Worm is a grimdark web based novel by Wildbow. Very long but has some very interesting stuff in there. If you are not familiar, you won't understand what is going on in this story. I had this idea many years ago and wrote a few bits, but have not found the energy to get back and write any more for years, so it goes into the bits and peices pile along with the other abandoned projects. Hopefully someone gets something out of it

# # # #

It all started because Leet was complaining, which wasn't unusual.

They had only just returned to their studio-come-lair after being humiliated by the Undersiders and nearly blown up by Bakuda, and were stripping out of their tattered Bomber-man inspired outfits. Normally Leet talked positively about their missions non-stop, even the failures - since it made for good viewing by their youtube followers, but today their camera was off, thanks to enemy action of the newest member of the Undersiders, Skitter, and neither was feeling particularly happy after the verbal bullying of Tattertale.

"I can't believe what that little bitch said," complained Leet angrily as he slammed the heavily reinforced door of their lair. "People do not watch us just to see us fail. Our subscribers have an appreciation of our quest to celebrate and promote the noble art that is Video-gaming."

Uber said nothing as he peeled out of the burnt remains of his costume, but the doubts introduced by the sharp sharp-tongued villain had been preying on his mind continuously for the whole trip back.

"And how dare that bug-bitch cover the camera," Leet continued as he made his way into the shower. "Now we have nothing for our show. Our fans are going to be pissed!"

Uber sat down at their computer and started thinking, really thinking, something he was not actually used to doing too often. Normally he would be right in there with Leet, slagging off about whoever it was that defeated them and ignoring anything that did not fit into their world view, but Tattletale was an expert at manipulating people, and her words to him struck deeply.

"They're laughing at you, Leet," Tattletale heckled him, "You're trying to be all dramatic, all intense for your viewers, and they're just sitting at their computers, snorting over how much you suck. Even Über is laughing at you behind your back."

"Shut up!" Leet spat the words, glancing over his shoulder at his teammate, "I trust Über."

"Why are you even with this guy, Über?" Regent asked, "I mean, you're kind of lame, but you could at least accomplish something if he wasn't fucking up half your jobs."

"He's my friend," Über replied, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

His power allowed him to temporarily become an expert in virtually any learnable skill, but he rarely ever used it for anything other than relatively simple physical abilities, like martial arts. Obtaining skills to perform tasks like editing the often poor footage taken of their exploits by Leet's flying camera into a mildly popular web show were about as far as he normally went into the realms of mental disciplines.

He didn't really think of himself as Thinker.

Not that he didn't use his power pretty much constantly. He was extremely fit through non-stop use of expertise in physical fitness, exercise, and a fair dose of motivational self talk, unlike Leet who was on the chubby sit of things. Some level of these skills stayed with him even when his power switched to a different specialty simply because he used them so often that he could remember them as if he had learned them the old-fashioned way. Of course, he was nowhere near as skilled when not focussing, but he was competent enough to incorporate some training and fitness into his everyday life without having to concentrate his power on them.

Now though, he wanted to Think. The Undersider's worlds lit a fire inside of him. He wanted to prove Tattletale was wrong when she said their audience only watched them to laugh when they failed, and for that he needed skills he had never bothered much with before.

Unfortunately, he wasn't even sure what skills it was he needed. As a geek at heart, he had never really understood a lot of the social interaction that people did. Leet was about his only real friend, and he was an even bigger geek and even less socially aware.

While Leet continued to rant about how to best get revenge, and what their next video-game inspired outing should be, Uber connected his computer to Internet and began browsing for ideas and some sort of guideline. The most obvious place to start was self-help boards and forums. He wasn't particularly interested in how to win friends and influence people, but knowing what other people did could possibly help to find a way to prove the bitch wrong, and that was where he hit his first big shock.

He had expected to see hundreds of pages of books and boards that pathetic people resorted to in order to become part of the 'in' crowd, but instead he found thousands, if not tens of thousands of books in every style and format. It was staggering. Quickly he figured out that a lot of them were about social things like how to talk to a girl (and there were a lot of them in particular) but it seemed like every conceivable aspect of human life had multiple books written to advise and help people.

Ranging from practical skills like gardening and house cleaning, to things like how to pick the right handkerchief for a high society cocktail party. From show-lace tying, to compound double coin knots; it looked like people took things to extremes he had never dreamed of, and a lot of it was really fascinating.

After stumbling about for a little while, getting distracted by every shiny new article or headline, he finally managed to regain focus and find a category that would help him in his current quest. Surprisingly the most useful information he found was aimed at high schoolers looking to choose a career.

It helped him find a way through the labyrinth of courses to identify skills that he would need, and he got a surprise secondary goal out of it that he had completely failed to even consider before: study skills.

Uber had gotten through school, but not done well. It was a stupid myth that all nerds and geeks were brainy. They were usually just focussed on their one area of interest, to the almost total exclusion of all others, especially social skills, but that did not make them geniuses, or even very good at their obsession. His own area of fascination had been martial arts, but before getting his power, the only fights he ever came close to being in were in computer games - which then became the focus of his passion.

The educational resource site provided a ton of links to study tips and learning strategies that, combined with his power, would accelerate his ability to obtain the skills he wanted.

Before he had even finished reading a series of articles on speed reading with high retention, his rate had increased tenfold, pushing it to the point where he had to increase the speed of the mouse scroll so that pages could roll past at a speed that didn't bore him.

Several articles and one book on memory training gave vastly conflicting ideas and strategies, but his power somehow combined them all, giving him different ways to recall different things with incredible clarity.

Time management didn't seem that important at first, but the more he read on it and put it to use, gaining skill as his power took over, the more it made sense, and he could see how to better structure and order subjects to get more out of them.

The most amazing thing was that despite the speed he tore through the information and forced his power to put it to good use, accelerating his progress almost every minute, he was not feeling even the slightest twinge of the dreaded power-overuse Thinker headache.

Within just a couple of hours he lived up to his chosen cape name and became 'uber' at learning. Then he turned these new skills towards learning what he originally wanted to, a skill he had never before thought necessary or even useful - he learned how to be a nice person, a respectable person, a person people would look up to and admire - it was sickening.

So much sucking up, so much compromise, so much deceit. Going against natural instincts of looking out for 'number one', so much forced politeness, and so many rules; Shiny Gold God; the number of rules!

Of course, if he actually believed in the spiritual side of it, there would not have been any problem, but with his experience of the world, the pain and suffering he saw no matter how 'good' people were, the faults he saw in even the most altruistic organisations, he just could not buy into the philosophy of goodwill and peace to all men. He honestly didn't believe humans, as a race, could or even should, turn their backs completely on nature.

Nature bred for dominance.

It did not protect the weak, unless the weak would make the whole stronger. It did not often show mercy or compassion, unless there was advantage in it. It was ingrained in the very DNA of every living thing to rise above their station, climbing over the bodies of others to get to the top and stay there. To do otherwise was so unnatural it was bound to fail, and history backed him up on that with corruption always finding its way into the heart of everything.

Briefly he diverged into pure philosophy, discovering many others that shared his beliefs as well as totally opposing views and many mixes of the two.

It became pretty obvious that current society of Earth Bet leaned heavily towards 'his' end of the 'belief spectrum'.

At that point, Uber realised that there was something seriously amiss.

Too many of the books and articles went the other way. They were too disconnected from the reality he knew, as if the people writing them had only peripheral understanding of the threat and promise capes had brought into the world. Unless all of the authors lived in a fantasy world where capes where still only a minor thing, where police and authorities kept order and capes were just a few rogues that caused trouble, there was no way anybody would accept some of the crap he had read.

It was possible of course, but highly unlikely.

A more obvious and startling answer was that bugger all of the material he had looked at so far originated on Earth Bet. Even as he thought it through, it made sense. Earth Alph was very similar in many ways to Earth Bet, but it did not have capes. In a world where no gangs of super-humans roamed the streets, where the highest authority was often controlled by noble guiding principles and held accountable to them by ordinary people, these sorts of ideals could thrive, but not here. Not in a world where there existed creatures that shrugged off nuclear weapons and sunk landmasses filled with millions of people, for no discernible reason.

Maybe it was precisely because his world naturally lacked this sort of mindset that these books were allowed to be published here. Technology trade was heavily restricted, but a lot of cultural things, like video games and art, had been allowed to come through, so possibly the lack of this type of literature also fit into the realm of fantasy.

Whatever the reason for all this Earth Alph crap to be getting through the restrictive trade barriers, it didn't help his goal, so he ignored it and shifted his focus to the other skills he realised he was using to help understand these ideals.

When he used his power for physical skills, such as martial arts, it flooded his brain with choices.

A myriad of pathways opened up in his mind's eye giving him the ability to plan moves. A punch thrown in a particular way at an incapacitating spot of his enemy would lead into a twist away from a likely counter, or if it was blocked, would leave him in the right position to feint with an open hand chop while readying to bring a knee up for a sneak strike.

He could tell in an instant how an incoming swing could be blocked in a way that broke the arm of the attacker, or he could duck under it and lash out with a leg sweep – each and every choice was laid out in an interweaving tapestry that he understood on a fundamental level, and every move came with the knowledge, practically the memory, of how to do it. It was as if his muscles had performed that exact move a thousand times and even the most complex combination was as easy and natural as walking.

If he chose something only a bit more cerebral, such as using a massive Leet-built paintball sniper rifle to hit a target over a kilometre away, he still had much the same experience. Every aspect of the weapon appeared intimately in his mind as if he had used it for years. He could see the wind swirling between him and his target; feeling it as if he was walking the path his bullet would take. His world would shrink down, focussing on only those bits relevant to his task. No distractions would impinge on him as he lined up, plotting the path of his target and instantaneously calculating his shot, taking into account everything from his target's likely movement to possible gravity fluctuations and the ballistics of his missile.

It was rare for him to miss.

The beauty and ease of using his power in this way made it his preferred method.

Using it for a purely mental skill, like he was now trying to do, was much less satisfying. There were too many choices, too many variables, and far too much subjectivity. When he did the video editing, he usually ended up with a massive headache after only a few hours. There were just so many different ways of doing things, and so many different points of view. He could start out intending the footage he was cutting to be presented as an action orientated adventure like Indiana Jones, but half way through discover he had switched to an action comedy, like Jackie Chan, with the totally different style ruining the flow of the final product.

Even his story-lines tended to get mixed up, with the original ideas becoming lost amongst the crowd as more ideas slipped in or took centre-stage.

Eventually he discovered he had to apply his skills in a series of steps, and force himself to be disciplined while doing so lest he become distracted and forget what he was aiming for. That in itself was a skill that caused issues as his power tried to make him great at that instead of the one he needed to actually use. Through practice, and a lot of trial and error, he managed to train himself to balance between different skills, often envisioning them as a combine single skill, which was a nifty mental trick. Sometimes he labelled these commonly used skill groupings with easy to recall names, like the Martial Artist, and the Runner. This made it easier and faster for him to change what his power enhanced.

After watching the raw footage of their exploits used to make the Uber and Leet show, and rating it with an objective eye against a fixed list of categories, he would then pull out the "Writer" skill set and plot out how the "story" should go making sure to match it to the footage in a way to get the best out of it.

Editing and arranging it all was a completely different skill set (The "Producer"), as was putting in any special effects (previously determined in the plotting stage).

All in all, it would not be unusual for him to go through a dozen skill sets, just for couple of hours of video footage for the unwashed masses to enjoy on the Uber and Leet channel. He had tried combining bits of all of them into a sort of super-skill set that he called 'Spielberg', but his head had started hurting so fiercely he had to abandon the idea.

Now he went back to revisit all of this prior work and examine it in a completely different way.

He mentally pulled apart the videos from the point of view of a Psychologist, and digested the comments as some sort of Anthropologist and then all of it again as a Sociologist and many other points of view that he had not really known existed before starting this project. The forums and discussions board threads where their names appeared were far too numerous for him to examine them all, so he had to limit himself to samples across only the most popular threads, or he would take months to finish, even at his best enhanced speed.

He hit virtually every single 'soft' science in his examination, developing new skills and switching between them as he made notes and reviewed the history of 'Uber and Leet', super villains.

Soon enough he hit a roadblock.

On a notepad next to him, he jotted down some of the many possibilities his power filled his mind with. So many different reasons and insights into how people interpreted their body of work appeared in his head that he could not possibly endeavour to examine all of them. He needed a new tactic. He needed to offload this grunt work to and elevate himself into a more supervisory position to get a broader picture of the situation.

Popping a few 'industrial strength' headache relievers Leet had once mass produced, he delved deep into coding and other information technology skills to create programs to extract meaningful statistics, hitting some serious maths and data analysis skills along the way.

Extremely long and complex formula for dealing with large crowds of people forced itself into his brain as he used his power to find a way to make sense of what he was seeing, practically creating a sort of phsychohistory. The numbers crunched, working their home made super computer as it had rarely been worked before, to distil everything down to easier to understand statistics.

Long after Leet had finally wound down his ranting and ended up in front of the TV playing whatever game happened to be nearest, Uber finally came to a conclusion. Now he just had to utilise more of his newly developed 'soft', humanities based skills to deliver the result to his best friend in a way that would encourage the best possible response.

"We suck," he told Leet.

"What?" asked Leet, shocked enough to pause the game.

