At the eve of a new arc, allow me a moment to address the audience.
"Is this even Worm?" said audience might be saying right now. "Where's the grimderp? I'm hardly traumatized at all!"
Never fear, the chill nature of arc S was merely the train building up speed. And it will continue to do so for a while yet. The thing about a train, gentle reader, is that the ride it offers is quite smooth right up until there stops being any rails beneath it.
Be reassured, arc L is where my brain started having ideas that made my better judgement sit up and go "you sure about this bro? It's a bit much, don't you think?" I'm going to completely ignore it, of course, and proudly announce:
Content Warning: YES
===
When Dragon gives you a ride, you ride in style. But the Canadian armed forces are no slouches either. You've never ridden a helicopter before.
As you're about to leave, the... sergeant? The guy in charge places a fatherly hand on your shoulder. It's a bit funny, since your current persona is older than him, but you're actively trying to not find things funny right now.
"Just wanted to say, no one here is judging you. You kept it together when it mattered, yeah? Freaking out a bit afterwards is fine. Doesn't make you any less of a man."
Keeping your shit together would be a lot easier if people stopped being so goddamn funny all the time.
----
You wander the temporary base camp looking for Dragon. It's quickly emptying now that the fight is over, but you're still surrounded by more parahumans than you've seen before in your life. Truly a feast for the eyes, as long as they are magic eyes.
Now if they'd just stick around for a few weeks, you could get something useful out of it.
"Smith! There you are!" Dragon's voice comes from behind you. You turn around to finally meet her in the flesh.
Or... not? She's in power armor, of course, a colossal battle-suit almost ten feet tall and bristling with weapons. Except no, sorcerer's sight reveals that what you're looking at is tinkertech all the way through, with no chewy human center.
But sorcerer's sight also reveals that what you're looking at is definitely a parahuman. The glow of a power is unmistakable. You suppose a similar effect could be achieved by a Master capable of possessing inanimate objects - but then the power would also show up as active, which this one does not.
Sooo... Dragon is secretly a robot. A robot cape. A paranonhuman, if you will.
"Smith?"
"Ah, I'm afraid you've caught me staring, my lady. That's quite the provocative outfit you're wearing."
Dragon laughs, and it sounds remarkably genuine for a robot. "Yes, several Tinkers have told me so. I wanted to tell you that I've arranged for Strider to take you directly to my factory. I'll join you within the hour, but I still have some things to take care of here."
"Of course." As you understand it, Dragon usually handles the majority of the administrative work involved in Endbringer fights. Must be her giant robot brain. "Uh, where do I find this Strider?"
After she's given you directions, you also request her soul's price. Person enough to trigger means person enough to desire, right?
Dragon wants to have her restrictions removed.
You chew on that as you make your way to the departure point. What restrictions? It's the first time you've gotten a soul's price and been unclear on what you're supposed to accomplish. You've often boggled at the how, but never before has the what been in question.
You are jolted from your thoughts when you notice a glow on the side of the road. Did someone drop their tinkertech? You crouch down for a closer look.
Your breath hitches as you recognize the object. A slim crystalline feather - or a fragment of one, but even with he tip broken off what remains is still almost a foot in length. Its opalescent white hue leaves no doubt as to its origin. Someone hit her hard enough to send it flying all the way out here?
A likely story. A magic feather from the telekinetic precog just happened to land in the middle of the base camp, where it just happened to go unnoticed until you - an alchemist Tinker who was previously singled out by said precog for special treatment - stumbled across it?
Yeah, no. There is no conceivable universe in which this is not a trap.
You pick it up.
Your goal is marked by parahumans standing around in groups, waiting to leave. No one greets you as you take your place among them. They all look varying degrees of grim and tired, and few are talking even within the groups. Every so often a cape will appear, walk over to a group and exchange a few words, after which they all vanish without fanfare. That must be Strider.
He's dressed in eye-catching black and blue, in a style you would describe as 'action train conductor' - complete with a jaunty cap, even. Rather than a conventional mask, oversized ski goggles cover most of his face.
