He nods. "Everybody's got a specialization, it's part of the trait. I do hydrokinetics. Not always as useful in the combat sims, but devisor plumbing is a very hot field. Hydroflux charges as much for one bathroom as you would drop on a decently sized house. I'm not Hydroflux - you can tell by the tentacles - but I like to think I'm pretty damn good."

"Nifty. I need less plumbing than average, but I can certainly appreciate it. I'm all about the non-combat applications."

"Yeah, you look more like an autoclave kind of girl."

"Yeah, pretty much. You looking to go into business after school, sell fancy bathrooms and luxury autoclaves?"

"I don't actually do autoclaves, there's not much you can do to make boiling steam more comfortable. But I'm going to sell extremely fancy bathrooms, yes."

"That's pretty awesome! I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to sell yet, but I'm planning to start a business too. Probably something custom and expensive."

"I'm gonna make holdouts," Elijah says. "Not, like, weaponry, that's military-industrial bullshit. But a high-powered pocket laser can be a really effective tool."

"Not gonna say I'll never be in the market for a pocket laser myself. Never know when you might need some optics tested, or something heated up."

Ethan grins. "And I already got a patent on a breed of flowers with antidepressant properties, and I sold it for a couple million dollars, so I'm sitting pretty for a good while."

"Wow, nice! Once I come up with something patentable I know who to ask for advice on the paperwork."

“Nah, I’m not that great at paperwork, I was just lucky enough to come up with something really good in a niche that wasn’t being filled. See, the flowers don’t act like a chemical antidepressant, they’re more like one of those sunlamp things. So people can just buy a pot and keep it in their room and it ameliorates their symptoms. I went to Goodkind & Jackson and they told me to name a price, I said a million, they said ‘we’ll only go as low as 2.5, and that’s final’. Apparently Goodkind & Jackson is kind of like that.”

"That's amazing. What you did and what they did. And it's going to benefit so many people!"

Ethan beams. “I know! It’s great!”

"I can't wait for my first gadgeteer lab class!"

Conveniently, her first gadgeteer lab is right after lunch!

It turns out Ethan has lab at the same time, and he leads her to the workshop area and shows her the various sections. "I'm not as up on anything except bioengineering," he freely admits, "but you eventually get a feel for the place through osmosis if nothing else."

"This is so great! And we can just work on whatever we want all class period?"

"As long as it's legal," he says.

Margaret dives into fabricating a new head and torso. The head is going to have awesome cameras and microphones and the torso is going to have her important computing parts in the center of a lot of armor and both of them are going to have space for batteries.

Moderately awesome cameras and microphones are available! If she wants particularly awesome cameras and microphones she may have to put in a requisition order. (There's some very nifty sensory equipment out there.)

The campus maintenance team hasn't got back to her yet, so she still can't count on having money. Are any kinds of awesome requisitionable sensory equipment available for free, or does requisitioning things always cost money?

Requisitions don't always cost money - if she wants fifty pounds of lead, for instance, or some other object costing less than $100, she only needs to file the requisition form with a project summary.

(There's also the scrapheap, which is reputed to sometimes contain more expensive items which have been discarded when they turned out to be useless to whatever project they were requisitioned for. However, these rarely last long before being reappropriated.)

Then she'll start with the best cameras and microphones already available, but design their interfaces with the rest of her head to be easily swappable out for better ones. Eventually she wants to be able to see and hear a vastly superhuman range of electromagnetic and audio frequencies, but for now she'll settle for high resolution, a nice range of zoom, and maybe some infrared if she can get it.

There's a small drift of webcams and microphones that she can sift through, many of them fitting these specifications! There's also a couple of UV and infrared cameras, if she wants to try out some amateur surgery.

She can totally put multiple lenses on the same face and integrate the images on the software level. The result looks a bit insectoid, but in a cool way.

In that case, she can see into the infrared and ultraviolet!

Once she achieves this, however, it's time for Mutants and World History. Today they're learning about the effect of "Theme Heroes" on World War II.