The study into Reaver was kind of fascinating. The first thing I'd learned was that the powers I had noticed in Reaver were not the only powers that it held. I made notes on each of the powers:

Short-Range Teleportation- Teleportation within a range of sight. There were several limitations that kept it in the E-Tier. The power itself didn't augment anything else, so you had to train with it to get over the displacement sickness it caused. It had limited range, so even if I could see something off in the distance, I couldn't just immediately port there. On top of the training needed to effectively utilize it without hurling, and the range limitations, I also could not go through solid objects with it. While it might be considered an awesome power, its limiters are what brought it back to E-Tier.

Black Tendrils- Produced black tendrils from either hand that could wrap around a person or object. They could be manipulated by the user, but were limited to the strength of the user, and since they came out of the hands, you can't be holding anything in your hand. I'd been able to exploit that myself, and as well, had a hard range limit of 10 meters, just over 32 feet. Still useful, but again, the limitations of the ability kept it safely low-threat weighed against higher-tier abilities.

Agility Boost- Augments the agility of the wielder. Tim hadn't been all that agile, but with this had been on my level of agility given my 1%. That was the limiter on this one, that it wasn't superhuman unless you maintained a top-level of agility to start from. For most people, to top out this ability, you have to spend your life in constant training.

Fear aura- within its radius, the power overloaded the fight or flight response of everyone in the area. This was powerful, sure, but it was the AoE problem. You couldn't discriminate, so any allies or bystanders in the zone were humped as well. Its range was a radius of just over 15 meters, or 50 feet, and as with the teleportation, it didn't go through solid objects.

Those were the powers I'd already essentially known about at the point of the fight, but that was only half the registry of powers in the bracer. Reaver had taken eight heroes out, and some things still remained:

Prey scent- Once I "locked in" a scent, I could track it pretty much forever until I released it, caught them, or they found a way to break the scent marker. This was one of the tracking abilities that had helped it find me and other heroes, to get them alone. No practical combat use outside the niche, but it would be useful in the law enforcement sense of crime-fighting.... also when I lost my keys or wallet, not that that comes up a few times.

Technopathy- Ability to communicate with and manipulate digital devices. Its limiting factors were sort of robust. For instance, you can't just 'do anything' with it, you have to essentially know what you're doing with the device, so yeah, I "could" try to communicate with a nuclear bomb, but lacking any key knowledge of how to activate anything within the system, I wouldn't be able to do much, though I could potentially shut one down by hitting the wrong passcode a few times, but I could do that by just mashing random buttons. Next up, computers speak in coding language, so unless you're about to spend your life learning every computer code in use, again, you're kind of limited on that. Yeah, you could use most phone apps, and that was how I'd been ultimately tracked by my phone through the H.A.A. app, along with Reaver being able to listen to the mic on my phone, since those were mostly on the whole time to allow for things like voice controls and marketing crap.

Finally, the two 'broken bullshit' powers:

Spatial Cognition- In terms of an individual power, this was... not great. I mean, don't get me wrong, it has a ton of various uses, but it's pretty much just the top-tier of spatial awareness. On it's own, it had uses, but it was low E-tier. Hook that power to something like the teleportation, and scent ability, and it got way more OP. With teleportation, absolute spatial awareness was a fundamental concept of the ability, to be able to gauge the exact distance you were porting over and readjust on the fly. With scent, I could fully determine direction and distance of the scent trail. The limit was only perception.

Sensimotor Synchrony- Oh... fuck this power. This is insane hooked into the other abilities. Okay, so as an isolated power, its only function was to remove the "lag time" between thought and action. Like, if you wanted to fire a gun, your brain has the thought to put your hand to the grip, the thought to wrap your fingers, the thought to unclip the strap holding it, the thought to draw it, the thoughts around aiming, and the thought to squeeze the trigger. Reaction speed increases by leaps and bounds, since you can literally now move at the speed of thought, cutting out the intermediary steps of the process. It had combat applications, but without other powers to feed off of, it was mostly a defensive measure. Attached to other powers, it was a broad spectrum boost to everything. Instantly lock on scent, instant boost on agility, increased manipulative control of the tendrils, and I'd directly seen its use with the teleportation and spatial awareness abilities.