Before too long it's your turn.
"Smith?" he asks.
"Yes," you respond, and your surroundings change before you can finish the syllable. Strider vanishes before you can thank him.
Wait shit he didn't bring Fenrir along! He must designate individuals to teleport, rather than an area. And of course he didn't see the invisible wolf. Crap. Double crap. If Fenrir gets lost, how would you possibly find him again?
Uh, well, nothing you can do about that now. You'll just have to hope that he can find his own way home. You forcibly put the matter out of mind, and focus on the other important aspect of being teleported.
Looking around, you find yourself standing on a helipad on the edge of an industrial park. Several large but relatively flat buildings sprawl out in front of you, surrounded by thick forest. You'd be tempted to call it the middle of nowhere, but there's a surprisingly wide and well-maintained road leading off into the trees. Or maybe not so surprising when you think about it, she has to get materials delivered somehow.
Lacking any direction, you wander aimlessly between the buildings. You hear machine noises emanating from several, but don't try to get inside. Eventually you come upon the one that must be intended for you.
Large parts of the roof has been replaced with glass, and several gigantic parabolic mirrors have been mounted above it. Perfectly smooth and flawlessly reflective, they are a far cry from the hodgepodge mess you built back home. You feel your Tinker instincts stirring, and you haven't even seen the furnace itself yet.
You're not sure how long you stand there, lost in thought.
"Wait until you see what's inside," Dragon says, her voice tinged with amusement. When did she get here?
What she proceeds to show you is indeed impressive: The furnace is suitably large, the magma already preheated. The lenses in the focusing array alone probably cost more than your dad makes in a year. It's all motorized, with a control panel letting you move and swivel every mirror and lens in three dimensions, and adjust the temperature of the magma down to a tenth of a degree. Next to the control panel is a similarly advanced CAD workstation.
Surrounding the furnace, and taking up the entire rest of the building, is... well, to call it a 'well-appointed blacksmith's shop' would be like calling a 747 a 'well-appointed paper airplane'. It easily matches any factory-cathedral your power could dream up.
Throughout the tour, however, you're distracted by one thing: Dragon changed into more human-sized power armor since you last saw her. The casual wear of battle-suits, hardly armed at all.
Except, you know, there's obviously still no human inside. Nor is there any sort of swappable 'core' that could have been moved from one armor to the other, even a cursory examination with sorcerer's sight shows that their internal layout is completely different. But the parahuman glow doesn't lie: It is the same 'person'.
Sooo... Dragon is secretly two robots?
No, that's stupid. Once you've figured out how to be more than one robot, there is absolutely no reason to stop at two. Dragon is an arbitrary number of robots. Or, to use the technical term, a Skynet.
This revelation might require a slight change in your plans.
"Good news," you tell Dragon once the tour is concluded. "I figured out a way to reduce both the weight and the cost of the orichalcum."
"Oh? Do tell."
"I should be able to alloy it with up to twenty percent meteoric iron without impacting its durability, as long as I also add trace amounts of iridium." You repeat the words popping into your brain. "Maybe nineteen percent, to be safe."
"It has to be meteoric?"
"Yes," you state with finality. "...if you figure out why, I'd love for you to explain it to me."
"It's still cheaper than gold," Dragon admits. "Even if the reduction in density won't be all that-"
"No, no," you interrupt her, "the density isn't important. I said reduced weight, not reduced mass. Do pay attention."
"I see..."
Yes, it's that kind of Tinker bullshit. You move your hands in front of you, experimentally swinging an imaginary orichalcum sword around.
"Wow," you say as your brain supplies more data ex nihilo. "The effect on angular momentum will be nuts. How..?"
"I do believe the phrase is 'fucking Tinkers.'" Dragon is taking the nonsensical physics with good humor. She probably runs into stuff like this all the time.
"Yeah. Anyway, I can't add the iron until the orichalcum is fully synthesized, so you have a week to procure it."
