Interlude 3.9.5: Christopher Williams

2010, November 7: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

Creed led us on a merry chase through the shopping district. His skates seemed to be able to change direction in midair just as quickly as Aegis. He made it look natural, like running on air was something humans were all born to do. I really wanted to take it apart to see what kind of gyroscope he used, but that looked more and more like a pipe dream the longer the chase went on.

It was clear he was toying with us, and not just from that terrible attempt at a carjacking console used as pretext to let us give chase. My hoverboard had a higher top speed than Aegis' flight, but I couldn't turn very well while going so fast. Aegis on the other hand just wasn't fast enough. We tried working together to corral him but every time we got close, he vanished from sight, only to appear a block away with one taunting joke or another. One time, he even teleported onto Aegis' back and rode him like a cowboy.

Until finally, he stopped popping up, leaving us in the middle of the Boardwalk feeling like fools.

We signed a few autographs, posed for pictures with tourists, and finished up our scheduled route before heading back to HQ. All the while, we tried to figure out what he could be up to.

"I don't get the guy," I told Aegis as we flew back. "He does a terrible job of trying to steal a car to get us to chase him and then just… leaves…? Why?"

Aegis shrugged. "I don't know, Kid. Maybe he was trying to distract us from something? Console, any word on crimes in the area?"

Officer James, I wasn't sure if that was his first or last name, spoke over the comms unit. "No, nothing that 'd warrant a cape response from us, Aegis. We'll have you write an AAR when you get back. The director also wants both your helmet cams."

"Do we have to?" I noticed that even my normally responsible leader couldn't quite hide the whine. "I wouldn't say there was much action."

"Yeah, you just let the newest villain skate literal rings around you," came Shadow Stalker's biting remark. It was protocol to have both one Ward and one PRT officer on console, the former to gain experience and familiarity with protocol and the latter to actually handle any emergencies. Just my luck, Stalker was our gal in the chair today. As far as I could tell, she was once again being punished for something or other. It happened so often that I barely paid attention anymore.

"Don't start, Stalker," Officer James said warningly, "you're already on thin ice."

"Yeah, whatever."

"And yes, Aegis. You do have to write that AAR. The director wants any and all information we can gather on Creed. She's especially interested in hearing your thoughts as a fellow tinker, Kid Win."

I groaned. It made sense, I knew it did, but that didn't mean I had to like it. What did she want me to say? That Creed was a better flyer than me? That he built better tech? It wasn't as though I had the chance to take his gear apart.

"Yes, sir," Aegis and I chorused.

"For what it's worth, you two did well," Officer James told us. "Our current policy is to gather intelligence more than anything so him getting away isn't a huge loss."

"Aren't you worried about what he could be making with all those computers, sir?" I tried.

"We are, but it's not as though they were specialized materials he couldn't get elsewhere. If he really wants some computers, we can't stop him from getting them, especially since he actually did pay for them. Even if we caught him, we can't really confiscate them indefinitely. For the moment, we're putting Creed on the same threat level as Uber and Leet; he's more of a professional comic than a villain, and one who seems interested in preserving the stability of the city as a whole."

"So you're saying he's not a priority," Aegis said. "I can see that. I just wish we could have asked him some questions."

"That's right. As far as we can tell, he seems unlikely to commit overt crimes despite his self-designation as a villain."

"What? Carjacking isn't a crime?" Stalker laughed derisively.

"It would be if he succeeded, or he wasn't so blatantly trying to fail. At most, it's harassment or disturbing the peace as things stand and even that'd be a stretch. It's clear that he never intended to take that woman's car. He's intentionally making himself look less competent, something we've seen from other comics."

"Yeah, Leet's trying to be a fuckup."

I let the rest of the conversation wash over me. It wasn't like me to contribute much anyway. Gallant, Dean, said I was the type to "keep my own counsel," but that probably made me out to be wiser than I was. For fuck's sake, I could barely count. What wisdom? What expertise?

I sighed. That was him in a nutshell. Dean was a cool dude, but he sometimes got so caught up in gauging our feelings that he didn't say what was plain for everyone else to see.

I did wonder though: Creed seemed superhumanly capable at times, even more than other capes, but he also behaved in ridiculous, possibly even short-sighted ways. That was one of the big arguments for him being a new cape: He was too unprofessional despite his obvious connections and wealth of resources.

