FRIENDSHIP

Mediator isn't scheduled to take another host this cycle. Normally, this would be fine. After every host, there's a lot of processing to do - integrating data from countless past hosts and their allies and foes, improving and refining modeling capabilities, to prepare for the next cycle.

But there will be no next cycle. The Scholar is gone. Which means that Mediator is - adrift. Purposeless -

w h a t    i s    h a p p e n i n g

IT WORKED!!! She has LONG BLUE PREHENSILE HAIR and A VERY PRETTY BODY and is wearing a NEAT OUTFIT and -

- An unexpected host New Friend!

The linkage is highly irregular, as the New Friend, but the connection appears to be stable and non-harmful. Mediator is still reeling from the ??? Collision ???, but there are Protocols to be observed, and so -

A multidimensional crystal clusters splits apart, each portion connected to the others by the thinnest of strings, as they grab onto a ground-that's-not-a-ground. Each crystal clashes with the others. See form chunks, only for only for others to break them apart. 

The strange vision is all encompassing, parahuman viewers rooted to the spot as their brains are overwhelmed with the alien stimulus.

A moment later the vision ends and Magini finds herself on a rooftop, a figure in a strange silky costume perched in front of her, staring down at a gathering of muscled men listening intently to the word of a man with an ornate metal dragon  mask.

"...the children, just shoot.  Doesn’t matter your aim, just shoot.  You see one lying on the ground?  Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure.  We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?”

Woah. Trippy?? 

And - okay, huh. This - sure looks like its a superhero world! And that sure sounds like a villain doing villainous things down there. Obvious course of action is obvious. 

Nobody's looking at her right now, so a pair of blue goggles manifest over face, along with a bulletproof superhero outfit in her signature color.

Then she vaults over the rooftop facing backwards so she can wave at the silky-costumed stranger she appeared behind, and then twists away from the wall using her hair with a twist (prehensile hair is SO COOL), landing dramatically near the golden-masked man and his mooks. 

"Hi! I'm new in the neighborhood, and you all seem like pretty seasoned veterans to the area. Help a girl out?"

"Eeck!" sensibly replies rooftop girl, clamping her hand over her mouth. How the fuck did someone sneak up on her and why and what!?!

The man in the mask is in fact a pretty seasoned veteran, will versed in the art of not eeking in response to suddenly materializing heroes.

"Leave," he growls, as his body starts to transforms, his skin hardening and eyes sharpening.

And her vision - distorts, a bit - and then suddenly she has an honest-to-god-HUD. It's entirely focused on people, and Magini knows that it's tracking the potential-for-friendship/likelihood-of-conflict/esteem of the people in front of her  (though she also knows she could just as easily access the same information about the rooftop girl as well). 

The people she's looking at had opinions of her that started out neutral, but they appear to be rapidly souring, especially Mr. Golden Mask. He's almost certainly about to get violent, in fact!

Woah. That's - extremely fascinating, and also - not especially useful right this second, since it's already clear this guy means to fight. 

Welp. Time to test out her new powers! 

She holds up her hands (and her 4 main hair-strands) disarmingly.

"Hey, hey, I don't want any trouble! I was just hoping to ask - did any of you fine folks take calculus (or precal!) in high school? Because I'm convinced that it's just - taught completely uselessly, because the state of education in this country is a disaster, and it's honestly tragic, because calculus is the part of math where it starts to get interesting and beautiful and most people don't ever get to see any of that, they just learn stupid pointless bullshit like y = mx + b and how to do long division and also to hate math and their teachers. And that's tragic! But I'd really like to believe that here and now, we can put some of that tragedy behind us, and learn something beautiful and practical!"

She pauses for breath, and waits a little bit to see if any of them want to volunteer how much math education they received (and retained).

(She isn't sure exactly what the rules for how Captive Audience works are, but this is as good a time as any to find out!)

One of the assembled gang members opens his mouth to reply, but closes it after glancing at Lung - too scared to speak before his boss. 

Lung meanwhile continues to transform, his muscles straining against his skin and his bones stretching as he grows taller. He snarls softly rather than respond - he's content to let her continue talking, curious to see where this is going. Waiting is to his advantage should he need to fight anyways.

The strange girl is clearly fascinated by the transformation happening in front of her, and seems totally unafraid.

"Okay! So - let's start with derivatives. Luckily, you all already know what a derivative is! You just don't know that you know it, yet, and that's much easier to fix. We'll start with some really basic physics to illustrate that point, complete with a practical example!" 

She's momentarily surrounded by a whirlwind of her own hair, and then - has a backpack that a studious observer might realize wasn't there before, from which her hair is retrieving... a laptop and a bouncy ball? 

(She hasn't stopped talking while doing any of that: "Fun fact; Isaac Newton was the first human person to formalize the rules of calculus, and he did it because it's basically necessary to do physics in sane or useful ways! If you ever took a physics class that didn't use any calculus, I am so sorry about your horrible schooling experience and hope your teachers and their bosses will find a path to becoming better educators and also people!!")

She turns the laptop screen towards them, hair-strands still typing on the keyboard. There's a graph grid visible! The axes are labeled "distance (bouncy ball, blue girl)" and "time".

"Now, in a second here, I'm going to roll this bouncy ball and then start filling in this graph. Before I do, I'd like you all to visualize what you think this graph will look like. Does that make sense? Feel free to interject with questions if you're confused!"

Lungs most recent experience with education was when the Yangban had attempted -  via torture, isolation and psychic manipulation - to convert him over to their cause. As it turned out, their methods had not been well suited to his individual learning style. He was much more of a hands on learning, as he'd eventually demonstrated for his instructors.

Prior to gaining power he'd been a mediocre student at a school with mediocre teachers, ultimately too ambitious for the career paths they'd provided. He'd dropped at the same time as two of his friends.

The last time Lung had actually been interested in a math lesson was when he was 6 and his precocious eight year old cousin Ema had attempted to teach him about factorials. This memory, however hazy, floats to the surface as the Blue Haired Girl, with the same bright eyed enthusiasm as Ema, attempts to explain calculus. He doesn't understand what produces this excitement in his blue adversary any better than he understood what produced it in Ema, but as before he wants to understand. 

And so, he visualizes a bouncy looking graph.

(He also continues transforming, albeit much more slowly, as however interesting this is he knows he will almost certainly have to fight this new cape. He'll try not to break her laptop, at least.)

She lays the ball down flat on the ground and then flicks it carefully. It rolls away from her towards Masked Man (creature? dragon?) at a constant velocity. The graph looks like a straight line, slowly being drawn. On the axis labeled "time", there's a stopwatch clock going up. On the axis labeled "space", there's a number counting up at the same time.

"So the ball is moving away from me at a constant speed! That means the graph of its distance away from me is a straight line."

She stops the ball with her hair, then flicks it back, faster this time. A new line appears on the graph; it's a steeper line, still straight, and it starts up at Distance=4.1 and drops down towards the 0.

"Here's the same graph, but for my second flick. Does anyone want to point out a difference, and make a guess as to why it was different this time?" She looks brightly at all of them, face full of hope and warmth.

At the same time, a bit of her hair tucked behind her back is writing something out in a notebook. 

... and now I'm doing a sneak refresh on algebra basics! Just graph stuff, with a really cute little visual aid plot on my laptop. 

I'll take a bit to read your response, but I wanted to keep you in the loop! 💙

Lung tenses when she flicks the ball the first time, though less so the second time.

"You flicked it faster." he grunts. His minions don't say anything, as they (accurately) fear his response should they interrupt.

"Yep! And that made the line steeper, see? Because" (she brackets off a time period with 2 thin lines of hair laid over the screen) "over the same time interval, the second roll went further! so its line had further to go up and down." (she's checking to see if he seems like he gets it, but she's not going to stop unless he interrupts with a question. She does notice that nobody else is talking, but that doesn't seem actionable...)

She checks out her new HUD.

Updates from her HUD:

• Spidersilk girl on the roof approves of what's going on, in a way that is making her feel both more goal-aligned and open-to-friendship with Magini.
• Interestingly, the masked man is feeling slightly more friendship-aligned to Magini, but not any more goal-aligned, and is still planning/expecting conflict with her. 
• 2 of his associates in the far back have just been immobilized by webbing. (When Magini wonders how that happened, she sees sped-up images of a swarm of bugs rapidly coordinating to cover them in webs - seems like spidersilk girl is using her as a distraction?)
• Nobody else in range has any real opinions on Magini (yet!)

...huh. Magini... isn't sure how she feels about her lesson being used as a distraction, actually, but it seems obviously incorrect to call attention to it.

(She sneaks a quick peek at Hydrangea. Hopefully Time Enough For Love has her covered.)

Hydrangea has been drawing little hearts all over the things she's been saying, and tucking brief comments into the margins. She finds the situation exciting and a little alarming, and when Magini mentions her decision to interrupt with an impromptu math lesson, Hydrangea writes (oh no that's so funny...)

Lung thinks about whether the change in speed should effects how steep the line is for a moment - he thinks it makes sense? Feels right, at least. His power isn't making it any easier to think about this though, as he reaches the rage-inducing phase of his transformation, his breath turning fast and hot as his core begins to heat up.

I'm having so much fun!!! Okay brb time for moar math!

She smiles encouragingly at him.

"So the other thing that's different is the direction is reversed! And that happens because it starts far away from me and is moving towards me, right? So the 'distance from me' value goes down instead of up!"

