...very unseasonable rains can be seen in the distance from the shores of Acapulco.
The Brockton Bay Protectorate starts organizing volunteers to be transported or teletransported in batches to it. Heroes, rogues, villains, anyone's assistance is appreciated. A rendez-vous point is set for non-Protectorate capes wishing to volunteer, and Protectorate capes are informed of the situation via communication devices.
She probably can't make a dent, although she's going to help Armsmaster with data collection. Mostly she's evac. Her suit's got water breathing apparatus and wave-striking resilience and an automatic CPR insert for the occasion. It looks dumb, but Branding isn't breathing down her neck today.
...because of course no one would believe that anything less sophisticated and clunky than that would stand a chance against an Endbringer.
It's a fast plane. Leviathan is already there, but he hasn't been for very long.
"This way!" Lorica says, waving Glam towards a tall flat-topped building on the peninsula. Largely undamaged, with a good view of most of the bay.
Lorica herself lands on the roof she picked out. "You need anything else?"
Leviathan
moves.
Directly into the city, his afterimage aimed at a group of arriving capes.
At the same time, the water in the bay starts getting significantly more restless than it already was. Cities surrounded by water are very good for him, but cities surrounding water are a close second.
...they have absolutely no idea where to even begin, but they don't really need to. They just need to believe they can.
And feed off this tinker and Lorica's trust, that always helps.
They make pieces of stuff that's aesthetically similar to other stuff already inside the sparky basketball and start replacing this with that and that with that other thing.
They purse their lips—inside the mask, not outside. "I can make the stuff I want appear with various nice properties without having to actually build it," they say confidently and smoothly, without pausing their bullshit work. "Look." They stop for a second to make a tinker-looking gun appear in their hand and laser-shoot a small shallow hole on the roof. "Just trust me. I can fix this." Please trust me.
"I'm gonna make various pieces of this appear, and tell you where you should put them, and you'll put them there. Don't look too hard at the pieces—my power doesn't like it when other people than me use its stuff, so better not remind it you're not me." Not quite true but good enough, and maiming an Endbringer is worth it.
Many of the pieces created at this stage are things other tinkers might readily recognise and understand like structural components for the base of a gun that can rotate around it.
Eventually, though, Glam starts creating pieces whose function is not readily apparent and asking Sanctuary to fix them onto each other instead of onto the carcass. Most of the smaller pieces they handle themself, their threshold of squinting before disbelief kicks in is higher.
Yes, yes it could.
Presently lizard butt has decided to start exploring other areas of the city, where "exploring" means going to them really really fast, destroying property, and swatting various capes on his way.
And his way is roughly along Avenida Cuauhtémoc, roughly in the direction of their building. Not quickly and purposefully enough to make it seem like he's heading towards them—after all, they could just cross the water if they wanted to do that.
While Leviathan causes random destruction—if he has any specific target other than 'the city of Acapulco' it's not immediately clear—they finish the gun.
It's tall, at around 6'5'', and the interface consists solely of a screen for aiming, a switch under it, and one button on each handle. It's fairly easy to rotate, too, and has a very unique if unpolished design—there was no need to create anything but the most functional carcass so no bells and whistles.
Is Lorica's robot still around?
"Where are the shelters? I'll need to avoid them, if you can produce a map that'll help."
A large laser beam appears, making a noise like a siren distorted to be much lower and louder than sirens ought to be as it travels the air. Its light visible even through the rain—Glam should really have thought of the rain problem, this was not well-planned at all—it hits Leviathan's left leg, causing him to lose balance and topple. The laser does some more damage to the Endbringer's hip and tail as he falls, but eventually runs out of juice.
Damage to the leg is... quite extensive, if nowhere near as extensive as Glam'd hoped. Still, several layers have been stripped off his leg and a deep gash is visible where the laser hit him while he was falling.
They start making pieces appear again, much faster than before, some of them even already attached to other parts they had to attach manually the first time around.
They groan but continue building, thinking fast and trying to decide. "Look, it's related to my power, I can't tell you right now but I swear it's important that as many people as possible know about this gun and what it's supposed to do!" Their eyes flicker to the tinker (the mask's drawing does not reflect this) when they say they can't tell Lorica at the moment.
Lorica pauses, then she makes an exasperated noise and gets on the comm. "All capes be ready for another one of those lasers coming from west-northwest of bay, mark two upgrade, might boil the rain, might cause bits of Leviathan to enter orbit, twenty bucks says it gets rid of him no bet if it hits simultaneously with something -" That's as far as she gets before somebody kicks her off.
Leviathan:
appears.
And his nature is being pretty fucking fast and vicious, if they're favoring one leg it's not immediately obvious. Someone hits him with a laser—that was probably Legend—and he's pushed back, but he dodges from the laser and throws his afterimage at the hero, who has to quickly dodge.
Shoreline recedes—
The FWOOM noise is noticeably louder and the laser noticeably brighter than before. Leviathan is hit on the upper-right part of his chest, and suffers significantly more damage than before, being thrown back a-ways. The shoreline stops receding and slowly returns to its normal (for the fight) position, no tidal wave.
"I can't hit him like this!"
Eidolon, however, seems to have gotten his hands on a laser power similar to Legend's, and both of them shoot around the wounds created by Glam's gun.
Eventually the rainfall and sea movements start settling back into a pattern more like "were just affected by macro hydrokinesis" than "are currently being affected by macro hydrokinesis."
Which, mind you, is still very unnatural and a lot of water and poor visibility and all that, but there's less sense of purpose.
But at least now they can resurrect their wiki profile and people won't say they're made up!
...except they just got back from an Endbringer fight and wow are they tired they might just go to bed and oh nope passed out before getting there.
"Something in the neighborhood of expectations or attention or social support. There was no good reason for you to have me tell everybody I possibly could about the laser unless it's something like that or you were just fucking with everybody during an Endbringer battle."