"We suck, and we're jerks," Uber replied.

"Really?" asked Leet after a silent moment or two.

"Yep. Seriously."

"So that bitch was right and people only watch us to see us fail?"

"Mostly, or they suck just as much as us and can relate," explained Uber. "Very few have any real appreciation of video games, and virtually none of our subscribers find our re-enactments or tributes inspiring. The ones that do are nut cases."

Leet was silent for a few moments as he digested Uber's words.

"Shit. That really blows," he eventually said, with surprisingly little anger, especially considering the way he had responded to the Undersiders when they said basically the same thing.

Uber's skills were still working and he took in all the cues Leet was giving off and everything he knew about the low rated Tinker to form more conclusions that had never really occurred to him before.

Leet had an extraordinary Tinker ability, that was unfortunately crippled by a major handicap. He could build things from any Tinker technology tree, as good as a specialist in that area, but if he ever tried to build it again, it had an ever increasing chance of failing. The more similar it was to something he had built before, the more likely it was to fail.

Since this affected was present at a very fundamental level and tended to focus on the end results of what he made, it completely compromised his ability. It had taken Leet quite a few months to figure this out, and had cost them many opportunities and injuries as repeat builds of 'standard' equipment suddenly, often spectacularly, failed, usually at the most inopportune times.

When things did work, they generally worked really well, spectacularly well in fact. Many of the Tinker's original equipment was still in perfectly working order, but it was usually just a prototype with the plan being to build more advanced units based on the successful original. Unfortunately, the new versions started going wrong almost before they were finished.

As the more complex builds went wrong, Leet kept going back to the drawing board, starting from a simpler, more basic design to prove his concepts and plans worked. He would then build the next generation with only minor differences, only for even the simplest of changes to go astray. Starting again with a new build of the original working prototype immediately ran into trouble as Leet's power's flaws made itself felt.

Eventually they figured out the rough 'rules' of his power, but by then, many of their better ideas had to be abandoned as the bits needed had already been built so many times they could not be built again.

While they were both united by their love of video games, their theme eventually became a necessity. It allowed them to keep track of the things Leet built in order to minimise the 'exponential failure effect' as they called it. Patterning devices on items in video games helped Leet recall what he had built, and judge how similar things were to each other. He still kept copious notes, unlike most Tinkers who only seemed to write down ideas rather than document actual builds, but categorising them into videogame based collections made it a lot easier to recall, and a hell of a lot faster to compare.

Uber had been friends with Leet for many years, but had somehow failed to ever use his power to think about this flaw in his friend's power. Not anymore.

He knew most people found Leet annoying, and that both of them were seriously lacking some social skills, but it had never bothered either of them that much. They were comfortable being geeks, and never expected anybody else to deeply share their passion for things beyond the 'mundane' world of jobs and money.

They were also considered fairly sociopathic by masses of people on the internet, which reinforced their lack of care about what other people thought in a nice little vicious circle.

Of course they were smart enough to avoid openly targeting innocent people in their pranks and schemes, and even avoided using lethal weapons, not that people watching them live realised that, judging from their comments.

So what if they shot blood coloured anaesthetic paint balls at ex-Empire 88 gang members while driving down the street in a souped up car, or robbed a bank for all of its gold coins while dressed as 8-bit game characters? Nobody died, and they were low-life scum anyway (gang members and bankers both).

The building they destroyed in their awesome Rampage tribute was an eyesore built by some rich arsehole developer who bribed local officials to get permission. Knocking it down with a giant robotic ape was one of their greatest hits, although people got upset thinking the giant lizard resembled the Leviathan Endbringer a bit too closely.

The long arm of the law cared enough to send capes to arrest them not once, but three times so far, not counting the various times they had managed to escape being caught.

Worse, Uber realised, they were not having much fun anymore, with each tribute taking longer and longer to set up for less of a positive return. At some point, their fan base had changed to the majority of people now watching mainly to see them fail, hopefully disastrously.

It did not help that Uber himself found their failures damn funny, especially when it was one of Leet's spectacular equipment failures. Hell, seeing Leet falling off the roof in front of the Undersiders during their big entrance had almost made him giggle out loud.

"Schadenfreude", his newly enhanced memory mentally supplied him from the 'psychology' skillset; "The feeling of joy or pleasure at seeing another fail or suffer misfortune."

A twinge of guilt ran through Uber as he watched Leet come to grips with the news.

"So what?" said Leet in an apparent attempt to overcome the feelings he was obviously experiencing. "Screw them all. I am going to keep doing what I love doing and they can all go to hell."

With that he restarted his game, leaving Uber to contemplate his next step.

He did not like the idea of everyone laughing at them and wishing them to fail, and he knew Leet felt the same way, despite his words. Worse yet, nobody was taking on board their love of the art of video games.

Nope, things had to change, and it had to start with getting Leet's abilities under better control. The stop-gap measures they were currently using were not effective enough and took up far too much time.

While Uber had never really tried to understand Leet's devices, his memory, now enhanced by the skills he recently mastered to be able to learn the 'soft' sciences faster, meant he actually could recall a hell of a lot about everything the Tinker had build and they had used. He had no idea how most of it worked, but he could recall how it failed, and what effect those failures had on the comments and popularity of their show.

Returning to his computer, a home-grown super-computer-class machine Leet had originally built to play games on, he engaged his power to become a skilled researcher.

This was not an another new skill for Uber, since they often needed lots of information to plan their exploits, but it was different enough to take him quite a few minutes to get a real handle on it as his power flooded his mind in a way he was not that that familiar with. Even with his new study skills reaching an absolute peak, learning how to prise relevant information from the net was tough.

In many ways, it was a lot closer to his normal physical martial arts than his earlier attempts to analyse their videos using 'soft' sciences, while not quite as straight forward. He could see a path; a methodology to follow that would yield results, with many, many optional branches to follow, but it was nowhere near as overwhelming or subjective as his analysis work. It was almost purely scientific in its nature.

A simple internet search gave him a starting point. It led him to a very popular and acclaimed forum where various experts discussed Tinkers. Cross checks on some of the ideas presented, and the people presenting them, quickly made it possible for his power to give each suggestion or idea a 'rating' relevant to his and Leet's requirements and helpful, intuitive suggestions on looking deeper into each item.

But it was still far too much for a simple human, even one as empowered as Uber, to do.

Nudging his power, he called up his programming skills again and set about writing a complex system to perform the very searches his power suggested, and then summarise and compile the information into a much easier to manage form.

By then it was very late and Leet had already hit the sack ages ago, so Uber called it a night and went to bed, using his power to engage meditation skills in order to ensure he got a good night's rest.

He suspected he would need it.

#

The next day he found the program still running strong, but it had culled the options down to a few, high probability candidates.

One of these quickly attracted Uber as the most likely to help in the shortest amount of time.

"We need a better way of cataloguing and comparing your builds," he told Leet once the Tinker had climbed out of bed several hours later.

"Eh?" mumbled Leet as he sucked down the first of what was usually many cups of coffee.

"Our unplanned failures are damaging our credibility and attracting the 'wrong type' of audience," Uber explained, carefully choosing his words.

The process they currently went through was inefficient, unreliable and very slow. Too many times, and with increasing regularity, their equipment failed because they had miscalculated its chance to fail after missing some item or another that was too similar to something Leet had already built.

"We tried that before," mumbled Leet. "Didn't help."

That was true. Previously, attempts at using a database and program system for it had not really worked out, and Uber could suddenly see why.

Since Leet understood his technology better, it had only made sense for him to be the one to create a system for filing and tracking it, but his power had obviously interfered, messing up the tinker's system just the same way it sabotaged his other tinker work.

Uber had to be very careful about how he broke that news to Leet, or it would just become a major downer for the Tinker piled on top of Tattertale's attack on his confidence.

"I've got an idea," he said. "Something I thought of last night. I think it will work better because it won't be tinker made so won't conflict with Tinker tech."

Leet grunted, which Uber took as acceptance. Almost anything could be excused away by invoking "bullshit powers" excuse in some way, and everyone knew tinkers had the worst "bullshit power" ever.

Neither of them had ever really considered getting Uber to do the cataloguing, especially since it involved a purely intuitive symbology and methods for describing what everything was doing. Uber couldn't possibly know all of the things that went into one of Leets machines and any one of the custom components could possibly be too similar to a part of something else Leet had already made.

Also, at the time, Uber thought it was just too boring to bother with.

That changed now. They needed this. He needed to step up and help with something his friend was unable to do for himself without all the usual ribbing and teasing that normally accompanied such assistance, his 'psychological' skill set told him.

With his unfamiliar 'research mode' on, he dug into investigating how other Tinkers stored their blueprints and plans, and the result was rather surprising.

There was no 'standard'.

While whole libraries were filled with various aspects of the discipline of technical drawing, Tinkers rarely used any recognisable standard, common style, or specific symbology. Some cases had been noted where two completely separate Tinkers on different sides of the planet were found to use identical design styles, and many Tinkers, such as the famed Dragon, seemed to be able to read just about any Tinker's blueprints, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule.

Every single one of them appeared to come up with their wildly different own way of drawing their ideas and designs on their own with no help from any outside source.

Attempts to raise the technology level of the whole world by implementing Tinker-based technology all inevitably failed, usually because the maintenance of each device could only be done by the Tinker who built it, as they were the only one who understood it well enough to fix, and everything built by Tinkers became more unstable as time without maintenance passed.

Efforts to get Tinkers to cooperate and use a common standard so that others could be trained how to maintain it had failed, as if they were all suffering the same attitude problem and just didn't want to share with other Tinkers. Even the ones that really tried to make a go of it failed at some point.

To Uber, this looked very much the same way Leet's talent seem to fail him.

It was an accepted fact that it was very hard for one Tinker to maintain or copy another Tinker's work, and that mass manufacturing of all but a relative few Tinker-built devices was impossible. Everybody just gave up trying to overcome this limitation and accepted it.

Except Dragon, the much renowned, world's best Tinker.

Time and again Dragon's name came up in the conversations and papers Uber followed in search of a solution. She was apparently the only Tinker who had substantial success with converting her inventions into something non-capes could understand and make, the Containment foam being the most celebrated of these, and that was really just a refinement of some chemistry principles already well known in the non cape world as opposed to something purely Tinker-created using physics outside of what was considered 'mundane' or 'classical' ones.

Uber's power found this anomaly extraordinarily frustrating.

Exhausting the publicly available sources of information, Uber engaged his power to tap into another purely mental skill to get access to more hidden, less accessible data, one he had used often before. He mentally labelled the skill 'The Hacker'.

Surprisingly, he realised it was not that different from the Researcher skill set, with a sizable dash of the Programmer thrown in. A new program was quickly born to track down hidden sources of information. Some of these would undoubtedly need direct intervention by Uber to gain access to, but a lot of 'standard' hacks could be tried by his program first.

With that started, Uber realised it was now mid-morning and he had not even started his normal workout routine, or breakfast. Leet would awaken enough to eat breakfast soon, and while he was usually capable of toasting bread without totally ruining it, they both preferred it if Uber spend a few minutes as the Cook.

By the time he got back to it, Uber was surprised to find he was quite looking forward to it. The excitement was almost as good as testing out his Parkour on the rooftops of the neighbourhood, or finding a few thugs to work his martial arts on.

Browsing through the information returned by his program and compiled by a slightly modified version of the analyses system he had used to on their videos, he made a couple of startling discoveries.

"Hey, Leet," he called to his friend, who was already settling in for some game time. "Did you know Hollywood was destroyed about a dozen years ago and most of the world's top directors and writers killed?"

Leet thought about it for a few minutes before giving his carefully considered response.

"So what?"

"Well it's a big secret, but most of our movies are actually made on Earth-alph," answered Uber excitedly. "In fact, with the damage the Endbringers have done over the last thirty years, practically all of our culture and non-Tinker tech comes from there through back-channels nobody is meant to know about."

"Then how do you know about it?" asked Leet in a typically sceptical tone.

"My program has it rated as highly probable," answered Uber, not at all put off by Leet's attitude. "I was looking for some secret information and that came up. Our world has been so screwed up by capes and Endbringers that most of our civilised culture and development has been stalled while we fight just to survive. It's a bit scary when you think about it."

Leet didn't want to think about it.

"Cool," he said, returning to his game.

Uber smiled and returned to his research results and immediately found he had stuck gold.

Dragon had developed a system of technical drawing that was specifically designed for documenting Tinker Tech. Based on several complex systems in use on Earth-Alph, it had originally been slated to be the standard for patenting, but was instead rarely ever seen outside of the PRT as it turned out to be too difficult for most Tinkers to use. No tinker was going to waste his precious time documenting systems in such an incredibly complex and detailed way.

A very watered-down system was used instead, one that did not lend itself to actually showing how something worked well enough to be able to copy it, but still detailed enough to prove intellectual ownership.

Saint, Dragon's famed arch-enemy, had somehow gotten hold of a few of Dragon's designs written out in this format along with the key, and then promptly sold them. While not quite publicly available, there were enough copies around that Uber was able to find and download a few to use as samples.

He then had the not so pleasant experience of discovering his power gave him the ability to become an expert on this complex method, so long as he enjoyed an eye-watering headache while doing so.

