Justin looked around his workshop with a warm glow, it was the kind of satisfaction you only got by building something with your own cold, robotic hands.

Granted, things were still a bit basic in places, and a lot of a mess all over, but it was coming together nicely.

By the time he’d finished his 48 hours on the super-cluster, Justin had honestly been starting to go a bit stir-crazy. All work and no play, he thought happily. But now he could get his hands dirty, and actually start making things.

He was currently focused on Trundler, a medium sized ‘drone’ with oversized all-terrain wheels and a high-def camera. It was his main, and currently, only ‘eye’ in the workshop, and had originally come with moderate lab-appropriate wheels, until Justin had replaced them after the second time it had tipped itself over while crossing loose cabling.

He’d finally gotten the CVD chamber up and running and could now produce a decent supply of carbon nanotubes, or he could once he finalised his research into catalysts and found a better way to overcome the chemical adhesion issues he’d been experiencing.

He had five research stations on the go, mostly running density and resilience tests on a batch of semi-crystalline polymers, but the chemical adhesion was definitely next.

Of course he could have looked up the results of previous in or out of game studies, and had in fact contacted a number of different scientists out of Caltech and MIT to pick their brains. It had been a good way to raise his Science and Social skills while in the super-cluster.

Since then he’d found running his own experiments allowed for much better skill growth, as well as keeping the possibility open for fortuitous accidents. So far he’d only had the boring type of accident that required a boring amount of clean-up, but he’d gotten a lot better at controlling the mechanical arms around the lab, and besides, IRA was now in charge of a small maintenance drone for clean-up and repairs, so future spills were his problem.

His pride and joy was front and centre, and wasn’t ‘technically’ complete, but it was on its way! It was a multistage fabricator, a hodge-podge of modular auto-tools, arc furnaces, casting basins, molds, weavers, and catalyst chambers. It was basically a workshop within a workshop; and once complete, he hoped it would allow him to produce finished products in a fraction of the time. At least it would once he solved the heat and power issues anyway.

ERA had her own smaller computer system in the server room with Justin’s cluster, and was currently working on updating and expanding their supers database. Justin had run into a slight issue early on when he discovered that there was no real way to tell players from NPCs, and it was sometimes even difficult to tell heroes from villains unless they were actively involved in a bank robbery, or in foiling one. From what he could tell, villains seemed to spend as much time attacking other villains as they did scheming against heroes or stealing diamonds for their world-domination rays.

At the minute, he’d earmarked half-a-dozen potential candidates he was pretty sure were both heroes and players, and was tracking them personally. ERA was responsible for finding and cataloging everything else she could dig up on other supers for later review.

He’d also decided that the team were going to need a home base since Justin was loathe to invite strangers into his workshop. He couldn’t afford to purchase another building, and it was even possible they’d end up needing multiple locations around the city. So eventually he’d used an alternate ID to sign a 3 month rental on a former basement bar called the Underground. While researching local history to boost his History and Culture skills, he’d stumbled across a number of tales from Detroit's Canadian rum smuggling past, the most interesting of which were the tales of underground networks of smuggler’s tunnels. The Underground had three.

All in all, things were going very well. With a smile, Justin opened up his character sheet.