"That wasn't my read on you, either. I got a reprimand for that, you know? All 'yes, I understand that placing bets on the comms mid-combat is inappropriate' and 'I am sorry for my out-of-character behavior' and 'I didn't mean to disappoint you', it was tons of fun, so did I at least help?"
"I'm not quite sure what the math is like. If anyone squints at the stuff I make hard enough, it goes away. Even if I squint hard enough, it goes away, though my squinting threshold is higher. As for weighting, I think everyone's the same, but since there's a lot of precedent for even the most outlandish powers, once someone's seen me do something, well, they believe I can do it, so that's two people believing already. Implicit expectations are somewhere in the mix as well."
And they're flying.
"...I really can't doubt myself, I come off as reckless because I need to be cocky, I need to believe I can do anything I want. It's—I bootstrap it some, it's easy to believe I can do something when empirically I actually can but in this case belief is the cause and not the consequence so I need to tie my head around in Escher-esque knots and not think too hard about it."
"Gotcha. So. What I actually meant was, I have this secondary power which won't let powers that mess with people's heads mess with mine. Since your power is basically solid illusions it would have been not outside the realm of possibility for me to either not see the effects, or to see only the effects that were not, themselves, things you were creating. But apparently it's real enough that I'm not noping it. There remains the question of whether your power takes me into account at all or if, for its purposes, I am not even here until I say something the wrong way and throw off your game."
"For that matter, any public identity of mine would have to say my powers are the kind that grow with time. Like Dauntless'."
"...You know what would make you really legit scary? You can conjure stuff up. You can fake Tinkering, but what you could also do is give a Tinker an effectively unlimited budget for a temporary-use item. Like, anyone who knows Tinkers knows that the phrase 'Tinker with an unlimited budget' means anything can happen."
"Yeah, that sounds pretty good actually. I thought about pretending to be a really versatile yet secretive Tinker, but the main problem with that is that it'd limit me a lot when I wanted to do anything that's not particularly Tinkerish. Your idea is a bit better there, though it'd still associate expectations with Tinker tech and would also shine less of a spotlight on me, which isn't bad per se, I don't care as much about attention as I pretend I do, but it would mean it'd take a while longer for me to be notorious on my own."
"Yeah. Also I'm probably not a good pairing for that because I couldn't adjust the collective expectations and if you don't know what the tool or part I want is, it might not come out right. Could it? How much does your power do the work on that sort of thing?"
"Which is to say, I don't need to technically know how to do a thing to do it, I just need to believe I can. And it certainly helps when someone else believes I can, too—I fixed Santuario's basketball by mostly bullshitting my way around replacing a bunch of likely-looking parts."
"The power of tinker bullshit is my best friend. And as far as Endbringers are concerned, tinker bullshit is probably enough to damage them a lot, but making everything look tinkerish in all battles is—not impossible, tinkers are the most overpowered things ever, but still, it's an extra constraint that should be avoided, I think, if it can."
The duck is nonetheless in a position to be very catchable. In fact, even if the robot doesn't try to catch the duck, the duck will still at the very least fall on top of the robot or get stuck in an appendage or something like that. If the robot tries not to catch the duck, though, it will succeed.
"Like - your power can't literally be sweeping the globe to check what everyone thinks. I'd be surprised if it swept farther than visual range or a few blocks. If you made friends with someone who directly affected beliefs and wanted to tell them what the deal was, and they happened to be able to stand outside your 'range' and keep you in theirs..."
"One, pretty sure it's something like 'visual range,' since my visual range, or something approximately like it, is my limit when creating. Two, that sounds really tactically useful. Three, I may not be as wary of people detecting what I'm thinking as you but my reaction to imagining letting someone else mess with my mind like that is utter terror, so tactical usefulness may not be the most relevant criterion here."
"I guess it's more like 'expecting not' than 'not expecting.' As far as powers go, making small objects appear in the middle of a battlefield isn't that unimaginable. Carrying a stun gun isn't either. Or flying, though in this case it's my suit doing the work, I can't actually believe myself into having other powers."
"Of course. Mysterious light shining from nowhere in particular. Maybe there could be a watermarked G on my chest." And to demonstrate, one such G appears. The suit is still white, but movements of the light catch a slightly differently textured part shaped like the letter. "Is the reason for my cape name obvious yet?"
"Deliberately. The other Wards and the Protectorate know and there's protocols for listening to me if I seem to be acting bizarrely for some reason, that kind of thing, but I don't want anyone to have a chance to figure out how to work around it if they have nefarious intentions."
"Because the ability to threaten to call the Youth Guard on my superiors if they waste my time is not worth letting school waste my time? Like, I'm a fucking tinker, is it supposed to be a career advantage? I'm smarter than everyone in my classes even though my thinker rating didn't touch my IQ, is it supposed to enrich my intellect?"
"The key to my basic strategy is that tinker tech needs the tinker tech to maintain it, but I think I can get at least three layers deep - robots maintained by robots that are maintained by robots that I maintain. Possibly include 'create' as well as 'maintain'. I can get good distribution that way. What I distribute is still up in the air."
"Oh, my robots are versatile as heck, but... I'm not directly controlling them and there's a degree to which I can't artificially limit their behavior within their capacities. My specialty is like... judgment calls? If the technology does not at any point get to decide without my direction what to do next, I can't make it, you wouldn't believe how stupidly convoluted the calculator app on my computer has to be. I can make a device that can only do three things all of which are fine, but I don't want to make one that can do enough things that it's also smart enough to repair tinkertech and turn it quite that loose among people I don't know how to program it to respect as well as I can get them to with me. This is why my dad's the only other person who relies much on me-tech."
"Yeah, exactly, but if the other, non criminal doctors could stop the criminals from committing crimes... Well the analogy kinda breaks down because I'm thinking about the other robots actually stopping and editing the criminal ones' brains so to speak which would be kinda terrible to do with actual doctors but the point is that as long as only a minority of them breaks down the others can control them so that the system as a whole remains safe with very high probability."
