Wake 1.16

2010, September 26: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

I dialed Faultline as soon as I woke up.

"Creed, some of us work late. Four hours," she growled, then hung up.

"Huh, guess Melanie Fitts isn't much of an early bird," I mused. That was fine by me. I'd wanted to see if she had the materials necessary for Labyrinth's shawl, but I could stand to do a bit of prep work on my end.

Thinking about it, the quick-change can used by the Vinsmoke family wasn't all that was special about their raid suits. I could incorporate their physics-defying durability into my current Expansion Suit and Labyrinth's shawl. Unfortunately, while I could tinker up a bullshit loom from mom's sowing machine, it was something she got from grandma, an heirloom she still used consistently. I couldn't take it without her knowing. Likewise for the raid suit's specialized boots that let the Vinsmoke siblings run on air.

I quickly realized that if I wanted the full package, I'd need to build something else to power my tinkering. I already had a place: the Gullrest.

'The basement beneath Harvey's could be used for material refining and I could have my own private lab on a boat,' I decided.

I spent Sunday morning working out, gathering materials from the scrap in my backpack, and spending time with my family.

X

Faultline got back to me after lunch. "My apologies," she said curtly. "I had a late night."

"No offense taken. I was somewhat excitable because I now know what I want to do with the basement."

"Oh?"

"I would like that place to be dedicated to the production of high quality materials. I need a furnace, set of crucibles, grinders, bandsaw, lathe, and welder. And of course, please soundproof and ventilate my workshop."

"I suspected you to be a fabrics tinker of some sort. I'll have to revise my hypothesis."

"Keep guessing," I laughed lightly. "Suffice to say, I'll be putting those tools to good use."

"You do realize that so many metalworking tools in close proximity is likely to present a health hazard?"

"I'm aware. Let me worry about that." If Franky could build himself a cyborg body out of an abandoned ship after literally getting run over by a train, I could work metal without setting fire to a restaurant.

"This is going to be pricey..."

"I'll toss in a shield generator along with Lab's shawl," I promised. I'd originally planned to make her shawl a ripoff of my current Expansion Suit, but Sanji's raid suit came with both an invisibility function and a cape that could create shields powerful enough to take a hit from an ancient zoan, one of Kaido's lieutenants at that. It was better than my suit in every way and I saw no reason to deny the shaker some added protection.

"How strong is the shield?"

"Strong enough to take a hit from an endbringer," I said confidently. And it was true, assuming they were their usual sandbagging selves. "I wouldn't recommend it for long, but once or twice? Definitely."

I heard her suck in a breath. "Done. I'll have the lab ready. I have the materials for the shawl. You can pick it up any time."

"Excellent. Sowing machine?"

"Of course. Feel free to keep the extra Kevlar."

"Much obliged, Faultline. I'll be by to pick it up tonight."

That done, I spent the rest of the day drawing up blueprints for a unique, hyper-efficient generator to power my new tanker-lab. To my pleasant surprise, I already possessed much of the materials I needed, including several car batteries and a whole engine block. It was just about everything I looted that first night I met Newter, but I'd happily raid the junkyard a dozen more times for this.

'Franky's going to be so proud of me,' I thought with a giggle.

X

2010, September 27: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

I was fully rested after an afternoon nap so had no trouble waking up at one in the morning to run over to the Palanquin.

I left the club only fifteen minutes later, once again woolgathering over my options.

Back in my old life, I sometimes laughed at fanfiction tropes, particularly the one about tinkers starting out by robbing stores. Sure, I engaged in a bit of it myself with Good Neighbor and the junkyard, but I liked to think that I was better than the stereotypical tinker protagonist.

I, in my pretentious, self-aggrandizing wisdom, had scoffed and thought that a tinker with a powerful specialization should be able to acquire materials without risking himself by nurturing allies.

I'd done that, to a degree. Having done so, I now realized that this course of action had limits. As vital as she was, Faultline was also a pragmatist. She wouldn't help me unless I offered her something in turn. The more I relied on her, the less time I would have to tinker for myself. And already, with school, family, and training with SAINT, my time was at a premium. It was the main reason I'd decided on making the tanker my second lab.

I'd waffled back and forth on the decision, but with my base far out at sea, I was as safe as I could reasonably expect to be. The basement beneath Harvey's would be stocked with a forge to refine materials and would in turn be my semi-public lab. That way, if Faultline was forced to betray me or the location was otherwise discovered, I wouldn't be losing much of my finished products should I abandon the space altogether. And, someone who already destroyed my expendable lab wasn't likely to go looking for the real deal.