Codename Artisan Designation Ketican Interstellar Probe VDCI Also Known As Kip Weyland Species Artificial Intelligence Archetype Inventor Origin Synthetic Wealth $ 157,450 Level 2 [00%] +1 CP Integrity 240 / 240 Recovery Rate 0.22 per minute Strength - Intelligence 60 Agility - Acuity 40 Fortitude - Willpower 22 Stamina - Focus 130 / 130 Recovery Rate - Recovery Rate 0.22 per second Powers Talents Complications - Machine Traits Amorphous - Inventor Outsider - - Partial Amnesia Skill Rank Skill Rank Awareness Beginner 5 [64%] [Engineering] Novice 1 Meditation Beginner 1 [08%] - Design Novice 1 [23%] Persuasion Beginner 2 [21%] - Crafting Novice 1 [18%] Stealth Beginner 1 [12%] - Maintenance Novice 1 [03%] Subterfuge Beginner 3 [56%] - Repair Novice 1 [04%] Visualisation Beginner 1 [10%] [Science] Novice 1 [Coder] Novice 2 - Biology Novice 1 [35%] - Coding Novice 1 [32%] - Chemistry Novice 1 [31%] - Decipher Novice 1 [30%] - Materials Novice 1 [35%] - Encryption Beginner 5 [95%] - Mathematics Novice 1 [13%] - Hacking Beginner 6 [87%] - Physics Novice 1 [42%] You have chosen to minimise five Skill Groups. Please see individual Skill Group for more information. [Behaviour - 4 skills] Novice 1 [Inquiry - 4 skills] Novice 2 [Culture - 4 skills] Beginner 8 [World Affairs - 4 skills] Novice 2 [Enterprise - 4 skills] Beginner 10

While working on his skills, Justin had decided to investigate the details a little more. Imagitech had released a few ‘teasers’ where they discussed the adaptive skill system, and a few people had managed to grind individual skills out of the Novice tier, all of which meant that information was starting to trickle in on the forums. Justin wasn’t a big fan of metagaming, but he figured he needed every advantage he could wring out of the system if he was going to make his plans to undermine the Heroes League work.

There were apparently five or maybe six skill tiers, each costing five times more experience per level than the last. This meant that it cost only 1,000 xp to level up from Beginner, 5,000 xp for Novice, and 25,000 xp for Expert. After Expert it was theorised that there were at least Master and Legendary levels, but beyond that little was known.

Mental skills at least could be vaguely associated with an educational level. Beginner, Novice, and Expert were equivalent to an Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master’s degree. It was assumed that Doctorate level was beyond that, probably at Master rank. Physical skills were a little harder to tie into real-world analogues, though a number of people were suggesting a comparison to Amateur, Collegiate, State, and Olympic levels of training.

Each skill also had an associated attribute, their score representing the character’s natural talent. The higher the attribute, the more chance skill tests would succeed, more xp would be given, and the faster the skill would advance.

After seeing the development speed of his Intelligence skills, Justin had been a little bummed over ‘wasting’ points on the Inventor Talent. Yes it had saved him some time, but that was one of his most prolific resources, and surely he would have had even more of it if he’d put those 10 points into Acuity.

While taking a more indepth look at his skills, though, he’d noticed something strange. His Science and Engineering skills all listed his Intelligence as being 5 points higher than it actually was. In the end he’d decided that the skill focused talents like Inventor must represent not just past experience, but also advanced potential in the given skills. He was very happy with receiving a +5 bonus, and was even happier when he raised his Intelligence to 60 and it went up to +6. A 10% boost was even better than a flat bonus, not only was it going to give him more points, but it also meant that it gave him a greater benefit than it would other Inventors with their piddling 20-30 Intelligence. Everything was coming up KIP!

His self-satisfied ruminations were interrupted by Jason buzzing to make a delivery.

ERA had stumbled across the identity of the young hero relatively early on in her investigations, he was really just too casual, or maybe naive, in maintaining his secret identity. It was his fan-service that had finally made the definite connection, as he’d spent quite a bit of time responding to fans on Facebook, Twitter, and the Hero forums, in between posting on his personal feeds at an impossibly fast rate.

Justin had done what he could to muddy the waters a little, changing post timings, establishing alternate candidates for Shift’s identity, creating a few false alibis, and spreading conspiracy theories on the hero-watch forums.

He would really like to have the young speedster on the team, there weren’t many around who could match his speed after all. But he wasn’t yet sure whether it would be worth the problems the youngster would bring with him. In some ways that described most of his potential candidates though, and could probably be applied to himself just as easily. Maybe the solid, issue-free types had already teamed up? Maybe they’d high-tailed it out of Detroit? Maybe they just didn’t play geeky games?

In the end he’d decided to keep Jason Mach close and build a bond by giving him some paying work that also let him practice his skills.