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Book 2 Chapter 2. A hint of drama

Book 2 Chapter 2. A hint of drama

Do you know what travels faster than quantum entanglement? Rumors. Specifically gossip. Or, in this case, while I was hunting down Mindy, she was busy hunting me down at the fair as well. The fair itself consisted of three guild pavilions, although most of it was held within the arena itself. Mostly it was simply a series of various fold-up tables with signs on them, a student or two, maybe some pictures of what the club or organization was about, and a sign-up list and contact information sheet.

North of that, farther into the arena proper, were more professional-looking booths set up by corporate interests, a few professional teams like the monster hunters, and even a few of the consortiums. Kellar Academy was a big deal, and while few of the alpha students were wandering around in costume, the day students returned from their first term break was when the special interests would start pulling out all stops to recruit promising talent, both alpha and baseline or low-tier.

Both Mindy and Abbey were with me right now, but we were set up in our costume armor instead of civilian attire. The light armor, of course, would be difficult to distinguish as armor at all in Frostweaver and Network’s case.

They both had similar armored helmets, complete face coverage down to the nose, a hard mask that goes completely over their head but has simulated hair in Frostweaver’s case, and the lower halves of their faces were artistically blended holomasks that exposed their chins and mouths. At least, it looked like it did, although they had blended silica nanoweave face shields that nearly invisibly covered their faces and provided an emergency atmosphere and protection at a moment’s notice.

Their costumes were very thin, by their own decision. Slightly thicker than contraweave, the girls didn’t actually have any air gaps to show off easy-to-hit zones, although the colored patterns, green and white in Network’s case and blue and white in Frostweaver’s, certainly looked like it should have been showing skin. However, at each joint, and in each stress point and emergency impact point, a thin layer of honeycombed armor, slightly visible as seams under the flexible primary layer, protected the girls with enough extra protection to take an old-style armor-piercing thirty-millimeter autocannon round safely.

Because of the way the force was distributed, any of the armors could distribute a thirty-mile-an-hour full-body impact from anywhere in the armor, including the neck, focused down to as small as ten molecules wide. The joy of nanomesh. It wouldn’t make someone like Network into a tank, but each of the armors ALSO had a series of contingency devices… five hundred yards of yarn-like rope able to support up to a thousand pounds, a full emergency pack with auto-injectors, built-in emergency comms with the base switching station under Candace’ watchful eye, and the armor itself could be used as a wing-suit or deploy drogues in case of a fall.

Yes, I was terrified of someone falling to their death. They also had full oxygen supplies, could handle pressure up to 1000 yards underwater or a lack of pressure up to a full vacuum, excellent radiation, fire, and cold insulation, and the micro-vents circulated atmosphere constantly to keep the suits at a comfortable temperature against your skin. I was particularly proud of that last bit.

Plus the girls looked… well… amazingly hot in the costumes. The best part? Once I finished the heavy armor overlay, these costumes would plug right in and become the under-layer for a suit that would make power rangers scream in envy. Not that I planned to have them combine into some kind of mega-robot or something, but in her heavy armor, I was betting all of Frostweaver’s physical attributes would come up as no less than solid class 6.

I was wearing a similar costume, but mine was a much heavier suit, with very visible torso plates and enough extra utility pouches to make Liefeld proud. I’d managed to get my joint locks just perfected enough that I could use them… Joint locks were something I was very proud of, being able to lock plates in small areas or even all over to prevent impacts and simulate the great strength most power armors tried to create.

You’d be amazed at how strong your natural strength can become when your suit locks everything needed to effectively use your natural maximum without hurting yourself. If your spine plates lock just before you hit something, you can easily take hits that would fold and kill other people, and the best part was, it was entirely hardware engineering, exactly the hyper-extension protection I’d been trying to maximize. It was still not perfect, but Terracotta had come up with an incredible idea that I desperately wanted to try, and without joint locking, that idea was impossible without likely killing me.

And to be honest, my armor kind of made me look like a sexy badass myself, especially since it tended to emphasize my musculature since it was nearly half an inch thick in certain areas.

We each also had control pads built into our arm guards, extra-armored boots and gauntlet segments, and of course, enough armor in certain areas to make sure that no one would be able to tell what temperature the inside of the suit was… and in my case, anyone that tried for a cup-shot was extremely likely to wind up fracturing whatever limb they used to make the attempt.

“So, you are saying that the armor won’t work if someone isn’t authorized to use it? Like Biosecurity?” Ironhide asked.