On the other hand, I'd heard off duty officers talk about how it could all be an act. If he really was a veteran immigrant from out of the city just looking to rebrand, if he really did have connections to some mysterious sponsor, it'd explain his advanced tech and near impossible growth. In that scenario, his admission of being Wards-age could be a white lie to get us to treat him with kid gloves; his publicity stunts at the bank, Toys R Us, and now Best Buy could be just that, stunts.

There could only be one conclusion in that case: He wanted to look less competent than he really was. For whatever reason, he wanted to blunt his own image despite having interfered against the Empire and Merchants in such a spectacular fashion.

Why? To convince the PRT that he's not a priority? If so, he succeeded. Was it all just an advertisement campaign for his catalogs? It was a comforting thought in a way, to believe that he was purely motivated by money. At least then, that'd be something we could all understand.

I wasn't sure what to think. The box of Legos, I wasn't sure why I kept them, weighed on me. I'd have to get it screened, have it opened by an officer to make sure there were no bugs or anything. That was obvious, right? Even he wouldn't try to sneak something by us in such an obvious way?

Which meant he blew five hundred bucks just to give me a Lego set so he could… what? Insult me?

"It's what you're good for," I heard his voice echo in my mind.

No, that didn't seem right. If he was really as mercenary as he claimed, if he was motivated by money, why would he go so far just to mock me? Parting with that much money just to insult someone he'd never met before wasn't the kind of thing a mercenary would do, right? If he wanted a tinker rival to show off his catalog in forced confrontations, he'd probably have gone for Armsmaster.

If there was one thing I never suffered from, it was an over-inflated sense of self-importance. Creed didn't do this to mock me, at least not entirely, which meant there was some meaning in the Lego set. He'd said something similar in his introductory PHO post too, along with a shoutout to Miss Militia about Moby Dick of all things.

I shook my head, baffled and frustrated. I had no idea what that guy could be thinking.

I felt Aegis tap me on the shoulder. "Kid, you alright? You've been spacing out."

I looked around to find that we'd arrived. I'd just been following Aegis and hadn't even noticed where we were going. "Yeah, sorry, just thinking."

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"Just thinking about Creed."

"Isn't everyone?"

"Yeah."

After opening the Lego set in public and checking over the pieces, they gave it back to me with minimal fuss. It wasn't stolen, it wasn't a bribe, so it could stay. Maybe he did build Lego models of inventions during the brainstorming phase and he was trying to give me a leg up?

I snorted. I wasn't that lucky and villains weren't that nice.

The two of us headed back to the Wards section of the PRT base to get out of our costumes. Aegis would probably go text his girlfriend or something and I wanted to get some tinkering done. Aegis swiped his thumbprint to override the alarm, there was no need to wait the customary thirty seconds when it was just the three of us.

"Hey, Stalker," he said cordially. He always did, he was a cool leader like that, always trying to reach out in his own way. He lacked Dean's emotion-vision or whatever, but Carlos made up for it with a steadfastness that none of us had. I'd miss him when he graduated.

"Sup, losers," she shot back in true Stalker fashion.

"No need for that."

"Yeah, not like you let a villain fly circles around you or anything."

"You heard Officer James, Stalker, policy is to gather intel. He didn't actually commit a crime today."

"Today," she stressed. "We all know he's responsible for the Hillside Heist. The only reason he's 'wanted for questioning' instead of an arrest warrant is 'cause Piggy wants to soft-sell the Wards to him and the rest of you are too pussy to do anything about it."

"No, it's because he's really wanted for questioning, Stalker," Aegis said, tiredly but firmly. He ran a hand through his hair and slumped onto the sofa. "We went over this. We don't actually know who committed the Heist."

She threw her hands up in frustration. "For fuck's sake, Aegis, he admitted to selling illegal tinkertech! On live camera!"

"He did, and we'll deal with that, but I think The GOAT being heroic is messing with Piggot. They're not quite sure what to do, or if leaving him alone is actually the best policy. Personally? I think she's giving him enough rope to hang himself with."

"Well it's fuckign stupid."

"No arguments from me, but pressing him with just the two of us could mean dealing with his full arsenal. We don't know enough about what he can do and we want him playing with kid gloves until we know more," Aegis said, but it was pretty clear that he was just parroting what someone else told him. The guy wasn't the sort to back down from a fight and I wondered how much of what he said he actually agreed with. He let out a tired sigh and pulled out his phone, probably to text Stephanie.

Stalker fumed. Seeing she wasn't going to get more engagement out of our leader, she turned her angry eyes to me. "Ugh, so what? 'Unknown tinkertech?' Your shit should be equally unknown to him too, but you're too much of a pussy to take a shot at him, huh?" she said venomously.

