybe try to figure out something that will help somone with a TB infection?"
She looked around, "Can we do that?"
"Well, I'm fairly sure we can make something like that, I got pretty close with that lady we saw back there, and I remember enough of her muscle structure that I think I can set up a test-bed with some tissue by itself."
"Isn't tht illegal?" she asked in a whisper.
I furrowed my brow, mentally accessing the various laws online. "I don't think so? As long as we aren't hurting anyone, and we take 'necessary precautions' to make sure we don't infect anyone… Umm… There's a certification course that the University of New Hampshire does that would cover a formal lisence, but I don't think that's a legal thing, especially if we're not dealing with people. Maybe if we want to take this to human trials or something, we would have to do a bunch of paperwork, probably complete a few certification courses to make sure we can carry out human testing?"
"Really?" Panacea asked.
I shrugged, "I've been looking into that sort of thing for something I want to do soon, and the regulations surrounding everything. There are a lot of laws surrounding selling the stuff, but it looks like all the laws for just making things and using them yourself are basically just normal laws. And I couldn't fina anything online for the laws around handling bacteria, there were some things for biological weapons, that makes sense, but since we would be working towards peaceful research we wouldn't be covered by that."
"Huh…"
"You mean you never looked up the laws for this kind of stuff?"
"Well… it doesn't matter. When do you want to do this?"
"We can pop over to my clinic. I don't have a proper lab set up, but the operating theater is sterile, and I have biological waste disposal services there. We can pick up a toaster oven for autoclaving and some pyrex for glassware so that we can experiment with stuff."
Amy though about it for a moment before agreeing. We walked into a Wallmart, grabbed what we needed and I flew her over to the clinic.
We put a slab of pork down, and I watched as Panacea covered it some yeast to get it started. I nodded, "You need living matter then?"
"Yeah, you don't" she asked.
I shrugged, "Not really. I can mess with a lot of things."
"Could you then?" she asked pointing at the meat.
I nodded, and reached out to the meat. It twisted uner my fingers, forming into a loose bundle of lungs and a few rudimentary organs to keep it nominally alive. And then I twisted the yeast into the strain or TB that I saw earlier.
"How does that look."
Panacea blinked, "That looks right, what did you do again?"
I took a moment and brought my counter-agent back into existence, twisting some of the TB into a series of bacteriophages that would destroy the bacterium.
I was about to give it a hand but Amy tapped my hand, "No, I kinda want to see what it does on it's own."
We stood there for a while, watching the counter-agent as it ravaged the bacterium.
"It isn't smart enough is it?" I commented as it was unable to find pockets of the disease. "At this rate it wouldn't be able to get it all."
Panacea shrugged, "Maybe it just needs some more time? It's really good at eradicating the pockets it does find, but it only seems to be able to find pockets by basically running into them by random chance."
I considered it, "Got any ideas on how to fix that?"
Panacea nodded, "Mind if I give it a shot?"
I nodded, and watched both her power and the TB in one of the other lungs as she set to work. I saw how her powers began to thread different alien contaigons together, carefully crafting a delicate mechanism that would let the viruses walk along the protein strands in the ICM, propagating between the very cells themselves as they progressed through the body. I could see how she set up marker proteins that would decay in time, guiding a wave of expansion as s shell of viruses spread out through the body searching for any sign of the bacterium and fell upon it with an unfeeling efficiency.
We took turns for a few hours, until eventually, I got an email.
I checked the time and frowned, "Um… so… it's getting late."
Panacea looked up at me, "What?"
"We've been here for about four hours. It's nearly eleven."
"FUCK!" She yelled, "Mom's going to be so pissed!"
I took a moment to render our experiments into a simple sterile goo, "Let me just clean this up and set up an autoclave, and then I'll take you home."
I dropped her off as quickly as I could, actually burning past my regeneration in order to get her back home quickly before finding a nearby storm drain and racking back home.