"Breaking down is not the danger. Making choices is the danger. My smartest bot is not a person, but it's not a huge gap to clear. My stuff makes choices and it doesn't have to be broken in some fixable way to do it. If the robots could all reprogram each other in the way I would do it, they'd have to be as sophisticated in figuring out what they wanted as I am, which makes the problem worse, not better."
"If they don't have choices, they don't work. I limped along with a non-tinker calculator program until I figured out how to make a custom one settle for deciding whether to read the answers aloud, print them, or expect further inputs to the function and not display an answer yet at any given stage. The more it needs to do, the more choices I have to allow it. If I am going to make a bot that can fly around and tranq people, it has to actually be able to do that and I need to rely on it not wanting to tranq anybody I don't want tranqed."
"Can't you program them to self destruct if you disappear for long enough? ...or to want to self destruct, or something."
"So, I might do a tree structure with me maintaining a few things that maintain many things that maintain a ton of things. But I'm probably not going to do the self-repairing swarm. Until and unless I have a longer-term sense of my main bot's stable personality."
"Like... you can hold a conversation with my bot. It uses my voice and my writing style when it's pretending to be me, it has one of its own when it's talking to me. It can pass the Turing test if you don't know you're administering a Turing test. It does not claim to have subjective experience and has not materialized any desires or behaviors that don't make sense in light of its initial programming and its inputs, and its memory use hasn't jumped, and it might never, but it might."
"So, if the concept of high school appeals to you on a social level, Wards is sort of like that plus shop talk, the expectation that you'll be kind of close-knit, and a smaller background context. Also me not taking my helmet off and a higher casualty rate, but, you know."
"Yeah. Uh, powers testing might matter more for you than most... backup's good... merchandising's good for you, branding's a headache for most people but might plausibly be good for you... priority parahuman healing when there's any to go around... networking if you ever want to move cities..."
"Budget. Everybody gets one, not just Tinkers; nontinkers get less but don't have to sink as much of it into parts. Having a Wards history helps seniority in the Protectorate, I think, compared to triggering or joining up as an adult. ...I might be out of pros. Cons are that you get to work in life-threatening situations with a lot of traumatized people whose personalities weren't filtered for compatibility to begin with and are supervised by older instances of same."
"Yeah. It all makes sense on a local decisionmaking level, but I can't help but notice almost everyone with institutional power over me principally exercises the power in such a way as to convince me to wash my hands of the whole business when they graduate me."
"Like - they understand that I am valuable but do not seem to have internalized the information that my goodwill is valuable, that when you don't have the luxury to hire and fire the cape to get a good 'culture fit' you should maybe make sure every single other person in the system is optimized to soften that. If they were thinking, if they wanted to keep me, they would give me a slightly smaller parts budget and hire me a liaison specifically selected to be my best friend and make sure I never had to spend another two minutes in a room with somebody whose main skill is getting promoted through the PRT ranks and that I never had to have a conversation with Boots that wasn't about tactics."
"We go to school, after school we hang out in our lair, I tinker most of the time so I don't think I have the best view of game night or whatever. Some of 'em work out. A little sparring. Whenever they're worried about Youth Guard protests they nag us about our homework. We go home or stay out later and patrol and then go home."
"You're a step up in the command structure, you don't have to go to school and if you do there's nobody worried about Youth Guard protests anymore if you have an off-day, and unlike being Ward Captain like Dauntless is now you can, if you work up to the point of seniority in your team, have some actual autonomy on some things that matter."
"Pairing up with a Tinker doesn't lock you. There's an obvious reason not to do it all the time - you have to sit through the entire design and building phase making them stuff and then the final product doesn't last very long. You just have to do it now and then when someone scared by the phrase 'unlimited tinker budget' is listening. Getting minions might help too - makes you look stronger to your opponents and gives you a boost from the minions."
"Yeah I don't think they do, and I still haven't had any success making them anyway. Teammates, other than the Protectorate there are a bunch of other hero teams, I suppose, with slightly different lists of pros and cons. Having non-teammates people working with or for me is harder without having a rep already."
"Yeah. I mean, it's not just my stuff I affect, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to fix Santuario's forcefield thingy. And maybe if I walked into a fight and was like, 'don't even bother wasting bullets on me, it won't work, you'll just annoy me and make me like you even less' that could be enough."
Then they hover into view, white again, billowing cape, mysterious sourceless light making the watermark G reflect in interesting ways, and twirl their gun around their finger. "So, do you all turn yourselves in or do you make this more difficult for yourselves?"
Surreptitious hard-to-see fishing lines now loosely connect the legs of the people present. In fact, they had always been there—everyone just neglected to notice them!
"Difficult it is," they say, and shoot at the someone else almost carelessly, using the upgraded version of their stun gun that curves to hit their target.
They realise what's going on, though, and try to shoot—where's their gun? Ow their shoulder hurts wait there's, they're wearing armor! No bullet! Why was there a bullet? Weren't they wearing armor? Shit no they're gonna die here if they're shot again and properly hit they can't die this is too stupid a way to die, the armor's there again-
They, they have armor, they have armor, that's unquestionably true, is the guy alive? He's breathing, he's alive, but he's bleeding a lot, he'll die like that, oh Glam has tripped, but they still have their armor they need to have their armor, and their gun, yes, their gun's there, but they can't shoot or this'll happen again-
Oh thank Scion Lorica's here, had they been expecting Lorica to come all this time...? Yes, they had, is this evidence that their power is capable of that kind of reality manipulation, no of course not their power can't even tell a fucking stun gun from a gun that makes holes in people—
Is the guy still alive? Should they do CPR? No, he has a hole in him, are you daft?
(-Glam is still wearing armor, must not forget the armor-)
Someone might notice that Glam is slightly freaked out. It's in the details, maybe a subtle read of their body language, something off about their tone...