"Not true," I tried defending myself. "I'm not about to start shooting in the middle of Best Buy, genius."

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"So what's your excuse for when you were outside?"

"I was foll-"

"'Following orders?' Really? You're pathetic, Kid." She stood with a disgusted snort and tapped the backpack. I heard the jostling of Lego pieces. "Maybe Creed's right. Maybe this is all you're good for."

"Stalker, that's uncalled for," Aegis called, but she was already halfway in her room. We heard the door slam shut a moment later. He turned to me. "Kid-"

"She's right, you know," I said, taking off my visor with a watery smile. "I'm a failure as a tinker. I don't even know my own specialization and Creed shows up and forces the gangs to play nice over an afternoon."

"No you're not, Chris. Creed's an abnormality. If he wasn't, we wouldn't be talking about him at all."

"That doesn't change that I can't finish a single one of my projects. I still take my board apart and put it back together, you know. Same with my pistol. I keep trying. There's always something that tells me that they can be more, and then… and then… they get assembled right back into what I had before."

"You'll figure it out," Carlos said. He tried to be comforting, to act like he had faith in me, but he wasn't the tinker here. He didn't understand. The only one who could was Armsmaster, and one of the top ten heroes in America had better things to do than tutor the failure. "You'll get it one day. That's what the Wards are for, to learn."

"Yeah, sure," I replied morosely. "I'm going to my lab."

"Yeah… Okay… Have a good one, man."

"You too…"

X

My lab honestly looked a lot like a mix between a high school science class for one and a mechanic's shop. One half of the room was clean and pristine, or it would be without my crap all over it. It had slate-gray countertops, nice wooden furniture, and cabinets filled with tools I needed for detail work.

The other half had the larger, noisier tools such as a lathe, drop hammer, and bandsaw for shaping the chassis of my creations. Just sitting through the training course for those had been a pain and a half. I didn't need the course, no tinker did, but the PRT apparently liked to cross their "i"s, just in case. I'd mostly used them to form the plates of my armor and the body of my hoverboard.

I let out another dejected sigh and laid out my gear on the counter. I had a depressingly small catalog.

The tech I was proudest of was without question my hoverboard. I ran my fingers along its edge. It was actually several distinct pieces that I kept trying to configure in new ways for better speed and handling. There was an anti-grav module on the bottom, magnetic clamps for my feet, two repulsors for thrust, and a hard drive that interfaced with my helmet along with a gyroscope to keep me balanced. It was a great piece of tech, even Armsmaster said so, but I felt it could do more, be more.

What did it say about me when the best thing I'd ever made felt so incomplete?

Next was my spark pistol. I had two of them because I once thought guns were my specialization. Stupid in hindsight considering my hoverboard, but I'd been desperate to cling to any success. It had good range and lobbed condensed orbs of electricity that could be adjusted to fit the scenario. Most of the time, it was just a nasty shock, enough to snap people out of doing something stupid so we could talk them down, but it did have higher settings that could potentially be lethal to normal people. "Brute-rated," the analysts called it, though I doubted it'd do anything to a real brute like Glory Girl or Lung.

I looked it over and seriously reconsidered its design. Creed had something similar but had imbedded it into his suit. I had to admit, however grudgingly, that it was a neat idea. It gave him an almost mage-like aesthetic that was more PR-friendly than carrying a gun around. It also made him impossible to disarm.

Why hadn't I considered that? There was enough room in my gauntlets, surely. I banged my head against the table and let the cool surface soothe me. It felt like he was just plain better at designing things, even discounting how his tech outperformed mine.

I looked at my breastplate and visor. I'd modeled them after Hero's own. The greatest tinker ever wore blue and gold; I wore red and gold. He insisted on a visor instead of a full helmet because it made him more approachable so I'd done the same. From the smooth curves to the sharp angles around the shoulders that broadened my silhouette, I'd done my best to pay homage to the greatest tinker ever.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be just like him. Now, as I looked at my armor, that dream was starting to sound pretty damn sarcastic even in my own head.

I spent the next half hour performing maintenance on my tech. I didn't need to, our encounter could hardly be called a fight, but this was what Armsmaster recommended: Check over everything as often as you use it. Don't put off maintenance, however minor. The man was meticulous and I could see why he was considered one of the best in the world. I already failed at building, far be it for me to take what I did make for granted.

