“What’s your plan?” Mr. Hill asked, crossing his arms and looking down at me.

“Let me show you something.” I burned the Seven of Diamonds, and a stone construct rose from the ground. It was pretty simple in design, basically stone shoulders and arms like a club-arm puppet, atop a stone pillar with a big hollow in its middle with a thin stone sheet sitting in it.

“This is a Punching Dummy design. Powers up with magic. It’s not designed to test technique, it’s designed to force you to improve your punching speed. Go stand in front of it, and set in a boxing stance just close enough so you can reach that board in its chest.”

Interested now, he did so. As he stepped in closer, the Dummy animated, mimicking the roll of his shoulders, and the way his arms were set up. As he slowly delivered a punch to toss the slate, the Dummy did the same back to him, poking him in the chest.

“Now, normally the best way to do this is with robotics, because you’ve seen how fast a robot can move and hit before, but this is fine. Don’t Root, the slate breaks easy. Draw your fist back, and throw a punch.”

“Huh.” He paused, watching the dummy mirror his movements, and then jabbed out.

The Dummy’s arm snapped forwards much faster than his, slamming into him like a piston and driving him back out of range before his own blow could land.

“Hoo...” he trailed off thoughtfully, staring at it, totally unhurt by a blow which would have crushed a normal man’s chest. “It hits faster than I do...”

“It’s actually using some of the earthpower you draw to yourself. It’s not tougher than you. It’s not stronger than you. It’s just stone and bearings and some metal.

“But it’s not human, and it doesn’t have human limits on how fast it can move.” I pointed at it. “Heavy Hand is for big hits. Hercules hits harder than you do because he can break the speed of sound with a punch. He can push his muscles and tendons to divine levels of speed because they are strong enough to take it without ripping or tearing.

“You’re full of the power of earth and stone, and maybe steel. You should have the same kind of piston-smashing power when you trigger it. Lightning along the nerves, pressure builds and releases instantly, and you strike.” I gestured at the Dummy. “There’s way less energy moving this thing than you have. It’s literally a bunch of rock and metal moving with the same exact energy you have inside you.

“Now, beat it to the punch. Don’t worry, it’ll mend itself when it starts breaking its blunt limbs on you.”

Slowly, he grinned. “This, this is useful.” He looked at me ruefully. “This is what it’s like working for a Schmot Person, huh?”

“I’m afraid so. If I’m going to borrow your name and protection, I have to give something back, right?”

He shook his head and turned back to the Dummy, raising his fist, and it did the same in return. He punched out, as fast as he could, and it hit back, striking first and driving him back a step.

“Ya know, cooking for me was probably enough,” he tossed out to me.

“Naw. Cooking just makes you my slave. I want a better slave,” I responded drily.

He guffawed and got back into place. With the patience and focus of the earth, he started the long process of learning what would one day be renowned as his Piston Punches...

=========

The Present...

The chop-shop/custom car garage was fenced in with barbed wire, no visible holes in it, and some pricey cars, often with custom paint jobs, visible parked off to the sides. The casinos weren’t that far away, and likely the garage both serviced the spenders there and preyed on them as opportunity presented.

All in good fun. That’s what insurance was for, right?

It was after midnight, but the place was still hopping, probably too hot to really work on in the middle of the day. At night, the street racers and muscle cars came out, and that’s when the garage really worked. There were people moving around in the well-lit yard, and the gates were open for cars to pull in and out of as needed.

They probably did set-up, resupply, and took orders during the day, and worked on getting stuff done in the evening when it was cooler. If some foreign-made car happened to wheel inside the sliding gate at the back of the lot and into the warehouse back there real quick and sneaky-like, it was all a part of the business day.

I was promptly judged positively by my tan-proof pale skin, while the redhead at the counter looked way up at Mr. Hill, swallowed, and positively ID’d him by the previous phone call.

The Mick came up to meet us himself. He was an average-sized fellow with the iron forearms of a mechanic, hard eyes, a disarming white smile that probably got him laid a lot, and the wavy black hair of the southern Irish and probably Italian in the mix. “Mr. Hill! Glad to see The Mountain made it back!” he called out, smile as energetic as his hand, which Mr. Hill took firmly.

“You did good work with the truck last time, had no problems with it while I was here, Mick,” Mr. Hill rumbled.

“I heard you were using a juiced-up rig like it back on the Coast,” he waved it off, clearly pleased at the compliment. “But you like using a van for the mundane stuff?”

“Yeah, I ride around in a boosted hopper with some tech in it to get around back there,” Mr. Hill admitted, following The Mick’s wave into the back room. “But for jobs, yeah, a van works best, the more inconspicuous the better.”

“Landscaping, right?” He was impressing me with his research. I gathered he knew Mr. Hill’s mechanic, and was showing he had connections.

“Yeah. Dunno if Petrov said anything, but your tips came in handy. He’s definitely been doing better in the street crawls recently. Thanks for giving the kid some help.”

The Mick waved it away, but if anything got even prouder. “Easy stuff, nothing to speak of.” His eyes slid over to me, lit up, and then cooled down after a glance at The Mountain. “Who’s this?” he asked straight, noting the Mask cautiously and remembering we were from The Coast.

