It was a long three days spent inside the secretive underground lab that Lightforge had built for himself. More than once the occupants had considered leaving and wandering around just for a change of pace. Unfortunately, there were good reasons for why they had decided to stay inside while training. Reasons that didn’t go away just because they were bored.
This left them with quite the quandary: they had three days to kill for every time they spent three hours training. That was more than enough time to drive yourself insane if you couldn’t find ways to entertain yourself.
Each of the three found their own ways of coping with the situation, to varying degrees of success.
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Day 1: Lightforge
Lightforge honestly had the easiest time of the three by far. He was inside his own lab and it was stocked full of parts for him to experiment and build with. Even without the training sessions, he would likely be doing the same thing anyway.
His first task was to replace the reactor that had previously been powering the lab. He’d added a few lights around to make the space workable, but it wasn’t an ideal solution.
The problem was that the reactor had been built from rare and expensive parts, relative to his level. And he couldn’t scrounge anything from the original since it had been turned into a core component for the emitter. Even if he could remove it, he wasn’t willing to risk it.
That left him with a few options, but most of them were bad. He had plenty of batteries meant to fuel his various creations, after all. The trouble came from trying to recharge them. A lot of this world’s parts included some amount of built-in solar charging. It wasn’t enough to run anything significant, but it made for a decent backup.
That stopped being true if you were trying to live underground. He was currently working from the idea of just using solar power during the times when they would be outside. The trick would be to make a system that could provide three days worth of charge in just three hours.
He was sitting in the brightest part of the lab, staring at a small pile of solar cells and wire. He needed the array to be large enough to do its work but simple enough that it wouldn’t take too long to set up or take down. The trade-offs were frustrating and he was starting to get annoyed about the whole thing.
This time he was determined to make it work. Slowly and smoothly he was taking the solar cells and arranging them into a complex arrangement, held in place by sections of stiff wire. It was a huge pain to assemble, but once it was done it should work like origami, folding and unfolding with ease.
For the moment, it looked more like a modern art installation. His first attempts had been rough and had eventually fallen apart, but now he was confident. He’d been assembling the device for nearly an hour when Sunbird sauntered by and tilted her head at the curious sight.
“That’s cool,” she said, “I figured you were just going to tap into the power lines in the sewer, but that’s much cooler.”
She wandered away as Lightforge froze before smashing the delicate structure to pieces.
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Day 2: Gray Guardian
The healer of the group wasn’t generally susceptible to boredom. They didn’t mind peace and quiet, and typically preferred it. They were learning the hard way that there’s a big difference between being quiet because you prefer it and being quiet because you don’t have a choice.
From a detached perspective, that wasn’t fair. After all, Gray Guardian was certainly not Anne Frank; there was no reason to sneak about and stay absolutely silent. The thick concrete that surrounded them made that unnecessary. But the atmosphere around them certainly made it feel like they needed to stay quiet.
Lightforge was silent as he worked away on his projects, moving from one to the next with little rhyme or reason. There were extended parts of the day where it appeared that he had completely forgotten about the others existing.
And as for Sunbird? She was suspiciously quiet, like a puppy right after taking a dump on the floor. She was definitely up to something, but the healer had no interest in trying to find out what.
Instead they decided to focus on themself and push the limits of their abilities. Between synergy abilities and hidden abilities, there was a lot more to discover than they would have initially thought. Any advantage that they could get would be greatly appreciated.
Their first thought was simple: detect people around them. There had been too many incidents where someone they knew had been jumped and either killed or nearly killed. If there was some way to detect ambushes before they happened, it could be completely game changing.
The key would be their synergy skill, Zone of Blessing. It let them extend their buffs to anyone within their barrier. That was plenty useful on its own, but it came with a side benefit. It allowed them to detect everyone within their barrier, as they immediately became targets for the ability.
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They sat cross-legged on the floor and cleared their mind. A bubble shield appeared around them, glowing with soft white light. Their thoughts slowed and calmed, replaced with focus on the barrier itself. In a very real way, it was simply an extension of their own body. They planned to treat it that way.
It was faint in the back in their mind, but they could feel the surface of the barrier as it swirled around them. They put their mental focus on the barrier and started to gently push out against it.
Inch by inch, the barrier began to creep outward, pushed away by the healer’s will. It wasn’t easy; it didn’t want to grow beyond its normal size. But they persevered and maintained their mental focus, steadily growing the range that the barrier could cover.
The exclamation from the other end of the lab was the only warning before the entire space filled with the din of crashing metal against concrete. Gray Guardian’s concentration broke and their shield contracted in an instant. It didn’t stop when it got to its normal size, either.