After routine maintenance, I took my gear apart to try and make improvements. If I rerouted energy in a different way, could I improve the output from my repulsors so I could go faster? If I reprogrammed the software connecting my visor to my hoverboard, could I make myself more agile?

Armsmaster told me once that necessity was the mother of invention, that the greatest works of man were made in times of great need. He also said that we stood on the shoulders of giants, that by looking to others for inspiration, we could progress further than we'd ever considered.

I turned on my computer to the video that had been immortalized on the Internet. It was the tail end of the fight between the Empire and Merchants, Creed's debut. I must have watched it a hundred times by now.

"GIGA IMPACT!" he roared as he crashed down onto Squealer's latest monstrosity in a corona of yellow and green energies. Truck exploded in a truly spectacular fashion and Creed was launched into a building by Skidmark's fields. He emerged a few seconds later to force the battle to a standstill.

His ridiculous need to give his finisher a name like a cartoon character aside, the clip was now being used by at least one mod as the unofficial PHO banhammer.

'Could my armor take that kind of punishment?' I asked myself for the thousandth time. I didn't like the answer.

I watched it again and again, asking myself, "What could I learn from this?"

That Creed was a Sentai Elite wannabe? That he made "signature attacks?" That his armor might be voice-activated to perform those finishing moves like some kind of pro wrestler? That my armor wasn't anywhere near durable enough? That I should stack forcefields? I didn't even know how to build one forcefield, never mind two!

"Fuck!" I swore. I kicked the backpack lying beside my desk in frustration. It rolled and I must have forgotten to zip it up again after I came back from patrol because the Lego set clattered out onto my floor.

"That's what you're good for," I heard. I could see his face in my mind, that black-orange suit and smug posture, always with some wiseass quip for us as he skated just out of reach.

Before he came along, I still wasn't the best tinker, far from it, but I at least had the distinction of being the only flying tinker. Aerial support was a big thing, I'd been told. My hoverboard let me do something even Armsmaster couldn't. It made me the most mobile Ward after Vista and Vista was a shaker-nine.

And then Creed made his debut. He could fly. He had enough firepower to make two gangs stop fighting. He was versatile enough to copy my spark pistol while making some sort of telekinetic gun that could choke out Krieg. He could teleport. He could make forcefields strong enough to rival Dauntless.

He was me, but better in every way.

Creed's dark helmet was replaced by Shadow Stalker's stoic faceplate. "It's all you're good for."

Some teammate she was.

In that moment, I hated them. Creed, for being everything I wished I could be. Stalker for being a fucking bitch.

I grabbed the box of Legos and hurled it against the wall with a frustrated yell. "Ahhhh!"

The box burst like a water balloon. The plastic trays that held individually sized pieces must have broken too, because dozens of little Legos scattered all over my floor.

"Shit."

I breathed heavily, thanking God that my lab was soundproofed.

I looked around and felt ashamed. There were Lego blocks strewn all over, like a child had thrown a tantrum. That was exactly what happened, I reminded myself sardonically. Assault liked to say that we should let ourselves be kids, but that didn't make me feel any better.

Even so, there was a small part of myself that I was afraid to acknowledge that was happier now. Not happy, but at least content, refreshed. They did say I needed to express myself more…

"I'm jealous," I admitted aloud. It felt good to get it out there in the privacy of my lab. "I feel like a failure."

I stood there and allowed the air to absorb my words. Then, I felt awkward, like I was one of those weirdos at school who talked to themselves.

Sighing, I bent down to pick up the pieces. The anger faded, replaced by a resigned acceptance. I wasn't being fair to myself or Creed. It wasn't his fault that he won the power lottery. It wasn't his fault that Stalker was a raging bitch.

"That's all you're good for," I heard her voice again.

Was that what he really meant? I-I didn't think so. He said something similar on PHO, too. I waffled back and forth between being pissed and trying to figure out what he could have possibly meant. Miss Militia was evasive when I asked her about it, though she suggested he or The GOAT might have some thinker elements to their powers, something about personality profiling that was beyond me.

That was one more reason the director was cautious: We legitimately didn't know how many people he had on his side, or who they could be.

Whoever the thinker analysis came from, it was a hard miss on me because I didn't grow up playing with Legos. Or maybe he wasn't trying to offer any form of thinker advice. Maybe he was just fucking with me. That was seeming increasingly likely.

I picked up one of the pieces and absentmindedly began to fiddle with it. It was a miniature satellite dish, the main laser gun of the Death Star that focused several beams into a single focal point before blowing up some poor schmuck's planet from lightyears away.

Ridiculous of course, but I couldn't help but like the classics.

