Justin logged in the following morning full of purpose, waiting impatiently for his allotted time on the 30k-core server. It was like transferring from a golf cart to a super-car, like being injected with a syringe full of caffeine, ERA and IRA pulsed around him in pleasure.

The first thing Justin did was check the list of Manticore's associates for a possible target, and paused as an accountant caught his eye. According to emails exchanged, the accountant had cleaned up a lot of Leo's money for him. They talked in code obviously, but their meaning was clear. Tracking down the accountants office computer wasn't too difficult, but he had some fairly hefty protections running, as a dirty accountant who worked with scary people's money really should.

Justin had once heard it said that the weakest point in a system was sitting behind the desk, so he wrapped up a logging packet in the best disguise code he knew, and attached the innocuous seeming attachment to a message from Dr Leonard Pteron, requesting the accountant's help with a small predicament.

Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Coding - Novice Level 1 [24%].

+7 xp to skill group Coder - Novice Level 1 [25%]Successful Skill Use +12 xp to Subterfuge - Beginner Level 1 [57%].

He received a reply from Ainsley Barrows CPA, offering to meet Leo to discuss his needs, Justin put him off with a reference to 'laying low' and hoped Ainsley had opened the attachment.

While waiting to see if his logger would bear fruit, he kept himself busy. He spent some time n the recesses of the dark net investigating additional hacking methods. After which he set about creating a false alias for himself. It didn't take long to find an SSN that had fallen through the cracks, and with the creation of a few false records and a request for a name change, Kip Weyland was born.

Successful Skill Use +16 xp to Hacking - Beginner Level 7 [47%].

+8 xp to skill group Coder - Novice Level 1 [27%]Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Subterfuge - Beginner Level 2 [24%].

He spent some time investigated the cost of setting up a super-cluster, and found that to get a top-of-the-line cluster cost about what he expected. There were a number of cheaper options though, they wouldn't be as good, but they'd be good enough, and he could order one of them now and hopefully have it all up and running by the time he was ready to relocate.

He decided that there was really no guarantee he'd be able to get more money any time soon, and if he didn't get things moving on a new home, he could end up back in the data server, wasting time and hating life. That thought decided him.

After a little more research he got in touch with an industrial computer supplier and negotiated over VOIP with a guy named Brant. In the end he accepted a quote for a $350,000 cluster delivered in two days time with on-site set-up. It would have a decent run speed, but the real advantage was that it could be easily expanded.

He had the feeling Brant gouged him on the price a little. He wanted to blame the Outsider penalty, but it was probably a combination of that, his broken English, and his lack of experience bargaining. Maybe he should have added a procurement specialist to his team list? Anyway, the guy seemed a lot more reasonable when he found out Justin knew exactly what he wanted, and Justin was ok with paying a premium, as long as the guy delivered.

He forwarded the money, and promised a delivery address by tomorrow.

New Skill Discovered! Negotiation has been added to known skills.

Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Negotiation - Beginner Level 1 [14%].

Now he had a system ordered, Justin relaxed a little, if nothing else he could have it delivered out to a storage unit or rented office space. He ticked off 'New System' from his mental check-list, and put an in-progress next to 'More Monies!'.

He tried to decide what to work on next. During his night of planning, he'd given a lot of thought on how to make the best use of his advantages. He had a high intelligence, access to a world's worth of information (even if it was a little out of date), and a brain fast enough to quadruple the time he had to spend learning.

Once he had access to an actual workshop, he would probably devote nearly all his time to research, invention and heroing. But for now, he'd decided he had two things to do, and the first was to boost his attributes, and thus his advantage, even more.

Every skill he ranked-up gave him another attribute point, with later ranks taking progressivelly more xp to level, so all he had to do was discover as many knowledge and mental skills as he could, and then blitz them. He figured he had the equivalent of a week in the super-cluster, and that was a full week since he didn't need to sleep.

He knew he'd have some trouble working on social skills, and he would have to use translation packets to make sense of a lot of the materials, which wouldn't help in learning English, but it was either cheat or spend half the time puzzling over unknown words. He knew he'd need to get better at English eventually, but compared to other skills, the language seemed to be taking forever to progress. He figured it was the Outsider complication making sure he suffered.

The second thing he had to do, was to begin looking for other heroes. The way he'd decided to do that was to start a database. He set ERA to downloading every bit of footage, every news report, and every fan meeting she could find on local heroes, he signed her up to a number of hero-watch twitter accounts, and even tried hacking into the city's cctv network, but the protections were too advanced for him to get past.

Eight hours of server time (and a day and a half later), Justin received some good news from the logger on the accountant's computer. It had managed to get passwords to a few of Ainsley's accounts and a number of digital records on his operation. Apparently Mr Barrows cooked the books for a number of gangs, a few mobsters, and even one or two villains other than Leo. Just the fraction of ill-gotten wealth he was currently laundering through salons, honest-to-god laundrettes, mom and pop stores, and strip clubs was mind-blowing, and the records had just enough information to hint at a hell of a lot more.

New Skill Discovered! Economics has been added to known skills.

Successful Skill Use +8 xp to Economics - Beginner Level 1 [08%].

He considered leaving the logger where it was, hoping for more information, but that was the mistake most gamblers made, they staying at the table too long.

Justin spent the next hour carefully siphoning a little here, a little there, trying to make the withdrawals match up with previous fabrications. He then anonymously forwarded the client lists and accounts to the feds. Hopefully anyone who found the money missing would think that Ainsley had helped himself when he felt the heat coming down.

Current Wealth $2,275,000

The funds had finally made their way into Justin's 'safe' account. Was it wrong that he felt more than a little exhilarated? He'd knew he'd feel even better once he knew he'd gotten away with it, but it still felt like a successful heist. Did it always feel like this? For just a few seconds, Justin honestly considered going villain, or at least mercenary, for a while. The game apparently had some really good temptation and redemption quest lines, there to let players dip their toes in the other side's pool. But no, despite his apparently flexible moral character, Justin really wanted to be a hero.

He spent a few minutes wallowing in a moral crises, was he justifying greed and theft, all for the greater good? Did that make him as bad as the idiots in the Heroes League? In the end, he decided that things weren't just black and white, he could still be a hero while stepping over a few lines, most vigilantism was technically illegal after all, and most importantly, he was playing a game and he wanted to have fun.

New Skill Discovered! Philosophy has been added to known skills.

Successful Skill Use +4 xp to Philosophy - Beginner Level 1 [04%].

It looked like his plan to discover more mental skills was going better than expected. Guess I'll be reading up on Nietzsche's übermensch later on.

With a serious amount of money now in the bank, Justin went on a spending spree. He purchased a former auto-factory for just under a million, and doubled his server order with Brant, who grumbled about the additional cluster taking another few days. Justin agreed magnanimously.

Next he spent around $500k on various workshop and laboratory equipment, $50k on robotic arms and drones, and another $50k on a cornucopia of different metals, circuits, wires, and materials.

Deciding it was probably time to get back to work, Justin paused to consider that spending the money had been even more fun than stealing it.