Wake 1.7

2010, September 11: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

Despite being comparatively small, the helmet took the bulk of my attention. I was no Armsmaster; I simply was not equipped to make minute alterations to sensitive technology. Even with SAINT making calculations for me that were as accurate as physically possible, I had to be careful as to not introduce human error into my tinkering.

Finally, after several days of painstaking fine-tuning, my Expansion Suit was complete.

I decided to keep the color scheme as homage to the character, not that anyone else would get the reference. Matte gray, almost black leather covered the outside of the suit in one solid color, making it hard to tell where the leather jacket ended and the pants began. Gloves and boots just a shade lighter ensured that not an inch of skin was showing. The only splashes of color I permitted on the suit were found on the shoulders and visor, a burnt orange like Essentia's. The back sported secure fasteners for my expanded bag and a pitch-black belt held a holster for my PokéNav.

The main difference between Essentia's outfit and mine, besides my obvious lack of curves, was the helmet.

The additional cheek and jaw protection from the helmet's body made the shape of the visor more angular, giving off an intimidating vibe. I made the jaw guard detachable though, partially so I could eat through the helmet if I had to and partially so I could speak without looking like the boogeyman. When detached from the helmet's main body, the jaw guard hung a few inches lower to protect my neck instead. It also contained a rudimentary voice synthesizer made from an old CD player I looted.

I'd also taken care to bore a hole through the helmet's body, right between the eyebrows. An old camera lens I'd scavenged the other day was fed through it and hooked up to the suit so SAINT could see what I saw. The lens quality wasn't the best, I'd have to work on it when I got the chance, but it wasn't too difficult to copy the camera software on my phone and add it to the suit. This way, SAINT could rotate through the various filters with inhuman speed to provide me with real-time intelligence.

I looked it over one more time with a proud nod. I couldn't lie, even without the homage to the original wearer, the black and orange Halloween theme was kind of cool.

"We did it, SAINT," I said with a proud smile.

"Pory-gon!" he cheered with me.

I quashed the desire to try on the suit immediately. SAINT was pretty fast. He could hide from Sierra or mom if they knocked on my door. I couldn't take off the costume that quickly. Instead of risking discovery, I reluctantly put the suit in the back of my closet, behind the snowboard I only used once.

Looking at the board took me back. We'd gone snowboarding two years ago over the winter and dad had insisted that it'd be cheaper to just buy a decent board and use it every year instead of renting each time.

I promptly broke my arm, not even boarding down, but in the waiting line to ride the lift up. I slipped on the ice and fell on my ass, but tried to brace my weight on my arm, causing some hairline fractures. I felt pathetic. Dad looked sorry. Mom freaked out. And that was the end of that family trip. Before I knew it, I'd outgrown the snowboard.

"I wonder what I can make out of this?" I muttered. A part of me didn't want to take it apart; it was a memento of dad. Another part of me really liked the idea of incorporating it into my costume. "Maybe when my specialization changes…"

I started this rotation on the twenty-eighth of August. Since I'd get four weeks exactly, I had until the twenty-fourth of September, two more weeks. SAINT would spend a good chunk of that time learning new moves. As for me, I would have to decide on a name, contact Faultline, get set up with a lab outside my own house, and work on several items unique to the pokémon world.

I decided to table all of that for today and tomorrow. The DSS was done and I was confident that I could move the hard drive to my new lab, wherever it might be. The PokéNav, expanded bag, and Expansion Suit were finished, giving me a costume that didn't look cobbled together. I had a good library of moves and a way to get more. We worked hard; we'd earned our rest.

"You're awesome, buddy," I said as I cradled the blocky duck in my lap. I brought out his favorite snacks and let him go to town on them while I picked away at dad's guitar.

X

2010, September 12: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

I took SAINT running with me as thanks for completely mastering Thunder Wave in such a short time.

There was no way in hell SAINT could walk around outside, but he could still accompany me through the PokéNav. At times like this, I felt as though my specialization was Mega Man or Digimon instead of Pokémon. Still, we made the best of it. He could see out of the camera and communicate through both our bond and the headphones I'd modified, so I took him on a tour around the nicer parts of the city.

This was yet another reason for my hesitance to make more pokémon.

Technically, several pokémon were inorganic and would not trigger the societal prejudice against biotinkers. Several of those species were extremely powerful too: metagross, magnezone, gigalith, golem, et cetera could all hold their own with some of the strongest capes in Worm, and depending on their exact moveset, stomp some of them into the dirt.

Hell, gigalith, nowhere near the apex of the pokémon world food chain, was canonically capable of wiping out mountains if the dex was to be believed.