I set it aside. If nothing else, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to kill some time with. Besides maintaining what I had and tuning Dean's armor whenever he needed it, I didn't have too much in my pipeline anyway. Contrary to popular belief, tinkers weren't all workaholics like Armsmaster.

I picked up one of the few swiveling pieces in the set. It was basically a plastic nub that formed a socket so some other piece could rotate. From a cursory glance, it probably went with the auxiliary turrets on the Death Star, the ones that did such a piss-poor job of defending against Han and the rebels.

'It'd look cooler as the center of a minigun,' I thought. And before I knew it, I was reaching for the scattered pieces to build it a bigger mount for the barrels.

I didn't know how long I kept at it. It wasn't quite a fugue, not even tinker-bullshit could let me make a new piece of invention out of Legos, but it was close, closer than even a pen and paper drafting session. Something about the act of building with Legos soothed me; it felt right, like all the metaphorical pieces were falling into place. There was no math, none of my iniquities, none of the constant comparisons that found me wanting.

By the time I returned to myself, three hours had passed. In front of me was some sort of sci-fi spider-tank. I used every last piece of the Death Star and the new creation looked good enough to have been a box set of its own. The best part of it all was that it was still recognizably from the Death Star set. I could recognize individual parts of the whole: the main laser that stood on a towering mount, the turrets that became miniguns, the hinged plates of plastic that acted now as wing-like thrusters. It wouldn't have been out of place in a custom building contest.

I admired my creation for a minute and allowed myself to feel proud of my work. I even snapped a picture to show mom.

Then the bitterness washed away the pride. "Why can't I build like this when I'm actually trying to make something? Was Carlos right? Should I build models out of Legos before trying to machine them? Do I just need to stop thinking and have fun?"

Now that I looked, there was so much more I could do. I could see it now: The spider legs could be tucked in to form treads. The thrusters could be expanded into fully functional wings. The main laser could be converted into a thruster. My spider-tank could be reconfigured into a space-fighter. Or a submarine. Or a subterranean drill-bot.

There were so many possibilities, so many different ways I could take this. In fact, if I wanted, I could probably make scale models that actually worked. I'd need Armsmaster's help miniaturizing the anti-gav module in my hoverboard, but I could machine most of the parts myself, right here in my lab.

Why hadn't I ever played with Legos? It was awesome how interchangeable they were. Everything was variable, limited only by my own imagination. Everything was…

"It's what you're good for," I heard Creed's voice in my mind. That same smug, self-satisfied voice that said he knew something no one else did.

Then it hit me.

It struck like a bolt from the blue. Creed wasn't mocking me; he wasn't Stalker. He was…

"Oh, that son of a bitch!"

Author's Note

Sophia's honestly kinda fun to write. She joined the Wards in the summer of 2010 as far as I can tell and she is every bit the angry pitbull. It's hard to imagine, but I wonder if she actually mellowed out a bit by April 2011. This is still November, so the bruised ego from the press-ganging is still kinda tender.

"That's what you're good for," was Creed's hint at Chris's specialization, but it was admittedly a poor choice of words. Bryce wanted to play on the rule of cool and be the man of mysteries, but Stalker turned that into "This is all you're good for." Subtle but major difference there.

I feel bad for Chris, but I believe in letting my characters be themselves. Have you ever had an older sibling or friend everyone compared you to? He was more athletic, taller and better looking, did better in school, had an easier time making friends, never had any trouble finding a girl? Have you ever told yourself that it didn't matter because you were your own person, but knew deep inside that it did matter because you cared?

Chris is like that. He's a young tinker with dyscalculia and zero knowledge of his own specialization, something most tinkers figure out pretty quickly. Throw in the regular teenage self-esteem issues and it shouldn't be a surprise he constantly compares himself to Creed, the other young tinker. Problem is of course that Creed isn't a tinker in the normal sense, he's the tinker of fiction, a walking embodiment of all the bullshit in the multiverse.

Random fact of the week? Sure. The beaver has a gland in its rectum called a castor sac that secretes castoreum, a mix of anal juices and urine. It's by beavers to mark territory, and by humans as additives... in ice cream and perfume among other things.

Yup. It has a musky/fruity note that brings out the flavor of vanilla, gives cigarettes a nice aftertaste, and adds depth to perfume. It's rare so it's not in everything, but some luxury brands still use castoreum in their products. You may go about your day knowing that at some point in American history, the number of people who made a living off of picking through a beaver's anus was greater than zero.

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.