I shook my head. Right now we were inside of the forge Pavilion, which was using some sort of magical size enhancement. I didn’t understand how you could have a full forge and two-hundred-foot factory floor inside of a twenty-foot pavilion, but it was either spacial expansion, shrinking, or some weird permanent transport gates that were even more beyond me. Some of the widgeteers that worked for the forge Pavilion were capable of amazing feats.

“No. Each person has an energy signature. Normal human, alpha, mage, whatever. Normal neural nets are hugely risky because feedback could fry someone’s brain or nervous system that wasn’t innately resistant and make a weakness for certain sorts of alphas and beasts to exploit, but in this case, when I realized that both your energy level and rank was distinctive and flowed when you moved, I was able to add in simple sensors that react to reflexes.”

“I know it doesn’t seem like much, but just being able to lock your joints or trigger impact layers helps distribute impacts into the ground or convert it into kinetic energy. Right now, either extreme impact or intentional power flexing can lock those hotspots. It will take some training, but it is NOT power armor, is energy-free other than what it absorbs naturally, and should dramatically enhance the physical capabilities of almost anyone that wears it.”

The guy from Dupoint was shaking his head, “If it were reproducible or modifiable, it might be useful, but this is a finished product.”

I looked at him curiously, “I was showing all of you the finished product first. I don’t care about your opinion, this was for Ironhide.” I waved at the assessor for the Anvil, “They invited you because you have manufacturing methodologies that might be capable of creating some of these substances. But we will get to the stuff intended for you in a few moments. Please wait your turn”

I glanced back at Ironhide, ignoring the Dupoint assessor's shocked expression at being called out and treated like the child he was emulating. “The point is, that because it’s not power armor, and uses energy flows to determine lock and unlock status, it performs much faster than any sort of classic powered armor. We haven’t had a chance to test it with a true speedster yet, but it should be able to help protect a speedster, hypersonic flyer, or even biological flyer from the consequences of their speed as well as critical flight or transportation failure without slowing them down, I hope.”

I grinned, “It’s not quite those fantastic five unstable molecule costumes from the comic books, but it’s damned close, and while I can’t mass produce it, blueprinting it takes only a few minutes per suit.” I was showing one of the Mark two’s, which was sitting on the table Ironhide had set out.

He was dressed in much more exciting armor, his face completely concealed, that looked a bit like an old jousting outfit, and his voice sounded metallic and slightly hollow as he said, “So it’s like a handicraft, where you kind of have to make each suit special for it’s wearer?”

I nodded, “I guess, yeah. Each suit has to be customized to its wearer’s exact body dimensions, and more importantly, their energy signature to work perfectly. Of course, I have lesser versions, but at that point, it’s not much better than contraweave with Proxovan armor overlays.”

“And no one can do this blueprinting thing but you?”

I shrugged, “Not yet. Theoretically, it should be possible, since I am using energy sensors on the suits themselves for their safety systems, and that’s all I do when I customize it, but I also do the actual production at the same time. This stuff is woven on a molecular scale, I call it nanoweave, and unless you can figure out how to create a 3d-printer that can create carbon, fluorine, and silicon nested nanotubes and then weave millions of them together, it still takes micro-kinetics to produce.”

“Can a duplicator produce it?” The Dupoint guy asked, cautiously, his earlier offense subsumed by the possibilities of nanoweave. This was right up his alley, so I didn’t blow his question off this time. “I honestly have no idea, but next spring, I plan on meeting a professional duplicator and finding out. Good question, though,” I answered, trying to throw him a bone. I didn’t particularly like corporate types, but Dupoint controlled a lot of raw materials manufacturing plants, and I didn’t need to make enemies.

The guy nodded his head, “You are right that this is out of our wheelhouse, but we do have some… interesting production facilities. You said you had samples?”

I nodded and glanced at Network, who stepped forward with a small plastic case. “Bear in mind, all of this has been patented, but you are welcome to reverse-engineer the substances for production testing, and if you blow them up, well, they are not useful amounts so ask us and we can probably replace them. In addition, if you manage to figure out a way to industrially reproduce them, your production process can be patented or shared as part of the agreement.”

“Inside are eighty-one substances that each have industrial value as well as documentation cards from my testing. Forty-one of them are simply existing materials in new configurations that give them new uses, such as three-twenty-one nested carbon-fluorine nanotubes that have over almost a meter of unbroken length.”

The science guy looked shocked, but grinned, knowing damned well what that was worth.

“Some of them are utterly original, such as the replicated mylomar structures that have over seventy percent condensing ability on micro-voltage. And some of them, we aren’t sure what they are useful for yet, although we have tentative uses in mind like the heat-transfer material might be useful for heat storage on spacecraft or Peltier cooling.”