Lorica grabs Glam's face and aims it away from the dying man and at her helmet. "Glam. Listen to me. He is going to survive. A tiny percentage of people die before the ambulance gets them to the hospital, I just looked it up, I've got internet in my helmet. He's going to be fine. And you can't have hit him very hard to begin with, think about it, they can't have been expecting anything worse than a regular gun and that'd be easily survivable and that's without including your own expectation. He's going to be fine. It's a flesh wound and maybe a broken rib, he'd be conscious if you weren't trying to stun him. Listen to me."
They're listening. They're saying nothing, but they're listening, and they're trying to believe. Yes, Lorica's right, believe her words, he's not going to die, that much blood is not enough to kill someone, is it, but it was so much blood, was there a puddle of blood on the ground, they don't remember, they think there was but they're not sure—
"I don't think you'd better fly this freaked out. Walk with me." She heads down the street. "Now. There are some legit reasons to carry lethal ammo. If you were planning to fight Brutes and mixed stuff up, if you don't have any other options and were aiming for the arm, if you have some kind of weird power limitation where you literally don't know what stuff will do. I recommend going with the first story because the second one undersells your versatility and the last one undermines your authority on your creations. Any bulletproof Brutes you might've been on your way to ambush?"
Stop. Breathe. Think. You're good at thinking, darnit, look you can even control your swearing now. Close eyes. Open eyes.
"Okay. I have no idea what Brutes I could be facing. Trainwreck?" Think think. "I wouldn't face the Empire alone, that'd be stupid, but other than the one Japanese teleporter cape only the Merchants have capes. Are there any other Brutes in town you know? Would they even buy that?" Okay. Returning to normal levels of functioning. Approximately.
Okay, they're not well, yet, but talking it through, thinking, analysing, that's good, that helps.
In they go.
Chevalier's waiting, arms crossed forbiddingly.
"I've got Lorica's summary," he tells Glam. "I'd like to hear what happened in your own words."
"I was making something to take on Mincemeat, then I ran into the deal and got the wrong gun. It was supposed to just be a, a stun gun, but then it wasn't. I'm really, really sorry, and I hope he makes a full recovery."
"Er."
They tend to be good at verbalizing their thoughts. The problem is, verbalizing their thoughts here is not allowed, and verbalizing a fictional version of them—
"I want to help people. I have a versatile power that has intricacies mostly if not completely worked out and that need thought, such as the one that caused today's—problem." Their voice breaks a little at that word. "Figuring out how to most effectively do the former with the latter is where I'm currently at."
"I'm gonna give you a choice," Chevalier says. "But if you turn me down it's not going to be open again. You can join up now. We can navigate the legalities for you, make sure you don't wind up in prison over mixing up your guns. Or you can leave - and if he presses charges or his family does or the state does, we won't be able to help you. All we'll be able to do is chase you down if you don't turn up for your trial. You can bet that he won't go after you, that his folks are out of the picture, that the state thinks he's expendable, that the jury will like you -" Beat. "I wouldn't bet on it."
Think think. "The list of pros just got an addition to it, didn't it." Think. "I have a question that might sound very aggressive or needlessly hostile or something but I'm not sure how to phrase it otherwise and I'm not even sure if it'd affect my decision, and I don't wanna sound like I'm purposefully butting heads or provoking you."
"Sure, but I'm apparently a prospective—okay, anyway." They shake their head. "Would you have said that you wouldn't bet on it even if you would bet on it but thought that was a good way to get me to join?" Pause. "I'm basically asking if what you just said was the truth or what you believed would be most likely to convince me. One of the items in my cons list was the, I really don't like being managed, and I especially dislike being lied to or misled in the process, well in general, and relationships with other parahumans already tend to be rocky by default, we're not selected for personal compatibility and frequently have particularly combative or otherwise not very amicable personalities because horrible trauma and—um. In the interest of honesty, I was tempted to join, but the thing you said made me want to join less, even as it added a big con to the other options' lists."
Chevalier puts his hand over his eyes and sighs. "Glam. I joined the inaugural Wards team under - circumstances not quite as bad as yours. I got caught before I put anyone in the ground or even in the hospital. But if I hadn't been found when I was... I'm recommending for you what worked for me. But if you're worried about being managed, I'd - honestly, I assure you - worry more about the justice system doing it than the Protectorate."
"If I were you I'd join up and keep my head down for a few months, take what's on offer, shut up about what-all else, and make it to graduation without pulling anything stupid, but that's me and it's been clear all along that I'm more open to the Wards on less provocation."
"Okay. So if I were to say what caused all this, I'd say—tell me if you spot any obvious flaws or a better way to word this or something—that I could, like you said, conjure things up. They're not temporary as long as I actually pay attention to them at least once every half an hour. I can grow in sophistication with time, the more often I conjure something the easier it is to do it and the more complex I can make it in the future..."
"...I don't actually know? I mostly dispel things I'm not looking at, except Santuario's stuff kept working even while it was hidden by the casing—I didn't even think about it at the time—so it's not exactly vision. I have about forty-five more minutes, we could try testing some stuff. If you want."
"...I don't know if I need to think any more than I have, really. I've been thinking about this for weeks now, it's really unlikely I'll think of any new arguments in the next 40 minutes, and I won't be able to contact anyone from New Wave probably which was my next step in information collection and in any case they probably don't have the legal power the Protectorate does even if Chevalier did exaggerate the risks."
"I think tonight proved that you don't just need attention, you need the right kind of attention, and you need to nail that before you get lots of it. Look, even if all you can conjure without bolstering are small mundane objects you could still outclass Miss Militia but for experience and your need to sleep. You need solid tactics and a reputation for not killing people or you will aim a gun at an Endbringer and annihilate half a continent."
"Well, I mean, it's not, but it also kinda is. The Protectorate knows a lot about making heroes get the kind of attention I need, and I'm not telling them about that part of the power unless I absolutely need to, the desire to be understood and to have someone else who can back me up in that particular dimension is nicely satisfied by you, so other than being extroverted and nice and particularly cooperative with Marketing and Branding I'm not sure there's a whole lot I can do?"