“The Dealer. Plays at cards, can read your mind, and cooks for me. Professional. Watch your hands and your words around her,” Mr. Hill said blandly. “And tell your boys.” He reached out, picked up a big wrench there, and held it out.

I flicked up a card, made sure he could see it, and flicked it.

It flashed out and buried itself in the concrete wall two-thirds of its length, making The Mick and two of the mechanics nearby ogling me jump. That hefty wrench fell apart in Mr. Hill’s grasp, the head hitting the ground with a heavy clank.

“Uh, right,” The Mick agreed, blue eyes kind of wide. Mr. Hill tossed me the handle as the head floated off the ground. I flicked up another card, put it between the two halves, and it burned away, sealing the pieces back together flawlessly.

I politely put it back where it had come from, twiddling the weighty steel through my fingers like a baton and setting it down silently, a display of strength and dexterity these men could appreciate. The mechanics chose to look everywhere, and if they were commenting about my figure, well, it was to be expected. I had a helluva figure, after all, even for my age. If they weren’t looking and dreaming, they weren’t attracted to women.

With the Mask on, my physical age was impossible to tell, and from there it was all posture and attitude. I carried off both pretty easily.

In the last month, my Assay had switched my age to fifteen. It seems I’d had a birthday, although what the spell was basing it on was a headscratcher. I suppose the emergence from the womb and severance from the mother was a significant magical event that could be tracked, but it wouldn’t be able to tell a late birth from a premature.

Whatever, I now knew my birthday by accident. Highschool freshman or sophomore age again. Ugh, what a horrible time that had been... Wait, that wasn’t even my life anymore. Hah, time to skip that whole show...

I surveyed the cars being worked on, noting the ones actually being serviced, and the ones being, um, repurposed. Subtle differences in how they were being attended to, the equipment around them, and the way the mechanics moved. It only amused me, and while I could stop it, I wasn’t going to. The best way to stop theft was to have a better way of life available for everyone, and Murica here didn’t have it.

If they wanted their capitalistic society to rule the world, they also had to fix their own problems and realize that pure capitalism didn’t work, save for the people on the top of the stack...

Robin Hood wasn’t a bad man, after all.

My eyes halted momentarily on a sleek black fire-trimmed street racer, a Mustang-variant muscle car with some real power behind it, parked off in its own clean slot and left strictly alone.

The Mick happened to glance back at just that time, not an accident, and caught me looking. “You like my ride?” he beamed, clearly looking to make an impact.

I glanced at Mr. Hill, who just flicked a finger in assent. “That’s a Driver’s Car. It draws the eye,” I replied after getting permission.

The way I said it gave both men pause. “Not sure what you mean?” The Mick hedged a bit. “Sure, it’s got a good paint job.”

“A Car is to a Driver as a Horse is to a Rider,” I said, flicking my wrist disdainfully at every other car in the shop. “Mere vehicles. That is A Car, and you are its Driver. You can make it do things no vehicle should be able to do. Drivers are rare, Master O’Bannon. Nurse the Spirit of your Car, Driver, and it will take you along great roads.”

Mr. Hill huffed as The Mick fairly beamed, although he seemed a bit confused at the implications. Well, I could explain in more detail, but that would take time, and it wasn’t what we were here for.

I could see Mr. Hill was considering that seriously as we were led towards an off-white van, carefully painted up to look more beaten up than it was, with SLABSIDE EXCAVATING scrolled professionally on the side.

“Don’t test the paint, but she should be good to go,” The Mick said, pointing at the words and flourishes around them. “Test the suspension, I beefed it up for ya.”

Mr. Hill put his hand on the front end and pressed down, aware a lot of people were watching. Effortlessly, he drove the front of the van down six entire inches, making the car guys looking on hiss under their breath. If physics meant anything, he’d just done something impossible. He had been pressing with far more pressure than he weighed, after all, and the metal around where he had leaned on it hadn’t even deformed.

“Looks good,” Mr. Hill ground out, letting the van come back up as easily as he’d pushed it down. The Mick fetched the keys off the wall and tossed them to him.

The handles for the doors were over-sized and reinforced to accommodate The Mountain’s big hands, but I was strong enough that it didn’t make a difference to me. The passenger seat was normal-sized, but the driver side was basically a harder oversized bucket that could accommodate his wide ass and shoulders, and even the steering wheel was further from the door, meaning The Mick had somehow widened the thing in just a few hours.

Yeah, definitely a Driver. They came up through Artificer/Gearsmith, working on vehicles and/or Constructs. They could work miracles with vehicles, and it only improved if they were Drivers. Learn to make the cars, learn to drive the cars. Do miracles with both.

Of course, they stood out more in an era with no super-science or high magic, but that just meant they got to stick more things into their Vehicles, in the end.

We’d see if someday he’d make it up to a mech of some kind. Or even if he’d need to. Drivers could do some crazy things to their vehicles, if their ambition and resources were enough. There was that whole Vision Quest thing they could get on the Road to Eternity and stuff...

That was for a later time. For now, it was just get in the van and go for a ride.