“So wait, you are just letting me have this stuff and reverse engineer it, and you’d let us keep any production processes as long as we pay you a fair share of the finished product?’

I shook my head, “Nope.”

“No?”

I shook my head, “No. We patented the end product to prevent ownership battles in the future. Almost everything in that box is a mark one product… something we created on our way to figuring out how to make this.” I tugged at my suit, letting the surface distend slightly before locking it back into place. "Technically, the end product is going to be one hundred percent public domain, my production process is my own business, but I am giving you a head start on your production process. My only payment will be my name attached to the product, and to be fair, that's more than I need since I have already moved past most of these."

“Most of it’s only a generation or two above what’s being put into production right now, and those samples are a present, no more and no less, to help you skip a few steps, I am only saving you a few weeks, months, or years of work, which you are going to turn around and devote to production methodologies.”

The Dupoint scientist looked at me in confusion, “Why?”

I shrugged, “Three reasons. The first reason is that while I understand logistics, production is far outside of my bailiwick… I could never create the kinds of facilities necessary to exploit this stuff.”

“Two, the sooner you can figure out how to mass-produce it, the sooner it will wind up in the gear and equipment on the front lines, the men and women who fight and die to keep our cities from being overrun. That’s also why we patented the materials because I fully intend to start custom-crafting gear using some of these and I don’t want a legal battle. That will waste my time.”

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The guy was nodding, “Yeah, but money?”

I laughed, “Someone smacked me in the head recently. I have a lot more important things to worry about than money. Know anyone who wants a couple hundred pounds of Rhodium? I hear it’s all the rage recently, a quarter of a chainbuck each.” I was, of course, talking about blockchain bucks, a popular sort of crypto worth almost 100 grand per buck.

“As far as money is concerned, well, I am not sure that it’s a motivation. We would happily accept crypto donations, but unlike most tinkers, we don’t have to purchase expensive materials, and we can produce vast amounts of valuables if necessary.”

Ironhide nodded, “You don’t want to have to deal with hard money because capitalization is meaningless. I get it.”

I shook my head, “No, you don’t.”

“How so?”

I smiled a little, “I want… I need some things that have values that are incomprehensible, unreachable, or simply immeasurable by any sort of regular value standard.”

He looked at me, his helmet seeming to stare into my soul. “What sorts of things.”

I shrugged, “People. I need information and people from Earth 3152 and any artifacts or information you have on the Serenoids. That's why I am fine cooperating with Dupoint because you guys already have a history of reverse-engineering some of their materials. Remember how you figured out non-ferrous steel to make Proxovan? If not, I do.”

***

I was not happy. I mean, the Dupoint guy was still thinking it was all about money, which I understood, but couldn’t empathize with. But Ironhide was acting like I was some kind of genius inventor angling to take over military production or something, which I wasn’t. The science guy? I hadn’t caught his name, but when he found out none of it was Tinker tech, he was drooling and eyeing me like he wanted to have my babies. Creepy.

Mindy smiled at me slightly as we walked towards the Arena. “I think I am starting to understand you a little better.”

“How so?” I asked. I wasn’t that hard to understand, at least I didn’t think I was.

“Your motivations, I mean, you are all about doing the right thing. You don’t care about money or fame. You really should be a hero.”

I shook my head, chuckling softly, “No, I am really not. Admittedly I never cared much about money, I figure as long as I have a nice place to live and someone to share it with, I am good, but I am not a hero. If anything, I plan to be a hunter.”

Her eyebrow raised, “Oh?”

I nodded, “Yep. Being a hero is a lot of things, it’s about not only being the best of the best, but also it’s about being a figurehead, being the light in the darkness for the frightened, and being the spearhead. I'd rather kill monsters and let the police handle supervillains.”

She nodded, “But you don’t want that?”

“Exactly. I don’t want to rule the world, I don’t have some grand play for being the best of the best, and I don’t want to be anyone’s inspiration. What I do want, though, is to help those inspirations. Our world is a dangerous, terrible place, and my dream is to someday be able to walk down to Florida, find a nice piece of beach, a cute girl to share it with, and drink a pina colada without worrying that the kids playing in the surf are going to get eaten by a giant radioactive monster.”

I shrugged, “The rest? That’s just a means to an end. Sure, I like helping people, but my entire philosophy can be summed up in four words. I like living here. That’s not humility, it’s basically laziness. I am not particularly motivated by peace on Earth… Humans are brutal to each other and always will be. This is OUR world, and I will happily screw over anything or anyone that wants to take it away from us. We have the right to screw it up any way we want, to hell with the rest of the universe.”