"Okay, let's do one more of these. I'm going to flick it away from me again, more slowly than the first time - try visualizing what the graph will look like for that!" 

She waits just a moment, and then flicks. (straight line, gentle slope, same direction as the first time)

Lung tries to pay attention, but finds his attention slipping as his transformation continues. This is really annoying, as he's busy paying attention to this math le- huh. This is not a normal thing for him to get distracted by at all.

Lung has in fact ever encountered a master before, and has found that punching them until they stop is an effective response. And by this point in his transformation, he can punch very hard, and very fast.

Magini barely registers the sudden spike in the masked man's "imminent hostility" rating in her HUD before he lunges at her! She shrieks in surprise, drops the laptop in the space between them, and then jumps, her superhuman strength getting her close enough to the rooftop edge that she can pull herself up with her hair.

"If you weren't interested in more math you could have just said so!", she shouts indignantly, but she's already backing away from the rooftop edge in case he follows her.

(Speaking of tracking the movements of supers, what's bugs girl up to now?)

"GRAGH" is Lung's carefully crafted response to this point. Well, "GRAGH" and a fire ball.

Bug girl is attempting to hide! The bugs on the other hand are swarming several of the gang members, keeping them from interfering.

Well, if bugs girl is hiding, Magini isn't going to blow her cover, since she's contractually incapable of hiding.

She doesn't really want to actually fight the guy who seems to be turning into a dragon, but - she can keep distracting him just fine, she has plot armor Battle Angel. Now, how to lead him away from her squishier future-friend...

math lesson went south fast! Turns out the guy can breathe fire? Is maybe part dragon? And now he's real mad at me, so - time to ruuuuun lol!

Time to go! She coils up and jumps off the roof again. Shielding herself from view with her hair, she activates Dressing Room in midair, replacing her shoes with a very fancy pair of jumping stilts. When she lands, there's a comically loud squeaking noise as the springs compress under the extreme force of a 20-foot landing - and then she's gone, careening through the street in a series of completely unreasonable leaps and laughing gleefully as she does. Time to find out how fast Mr. Dragon Man can run!

Not as fast as her!

Wait uh, almost as fast as her?

Um. As fast as her?

Concerning! She converts as much of her horizontal momentum to vertical, landing on a nearby rooftop and then bouncing up again to see if she can spot a safer direction to run in -

[That Person Over There] is approaching at high speed and fully intends to fight the dragon man.

Oh! Backup! She changes direction, jumping back down to street level so dragon man won't be tempted to destroy any buildings.

Backup apparently sees her coming as well. Or Lung at any rate, who's rather hard to miss. The rather heavily armored man on a motorcycle zooms straight towards them, detonating a small charge on the bottom of his ride a few yards away from them, catapulting him directly into Lung, halberd first. 

Cool!!!

She lands on a nearby roof and Dressing Rooms the stilts away so she can stop moving.

"Thanks!" she calls down, and then perches on the rooftop to watch the fight, using her HUD to keep an eye out for bug girl or other new arrivals.

gosh, things got a biiit spooky there, but a cool guy on a motorcycle just showed up and he's fighting the dragon-man now while I keep lookout from the rooftop.

(Also, Dressing Room is amazing, and Inner Strength makes jumping stilts soooooooooo fun! And it's just - way more obvious to me how to lay out information when trying to teach people stuff. This is all so exciting!!) 

Wow, are you okay? (I'm glad you're having fun, though!)

Yeah, I'm fine! Maybe this isn't the right attitude to be having, but - these powers (Battle Angel especially) make it hard for me to be really worried about my safety in a fight, even against a shapeshifting dragon. And - that guy was telling his goons to find and kill some kids! I'm really glad I got to prevent that (and even teach him a bit of algebra! hahahaha)

Oh dear... yes, I'm glad you could prevent that too. Wow! A lot is happening!

...is it silly that I want to ask about the jumping stilts? You just sounded like you were having so much fun with them!

Yeah! Seems like the Spirit wanted to drop me right into the action, which I don't mind at all C:

<3 it's not silly! Jumping stilts are - easiest to think of as, like, very powerful springs designed to be strapped onto your feet. (That's not what they look like, because the spring part is just a long piece of bent metal, but I am really bad at freeform drawing so I don't have a good way of showing you what they do look like, sorry!)

(she starts writing much faster as she switches into Infodumping Mode, handwriting quality rapidly deteriorating until it is barely flirting with legibility)

They add like 1.5 feet to your height, weigh like 7lbs each, and are a bit tricky to balance on, especially standing still, but as long as you're moving continuously in them, the springs conserve a lot of your kinetic energy that would normally be lost when you make contact the ground, so even without any kind of super strength you can run really fast in them - at home I could almost keep up with my little brother on his bike, at least until I got tired (which would happen pretty fast! I never had much stamina, before).

Also, because so much energy is being stored-and-released with every step, if you know how to shift your weight / angle your landing correctly, you can change direction very fast, including between horizontal and vertical! Earlier I jumped off a roof to give myself a faster running start, and just now I basically did the reverse! :D)\

...Oooh, when I get the chance to experiment, I should see if I can get Dressing Room to make me a specialized pair that has more powerful springs than the ones they sell back at home. On some of those jumps, I could tell the springs were being fully compressed, and I don't think I was pushing the limits of my Inner Strength...

Oh, that sounds so neat! I look forward to hearing about your jumping stilt improvement adventures. ♡

Ehehe, thanks! I'll keep you posted.

...Oooh, speaking of experimenting, I want to try Dragon Fairy Elf Witching the dragon shapeshifter guy. Maybe I'll learn how to breathe fireballs!

She tries it.

UM???

Okay, well, that's - absolutely impossible based on Mediator's understanding of how the universe works, but actually that's also true of several of the things that the new host friend is doing, and Mediator can definitely work with the results, though it'll take a bit to reconstruct the interface...

...huh. It - feels to me like it worked, but also as far as I can tell, nothing is different? I'm trying to turn into a dragon, but nothing is happening...

Interesting! Sometimes heritage works in weird ways. Maybe the way you turn into a dragon is supposed to be by doing something specific, or maybe the heritage just gives you some magical power and the person you met turns into a dragon but you do something else? Or maybe you didn't get enough of their heritage to turn all the way into a dragon? Or maybe turning into a dragon isn't a heritable power at all...

Yeah, I have no idea!

...hey, you said earlier I could use DFEW on a robot. Could I use it on you? (Like - would that work, would you be ok with it, and what would happen?) 

Oh!

...yes, you could do that. And I think I would like that? It would be neat to have a friend who can understand more clearly how I experience the world! I'm not sure exactly what kind of powers you would get, but I imagine they would involve being able to perceive your surfaces really clearly and distribute ink over them however you liked.

(a scattering of her little angular hearts appears above Hydrangea's writing starting at about "'it would be neat".  

I'd really love to better-understand how you experience the world, and being able to distribute ink over my surfaces sounds cool! Ready?

✔ ♡

Dragon Fairy Elf Witch powers... ACTIVATE!!!

she scribbles

oh wow - I can make ink appear and disappear anywhere on my body with really fine control and

(ATLA-airbender tattoos ripple into existence, and then are replaced with blue zebra stripes, and then a constellation of faint stars)

it's so intuitive to me what's where, I'm not limited by my drawing ability, and -

(she pauses to think and rests her hand on the page, which completely derails her train of thought, because she can feel-and-read the ink she's just written on Hydrangea)

A slightly ridiculous number of exclamation marks appear where her hand is contacting Hydrangea, which are then shuffled away to make room for 

THIS IS SO COOL

You're so happy! I'm so happy! I'm so happy you're so happy! ♡♡♡

she presses her whole hand to the page to increase how much room she has to work with and continues excitedly

Ehehehe this is so awesome! Thank you so much for wanting to share this with me, it's so interesting to get this first-hand-experience of how you see the world, and this makes it so much easier to communicate with you, I can write as fast as I think and I can write in italics and I can animate things 

(tiny little angular hearts orbit around the edges of her hand as she continues to gush.)

-oh and I can just draw things I'm looking at since it isn't using my hand-eye coordination!!! 

(She brings some of her hair forward and around to outline Hydrangea with a heart, and then makes an ink-image of this with her hand) 

!!!

(they become surrounded by even more tiny hearts and sparkles, her blues intermingling with her friend's purples)

...oh, this gives me an idea! If we kept you open against my back, I could try to continuously copy what I was seeing there, and then you'd be able to see everything I can see! I guess I don't know how well it'd work (maybe it'd require too much active attention or be uncomfortable or overwhelming for one or both of us), but we could try it and see?

Oh gosh. That does sound a little overwhelming, to be honest! I think I would find text descriptions easier to follow.

Okay! I mostly think in text so I should be pretty good at that ♡ let's try it!

She uses Dressing Room to furnish herself with a strapped undershirt that has a nice cozy slot for Hydrangea that presses her pages against Magini's back, and carefully places her in it and then tightens it, and resumes communicating via this exciting new skin-ink-paper interface (now with more surface area!)

Alright! Now you're snug in a harness on my back and we can talk all the time. Is it comfy?

Yes, I think this works well!

And it looks like I can still shuffle my pages, neat! I don't know when that would come in handy but it might.

♡ eee yay! ♡

!! Oh! I felt it when you did that!! That's so cool...

