***Heather***

Heather couldn’t wipe the smile off her face if she wanted to. Somehow even the fact that they’d walked away with about a hundredth the amount she’d wanted couldn’t bring her down. She’d had a great time, near-death experiences notwithstanding.

She unlocked the front door and snuck into the living room, holding her shoes so they didn’t make too much noise.

Click.

The living room light clicked on, revealing her father, sitting on his favorite chair, facing the door.

It wiped the smile off her face.

“Your biggest miscalculation,” Karnos said, his hand drifting away from the lamp. “Was that I wouldn’t care who you were dating.”

“Little Perry Z from next door? Good kid, good pedigree, his parents are rich, and I get along well with his dad. His mom’s not a dealbreaker. A solid choice. I approve.”

“Dad-“

“Your second miscalculation, was that I am not responsible for your actions,” Her dad said, rising smoothly to his feet. “Doesn’t matter if it’s before or after I’ve made the deal. As long as you live in my house, I’m responsible for what. You. Do.”

“My money,” he said, holding out his hand as he approached.

Heart sinking, Heather handed Karnos her share of the bust, on a little plastic chit with the Nexus symbol on the center.

“This is just the start,” Karnos said, brandishing the money in front of her “You’re very lucky you picked a boy I can’t touch for this little escapade. But I can punish you.” Heather looked away as his gaze burned into her skin. “Look forward to it.”

“Go to bed,” Her dad said, heading back to his seat and collapsing down into it.

Heather ran back to her room and slammed the door, shame and rage warring with each other as she dove into her bed and screamed into her pillow.

***Perry***

Twelve. THOUSAND. DOLLARS!

Sure, it wouldn’t buy a secret lair or any of the truly fancy stuff, but it would propel his suit and his spell-frames to the next level.

Was it worth risking my life multiple times in one night? Probably not, but I’ve got the money and I’m still alive, so the point is moot.

Nexus gave out their cash rewards in little plastic ‘chits’ that looked something like a thick plastic keyfob. Couldn’t exactly verify an independent super’s identity so they had to use cash on hand, which came with its own problems, since it’s use couldn’t really be traced. There was a healthy trade of chits on the black market, but it wasn’t a major concern.

Let’s see… Perry began mentally listing off his wishlist.

CAD Program: $150

Cheap 3-D Printer: $2000

Cheap CNC machine: $3000

Better Areonite casting setup: $500 + labor

Raw materials for Mk 2: ~ $3000

One year bigger storage space: $1200

Spell ingredients: $2000

And just like that, I’ve only got a hundred and fifty bucks left. Maybe I can take everyone out to the arcade. Actually, I’m not sure if Brendon would wanna do that ever again, given the whole kidnapping thing.

Perry felt like moonwalking all the way to the bus stop, where Heather was standing with a vacant look, staring into the distance.

“Hey Heather, up top!” Perry said, grinning, hand raised for a high-five.

“Get lost, creep.” Heather said, barely glancing at him as her bus-friends tittered.

“O…kay.”

***Later***

“Did I do something wrong?” Perry asked, sitting across from Brendon, eating a slice of pizza that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment outside of a high school.

Brendon glanced over his shoulder at where Heather was hanging out with her mean-girl friends, masticating his huge sloppy joe with the placid look of a cow.

“Maybe your date didn’t go as well as you thought it did?” He asked, turning back to Perry with a shrug.

“Well, we survived it, so I thought that was reason enough to – wait, you knew about that?”

“Yeah man, everybody knew you guys went on a date last night.”

“Huh.” The gossip network was not to be underestimated.

Maybe she’s pissed about the small payoff?

If everything had gone to plan, they would’ve had nearly a million dollars in exotic equipment and weapons, but given that the truck had a prawn in it, without assistance, they would’ve gotten nothing, or dead.

Perry was perfectly happy with twelve grand, all things considered. It wasn’t like he could make that in a single night flipping burgers.

It’s probably not the money. The lack of a glamourous debut? Being face-to-face with Solaris and not having a name?

There were a lot of things that were minorly disappointing about last night, but none of them could justify being that grumpy, taken individually or altogether.

It burned pretty bad, being snubbed immediately after an epic night out like last night. But Perry wasn’t going to go over there to prod at her and make it worse. There were few things worse than being mocked by a gaggle of teenage girls, and death wasn’t one of them.