Any of the individual abilities were very limited in scope of power, either directly, or by the limitations of the ability, but as a whole, they'd turned Reaver into a killing machine. There was another issue, however, a bit more minor, but it did suck a bit- While I could get better at using the powers, they didn't actually interact with my 1%, since they were an outside force operating through me. I was essentially just the vessel being used by Reaver to be able to access the powers.

The H.A.A. wanted me to hand Reaver over for destruction, and I did get it at a certain level, but Reaver's alive in its way. It thinks, it feels, and its sins were not its own. It was never given an understanding of any version of proper morals and ethics, and did what it thought it was supposed to do. Just like if Princess were raised in a dog fighting ring, Reaver only knew war, only knew fighting. I'm... I'm not okay with the concept of killing it.

There was more to it, though. Reaver had referenced the ancient Heros of Greek and Roman times. For a moment, I considered something: It knew enough about what powers were to absorb them. That wasn't a fluke ability as far as I could tell. That would state that there were enhanced in the life and times of Rome and Greece, because why make a function for a thing that doesn't exist? It would be like the Romans building anti-aircraft weaponry. If there's no aircraft, there's no reason for the weapons to fight it. It was magical in nature, and that stated there was magic in those times, enough to make Reaver. So where had all the magic and powers been the past thousand years or so?

This put me on a different track: Technopathy. It was an odd power that could only be relevant in the digital era. If powers were attached to something so ancient, why was there a power like this? It was so dated to modern times that it would've been barely functional until about the late 1990s when digital started becoming more commonplace. I got a sinking feeling as the 1% kicked up the theory that there was something behind all of this, back then, and the last ten years. Something was coming, and I had no way to prepare for it. I couldn't even really tell it to others, because every iteration of the explanation sounded like I was getting ready to start making a survival bunker and breaking out the tinfoil.

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As to Reaver itself, it didn't really have reliable information outside of its users' personal perspectives. It had simply taken everything they thought and felt as the absolute truth of the world. While I could establish an essential chain of custody of it, Reaver itself didn't have much in the way of provable evidence of anything. Living to thirty in the Dark Ages of Europe was, in itself, not as simple as now, and Reaver had been in the hands of violent men and women, who had an even higher propensity to die before that line, and if no one was holding it, Reaver had no perception of anything, so there were big gaps. Reaver did have names, however, so I wrote those down, sending them off to PSU's history department, since the university was right in downtown. I could look it up myself, but that would mean a lot of time having to learn a ton of different history, spread across centuries, with random twists and turns. Yeah, I could do it, but I would have to divert off of what I was doing in the here and now.

Okay, let's get to work. We had an office now... not a ton of employees, but we had people. We listed Darryl, Brad, and Aimee as interns, paid interns, but interns. They wouldn't be able to help much with school on and the whole 'child labor' issue, but it kept them in the flow of things, and as a secondary point, it gave them something to put on college admissions forms and essays. They were put over to the game development side of things, since that was mostly safe as far as laws were concerned on the matter. I was also working in game development amongst other things, and with technopathy now a thing for me, I decided the best thing to do was, in fact, learn every coding language currently in use. JavaScript first, followed up by HTML/CSS, the top two most used languages that existed.

Fred was being trained to help set up the non-profit arm, acting as a community liaison with the homeless of the city. They knew him, at least somewhat, and people could tell the difference between someone like Fred trying to help them, who knew the real struggle, and someone like me, who might mean well, but had never gone hungry, had never had to convert a bus stop into a temporary shelter. Dad was working as the head of the real estate arm, since that was closest to his area of expertise, while Brad's Mo- Susan worked as the line of communication between us all. She was doing a lot, and I felt a bit guilty about that, so my tiramisu production went up.