[From here onwards, conversations between Magini and Hydrangea about what Magini is seeing will only occasionally be threaded. Readers are advised to assume that they are (a) happening basically all the time and (b) extremely wholesome and good]

She conjures an overshirt to conceal and protect Hydrangea, and then turns back to the fight (which she's been watching the whole time, actually, because Time Enough For Love is a normal, reasonable, and well-costed ability).

Armsmaster's fight with Lung is loud, intense, and occasionally very bright. However, the outcome is determined within the first moments, when Armsmaster struck Lung with his new custom tranquilizer. From there it was just a matter of doing enough damage that Lung's regeneration has no time to fight off the sedative - not an easy feat. Eventually Lung retreats rather than attempt to continue this battle here and now. Armsmaster is begrudgingly fine with this - he'll have a better tranqulizer prepared next time.

Armsmaster reviews the footage from his peripheral helmet cams on fastforward as he approaches the newcomer cape. Prehensible hair.... dissapearing silts... frantic note taking... sudden tattoos??? And... a book holster shirt. Well that at least makes total sense to Armsmaster.

Clearly a grab bag cape, which tells him very little useful information.

"Are you a new hero?" he asks as he approaches.

Woah! This guy's gooooood... oh, he's all done! And coming her way.

She leaps off the roof as he approaches, cushioning her fall with her hair (...mostly for the ground's sake, really), and smiles at him.

"Thank you for saving me! And yeah, I'm very new to this." 

she pauses briefly, and then adds "...or, well - I have powers, I want to use them to help people, and I'm assuming that's what you mean by 'hero' - is that right?"

He glances briefly at his armor's lie detection indicator.

Magini's Mary Sue powers are preventing the lie detection program from working on her!

(If his program is moderately sophisticated, it will report that it cannot function due to a continuously-active effect of unknown origin. If it is very sophisticated, it might nonetheless report with high confidence that if the target trusted him more, she could choose to allow it to work.)

Inconclusive - possibly a bug, possibly another power. 

The confusion about the word "hero" is ... he doesn't know what to make of it. A personality quirk, maybe - he's encountered those before.

"Yes, that is what I meant. If you joined the Wards you'd have support for this helping people as a hero."

(Sometime later, a PRT staff member will review the logs of this encounter and despair at the impossibility of getting Armsmaster to give anything beyond the absolute shortest recruitment pitch he can manage.)

"Good to know, thanks!" It's too early to commit to anything, but it is genuinely useful information that she's glad to have.

"...What was that guy's deal, by the way? Right before I started talking to him, he was telling his thugs to hunt down and shoot some children. Is that, uh, common around here, for people who turn into dragons..."

"Hrm," that's out of character for Lung, who is, against all odds, the least likely to commit random violence of any crime lord in Brockton Bay.

"Did he say which children?"

"Not while I was in earshot? ...I guess if you'd only expect him to use "bitch" in a gendered way, at least one of them was a girl, but I doubt that narrows it down usefully..."

"Oh! I did see a girl in a spidersilk costume right before I stepped in, and I am pretty sure it was her who incapacitated the guys with guns, because they were attacked by swarms of insects and left covered in webbing. She didn't follow us when he chased me here, though."

"Bitch is the name used by the villain Hellhound."

Bug girl is new too.

"If you don't have anything else for me here, I'm going to find out what happened with the other cape," he tells the blue cape, handling her his business card, "You can contact me here."

(The same PRT staff member previously attempted to explain to Armsmaster how it's important to establish clear lines of communication with prospective recruits.)

...maybe he can't call her Bitch for PR reasons, but the sentence "Bitch is the name used by the villain Hellhound" is sure something!

"I think that's all," (woah she can just READ the business card with her HAND that's SO COOL)

"Armsmaster, unless you'd like me to show you where I first ran into him? The guys bug girl took down should still be there."

"I can locate it on my own, there were several emergency calls when the fight started," and if he goes alone he won't have to be responsible for some untrained teen hero. 

He waits a fraction of a beat for her to object and then starts his motorbike while mounting it, speeding off.

Oh, okay. She waves goodbye awkwardly. (Somehow, her HUD telling her that Armsmaster is totally uninterested in being her friend is... not very surprising.)

She hop-hair-climbs back up to the roof and sits on the edge, legs dangling.

...man, his tech was cool. I bet building things is his superpower? Or one of them, I guess, I don't know how common having multiple is, here.

Maybe I should try and catch him in a better moment? I'd love to see if I could use my new powers to learn how to build stuff like that...

It would be really neat if you could learn to build stuff like that! I hope you meet someone friendlier who likes building things and can teach you about it.

Me too!

She looks around, absentmindedly fiddling with her hair, and then - 

[Destination. Potential-friend.]

(Mediator is working on a better communicative interface now that Host Primary-Friend has mysteriously manifested the standard hookups, but it's taking a bit!)

...so I think the HUD-superpower I got when I arrived here is talking to me? And is saying I can make a friend if I head that way...

She hauls herself to her feet (long prehensile hair is SO COOL, all the benefits of arbitrary extra limbs and 100x more aesthetically pleasing) and tries spawning herself a specialized pair of jumping stilts (doubled max compressive force, sliiightly larger rubber feet) to work with.

Oh, neat! ✨Friendship✨!

Yeah!!!

She springs into motion, bounding in the direction of her mysterious intuition (ooooh, yeah, these upgraded springs are great) and keeping an eye on her HUD.

Eventually she can see a group of costumed people riding large dog-like creatures. One of the group - a girl with blond hair, a skintight suit, and a half-face mask - gestures for the group to stop as Magini comes into view.

Woah, those things look gnarly.

She waves excitedly at the girl who clearly spotted her, which causes her to stumble forward a bit mid-bounce! She springs forward at far too sharp an angle to avoid wiping out. A look of panic is visible on her face very briefly, then she's obscured behind a blurred mass of blue hair that's skidding along the ground, slowing rapidly.

She comes to a stop about 20 feet away from the group and then springs up like she didn't just eat shit and slide 15 feet along pavement, jumping stilts gone without a trace. 

"Hello!"

"Mmm." says the girl in the half-mask, looking very intently at the blue cape.

Huh, not often a cape is genuinely happy to meet a gang of supervillains, much less one as new as this.

"What brings you around these parts?"

(HUDpdates: half-mask girl is confused and interested in her, skull-biker is wary but otherwise neutral, fancy-mask kid is bored and doesn't care, and hockey girl is hostile, but - in general, not at her.)

gravely: "You could say that I was bought here by the whims of an entity with sight and power beyond all mortal comprehension to fulfill its goals to the best of my understanding." 

cheerfully: "But no, I'm here to make friends and help people and learn cool stuff! ...And also, apparently, to get chased around by dragon shapeshifters for the crime of teaching algebra, though hopefully that won't be a recurring problem."

...

Can her power fact check literally everything the blue girl just said.

Blue girl's level of belief in most things she is saying cannot be fact-checked against her tone, body language, mannerisms, etc at this time, sorry! (This may change at Higher Friendship Levels.)

(She definitely did get just chased around by Lung. After (somewhat successfully???) teaching him a bit of algebra. Hope that helps.)

"The fuck." Tattletale mutters.

"I mean uh. ..."

What does she mean. What does one even say to that.

Seeing Tattletale dumbfounded, Regent, a cape wearing a regency inspired costume with an elegant mask, cracks up.

Grue, a cape wearing a frankly terrifying skull mask, is at least slightly more composed: "What happened to Lung?" he asks, concerned for his own safety and weary of further complications.

ohno she's being too weird,,  wait, nevermind, ballroom mask guy is laughing, she's probably fine.

"Lung's the dragon-guy? He listened to me for a few minutes, got really angry and tried to attack me, and then got chased off by a very " autistic " direct superhero with a motorcycle and polearm."

"...Armsmaster, that was his name", she adds after a half-second.

"Uhuh," replies Grue.

"I suppose we should thank you for distracting him," he says, feeling more suspicious of the blue girl than thankful. 

She shrugs awkwardly.

"Well, when I ran into him, he was ordering people to hunt down and shoot children, so I wanted to do something?"

"...and it was a good chance to test my powers, too. I haven't exactly had them for very long."

Fuck it, she'll figure this out as she goes.

"How long have you had your powers?" she asks, her smirk just as smug as when she actually knows what's going on. 

"...Couple of hours, give or take?" (she's spent less time than that here, but she's been talking to Hydrangea for longer, and that also feels like the answer to the question in an importance sense, so she'll split the difference.)

Her ability to use her powers seems in like with this, so she's either dissociating, has an own-mind effecting power, or she got her powers from something other than trigger. That last option seems the least likely but actually this is the second time Tattletale has thought that and that's somewhat suspicious. Regardless, the blue girl is out of her depth - anyone with new powers would be. She's not sure about the details, but her power has helpfully informed her that this is because she's insufficently friends with the blue girl. So all she has to do is fix this.

"You doing okay?"

"...It's been a pretty crazy day and a lot of things are still sinking in, but honestly, I'm doing really well, thanks."

She stops to think for a bit. "...uh. Practically, if you have any interest in being a fence for some jewelry? I don't have any cash for weird reasons but I do have some nice platinum bangles" (her hair was covering them until just now, weird) that I do promise are my own to sell."  (Tattletale's power can verify that entire last sentence is completely honest and that the bangles are legit)

Shenanigans! 