“Is that why you were playing villain?”

I nodded, “Yup. If you buy into the old alpha-beta gamma personality thing, I am a beta who is more than happy to stay a beta. If I could find an alpha personality worth backing up, I’d probably do that instead. Let THEM have all the money and fame, I am just as happy in a lab coming up with cool toys, or helping train the next generation of heroes to kick ass.”

“Are you scared of celebrity?”

I coughed. “In a way, yes. I am not an introvert, not really, but I also don’t like attention. Sure I’d like enough money to do what I want, but I have no interest whatsoever in all the...fidgety bits of gaining wealth and power and keeping it. Mostly I just want people to leave me alone.”

She nodded, “I guess I kinda get it. But honestly, for a while, I thought alpha powers only wound up going to pretty extroverted people. Then I realized that those are only the ones who show it. Abby is more like you, though. She’s not a hard introvert, but she prefers just to do her thing, and to heck with everything else. Me, I will admit I want to be a real hero, saving people, and interviews, maybe go to Europe one day to see the castles, have guys all putting up posters of me…”

I grinned, “And for you, well, that’s attainable. Hell, if I didn’t think it would cause drama in the team, I’d be more than happy to have a poster of you dressed in a swimsuit next to my bed.”

We were passing by one of the many snack booths, and I quickly grabbed a couple of drinks and some big cookies for the two of us. I could at least afford that now, but making enough money to support yourself was a long, slow process.

She licked her lower lip, “Really. A picture of me in a swimsuit? Not a naked picture?”

I glanced at her suspiciously. “No. I’d rather see the real thing instead. But like I said, it would cause endless drama, and I friggin’ hate drama. I have a lot of time to think when I am gaining energy, and I realized that all of it, in the end, is about sex.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed. “Okay, this is going to sound weird, but why do people want lots of money?”

“To be comfortable,” she answered promptly. “To have the best. To be able to control the actions of others, and umm… to be able to do things without having to go through all the problems of responsibility.”

I nodded, “That was a better answer than I was thinking of. Power. Why do you need power? To show you are superior to others, why do you want to be superior? So you can get the best sex.”

“But me? I sorta have all the power I want. The only thing I want more power for is to be able to destroy all the threats.”

She nodded, “So you can sunbathe safely. But there’s a lot more to power than just sex.”

I laughed, “Right. Someone told me that if I wanted Angel, who has sorta been considered the ultimate sex symbol for the last forty years, all I would have to do is ask. Which means, I don’t need an expensive car, a mansion, a million-dollar couch, or any of that junk.” I held up my hand and flicked my fingers. Gold was a LOT easier to synthesize now that I had a larger energy pool, so I replicated a handful of krugerrand, something I had seen on the net, with a slight pop as the molecular structure of the atmospheric gasses I had absorbed to create them were displaced.

I held them out to her, and she cupped her hands while I poured them between my fingers into hers, with little chimes as the coins struck. “So money, aside from enough to be convenient, is pretty meaningless now. But those coins aren’t spendable. They are chemically pure identical blueprints, which anyone would be able to tell just by looking at them. I could make them more useful…” I turned them into a bar of gold in her hands, which was easy since they still had my signature. The hardest part was to keep them from altering in temperature or radiation levels from the manipulation.

“That’s better. There are still some places that buy gold, but I’d rather use the energy to make something useful. With a few days' work, I could probably fill a truck with those, but that wouldn’t do me any good. I’d rather spend the same energy on making a bunch of anti-material rifle rounds that the city guard could use to take out monsters more safely.”

She looked a little shocked, holding the small bar in her hands. “Do you mind if I keep this?”

I shrugged, “Why should I mind? I mean, in terms of pure value, I think I might have left a couple of million sitting in that Dupoint rep’s hands. And right now, I already finished making mark two suits for Frost Phoenix’s team, and frankly, I would have a hard time giving a damn about their little payment scheme. It’s irrelevant, except that it would make them harder to beat if we had to do a team conflict again, which seems to be important to you guys.”

She sighed, “So as your sponsor, what am I supposed to do to motivate you? It seems sort of impossible, and I get tested on this. Also, why haven’t you done this before?”

