Tabitha sighs and gets to work. Some tinkers could skip to the last step, but for her she had to start in the middle. Tabitha couldn't just brew a serum; she had to make a machine to brew the serum. Bright side: Once the work was put in, she could mass-produce it pretty easily (although the machines broke down all the time). Downsides: It took longer to set up, and both bugfixes and upgrades were major pains. Still...
Tabitha started by planning how to modify the general serum-creating machine to make super-strength serum. Super strength is a pain; it would be able to take bits from all of her other serums, but just mixing them was never predictable. Reliable, but unpredictable. The thing is, there are just a lot of things that a super-strength serum needs to give. The muscles need to be able to apply enough force to lift a car, but the bones need to be able to avoid being crushed under a car, and of course the muscles also need to be toughened to keep from ripping themselves to pieces. And the mechanics of significantly improving force applied are difficult to figure out.
If only...Tabitha had heard rumors, like everyone in the PRT and most people in the world, of people who sold canned or bottled superpowers, based in the Caribbean or Africa or Disputed Russia or somewhere else out of the way or in chaos. If she could get her hands on that...the possibilities would be endless. She could stop faking and start doing.
[20!]
Tabitha got distracted on this line of thought.
Could I do something like that? Before she knew it, she was looking up information on every Trump the PRT had data on--from locals like Sliver and Fang (huh, he joined the Bones) and greats like Trump herself. She began making plans for this new device, how it might work. Before she knew it, she was interrupted by her stomach growling. Glancing around the room, she realized she had slipped into that state Tinkers sometimes have to face where they keep working on their inventions for hours or--according to urban legend--days on end, until somehow shocked out of the state.
End result: A mostly-complete design for a machine that could probably create some kind of power-granting serum. She'd need to test it extensively, once she finished it. But first...late dinner, much-needed sleep, and all of that.
Kevin gets dinner around six. He keeps en eye on his surroundings, and notes a number of heroes, PRT officers, and civilians. One looks...hey, is that the girl who attacked him earlier? Why is she here? Shouldn't she be in a prison? She is sitting right next to the Wards' dining area, even! And now a hero--Sliver?--is taking her
into the Wards' dining area...keeping an eye on her?
Delphinium and Selina keep together most of the day. Selina is being taught some basics that Delphinium remembers related to the Wards--how things work, who to listen to, stuff like that. Soon enough, it's dinner time. Delphinium gets food and goes to the Wards' dining area; Selina sits as close to said area as she can without seeing the unmasked faces of the Wards. Selina has barely started supper, however, when Sliver shows up and asks her to join him in the Wards' dining area. Startled, she accepts.
Selina is lead into the area, where she sees the Wards eating, costumed except for masks. Several are startled at her appearance, most notably Bullhit and String-Em-Up. Some try to get their masks, helmets, or other facial coverings on.
"Um, Sliver, why are you bringing a civilian in here? Isn't that against rules?""Dud, that's the girl who attacked HQ this afternoon. Breaking rules isn't the dumbest thing about it."
"Seriously? That's more than a little dumb.""Quiet! Everyone who doesn't know, this is Selina Nox, and she will be joining the Wards on a probationary basis soon enough. I've heard what some of the Protectorate and PRT folks were saying about her--"
"--because they happened to be discussing it near where you were going about your unsuspicious business--"
"--and she's kinda had a rough time. So, I wanted to invite everyone to her early, and vise versa. Selina, I'm Sliver, aka Ines. Yeah, I'm a girl. I had an...incident when I triggered, so the PRT felt they needed to try a bit harder to hide who I was, so they had me pretend to be a guy whenever I'm in costume. Kinda annoying. The big guy is Bullhit, aka Gus, aka the guy who's always in trouble. Literally, he got in trouble the day he announced his name--"
"It's a pun on Bullet, I swear!"
"No one over the age of ten ever believed that, Gus. Anyways, ever since then he's been getting into enough rules-defying antics to keep him fully on the PRT's hit list, which doesn't actually sound as good as I intended.""What a surprise. Sliver bungles a pun."Sliver and Bullhit start arguing; it doesn't take long for Blaster to start egging them on. Scatterstep sighs and turns towards Selina.
"You might as well get used to it. Sliver's graduating in three months, but until then she and Bullhit are going to be going at it like this a couple of times per day. Probably less if they're both going on separate patrols, and if they've got the same patrol...you don't really want to be manning the control room. I'm Leonor, alias Scattershot. Blaster, shut it. That's Blaster, or Sue. She is kinda annoying, and more than kinda immature, but her gear's good. String-Em-Up, Jesse, is usually pretty quiet around everyone else, mainly because we tend to tease him. He's basically the kid brother of the team."
"Hey!
"Don't hear you denying it." He leaves the floor open for Delphinium to introduce herself to Selina.
Steven discovers that his power does not quite work like that. He does, however, have a lump on his hand where he took a chunk out of his now-three-and-a-half-legged bed.
*RangerCado is still a sad panda cause that was the only good option but it was still a bad option
That's Worm for you. Even the best option may well be an atrocity.
Heck, just wait for the climax. And no, that arc is not anywhere near the climax.
GWG's comment gave me perverted thoughts about what grey boy could theoretically do....I....don't know what to think of myself anymore...
That's right, he could cut someone and force them to feel being cut over and over again for eternity.
Yeah, just say that that's what you were thinking.