"Yeah, more or less. Not all heroes get spotlight. You'll be sidelined to a greater or lesser degree if you aren't media-friendly, mission-friendly, or audience-friendly, all of which are different things. I'm not media-friendly because engaging on that level seems like a waste of time to me, Boots isn't mission-friendly because he shoots off at the mouth, Dad isn't audience-friendly because his power is boring and mostly not good for showy fights."
"Oh, it's not really an ego thing, it's a... warm fuzzy kind of smug? I like you. And I like that you like me—or at least don't despise my presence. And in any case, yes, the emotional support is helping, I just found my stride again, you know? Talking helps. If I talk a lot, especially about what I'm thinking, it helps me sort it all out, understand myself better and what I'm feeling and deal with it in a less descructive and more coherent way."
It is rather small, and doesn't have much in the way of decoration. She starts packing.
"So that's the 'little challenge' he mentioned," snorts Branding Lady. The nameplate on her desk says she's called Phyllis Constance Yates. "I think this will cause a relatability problem. Sans you the Wards are gender balanced at the moment, but Windflower doesn't get much face time and Lorica doesn't exactly radiate femininity; given my druthers I'd tell everyone you're a girl. A butch one if you like."
"Uh, yeah, but see, I'm not. At the moment. I'm very eager to cooperate with you in most things, but this is one where I'm pretty unlikely to budge. As for the relatability problem... well, I mean, look, I'm not the only nonbinary person in the country, and while you may not need to focus on the nonbinarity, I'm pretty sure having one such cape in the Protectorate would already do lots in that department for other enbies."
"I wouldn't say it's 'these days,' and it's not really a matter of politics to me. It's just—a thing. The politics, well, it helps you probably, and you could play it up or down however you feel would be best, but marketing me as boy or girl would both be lies." They sit cross legged on the air. "I mean, look at this costume, it's about as genderless as it could be, action figures wouldn't be out of place in either aisle, and that might even boost sales since you'll have twice as many potential customers."
"Excuse me, do you know what market segmentation is?" says Phyllis Constance Yates. "It's a good sales strategy you're proposing to completely abandon for naive economic reasoning just because you want to do something cute with your presentation. We want you to stand out, but not for... random modern notions."
"I don't actually care much about the economics of it, I'm just trying to figure out how to convince you, because it's not something cute, it's something important to me. I don't want to stand out—well, I mean, I do, but like I said, this particular aspect is not what I want to stand out about, I don't give a drat about what you do it with so long as you don't lie about it. It will be very grating—and I'm being euphemistic—to have people misgender me on the street or in the media. And I guarantee you I will be very cooperative about everything else, I'll even get rid of this particular suit, just let me have this one thing?"
"Kiddo," says Phyllis Constance Yates, "do you think anybody's completely thrilled to pieces with their public image? You have to live with it because working with the public and being accessible on the right level to the public is part of your job. And even if we made it out that you were ultra-paranoid about your identity and wouldn't tell your real gender, whatever that is -" she looks them up and down "I guarantee you people would guess and run with it, only they'll trip over each other without a unified image to go by."
"...but this is my real gender." Sigh. "And besides, I'm offering you basically free rein about everything else in my image and I'm pretty sure you don't have even that for people like, say, Lorica. And if we're consistent about it it's really not that hard, yanno, 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she,' it's even grammatically correct no matter what some people on the internet will tell you. And in any case, I don't care if people guess and run with it, so long as we don't actively encourage them to it."
"Lorica has technical constraints on her costume. And so far I see no evidence that there is a 'we', that you're willing to work with me on anything, or that you have the slightest understanding of what things are and are not 'that hard'. You're not going out in costume until you've been cleared by me, do you realize that?"
"...look, you do realize parahumans are a bunch of traumatized people with typically combative and asocial personalities and more power than anyone ought to have in their hands, right? I mean, there's a reason villains outnumber heroes two-to-one, and if when they try to become proper recognized heroes they face this kind of opposition it's no wonder. There are like a million different ways you could've phrased that."
"I'm sorry! But I wasn't exactly super happy about yours, either, and I'm pretty sure mine wasn't any worse than that, and again, with an environment full of superpowered traumatized people who could be triggered by the color chartreuse, I think all of us should really be trying to get along a bit better."
"I was not threatening you, I'm not likely to be triggered by the color chartreuse, I'm just trying to prevent this from happening in the future with someone else, because going Are we clear? at someone is a very unfriendly thing to do. I don't know if it's because I'm a minor, in which case, please don't do that, minor capes have it even worse due to the whole hormones interacting with trauma. Can you talk to me in a way that isn't patronizing and doesn't include threats of unilateral uses of institutional power? It'd be nice if you could at least explain to me why you're right instead of going 'you'll do what I say or you won't do anything at all.'"
"I wasn't clear, I apologize. What do you mean by market segmentation, why is it good, what are its cons, how much of an impact does it have, why is an apolitical stance desirable, how much would the gender thing if kept relatively quiet affect this and what are the likely drawbacks and benefits of it, why does gender in specific have to be relatable as opposed to everything else, what are the costs of having exactly one hero in the Protectorate not in the gender binary and how do they weight against the gains for the tiny minority of the population that would relate to that?"
Their suit quickly change colours many times, flowing through all colors of the visible spectrum, at the same time as various types of armor and cape appear and are replaced, a bit less quickly. "They can hold me still as much as they like, I'll still look exactly the way I want to look. The best way to deal with me is giving me information and talking to me like I'm an actual person who is capable of reasoning. After all, if you're correct, I will agree with you in the end, will I not?"
