You raise an eyebrow behind your mask when you catch sight of Kid Win. He's managed to burn through a good two thirds of his Loyalty since you last saw him. Which means that he's a much better man than you thought. And also that he dedicated considerable effort to betraying you.
He refuses to meet your eyes as he hands you a thumb drive. You give him an ever so slightly patronizing smirk and leave him to fidget while you check out the goods. You procured a crappy old laptop specifically for this purpose - it's not as if Faultline would let enemy tinkertech anywhere near her own computer.
You verify that the size of the database is roughly correct, and call up a couple of random profiles to check. And you do mean random. You do not do the kind of cheeky bullshit where you just so happen to check a specific pair of entries under L and S. Not where Kid Win or Faultline could conceivably notice.
(What did the word 'kinetic' ever do to the PRT, that they'd torture it to the point of calling some guy named 'Flying Brick' a 'laterculukinetic'?)
"That all seems to be in order," you say, flipping the laptop around towards Kid Win. "Now if you could input the secret code that will make it not delete itself an hour from now, that would go a long way towards you not getting murdered in your sleep." He twitches, and glances towards Faultline.
"If I were to find out that you acted in bad faith, I would blacklist you from further business at my establishment," Faultline says calmly. "Whether Quicksilver takes further measures to punish contract violations is out of my hands."
"It would be a terrible shame to die before you can even cash out your college fund," you note. "Could you really bear to shuffle off this mortal coil with that juicy government teat unsuckled?"
Some subset of those arguments must have convinced him, because he stiffly walks over to the proffered laptop and enters a long string of letters and numbers. His Loyalty does not fray any further, so it was probably the correct code.
"It was two hours actually," he mutters, as if that would soften the blow of your victory.
"Thanks," you say. "Don't worry about the part where it tracks everything I do and reports it back to you, I physically disabled the network card. This hunk of junk will never connect to the internet again." You used his own power to figure out how to do it, too.
"Sorry." He doesn't exactly sound sincere, but resignation is the first step on the road to submission. You'll take it.
You offer him a beaming smile. "Now, what did you do that I didn't anticipate?"
He hesitates for several seconds, but his resistance crumbles in the face of your increasingly predatory smile. "It, uh, it modifies the screen refresh interval to emit a recognizable radio signal that could be used to triangulate your location."
"Only turn it on inside a faraday cage, got it. Anything else?"
He shakes his head. The Loyalty remains stable.
"An excellent piece of modular malware," you say, patting his shoulder. "Something you could only dream of making a week ago?"
He nods glumly.
"Quite the bargain, no?"
When Gregor shows up to escort the young hero out, you signal that you want to talk to him afterwards. Gotta keep those costs down.
You idly wonder why Faultline has Gregor of all people on doorman duty. Even with her somewhat creepy gas mask outfit, Spitfire cuts a much less unsettling figure. Maybe that's the point - Faultline is deliberately exposing her visitors to Gregor to unsettle them and gain an advantage in negotiations.
Then again, Gregor is a pretty friendly guy. He may have volunteered just to get a chance to talk to people who won't run away. Maybe Spitfire is an introvert, and insisted on a 'no public interaction' clause in her contract. You don't know these people well enough to say.
You haven't come to any firm conclusions by the time Gregor comes back, and it seems a bit rude to just come out and ask. You put the matter out of your mind and turn to address him.
"Here's a weird thing that may or may not be worth money to you: Alabaster, the guy from the headlines? Not a Case 53."
Gregor, as much as you can make out an expression on translucent flesh over a grinning skull, looks thoughtful.
"So," Faultline says, "whatever 'color' you're seeing, it's not purely the result - or cause - of physical mutations."
"I guess." You shrug. "I've frankly stopped trying to come up with theories at this point."
---
"I get it now," you tell Faultline at the end of your session.
"Beg pardon?"
"Your power. I understand how it does what it does. We're done."
"Ah. But you can't explain it in English, of course."
"No."
"And you still see no way to improve it."
"No."
She drums her fingers against her desk. "And now you want to study Labyrinth."
"Yes."
She is silent for a long time. "Would you have killed him?" she finally asks.
"The kid? Nah." That's probably the truth. On the other hand, you kind of have a thing about being betrayed. You're not entirely prepared to answer for your hypothetical behavior here. "Just needed to scare him straight."
"...I'll talk to her," Faultline finally decides. "Come back tomorrow and I'll have your answer."
---
With a power as destructive as Faultline's to test, you swing by the boat graveyard on your way home. It's not really on the way, but whatever. You're not murdering any more alarm clocks where your dad can tease you about it.
Instead you walk up to an innocent brick wall and cruelly activate your new power against it with a light tap of the finger. There's a brief flicker of feedback in your brain, but the wall remains fine. Hm. You frown at the wall and try again, holding your entire hand against it this time.
Ah. A sense of 'wall' gradually impinges on your mind - or possibly soul. To command it, you must understand its essence - and you do. It's not as if it's hard, it's a regular pattern of bricks, set in uniform mortar. Once you've fully internalized the structure of a roughly Taylor-sized patch of wall, you give it the only command your power allows: Be not.