Even so, the thought of trying to manage such powerful creatures while keeping them cooped up and locked away from the rest of the world… that was just begging for a disaster. I had to remind myself that they were not tools but partners. The power of friendship was a tangible force with pokémon and anything less wouldn't work out in my favor. The best case scenario was that I would get outed when one of my pokémon got bored and escaped for a merry romp through town. The worst case scenario involved a crater the size of this city.

After my run, I cooled down at a café on the Boardwalk. The café was a hipster's paradise: upscale, but pretending they weren't by having bare brick walls, unshielded light bulbs hanging from the ceilings, and books guests could just pick up at will. The second story overlooked the Rig.

I sat in the corner of the second floor and sipped some kind of frothy, sweet cold brew while the two of us marveled at the miracle of architecture. The Protectorate HQ was usually described as an old oil rig, but that just didn't do the building justice.

Yes, it used to be an oil rig; that much was covered in elementary school, but if I hadn't been told that, I would have never guessed. The entire building was encased in a force field that reflected the sunlight from the water in a dazzling display of color. I could see silhouettes of arches and spires and though I couldn't make out exact details through the force field, it was clear that the entire Rig had received a massive makeover at some point. I had a feeling that the obscuring effect provided by the force field wasn't purely incidental.

After cooling down a bit, I took a walk around the pier and gave SAINT the grand tour. I told him bits of the city's history, both the good and the bad, from the abandoned ferry to each member of the Protectorate and Wards.

My blocky friend took a particular liking for the Forsberg Gallery, a modern art gallery known to every Brockton native as the premier destination of school field trips. I must have visited the place on at least four separate field trips at this point.

While many of my classmates only liked it for the chance to skip school, I found the museum to be peaceful. It reminded me of my past life.

I was no great artist, but I used to attend a local pottery studio and make things for friends and family. They weren't good enough to be sold or anything, but I found the process of molding and firing clay soothing. With my career as a physician's assistant, the chance to take a break and forget about prescriptions and planned surgeries was a godsend.

Whenever I saw Forsberg's ceramics exhibit, I felt the urge to hop behind a wheel and start throwing a vase or two. I enjoyed Forsberg for the memories it roused in me; SAINT just liked the oddly shaped building that looked like it was built out of Legos with some inspiration from a game of Jenga.

Halfway home, I received a text from Sierra about a study group she had set up for her engineering major.

B: You need me to stay out of the house for a few hours?

S: Nah, you're good. Where are you anyway?

B: I've just been wandering around. I'm a few minutes from Hillside if you want me to get you anything.

S: Can you? Donuts?

B: Devil's Bakery on 13th Street, right?

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

S: Yeah, let me ask them what they want.

I shrugged and turned left on the next intersection. A small detour wouldn't hurt, and I wanted to introduce SAINT to the wonders of fried dough. The Devil's Bakery was a bakery on the ground floor of Hillside Mall specializing in unusual flavor combinations such as maple-walnut and bacon, matcha-lemon meringue, and salted strawberry cream.

They were excellent, so good that there was even a running joke online that the owner was some kind of pastry tinker. Andrew something or other… I was just outside the bakery when my phone buzzed again.

S: I want a vanilla bean custard with strawberry drizzle, Sabah wants a maple-walnut donut with cinnamon sugar, and Michelle wants a blueberry crepe.

B: No problem.

S: Thanks! Love you, bro! I'll pay you back!

'Sabah, huh? What are the odds?' If I remembered correctly, she triggered as a result of a confluence of factors, including a pushy boy. Her father also had a heart attack. That meant that the friend she was venting about a week ago was likely Sabah, soon to be Parian. 'It's almost like I'm being pushed towards plot-relevant characters…'

I ordered myself a brownie and got SAINT some walnut crunch bars as well.

Once home, I knocked quietly before opening the door. "Hey, sis."

A dizzying mess of papers covered our living room floor and coffee table. I saw an Arabic girl with full lips and wide, expressive eyes even shorter than me who could only be Sabah. Next to her, a tall brunette gave me a cheery smile that sent my teenage hormones firing. 'Michelle, if I had to guess.'

"Snacks!" Sierra cheered.

"That all I am to you? A delivery boy?"

"Yup, and there is no greater honor for a baby bro."

"Joy."

Michelle giggled. "You two are funny."

"All an act, I assure you. Bryce is a menace."

"I'm a menace? Michelle, right? Catch." I held out the larger of two bags before jerking it back. I tossed it to the smiling brunette. "Don't let Sierra have any."

"Oh, come on!"