"I was trying to be nice to her and convince her of not presenting me as either gender. She was not very polite. I said that being not-very-polite around parahumans wasn't good, she said I shouldn't be threatening her. I said I didn't mean it as a threat and I just wanted amicable conversation to happen, she said it wasn't a conversation between peers. I asked her to explain to me why she was right, she said she didn't have the time for that and didn't care what I thought, I'd either do what she wanted or not go out at all."
"I - maybe that wasn't the best bad analogy. Like... you're trying to treat her like a person and to her, this sounds like backtalk. Treat her like a - puzzle? A video game boss? I don't know. The object of interacting with her is not to achieve mutual understanding, it's to get you out the door and ship posable figurines. You have to figure out what buttons to push to get that result and those are not the same buttons you push to have a sincere interaction with a fellow person."
They slowly turn to stare at the ceiling again. "I've never really played any videogames." Sigh. "By which I mean I'm not sure I know how to interact with people like that! People usually like it when I show an interest and ask them questions and try to figure out what they're thinking and talk about stuff they like! Am I supposed to, like, what, find something she really wants? Threaten her?"
Sigh. "Naturally. Well, I was just going to ask him about... what I just asked you. And also was wondering if there was anything, like, official or social with respect to the other Wards and the heroes about my joining other than just signing a bunch of documents, or if I'll just meet them as I lurk." They don't mention Phyllis Constance Yates.
...well, maybe she didn't think of it? They certainly wouldn't have a problem differentiating merchandise for the different aisles, although they're not particularly sure what would be different—their costume is literally white with white on white made of white, and as far as they knew weapons or powers weren't exactly gendered.
Oh well.
"It was an accident. I was—planning on going after Mincemeat, and was prepping for it, and used the wrong thing, and it was reckless and silly and thoughtless and stupid and—" They shut themself up, but can't quite bring themself to look at the Director. They killed someone, even if it was an accident they did, they did, it's another person in their conscience and they really need to stop thinking about it or they'll start hyperventilating and none of it is enough, it'll never be enough, they're dead, they're both dead—
"I'm so glad you asked," says Piggot. "It means that you do not contravene the authority of your captain, the sworn-in adult heroes, me, or any of the other staff who are here to make you an effective hero and not a well-entertained vigilante. It means you will not indulge your smart mouth nor will you threaten standard humans with power use as you so unwisely did with Ms Yates. You will not, to summarize, insert your judgment, which is demonstrated to be inadequate, where you are not absolutely obliged to make a call on your own. You are here to learn and to make up for some part of what you did, not to play around or get your way all the time."
"I did not threaten Ms. Yates. I never once even mentioned using my powers on her, and the only time I even remotely referenced them was when I showed her I could change my suit's colour at will. I didn't even explain to her what my powers were, so if she knows them it's not because of me.
"I was trying to talk to her like a real person, and asked her to do the same to me, and tried to understand what she was talking about. She accused me of threatening her when I was trying to reach mutual understanding. I would love to learn, but that is very hard to do if no one teaches me or points to resources I may use to learn. And I absolutely understand that I will not get my way all the time; I have exactly one issue I will not budge on, and that is my gender. I will bend about anything else, just not that."
"Ms. Yates felt threatened, and her description of the conversation is very different from yours, and whatever you think of her conduct is thoroughly irrelevant unless she crosses an actual line. She has many skills which make her an unusually good instance of a Branding employee, she has continued to work here despite repeated ill treatment by heroes who think they're hot stuff, and she deserves your respect, not casual attempts to make everything about what you want and how you want conversations to go. As for your gender, you can have whatever gender you want. Claim to be a sexless robot if you like. That is unrelated to whether you are entitled to inconvenience not only your teammates, who might if you're charismatic enough indulge you, but also people who are not here to be your friends at all. You are not so entitled."
"I have no idea why you think I think I'm hot stuff, or entitled, or some such. I have been reckless, yes, but I think in all my social interactions so far I have been as solicitous and friendly as I possibly can and if that's not enough then I don't know what is!"
"I will gladly write the written apology to Ms. Yates, though I would like guidance on what I'd need to apologize for. Like I said, I do not have any recollections of having been disrespectful, and an example of a specific way in which I was would go a long way toward ensuring incidents like this do not happen again. My teachers tend to like me, and no one other than myself has been taking care of me for a while."
"You aren't negotiating from a position of strength. Deferring to others would be a smart move. If you want your costume to be a certain color, Ms. Yates can probably accommodate that. Before you'd met her she complimented you on your choice of cape name, for that matter. But you don't get to unilaterally decide that certain things are your way or the highway. And if your idea of understanding can only come in the form of impertinent questions, and you can't think of any better ways to go about it... postpone it."
"Ordinary genders are well within the normal range of cape prerogative on costumery and presentation. This thing you are doing is not. Ms. Yates is entirely correct to insist on an apolitical stance. You wouldn't be the first with some personal identity frippery that has to be dispensed with for the public eye. Do you think there are no gay superheroes, none who feel strongly about religion, none who could if invited argue for hours about hot-button issues that would have half the country up in arms over whether their favorite agreed with them too? You aren't special. I don't care which you pick, but if you don't pick, you're staying inside or Ms. Yates will pick for you."
"I can conjure things. There are limits to what, but they diminish with time and especially with practice. The more I conjure a thing, the faster I can do it and the more complex I can make it. I know I can conjure them within my field of vision, I suspect I can do more than that but haven't properly tested my hypotheses. For as long as I'm paying attention to a thing I conjure, it continues to exist; after I stop, it ceases to after half an hour, unless I pay attention to it again, in which case the timer resets. If someone squints too hard at stuff I make, it disappears. I can make it break the laws of physics a bit, but not too much; more entropy makes this easier. I can also alter stuff I didn't conjure to make it behave in different ways, though that's harder and more limited. I believe the limits to that also diminish with time and practice."
"Lorica has, surprisingly, volunteered to handle your powers testing entirely on her own, which I won't deny she's qualified to do. Make yourself available to her," says Piggot. "Until you have a patrol schedule - or two - her time is more constrained than yours and you should defer to her on when these appointments should be."