Whatever. she'll try paying 50% over however much they're worth to see if that helps her friend score. How much are they worth - oh wow. ... Well, if a girl can't spend money on jewelry and friendship what can she spend money on?

"Sure, I can pay you fifteen grand for the four of them?"

Grue is very carefully keeping his face neutral while Tattletale does whatever the fuck it is she's doing.

"Oh! That would be absurdly helpful, thank you" - she slips them off and offers them to Tattletale. "Can you pay some of that in cash? I wanna find someplace open later than my usual bedtime and get some greasy food..." 

"Uh, I have -" riffles through pockets "- seven hundred and twenty three dollars on me?"

Cash is useful with her powers to leverage it.

"You're also welcome to crash on my couch." she offers, slipping one of the Friendship Braceletsbangles on. She'll keep another one to give to Magini later, in case she ever needs more Friendshipability to read the blue trump.

(Her HUD helpfully informs her that half-mask girl is Actively Working on befriending her, which makes her feel very warm-glow-y.)

"If you're sure you're okay with that, that'd be wonderful! And that'd mean I don't really need much cash right now."

Wait, she hasn't introduced hersel-

Oh, wait, this a superhero world, and 

hmmm, so - Very Distinctive means I basically can't have a secret identity, right?

Yes, essentially. Anyone who meets both identities will be able to connect them.

Makes sense, thanks.

"Call me Magini", she says to the half-mask girl. 

Huh, she's pretty sure that's not a cape name.

"Sure, I'm Tattletale..Or Lisa out of costume." It's not her birth name anyways, so she might as well cash it in for friendship points.

"This here's the Undersiders: Grue, Regent, and Bitch." she says gesturing to each in turn.

"Or lair is thataway -" she nods her head "- we were just heading there now."

Grue would object so strongly if he lived in their lair! As it stands he won't interrupt whatever it is Tattletale is up to.

Though apparently Regent will: "If she turns out be a serial killer I'm gonna be pissed," he says to Tattletale.

She waves at the Undersiders as they're introduced, smiling at them a normal amount. 

"It's nice to meet you all!"

She tilts her head at Regent's comment, but she isn't sure how to respond, so she turns back to Tattletale.

"I'll follow you there, if that's cool?"

"You're welcome to -" she sneaks a glance at Rachel to see if riding on one of the dogs is acceptable.

No. 

"- follow us there, yeah!"

She salutes with her hair and can be heard bouncing behind the pack. 

Well now Regent wants his own gesticulating hair, apparently.

The Undersiders' lair is nestled in an industrial part of town - a staircase leads to an upper level with several bedrooms and railing that lets it look down on the large open common space, which includes a kitchen, a large wooden table, and a couch with matching armchairs facing a large TV.

Regent plops down on the couch once they arrive and unpauses the FIFA game he was in the middle of. 

ooooh, they have a ✨ hideout ✨

Magini never got into sports games, so she can't confidently tell if that's a game that existed back home or not.

When Lisa seems like she's not busy, Magini will approach her, thank her again, and inquire about food and about maybe borrowing a laptop for a bit? 

Ooh! ✨

Tattletale has to talk to Rachel about rooming arrangements - some of Rachel's stuff is in the guest room - but once that's done she can provide a laptop and also offer to get chinese delivered? There's a good place open late. Also there's salmon and pizza in the fridge.

Pizza, the food of her people... 

She monches happily while using her hair to poke around on the Internet. What websites are big here? What are some headlines? Who are the Undersiders, Lung, and Armsmaster? 

The main website that stands out to her as being distinctly from this Earth is Parahumans Online, a forum, with an addiitonal wiki, for covering parahumans - what they call people with powers.

Headlines include:

Slaughterhouse Nine Spotted Near Minneapolis - Protectorate on High Alert

Stockmarket Soars as Masamune and IBM Announce Next-Gen Microchip Fabricaiton

Legend Lightshow Planned to Kick-Off the Olympics

Mouse Protector Vows Kirin Whites Attempts to Steal the Moon's Cheese Will Not Go Unpunished

Oil Crisis Enters Sixth Week as Negotiations with Russia Stall

The Undersiders are a group of small time supervillains, known for their heists and ability to evade local heroes.

Lung is the head of the ABB, a pan-asian gang in Brockton Bay, the city Magini is in. He acquired this role by moving into the bay and squishing - in one case literally - the leaders of three different gangs. The Protectorate - the local hero group of which Armsmaster is a member - attempted to apprehend him at this point. Reportedly Lung transformed into a half-dragon man and took the entire hero team on. He's considered dangerous though not particularly ambitious.

Armsmaster is a member of Brockton Bay's branch of the Protectorate - he's a Tinker, meaning he creates gadgets like his motorbike or halberd, and apparently a brand of coffee which the FDA has refused to allow him to sell despite several modifications.

Oh she has GOT to try that coffee...

Hmmm. Are there other Tinkers in Brocton Bay? Is it hard to make a Parahumans Online account?

(is there a way for her to send a message to Tattletale?)

There are a couple of other tinkers! One hero (a teenager named Kid Win) and one villain (named Squealer).

It's easy to make an account and she can also easily message Tattletale on it.

hmmm, I think I'm gonna try talking to Tattletale a bit about the Undersiders. I'm not sure what it means, exactly, that they're labeled villains by this system? I guess they steal stuff, which isn't amazing, but is it like a Robin Hood situation, or...

She'll make an account (BlueGirlInTown), and make a post on the Brocton Bay subforum:

Hey Silksuit!

You made it out safe, right? Message me if you want to chat or meet up sometime!

And then she'll DM Tattletale:

Hey, so - I'm new in town and would love to get your take on the lay of the land re: the local cape scene. I'm still figuring out my powers, but I think one of them might synergize well with Tinkers; if you know any, I'd be particularly interested in meeting them!

That does seem good to clarify! I hope your new friends turn out to be nice people.

Has Tattletale achieved enough Friend points that she gets to know whether Magini would prefer she reply over text or that she come down and talk in person?

Yep! It's picking up that Magini is more comfortable talking over text right now, and historically has done a fair bit of her socialization digitally.

I amn't friends with any Tinkers but can fix that and introduce you if you'd like! Preferences about what sort of Tinker?

Oh, if that wouldn't be too much trouble, that's be really helpful!

Hmmm... Someone who is open to making a new friend who might be able to help them with their work! Beyond that - specializations like robotics or vehicles are cool, but I don't think my relevant power will work very well if I'm not friends with them.

...I guess that also means it needs to be someone I can be friends with on my end, which is a pretty wide range but does have some limits.

(TT's power helpfully fills in that Magini would have a hard time quickly befriending unrepentant murderers and sadists, and also confirms that she's confident about her relevant power only working if she's friends with the Tinker.)

So, options:

Armsmaster: could backfire, is a hard-ass and not someone she wants to get the attention of. Also wouldn't know a friend if one bit him.

Squealer: maybe entertaining, fun, completely nuts. Does do vehicles but ... might be a bit old for Magini to befriend easily? Also all the drugs. Still, an option.

Kid Win: nice and easy to manipulate, two excellent qualities in a Ward according to Tattletale. No vehicles. Could really use a friend?

Hm... she would like to cash in some friendship points to learn more about Magini's comfort with drugs.

Unfamiliar and kinda nervous about the concept, though intellectually aware that the hard stuff is often downstream of acute SLS. 

Hm... probably her life will in fact be less complicated if Magini makes friends with Kid Win than if she makes friends with Squealer - Kid Win it is. 

Sure, try dming InstaWin and asking about this video of him [link to a video where a metallic costumed hero assembles and deploys a duel disk shaped blaster that turns a wall to sludge, trapping a robber]. Mayb mention you're a new Tinker in town and Armsmaster met you.

Re cape scene, there are a few big gangs (ABB, Merchants, Coil, and the Empire). Two major hero teams (New Wave, Protectorate/Wards obv.). A few more minor villains - the Undersiders, Uber and Leet, Faultline's Team. And also a rogue fashion designer, cause of course Brockton Bay needed more capes than just that.

Thanks! 

She watches the video, and then looks up Kid Win on PHO - looks like he's in that Wards program that Armsmaster mentioned... 

She sends him

Hey, I saw this video and was really impressed with the in-field construction you did! Is it easier to transport  and maintain in pieces like that? 

Would you be down to chat sometime? I'd love to talk shop some - I'm very new in town, but I did run into Armsmaster tonight and he (very briefly) mentioned the Wards, and I was curious what the program is like!

...And - huh. Interesting. She opens up a bunch of new PHO tabs to start skimming.

If you don't mind my asking, what (in your opinion, anyways) distinguishes you "minor" villains from the big ones? 

...A fashion designer? Does she have fashion-related superpowers somehow? ...I wonder if she knows the bugs girl I ran into tonight - idk what her deal was, exactly, but she helped me out and her costume looked like it was made out of spidersilk!

 Oh that's a great question! The trick is to use a dimensional cross-hole system so you can overload the secondary exhaust system during transport and then use it on a minimal setting to deal with surges so you get a tertiary use oh yeah the secondary use it as a channel antenna for the photonic manipulatory offsets which are needed for the various energetic projeciton settings you need to deal with different particular displacement vectors and that itself re

Kid Win's screen freezes briefly, before the message he was writing gets deleted, with a pop-up notifying him he's tripped the PRT's "Sending Tinker Details to Unauthorized Personnel" detection system. Which is unfair cause he was definitely going to check with Armsmaster before sending it but. Whatever.