Once again, Uber was amazed at his power. He didn't really understand Dragon's design, but he could clearly understand the documentation. It was like been able to read the words of another language but having no clue what subject was being talked about in the book. His mind struggled to embrace the concepts and theory in a usable manner, eventually treating it as a sort of super programming language that dealt with forces and materials he simple could not fully understand. He saw the way the conventions embraced all aspects of design, from raw materials to assembly. It was ridiculously comprehensive and even a simple device could take an age to fully document, but it was exactly what they needed.

He embraced the skill, despite the headache, mixing it with his expert understanding of Leet's personal system, and then called up one of Leet's designs, intending on converting it by virtue of simply recreating it using the new methodology, symbols, and conventions.

It felt like the universe unfolding in his brain. Even a simple straight line on the page became a nightmare of possible ways to express it, and the more technological bits exploded into masses of symbols and mathematical formulas far too intricate to understand. Every centimetre of the simple, hand drawn design brimmed with unfathomable complexities.

It was too much. Too many things he did not understand; too much to remember; too many paths. His mind was breaking, splitting down the middle, shattering.

His breathing sped up, becoming faster and faster as he started to hyperventilate, and his heart started racing, thumping harder and harder until he thought it would burst forth, but he could not tear his eyes from the page, or even control them as they roamed from one end to the other, trying to take it all in.

Uber began to panic. He had no way to release his power; he had never needed to be able to do it before. Now it threatened to kill him if he didn't do something

With a strangled cry he fell from his chair clutching his head between his hands.

Desperately, he reached for a different skill set.

At first nothing happened and the pain in his head increased even more until he was sure he was going to die, but then he felt his power flare and a well practiced skill slipped into place.

The meditation skill he used when preparing for bed every night washed over him like a cooling breeze. It was actually more of a whole 'guru' skill set that included meditation as well as yoga, but gave him the ability to go through a series of mental exercises to calm and relax his brain.

"Dude, are you all right?" asked a terrified Leet, helping him up from the ground. "What happened?"

His face felt wet and his hands came away sticky, but it wasn't until he saw Leet's hands that he realised he was bleeding from somewhere.

"I'm okay," he said, still running through the calming mantras in his mind.

"You don't look all right," said Leet shakily. "You screamed and then smashed your head on the table - Scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry," he said, feeling for the wound on his head. "I just bit off a bit more than I could chew."

Leet let him go and watched warily for a few seconds to make sure he wasn't going to fall down again, and then rushed off to get one of the many first aid kits they had around. They were injured in their escapades often enough to have a comprehensive collection of medical supplies on hand. Theoretically, Uber's power let him adopt the skill of any medical professional needed, but he had yet to try more than some General Practitioner level of diagnosis and small surgical operations such as stitching up wounds. Setting a bone was probably the most dangerous and complicated thing he had ever been called on to do.

He switched skills now, dropping the Guru and grabbing an advanced first aid set he sometimes used that he called 'The Medico'. A lance of pain shot through his skull nearly making him pass out, but it passed quickly.

Leet returned with some bandage pads to press against the wound to stop the blood flowing out from what Uber found was a fairly shallow gash just above his right eye. Added to the bruising and other minor injuries they had gained in the encounter with the Undersiders, this week was turning out to be a rather bad one.

Cleaning himself up in the room they had designated as the infirmary, Uber reflected on what had happened.

His power made him arrogant, he knew that. Been able to become an expert at almost anything practically instantly made him over-confident to a ridiculous degree. As he had become more and more of a prick, and lost more and more of the few friends he had because of it, Leet had stuck by him. While it must have been incredibly frustrating for Leet to have a friend who aced everything he tried while unable to master his own power, Leet had never the less worked hard to not let jealously or envy get between them.

By the time Uber had grown up enough to understand how much of an arse he could be, and had ran across enough people to beat some humility into him, Leet was about the only person left in his world.

It helped that he was uniquely qualified to test Leet's creations, whether it be test driving a modified race car, flying a new reactionless jetpack, or testing an aqualung that extracted oxygen directly from the water, Uber could load up whatever skill he needed in an instant to test it thoroughly and survive any failure.

It was great fun.

They were successful enough to be able to afford to hire a couple of minions for much of the drudge-work, and managed to buy the building they turned into their lair, but not so successful as to attract the undivided attention of any of the many gangs around the place, or the PRT.

Tinkers were a particularly highly sought after commodity.

At the very least, Tinker supplied weapons could give a gang much needed firepower, even if they did have to be hand-crafted and required regular maintenance. At their most powerful, they could do a hell of a lot more.

The duo were still forced to fight off a few smaller gangs every so often. Usually involving the attackers in one of their online tributes to Video games worded as a deterrent, and eventually they established a reputation of being too much trouble for the value of Leet's unreliable power.

Things had only been getting worse since then, though. Uber wondered how they would fare if they were faced with any of those old foes now that Leet's power was almost useless. Their latest failure against the Undersiders was a last ditch effort to reclaim some of their former glory, and look how that had gone.

"So what happened," asked Leet, looking uncharacteristically concerned.

"I'm not really sure," he answered. "I think it might be like when I first triggered – if I tried to be a black belt in Karate, no problem, but if I tried to be Jackie Chan, my head would hurt and I'd get a huge headache."

"But that doesn't happen anymore," said Leet. "You worked out how to mix and match, right?"

"Yeah but I've not really been stretching myself. I mean, maybe it's a bit like a muscle. I've been using the same kinds of skills for quite a while now, fighting and acrobatics and that, and I've grown good at switching and combining them, but I tried something a lot harder this time."

"What did you try?"

"I think I tried to be an engineer," said Uber, instantly aware how lame that sounded.

Leet laughed, of course.

Uber explained the situation, about how he was trying to develop a better way for them to check new designs against old ones and how that had lead to Dragon's system.

"Well maybe you have to be a Tinker to be able to be an expert in using it on Tinker design technology," suggested Leet.

"Possibly," agreed Uber, unconvinced.

It could be true, but he just expected that he would have stared at the page and not understood it, not that he understood it so well that his mind felt like it was breaking. There had to be more to it, something that his power could not overcome.

Something that caused his power to almost kill him.

#

The next day, after a longer sleep than he normally had, he returned to his computer to go through the rest of the results his original program had returned on how to fix their image.

There were a lot of possibilities on where to take their show to regain respect and admiration, including a way of subverting much of what the 'fake' Holywood was currently stealing from Earth Alph, but it still hinged on being able to get better control of Leet's Tinker power.

A totally 'out of left field' idea was for them to use Uber's ability to become an expert on anything to create 'self help' videos, books, and articles more relevant to Earth Bet, since as Uber had found, most of it currently was again just imports from Earth Alph. This held very little appeal for Uber, unless he could somehow encase the 'lessons' inside a video game theme, and Leet would be barely involved except as a side-kick.

Another interesting but low probability idea was that there were Artificial Intelligence systems capable of analysing Tinker-tech using various 'classical' physics, and that could help them better figure out if one of Leet's builds was going to fail.

Without even thinking about it, Uber's power kicked in and he started imagining about how that could be. Many ways of how to design and code a system capable of this started building in his mind, twinging his still throbbing head.

"I'm going for a run," he told Leet, pushing himself away from his computer.

Engaging in some pure physical activity outside of their lair would hopefully help him clear his head.

#

The roof tops near their lair were a well-worn path for Uber, and while he tried to vary his route and even the skills he used, he had run it far too many times for it to be really challenging.

There was no pain as he dropped in a free-climber's skill set to scale the wall of the first building he came across and then vault onto the roof with the practiced ease of a professional acrobat. He alternated bouts of Parkour with more pure acrobatics as he went from rooftop to rooftop, quickly working up a decent sweat as he ran through an enormous repertoire of physical skills.

His power did not make him super-human. The Brute-0 rating from the PRT meant he was no tougher than any other unpowered human, albeit one that was in peak physical condition. He was able to use the skills of an endurance athlete to learn how to push his body to the limits of its capabilities, without going that step further into injury, and keep it there for an extended period. That should have given him a Brute-1 rating, but nobody except Leet had ever watched one of his serious training runs, and he wasn't telling anybody. The spectacular videos he posted showing off his amazing skills never really showed just how long he could keep up the high energy output, or how much damage he mitigated with expertly controlled falls and other stunt-man skills.

A few hours of strenuous exercise through the industrial district would keep his mind from dwelling on the roadblocks he had hit in his quest to overcome their declining reputation and status.

Unfortunately, a mere hour into it, he came across a scene all too common lately. Some thugs, ex-Empire 88 goons by the look of their skin-head haircuts and Nazi regalia, were involved in some sort of dust up with another gang, probably Merchants, out in the middle of the street. Somebody had released the civilian names of all the Empire's capes and the gang had pretty much self-destructed, but remaining gang members still tended to hang around together.

It was quite a lively party, with a few clubs mixed in with the usual assortment of knives and other home-made weapons. Both sides were fairly evenly matched too, from the look of it, with about a dozen of each now involved.

Normally Uber would have happily dropped down into the middle of them and partaken of the festivities, but his head was still hurting and he just did not feel the need. So instead, he dropped into his 'Ninja' skill set and stealthily snuck away, heading towards where he hoped there would be less distractions. He could probably have walked away without making any effort at all and not been seen, but it was a good opportunity to practice.

He decided to swing by the site of their recent defeat by the Undersiders to see just how much damage that crazy bitch, Bakuda, had done with her weird bombs.

#

The devastation was impressive. Once past the barriers set up by the police to keep people out, the storage yard was a mess. Not only were there massive amounts of 'traditional' damage, most of which still needed to be cleaned up, there were still many areas under the effects of Bakuda's more exotic weapons.

One part was still frozen solid, although it was slowly melting, while another was encased in a globe that, unless he was mistaken, looked exactly like Clockblocker's time stop effect.

Uber spent some time getting footage, sometimes running and dodging through the damaged alleyways to make it look like it had only just happened or that he was in the middle of it. Maybe he they could piece together the footage taken during the battle with these extra shots and still get a show out of it for their fans.

Then again, he wasn't feeling particularly enamoured with their fans at the moment, not after his recent revelations.

Still, he had nothing better to do, so he wandered around, making sure to get close ups of the blood splatters that had not been cleaned up yet. They would need touching up later, since they weren't fresh anymore, but you could fix almost anything in post production.

A loud crunching underfoot in one area caught him by surprise and he nearly jumped in fright when he looked down and realised he was standing on a carpet of bugs. Luckily they were dead bugs. Skitter's army. Scion's balls she was creepy.

Who wanted to cover themselves in bugs? It was horrible. He wouldn't surprise him if she turned out to be a case 53 and was actually a bug in the shape of a girl.

He made sure to zoom in on the bugs, and even overcame his instinctive disgust enough to throw handfuls of them into the air and film them up close as if they were attacking. There were more than enough to make it look realistic.

How the hell does somebody control that many animals anyway? His brain nearly fried tackling a task not a thousandth as complex as controlling hundreds of thousands of bugs.

Or was it?

What could it be about those technical drawing specifications that almost split his head? Could Leet be right and it required a Tinker to be able to understand because it was incredibly complex with millions of concepts and ideas his brain could not handle? But why didn't his power just cut off then? His power let him use it. Even now he could envision something simple like a light globe drawn with the new symbology, but trying the same thing on Leet's notes had cracked his brain.

Well if he couldn't personally use it directly on Tinker tech, maybe he could still use it. He could write a system for converting the personal conventions and symbology into Dragon's system and possibly build a library of functions and even machines that could fill-in the 'missing parts' most Tinkers neglected to write down. It would be manual at first, but with enough examples and machine learning code it could begin to learn how to do it automatically, building 'complete' drawings.

Sure, for most things it would not be viable since the program would probably not know what the 'missing bit' was meant to do, but the way Dragon's system worked to describe the forces and reactions involved just screamed out for a way to identify possible alternatives, perhaps even identifying where 'mundane' technology could be used in place of some Tinker-built bits.

Hell, Dragon's system had the potential to describe the manufacturing process needed to build components and then work out in simulations what they would do from that, so it couldn't be that much more difficult to start at the end result and have it reverse engineer a system to cause that desired effect.

The idea had potential.

But first, he thought, packing up the compact camera he always kept on him, he had a web show to make.

#

The show they ended up airing had very little to do with reality.

Footage stolen from security cameras, news services, and witnesses, combined with their own short video from the battle, Uber's after action shots, and a liberal dash of re-enactments, let them script an exciting bomber-man themed battle that ended up with the Undersiders as the victors and the two 'underdogs' badly burnt and beaten - but smiling like the good sports they were.

It was an amazing fabrication that turned out to be one of their most popular episodes ever, possibly due to Uber's new understanding of what made a show popular as opposed to what he and Leet liked in a show. Leet was surprisingly chipper after the show's hits started rapidly climbing, finally dragging himself out of the doldrums he had been languishing in since the battle.

"See," the Tinker said. "It doesn't matter why they watch us, just so long as they do."

Uber didn't really agree, but the money from their show was important, since it was their main source of income. Getting the money without it being confiscated by various authorities cost a big percentage, but eventually they would end up with something for their efforts.

"So what should we do next?" asked Leet.

"I've been thinking more about what I was working on before," said Uber.

"The thing that nearly melted your mind?"

