"The aerogel sounds great. I haven't tried the container thing, do you have a bottle of water and somewhere you won't mind it potentially ending up on the floor? And it's been at least fifteen seconds, so . . ." He pulls his watch and puts it back on. "Nope, time doesn't pass in there. Which suggests that if I can put animals in at all they at least won't suffocate."

Knockdown has bottled water he hands Bruce. “Here ya go, we make much bigger messes than some spilled water in here don’t worry.”

"Thanks. Alright, let's see what happens!" He puts the full bottle in his inventory, takes an empty bottle out, grins, and then sprays water all over the floor a couple meters from where they're standing. "Hey, I'm a hose!" He can't make any "drank from the firehose, now I *am* the firehose" MIT jokes out loud, but he can certainly make them in his head.

“Hmm...30 litres of water isnt that much when you think about it though, and you need space for other gear I would assume...try it with air in the bottle this time if you dont mind?” Dr Barker paces around Bruce looking at the distance the water travelled from his hand.

The same trick works with air, and produces an audible puff of wind. "That came out a lot faster. Hard to tell just from looking, but I think it might come out at a constant mass flow. Even a kilogram of air would be quite a lot, this could be potentially dangerous in a confined space."

“Oh goodnes yes don’t build up a whole kilo of air and release it, that is quite a lot of volume, maybe we should be behind the blast shields after all.” Says Dr Barker.

”Dont worry I could have a forcefield up before the bang reached us, but yeah lets not test it by blowing your arms off hey new guy.” A smile from Knockdown to defuse the tension.

"Yes, let's not. Even if they might grow back overnight. I'm thinking my eventual gear setup will have some air and some water and some aerogel, but also things like first aid stuff, a beanbag gun, duct tape, that sort of thing. And it'll depend on who else I'm with and what threats we're most expecting."

“Even without the air and water it’ll be like having the most well equipped PRT trooper ever on our team. A full arsenal wherever you go, I like it.” Knockdown looks very approving of these powers. “Carrying around enough supplies can be cumbersome in costume but its like you have a bag of holding to carry the party with.”

"Bag of Holding is basically it, yeah. I'm glad you think it's useful! It's not as flashy as some powers, but it suits me pretty well. Hmm, what else should we test, or is it time to move on to the next thing in the grab bag?" He looks at Dr. Barker as he says this last, and reminds himself not to turn his head if anybody calls that very similar name.

Dr. Barker looks a little dissapointed as he says this. “Maybe we should leave pressure and volume experiments to later once we have some safety standards written up, we havent had exactly this problem before at this power testing facility.” Sad face at having to wait for safety to be able to science more. “What else is in your amazing bag of many things?.”

Seems both Knockdown and Dr Barker play D&D with references like those.

"Anything involving my regen should happen last. We could test my strength and speed, or I've got that map I mentioned but it works best outdoors."

“Strength and speed we can do.” And Dr. Barker leads Bruce over to a bunch of different excercise machines some even specially designed for brute testing and for testing movers.

And thus he is tested on all the machines. Bruce is at olympian athlete levels of strength and speed due to his Strength and Dexterity scores and very good stamina due to his above average Constitution.

”It’s almost a pity you are a Parahuman, you are at peak physical condition for a nonpowered human. You could have gone to the Olympics if being a Parahuman didn’t disqualify you.” Knockdown says.

“We have Tinker and Thinker tests too if you want to try them?” Offers Dr. Barker after they are done testing his physical condition.

He probably wouldn't quit academia for the Olympics, but that's neither here nor there. "Cool!"

"Sure, I'll take them. I don't think they'll show anything particularly superhuman, but I'm curious what they are and it can't hurt to be sure." Also they might be educational enough to give him a skill.

Thinker tests are a mix of intelligence tests, problem solving so a lot of puzzles, and mathematics and physics problems, its kind of fun. A lot of sense testing like seeing how quiet a noise he can hear or if he can see infrared or ultraviolet, these are pretty boring. Precog tests which again are pretty boring since Bruce has no ability at that unless you count his map. And a bunch of bizzare questions along the lines of if he can taste the colour of tommorow probably to pick up some of the stranger thinker powers.

Bruce scores very very intelligent but nothing that mundane humans couldn’t achieve very rarely. Dr. Barker seems put out someone beat his score, he was up until now the smartest member of the local PRT according to those tests.

Knockdown finds Dr. Barker being thrown off his perch hilarious.

The Tinker test is literally a bench of random parts and being told he has two hours to build something.

He does surprisingly well on the hearing test by turning up the master volume, but the others are pretty straightforward and the precog test is a joke. He feels like a total douche for scoring higher than Dr. Barker because of his power and letting everybody believe he was always like that, but not bad enough to say anything about it.

In the tinker test, he decides to practice his repair skill; he finds a broken motor and manages to get it turning again.

“Thinker 1 for the hearing and intelligence and Tinker 0 for getting a motor to work out of all this junk? What do you think?” Dr. Barker says to Knockdown.