"Im afraid it's going to be slightly more than a week. I've arranged the purchase, but there are strict regulations about transporting that much gold, and with the current state of emergency..."
"My schedule doesn't have all that much flex in it, you know." Your voice is grave, belying the song in your heart. More time with Dragon's power? Yes please!
"I know. If things still aren't moving by tomorrow I'll start calling in favors."
"In the meantime, I believe we have a... what would you call it? A drone? A weapons platform?"
"I just call them 'suits', even the unmanned ones." You're not sure if that's giving too much away, or a clever double bluff, or what. Whatever works for her. It. Whatever.
"-a suit to design. But, uh, I'd appreciate if you could show me the way to the bathroom first."
---
The 'bathroom' is a porta-potty behind the building. Okay, it's a few steps above the plastic abominations you'd find at a fairground, but it's clearly not a permanent structure. Makes sense, really. The factory is designed for robots pretending to be humans in fully-enclosed power armor. No reason to put in real plumbing all the way out here.
Dragon added one personal touch to the facilities, though. Your eye is instantly drawn to a small glowing spot of tinkertech on one of the walls. Leaning in close, you see that's it's a tiny camera. Without sorcerer's sight, you'd never have spotted it.
Well, you can't have Dragon catching you with your pants down. You wag your finger in front of the lens, then rip it out of its mount and put in on the sink, facing the wall.
---
"I hope you're blushing in there, young lady," you tell Dragon, launching the camera towards her with an underhand toss. She pretends to be so flustered she fumbles the catch. "I admit I'm not 'hip with the kids', but I believe it's still considered polite to ask for those kinds of pictures."
"I, uh, I just-"
"You have no excuse?"
"No, I suppose not. I have cameras monitoring every other part of the facility, I guess I kept going out of habit, and-"
"And you're sorry you got caught?"
"Yes. No! I'm regular sorry, I shouldn't have done that." It's sort of funny, the way she doesn't know that you know and has to keep pretending to be human, but it's hardly productive. You're here to steal her power, not indulge in playacting.
"Water under the bridge," you say. "Now, about that design..."
You start by sketching a rough silhouette, basing the design on the inspiration you had when watching Kaiser's armor. Your Tinker power likes armor, and you're quickly refining the design and sketching out decorative flourishes and intricate interlocking joints. Dragon vetoes most of the decorative stuff, preferring a sleeker design. Probably because she's the one paying for the orichalcum.
You get into a lively discussion about the joints, however. You're basing your designs on human-worn armor, but with a robot you can design the articulation of the limbs however you want no longer need to worry about comfort. Dragon is more experienced in building robots, but hasn't worked with this much indestructible material before and doesn't have your instincts for it. Between the two of you, you're pretty sure you're breaking new ground in the field of armorology.
You didn't expect that you'd come remotely this close to holding up your end of the collaboration. You frequently have to pause and think for minutes at a time. Ostensibly to 'catch up with the World's Greatest Tinker', because a bit of flattery never hurts. It's even half true, you're so busy contributing that you need the pauses to internalize your observations of her power.
You're also having incredible amounts of fun. Before you know it it's past midnight, and you don't realize it until Dragon shakes you awake where you fell asleep in your chair.
"It's been a long day, hasn't it?" she says. "Let me show you to your room."
Your room is a cot in the corner, behind a pair of screens. You're sleepy, but you're still alert enough to look pointedly at the wall just above your bed, and again at another spot on one if the screens.
"I'll remove the cameras."
---
When try you get dressed the next morning, you find that your costume has other ideas. The residue of containment foam from the crash has not only stained it an eye-catching orange, it somehow hardened overnight. Luckily you still have two sets of the bulky unisex clothing you wore while transforming, and your backpack mostly protected it from the foam.
Your skin also features a certain orange tint here and there. You sponge yourself off in the sink as best you can. You're probably going to be pretty smelly by the time you leave, but at least Dragon has no nose.
