Wave 2.1

2010, September 27: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

With dozens of ideas rattling inside my head, I texted my mom the moment I exited Arcadia's faraday cage. I told her that I'd be hanging out with some friends at the Boardwalk and that I'd be back by dinner. That left me with a good four hours to kill, four hours of tinkering in my new ship. I ditched the crowds and jogged a good six blocks away before ducking into an abandoned alley and using the quick-change canister to put on my costume. After that, it was a simple matter to texture myself a new disguise, an old but rugged dockhand this time, and head to the Boat Graveyard.

Looking around my lab, I couldn't suppress the sigh that left my lips. Now that I wasn't just here to mess around with my powers, I realized just how filthy the place was. I could see crusty stains of some dried fluid or other and piles of junk that the ship's original owners had not seen fit to take with them. Old cigarette boxes, a used up lighter, and even a grimy hardhat littered the floor. With a flick of my PokéNav, SAINT materialized by my side. "Cleaning this is going to be such a chore," I groaned.

The Pokémon specialization had passed and with it my easy access to new TMs. That was fine though; the skillset I already had placed me among the most versatile capes. Nor did I want SAINT to be a mini-JARVIS. He was capable of interacting with the world so I refused to keep him locked up in my computer as my personal TM-slave. I'd taken to bringing him with me to school so he could see the world through my interactions.

Prime directive: Grow with me. Now that I had a foundation for my own power, I wanted him to be strong too.

I still wasn't great at parsing out the minutia of his unique speech, but from what I could glean from the bond, he wanted to see what the big deal was with this whole school business. He saw the whole affair as a waste of my time. To be fair, he wasn't wrong, but I wasn't sure how to explain the concept of societal obligations to him beyond letting him watch me interact.

"Pory," my buddy trilled as he looked around. He floated in place before going to nudge a blackened wall, the result of one of his sessions practicing Thunderbolt.

"Okay, sooner started, sooner done. Our first order of business is going to be to build a soda engine."

He tilted his head in that universal sign for curiosity. "Po?"

"Yeah, soda, the sugary, fizzy stuff that I drink sometimes. My new specialization lets me use it as fuel. After I build that, I'm going to build a power washer and hook it up to the engine so I can flood this place with soap and high pressure water. I'll have to sluice out all this crap then wait for it to dry. After that, I can build a DSS port so I can transfer my loot directly to the ship and get building."

He nodded in understanding. I took a whole engine block I'm pretty sure once belonged to a tow truck and a mini fridge and got to work. While I was busy with that, I set SAINT to moving all the trash outside with Psychic before dousing the place in a mix of hydrogen peroxide and ethoxylated alcohol, just one more thing I'd stolen in bulk last night. It was a good way for him to build up control with Psychic if nothing else.

Hopefully, the chemical would set and loosen up some of the gunk by the time I built a washer. 'Heh, most tinkers build tools to build more tools. Here I am building tools to clean my workshop.'

I was amazed at the rapid progress I made on my engine. The fugue almost felt as though the Cyborg himself was guiding my hands. Perhaps it was the quality of materials I now had access to, but it only took a bit more than an hour and a half to make myself a decent setup.

It wasn't pretty. The new soda engine looked like someone welded a mini-fridge to an engine block, because that's basically what I did, but I could worry about the aesthetics another time. I loaded the fridge with twelve glass bottles, each snuggly fitted into cushioned slots, and flipped the switch. A pleasant hum of implausibly efficient motors filled the air.

"Pory?" My porygon trilled in question.

"Yeah, I'm done, buddy. I just need the power washer now. Are you finished with the bleach?" He nodded and drifted over, prodding the new engine with his blocky nose. "I know it doesn't look like much, but just twelve bottles of coke can get me a full day of clean, SUPER power."

The power washer was a bit more complicated than the engine, possibly because there was no direct One Piece analog I was drawing from. The level of technology certainly existed, but I was building it myself using the principles, laws, and logic of the One Piece world, soda-power and all. It took some doing, but I managed to turn a few vacuum cleaners and a super soaker into a type of jet in just one hour.

The next half hour was spent sluicing out the alcohol and peroxide-laden grime with a water jet that, at its highest setting, could erode marble. I stuck with the wider nozzle. With an hour to spare before dinner, I hooked up the soda engine to several heat lamps with the hopes that the floor would be mostly dry by the time I came back.