"Yeah, I've got an idea. I want you to dig up whatever you have made that best matches the design you have made for it. I know you chop and change as you go along, making it up on the fly, but I want the best examples of where you have built to the specifications, as such."

"What for?"

"I am going to try and write a program that can learn to convert your designs into that format I found that Dragon created, the one that nearly melted my brain, and then try to have it find mundane technology to substitute. Maybe we can convert your inventions into things we can make multiple times using non-Tinker tech, like Dragon did with containment foam. If we could do something like that, we would be total heroes and people would flock to watch our show - people are stupid like that."

Leet looked totally unconvinced.

"Won't you go into a meltdown again, if you start looking at it, or trying to use it?"

"Nah, I got a plan," reassured Uber in his best dramatic voice, which was quite dramatic - his power was good for that sort of posturing.

"Okay," said Leet, still not looking happy about it. "Do you want something from one of the times I went back to the drawing board with the simplest design? Not many of them actually worked though."

"Hmm, no, I think we need something that did work, otherwise it is going to be feeding it garbage information to learn from."

Leet nodded and wandered off towards the shelves and boxes that filled a goodly portion of their warehouse.

Uber sighed and sat down at the computer, calling up his power. It was going to take a lot of varying skills for this project, all of them mental. Maths, science, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, genetics, you name it, at some point in time he was going to have to tap into all of the sciences to varying depths in order to write the system he envisioned.

He reached for some powerful pain killers and resigned himself to at least several days of agony.

#

"I still don't understand how you are going to do this," admitted Leet. "I mean sort of get the idea, but I don't see how you are going to do it without melting your head."

"Yeah, the first part is going fine. I've got the system learning on its own now. It's going through a heap of mundane designs and processes converting them into Dragon's system to use, but every time I look at converting one of yours, my head implodes," admitted Uber, his red, bloodshot eyes and pale complexion telling the story of his marathon efforts more clearly than his words.

"What you need," said Leet, "is a device created by a brilliant Tinker that can scan a Tinker tech thing into a digital model and can then be used by your program to build the basic drawings in Dragon's notation without involving your tiny brain."

"Yep," agreed Uber, staring listlessly at his screen. "That would go a long way towards – wait, what?"

Leet was smiling.

"I said, you need –"

"I know what you said, just tell me you've built it."

Leet was smiling even more now.

"You did? You built it?"

"Yep. It was nothing like anything I have ever built before. I even managed to tap into your program without disturbing you or it at all. You've been like a zombie for days now."

"Does it work?"

Leet frowned.

"Of course it works," he said, sounding annoyed.

It was, after all, probably the best thing he had ever built, not including the micro-brewery.

"Sorry, man," said Uber, shaking his head wearily. "I'm a bit out of it. Of course it works. Show me!"

"Okay – it's over there."

On one of Leet's many workbenches sat a device that looked suspiciously like a hair dryer attached to a dishwasher by a thick cable.

"What's with the look?"

"I sort of ran out of ideas on how to package them in a way that I haven't used," admitted Leet. "So I used things I have never even considered before. By the way, you'll have to hand dry your hair and use a tea towel until we get replacements."

"Cool. So, show me."

"Take the dryer," he instructed, "and point it at the Bomberman solid hologram maker we used with Bakuda. Now turn it on using the settings in the handle wave it all over. Don't worry about over lapping or going too quick or anything, it will compensate for all of that. Just make sure you get it all in. The screen on top of the dryer will show you a wireframe so you can tell when you have it all."

Uber followed the instructions, watching as an image slowly built up.

"This is total Tinker powers bullshit. How are you seeing inside of it? How deep, I mean how fine does it scan down to?"

"It can go right down to nanoscopic scale, if needed, for things like chips and processors."

"How the hell can it do that?"

"No idea," admitted Leet, earning an incredulous stare from Uber. "What? I can see what it is doing, I even understand the way it twists and turns the forces, but I really do not understand how it is doing what it does. I used an old electron microscope we had, along with some radar tracking stuff and a whole bunch of other things including those failed computers I built, and created a whole new technology I have never even heard of before.

"In my mind, it's using Gravitrons to measure the atomic weights of things and their 'pull' on everything around at varying distances, but that just makes no sense when I say it out loud. Sounds kind of silly really."

"Yeah, sure does," said Uber finishing his scan. "So what happens now?"

"Now we have a multidimensional representation of the scanned object that a copy of your program can use to convert into Dragon's design format. You just have to finish writing a system to reverse engineer how to do the same thing using other, non-Tinker tech alternatives, and that's going to need a lot more processing power that this box has."

"That's fantastic," said Uber, genuinely impressed.

"But wait, there's more! Turn on the scanner again, this time using the switches on the bottom, yeah the old heat setting ones, and then record while I use the hologram maker to create something."

Intrigued, Uber did as Leet said, watching the screen carefully as Leet generated one of the fake bombs they unsuccessfully used against the Undersiders.

"What am I seeing?" he asked as an unending series of numbers scrolled over the screen.

"You are looking at the forces been used to create the solid hologram," answered Leet smugly. "it's the raw data, but it will be converted to Dragon's formulas and equations."

Uber thought about it for a while.

"Huh?"

Leet rolled his eyes and puffed angrily.

"Don't you get it? It's a recording of the hologram being made. With this information I could probably build a machine to do what was recorded, if I didn't already know how it was done, since I made it, of course."

Uber silently thought about it a bit more.

"Huh?" he repeated.

Leet let out an explosive breath.

"For fuck's sake, Uber, get with it. If you recorded somebody using a Tinker made device, I could build something to do the same thing. If we ever get a hold of another Tinker's gadget and got it back here, we should be able to build our own. Like, I could copy how somebody's pulse laser gun creates its shots."

"You're shitting me."

"No, no shit. Then you could run it through your little system over there and maybe figure out a way to build it using non-Tinker tech and make it mass producible. Before you know it, the whole world would be armed with non-Tinker lasers that probably won't work quite as well and will quite likely be ten times the size, but will still work."

"Holy shit," said Uber. "I never really thought it through. I was just thinking we could build replacements and copies of your stuff, not mass produce knockoffs of other Tinker's gear. This is serious bullshit Tinker-tech, man!"

"Very holy," agreed Leet. "We could totally break the world with this, once we get it going properly."

Uber slumped.

"I have to get back to coding, don't I?"

"Yep," laughed Leet. "It's all on you now, buddy. It's all on you."

#

It was a surprisingly short time later that Uber finally had a system working - a herculean task that he was actually quite proud to have achieved.

Not that Leet had been idle during this time. He had made good use of the scanner, building a library of his own devices, even the failed ones that had not blown up. He had even somehow managed to get a scan of the scanner, although Uber was baffled how, even after Leet tried to explain.

Unfortunately, while they were able to get all of Leet's inventions into Dragon's format, none except some extremely basic devices were able to be converted to non-Tinker tech, mainly because they were actually copies of non-mundane devices to begin with. More importantly though, they were able to discover how his rebuilds differed from the originals and what it was about them that made them fail.

A new aspect of Uber's recent education splurge quickly came to light. With all of the time he had spent learning about various science, engineering, and math disciplines he was able to develop 'repairs' for some of the devices Leet had failed to get going.

Sometimes it was as simple as making a slight modification, like realigning some crystals. Other times it was just ripping out some additional thing apparently unnecessarily added. There were even a few times where he just had to break apart and rebuild the malfunctioning device without a multitude of small errors like bad solder or backwards connections. Leet could not even see many of the problems before they were pointed out to him, and only Uber could make the fixes, as anytime Leet got involved, it somehow went sideways.

This pissed Leet off to no end.

"You are a wanker," Leet told Uber, only half joking. "You call Tinker powers bullshit, but here you are faking being a Tinker with fucking boring normal skills any off the street smuck could learn."

"Yeah," laughed Uber. "Sucks to be you, eh?"

Leet just could not see why his power messed with him. Even when he tried to make exactly the same device twice, somehow his skill wandered off and he ended up with variations that he had not planned for. The fact they could now spot those variations and in many cases Uber could correct them, really annoyed Leet.

Okay, a bit more than a handful, Leet admitted to himself, and Uber did suffer some ripper headaches after doing it, but still; not a Tinker.

Still, even though only a relatively few devices could be fixed, they now had a lot more working equipment and toys to use, and being able to fix things like their mega-souped-up Spyhunter car made Leet very happy. So many of the things he had built for previous shows that ended up in the trash pile after just minor damage could now be reused since Uber could fix them.

They barely knew what to do with themselves. They could revisit some of their favourite live-action tributes for their web show, or try the ones that failed again, or even just mess around with the gear, being dickheads simply for the fun of it.

Messing around won.

An afternoon of jousting on barley controllable flapping mounts, or jetpack races around the city dropping bombs on gang members? It was a hard choice to make, so they did both, and lots of other amusing things too. With less fear about breaking equipment they could not fix, they felt a rush of freedom, a lifting of a burden they had not realised they were carrying. It was awesome.

Unfortunately it all came to an abrupt end when the Endbringer attack warning siren started blaring.

#

"What do we do?" asked Leet almost in a panic. "We don't have anything we could use to fight an Endbringer. We'll be killed if we have to fight it."

"Calm down, dude," said Uber, who actually wasn't much better off.

Off hand, he really couldn't think of anything he could bring to an Endbringer fight. None of the gear Leet had ever built was made for that class of damage dealing – it was a whole other level – and no matter how good a street fighter or driver or anything else Uber could be, it was worth nothing when it came to Endbringers.

"Leviathan. Chirst's sake. Leviathan. I mean at least with Simurgh I might have been some use, but Leviathan – just forget it," babbled Leet. "I've still got the 'Last Resort' force field set up. It won't hold out against a direct attack though - maybe a half dozen hits at most. Maybe it won't come near us and we can just hide out in here."

Uber forced himself to calm down, once again tapping into his 'Guru' skill set, and began to think rationally. They didn't actually have to participate in the fight, it wasn't mandatory, but something inside of him wanted to. He could feel the pull in him, urging him to find a way to use his talents to participate, and sitting the fight out meant either hiding out here and hoping the fight didn't come near, or going to one of the many Endbringer shelters that dotted the city – a death trap if he had ever seen one. But Leet was right, at best, he would just be cannon fodder.

So not a direct confrontation role then, for either of them. One of the support roles. Administration? He could fill a role there easily, but it would be boring as all hell. Nah, he wanted something a bit more front line.

Search and rescue? That wouldn't be bad, but he didn't really have the mobility required, unless...

"Leet, do you still have any working teleport systems?"

"What? No, nothing that will get us far enough from here. Hang on, we've got a line of sight thing from that game, you know the one with the jumping and shit – fuck I can't remember what's called. We could go in a series of jumps – no wait, you are limited how far you can go from the base station. You can get back to it in one hop even without line of sight, but you can't take it with you. No good."

"Leet, I am going to go help," said Uber. "I'll take the teleporter and go help do rescue and recovery."

"You'll get squashed like a bug with the first wave," said Leet.

"We still got that Metroid armour, right?" asked Uber, heading towards the equipment racks.

"It's not real armour, remember? It's just a mock up. It might take a couple of shots, but nothing more, and the arm canon is broken."

"Well what have we got that might give me a bit more protection?"

"You can't seriously be doing this," said Leet.

"I am. I can't just run away or sit back. Is this the teleporter set?" he asked, dragging out two metre wide discs and a pair of bracelets from a large box. One pair was red and other green.

"No, grab the other one - the thought activation doesn't work on that one. Put the manual activation button on your wrist as a backup – it'll be easier to use it, if you don't die the moment you get out there," answered Leet pointing to the red sets.

"What about the armour?"

"We've got nothing any good. About the most useful we have is the army surplus gear from one of the first person shooters. It's real stuff, one of those ones with the little plates you slot in. Or you could grab that ceramic chainmail vest we've used a few different times – please, Uber, don't go. What am I going to do?"

Uber dropped a jet pack on the pile of equipment he was talking before going to look for the clothing and armour. His current denim jeans and space invaders t-shirt really wasn't going to cut it. He thought about engaging one of his skills, the motivational speaker or something, but decided just to be straight with his best friend.

"I've got to go, man. I can feel it. Can't you?"

Leet gulped and dropped his head, nodding.

"It terrifies me," he whispered.

"I know," said Uber. "Me too, but I have to go. If I don't go, I don't know. I might explode or something."

"Okay," said Leet.

"Look, I think you should come too. We could steal a helicopter and do a Choplifter or Air Rescue tribute or something, and there is bound to be things they will need a non-combat Tinker for. You don't even have to be near the front lines. Go help out at the hospital or something – actually, that's a great idea. That's brilliant. It will be safer than being stuck in one of the bunkers."

"What?"

"Your scanner, could it work like an x-ray?"

"X-ray? Shit man, it can be like an x-ray, a y-ray, an MRI, and an ultrasound all at the same time," said Leet. "I won't even have to reprogram it much."

"Then pack it up – it has its own power supply, right? Right, pack it up and well drive over in the Spyhunter to the hospital. I'll leave the base station with you and go do some search and rescue, then I can teleport anybody I find back for you to scan and the doctors to fix up."