The mortar crumbles to dust, and the bricks are sent flying into the building by an unseen force. You blink in surprise as they land stacked in a neat cube, with a similarly neat heap of mortar dust next to it. Huh. That's not how Faultline does it.
Just inside your new doorway you spot an old wooden pallet. New test subject acquired. Squat down and touch it. Comprehend its nature. Unmake it. As expected, it flies apart into a stack of wooden boards, a stack of wooden blocks, and a small pile of nails.
It's a remarkably... Tinker-esque way of destroying things. You blame Kid Win for intruding on your Faultline-time and making you subconsciously associate the two. Perhaps 'blame' is not the right word, you don't really mind this particular power-mutation. So what if you need to understand what you destroy? Between industry and forge wisdom and your own Tinker 0 skills, understanding things is a piece of cake.
The biggest issue is the time it takes - maybe fifteen seconds to completely model an object in your soul? Still fine for dynamic entry, provided there is no one outside to see you stand around fondling the wall prior to your Kool-Aid Man impression. Not so good for hot pursuit.
Actually, about that... you grab two of the boards, and use a mind-hand to drive a single nail through the middle before invoking your charm of unmaking once more. Just as you'd expected (or at least hoped), it is much quicker to unmake your simple wooden X.
When you try it on just a nail, though, nothing happens. Well, it was forged from a single piece of steel, after all. What is there to disassemble? It makes sense, as long as you don't think too hard about the ontological implications of 'object-ness' apparently being a real, physical thing that applies to certain groupings of atoms but not others. That's easy enough, you're already ignoring the alive-ness property that Faultline's original power demonstrates, among other things.
Ideally you'd want to test your new... your charm of unmaking on something more complicated as well, like a car or something. But the boat graveyard was scoured clean of technological debris long ago, when Squealer made her debut and started offering hard drugs in exchange for Tinkerable scrap.
Instead you try for volume. Just how much wall can you disassemble in one go? Straining yourself, you manage to encompass most of an entire side of the building. A good two hundred square feet, if you're any judge. Shit, didn't mean to actually unmake that!
You throw yourself outside as bricks explode around you on decidedly unnatural trajectories. None of your martial arts instructors would be impressed by your landing, but you ignore the pain and keep rolling towards safety as part of the roof caves in, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
You did sort of make an oopsie there, you freely admit. Still, boat graveyard. No one cares.
---
When you get home, Dog Burglar is waiting for you with another set of pictures. You call Lisa to relay the information.
"Tell Rachel 15 Willow street, Sunday night slash Monday morning, 3 a.m. And yes, that's the only time it's unguarded."
She groans. "Make me be the one to explain to her that fewer locations means increased resources protecting each one, why don't you?"
"On the bright side, it's the last one."
Your next order of business is to make a faraday cage. That sounds impressively 'SCIENCE' to the uneducated ear, but translated into practical terms it means 'chicken wire'. Just wrapping your laptop in layers and layers of chicken wire - you're not exactly straining the Tinker 0 powers here. There are more elegant ways to do it, but chicken wire happens to be what you have lying around in the basement.
It works, but it makes it incredibly annoying to type, and almost as much of a pain to read the screen. You'll just check the most important things for now, a proper binge can wait until you've set up a properly shielded room (somewhere that's not your house).
Or that was the plan, but the very first entry in the alphabetized list of parahuman names demands that you stop and check it out. No, it's not a joke. Not only is there a Tinker out there whose official cape name is 'Single quote right parenthesis semicolon drop table parahumans semicolon dash dash', the glorious bastard somehow got a PRT intern to enter it in the database using punctuation characters instead of spelling it out. "'Table' for short", the entry guilelessly notes, just above where it says he's wanted for vandalizing digital government property in seven different countries.
Sorry Armsmaster, you will only ever be the world's third greatest Tinker.
Spoiler: Database entry PRH-LowkeySpoiler: Database entry PRH-Smith3Spoiler: Database entry PRH-Quicksilver
You confirm that there is no hint of Low Key's wolf being anything but a regular Master projection. Nor does a search turn up the word 'Arcadia' in any of the 'Unknown Master' or 'Unknown Stranger' profiles. Gallant has not spotted Fenrir. Nor are there (as far as the PRT knows) any other capes with sensory abilities in Brockton Bay.
The peace of mind is nice, but you won't really have any immediate use for the rest of the database - there's plenty of capes you haven't gotten to yet right here in the city, and it's not as if you can just decide to move elsewhere without getting your civilian identity into a lot of trouble. But one day...
After some reflection, you decide not to lean on Kid Win for any further services. His Loyalty is uncomfortably ragged, and if it snaps he might fess up and paint Quicksilver as a villain. You can't have that, not with an entire database of heroes you might want to approach as a neutral party once the local prospects dry up.
Like that fascinating Flechette person, for example.
===