I was sitting in my office- That would take some adjustment- with three computers. One was a laptop, so I could work on the go, then a gaming rig that I was using to do coding, and finally, the Bloomberg Terminal. Once Dad had understood what I could achieve with stock trading, this had been his first goal. From this single terminal, I could monitor every market, newsgroup, and industry in the world in real time, and it gave real-time updates on basically anything that could affect the markets. I did have to get used to the three-screen setup of it, but I mean, I'd been essentially doing that with doing livestreams on video games, so I was at least a third of the way to mastery. I couldn't code yet with the technopathy, but just the ability to communicate with the computer allowed me an insane capacity for analyzing the information contained in the terminal display, and with my Syncing ability attached, I could execute trades instantaneously as soon as soon as I needed to, far faster than simple clicking and typing. For its part, Reaver found the whole thing fascinating, advancing its learning of the world and people by leaps and bounds, balanced by my desire to help.

I realized quickly that I'm fucking dangerous. Yeah, sure, I could be a badass in a fight, I'd gotten right with that point, but in an arena that was entirely based on your ability to research, respond mentally and immediately, I actively affect trade on a global level if I just decide to. I wasn't kidding about the traders getting antsy about short-selling. In studying, I realized how fucked the global trade markets were, mainly through two specific problems: Short-selling, and Stock Buybacks. Shorting stocks is a racket: You borrow someone else's stock shares for a specified length of time by contract, sell them to drive down the stock price, and then buy them back at the lower share price, passing them back to the guy you borrowed them from in the first place, and pocketing the difference.

It should have been considered market manipulation, and in fact, had been until the 80s. The point of stock investing was to invest in companies with the idea of seeing the stock improve over time. Shorting stock was the opposite, a naked attempt to drive the stock under, and profit on misery. So yeah, fuck those guys. It didn't even take all that long to get the traders to back off it, because stock traders only did it because it generally worked. By buying stock in shorted companies, I could drive up the price up, while getting a legitimate stake in multiple companies. This crashed the short-selling because once the time limit is up, you have to buy back the stocks, regardless of price. So yeah, if the price per share is higher than you sold it at, you're gonna need to pony up the dough, Bucky.

All the information I was using to do this was publicly traded information, it wasn't a secret. And calling it market manipulation wasn't exactly a great direction either, because if you did call for it, you would have to prove that it was manipulation. From there, you really opened yourself up- For one, you had to admit rather publicly that your entire trading group got clowned by a fourteen-year-old boy who was downing Nesquik at the time, and in trading society, you might as well slit your own throat. Then, there's the counter problem: You couldn't accuse me of market manipulation, without me having the open shot to counter that it's you doing the manipulating. In fact, that was part of the plan, to pursue it so hard that either they tapped out on short-selling entirely, and made regulations against it themselves, or decided to come after me about it, and take it to a court, where I could try and force regulations against it that way. Side note: The companies that are being shorted love me.

Stock Buybacks were a whole other thing, a really detestable practice, where essentially, you beef up your stock price ahead of earnings reports in order to make it look like your company is doing better numbers than it is, and could even make it look like the company was actually prosperous while being fundamentally fucked. At one time, it was simply a practice to remove dilution of your stock, beefing up your company's individual stock price per share, and that would translated to getting higher payouts per stock holder on dividends. That time was gone, and for a lot of companies it was being used to make the company look more solvent than they were. Countering was pretty easy, actually. All you had to do was the following: Get enough stock in the company to get a quarterly earnings report (They're required to give it to you as an investor), find the information they buried knowing that their investors wouldn't fully read giant document made of legalese, and then just make sure all of them found out about it, that their stock prices were artificial, and could plummet at any moment, for the company to then re-sell the bought stock to post a "profit" on the next report.

Think the federal government's coming for your fiddly bits? Wait til you see the investors in your company realize you've been playing them in a financial shell game for several years. The government'll fuss at you and maybe make you pay some money. The investors, however, are out for blood. But hey, we got enough for the mall, and... huh, wait, did I...

Well fuck, I own a small solar company now. RIGHT, they were shorted out to the nines, so I'd managed to buy up like 80% of the stock as investors dumped out to get out of the damage pad. Gonna have to figure out what to do with that. Right now, I gotta flood the Oregon Food Bank with enough money to feed everyone surf n' turf for a month, and more importantly, Aimee's got new jeans that she says I need to check out.