"Or you could stay with me and do some doctor stuff," said Leet. "We'd both be safe. Could make it like an 'Operation' tribute, although the port to video game was crap-"

"Okay," agreed Uber, but he knew he was lying. Once they were there he would leave Leet and head out to where the action was. Nothing else was going to satisfy the raging need in his chest, and there were plenty of rescue games that took place on the front lines.

#

An hour into the attack and Uber was regretting his decision.

The green arrow on his armband blinked rapidly, pointing the direction Uber needed to go for his next 'customer'. The torrential rain limited visibility, making Leet's line of sight teleport useless for getting to the injured cape, which was a pity because his goggles were barely holding up due to the speed he tended to fly at.

The jetpack roared as he swung between buildings in the direction the arrow pointed him. Visibility was even worse the faster he went, but he was desperately pushing himself.

A power line suddenly loomed out of the rain threatening to clothesline him, again, but swore and managed to duck below it, pulling up just in time to miss ploughing into an abandoned truck sitting in the middle of the road. At least, he hoped it was abandoned, since part of a building had fallen on the driver's cabin, crushing it completely.

The arrow blinked faster as he got closer to his target, so he had to slow down or risk overshooting then having to turn around and come back. That was embarrassing at first, and maddening after the third time, especially since he ended up being too late.

There wasn't going to be a fourth time, not if he could help it.

So far he had only recovered a dozen or so wounded capes. The expected casualty rate was one in four, but it seemed a lot higher to Uber. His teleportation and jetpack made him a valuable, but squishy asset, so he was kept away from the close in fighting and only sent to help those on the periphery of the battle, or the ones left dying in the monster's wake, which meant longer flying times to get out to where the injured lay.

His head hurt from the constant pounding of the rain and occasional impact of a stone or other rubbish. He did start with a hard hat somebody gave him at the briefing, but he had lost it somewhere along the way.

The arrow was almost solid now, so he dropped to the road and began looking around. The street was relatively clear with no rubble from collapsed buildings, although the water had obviously been a lot higher earlier as a couple of cars were pushed up against a building to his left. It was only ankle height now and still dropping, but at any moment another tidal wave could come in.

Finally he saw her, tangled above his head in the branches of a tree just a couple of metres from where he stood. She was wearing a multi-coloured, skin tight suit of the type favoured by many of the flying capes who usually fought from a distance. Probably a new cape. For some reason they rarely incorporated any real armour, probably thinking they would never get into physical combat or relying on whatever effect protected them when they flew. It usually only lasted until their first real injury.

The costume was torn in many places and blood covered much of her, despite the rain. She looked like a broken doll hanging with all her limbs askew.

"Shit," he swore, rushing over.

Even as he took the few steps needed to get to her, his power switched to and started cataloguing the injuries he could see. It was not good.

He couldn't reach well enough to get her down without just pulling her out of the tree, and probably hurting her worse, so instead he threw himself at the lowest limb and hooked his hands around the slippery wet branch.

His power took over immediately, switching to a gymnast or something similar so that he could smoothly swing up onto the thin branch. From his new perch he carefully reached out to take a hold, but he was too far away to make any real contact, and he had to make sure not to dislodge her from her precarious position.

To teleport, he needed to be closer, but with all of her limbs broken and signs of some internal injuries, he could not risk moving her roughly.

Balancing with skill that most tightrope walkers would envy, Uber slowly moved along his soaking wet branch, intending to get close enough to wrap him arms around her and teleport out. Agonisingly slow, he slid one foot and then the other along the branch, with his hands holding onto even thinner ones above and to the sides of him.

"She must not weight a lot," he mumbled to himself, "since she is basically being held up by leaves!"

With his third step he was close enough to reach her, and stretched an arm out to encircle her waist. Just as he got his arm around her, a strange feeling of lightness encompassed him, and something shifted. Suddenly the branch broke.

In times of great stress, many people had experienced their nervous system dramatically speeding up in response. Time seemed to slow down. Some people trained this ability, turning it into a skill that saved their lives time and again.

Uber was one of them.

His power kicked in, switching to his bullet-time skill so fast he didn't even realise he had began to fall before he felt everything around him slow down. With an unnatural calmness, he activated the teleport, while still holding firmly to the waist of the injured cape.

There was blinding flash of light, and suddenly he was no longer in the tree, but still falling as the weight of the body under one arm dragged him down. The base station for the teleporter sat in a small alcove in a side wing of the main hospital. As expected in times like this, most of the hallways were lined with beds, and the walking wounded were everywhere, but Leet's teleporter, like the others in use there, needed a clear space to work. The whole wing was set aside as a receiving area for teleporters and other high-speed transport.

Uber grabbed the cape with his other arm as well and smoothly controlled their fall, lowering the her as gently to the floor as he could while taking up their momentum with his own body, which ended up with him almost doing a flip as he tried to roll completely over her while not transferring any weight on her.

Coming to his feet, he turned and the knelt down to start working on his patient.

Normally he would have performed basic first aid before teleporting back. Bandaging wounds, reseating dislocated limbs, and even resetting broken bones before spaying a light coat of containment foam over them to keep things in place until a real doctor would work on them. There hadn't been time with this one.

He gently rolled the cape over onto her side and put her into a recovery position before addressing her other wounds, starting with the ones that were bleeding.

"Nice entrance," said Leet.

Uber looked up and saw his friend coming over, dragging their scanner on a cart behind him. He looked as dishevelled and as worn out as Uber felt. Leet insisted he be able to work near the base station, so that he was on hand every time Uber came through.

"Heya," Uber said, letting a brief smile show as he grabbed a knife from his boot and started cutting away the costume around what looked like the worst of the wounds. "Start with her head while I see if I can stop the bleeding a bit."

He had more than one reason to be glad to see Leet, the second one being the scanner would make it a lot easier to treat the cape.

They worked in silence for a moment, Leet removing the capes open faced helmet and then scanning while Uber stuck self adhesive bandages over the wounds that looked the worst.

"Mild concussion and some internal bleeding," said Leet, catching Uber by surprise. "She's out due to a blow to her head, should come around in a few minutes. Rest of her injuries are mostly bruising and some deep cuts that will need stiches."

"You a doctor now?" Uber asked.

"Nah, but I've been labelling the scans with what the doctors say they see and the system has been learning. It even prints a chart," he said, tearing a piece of paper out of a slot on the scanner Uber was sure had not been before.

"Excellent," said Uber, finishing up what he could before the people working as orderlies came over to move her. Leet pinned the chart to the remains of the costume over her chest as the orderlies moved her off.

"So, nice bush," said Leet, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

Uber was confused. He quickly glanced down, checking if his clothing was ripped - it wasn't. For a moment he wondered if the cape he had just saved had lost more of her costume than he noticed, but then realised there was a leaf covered tree branch lying at his feet.

"Yeah, you know me, I see bush, I got to have me some," Uber replied, striking an overly proud pose.

They laughed for a moment, taking a break from all of the drama around them to be their usual puerile selves.

"Scanner," called out a voice, probably a doctor. "I need that scanner over here."

Leet shot Uber an apologetic smile before grabbing his cart and rushing off.

"Hold your fucking horses," he called. "I'm only one man."

Uber sighed and took a moment to take stock. He was sore from the physical work, and mentally drained from the things he had seen, but otherwise he was not going to complain too much.

People were suddenly appearing in the receiving area with wounded, and then disappearing every second to go get more. Orderlies and doctors were rushing everywhere, taking the wounded and then moving them elsewhere, depending on their wounds. It was chaos, but a controlled chaos.

All around him people where badly injured, some of them undoubtedly dying. He could engage his doctor skills to take a break from the rescuing and lend a hand with actual healing, but that would mean less people out in the field bringing in the wounded. It was hard to say where his help was needed more.

At his feet, near the broken branch, the rescued cape's helmet lay where Leet had dropped it. It was more of a skullcap sort of thing made out of something that felt like rubber, and bright orange really wasn't his colour, but it looked pretty strong.

Pulling it on his head, Uber adjusted his goggles, filled up his pockets with more bandages to replace the ones he had used, and then headed out again.

There would be time for doing the doctor thing after people weren't getting hurt and needing rescue anymore.

Besides, he hadn't gotten even a glimpse of Leviathan yet.

#

Before it was over, he did get to see the Endbringer. Just as Scion beat the ever-loving shit out of it – at least's how he liked to think of it.

A bunch of supersized dogs were tearing into the monster, giving it some real trouble, but it was slowly turning the tables on them, taking them out one by one.

Uber was on his way to a civilian shelter that had cracked under the pressure of the massive sink-hole Leviathan had made of the city centre. Capes were meant to be opening the door to evacuate the shelter and he was going to grab a couple of the more injured people inside and get them out.

The rain let up a bit, and he was able to start teleporting to places he could see rather than relying on the jetpack to get him out to the injured. It reduced his travel time to a fraction of what it had been.

Unfortunately, the Endbringer arrived first, and proceeded make getting the people out of the shelter a mute point. The monster's tail simply smashed through human bodies, mundane and cape alike, turning them into something that he would need multiple trips to recover - and a bucket.

It was selfish, but Uber suddenly felt quite grateful that he had chosen not to stay away from the action and hide in a public shelter - It could just have easily been him and Leet in there being turned into chunks.

His teleport put him near the shelter just in time and position to watch as Leviathan fought Hellhound's mutant dogs.

It the unexpected lull, he couldn't help analyse what he was seeing. The Endbringer was too powerful to take on head to head. No matter the power, it seemed to have a way to counter every attack, bypass every defence. The felt like whole battle so far had been dictated by the unfathomable whims of the beast with only minor inconvenience caused by even the most powerful capes.

It wasn't all-powerful. Attacks did get through and hurt it. It could be knocked down, or held in place, but never very badly or for long.

The fact of the matter was they were losing. Despite the best efforts of the capes, the beast was doing what it wanted, when it wanted to.

Unbidden, Uber's power switched and he came to a sudden realisation: Their tactics were wrong.

They fought together, even working as a team, but almost everything came down to individual efforts. A super strength cape did not use his might to hurl tinker-made bombs. Masters did not control hordes of bio-engineered soldiers. Trumps weren't boosting the output of telekinetics to alter the landscape or loosen Levithan's control over the water so hydrokinetics could hamstring the water attacks. Everybody was fighting together, but on their own.

Hell, the Tinkers were still building individual weapons instead of combining their efforts to make a super weapon. He could even see how it could be done, if only they could properly communicate their inventions to each other.

Overall, the strategy sucked.

Why would they try to push Levithan back out to the waves that were its home? How could they expect to contain it when it had the ability to summon tidal waves and produced unlimited water in the form of its shadow image?

It made more sense to try and separate the creature from the ocean, rather than push it back. Nothing appeared to be holding it to the ground, couldn't they have hoisted it into the air where it was automatically at a disadvantage? Take it up high enough quickly enough and they may even have been able to defeat it, since water does not work well in the vacuum of space. A bunch of capes could have lifted force fields placed under Leviathan, or a tractor beam grabbed it from up high to drag it into the stratosphere.

Speaking of being up high, so many capes died because they were grounded. Standing on the top of buildings was better than being on the ground, but surely there had to be ways of keep ranged attack capes in the air where Leviathan could not easily reach them. A fleet of plain old mundane helicopters could have made a significant difference to the logistics of the battle and there really was no excuse for not having at least a few of them more involved, and a few dozen jetpacks like the one he was wearing would have been extremely useful.

His musings came to an end as Leviathan finished the last of the dogs and was then attacked by Scion.

Scion, the first cape, the most powerful cape – the cape that seem to ignore everybody and barely register what was going on around him. He often stopped to help people, but not in any logical manner. He would put out a house fire while a major battle loomed near-by and not bat an eye lid. He did, however, take exception to the Endbringers, usually driving them off.

And that's what he did now, slapping Leviathan around and countering even his most devastating attacks with ease. Tidal waves fell apart with a simple wave of a golden hand. Sun-bright beams lashed out, digging deeply into the Endbringer's flesh and burning great gouges into the hide that had barely been damaged by the best the Capes had to offer.

Eventually the Endbringer fled back to the ocean from where it came, and Scion floated away, not sparing a glance for the devastated city and its suffering inhabitants.

Uber kicked himself for getting distracted, but noted a lot of other capes hovering around watching too. Only Eidolon had continued to fight once Scion had entered the fray, adding his not inconsequential might to the battle by freezing the water around Leviathan several times, trapping him for Scion to punish with blazing attacks of golden light.

With the show over, Uber kicked his jetpack into action and headed to the remains of the shelter, hoping at least some people were left there for him to rescue.

There was, a lot of them in fact. He made six return visits while other capes took many more people away. The dead outnumbered the living though, or it seemed that way, possibly because most of them had been torn apart and lay in multiple pieces. Pretty soon he was reduced to hunting for survivors, that were few and far between, or abandoning the search and putting his Medico skills to use.

The thought of spending hours in the hospital using his doctor skills was not at all appealing, so he decided not to. Screw it, he was villain, not a hero. He had done his bit. He had risked his neck being out in the open during the attack. Nobody could say he didn't help save lives, or carry his weight, but he had enough and it was time to give it up.

Taking one last rescue in, a man far too old to survive without some serious healer work, he set off to find Leet.

Surprisingly, Leet was still going. Not even remotely fit, Uber was not expecting the Tinker to still be standing after hours of running around, but he was.

