He'd spent nearly an hour looking over Janus' suggestions and thought he'd finally reached a decision. Maybe. It was tempting to ask to see the full power list, to trawl through it looking for the perfect choices, but there were two thoughts holding him back.

Firstly, he was concerned about how long he had been away from the game, and how long this decision had already taken. Anything could be happening with his lab or the team. Was an NPC Artisan currently sat in his server messing with his experiments? Had the team managed to extract useful info from the Jackals, and were even now gearing up to attack their stronghold without him?

He supposed he could put the decision off and spend the points later, but that seemed a little like sitting on a winning lottery ticket.

Secondly, that way lay temptation, and he'd promised himself that he'd at least try to go for the rational ascetic choices. He just knew that if he looked too deeply he would find some op combination and the next thing you knew Artisan would be summoning indestructible, fire-breathing lizards. He paused as he realised he'd just described a dragon, was there a power that would let him summon dragons?

Focus! he told himself.

He would umm and ah, and tell himself he was only choosing things because they 'sounded interesting' or 'presented an interesting challenge', but he knew it would actually be because he couldn't resist the draw of power and optimisation.

Justin sighed. It was that draw that had led him to playing an OP AI inventor, why he had these points to spend now, and why he was seriously considering going with the most versatile, powerful option already in front of him.

He'd already spent some of his points, choosing an augmentation power that would let him spend Focus to temporarily boost his mental speed.

Over-Clocking II

Type: Mental Augmentation, Limited (Self, Acuity, Dilation)

Description: Boosts the time-dilation effects of the character's Acuity by 200%.

Details: Modified dilation x12, 8 focus per second.

Notes: Short boosts to dilation have a max threshold equal to three times the user's sustained threshold.

This is for the user's safety. Your current sustained dilation threshold is x6 normal.

He'd noticed that his current level of dilation, while plenty in his everyday life, didn't give him much of an advantage in combat, especially compared to someone like Shift whose powers allowed him to not only think and react more quickly, but also seemed to ignore such limiting factors as signal transmission rates, inertia, and air-resistance, all things that Justin still had to cope with. Giving himself more time wouldn't necessarily help with that, but having a little more time to observe the field and consider the right moves, might make all the difference.

He spent a minute considering the science of Shift's speed and how he could match it. Were the speedster's dendrites different to those of a normal person, perhaps a different, more conductive material? Or did his power warp time in some way, allowing him to seem to move quickly? While that would alleviate a lot of the problems, it wouldn't explain the transfer of inertia. Was his power actually a combination of multiple smaller powers?

He wondered if Janus would answer questions on it while he had him here? Janus quietly cleared his throat.

Right, focus, he thought, getting back to the powers.

He looked again at the code duplication option, but only to make sure there wasn't something he'd missed. It would be nice to be able to get more things done, but he was pretty sure that duplicating himself wasn't the way. Most of his problems came from not having enough time to focus on all the things he wanted to get done, but it was still important that it was him doing it.

Duplication like Divisions would only give him more hands, a problem he didn't have thanks to his control of drones. The more advanced versions would need to create a full NPC copy unless they were willing to get into some time/memory manipulation that would just be ridiculous. An NPC copy would just mean someone else was doing something rather than him doing it himself, which kind of defeated the purpose.

He was ok with getting help from Era and Ira, but they were clearly helpers, completing the varied menial or time-consuming jobs he didn't want to focus on. Another him would mean another chef in the kitchen, another general on the field. Was it possible for a duplicate to get tired of their prime and off them? That would be a particularly ignominious way to die. Et tu, me?

There were a couple of other tech-based powers he was considering, but in the end they were just hard-coded facets of other, more versatile powers. It was something he'd really only noticed after listening to his teammates talk about their own powers earlier.

There really seemed to be a hard separation between abilities that gave a distinct effect, like Division's duplication and augmentation, Revenant's enhanced strength and toughness, Shift's speed and regeneration. And powers like North Wind's control of air and cold, Shade's manipulation of shadow and stone, versatile powers that were more limited by the player's skills and imagination than some formula written into the power's description.

Justin was starting to think of it as the difference between being given power armour, and being given the tools needed to build your own. Which pretty much made his decision for him as to which kind he was going to go for.

The only real decision then was what he wanted dominion over. He could go for something ubiquitous and powerful like electricity, magnetism, gravity, or light, but they all felt too simple and direct. Impressive, but having the kind of impact that he hoped to eventually be able to replicate with his crafting.

He could choose something more limited, more focused. But the only one option that appealed to him there was Technopathy, and it had a similar problem as the others. Basically it was a subset of electricity and magnetism, and it would only really allow him to do things he could already do thanks to being an AI, or at least hoped he would be able to eventually.

It would certainly make things simpler, allowing him to construct devices and mess with systems more quickly and easily than he could at the minute, without even having to understand what he was really doing or how he was doing it, but that didn't really appeal to Justin

He stopped as those thoughts percolated with a memory. Could a similar power explain the issues he'd been having with the government systems? It would certainly explain how the encryption seemed so simple one minute and yet tied into knots the next, how the protections were both beyond his ability to break and yet, were so incredibly inefficient in design.

It would also answer some of his questions about Chompers, a piece of powerful, compact code well beyond Justin's current abilities, which also happened to be so small and dumb as to be nigh useless against actual system intrusion. It was the kind of unfocused, destructive program that no rational coder would leave lying around unsupervised in their system. It was the coding equivalent of keeping a bucket of fire in your log cabin as a security measure. Exactly the kind of thing an inexperienced coder might create if given the power to just wish code into existance.

Powerful but lacking knowledge was a good description of whoever the state had looking after their systems. Which meant that if they ever bothered to learn, they could be incredibly dangerous to Justin. He really hoped they were on the heroes' side, but if so, what then were the chances they didn't work for the Heroes League?

Janus coughed again gently, as he'd seemed to do every few minutes while Justin dithered over making his final choice. And smiled as Justin blew him a mental raspberry.

His wandering thoughts had been good for something, they'd made his decision for him on another of the powers.

Purchase New Power?

Hardened Code III

Type: Mental Shielding

Limitations: None

Details: Willpower provides two and a half times the usual Mental Resiliance.

Cost: 9 cp

Confirm Yes / No

Notes: Mental Resiliance is tested against attempts to mentally attack, control, or manipulate you.

He'd have to remember to mention the power to Revenant at the next OOC meeting. He knew the undead warrior was vulnerable to magical control, so a little mental fortification might be in order for him too.

Getting back to his crux of his dilemma, Justin finally admitted to himself that the only reason he hadn't already picked the best power in front of him was optimisers guilt. He'd know it would happen, had tried to limit himself and his options, but he was fairly sure that Janus was actually the devil in disguise, put here to tempt him from the true path.

He'd already made his decision. He was powerless against his addiction, and since no higher power seemed ready to step in and save him from Janus' evil, enticing grasp.

He threw Janus a mock-glare, but the insidious purveyor of digital narcotics just threw him a blissfully innocent smile.

Sighing at his own weakness, Justin reached out and selected Quantum Field Manipulation.