With some relief, she unhooks the mask from her ears.

Her mouth is a pretty gruesome sight. She doesn't have lips, her gums are black, and the spotless whiteness of her teeth somehow just makes it worse. She casts a worried look towards Margaret, before remembering that Margaret doesn't have facial expressions.

Margaret is glad she doesn't have facial expressions right now, because that is seriously gross but there's no way she's going to comment on it. All she says is, ". . . I hope that doesn't hurt."

Lucy visibly attempts to come up with an appropriate response. Eventually she says "It does, but thank you."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Good luck building a fix." 

" . . . So when are you going for powers testing?"

"They said it was 11am in Lab D. I'm not sure how they could test my devisor level, but presumably they've figured something out over the years."

"Yeah, I'm sort of imagining them sticking you in a lab and saying "make something cool". I bet it's way more formalized than that, though, when I applied here they had me fix a bunch of broken things that were deliberately escalating amounts of broken."

"I guess we'll see."

Tomorrow dawns bright and early, as tomorrows tend to do. Powers Testing approaches.

And Margaret approaches powers testing!

Powers Testing is conducted by a weedy-looking man named Dr. Duncan. First she's shown to a computer and given a test. There are sections on memorization (increasing strings of numbers, skimming and immediately reciting paragraphs or pages of text), spatial reasoning in up to eight dimensions, and an absolutely brutal strategy game like a cross between Go, 3D chess, and the Game of Mao. There are also straight math and English and science sections, the last of which shades into the bizarre towards the end. (There are entirely too many quantities approaching infinity.)

Margaret is very intelligent and knowledgeable for a high schooler, but not inhumanly so. She gets some physics problems she would otherwise have missed by leaning on her mechanical intuition and on thought experiments about how a device working on a given physical principle would need to behave.

Dr. Duncan then lays out another array of gadgets for her to repair, just like the first powers test. There are a lot more crazy machines on the upper end of the complexity scale this time, though, including a few that don't seem to even be mechanical - a smooth marble sphere, for instance, and a crystalline flower. There's also a futuristic-looking pistol that just doesn't make any sense - when she pops it open, its insides have no real power source, just a complicated set of lenses.

This is even more fun than it was last time. Margaret fixes most of the gadgets--the marble sphere is a metamaterial that changes its density in response to ambient light levels, but it was left in the sun too long and needs to be chilled until the structure relaxes again--but the crystal flower and a couple of the others leave her baffled. "I think this one's a devise," she says of the nonsensical pistol, "if it ever did anything I couldn't tell you what or how."

He nods. "We include a couple of impossible ones just to throw people off - or to test for a theoretical 'super-gadgeteer', depending on who you ask. The flower's enchanted somehow, and the pistol is indeed a devise. Based on how easily you dealt with most of them, I'd have to say you're a rank 6 gadgeteer - very impressive. Now comes the physical test."

There are tests of speed, deadlift capability, endurance, et cetera. Breaks are at regular intervals, including opportunities to plug herself in.

One of the later tests appears to be another test of speed. She is placed on a treadmill and set to go at a certain rate.

Abruptly, out of the console pops a boxing glove on a spring, moving much faster than aerodynamics should allow it to.

She's a bit slower than human average, but her endurance and deadlift are a bit better. She wonders if they let you retake these tests occasionally; she expects all of those facts to change.

The boxing glove pops her in the head and she startles back right off the end of the treadmill.

"ACK, my eye!--I'm okay, I'm okay, just give me a minute to straighten my camera out."

"Oh dear," Dr. Duncan says. "I apologize, it's a standard test meant to test for danger sense and autonomic powers. The floor is supposed to be padded, but evidently it's not padded enough."

"No, no, it just got me at an unluckly angle and I had a screw loose. And no danger sense."

Dr. Duncan offers her a helping hand. "Well, it looks like at the moment you don't qualify for an Exemplar rating, but you're a 6th rank Gadgeteer and that's certainly something. I imagine you intend to enhance your chassis; anytime you do so and think it might qualify you for an Exemplar rating boost, you can arrange another test online and head down. No more boxing gloves, I promise."

"Oh, excellent. I do expect to make a lot of both physical and mental enhancements, so the option to update my rating is nice. Being a gadgeteer is just lovely."

He smiles. "I have to agree. I don't get as much time to invent, these days, but it really is just so satisfying, isn't it?"

"It really is!" And if that concludes their appointment, she will head back to her room and sign! up! for! classes!

She has eight slots plus Saturday morning, and self-study if she can get admin's consent; she's required to take Basic Martial Arts (or Noncombat Survival, but BMA is strongly recommended), Intro to Powers, and Gadgeteer Lab.

Recommended classes include Robotic Anatomy (Surpassing the Human Ideal!), Fundamentals of Nanotechnology, Intro to Fabrication Techniques, Exotic Materials 101, World Lit, Precalculus, and Mutants in World History.

This school has a class on surpassing the human ideal? How much better can life get? Well, she can only take nine of those ten things at once, that's not ideal. She should probably frontload the gen ed classes and put off either nanotech or exotic materials, but either of those could in theory be useful in designing the Best Chassis Ever. Or maybe that's just an excuse she's making to put off taking history.

After a lot of internal debate and looking at syllabi, she signs up for everything except Fundamentals of Nanotechnology: it would be easier to incorporate nanotech into herself later without a full-body revision, whereas if she decides to be partially made of exotic materials that's really something that needs to be taken into account early in the design phase.

Lucy returns from powers testing and possibly also lunch. "That was... odd," she says without preamble. "Hello Margaret."

"Hello! Is it the kind of odd you wouldn't mind telling me all about, because now I'm super curious."

She nods, removing her mask. "Well, he interviewed me about my past inventions - how long they'd taken, whether they worked on the first try, et cetera. Then he had me working with a protein-folding program, trying to make proteins for specific tasks - some of which were insane, by the way, one of the tasks was 'turn flesh into gold' - and he told me that based on the results I was a rank-3 Devisor. Which seemed a little low to me, but what do I know." She considers. "Also, there was a boxing glove on a spring at one point."