"I'm packing it in," he said while Leet continued to run his scanner over a patient. "I'm heading home."

"Oh, er, okay," said a very distracted Leet. "Look at this – the program has learned just about every possible injury and damage you can do to a human body. It's gone beyond the simple recognition parameters I started it with and into completely new areas, all by itself! Hell, it determines a person's blood type now, and can tell an absolute shit load of prior history. It's even somehow managed to figure out how to priorities injuries, probably when I rescanned a few people after they were healed by Panacea."

"Hey, that's great," said Uber wearily. "But at this point, I just don't care. I'll see you later."

"Yeah, okay," said Leet, barely looking up from the screen.

Uber sighed and headed out, dropping his armband on a pile of them near the end of the ward.

The battle may have been over, but the emergency was far from. People were still getting pulled from the rubble of collapsed buildings, and the queue for operations and treatment was still growing.

Uber felt a slight stirring of guilt as he walked past them, but shook it off. He wasn't really a doctor. There was always a chance that he could use the wrong skill set and end up hurting rather than helping, but that was a weak excuse and he knew it. Still, he kept walking, determined to leave it all behind, at least for a little while. Maybe he would come back in a few hours and help out, but not right now.

Finally leaving the building, he took to the sky and headed home. With all the damage and chaos, it wasn't easy to navigate, especially from the air. The unfamiliar perspective made it hard enough under normal circumstances, but with a new lake taking up a large portion of the city, it was considerably harder.

He got lost twice, but eventually found the right directions by ducking down to street level and following the road signs, only to find that instead of the warehouse they called home, there was a hole.

When Leviathan created the lake in the city centre, several other sink holes appeared, and his home happened to be right on the edge of one. Looking over the edge, he could see another new lake slowly forming as water flowed in, filling it up.

"Well don't that just beat all," he said, sitting down on the edge of the hole.

Everything they owned was in that warehouse. All of their equipment, all of their supplies, even all of their money, since the police kept tabs on bank accounts.

And it was all gone.

"Shit," he said, deciding it was not worth the rant he really wanted to make.

For many minutes he just sat there, swinging his legs over the side of the rapidly shrinking cliff as the water rose up, then his power kicked in, bringing in skills he had never really focussed on before.

Plans unfolded in his mind, options and alternatives. He did not have to sit here and do nothing, there were dozens of things he could immediately do to improve the currently hopelessly destitute situation. Schemes and cons, legitimate but opportunistic businesses, and ways to obtain help from aid agencies; choices and options flooded in as quickly as the water below him.

Instead, he switched to Guru, and calmed himself down until eventually, despite the wet and cold, despite the muddy ground he was sitting on, and all of his aches and pains, he dozed off.

#

"Where the fuck is our house?" screamed Leet.

He was taking it quite a bit better than Uber expected.

"Where the fuck is all our stuff?" the Tinker roared. "Fucking Endbringer. Come back here you fish-fucker and I'll fuck you up myself! Trash my shit will you? Fuck. You."

He went on for a while longer, with Uber occasionally feeding him more lines and stoking his anger for a bit of a laugh. It would have been great to have had working camera for it, but Uber's had been lost at some point before his Leviathan close encounter, more's the pity. The footage taken during some of his rescues would have made from some great web shows, and Scion's beat down on Leviathan was worth a lot of money.

Still no use crying over spilt milk and all that jazz.

"You done?' he asked as Leet finally wound down.

"Yeah, I'm done."

"All right. I am thinking we've got a couple of choices. We can go throw our lot in with the other homeless at one of those shelters they are setting up-"

"Yeah, not happening," said Leet with a shudder of disgust.

"Take over one of the houses nobody seems to be using at the moment-"

"And get kicked out when the owners come back or when the cops figure out we don't belong there and shoot us for looting," dismissed Leet.

"Or move to one of the many warehouses still standing that have been empty since before the attack. There's not many of them, and they are not in good shape, but nobody important is going to go poking their noses around them either."

"Hmm, probably the best idea, but it still leaves us with no food, water, money, clothes or anything," said Leet angrily. "We have jack shit to our names and no way to get anything since the little that hasn't been destroyed is going to be guarded pretty heavily I'd imagine."

"What about the scanner?" asked Uber.

"I left it locked up at the hospital. Nobody is allowed to use it except me, in case they screw it up somehow, but you know it's bound to start failing soon."

"How much of my program does the scanner's computer have? Could we use that to figure out how to fix the scanner like we did for the other stuff?"

Leet shook his head.

"Nah, it's only got a bit of your program, and it doesn't have the processing power to do it either. We'd be waiting a month and it'll probably break down in some other way before it was done.

"You know, I can recall all of the code," said Uber. "We just need a computer that can handle the job."

"We need food more. The handouts will keep us alive, but they really suck."

"I suppose I can use my power to get a job - I can do just about anything any unpowered person can."

"Look around, Uber. Nobody is hiring. Hell, just about everybody who can walk is volunteering to help out just so they can keep getting handouts."

"Well I maybe I can get work with some of the out of town companies doing the cleaning up. I can keep my eyes out for scrap and parts we can use to built some Tinker stuff."

"You and every other Tinker in the city."

"Yeah, well, it's better than sitting here starving to death. Come on, let's go find a house first. I need a change of clothes and even if we get chased away, I reckon it's worth the risk. We can go look for a new hideout later."

Leet grunted angrily and kicked a stone into the new lake covering what had been their home.

With services and food only available in limited areas, large portions of the city were abandoned, especially in the already run-down areas near the warehouse that was their previous location. Most buildings were damaged by the tidal waves Leviathan summoned, and quite a few from the fighting as the capes tried to hold back the Endbringer.

A few hours later, rather than finding a house to loot, they had a place to set up shop in. It was an old four story apartment building, obviously abandoned and boarded up well before the latest disaster, and half collapsed to boot. While nobody had properly lived there for years, it still had some broken furniture and assorted personal belongings, probably from squatters, by the look of it. People had trashed the place, leaving graffiti and rubbish throughout the building, with needles and other drug paraphernalia littering the floor, but the remaining portion seemed structurally sound.

"Lovely," said Leet. "Just what I've always wanted, a flop house all of my own."

"Well, you don't want a place that somebody might come back and claim, do you?" asked Uber.

"Chances are the owners are all dead inside here somewhere anyway," grumbled Leet.

Uber laughed and carefully made his way through each of the empty apartments, looking for the most habitable. There were a few that were quite decent, as at least some of the squatters had tried to keep them liveable.

They ended up deciding to move into the third floor, figuring that level would the least likely to be disturbed should squatters return, and the level above was too leaky to fix. Uber set about repairing two apartments, taking whatever materials he needed from other more damaged rooms and utilising a raft of handy-man and architectural skills to bring them up to a decent standard, while Leet stuck with cleaning them out, grumbling non-stop. They even added a salvaged steel security gate on the stairs leading up to their floor to further discourage anybody coming up.

Leet could have used his Tinker talent to build machines to help them, but with their limited resources they did not want him to waste his 'one-shot' on anything so trivial, at least not until they had a more secure place. It would be criminal to make something really useful and then have it stolen.

He did combine a bunch of mostly broken drug making equipment they found in boxes in the flooded basement to make a solar powered water condenser and purifier though, since services were still off. It was amazing how having the ability to wash or have a drink of clean water made such a difference. The building sewerage was somehow still working, possibly due to the new downward slope of the nearby area thanks to the massive sinkhole created by Leviathan.

Leet's power often worked despite his best efforts, but so long as he confined them to his head, there was usually no problem. He had plans to use Uber's jetpack and the teleporter to make a power generator that could also do a lot of other things, once they had some tools and few other bits and pieces.

Meanwhile, Uber kicked in some tailoring and seamstress skills to make clothes for them. Mostly it was just using modified syringe needles to resize and repair clothes they got out of donation bins or found in the wreckage of the city, but having something other than their costumes to wear improved their mood considerably. Vain, but true.

For food they still had to go the 'soup' kitchens for hand outs, and Uber spent at least half of his days working with clean up and rebuilding crews while Leet worked at the hospital running his scanner on the injured people still overcrowding the building. Both of them managed to pick up extra food and some bits of useful gear here and there in the course of their jobs, but they were careful not to do anything that could bring them negative attention of the authorities, especially Leet who had to keep his mask on to protect his civilian identity. Uber was able to blend in and use his ability to master any skill in order to fill any roll that became available.

He still occasionally went for a run, despite the fact he spent most of the day doing physical work. Having a new area to go through made it interesting, and he liked knowing what was around their new home. For these he put his costume on, since the level of skill he used automatically identified him as a cape to anybody watching.

Many of the buildings in the area were in worse shape than their new home, but there were still a lot of occupied ones, filled with people of all sorts including families. It was surreal to see people trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and get back into some sort of normality while half of the city had simple ceased to exist.

Stumbling across a small gang casing one of these occupied areas was a thing Uber had simply not been ready for. Before any of them could act, he dove into the alley where they stood and closed the distance to them in a blur.

The first thug went down to a perfectly executed punch to the temple, and the goon next to him followed soon after as Uber kicked him in the stomach with a spinning kick that took most of the momentum from his dash into the alley. He put his hands on the back of the collapsing thug and spring-boarded over the other three gang members, twisting in mid-air to land facing them, then dropped another one with a vicious chop to the neck.

One of the remaining thugs managed to get a gun out and pointing towards Uber, but he was too close and Uber slapped his arm up and away, letting the bullet fire off harmlessly into the wall of the alley. An elbow to the gut and follow up fist to the face knocked the gunner back, leaving the weapon in Uber's hand as he snatched it out of the staggering thug's grip.

The gun was now pointing at the only two still standing. Uber pulled the trigger quickly, making two holes in their surprised foreheads. He didn't even realise what he was doing until another two shots rang out from his hand, putting an end to two more of the thugs that were still moving.

In the shocking stillness that followed, Uber felt himself begin to shake.

He didn't kill people - hadn't even decided to kill these guys. It had just happened. The moment he had seen them he had somehow come to the conclusion they were intent on harm, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. From the first blow, Uber had not really been in control. Everything was done on instinct, without the usual 'bullet time' awareness he automatically fell into during a fight.

"Shit," he swore.

Murder, even of thugs, was something that attracted far too much attention, if not from the police, then from the rest of the gang. Worse, not all of his opponents were dead.

"Shit," he said again.

Seeing one of the still living gang members starting to stand, he quickly moved over and put a choke hold on him, putting him into unconsciousness.

"Shit," he said for the third time.

He couldn't just run off. The survivors might get reinforcements and come looking for payback. They only a minute's look, but it might be enough to identify him.

He didn't want to kill them in cold blood, it just wasn't in him.

"God damn, shit," he said.

He needed them out of the way somehow. Obviously calling the police was out of the question- wait was it?

Quickly he rummaged through the pockets of the downed gang members, finding a mobile phone that had a charge and a connection.

He wiped the gun he had used down and then placed in the hand of one of the corpses, getting a good print on it before dropping it on the ground and moving the bodies around a bit.

Hopefully that would confuse the issue and make any tale they told look like a lie - not that low level thugs like this were known for telling the police anything anyway.

He went through the rest of their pockets taking all of their belongings, which included some cash, some interesting knives, and a few more guns, along with other miscellaneous junk. He also took a leather jacket from one of the corpses. The swastika on the back had to go, but other than that it was a lot nicer than anything he currently owned, and had enough pockets on it to carry his loot. Then he rang the police hot line.

"There's been some sort of a gang fight," he told the dispatcher in a heavily disguised voice. "Looks like a couple of them are dead."

At their prompting he gave the location, but hung up when they asked him for personal details, choosing to remain anonymous.

Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he scaled the wall of the alley and made his way off over the roof tops, pausing to destroy the phone he had called the police on and dropping it far from the scene of the crime.

His adrenaline was still pumping as he made his way back to Leet via a long circular route that should confuse anybody who tried to track him. The whole time his mind was contemplating what he had done.

He was certain the gang had not been there for any good, and vaguely recalled somehow determining that they were watching the occupied houses, looking for a good target, but it was all a bit blurry now. At any rate, he had somehow invoked a skill set far more deadly than his usual fighting style.

Even looting his downed enemy was something new, but it made sense, making it look like somebody may have simply mugged the bangers.

By the time he got back to his new home, he had almost decided not to tell Leet, but changed his mind as soon as he set foot inside.

Leet was not happy.

"You moron," he yelled. "The last thing we need is someone getting a new grudge against us!"

It took a while for Uber to calm him down and convince him they were not in any danger, a lie he only half believed himself.

"Of course, it would be an easy way to get more stuff," he said.

"Not worth it," said Leet. "It was okay when we had our base and some minions, but out here we are pretty much just sitting ducks. How much did you get, anyway?"

Uber went through the pockets of his new leather jacket, pulling out a lot more than he thought he had stolen.

Three hand guns, about fifty dollars in cash, several small bags of drugs, seven folding knives and two long bladed ones, a pair of knuckle dusters, one of them brass and expensive looking, some extra ammo, and a bunch of wallets, three of which had driver's licenses in them.