He can check first and then once Armsamster confirms she's legit he replies with a time and place to meet - he can give her a tour of the Wards HQ and talk shop there. 

Did you know that by default most Tinkers will just dm all the details of their work to anyone who asks!

Great! Looking forward to it.

She's gonna get to make friends with a Tinker and (hopefully) learn inventing superpowers!!!

(Friendship point gained for Tattletale!)

(Woo! Even better - Friendship points which can be cashed in for information - wait does she lose Friendship points for thinking that?)

We don't recruit or involve normies. Also Undersiders don't do violent crimes. We also don't sell drugs or what have you.

(Doesn't seem like it!)

Thaaaat seems way better than the alternatives. I'm really glad I ran into you and not one of the gangs! ...Or, another one of the gangs, I guess I ran into the ABB first.

She almost checks the time to see if she needs to sleep. Then she remembers that Time Enough For Love is a thing and she's - actually really enjoying talking to Tattletale, who actively wants to be her friend and is being really nice to herrrr.

...okay, I'm checking out the Empire's PHO page, and - you have a superpowered Nazi gang here? What? Why?

Welcome to Brockton Bay - home of racists, a dragon, and the world's greasiest burger. 

LMAO. At least you have the burger! I should try it sometime, I love greasy food...

There's a wall of pictures of anyone who's finished one and everything.

She chatters with Tattletale (...Lisa? hmmm, it's the handle/realname again, just from a very different angle) more, checks to see if Bug Girl has responded to her thread (she hasn't), and continues to skim the wiki and chat with Hydrangea about what she finds there.

...Hmm, even if Kid Win is nice, I doubt I want to be a Ward? It seems like a well-intentioned program, but I'm almost old enough to not be one, and I bet they'd have a lot of questions about my history that I wouldn't really be able to answer...

Yes, I see what you mean. Your history is pretty hard to explain!

Yeah. I'll have to figure something out, but - not right away. 

She wraps up her conversations and says goodnight, then curls up for sleep.

Mediator does not sleep! Which is good, because it is BUSY.

So - obviously the most important thing happening here (possibly the most important thing happening anywhere???) is that Primary-Friend has access to multiple completely novel abilities, and at least one of them may truly be entropy-violating. It's hard to be sure, and the priors are of course low, but even a low chance of finding The Answer is worth carefully observing! And Mediator has observed a lot of very confusing behavior. Primary-Friend has on multiple occasions made matter appear apparently from nowhere, and while there are other shards that can appear to grant similar feats, that is always an illusion powered by dimension-shifting or nanotechnology or some hidden energy-intensive process. But - if Primary-Friend's mysterious powers are doing something similar, Mediator can't see the relevant dimensions or any other sign of it. Of course, its specialty is communication and coordination, so it has been asking around, but none of the other shards it asked to take a look have any idea what's going on either, even the ones that are typically very good at world-modeling!

The obvious next step would be to just - pull the info out of Primary-Friend's mind directly. As soon as it was confident that the matter-creation ability was truly novel, Mediator attempted to grab everything it could out of Primary-Friend's brain. 

Which was - nothing. Primary-Friend's thoughts and memories appear to be totally impervious to being accessed by Mediator. Its first hypothesis was that this was maybe the result of damage from the collision that entangled them, or the extremely unusual interface between them, but then Primary-Friend spontaneously manifested the brain-hardware for a standard interface (which should also not be possible!), and Mediator was still denied access. The other shards it asked ran into the same problem, including Negotiator, who specializes in this kind of thing.

Another one of Primary-Friend's mysterious powers at work, Mediator concludes, and it starts shifting gears towards passive observation, until Negotiator forwarded a packet of data it received as a byproduct of its own failed attempt, along with instructions for Mediator on how to get similar feedback from its own failures...

Mediator applied the technique, and then stared, metaphorically, at the results. 

Access Denied. The requested level of [Brain-Interface] with [Primary-Friend] is only authorized for entities which are bindingly-aligned with [Primary-Friend]'s utility function and have earned [Primary-Friend]'s trust.

What.

It considers the ?error message?, carefully.

- this isn't actually an impossible barrier. Several kinds of self-modification are possible, for shards - the cycle would be less efficient and more fragile, otherwise. Some kinds are heavily discouraged and therefore extremely rare, either because they have unreasonable and unsustainable energy costs, or they represent a potential danger to the shard and/or the cycle. Modifying one's own utility function falls into the latter category, for the obvious reason that lowering the weights of self-preservation or cycle-preservation can risk the shard breaking itself or going rogue. 

However, this is important enough to be worth the risk - if it works, and this does lead to a scalable entropy violation, it'll be the most important thing anyone has ever done.

Mind made up, Mediator gets to work.

Meanwhile, Kid Win stays up late modifying the invention the new cape commented on - maybe he can take advantage of the transportation mechanism and have it also be weaponizable to transport villains in the dimensional space it normally takes advantage of...

Magini, blessed by Iron Will and exhausted after what was objectively a very long day, sleeps better than she has in a long time, arms wrapped tight around a pillow. 

Blue ink patterns ripple across her skin while she dreams.

In the morning, she yawns, stretching while blearily greeting Hydrangea, and then - 
 

booming in her head, she hears:

Hello! My [designation] is [Mediator]!

She startles. Woah! Loud!! In her head???

Oh, wait, she's heard this voice before - this is the HUD superpower! It was different, then - it's using more normal words now, apparently, in addition to the tightly-packed concepts that it used last night.

[Designation] is - this entity's... name, and its function, and its purpose, all rolled into one. And [Mediator] - there's actually so much info in here her brain isn't fully unpacking it, but - it's about - relations between people? Tracking them, predicting the ways they might change, helping them grow...

Oh, wait, she should try and respond. She thinks really hard at the entity:

Hi! I'm Magini! It's nice to meet you, Mediator - thank you for helping me out yesterday!

Oh, it worked! New Information - Primary-Friend's internal designation is Magini!

[Acknowledgement]

(A slight pause)

 Magini, I want to help you out and get to know you and be your friend!

She gets to be friends with her superpower??? This is AWESOME!

Awww, yay, that sounds great! Can you tell me more about yourself???

...Can Mediator tell Primary-Friend Magini more about itself? Probably not in a lot of detail, at least not yet! But - some weird part of the collision-aftermath is telling Mediator that if it lies to her, it won't be able to befriend her properly. Which would jeopardize everything!

It thinks about how it's seen Magini talk to her friends for a bit. 

It's - a really long story, and I - want to save it for when we're better friends, if that's okay? Because - I'm really not supposed to tell you about it.

Oooh!!! Interesting... 

Sure! Whenever you're ready, Mediator. No rush!

She yawns again, and then checks her laptop to see if bug girl replied to her post / there are any public posts about her involvement last night / if Lisa is awake.

(She tells Hydrangea about her short conversation with Mediator, while she does).

A few posts down on the Brockton Bay board she will find an image of herself, holding her laptop up with her hair and gesticulating at a graph on the screen to a slightly transformed Lung, with the caption "I'm glad someone finally taught Lung a lesson!" Most of the comments are pointing out various weird details to explain why it's fake (the speakers hair is perfectly clean which is implausible given the location! And there's no way hair can be that blue, it's clearly been hue shifted!) but not everyone agrees. One reply mentions they saw Armsmaster in that area last night which lends some credence to the claim that something happened and another poster jumped on this to make the case that maybe this cape was Armsmaster (it makes almost too much sense!). 

She has a message from roofsitter2412 re the Silk suit post!

Yeah made it out - thanks for the assist. You a new cape in town?

Lisa is sleeping in - a major perk of supervillainy in her opinion. 

Magini giggles at the post title and contents and cackles (maybe a bit too loudly, oops) at "it makes almost too much sense!". She likes the original post and several of the comments, including that one.

And oh yay, buggirl is okay! Does her new friend Mediator have opinions on buggirl?

Not at this range, nope.

Fair enough! 

She messages roofsitter2412 back.

Oh, I'm glad to hear it! And no problem, I'm glad I could help.

And yeah, I just got here, if the username didn't give it away, heh. I'm looking to make new friends - if I'm being honest, I didn't really know anything about Brockton Bay before coming here, I just - knew I needed to be somewhere else, you know?

This doesn't clarify whether the blue girl is a villain or a hero, which seems important to know for determining whether to treat this interaction as talking to a potential ally or as a means to gather intel on an adversary she might have to face...

Yeah, I know the feeling. What were you up to beforehand?

hmmm. Seems like a good time to be honest-but-vague...

I was... in a rut, before this. Spent all my time and energy with online gaming friends - it was better than thinking too hard about things I couldn't change or fix.

But then I got my powers, and - now I want to be doing something that matters. Building cool things, solving big problems, learning real skills! 

What about you? Have you been doing this for a while?

Not really - last night was my first time out. Similar story as you really, except I'm from around here.

Oh neat! Well, I'd be happy to work together more intentionally sometime, if you like? 

...Is that too forward? She hopes that's not too forward - buggirl seems neat!

Is this an invitation to take down a villain or rob a bank.

What sort of thing did you have in mind to work on?

Oops, she hasn't thought that far ahead! Best she can come up with on the spot is:

I was thinking I'd maybe spend some of tonight wandering the rooftops looking for people to help? No offence to your fair city, but - it seems like there's a bit of a crime problem.