I shrugged, “Right now, what do I want? I want a heck of an awesome coder to help me make the suits a lot better. I thought I could get Quiet Code, but drama seems to be blocking that. I want to finish making a decent communications system. I want to help other people get a handle on their power. I want to make a device that can measure and store the essence people produce naturally so I can help keep male double-powers from killing themselves. I want other people to be able to track their power levels, and maybe even figure out ways to optimize or progress so that they stop dying against incursions. I have a lot more wants, but all I really need is time.”

I glanced at the gold, “As to why I didn’t do it before, well, it takes a lot of energy. That’s about half an hour of hanging out down in the dump tunnels, and three months ago that would have been months of downtime and a nightmare to get rid of.”

Mindy nodded, “Want some advice?”

I nodded, “Sure.”

She stopped and looked at me directly, brushing one bi-colored red-and-ice blonde bang out of her face, “Okay, remember, I am trying to take this sponsor thing very seriously. So please take this the way it is intended.”

I nodded back at her. “Okay?”

“Stop being such an idiot.”

“Huh?”

She sighed and took a sip of her drink. “You. You are being a total idiot. You are one of the smartest guys I have ever met, you are incredibly competent, and all of us know you are the real team leader even if you keep trying to defer to me. Not because you are the man,” she said, tucking the bar of gold into a belt pouch and making air quotes with her fingers.

“Rather, because you are always the one that knows what we should be doing, where we should be going, and because you have a plan for everything almost instantly. Sometimes you are wrong, but you have this stupid confidence, not confidence thing going on that’s just getting… old.”

I looked at her in confusion, with one eyebrow quirked, “Confidence not Confidence?”

She nodded, “Yep. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute, but the whole chair guy thing? It’s so humble-brag that it sometimes makes me want to scream. That whole wealth and fame thing you hate so much? Sure, a lot of people enjoy it, but it’s a responsibility, a price, not a privilege you can just throw away when it’s not convenient.”

She shook her head rapidly, and I could tell that she’d been hanging on to this for a long time. “You like to say that the whole with great power comes great responsibility thing is a farce… and the way people usually use it it’s true, but the real point behind the saying is that great power IS great responsibility. It’s painful to be powerful, and you keep fucking shirking that responsibility and bluntly backing away from it and trying to dump it off on the rest of us.”

“But…”

She was looking a little upset now and held up her hand, speaking over the top of me, “No, you get to run your mouth all the time and pretend you are just a silent partner. I am getting this out now while I can. Your whole wounded bird thing was appealing, the sob story about your ex ruining your life, breaking your heart… but now, get the fuck over it! You are in a school full of girls that are ten times as awesome as Crystal is, on a team that would jump in front of a bullet for you, You can make money out of nothing, and yet you keep ignoring it all to cling to that double-edged low self-esteem crap.”

She pointed angrily at the dorm building in the distance, and I noticed more than a few fellow students were carefully trying not to pay attention to the growing volume of her outburst. “Half the girls in that building would drop everything to jump you if you said just one word. Hell, a dozen of them would probably give you everything they have and marry you if you asked. Why? Because you are NOT the guy behind the computer.”

“You constantly overlook everything around you, all the people around you, and then smugly pat yourself on the back because you are “doing the right thing” or wallowing in your grief. So Crystal was a bitch that stabbed you in the back? You didn’t love her, and her fucking some distant relative you barely knew and then stealing something you didn’t want in the first place? Get over it already!”

“LOOK at your teammates. Look at what they have to offer, not just their tits, not just their powers or their threat level. Did you know that Network is one of the best researchers on the planet? Have you asked her to help you find a decent object coder?”

“How about Chinook? Have you talked to her long enough to know that her entire extended family was eaten by skinwalkers right in front of her, and that was what made her ascend? And that she’s terrified because she has dysgraphia, and might not be allowed to graduate or even join a hero team?”

She shook her head in evident disgust, and dropped her voice to barely above a whisper.“You are the most hero-ish hero anyone has ever seen, surrounded by people who care about you, and you keep hiding behind your team instead of leading them. So here’s my advice, as your sponsor. Grow up, open your eyes, stop wallowing in fake humble self-pity, and stop lying so damned much, especially to yourself.”

She glared at me. “One more thing, I am done with this fair. I am going to go train with Terracotta, which is what you should be doing as a first-year instead of wandering around trying to impress a bunch of greedy people with the introvert genius act. When you decide to start trusting and helping people who would kill or die for you instead of acting like an emotional black hole, talk to me. Until then, this sponsor crap is driving me crazy and I can’t deal with it right now.”

She threw up her hands and stalked off. Abbey, who had been walking along with us, was just sort of looking away from me and pretending the whole thing was some sort of fair display she hadn’t noticed. What the hell just happened?