"This was not worth killing four guys over," said Leet, and Uber agreed with him. "But, the chances are the gangs are a lot better off than most other people at the moment. Maybe it would be worth going after them a bit - stealing their shit. I mean it's not like the police are going to look into it too much, especially not of you do some of that martial arts shit and wear makeup making you look a bit Asian - like you did for the Bruce Lee game re-enactment. They'll all just think it is the ABB attacking."

Uber could not believe what he was hearing.

"I am not going to start a gang war just to steal stuff," he said. "If the ABB find out somebody is pretending to be them, there will be hell to pay."

"Not saying you have to pretend you are from the ABB, just let them think it, or keep the Nazi jacket and hit the merchants maybe – that will confused them."

"Forget it," said Uber. "Not happening."

"Stop being a sissy," said Leet, no longer able to hold in a smile.

"You wanker," laughed Uber, realising Leet had been leading him on. "Had me going!"

They laughed for a while, with Leet crowing about it for a lot longer than it really deserved, but in the back of his mind, Uber couldn't help think there might have been something to Leet's idea, just not at the moment.

#

"Look what I managed to get a hold of," said Uber, placing a large cardboard box on the table he had built out of scrap using carpentry skills. It was actually nicer than the Ikea one they used to have in their lair, with carved wooden legs and sturdy bracing making it very solid.

Leet looked up from the novel he was reading. He normally preferred comic books, but there were lots of 'real' books floating around for free at the moment; literally, since a library was one of the buildings now found at the bottom of the new lake.

"It's a bunch of old electronics I saw in a pile that was getting carted away," Uber explained. "Some of it looks a bit more high-tech then the usual junk, so I grabbed it."

Leet put his novel down and started rummaging through the contents of the box, making appreciative noises as he came across an especially 'tasty' bit every now and then.

They had already accumulated quite a few other boxes of gear, but all of it was, as Uber described, 'usual junk'. White goods and common commercial devices like toasters, kettles, TVs, and video machines, even the odd computer or two. It was all stacked up in one of the other apartments Leet had designated as his workshop. Uber had his own workshop right next to it, where he did all of the handy-man stuff they needed.

They had power, by dint of Uber using an electrician's skill to reroute some of the restored grid to their apartment, but they were careful not to let it show or use too much.

"Cool," said Leet, dropping the bits back into the box and picking up his novel again.

Uber didn't let his disappointment over Leet's lack of enthusiasm worry him.

"I was thinking about taking a run over to the hole and maybe free-dive down again," he said. "It's a lot more settled now. I was hoping you might be able to put together some sort of scanner to look for the base. If I can find it, I might be able to find some of our stuff."

"That's not a bad idea," said Leet sounding a bit more interested. "Probably a waste of time, but worth a shot."

It had been weeks since they had lost their home, and Uber still wasn't ready to give up hope they would never see any of their stuff again. His work with the construction and maintenance crews let him see how things inside of a building that had fallen over often survived surprisingly intact.

"Can you do it then?"

Leet sat in thought for a moment, going over all of the bits and pieces they had and figuring out how to combine and modify it.

"I can't make anything like the scanner, so a ground mapping thing is out, but I might be able to make something to locate some specific bits of our stuff, like the force field generator, assuming it hasn't been completely destroyed. That would be our best bet, since it's the most unique thing I can think of, was pretty much at the centre of the base, and would have been the last thing crushed when it failed."

"Excellent," said Uber enthusiastically.

He knew Leet was pretty down and feeling a bit useless, so seeing him start to get interested and do something was great, so long as what he built worked that is. Without their database and notes, it was a lot more difficult for Leet to steer clear of similarities from his prior work, and the more similar to something he had already built, the more chance it had of failing.

Uber had to make any repairs to the scanner, since Leet just changing one of the switches had ended up partially melting the hairdryer. It was lucky Uber understood enough to be able to help, correcting the strange things the Tinker's power did when it went wrong.

"Er, do you mind giving me a bit of a hand," Leet asked with a hint of embarrassment.

Obviously he was thinking along the same lines as Uber.

"Be glad to," said Uber, grinning like a loon.

So together they built a device to search for a reflective radio signature of the shield generator in their old lair. Uber didn't really understand how it was meant to work, but managed to keep Leet on track and did a lot of the boring leg work like soldering and wiring things up.

The range was not great, only a dozen metres or so, but it was better than trying to look with plain old eyeballs, especially since the water in the new lake was not particularly clear.

They also managed to cobble together a rebreather using some supplies Leet liberated from the hospital and a fire fighter's gas mask found floating amongst the wreckage on the banks of the new lake.

It was not a long walk to the bank of the lake where their base used to be, but it wasn't just around the corner either. When they got there, Uber was bit surprised to notice Leet wasn't puffing and didn't look winded at all.

"I've lost a lot of weight since we have had to live on rations," said Leet.

"I hadn't really noticed," said Uber looking closely at his friend. "You look fitter too."

"Yeah, I'm sure all this moving around working crap is bad for me."

Uber waded out into the water, carefully making his way down the steep slope until the water was at about chest height before putting the modified face mask and his goggles on.

Leet felt himself holding his breath as he watched Uber go through a series of trials, testing the rebreather thoroughly before putting himself in a position that his life depended on it. His freediving skill would let him easily go down the ten or so metres that was the bottom of the lake at its deepest and stay there for a few minutes without any sort of breathing aid, but staying down longer without having to come up for air would speed things up a lot.

With the rebreather, he could safely stay on the bottom for more than half an hour without worrying about getting the bends, or that's what Leet was able to gather from the brief search he managed to make on the hospital's internet connection.

Watching Uber give the thumbs up and disappear beneath the water, Leet sighed and got comfortable, taking out one of his books while he waited. Been able to totally lose himself in the novel was still surprising to Leet. He wasn't much of a reader, preferring video games and even TV, but he was developing a new found love for reading, especially romance novels of all things. It helped that they were overflowing with sex.

It felt like only a few minutes later that Uber returned for his scheduled break, his dive bag bulging with items picked up from the bottom of the lake.

"Any luck with the tracker?" Leet asked.

"I got a faint ping once or twice, but I think it was just echoes or something. I circled around a bit but it didn't lock on. I found a few things though," he answered, emptying the bag out. "There's some stuff I'd like to get a crane to lift out if we could. A few cars and some big solar panels, a water tank barrel thing that looks like it is still intact, and an absolute shit load of other junk that is just too big to carry."

Leet sorted through the bits Uber had retrieved. He couldn't see much rhyme or reason to a few things, but the solid gold watch was nice, and the mobile phones might be recoverable if corrosion hadn't already wrecked them.

"What about using the teleporter?" he asked. "You could get a good hold of whatever you wanted to bring and just port it back to the base station."

"Won't the water make it too heavy?"

"Nah, there is no limit on weight, but you can't take anything that goes for more than about three metres, circular, and most of the water will be filtered out and left behind anyway."

"Three metres in diameter or radius?"

"Radius, from you, so some cars will fit, especially smaller ones. We can set the base station up in one of the ground floor apartments. Put it on the ceiling so you appear underneath and don't crush it. The water won't matter if we use the room that's missing most of the wall – it'll just run out the hole. We can always put up a flood wall to make sure, or dig a drain hole or something."

"Cool. It'll be a pain walking all the way back to go under again though. I suppose I could collect everything into a pile and take it all at once."

"Yeah, or you could just fly the jetpack over."

"What and leave it on the shore? You'll need to be back at the base station to move everything out of the way before I can bring in the next lot."

Leet shrugged.

"The pack will work underwater. Won't do it any harm. Just keep it on, unless it makes you too heavy or something."

"I can use the pack to get around down there?"

"Well yeah, it's not really a jet pack, more of an anti-gravity sort of thing, although it's not true antigravity-"

"You clown! I've been swimming my heart out and I could have been powering about?"

"Sorry, I thought you wanted to swim about. I mean I have no idea what's down there. I might go for a look."

Uber shook his head.

"Don't," he said, taking a long drink from one of the water bottles Leet had brought along. "There are still a lot of bodies around, and they aren't pretty."

Leet shivered, inadvertently imagining old, water logged corpses amongst the wreckage of a few city blocks.

"Yeah, nah. I'll leave you to that then," he said. "See if you can find a bed frame too, one of those ones with springs. That mattress I am sleeping on is killing my back because it's on the floor. Keep an eye out for any tools too. A tool box full of spanners, screw drivers and stuff wouldn't go astray. Hell, even workshop power tools if you see them. The water has probably ruined them, but we might get lucky."

"We need a kitchen sink too?" Uber asked sarcastically. "I've seen a few fridges."

"Just go make like a fish while I go back and start getting things ready. You know, we are probably going to need a bigger place if this works out."

Uber laughed and headed back into the water while Leet picked up all of their stuff and started heading back.

Things might actually be starting to look up.

It wasn't until a few days later that they managed to get a system working pretty much like they had envisioned. They ended up setting up the teleporter base station on an overhanging pole in what had been an undercover parking area for the apartment. It was still enclosed by a fence, making it semi private, and the water that came in with Uber quickly drained away down the old driveway and into the storm water pipes out on the street.

While still keeping an eye on the scanner, Uber instead spent most of his time recovering items the pair could use. He picked up a thousand and one small items as he went along, things that they had not really noticed they were missing until then.

Cupboards and other furniture like Leet's requested bed frame taken from sunken apartments, fridges and ovens, and more tools than Leet could ever hope to use, some of it top quality.

The water had of course ruined a lot of stuff, but Uber's handyman and electronic skills let him repair a fair bit. Leet was getting better at not using his Tinker power to fix things too, finding ways to fight down the urge to 'soup things up' or bend the laws of physics while still tapping into the instinctive knowledge of how things worked. Uber kept cheating, using his mixed bag of expertise to be a "non-powered Tinker", much to Leet's annoyance.

They also recovered a couple of cars and several different motorbikes, but without fuel to run them, there was not a lot of point spending time getting them working. One day they would find out what had happened to their Spyhunter car, since it had disappeared from the hospital where Leet had parked it before Leviathan's attack, and when they did, somebody was going to pay- big time.

In the meantime, they started patching together a number of push bikes and traded them to people looking for alternatives to walking everywhere. Not needing fuel and easy to maintain, cheap bikes were becoming quite popular. Uber kept the best one he recovered though, a thing of beauty that probably cost a small fortune before it was washed away in the floods.

Another major benefit was the food Uber managed to recover. Tins had not started rusting yet, and bottles and glass jars were pretty much impervious to the water. Before long they had to fix up another apartment to use as a pantry and started selling excess that was nearing or only slightly over its due date. Sometimes it was for money, but more often it was other items people had salvaged or found.

Slowly, commerce and trade were returning to Brockton bay in the form of popup local markets in public areas. There was often a couple of capes on hand to keep a lid on any trouble, so the gangs tended to keep away, but the occasional shooting was still happening.

Their increased wealth necessitated an upgrade of their security, which was mostly just putting in some steel bars and nailing more planks over possible entrance points, but allowed them to finally stop spending so many hours working at the hospital and with the recovery teams, and they didn't have to go to the 'soup kitchens' anymore.

While they were doing much better, they still had a long way to go before they got anywhere near reclaiming what they had before.

Then Uber got a solid hit on the tracker.

#

"You are not going to believe this," he told Leet excitedly. "I've found our old base."

"Yeah? Excellent. How much of it? Anything good?"

"The. Whole. Damn. Thing. Intact."

Leet didn't really get it.

"What do you mean, intact?"

"Leet, buddy, the force field is still up."

Leet was speechless.

"I was deep inside a hole that used to be a garage, and I got a solid ping on the tracker," Uber explained. "I couldn't circle around like I would usually do, since I was a few metres underground-"

"What? You go underground?"

"Well, yeah. In some places it looks like whole streets just dropped down and stuff fell on top like a lid. It's like Atlantis or something."

"Cool."

"Very, anyway, in places like that I can get into basements and underground garages. Some of the best stuff has come from down there including most of the food. People keep stuff like that packed downstairs out of the way."

"That must be terrifying, I mean you only have the light of your torches to see by."

"Yeah, and I can tell you, the first time I came across a body I teleported out so fast I was still swimming when I hit the ground back here, but back to my story.

"I got a solid ping but couldn't get any closer, so I had to go back up and try to find another way down. It's funny, but I recognised one of the buildings that used be next door – you know the old tire place, where they stockpiled the imported tires? Well it had fallen over along and was sort of piled up with a lot of other buildings – that reminds me, I got some new tires for the cars, good ones-"

"Uber!"

"Right, sorry. So anyway, I was looking for some sign of our base when I realised the tire place was sort of a hill. All around it things were flatter, but this was a like a mountain. To make a long story short, it looks to me like all the soft crap, the sand and other stuff, has washed away, leaving a big pile of buildings behind, but I couldn't figure out why until I went around the other side and the tracker started going off its tits.

"I poked through some gaps and about a metre in I hit the force field. It took me awhile to move enough shit out of the way, but I managed to get up close enough, and I can see the whole building inside. It's a bit busted up, but there isn't even any water in there and some of the lights are still on!" he finished excitedly.

"That is incredible," said Leet. "How the hell did it survive?"

"It must have had a fairly easy ride down, I reckon. I figure the tracker didn't pick it up before because the force field is blocking the signals and it was too covered in crap. Any idea how long the power will hold out?"

"About twenty years under normal circumstances," said Leet, still dazed. "Probably only a couple under that much weight. At least one."