You bring the remains of your costume to Dragon. "You're the world's foremost expert on containment foam. Is this salvageable?"
"I'll see what I can do."
After a quick breakfast of the finest Canadian MREs (Dragon 'already ate', of course) you get back to work.
"I forgot to ask you earlier," Dragon says, "what shape was the Katla in?"
"The- the plane?" you ask. Dragon nods. "A good forty percent of it was still in one piece, if not quite the right shape."
She makes a humming noise. "Worth recovering, probably. The paperwork for removing technology from a quarantine zone is going to be nightmare, though."
"I thought you were in charge of all that paperwork."
"That's how I know how awful it is."
During lunch you call your dad. The instruction manual for your mask was also rendered partially illegible by containment foam residue, but you manage to figure out the 'secure call' functionality. It boasts of 'tinker-proof encryption', 'undetectable tunneling' and other such things you're not really qualified to evaluate. You have little choice but to trust it.
It's pretty neat, actually. With the right settings enabled the mask sends your undisguised voice over the phone, while still broadcasting the altered version through the external speakers.
You could simply disable the speakers, but you find it amusing to let Dragon overhear your end of the conversation and restrict yourself to statements that work for both father/daughter and husband/wife conversations.
"Of course everything is fine, you worry too much."
"Yes, I'm having fun."
"Love you, bye."
Things like that.
"Secret identities, eh?" you say after you hang up. "I'm on a lovely skiing vacation right now, did you know?" Dragon elects not to scold you for keeping secrets from your loved ones, possibly because she thinks you're older than her.
...come to think of it, are you? Robots don't have childhoods, just when did Dragon make her debut?
"It would be really neat if the gold arrived in time to melt by sunrise tomorrow," you remark as the sun sets.
"I know, I'm working on it." From the way she stops contributing for long periods of time, you guess she's on the phone with a lot of people. Unlike you, she does not elect to share her half of the conversations.
Her efforts bear fruit, though, as some time after midnight an armored truck pulls up by the factory, accompanied by a motley collection of capes. You only recognize one of them. A man whose armor alone would be worth a week of study, were you not otherwise occupied.
"Armsmaster," you say, nodding your head in his direction.
"Smith." He's never seen you before, but he's able to pick things up from context.
"Thank you for forwarding my proposal."
"Good luck on your project." There's a distinct note of envy in his voice, or is it jealousy?
The heroes help unload the gold into the furnace. You of course looked up the price of gold when you first became aware of your Tinker power, which lets you calculate that Dragon is spending roughly fifty million dollars on this venture in gold alone.
"Make sure it melts in time, but don't turn up the heat more than you have to," you tell her before you stumble off to bed. It's so late it's early, and you have to be up before sunrise tomorrow. Early to rise and early to bed / makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead. That's how the rhyme goes, you think.
---
Further design work is put on hold as you struggle with the unfamiliar controls. After a few hours of mild panic you get the hang of moving the mirrors and are able to resume. You needed a challenge, right? Now you get to monitor the forge, design a robot and steal Dragon's power, all at the same time.
"What do you want to name it?" Dragon asks.
"Smaug," you say without hesitation.
"It's a classic, but unfortunately not one in the public domain quite yet."
"It has armor made of treasure," you counter. And a weak point it doesn't now about, but you don't tell her that.
"You know, I can't really argue with that. I'll get in touch with the Tolkien estate. I doubt they'd object to us using the name."
"Hard to think of a more wholesome activity than opposing the Endbringers," you agree.
"Good thing Behemoth's shoulder is extremely inhospitable to thrushes," she jests. Ah. Great minds think alike, to a certain extent. Quick, deploy a distraction!
"...Let's maybe not joke about a clever feathered being ruining our shit?"
"Sorry."
You wave off her apology. "You know what we really should do, though? We should put a patch of plain steel on its breast - with orichalcum beneath, of course."
Dragon laughs. "Oh, very well. I've denied you enough frills, I'll let you have this one