X

I had dinner with my family and rushed through my homework before turning in for the night at ten. I waited in bed for an hour to make sure I wouldn't be called by my mom or my sister.

By the time I got back to the Gullrest, it was eleven-thirty and the concrete floor was bone dry after six hours of heat lamp treatment. I surveyed the empty space with a critical eye. 'It may be empty now, but one day, this place is going to be the greatest workshop in the world,' I told myself.

The emptiness said much about my currently lacking capabilities, but it said so much more about my potential. I didn't know what fictions my power would draw from, but the possibilities sent an electric thrill through my body.

I felt SAINT nudge my hand. "Reee?"

"Sorry, just lost in thought." I gave his blocky head a quick rub and pulled out a series of PCs from my expanded bag. "First things first, we've got another DSS to make."

Going over blueprints I'd already built wasn't difficult, but it was tedious. The original DSS that was a product of several days of coding could be ported over with laughable ease. It was code after all; Ctrl+C worked just fine. However, building the scanner and materializer took a long two and a half hours of steady work.

Once I was sure that I could access my entire DSS inventory through this port as well, I got to work on Labyrinth's shawl.

Labyrinth's shawl, based on the Germa 66 raid suit, would be a test run of sorts. Fortunately for me, Faultline did not get me a box of Kevlar jackets and expect me to stitch together a shawl; she got me several large spools of fibers, the kind I suspected belonged in industrial plants. Not having to unravel finished vests would make my life easier, but that was just step one.

To get the same kind of bullshit-durable fabric that the raid suits were made of, I'd need to sheathe each thread individually with a carbon polymer compound. That meant two things: chemistry and mechanical engineering to apply said chemistry.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a notebook filled with my blueprints. Turning to the page containing the chemical formula, I tore it out and presented it to SAINT. "SAINT, want to help me out, buddy?" He trilled his assent. "I need you to go into the DSS and get me these things. Just pile them up in that corner over there. Oh, and a foldable table for me to work off."

While he was doing that, I pulled up a ten gallon cooking pot. I'd only need about four for both outfits, we weren't exactly big people, but having a bit extra wouldn't hurt. I set it over a burner. SAINT returned with a tub full of household chemicals he was carrying with Psychic. After dumping the appropriate ratios, I had him watch the pot and occasionally stir it. I smiled wryly at how similar the whole thing was to making a pot of stew. I brought over a bag of charcoal and set it next to him. "Every time it starts to bubble, take one briquette and toss it in," I told him. "Be sure to crumble the briquette into powder first, okay?"

"Porygon!" he cheered.

I resolved to do something nice for my little helper. Multitasking became so much easier with a loyal, intelligent AI around.

Next up was the sheathing machine.

I found the appropriate blueprints and started to build. The idea was to create a machine that released specific quantities of the carbon polymer in fluid form to coat a surface. Then, the Kevlar thread would be fed into one end of the machine and out the other. The fluid would dry as the thread came out the other end, resulting in an incredibly durable material that still had the flexibility of thread.

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Honestly, the whole setup reminded me of a spaghetti maker in shape if not in function.

Once dry, the polymer would set and arrange the carbon atoms in such a way as to mimic graphene, the strongest material known to science. Mimic, not replicate. The impurities, other elements making up the polymer, would not allow for a perfect one-to-one copy of graphene's molecular structure. Instead, these impurities would make the sheath far more durable than a single layer of atoms could be while acting as insulators against both heat and electricity. Just as impurities in steel alloys helped make an overall more durable metal, the impurities in this polymer would help improve the graphene tremendously.

No, chemistry didn't worth that way. No, One Piece didn't give a fuck.

The build itself was short, an hour and ten minutes if my PokéNav was right, but the coating process would take hours. I was looking at six more hours for the pot to contain a sufficient quantity of carbon, three more to fully coat all the Kevlar threads we had, and a final hour to work the thread into a shawl. SAINT could handle the coating well enough, so I decided to build the sewing machine I'd need to make the shawl.