"Sure, more for me."

I ignored their bickering and waved at the third member of their study group.

"Sorry about the mess," Sabah said. "Our housemates are really loud and we forgot to reserve a study room at the campus library."

"Don't mention it. Sabah, right?" I shuffled behind my sister to reach the kitchen island. Digging through the fridge, I got myself two cans of ginger ale and stuffed them in my pastry bag.

"Yes, nice to meet you, Bryce." She sounded pretty neutral, certainly not like someone who was about to break down into a trigger event. She was very good at hiding her emotions, I didn't know her well enough to tell, or her life hadn't gotten too bad yet.

'Can I make her life better somehow?' I wondered. 'If I found out the name of the horny lab assistant, I could… What? Beat him up? Threaten him in costume? That'll end well. And it doesn't fix her dad's heart condition.'

There wasn't much I could do short of stalk her every step. Hypothetically, it'd be a trivial matter for me to go out in costume and tail her…

I immediately scrapped the idea. A young woman being followed by a new cape? Hell, if I did that, I might inadvertently be the cause of her trigger. I also lacked the healing technology to cure Sabah's father of whatever heart condition he had that would lead to the terminal heart attack either.

There were plenty of things in Pokémon that could fix a heart condition, but none of them were made by humans. Ho-Oh's Sacred Ash. Chansey's egg. A powerful Heal Pulse. None of them were tech and so beyond my abilities.

"… bro?" I was bought out of my musing by Sierra waving her hand in my face. "You there? You were staring at Sabah then spaced out."

"Oh, sorry," I blinked. "I was just thinking about some stuff I had to do."

"You sure you haven't fallen for my friend?" Sierra teased. "It's normal for a boy your age to crush on an older girl, you know."

I could see Sabah twitch uncomfortably at that so I shut her down immediately with the only thing I could think of. "No, I was thinking about my date to homecoming. Sabah's pretty, but my date's already troublesome enough."

'And Sabah's very, very gay,' I thought ruefully. 'Though to be fair, so is Amy.'

Judging by the glint of mischief in Sierra's eyes, I was going to catch hell for this.

"Ooh, Bryce has a girlfriend. Who? Tell."

"No," I said flatly.

"Tell. I invoke big sister privileges."

"You lost those when you acted like a spaz trying to get Laserdream's autograph. I'm legitimately afraid of meeting Eric Pelham in school now for fear he'll recognize me as the brother of that weirdo girl who stalked his sister."

"You swore you wouldn't mention that!"

"There's a story there," Michelle said with a grin. "Do tell, little bro."

"I swore I wouldn't tell mom," I grinned triumphantly. "Your friends are fair game."

"No! Go upstairs, Bryce," she shouted, shoving me towards the stairs. "Oh look, girls, we have so much write-up to do. Let's get to work."

Though I didn't get much else done today, I considered it time well spent. I got to hang out with SAINT, treat him to the wonders of fried dough, and even met yet another plot-relevant character. I spent the rest of the day finishing up Dennis' workout routine and sketching some doodles on a notepad for future reference. The purple agate quartz I ordered also arrived in the mail, so I'd get to make an eviolite soon.

X

2010, September 13: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

Making the eviolite was an interesting exercise in frustration. Fascinating in its own way, but also completely and utterly beyond the comprehension of this world's science.

An eviolite was a purple gemstone that could greatly amplify the defenses of a pokémon so long as that pokémon had not fully evolved. There was a fanon theory running around in my past life that the evolutionary stones triggered some sort of biological reaction, acting as catalysts for evolution through chemicals that the relevant pokémon species interpreted as pheromones.

That theory flew out the window where the eviolite was considered. For one, a chemical response that intentionally kept a pokémon in its adolescence made no sense. Second, the eviolite was universally effective, from dragonair to porygon-2. Body type or even basic biochemistry didn't seem to matter in the least. Third, raising a pokémon's defenses simply through chemical signaling would be impossible.

How did the pokémon world quantify defenses? Why did it only work on pokémon who had at least one more stage of evolution left? At some point, it seemed even my power had thrown its hands in the air and said, "Aura bullshit, don't ask."

At the end of the day, I didn't care. It was more important to me that it worked, not the specifics of how exactly it worked. The Dubious Disc that evolved a porygon-2 to porygon-z was canonically faulty, resulting in unstable behavior from the evolved porygon. I didn't want that for SAINT. Though the porygon-z boasted tremendous offensive power, the instability wasn't a fair tradeoff. Even putting aside my budding friendship with SAINT, I trusted him with my user interface, PokéNav, and so much more.