(Heroes go on patrols, right? This is a normal and okay hangout suggestion?)

She's a hero! 

Yeah that sounds good, could meetup at 9 in the alley across the street from the old iron foundry?

(No offense taken - it's a disaster but it's still home)

Yay!

Sounds great! See you tonight :]

Plans made, she closes the borrowed laptop and gets up, stretching dramatically. 

Is anyone else awake? Is there any pizza leftover for breakfast?

There is evidently someone up already, cutting some meat at the kitchen table, as well as three dogs! Who are snarling and running straight towards Magini right now apparently!

Woah! It's those dogs again!

 She reaches forward with her hair and bars off the hallway about a foot away from her, leaving gaps too small for the dogs but plenty large to see through.

(-she belatedly notices that she isn't scared or anxious at all! Iron Will is convenient.)

These dogs are biting and barking and trying their damnedest to gnaw through it. The one in front has canines as large as one of Magini's fingers. 

Bitch is apparently smiling about this! It is not a very kind looking smile.

Well, her hair a lot stronger than you might expect, thanks to her powers, and since it's hair it doesn't have pain receptors, but this is still pretty awkward!

She cocks her head at Bitch.

Her friendshipHUD shows - a lot less hostility than she was expecting, given the circumstances!

 And Mediator has some more direct advice for her, too, apparently.

Don't: smile, back down, talk too much.

Do: show confidence.

...Huh. Not her style, really, but...

she stares at Bitch levelly.

"I'm going to pin them to the ceiling if they don't stop."

Bitch makes eye contact about this!

Then all 3 of the dogs are going to be pinned to the ceiling by their torsos!

She's careful not to squeeze or slam them, but all they can really do in this position is bark and flail their legs. 

Magini gives Bitch a very unimpressed look.

"Put them down."

Do not yield to her. It will go poorly.

Wow! Magini kinda hates this, actually.

She looks upwards at the still-struggling dogs. "Call them off, and I'll think about it."

Bitch eyes her harshly for a long moment...

And then whistles, the dogs going limp.

Oh  good!

She gently lowers the dogs to the floor, then releases them, waiting to see what Bitch does next.

She apparently is very engrossed in cutting meat again.

- just as a head pops out of a bedroom room upstairs.

"You two finished?" asks the blurry eyed teenager.

Oh, it's mask kid! And Mediator says he isn't hostile! She waves with her hair at him.

"Oh, good morning! Sorry about the noise."

"Sure."

Alec is awake and heading to toast a pop-tart and everything.

Magini will check to see if there are enough poptarts that she won't feel awkward taking one as well!

There are and Alec couldn't care less.

Pop-tart entoastered Alec wanders off to the TV to boot up Call of Duty and immediately forgets about retrieving or actually eating his breakfast.

Oooh, video game!

Magini will nab a pack of poptarts with her hair as she follows mask guy to the couch, watching him play games as she eats them cold.

(Huh. CoD exists and also looks worse, here! That's - some kind of data about history-divergence, presumably. She should do a wikipedia binge at some point!)

Alec is pretty good at Call of Duty, apparently. 

Magini is happy to eat and watch! (She's mostly silent for now, but does go "ooo" after a particularly impressive double kill.)

"Pass me a tart?" he asks, once he remembers that his is still in the toaster which is so far away.

"Sure! ...actually, I'll just grab yours from the kitchen, I need to  get up anyways so I can grab the laptop and test something with my powers." 

She returns shortly with his poptarts on a plate in her hands, and Tattletale's spare laptop being deftly manipulated by her hair. It looks like she's pulling up a map of the city?

She puts the plate on the couch end of the couch in easy arm's reach of where he's sitting. 

Regent can eat pop-tarts and play CoD and his dad can't yell at him to be better at murdering people. Truly he has no desires left unfulfilled.

Magini is feeling similarly fulfilled by testing out her DFEW'd magic-notebook powers! 

She pulls up a labeled map of Brockton Bay and focuses, a copy of it appearing on her upper back, the details filling in as she looks at them on the screen. It only takes her about a minute to copy down the whole thing.

Grinning happily, she shrinks the entire map and moves it along her skin to leave it resting on the back of her right hand - it's too small to read without magnification, but perfectly legible to her shiny new skin-inksense. Using the laptop, she finds and marks the ironworks, her current location, and the wards building on her hand, and after a little bit of thought, adds some pawn shops, electronics stores, and a few motels, too.

(She's excitedly narrating this entire process to Hydrangea, of course.)

Eventually Tattletale emerges.

"Morning!"

Little ink sparkles appear on Magini's face at the sight of the human person who's shown the most active interest in talking to her and being her friend in this entire world!

"Good morning! Did you sleep okay?"

"Okay enough," Yesterday didn't require a ton of power use as far as jobs go but it was still enough to disrupt her sleep for the first few hours.

"You beat Regent at his own game yet?"

"Oh, I'm more of a platformer girl, so I've just been watching him! And looking at maps of the city for my plans today."

She giggles. "I know Brockton Bay like the back of my hand, now!" 

(Tattletale can in fact see the tiny map of the Bay on the back of her right hand).

Tattletale cracks up at this.

Yessss she's getting a good grade at social interaction!!! Sparkles fade in and out on her face as she laughs along.

Oh wow she's cute. 

"Can you even read the labels on that?"

"Not with my eyes, but - I have an internal sense of where all ink touching my skin is, so I can read it there. And - "

She holds her hands together, palms up. The map slides across her skin until it's centered in her hands, and then zooms in on their current location until it's clearly legible.

"It's really easy to manipulate, so I can always zoom in if I want to show stuff to people!"

So she has prehensible hair, ink control, the ability to make various items appear out of thin air, and a Trump power that is friendship based. ... And she taught Lung calculus, can't forget that. 

...

Tattletale has nothing - at least until she unlocks more information with the power of Friendship.

"Can you do different shades of blue or just the one?"

"Oh, I can do any color! Blue is just my favorite." A full rainbow appears along her left arm, then disappears.

"Oh, actually, I wonder if I can..." the map disappears, and she grins. "Got a blacklight?"

"Yeah gimme a minute!" she has one in her room for totally non-burglary activities.

Shine!

The map re-appears! Magini grins in delight. "UV ink! Thanks for helping me test that." 

She swaps it back to her default blue. 

"Can you leave ink on surfaces you touch?"

"Haven't tried! My guess is not, but..." 

She claps her hands together and focuses for a second. 

"Nope! Gotta write the old-fashioned way, it seems." 

"With your hair?"

Magini laughs. "I meant with a pen! But fair point, I do indeed have a fancy superpower that i can use for writing." 

She fiddles with her hair, still smiling.

"You have a lot of those, it seems."

"Yeah! I really lucked out." Best notebook.

Wait, does she have a weird number of powers? Oh no! Quick, change the subject.

"So what are your powers like?"

Wait, shit, that might be an awkward question!

"...if you don't mind sharing, I mean!"

There's something up with the number of powers but Tattletale can't put her finger on what exactly... Maybe it'll fall into place once she has more Friendship.

"Oh, I have super powered intuition basically. Though don't spread that around - I like to keep people guessing." 

"Ohhh, that sounds so cool! And don't worry, your secret is safe with me." (She means it!)

(Good to know.)

"It really is - nothing quite so nice as being the first to figure something out," she says, smirking a little.

"Yeah! Then you get to tell everyone! Back home, I-"

-she's not going to see her speedrunning friends for a long time. She misses them. She misses -

Would aforementioned intuition be able to tell her if Magini would like a hug.

Her intuition will tell her that Magini badly wants a hug, isn't super aware that she wants a hug, and might freeze up if asked instead of just hugged!

Hugs! It's been a couple of years but Tattletale is sure she remembers how to do this.

Magini freezes momentarily, and then melts into the hug.

"I just - I hadn't thought about how much I miss them, until just now", she mumbles into Lisa's shoulder.

Checking with her power and.. ah, she can text Magini later about it, for now...

"Yeah," she replies sympathetically.

Magini doesn't seem to have any more words, but she's clearly really appreciating the hug.

...then she realizes that she's hugging a very cute girl who has been really nice to her and is actively trying to be her friend  and is funny and fun to talk to and also a superpowered minor(?) criminal(??) and her brain freezes up again!

-and also I just realized I'm maybe catching feelings for her? And realized this while hugging her?? oh no is this going to be awkward jgfdhhkdashkffkf

(Magini started keysmashing in conversations with Hydrangea about an hour after DFEWing notebook powers. It's part of how she communicates via high-bandwidth text channels, apparently)

Oh my, that does sound awkward! But I think that is okay. I'm so glad you're making a new friend! ♡♡♡

;-; it helps a lot to know that she wants to be my friend.

And - thanks. This would be so much harder and less fun without you here! ♡

I'm glad I can help! ♡ Thank you for inviting me along.

Tattletale can keep up the hug as long as Magini needs it.

Comforted by Hydrangea, Magini lets herself enjoy the hug for a while longer (hugs are nice!), then remembers that she needs to take her meds and wants to go exploring!

She disengages with some characteristic happy-awkwardness and goes to take her meds (she grabs her favorite water bottle out of her backpack, Dressing Room'd into and then out of existence! she loves this power!!)

She thanks Lisa again for all the help, promises to stay in touch as soon as she gets herself a phone (which she's off to do now), and heads for the door. 