"Really? A whole year? Sweet. Now we just have to figure a way to get inside and get our stuff out."

"We can drop the force field remotely of course," said Leet, "but that would sort of destroy everything inside."

"Yeah, not a good idea," agreed Uber. "Well we have a bit of time to work on it, right? No need to rush off and do something silly right now."

"Okay, but damn. All of our stuff is in there. The money, the computers, our gear, the booze - oh crap. The fridge is going to stink something bad, even with the power on."

"Hey, we are doing all right," said Uber nodding his head towards all of the stuff they had managed to collect.

"True, but I really miss making our web show."

"I don't. Not really."

"And I miss being able to really Tinker."

"Fair enough. Well think about it for a while and maybe you can come up with a way in that doesn't involve dropping a thousand tons of water and rubble on our stuff."

"Hey, if the other base station is still in there and hasn't been busted, you can change the setting on your activation button to set that as your destination and just port in."

"Christ, that didn't take you long!"

#

They didn't immediately head out to the old base, instead Leet insisted on working through as many scenarios as they could to minimise the danger to themselves as well as the base. There was no better option than to teleport in, but Leet was concerned about conditions inside the bubble.

"There could be poisonous gas," he pointed out. "Or no oxygen, you can't know if a fire might have burned all of the air up."

"True enough," said Uber. "I'll wear my rebreather and take a canary or something in with me."

"Not a good plan, but along the right track. I think I can build something to test it a bit better, but I don't think you should port in with a ton of water – that could really mess up some of our stuff and might even bring the force field down."

"What sort of range am I going to get with it up? It has to be cutting down on it, since it was blocking the tracker."

Leet thought about it, running some calculations through his head before thinking better of it and writing them down for Leet to check. He just didn't trust his power not to mess with him.

"Looks like I am going to have to get in pretty close."

"We can build a raft to get you right above it, or maybe make a diving bell or something."

"I recall seeing a row boat or two underwater, I can retrieve one and we can patch it up, rather than building a raft, or I could just hover above the water using the jetpack a bit."

"That might be better, but we'll need the boat if both of us are going to go in. At least until you get a second jetpack and teleport activator."

"I didn't think you wanted to go in," said Uber.

"It's scary, but I really want to see what of my stuff we can get out of there. You can't just rip the computer out of the wall you know."

"Oh, okay, well I'll do recon and grab some simple things first. Money is getting to be a bit more useful since they opened up a way to buy stuff in from outside."

"True, but I really need my notes or I am going keep being handicapped."

"You've been doing pretty well," said Uber encouragingly.

"Yeah great, I can fix simple shit, whoopee. Man, I need to Tinker. It's killing me. I've gotten so desperate that I've taken up purposely making things over and over again just so I can spend some time using my power to figure out how they are going to fail!"

"Hmm, right. Well I'm not going to lug all your paper up here, we don't have the room for starters, but most of it was scanned into the computer right? Maybe I can copy it out?"

"We'll need some serious storage for that, and I can't build any without my notes!"

"How about just buying some once we get our money out?"

"That might work it'll take time since it's mainly only aid relief getting through at the moment, but it's an option. A better one is for me to spend a few hours down there and bring the computer back, if I can figure out a way to disconnect it, and rig up a power source big enough to run it."

#

"You know, I really like it in here," said Uber. "It's quiet and having an underwater secret lair is so 'secret agent' it makes me want to kidnap a white cat or something."

Leet looked disgusted.

"Aside from the fact there are like a million tons of water and shit just waiting to crush us, cats stink."

"Come on!" protested Leet. "You have to admit, nobody is going to find us down here."

"Yep, they will never find out corpses. All it will take is one small flicker and a big bubble of air is the last anybody will see of us."

"Maybe we can line the force field with something?"

"Our internal organs?"

"No, I mean concrete or something. Build a dome inside so that even if it does fail we won't die."

"Dude, I am really super uncomfortable with this plan. We are not James Pond or any other water breathing thing, and there are a thousand other things that can kill us down here. The air purifier could start making gas instead of air, or the teleporter could stop, trapping us in here to starve to death!"

"Yeah, yeah," said Uber, brushing away Leets concerns. "It's still a kickass bolthole."

#

"Uber, look at this!," yelled Leet excitedly.

Uber rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and wearily climbed out of his bed to wander over to where his friend was smashing away at a keyboard at their newly recovered computer. On the screens, a pattern of lines and bars scrolled past almost too fast Uber to follow, with equations and symbols flashing up only to disappear seconds later.

"Did you break it?" he asked, reaching into the fridge for a juice.

"What? No, Look!"

Uber cracked the bottle, still amazed how much food and drink they had recovered from the bottom of the lake.

"I have no idea what I am looking at," he admitted after a few seconds.

Leet snorted disgustedly.

"I was using the scanner on a patient when Panacea come in and started healing him," he explained. "I got a recording of her power working. The program is breaking it up, working out what forces were in use."

"So?"

"So, I followed her around a bit and managed to get a half dozen or more recordings of her fixing different things. Lots of life threatening things, but also a shit load of less dangerous ones, like broken bones and stuff."

"Cool, so can you work out how she does what she does? Some brainiac or research group will pay good money for that."

"Probably, but you're not thinking, lug-nut. Remember what I said when I first built the scanner and you were still writing your program to convert it to Dragon's notation?"

"Yeah, you said with this showing how another Tinker's device, you could make something like it - wait, are you saying you could make something that does what Panacea does?"

Leet was smiling.

"Not exactly, but yeah, I reckon I can build a device to heal things that are fairly generic, like broken bones and, if I have enough recordings, I might be able to work out the similarities and come up with a general healing sort of device."

"That is fricking awesome!"

"Yep, it is."

"We are going to be so rich!"

"And think of the games we can tribute if we can make health recovery spots for contestants to use."

#

"Man, this isn't going to like grow an extra arm on me or anything is it?"

"Doubtful, but that would be pretty cool if it did," said Uber.

"Ignore him and just stay still," commanded Leet as he made adjustments to the machine. "Okay, ready?"

Barry was a minion they had employed a few times in the past. He had survived Leviathan's attack only to break his leg a much more mundane accident. Leet recognised him at the hospital and convinced him to be a guinea pig for them

Before their patient could answer, Leet switched the machine on. A bright yellow light, almost too bright to look at flooded out of the box suspended above the table and began sweeping over the patient.

"It's just scanning you to record your injuries," explained Leet.

The light switched off and the machine went silent for a moment as the system began analysing the data from its scan. Seconds ticked by agonisingly slow.

"Is it working?"

"Don't move," warned Leet. "It takes a bit of time."

"Getting bored," declared Uber, earning a glare from Leet.

The box suddenly started moving, travelling down until it was directly above the injured leg.

"Here we go," said Leet excitedly.

There was another pause as the computer thought about the next step, then a green light, not quite as bright as the previous yellow one but still bright enough to make a person looking directly at it squint, shone down, bathing the leg in an eerie radiance.

"It's like an alien abduction," said Uber, earning another glare from Leet.

"I can feel it doing something," said the patient. "It's getting hot."

"Don't move," repeated Leet, carefully watching the monitor.

"Starting to burn a bit," said the patient, sounding a little panicky.

"Just tough it out," said Leet.

"Yeah, don't be a pussy," said Uber.

"Screw you."

The green light suddenly switched off and the computer sat silent.

"Is it done?"

"Not yet."

The white light returned, just as bright as before, causing them all to squint again.

"You need a warning sign or something," said Uber, putting a hand in front of his face. "And goggles, definitely goggles."

"The whole thing should be enclosed," said Leet. "Mind you, it would look a bit too much like a coffin then."

After once again scanning the patient, the machine returned to hover above the leg and do more calculations, then an orange light sprang forth.

"Now that's a really weird feeling," said the patient. "Like ants crawling inside my skin."

"Yummy," laughed Uber.

This time the light moved along the leg very slowly, taking a few minutes to run all the way from toes to hip and back again.

When it switched off this time, it returned to the head of the bed where it had started from and then shut down.

"All done," said Leet. "Get up and give it a try."

Uber helped the patient climb off the table then stood back as he slowly put his weight back on his previously broken leg.

"Holy shit, it worked," he said. "There is no pain at all."

Leet smiled proudly and Uber cheered, leaping up to punch his fist in the air and then giving high-fives all round.

"Now we just have to convince the Protectorate," said Leet.

#

Dragon ran over the program again, amazed at the way it dissected the readings it took from the scanner and applied formulas and algorithms to various portions. In truth, despite her incredible computing power, she had no idea how it worked. The fuzzy logic of the system defied understanding; at least by her.

The results though; there was no misinterpreting them.

The machine healed people of many injuries. It was not usable for infections or more complicated things like diseases, but for trauma, cuts, breaks, and almost every other injury caused by brute force, it was a miracle.

Actually, the real miracle was that it could be mass-produced.

Only the programming had to be copied, Tinker written as it was. Most everything else was made out of stock parts, with only a few components needing to be customer made - but even those were not advanced Tinker tech, just custom devices with specific, define characteristics all spelled out in the design. Everything down to the metallurgy and chemical process needed to manufacture every part of the machine was excruciatingly documented.

The machine was incredibly compact, being just under three metres long, two high and one and half wide, which made it comparable to MRI scanners that could produce similar scans but not heal at all.

It was a revolution, and not just for the medical industry.

Dragon was far more adept at analysing the physical machine itself, especially as the plans were provided in the design methodology and symbolism she herself had created. While to the rest of the world it might appear to be breakthrough in non-tinker technology, she had a different interpretation. Certain aspects of the design did not fit quite right with other parts. There was a subtle difference, a mismatch in technologies that pointed to something much more profound.

It started life as a Tinker device and had somehow been rebuilt using 'mundane' technology.

While there were many other examples of people doing similar things, her own containment foam being one such example, nobody had ever converted something as complex as this healing device. As such, the potential it represented was enormous.

If even only a small fraction of Tinker technology of this level could be mass produced, the whole world's technology level would be uplifted.

Unfortunately, the comprehensiveness of the plans was not enough, or actually, it was too much. Following all of the instructions, investing the time, money and effort to manufacture it exactly as detailed, was possibly too much for any company or even government to handle without years of work. It would take millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to build a factory capable of producing 'Docs'. The project itself was daunting.

It wasn't too big for Dragon.

It took only hours to develop plans for converting one of her existing manufacturing lines. While her battlesuits were important, the potential benefit for this technology, if it did indeed work as promised, was greater.

Within a few weeks the first of the devices would rollout and be shipped to the hospital nearest the factory that made it. One every two days would follow, destined for other hospitals that could make the best use of them. Brockton Bay was high on the list.

Meanwhile, Dragon hoped her enthusiastic endorsement would make it easier for her to eventually contact the secretive Tinkers behind this breakthrough. While their initial actions appeared fairly altruistic with only minimal royalties been asked for every machine and a small surcharge for every patient, she really hoped they did not turn their skill to making something that could be devastating to the planet, like cheap super weapons.

#

"So now can we do a laser gun?" asked Uber? "A big one, yeah?"

"If you can get a hold of one, sure," said Leet. "Once I've finished with Bakuda's freeze bomb that is."

"Sweet!"

# # # # #

With access to their system, they successfully build the "Doc" – mechanical healer capable of utilising the same healing power as Panacea (to a degree). This comes 'just in time' as Panacea is sent to the bird cage after her encounter with the Slaughterhouse nine. Lodging their patent with the PRT, Dragon immediately contacts them to arrange usage.

Uber convinces Dragon to work with them.

They of course abused their 'partnership' with Dragon in order to gain access to information they should not have, and discover the PRT (and Dragon) have already thoroughly analysed both their powers. With new insight about themselves (like how Leet's shard is trying to kill him), they embark on a new venture that will destroy the world's economy and make everybody play video games.

Utilising the same knowledge gained while building the Doc, but in an entirely different way, they build a mass-producible machine that is a cross between a video game machine (arcade cabinet), Startrek Replicator, and teleporter – the ARCADE.

It can make ANYTHING for anybody, so long as they 'earn' it by playing video games (and leaving meaningful reviews). Nobody will actually have to work to put food on the table anymore, as the machines can provide unlimited goods. Things that are too big to appear inside the collection slot of the cabinet, instead appear a distance away, teleported there by the Arcade a bit at a time as it is build.

Increasing skill in a game means increased rewards, but the longer you play, the more you can get (up to five hours a day maximum, so that it is fairer to people who do not have time to play non-stop).

Writing a game or a review that becomes popular earns more 'credits' in the machine.

The machines are also all linked, providing communications and internet access via quantum tunnelling based communications.

They are also able to atomise any waste put back into them.

Best of all, the machines can build themselves, and do so for free.

The machines take the world by storm, completely wrecking economies and turning everybody into game junkies.

After Scion attacks, and with no more Endbringer attacks, society finds it does not need to rebuild in the image it once was.

Anybody that cannot find something that they want to do, don't have to do anything, but most people find 'work' in ways they enjoy.

Cooperatives combine their scoring to gain access to things like houses, high rise apartments, trains, etc.

With so much free time, sports and other recreation pursuits flourish. Culture and leisure make a huge return to Earth-Beta.

Playing games is the only real 'work' anybody does anymore.

Mission accomplished.