The result was a very annoyed healer trapped in a ball not quite large enough to fit them inside. Even though they immediately dismissed the shield, that did little to improve their mood.
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Day 3: Sunbird
Sunbird had similar ideas to Gray Guardian about how to spend her time. She wanted to explore her abilities, but not necessarily to increase her usefulness. She was a hammer, and she was content with having a powerset whose only improvements could be equated to “make the hammer bigger.”
It might not be clever, but it was a skillset that would always be needed. So why was she focused on exploring her powers? That was simple.
Because she was bored and couldn’t think of anything better to do. She’d spent some time exploring the little underground complex that Lightforge had built for himself. It was impressive that he’d managed to create such a space without anyone noticing. And it didn’t take long for her to notice the little secrets that weren’t really hidden.
The main space was the lab, which was a decent size to accommodate the building and experiments that he ran down here. What he had not initially told them about were the narrow side tunnels that spread out in all directions from the main chamber. They ran beneath the street to various gizmos that he had installed beneath the neighborhood.
She had no idea what any of them did, and Lightforge had been smart enough not to include any big red buttons. That would have been too much for her to restrain herself against.
The gadgeteer was lucky that she wasn’t particularly interested in whatever he was building down here. She was more interested in the smooth concrete walls. With nothing else in the tunnels to distract from them, they pulled her attention. They were just sitting there, plain and boring.
That was when she’d had her brilliant idea. She raised a hand in front of her and focused. In moments her palm was glowing with a golden light that pulsed and sparked. The energy wasn’t meant to be held, it was meant to be used, to be unleashed. She was just going to use it a little unconventionally.
She reached out and firmly pressed her glowing hand against the smooth concrete. The wall hissed and smoked for a few moments until the light faded and she pulled her hand away. It revealed a shallow depression in the wall in the exact shape of her hand. The concrete was darkened around the edges, making the new detail easier to see.
She couldn’t help but break out into a wide grin before calling up more energy. This time she only allowed it to flow into a single finger, a narrow point that she hoped to use for all kinds of interesting things.
When Lightforge came to tell her that the emitter was finally charged, he found in a hallway that she was quickly turning into an art gallery. She was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as she used a finger-width beam of energy to carve doodles into it.
She’d been working all day, getting the hang of using the small, precise beam instead of her normal attacks. It was relaxing and almost meditative to hear the sizzle of the concrete and watch her creations slowly come into being all around her. She was quite pleased with herself, in all honesty.
She was less pleased when cracks spread from her fine pieces of art, quickly breaking the ceiling into sections. She tried to scramble to her feet but she simply wasn’t quick enough to dodge the ensuing rain of dust and debris.
It was possible that she hadn’t thought her plan all the way through.
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In a flash of rainbow light, the empty ruins of a building were made whole. Four thugs sat around a table playing cards in the front room while the real business was taken care of upstairs. The enforcers knew their role in the operation, and it was very simple: stand guard and hit anyone who wasn’t welcome.
It was the easiest job in the world, considering that no one outside their gang knew about the building. They’d been squatting there for weeks, right under the heroes’ noses, and they were none the wiser. The only work they’d had was to chase off a lone reporter who’d been sniffing around the area. They were good at their job and had put a deep seated fear into the man; he wouldn’t be talking to anyone.
The walls around them exploded inward, sending the guards flying from their game and raising the alarm for the rest of the gang. They flooded down the stairs to find three figures tearing a path through everything placed in front of them.
The figures flew through the gang members, tearing them down with a fury and ruthlessness that was decidedly unheroic. Soon the guards weren’t trying to join the fray anymore, they were simply trying to flee. Leave the intruders to the bosses, who were all much more powerful than the rank and file.
The intruders didn’t simply let them leave, however. Sunbird crowed and whooped as she whirled around and began blasting the fleeing criminals. Those who tried to attack found themselves stymied by the walls of glowing energy that appeared in front of them, courtesy of Gray Guardian. The healer was even using the barriers as weapons, making them appear right in front of knees or faces so the bad guys ran into them.
And Lightforge? He was ignoring the criminals entirely, as he had a different job to do. He was sprinting around the ground floor of the building, swinging his hammer with all his might each time that he came to one of the columns holding up the higher floors.
With a workmanlike efficiency he strode around, knocking out the foundations of the very building that he was standing in. It wasn’t long before the building groaned and began to collapse.
Sunbird and Gray Guardian were safe within one of the healer’s shields, while Lightforge had his enhanced shield emitter to protect him.
All three laughed and cheered as they climbed from the rubble and headed toward their next mission. After all their time in a small underground space, it was amazing to be free and to cut loose. And they were planning to make every second count.