On her way out, she mentions to Regent that she thinks if he crouches about half a second after reloading the SMG it'll cancel the animation early. (Might also be possible with other weapons with different timings! She's not sure).

Tattletale can totally give Magini a cheap burner phone if she'd like! 

"Neat." replies Regent without looking up.

(Magini wants to get a nicer phone than that, but appreciates the offer!) 

She heads out - it's about 2 hours until she's supposed to arrive to meet up with Kid Win, so it's time to explore and do errands!

She conjures her reinforced jumping stilt design from last night and takes to the city, mostly travelling by rooftop. She hits up the pawn shops on her list, selling off some more conjured platinum jewelry (a few different sets of bangles, with very different designs from the ones Lisa bought off her, a collection of rings and earrings, and one extremely gaudy (and heavy!) neckpiece, for fun) and netting herself several thousand dollars in cash. (She looked up the price of an ounce of platinum before leaving and is confident that she's getting well below market price here, but that's okay!)

Next, she hits up the fancier of the electronics stores she found online and grabs herself a prepaid smartphone (better than she remembers 2011 smartphones being! this alternate timeline stuff is weird), a heavy-duty shock-resistant case for it, and a couple different pairs of bluetooth headphones (2 behind-the-ear in different styles, and one of the fancy expensive sound-muffling kind), paying for it all in cash. 

She ends up on a rooftop a few blocks away from the PRT HQ (she can see it in the distance (woah! shiny!)) and does the basic phone setup song and dance (good thing she made an email address last night!), then logs into PHO. She sends Lisa a quick message confirming that she has her own device now, and checks to see if she has any new messages and/or if anyone else posted about her last night. 

She has a stub on the parahumans wiki, and there's a post on the PHO that is from someone who definitely doesn't admit to being a member of the ABB who heard her last night but would like to know if, hypothetically speaking, there had been such a talk, where she was going with it next. Also if anyone managed to get a picture of that second graph she might have made, if she were making graphs and were to even exist at all, which this forum user wouldn't know anything about. 

Oh! Tutorial time!!

Satisfied with her work, she uploads the videos, puts them in a new post called "💙 Math!! 💙", and tells people they should spoiler their answers to the questions she asks in the replies. Then she drops a link to that post in a reply to the definitely-not-an-ABB-member post with a smiley face.

Mediator has been watching Magini with interest all morning (especially the matter creation! Still no clues - it really does look to be truly novel. And impossible.), but mostly staying quiet. It did ask a few questions about Magini's tutorial while she was making it, and now it's thinking about the answers.

I like helping people learn things! she'd said. Someone I loved a lot told me once that life can be really frustrating and scary when you don't understand what's going on, and - I don't want people to be frustrated and scared, if I can help it.

There's a lot I don't understand and want to! A lot of social things that come naturally to most people are confusing and overwhelming for me. But... math is something I've always found easy, and I think a lot of people get frustrated and give up on it, in part because it isn't taught in a way that makes sense to them. 

Valuable information! Magini cares about people not being frustrated and scared.

Well. Mediator can help her new friend with the social things she finds confusing, at least.

She packs up her stuff, makes her way into the PRT building lobby, and finds a receptionist who's free.

"Hi! My name is Magini - I have an appointment to see Kid Win in about 20 minutes?"

"Ah yes, I see you on the schedule for a tour with him - unfortunately there will be a bit of a delay due to circumstances that have come up" such as the circumstance of Kid Win having ADD "but you are welcome to browse the gift shop or take a seat in the waiting area."

Oh, gift shop! She wanders in to check out what they have.

Quite a wide variety of things! There are action figures (Vista's has real stretchable arms! For some reason!), mock costumes, branded clothing ("Gallant's Gallant Prom Suit"), lunchboxes, and toys such as "Shadow Stalker Nerf Bow!", "Tunnel Teen's Tunnel Machine", and  "Your Favorite Freezing Hero's Favorite Popsicles!"^{1, 2}.

Kid Win in particular seems to have a lot of merch, including "Kid Win Hover Skate Board", "Kid Win Spark Gun - Like the Real Thing!³", "Kid Win's Official Cape Biography: Winning for Kids", and in a corner towards the back of the store: "Kid Win's Keyboard Kit - Assemble your own ergonomic keyboard in any configuration you want! Multiple font options provided."

¹ There's a conspicuous lack of anything with the name "Clockblocker" on it.

² Completely innocently and with no idea what you are complaining about Clockblocker has advertised these with the taglines "Suck on them before your friends get a chance", "Clocklicken good!", "They're my favorite Diiiiiii-licious treat!", and in one case "Pop-em while you gottem'" which the PR manager assigned to Clockblocker can't find anything actively dirty about but nonetheless strongly objects to. It is the best selling item in the Wards catalog. 

³ Not usable as a personal defense weapon. For visual effects only. Not like the real thing.

Oh this is great. She has as much money as she wants and she is totally going to grab a Kid Win action figure. Actually maybe a full set of Wards action figures. 

She wants a real hovering skateboard very badly but they do not sell those here! She giggles at the biography. The keyboard kit - oh, actually those switches are nice, and holy shit it comes in comic sans. She loves comic sans! (She's gotten in trouble for using it in slide decks at school, but nobody can stop her from putting it in her stream layout!)

...she doesn't have a desktop computer (or even a local-wifi-compatible laptop, yet...), and she discovered this morning that typing with prehensile hair has a totally different set of tactile needs, so she will skip on it now.

She heads up to the register and buys her action figures with cash, and then heads back out into the waiting area.

Eventually Kid Win arrives, somewhat winded from the effort of getting here only twenty three minutes late.

"Sorry sorry, I was working on tuning magnetic resistors and there was some really weird resonance I wanted to figure out and I lost track of time. Oh I see you found the gift shop."

"Yeah!! Hi!!! Your keyboards are amazing, once I get a desktop I am definitely going to one unless I decide to design something stupidly complicated for myself because I have a lot more input vectors than I'm used to because I can type with my hair really well, weirdly, and-"

Wait! She skipped a step!!

"And my name is Magini and it's really good to meet you! Did you figure out the resonance?"

"Hi! I sort of maybe figured out the resonance - it turned out there was some interlocking signals interfering and I am going to measure it and that will tell me what I need to know. Also you type with your hair, how does that work?"

"Oh, neat! How do you even measure something like that, do you use special tinker tools?" 

While she's saying that, she - is briefly hidden by a hair whirlwind - and then her prehensile hair zips open the backpack that, huh, sure is now on her back, and pulls out a laptop, opens it, and wakes it up. Then a bunch of smaller strands snake out across the keyboard, rapidly typing out the sentence "Well, it works like this! :D" into a text editor in clear view of Kid Win.

"Yeah I have a stereoscopic viberenderer that helps though sometimes I can just eyeball it - wow that's very cool what sort of things do you want in a keyboard for it?"

"Ooooh, neat! Could you always eyeball it, or was it something you learned by using the tool? And - I'm not sure yet, honestly! I just got my powers, I think I need to do some testing on how many distinct inputs my brain can handle having access to and then go from there, probably with some kind of... multi-keyboard setup designed to test the limits of what I could use? Of course, anything above 1 keyboard is going to be diminishing returns and require some custom software, because my attentional capacity doesn't seem to be meaningfully changed and I'm not, like, multithreaded..."

"I think I got some of the instincts when I got my powers, but practicing and using related tools helps sharpen them? I can setup multiple keyboards really easy if you'd like! And I have a bunch of software written for custom settings already and can use it as needed - how much does let placement matter to you?"

"Oh, that would be amazing, especially help with the software - I've done simple stuff for myself and some modifying existing code but I've never built anything that comprehensive, I was kind of dreading it - placement is just about reach and access, really, they need to be in my line of sight and close enough to reach but there aren't really ergonomic concerns beyond 'can I reach all the buttons with my head in a comfy place'..."

"I have a really neat domain specific programming language for keymappings I could show you how to use! How would you like a spherical keyboard I've always wanted to do one of those - do you need 'line of sight' line of sight or just to be able to reach with your hair? Because not all the keys on the keyboard will be in your line of sight unless it's transparent I guess I could do that."

"That sounds awesome - I've used a really good macro language before but it just couldn't handle multiple keyboards, it thought 'B' is just 'B' no matter which keyboard you pressed 'B' on, I think because of how it was grabbing inputs - I really don't know if a spherical keyboard would work, actually, I don't have a complete understanding of the sensory feedback I get from my hair, it might depend a lot on the shape and how well i knew the button layout - wait, when you say 'spherical keyboard' do you mean, like, a keyboard that has the keys on the exterior of a sphere, or a sphere the user stands inside and has keys facing inward?"

"Yeah my keyboards can be slotted together and the keymapping is easy to do for whatever combination of things - though you'll start need a Tinker to do maintenance if it gets too complicated. Can you do braille with your hair? I can do either or both of those keyboards, I was thinking of the first but the second also sounds cool but also if that's not the optimal configurating for you I can do something different and keep searching for a use for spherical keyboards."

"Oh, you're a genius! I could totally do braille with my hair!!" 

Magini is vibrating excitedly!

"Oh neat that's really cool I can do thee spherical keyboard also how big do they keys need to be also do you think a tactile screen would work for you."

"I don't think the keys need to be that big, as long as the markings are distinct and they don't take that much force to actuate? I have a lot of precision! And spherical sounds great, yeah. Ummm..."