Seeing how I had no intention of ever coding a Dubious Disc, the eviolite was the perfect item for SAINT to have on hand.

The creation process of the eviolite involved the agate, some live wires, a chisel, and mysterious designs I couldn't begin to translate that vaguely looked like unown. As far as I knew, the first eviolites were made by the same ancient civilizations that brought claydols and other artificial pokémon to life.

I sank into a fugue and when I woke up, it was to a purple, egg-shaped gemstone that pulsed with violet energy. I slumped forward in exhaustion. From what little I could understand, making the gem had drawn out a large portion of my own aura to act as a one-time catalyst. I couldn't imagine what making a z-crystal or mega stone would cost me.

I placed it in the middle of a collar sized for SAINT.

While I worked on that, I had SAINT study more powerful electrokinetic capes I stored in the archive. If SAINT could replicate Thunderbolt, it'd be a major upgrade to both our offensive potential.

X

I spent most of my Monday morning classes brainstorming my cape identity.

I'd put off deciding what kind of cape I wanted to be, but I couldn't procrastinate any longer. I was no Jack Slash, but nor was I Legend, neither a monster nor a paragon. That left a lot of wriggle room to explore.

Joining the Wards was out of the question: I had no intention of letting them put a leash around my tinkering potential. That said, being an independent hero didn't appeal to me either. Perpetually going on patrols to try and grassroots my way to fame, minding my actions so the PRT wouldn't have an excuse to strong-arm me, and getting into fights I wouldn't benefit from didn't exactly strike me as a fulfilling experience.

I knew the score: Villains captured in Brockton didn't get locked away; they walked out of the revolving door that was our justice system.

'What did I want?' I asked myself. 'I want to be able to build what I want, when I want. I want to protect mom and Sierra. From Lung and Bakuda. From Kaiser and Purity. From Leviathan. Coil. Jack. Echidna… I want a reputation for being powerful without encouraging challengers. I just want to have fun…'

Thinking about it, as much as I respected Panacea, I didn't think I could be a heroic rogue who helped people selflessly. I'd drive myself spare if I were stuck in a hospital like her, or stuck making whatever medi-tech came with my powers in the future. The last thing Earth-Bet needed was for a tinker of fiction to have his own psychotic break right alongside the strongest biokinetic in the world.

Dragon, the other hero I looked up to, operated on a level beyond me, for the moment. The Guild was appealing in ways the Wards just weren't. I wasn't too big on seeking a higher purpose or anything, but I couldn't deny that the thought of traveling the world alongside Dragon and Narwhal to be the final word on S-class threats sounded pretty damn cool. But that was exactly why they weren't a valid option: There was no way in hell I could leave the city at my current age, nor would they accept a minor for obvious reasons.

'What about Toybox?' I considered them for a moment.

They were villains according to the PRT, but few people actually considered them so and I didn't personally care for the designation one way or the other. As a collective of tinkers, they maintained their own neutrality with enough force that no one wanted to challenge them without a damn good reason.

Big Rig, a tinker who specialized in construction; Dodge, a tinker who built dimensions; Glace, the cryogenics tinker; Pyrotechnical, a thermodynamics tinker; and Toy Soldier, some kind of automation tinker, made for a daunting combination with excellent defenses and impressive firepower. If I joined them, I could share in their protection. I could benefit from their specializations and contacts, obtaining materials and lab space I wouldn't be able to acquire on my own.

That said, they came with their own share of worries.

To start, I had no idea how to contact Toybox. Their main lab was in an isolated dimension maintained by Dodge and any offices they had on Earth-Bet proper tended to be highly nomadic.

Second, even if I did manage to contact them, I wasn't sure of their full intentions. I would be negotiating from a position of weakness, with little to offer that the collective didn't already have.

Third, it was likely that they would demand I join permanently, moving with them in a nomadic lifestyle. Letting me remain sedentary in Brockton wouldn't be an option because that'd mean I'd be a security risk. I wasn't ready to abandon my family.

Lastly, they were canonically destroyed by the Slaughterhouse Nine following the latter's visit to Brockton Bay. That was a few years off, but Jack Slash managed to track Dodge's dimension somehow even with the death of Mannequin and incapacitation of Cherish, the tinker and empathic tracker. That told me that Toybox's dimension wasn't as secure as advertised.

I penciled them in as potential contacts for business transactions in the future, but I didn't think we'd be more than that.

Author's Note

Not much to say. Some more sibling antics. Bryce weighs his faction choices.

He's not going to be a Ward. Why? *Shrugs* Been there, done that, I guess. I want Bryce to have a very different career path than Andy.

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.