After that came the helmet. The raid suit wasn't magic. It couldn't read the user's mind and adapt because it wasn't made of Kill la Kill's life fibers. That meant making Labyrinth a new helmet. The trouble was that I had no idea how big Lab's head was, so I'd have to take a guess then readjust at the Palanquin. For now, I could handle the software portion that would help even the spacey girl control the invisibility and shield functions of her new shawl.

That was how I spent the next four hours: one to wrack my brain to build the most user-friendly interface possible for a girl who wasn't always there, and three to do the actual coding.

It was well past five in the morning when I finished. I had a gently cooling pot of carbon polymer, spools of Kevlar hooked up to the sheathing unit, and a sewing machine preprogrammed to make what was effectively a large quilt. I could add the details as necessary later.

X

2010, September 28: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

"Step it up, Mr. Kiley!" Coach Miller shouted from the sidelines as I lazily passed the ball to Eric. September was almost over, and with it, PE's focus on basketball. I was more than happy to let someone else take the spotlight here. Hopefully, we'd be playing a more easygoing sport next month, like archery or something.

The blue-haired superhero-in-training took the ball for a quick lay-up, putting our team in the lead twenty-four to seven. It was almost entirely the work of Eric and another boy named Stephen.

Eric jogged alongside me for a moment. "Dude, you alright?"

"Yeah, Didn't sleep much last night," I said. As much as I loved to tinker, it sucked up time like nothing else. "Then I woke up in the morning to jog to school."

"What, too busy jerking it, Kiley?" Stephen spoke up.

"Lay off, Steve," Eric cut in.

"Whatever."

"Don't mind him."

"I don't; that'd take too much effort," I said, rolling my eyes. Teenagers would be teenagers and Stephen Martin was an almost painfully stereotypical jock. I was tempted to use a minute jolt of Thunder Wave to make him eat dirt but reined in my temper. I wasn't ashamed to admit I could be petty, but I did have some standards.

Not many, but they did exist.

We spread out over our side of the court to better defend against the other team, but my mind was elsewhere. SAINT had accompanied me to school yesterday, but he'd chosen to remain behind on the ship today to sheathe more of the Kevlar fibers for me.

'I wonder if he's doing it right.' It wasn't overly complicated, just stick the threads in one end and pour the polymer fluid into the tank, but I worried anyway. The operation of the machine was simple, fixing it was not. If SAINT got bored and decided to adjust the pace and ratios, or if he was just unlucky, there could be a jam and that'd spoil the whole batch. I crossed my fingers and prayed for some good fortune. 'I'll have to step outside the cage at lunch to check on him,' I resolved.

X

After English literature, I ducked out of Mrs. Lam's class like a bat out of hell and snuck into the school lockers. Knowing there shouldn't be anyone in the showers at this time, I hid myself in the changing room and used the quick-change canister to disguise myself as a janitor before stepping out the back as if for a smoke break. Once I was away from the faraday cage, I gave SAINT a call.

"Hey, SAINT, how's it going?" I greeted.

"Reee," he trilled. He psychically lifted a whole spool of reinforced thread to show off his progress.

"Nice, they dried correctly then? I was worried that the machine might have jammed or something. Thanks for the help, bud. Feel free to take a break and eat. I left some of the enchanted honey mix and a bag of nuts in the drawer."

"Pory-gon."

"I know you don't need to eat. You can if you want to." I got an eager nod before he sent me a hazy image of the school through the bond. "Yeah, alright. I'll get going."

I sent Faultline a quick text to tell her I'd be by tonight to speak with Labyrinth. I still needed to make sure the helmet could be sized to her head and the UI was usable to her. A quick jog back into the changing room later, I rejoined my friends at the lunch table, my costume tucked neatly in my back pocket.

Dean and Dennis were having a heated discussion about some movie I hadn't seen.

"Hey, Bryce, where'd you go?" Chelsea said with a spoonful of pudding raised to her mouth. "You're usually not late."

"Sorry, I had to step outside the school to send a quick text," I said.

"What about?"

"Oh, you know, conducting business with hired guns and planning to overthrow a global conspiracy on my way to killing the greatest hero alive. Normal teenage stuff, really."

"Fine, don't tell me," she pouted.

X

Mom and I were just about to have dinner, lemon-garlic rice pilaf and some kind of gyro we ordered from a Greek place twenty minutes away, when Sierra stomped into the house in a huff.