This left me with the unenviable task of cleaning the interior of the ship and setting up my new lab, somehow without drawing attention to the location. Before One Piece, I would have balked at the task.

Now, now I was Franky, Iceburg, Vegapunk, and more. Suffice to say, no one alive knew more about ships than me. I doubted I could get the ship running in only four weeks. Many of the things the tinker of fiction allowed me to do looked like miracles, but they required time and resources, neither of which I had at the moment. Still, I could potentially make myself a ship of my own from within the Gullrest, like a cocoon housing a developing larva. I wouldn't finish in the time I had, but with One Piece as my specialization, I could easily prepare the blueprints and build a solid foundation.

Of course, that meant resources, more than I could ever find by raiding a junkyard.

A fifteen minute jog through the city later, I stood on the roof of the Hillside Mall. Just in case, I was disguised in a different costume using the Expansion Suit's texture function. I wore flowing purple robes and a hood that obscured my face. The robe was quilted, intentionally made to look like it was made from a spare blanket. It was designed both to make me seem new and to make my alignment ambiguous to anyone who saw me.

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Rule one of being an indie: Offend no one until you had a gun to their head.

When I first made a list of the things I'd need to furnish my lab, I considered going back to the junkyard but decided against it. Here I was, indulging in the fandom's tinker tropes. I was going to rob the place. Everything.

Hillside's stores, when closed, were protected from casual looters by sliding steel grates, cameras, and state of the art electronic locks. As one of the few not-shitty places in Brockton, the city was intent on keeping it somewhat respectable.

That meant absolutely fuck-all to someone with a tinkertech hacking suite.

I'd only be able to do this once before the mall's management requested tighter PRT patrols, so I'd just have to make tonight count. The additional benefit to Hillside over the junkyard, besides the fact that all of the things I stole would be new and in perfect working order, was that the gangs would likely not expect my presence here.

"SAINT, set an alarm for five-twenty," I spoke into the helmet mic. Mom typically woke up at six-thirty or so and I wanted to be home an hour before to be safe.

"Gon."

At the corner of my helmet HUD, I saw a counter start to tick down. "Can you access the mall's security system?"

"Pory-gon," he trilled in assent.

Two minutes later, SAINT was in. There were likely tinkers, not even Dragon, who could keep SAINT out. Fortunately for me, said tinkers were as expensive as they were talented, no way in hell a mall could afford their maintenance fees.

"Disable any silent alarms and make sure no signals can be traced from this location. Then shut off the cameras. After that, start unlocking everything."

Thus my looting began.

I'd get to building at some point, but tonight was all about gathering resources. Over the course of the night, I made countless trips to and from my house, each time with a bit more than six hundred pounds of stolen merchandise. Every time I stopped by my room, I dumped my expanded bag into the DSS, digitally unloaded everything, and immediately headed out again.

I practically cleaned out a tech store of TVs, sound systems, gaming PCs, and digital cameras before making a beeline for the nearest jewelry store so I could filch it of all sorts of precious metals and crystals like gold and sapphires. Enchanting was a thing; not in One Piece, but it was a rather common subject across the multiverse and I intended to be prepared if one rotated in. After that, the outdoor and sporting goods store became my target. There, I was able to acquire everything from crossbows and slingshots to torches, flares, fishing lines, portable generators, hunting rifles, knives, and utility hatchets.

Somewhere along the way, I expanded from Hillside to a nearby hardware store, the Earth-Bet equivalent of Home Depot. There, I picked up entire sets of power tools, solar batteries, paint, metal polish, piping, wires, and anything and everything that could conceivably be used to build something. If it fit into the lip of my bag, it belonged there.

By the time SAINT's alarm rang, I'd stolen almost two tons of small to mid-sized appliances, furniture, tools, technology, and chemicals. There was no specific methodology because even if I couldn't find a use for it with my One Piece specialization, there was a good chance it would come in handy later. With the DSS and SAINT to assist, I wouldn't even have to personally sort it all.

The first order of business after my grand larceny would be to develop Franky's trademark soda engine. Then, I could use that energy output to build myself a power washer to clean one of the concrete cargo holds, approximately twelve thousand square footage of empty space. It'd be my lab and the first room in my new mobile ship.

That was a problem for future Creed though. I'd only been working out for a month now and almost four and a half straight hours of exercise was downright exhausting.

There was one more thing to consider: Starting from tonight onwards, the city would know that a new tinker was in the area. The amount of materials I'd stolen could point to no other conclusion. No, there was even the possibility that they'd point fingers at a whole team of tinkers. Surely one person couldn't take so much, right?