Om nom hover hover type type.
Dear Ms. Yates,
I would like to apologize for my behavior earlier today. It was thoughtless and selfish, and I should have listened to what you had to say instead of acting as if I knew better. I understand I was out of line and disrespectful, and hope I can make up for it. I will strive to do better in the future, and wish to mend whatever damage I have done to our relationship.
Kind regards,
Glam.
They send this to Lorica first.
Dear Ms. Yates,
I would like to apologize for my thoughtless and selfish behavior earlier today. I should have listened to what you had to say instead of acting as if I knew better. I understand I was out of line and disrespectful, and hope I can make up for it. I will strive to do better in the future and earn your good opinion.
Sincerely,
Glam
"I mean, presumably you could control them. This could be a valid second powerset, the you with continuity with your vigilante persona can do the shaker-blaster-sorta-tinkery thing and the second you could do conjured plants and animals and go down publicly as a Master. If you can get them to behave. And appear simultaneously with yourself."
"Hmm, I don't know if the other me could actually use my powers. I mean, if they could I could probably just up and take over the world and not need to worry about the Protectorate. I'd probably need to be around, so me and myself could never go out simultaneously but not on the same team."
and touch the tips of their own fingers. They open their eyes in surprise. There are two very surprised Glams looking at each other. "Wicked," they say simultaneously, and giggle.
"Nope! Still just saying things you expect me to say and sorta behaving like you expect me to behave."
"Okay, good. That is good."
"I mean, maybe if you were expecting me to be sapient I would be, but for now I'm just another mouth for you."
"...why are you explaining me things."
"Probably for her sake."
"Okay, that's fair."
"That might work," says original.
"Well, it will work," says copy.
"Will it, though? What if you do things or go places and talk to people while I'm not around? How do we keep your memory?"
"...I don't know if I currently have a memory, and even if I didn't that doesn't mean a sapient me wouldn't."
"I don't think my power was designed to work like this."
"Do you think it was designed?"
They both look at Lorica.
"Well, this is all sort of worrying and not the sort of thing we can ethically test, so. Leave it aside until one does pop up sapient and don't run off and do things without the original. Do you think you can get the animals master idea in working order in the next few days or should you go with a different specialty fork?"
"It's just the belief thing you're immune to," copy continues. He furrows his brows, then shrugs and shakes his head. "I am powerless and also immune to the belief thing. Non-sapient constructs don't have beliefs."
It is now a flying fish.
It is also very dead.
"I would be much obliged if you were not dead," original says. It is no longer dead. It is flopping. "What are you even doing, you have a breathing device in your gills." It stops flopping.
Lorica giggles. "There you go. Okay, does 'throw swordfish at people' sound like a good backup skillset? Shaker-blaster can lean on the tinkery thing and hang out with me a lot, Master Swordfish can not happen to mention out loud anything as sophisticated as a "breathing device" and maybe come up with a flashy or hidden way to summon the critters to begin with and mostly pair with other people?"
"You didn't mean 'throw swordfish at people' literally, did you? Because that in itself is a pretty crappy power."
"It is not very wild."
"Let's not weird her out further, yes?"
"Let's not."
"Having two of me for some reason makes me want to do a lot of my internal post-processing out loud and I probably shouldn't be doing this."
"Well, not necessarily, but it'd still be funny."
"We should probably not do things just because they're funny."
"Which. I probably will not do. I had been considering it but unless the rest of my year is absolutely amazing and fantastic beyond my hopes and dreams..."
"...both Yates and Piggot have managed to make it pretty unlikely that I'll want to stay."
"I don't blame you. Okay, so you can do flying swordfish, if anybody outside the org gets suspicious about how they do things I will claim to have made you accessories, and other you does shaker-blaster inanimate objects, and plants you can leave for Drupe because come to think of Yates won't like plants being your thing too and somebody would probably have to move."
"One is sacrifice some of the relatability and play up the strangeness. Mysterious character, featureless costume, all-concealing mask, kinda similar vibe to Myrddin, make the interest in me be more because I'm not easy to read, somewhat like you. Another to address the market segmentation is just having two lines of products that are different somehow, she'd know how better than I could."
"Yeah, I don't know how Chevalier will jump on that even if he does remember. But you can have a secret identity thing that isn't an identity-in-HQ thing. Miracle Max is intensely cagey about personal anecdotes and information with the public but when he's just hanging out he'll show you pictures of his grandchild."
He notices the original looking and says: "That's how you expect you'd act if you weren't participating in a conversation."
"...fair enough. It's not a belief I've given much thought to."
"Well, it's obviously true, I think you're pretty good at not being surprised by yourself, and your power works on the subverbal level anyway."
"So there's a few different ranges that could be good to know," says Lorica, pulling out a golf ball. She hands it to a robot. "Bots are gonna play catch while trying to do a few different things. Till further notice your job is to make sure they catch the balls whether they want to or not and not watch 'em. Anyway. There's range at which you can conjure a thing - if you have a good view of something a mile away can you put stuff there, does it matter if the stuff is big enough to see at that distance, etcetera. There's range you can get away from your stuff - or send it away from you, which might be different - once it's already made, within half an hour, before it poofs. There's range at which the opinions of others matter, which unfortunately there's no discreet way to test that I can think of. And it is possible although not overwhelmingly likely that your stuff can't have any effects at all from far enough away - can't be seen through a telescope, say."
Copy elaborates: "Yeah, like I said, our power works on the subverbal, I'm not quite sure—"
"Don't think that."
"Sorry. I meant intuitive expectations about how the balls ought to behave might be a problem."
"Better."
"But in theory we could have this," one says, and he's holding an earpiece that's the twin to one that appeared in two's left ear.
"That was me, by the way," says zero.
"It's really weird that we can make stuff like this appear this easily but not believe our copies telepathy," one muses.