Nope, Perry was perfectly comfortable at the cool kid’s table.

“Brendon, you wanna hit the arcade again?”

Brendon paled and shook his head.

“Darn.”

The rest of the schoolday passed without incident, and Perry stepped off the bus without Heather even looking at him. He knew because he was staring. probably a bit too much.

A ball of frustration and anger roiled around in the bit of his stomach as he walked home, and he figured the best way to get rid of it was to bury himself in work.

Over the next week, Perry blew the entire twelve grand, setting up a somewhat respectable workshop in the bigger storage container, moving some of the equipment he already owned, combining them with the new acquisitions.

He also dealt with his level-up.

Congratulations! You are now a level 2 Garage Tinker.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Garage Tinker

Level 2

HP: 3

Body: 2

Stability: 2

Nerve: 4

Attunement: 7

Free Points:3

XP to next level: 1525

Current Quest: Do your homework

Reward: (5XP)

Perry pulled out his calculator to decide where he should put his stats.

Level ten of Attunement increases material effectiveness by 1.05^10

Click-click-click.

1.628

Cardboard would become…

12 X 2 X 1.628…

39 times stronger.

Vs it’s current weigh in…

(1.05^7) X 12 X 2 =33.77 times stronger

That’s a pretty significant increase. But should I spread the points out into the other stats?

Perry had almost died the night before, almost broke his neck and lost an arm, and the only thing that stopped it was his HP stat.

If he raised his Body to level 5, he’d get a 27% boost to his physicality, making him just barely below the range of superhuman.

Anything 35% stronger or faster than your body should be based on its muscle mass was considered superhuman territory, and was the scientific threshold that indicated someone had definitely Triggered. It was baseline super-strength.

That would make him a bit tougher, but still pretty squishy in the grand scheme of things. Titan himself most likely had super strength to the tune of approximately thirty times human standard.

On Perry’s scale, that would be… 1.05^70 = 30.42

About Body level 70. There was no way Perry was competing with that any time soon.

I mean, a stronger suit is inherently less risky too, isn’t it? Perry thought to himself. If the suit had been able to resist getting the arm torn off, and the neck had been properly reinforced, I wouldn’t have used up the HP shields in the first place.

And I have more of them now.

Plus, there was one thing Perry really wanted to test, and it required him to pump his Attunement up as fast as he could. He needed to focus on his strength rather than Titan’s.

Alright then, more Attunement it is, Perry thought, dropping the points in and raising his attunement to ten.

Perry was lightheaded for a moment as everything outside his room ceased to exist for a moment, then the sensation faded.

It was time to get to work.

Perry had identified several things that worked well about his first suit, and many, many more that could be improved.

Pros: The suit was lightweight, providing an astonishing weight/protection ratio, even allowing it to fly without specialized jets or a massive amount of fuel.

The power source was decentralized, so rather than going dead when the battery was punctured, it simply lost a little bit of max power, that the suit hadn’t even needed in the first place.

Cons: The protection wasn’t good enough. There was no neck brace to prevent a broken neck. The light weight meant punches and kicks lacked inertia.

There was a poor selection of abilities. Only having access to Kolath’s Floating Armaments and in only one flavor had been seriously limiting, offensively.

There were no internal comms to allow him to coordinate with team-members silently.

There was a staggering amount of energy up for grabs that the suit simply couldn’t take advantage of.

Perry aimed to address these issues.

1/8”Aluminum plate’s multiplier sits at…

12 X 1.4 X 1.628 = 27.35

27 plates of aluminum are by every measurement stronger than 39 sheets of cardboard.

The corrugated batteries though, I liked those a lot. Perry did some research into aluminum batteries. And liked what he saw.

He could turn the frame into the anode, and power the suit by rusting it.

Of course, rusting your armor to power it isn’t generally a great idea, but it could take a year before the integrity of the armor was compromised, and his Attunement multiplier would mean an even greater energy density for one of the most energy dense non-radioactive battery designs.

If Perry was still using the same cheap aluminum power armor in a year, he’d eat his hat.

The electrolyte can be saltwater, for a roughly 42% reduction below the 1.2 volts of potential difference, vs. Sodium Hydroxide.

The saltwater would doubtless be boosted by his Spendthrift perk, and Perry wanted a non-toxic option in case his battery got punctured again.