Faultline would of course immediately guess that I was the culprit, few others could move such quantities at once, but so long as it didn't get back to her and no one died, she likely wouldn't care. This would put me on the radar as a villain, but it would be on my terms. A bit of notoriety in exchange for the single best start an independent tinker could expect seemed like a fair trade.

"I was always going to have to step into the limelight at some point," I told myself as I stored my suit into the quick-change canister and took a quick shower before shuffling into bed.

X

Jogging to school after a night of heavy activity positively sucked, but I made do. If nothing else, I was certainly getting my exercise.

Last night's burglary was all anyone could talk about in school. In a single night, almost a dozen stores had been hit, with seemingly no rhyme nor reason as to the intended targets. The extensive list of just what went missing was still being tallied. No doubt, some store managers would be incentivized to downplay the number of items stolen in order to give the illusion of security. If not security, at least disassociation from the event.

"What do you think, Bryce?" Chelsea asked.

"Hmm?" I bit into a dry chicken nugget that definitely tasted better in my nostalgia. "What about?"

"The Hillside Heist!" the peppy blonde exclaimed. "You're usually much more into cape stuff."

'Shit, she's right. I look off right now, don't I?'

I rolled my eyes lazily and popped another nugget in my mouth. "Sorry, just tired. Is that what they're calling it?"

"Well what else would you call it?"

"A new cape with home remodeling powers. Just watch, he'll terrorize the bay with… interior design." I got a few light chuckles at that. "Really, it's probably a tinker. Tinkers need a lot of materials when they start out, right? So they either already have tons of minions, in which case it's not a new tinker at all, or they made some invention to help them out."

"It could also be those new thieves," Steph joined in. "The ones that have been doing burglaries around town."

"Undersiders," Carlos said. He shrugged at the looks he was getting. "My instructors at the police academy said something about it. It's probably not them though. They ride giant lizards and blow a lot of smoke. Literally, that's one of their powers."

"So what you're telling me is there are actual lizard monsters in our sewers? Why is our city so weird?"

"Probably not, the instructors think they're animals that have been empowered temporarily and return to their normal form outside of the heists. Otherwise, they'd be too noticeable."

"Makes sense, I guess. So the new guy isn't an Undersider."

"To be fair, we don't know how many people there were at Hillside last night," Dennis added. "I don't think they've found a single footage of the thief… or thieves. If they did, it'd be on the news and PHO."

"I wonder if Aegis knows something?"

"Wait, he gave you his number?" Dean asked, a bit alarmed. He sent worried side-glances at his friend.

"Yup!" Stephanie chirped. She was still on cloud nine from homecoming. "No dating, secret identities and all, but we texted back and forth over the weekend."

Carlos developed a sudden interest in his sandwich and I decided to throw the guy a bone. Piggot was likely going to have his hide as it was. He'd hardly be the first horny teenager to do something stupid.

"Don't bother texting now," I gestured vaguely to the fence surrounding our school. "Faraday cage."

"Yeah, I know. I'll ask him after school."

"Anyway, Dennis brought up a good point. Since there are no videos of the heist, the cape or capes can either spoof the cameras somehow, or teleport around them maybe. Since they stole a bunch of appliances, I'm going with tinker, which means the cameras were likely tampered with."

"Well how did they get all that stuff out without a moving van?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. We just don't have enough information. I didn't really pay attention to the news this morning so I'm just talking for the sake of it."

"Yeah, maybe it's best not to try and guess," Dean said. "I'm sure the PRT will find them eventually." With that, the conversation eventually shifted to other, more banal matters.

Author's Note

Yes, Bryce isn't particularly wise. Still, it wasn't an entirely braindead move. Like I pointed out, most tinkers start out with a sack of junk before they become a known quantity. Bryce got the whole fucking mall.

The school system thinks he is because of his previous life's memories. He's intelligent, having been a medical professional, but being able to regurgitate facts and being able to apply prudence in action are two separate matters.

Ultimately, I had him conduct such a reckless heist for a few reasons. First, one of the most annoying things I've had to do while writing two tinker fics is thinking I'd make Andy or Bryce make something, then wondering if I gave them the materials to build it in the first place. Then I'd have to go back and make sure or write another procurement scene. Now, Bryce has two tons of random shit in his DSS. He can build whatever the fuck he wants… kind of. Makes my life simpler.

Second, Bryce himself is getting a little impatient. He's very different from Andy in that regard. He's far more amoral and incautious. He's not quite reckless, but he's definitely willing to take more risks. A part of this is because he doesn't have ten years to work, but a bigger part is that he's just not the type to think through every possible outcome.

That, and he doesn't have Contessa throwing him a bone.

One final interlude and we'll be through with the arc.

Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/fabled.webs.