"Honey, what's going on?"

"Nothing, mom. Classes suck, that's all," she growled.

"Lab?" I asked, one eyebrow rose in an unspoken question. She met my gaze with a nod. 'Sabah's stalker then, guess talking things out didn't go so well.'

"What happened?"

"School's just harder than I thought it'd be, mom. It's not a big deal." She sighed as she flung her backpack on the couch and took a seat next to me. "I guess I just need to study harder."

"Okay, sweetie, just let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

"Thanks, mom."

After dinner, I was doing some research on Bad Canary's trial and some relevant laws regarding parahuman powers in the performative arts when Sierra barged into my room and plopped down onto the bed. She groaned into the pillow and rolled over to give me a pitiable look. I nudged my door shut with a toe and spun around in my seat to face her.

"I take it trying to talk to Sabah's lab assistant didn't work out?"

"No, we talked to him last week. He was all nods and apologies, saying shit about it all being a misunderstanding. I thought everything was good until we got back our grades for the write-up. He gave us a forty-percent!" she ranted. "I mean, it wasn't perfect, but what the hell? We went to go talk to him and he just blew us off! And now half the school is saying she offered to suck his dick for a boost!"

"Can't you go to the professor? He's the assistant; he shouldn't get the final say on your grade," I pointed out.

"I wish. Professor Hoffman is old, like older than grandpa. He's got tenure so he doesn't give a damn what happens. He just shows up to give us our weekly lecture and leaves the rest to his assistants."

"Dean?"

"No, then we'd look petty as fuck. A single lab write-up isn't worth going to the dean. He'd just brush it off as not his problem. And by the time this becomes an actual problem, our grades would get shot to hell!"

I sighed. I wasn't even in college and somehow dealing with college drama. "Well, has he at least stopped bugging Sabah?"

She waved a hand back and forth. "Ehh, kinda. He still gives her creepy looks once in a while but pretends she doesn't exist. Michelle and I have been running interference for her. He's just being so fucking petty about it."

"How's she taking it?"

"She's pissed, but not?" Sierra sat up to fiddle with a paperweight on my desk. "Look, Bryce, you didn't hear it from me, but Sabah's dad got sick. Or he's been sick but it's gotten worse. I'm not sure. Either way, she's got bigger things to be worried about than some creepy lab assistant and a few rumors."

"Stress on top of stress," I mumbled. She nodded glumly. "Way I see it, you've got three options: You three can go to the dean and make a fuss over it, stick with it until the end of the semester and just put up with his shit, or transfer out of the class. It's only been a month so that should be possible, right?"

"I checked. None of the labs we need have open slots and none of us want to become part-time students."

"Then the first two, I recommend going to the dean. Sure, it might make you look petty, but it'll end this whole shitshow the fastest. The dean will either tell you to suck it up, in which case you should look for another major with better faculty, or he'll rake the lab assistant over the coals. One way or the other, this ends without you wasting six months of your life with him."

"I know, I just wish it was that simple."

"It is that simple, Sierra. It's not easy, but the alternative is six months of a lab you can't learn anything in." We remained silent for a long minute. "Do you… want me to key his car?" I tried. I said it as a joke but surprised myself with how serious I was. I'd do a hell of a lot worse if this were Sierra and not Sabah.

"Pff, you?"

"Hypothetically, I mean." I waggled my eyebrows for emphasis. "I just need a name, sis."

"No, I don't want my baby bro to start a rap sheet because some horny idiot keeps making passes at my friend," she laughed. "Thanks, though."

I dug in my drawer and pulled out a small jar of enchanted honey. I kept a bit of it with me for snacking inside one of those little jars meant for berry preserves. "Here, give this to Sabah and tell her I hope her dad gets better soon."

"You don't-"

"I want to," I said firmly. "She's my friend too."

"You're not supposed to know her dad's sick, dummy."

"Fine, tell her this is so she can spoil her little brothers. I don't care."

"Thanks, Bryce." She gave me a side-hug and stood.

"Anytime, sis."

Author's Note

Chemists: Please don't shoot me. I know that's not how carbon sheathing works and that impurities in graphene would by definition make it not graphene, and more fragile. That's why it's tinkertech.

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.