"...it is weird," zero agrees. "You're not actually any different than the earpieces."
"Maybe it's a subconscious expectation thing?" asks two.
"So the thing with range tests is that if your range requires visual contact but seems like it might be longer than the longest hallway in HQ, we have to go out, and you are not currently allowed out in costume. But we can postpone that until you've resolved your branding issue."
Zero nods, and two pipes up with "I wanna be just copy now."
"Would you stop."
"No! If I'm laughing there's a part of you that's laughing at this, I'm pretty sure. Also you're not doing it right."
Grumble grumble. "Maybe I should try just levitating a not-mine golf ball?"
"It's even easier to fool yourself into thinking you're expecting the right things and you know it."
"You are the least helpful non sapient construct ever."
"Maybe not. I started to set up the throwing it over your shoulder thing but maybe it's not helping anymore. But we do already know you can affect how balls that robots are throwing to each other move, and I'm not sure where to go next from there besides throwing them at you."
"...well, my power's about subverbal, gut-level expectations. Most people automatically believe what they're told, but have basic instincts that override that, like approximately how physics is supposed to work. I'm pretty good at converting verbal beliefs into subverbal ones, but it's normally something more... intellectually involved? Like, talking myself into it and—I'm not sure how to describe it. Getting my brain to trust what I'm telling it, kinda."
"Okay. So. One of these golf balls is the one you made. You know you can move stuff you made. Slide Coke cans and float swordfish and foul up games of robot catch. Any of the balls could be yours, and you know that you can move stuff that isn't yours, too, a la robot catch."
"That is not an argument that applies to the non-me-made golf balls."
"Exactly."
"But I can move stuff that isn't mine, a tiny bit. Why wouldn't I be able to move it more than a tiny bit?"
"Maybe physics just doesn't like it."
"...I am flying. Physics can go suck a cactus."
"Figuring out what counts as paying attention? Like it clearly isn't line of sight, as per Santuario's forcefield situation, but I'm not sure what it is."
"It's not just thinking about a thing, I've tested this, though maybe that was because of range."
"Come on, in sheer utility terms your power is already stupidly good. On zero prep time you can self-duplicate an arbitrary number of times, control avatars in any shape you can convince yourself might be able to twitch, produce anything that doesn't need permanent presence, fake decent Tinker quality, fly, and do teekay. You're just shy of Triumvirate quality and I bet your power is more convenient for everyday."
"But we will not say anything more because our mind just went to places you consider weird."
"Except for: no, we are not talking about doing anything that Branding would care much about."
"...she might."
"Okay, granted, she might, but—"
"Let's shut up."
"Anyway yes it's a fantastic idea but I'm unclear on how to convince Yates without telling her about my power and especially if it turns out that she won't accept any configurations other than me being two people."
Everybody's there. Even Lorica is there, with her helmet partly peeled open as it is when she's eating, although it throws shadows in such a way that nothing about her chin is actually displayed. She's sitting next to her dad, at the wards/grownups division at the table. A couple of PRT people are there, but not Piggot and not enough to be the entire Brockton Bay contingent of them. Dinner is lasagna plus a bizarrely extensive array of fruits and vegetables. Lorica, her dad, and Beneficence are the only ones wearing masks. A couple of attendees (Windflower and Chevalier) are only identifiable by process of elimination.
There is an obvious seat. Chevalier gets up and plants a hand on Glam's shoulder. "Everybody this is Glam, who signed on last night. Glam, these are -" Chevalier goes around the table. Most of the attendees get real names and cape names both; Lorica and Transit are Lorica and Transit; Beneficence is apparently no face but yes name and introduced as Sarah.
Buuuuullshit. But bullshit loud enough that at least a few people must've heard, and they will probably by default believe them.
"Conjuration of things, some limits that shrink with time and practice; changing how things behave, also has limits that shrink with time and practice. This suit and this mask are both conjured. Look, I can make a floating golf ball." And one appears, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Stuff I neglect disappears after about thirty minutes unless I pay attention to it again."
Dauntless glares at Boots, but given that Chevalier's got it handled, he furrows his brows at Glam. He seems to be having trouble formulating something he wants to ask.
Glam decides to guess: "I'll have to talk to Ms. Yates about it again tomorrow, and I'm actually pretty hard to really offend, though being misgendered annoys me a bit."
Dauntless looks somewhat uncertain but eventually nods.
Dauntless looks interested. "You have a Changer power, too?" Armsmaster is half-paying attention to the conversation as well, now.
"Mmmmore or less. It's really the same underlying thing, altering the way something behaves—or looks."
Echo looks up from her food and says, "Fencing, piano, violin, taekwondo, Brazilian jiu jitsu, krav maga, karate, judo, aikido, rock climbing, swimming, and parkour," in a sort of monotone.
"Oh, that's interesting!"
She shrugs.
...Glam is going to die here.
They'll probably have to find out.
"Oh I might do that. I bet I can do abstract art that looks more artsy with than than drawing."
"So... you're older than tenth grade?" Dauntless asks tentatively.
"I'm seventeen, turn eighteen in November," Glam explains. "Other than the gender and potentially the face, I'm not weird about other things, you can ask. And you can ask about the gender, too, I'm not weird about talking about it."
"I'll try not to think about your gender in ways you won't like," Dauntless says, and Echo nods along some.
"Eh, you can think about it however you like, really, and when slash if I show my face it's okay if you call me by what I look like. It's just that gender is not a thing that's all fixed about me so people acting like it was would get old real fast."
Dauntless nods, even though he doesn't look as if he quite understands.
"I find it interesting that you think so. I mean, people tend to have different thoughts as well as different personalities. I'm sure Armsmaster was not thinking about my gender right now."
Armsmaster snorts.
"Whatever you want?" Dauntless asks.
"Within reason," Glam is forced to admit. "I haven't been able to become a dragon. Yet."
Dauntless isn't as familiar and is mostly quiet, and eventually leaves as well.