Not in case, when. Perry had been very lucky not to get damaged by the caustic puffs of compressed air and acid.

So, corrugated aluminum armor, arranged into individual cells producing juice for the motor.

The motors.

Perry wanted more, better motors this time around.

Perry pulled up his CAD program and began designing the Mk.2, piece by piece, sinking into the creative stupor of a Tinker Twitch, the world rushing by around him.

Once he had the CNC machine working at full capacity, he turned his attention to his spell-frames.

Specifically Dregor’s Flacidity.

More than anything else, Perry had been missing strong crowd-control and nonlethal takedowns.

Dregor’s Flacidity was possibly the most expensive spell he had, due to it requiring a solid silver bowl.

At least the bowl isn’t consumed by the spell. Perry thought. The cost per cast would go down over time.

On his original hunch, Perry set up three different sizes of silver bowls with a speaker right behind them, dialing in the sound from each until he reached their resonant frequencies.

Okay, now we need to make a spell-frame.

In a matter of hours, Perry printed and rigged up a simple frame which mixed, applied the paste, then blasted the back of the bowl with the silver’s resonant frequency.

It looked a bit like an oversized chapstick. It was convex to match the silver bowl with a small hole in the center where it extruded the paste from the mixing tube.

The spellframe then squished into the silver bowl, creating a perfectly even coat of material, before moving aside.

Or at least, that’s the hope.

Perry rigged up the spell-disc, took the whole thing far away from his expensive CNC tools, and aimed the bowls at cardboard cutouts of enemies.

Melt.EXE

It took about three seconds for the prototype spell frame to apply the paste to the silver bowl – needs work – then the applicator swung away on a hinge.

IIIIIIIIII

A high pitched sound assaulted Perry’s ears, but most importantly, the cardboard cutout of a bad guy began to sag, melting into a puddle of liquified cardboard on the ground.

Oh, heck, yeah. Perry thought, hands clasped over his ears.

The effect hit the cardboard man and a bit of the ground around it, and when Perry ran over to check, the surface of the distant concrete building he’d been using as a backdrop could be marred using a fingernail.

More testing required.

The paste seemed to evaporate as it was rendered into pure magic, and by the end of the spell, the silver bowl was perfectly clean and ready to go again.

The next time, Perry set up a field of wooden dowels and a camera.

Once he blasted the field, it became obvious that the silver dish did indeed concentrate the effect, creating a cone of gradually intensifying melting, followed by an inverted cone of rapidly weakening effect.

The wooden dowels at the center of the effect were completely liquid, while the rest were simply flacid and limp in two opposing cones.

This is going to kick ass at crowd control, Perry thought. it needs serious improvement, though.

If the effect was closer to radiation than sound, there had to be a way to make a laser out of it.

He wanted to be able to tag someone in the shoulder and render them into a boneless puddle for a few minutes.

Wide and narrow casting would both come in handy.

Perry took the prototype back into the garage and began drafting up improvements.

Obviously I can’t have a giant bowl attached to my forearm, Perry thought as he began tweaking.

First he revised the applicator to be a single sheet of plastic that could flip up and down, rather than the entire mixing system. The sheet of plastic would flip up and force the paste, injected from the forearm housing of the mixer, into the proper shape.

Then it would flip back down, nesting with the bowl when it wasn’t in use. Perry put a little motor and silver piston attached to the back of the bowl and used it to achieve tiny variations in the focus of the beam, from a tight beam for individuals, to something wider that could be used to soften walls, rubble, or weaken several attackers at once.

That design took about one and a half seconds to fire.

Still too slow.

Then Perry changed the way he thought about the use of time ‘applying’ the paste.

He designed a mold that matched the silver dish exactly, then had it fill itself whenever it wasn’t in use. When the spell was triggered, the cover would retract, it would flip up and slap the bowl of paste into the silver dish, making the complete spell, then retract, refilling itself for a second shot while the spell was being cast.

.25 seconds from trigger to cast. Almost good enough.

To clear his mind, Perry set the project aside, loaded up the CNC machine with a new sheet of aluminum, then pivoted to Kolath’s Floating Armaments.

It was time to figure out what the heck a jangle was as a unit of measurement.

Why couldn’t wizards from another planet have used the metric system? Perry thought, not for the first time.