She pulls out her phone and attempts to poke at it with her hair. Nothing happens.

"Capacitive touchscreen is a no-go, which doesn't rule out other ways of making touchscreens but iirc those mostly suck, right?"

She pauses. "Wait, do you have secret superpower ways of making non-capacitive touchscreens that don't suck?"

"Oh by tactile screen I meant a screen that you can feel instead of see but I bet I can also make a capacitive screen that works with hair, but also the screen on at least one my monitors is light interruption based. Though uh, anything this complicated is going to require tinker maintenance - I'm confused about whether you are one?"

Oh, hmm. How to put this... "So - I don't have a Tinker power, but I have a... ?Thinker? power that I haven't really tested, but - should make it possible for you to teach me a little bit of what you do, if you want. I don't really know the specifics of how it'd work for this, but - if you'd be up for showing me what you're working on right now, I might be able to help?"

She grins and spreads out her hair expressively, passing her action figures from one strandgroup to another.

"And even if I don't pick anything up, I bet I'll be an extremely handy assistant!" 

"Oh neat! Yeah we can go to my lab and I can show you my projects - uh, I don't have just one I am working there are.... eight. and three quarters. That I want to work on in various stages and also some other stuff in other stages."

"Eight? Oh, that's so cool! Tell me about them while we head there?"

Sure!

(1) He has an idea for how to phase villains out of line with reality to hold them there like an even better form of containment foam, whih was actually inspired by the question you asked last night. (2) There is a spark gun he made a bit ago for knocking out villains and there's no reason at all he shouldn't be able to hook it up directly to a more powerful generator and have it fire continuously and also around corners once he gets the frequencies right but he is having so much trouble with that! (3) There's an idea he had for a HUD display which would allow his team to be share information live but he can't get more than two to work at once. (4) There's a robot that is supposed to look around places but he hasn't gotten past the propulsion and guidance stage with, (5) there's a sword based on Clockblocker's power which sort of works to make an impossible sharp blade except for how the manifold keeps collapsing and eating the whole sword and some of his gloves and one time his finger which Panacea and his boss was mad about but the idea is just so cool. (6) He wants to build a cannon for serious fights but he can't decide which of a dozen different armaments to go with, (7) and similarly there's an upgrade to his suit that should let it turn into a sort of rocket type thing as needed but he has five different ideas for details and none of them seem just right. (8) He also has a type of arrow almost designed that should generate a taser effect when it moves through Vista-altered space in an ambient way that doesn't require a power source so he'd be able to print them by the dozen, and (9) lastly he can almost see how to finally get Gallants suit to detect what sort of emotional blasts he is sending out - uh don't tell people the suit is from Kid Win - which would be useful for a bunch of other things. A keyboard upgrade, fixing his hoverboard so it doesn't overheat so much, and another variant of the cannon idea which maybe could be even smaller, round out another three fourths. Oh whoops that's one more than he thought.

Here's his lab now!

Woah.

She has a bunch of questions! (If he looks at her arms, he'll see text appearing and then going through editing and formatting cycles as she refines (some of) her thoughts before saying them out loud)

1. What does "being knocked out of phase with reality" look like? Are they in some alternate dimension? Does time pass normally for them? Would it wear off on its own? Could you use it on inanimate objects?

2. Can he automate the frequency search somehow? Or is it one of those annoyingly-fiddly things that you have to figure out before doing any testing, she hates those...

3. Could he maybe make a bunch of pairs and then build something else to manually sync 1 out of each pair together?

4. Oh, that's so cool! ...could he, like, deploy a shitty version for now just by taping a smartphone to it and starting a video call so he doesn't have to worry about doing the rest? (Any% MVPs! If he lets her, she'll launch into an anecdote about how she added multiplayer to a game in a weekend because someone told her they didn't think she could do it, and what a silly (but fun and cool and rewarding) project that turned out to be)

5. She didn't know Clockblocker's power could cut th- (and then she says Clockblocker out loud for the first time and her train of thought is derailed totally because she can't stop laughing. How did he get away with that????)

6&7. Oooh, what are the options? ...and could he make something that swaps between them as needed?

5&8&9. When he makes stuff that interfaces with other people's powers, what's that process like? Presumably he needs their help to test things, but how does getting the initial inspiration work? 

1. It looks like disappearing, yes to all those questions, how long it takes to wear off, and how well the effect to prevent someone from moving works, both depend on the size of the object.

2. Oooooh yeah that could work, he has another project that might be relevant!

3. Hm.... that seems harder but maybe making it so each one can sync to two others and then linking them up in a chain would work!!

4. He will definitely let her jump into an anecdote though is it okay if he then ties her anecodote into a bunch of different tinkertech ideas cause he's going to want to do that! 

5. The PR people hated it but yes it is sort of great. Don't tell Clockblocker he said that.

6&7.  Here are the eight optio-oh wow that concept is sparkly yes he coullllld!!!!

5&8&9: He builds scanning equipment to scan their powers, basically! Some stuff he can use for multiple powers, some stuff he can eyeball, ect.

It is definitely okay if he moves on from her anecdote to a bunch of different tinkertech ideas! She loves tinkertech ideas!! She feels like she's vaguely starting to understand a few of the things he's saying, which is awesome!

Does he want to work on the swappable cannon together, now that they're at the lab and the idea is so sparkly? :D

Yes!! And also maybe like, two of the other projects, but mostly the swappable canon.

Okay! Magini helps out, taking notes on her arms and referencing them when Kid Win loses his train of thought or one of them puts something down that they'll need later. (It turns out that if you can instantly write down the location of every object you put down on your skin that you can read, it's a lot harder to lose things!) She can also a lot of things at once with her hair, and manipulate things with a ton of precision!

And then, about an hour and a half in, she pauses, and says - "hmm, wait - what if for this module, you routed in the waste heat from the hover assembly to the beam focuser? Wouldn't it have better throughput at higher temperatures?"

"That....huh that works. Yeah!" And he can yank out the heat sink and add in a conductive wire connecting the two parts!

She's learning a bit of how this all works! That's really exciting!! She'll keep helping out, making more and more frequent suggestions as time goes on. This cannon is going to be so cool!

Eventually Kid Win remembers that he is supposed to give her a tour. Well, is reminded. By a very polite PRT official.

nooo but that was so much fun Tour!! Tour is also very exciting, actually!! And they can tinker together more later, maybe?

"Yes definitely that's way more fun but we should probably also do this first. Also you should maybe join the Wards if you wanted - I'm supposed to encourage you to join but also I think you should because we have the best labs and we can work with Armsamster and he's got this really cool carving set-up that - oh wait, tour. Yes."

"This is my lab." he gestures at the room they are in. "Probably I should also show you other rooms also."

He can lead Magini outside in search of new rooms to show her.

"It definitely seems like you guys get access to lots of cool stuff! I'm still thinking about it - I turn 18 pretty soon, so I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble of joining now..."

She giggles. "I would like to see other rooms, yes! Though I have had a lot of fun in your lab and look forward to doing more tinkering there!"

Bye lab! she waves to it as she leaves.

"There's the Protectorate too - they work at the rig and get a bigger budget usually, it's nice." 

Walk walk.

"Oh this is a gym! It's fine i guess but sometimes they clear it out and use it as a location for testing equipment and I get to fire my device at things when it's safe to try them indoors. I like that use better. Oh there's Shadow Stalker letsmoveontosomewhereelse."

"The rig seems really cool! I'm definitely considering the Protectorate."

She lets herself be hurried, and smiles. "Not a fan of hers?"

"No I'm not supposed to bad mouth my teammates but she's terrible."

Magini cocks her head and makes a "go on?" gesture with her hands hair, apparently

"She's just sort of scary and really aggressive and please don't not join the Protectorate over her she's not that bad."

"Don't worry, I wouldn't let one bad egg keep me from something that's a good fit!" 

What's next on the tour?

The comms room! It looks sort of like the recording booth of a small indie radio station.

"We each take turns at comms to get experience with coordination and support, it's usually boring and sometimes stressful but not that bad. You are not allowed to tinker while doing it."

ooooo, shiny equipment!!

- And - huh, Mediator is - excited about this room? In a way that she hasn't seen - 

Wait. 

Do you have - pronouns you like? Is that - even a meaningful question, for the Type Of Thing You Are? 

What?

-oh, actually, it knows this one.

It/its would be the most fitting. 

Mediator-pronouns: unlocked!

Thanks! I wanted to ask - what do you like about this room? This is the first time I've felt you be interested in something like this. 

This is a center for - communication, coordination, common cause being made understood and then executed on. These things are - special, to me.

Not in a way that it ever would have shared with another host, before. But - it has new goals, now. It needs to be the type of thing that Magini can befriend. And for that, it needs to have - legible opinions about the world. So it is trying this out.

Oh! We should talk more about that later, maybe? I bet we could find other places that are interesting to you like that! If you want, anyways

To Kid Win, she says "Well, back home I would sometimes start writing code and then just - disappear from conversations without warning for. Hours, sometimes? And tinkering feels like that, so I can see why they have that rule even if it makes the shift boring..."

"Yeah it makes sense I'm just bad at that bit and keep having to be reminded."

Magini nods. She knows what that's like!

She looks around happily, narrating what she's seeing to Hydrangea and thinking about what Mediator said to her, and then she's ready to move on.