”Sounds about right to me, maybe Brute 1 for the healing and strength if it works like he says it works since we havent tested it yet. Does the inventory power count as a Striker ability? He can pull things out in melee range...Maybe blaster 0 if we give him some nonlethal ranged weapons like a beanbag launcher or rubber bullets. If the Inventory counts as a Striker ability I’d vote for Striker 3 as his main classification.” Knockdown muses.

”I agree, preliminary rating of Striker 3, Brute 1, Thinker 1, Tinker 0 and Blaster 0 depending on equipment.” Dr. Barker says into a voice recorder he pulled out.

”The ratings really don’t convey how useful you are likely to be new guy, I would be happy to have you on the team if you’d like to join.” Knockdown claps Bruce on the shoulder in a friendly way. “You can use our showers and one of our spare plain uniforms if you want before negotiations start, or you could go home and we could continue another time if you are tired out.”

Eh, getting here was enough rigamarole that he doesn't feel like doing it again tomorrow. "And I'll be happy to join! Spare uniform and a shower sounds great; I'll meet you back here in a bit to talk contract?"

And off he goes to see what superhero gym showers are like. He's back promptly, en-uniformed.

They all head back to the office they were in originally, the same suited woman is there still tapping away on her blackberry. Has she not left this whole time? She looks up at Knockdown.

”Striker 3, Brute 1 and Thinker 1 but highly variable in utility, will need a lot of gear to use full potential.” He says to her.

She nods and rifles through a briefcase for a specifc stack of papers in her briefcase full of papers and places them on the table. “This is a contract template, any clauses can be negotiated if it is not satisfactory.” She says to Bruce. The first words she’s said all day for all Bruce knows.

Time to intensively scrutinize every word of this contract as well as someone with 20 Intelligence, the Reading skill, and a lawyer cousin can! He takes notes in his Notes with his hands typing under the desk.

He would end up a junior member for a year with a $78,780 USD a year salary and have a $112,810 USD a year salary once he becomes a full member. Junior members have restricted acess to confidential files and cannot lead patrols.

The gear budget they give him in the contract template still seems very low even though knockdown reccomended he get a higher one. A lot of his expenses seem to be expected to be paid out of his own salary. There is a trap about invention rights for tinkers in there that SiesmicLizards post warned him about. There is a kind of shady looking NDA that is worded very restrictively, bruce could probably find a better wording that still protected PRT secrets while not stopping him from talking about institutional abuse for example. The contract wants to put almost full creative control over his cape name and persona in the hands of the PRT PR department and he should probably push back against that a little.

He will have acess to the Protectorate Gym with all its specialized equipment for capes. He can sleep in a bunk on base if he wants to. He will have acess to three cafeteria meals a day for free (Knockdown reccomends eating elswhere when he sees Bruce on the page that contains that clause). He will have acess to specialized classes for capes and acess to PRT trooper courses. He can be given a legitimate excuse for his civilian identity to work at the PRT headquarters if he wishes to have one. He can have acess to Tinker services if any Tinkers are in the local teams and they agree to do work for him when usually tinker gear is heavily regulated for civilian purchase.

Team members do need to reveal their civilian identity to the team leader but no-one else if they so wish it.

Otherwise the huge document seems pretty okay to Bruce.

Bruce is pretty well-paid for a postdoc, but that's like being pretty tall for a halfling. He has zero objection to those salary numbers. He does want a bigger gear budget, and argues persuasively that it will make him much more valuable. He also wants a whistle-blowing exception to the NDA ("of course it's very unlikely to come up, but I'd hate to end up in a bind where I'd have to either break an agreement or be an accessory to wrongdoing") and to be clear that the Tinkertech IP clause doesn't apply to him since he isn't a Tinker.

He doesn't mind the bit about the cape name and persona; they can control how he appears to the masses and the media and he'll keep being himself with anyone he actually knows. As long as he doesn't have to be in character at home or hanging around HQ, it's fine.

He does want an excuse for working at the PRT building, and already has a good idea for one; presumably he can work that out with his team lead, from whom he would like a written promise not to go telling people who he is. ("Again, I'm sure nobody here would, but it's good form to have it written down," he says, gesturing at the pile of papers on the table.)

Bruce is assured Knockdown won’t go telling people his identity, there are internal regulations that prohibit that kind of thing. So they don’t mind adding that to his contract that the team lead won’t reveal his indenity to anyone he doesn’t give explicit permission for.

Knockdown and the lawyer argue in whispers (that Bruce can totally hear if he increases his volume settings) about gear costs. Eventually there is a discretionary budget set aside for Bruce that requires him to fill out a form for things he wants to buy on the Protectorate dime and hand that form to Knockdown who will decide what to approve.

The lawyer argues against changing the NDA until glares from Knockdown make her relent and change it to have a whistleblowing exception.

They remove the Tinkertech IP clause without any issue, SeismicLiazrds article said they would remove it if pushed even if you are a Tinker anyway.

The contract ends up pretty suitable to Bruce for a first pass of edits with Knockdown having pushed for edits in Bruce’s favor multiple times. A more cynical person might think either he is really that stand up of a guy or this is an elaborate good cop bad cop routine with the lawyer.

Bruce even earns a system bonus during the negotiations!

|For being persuasive you have earned +1 Charisma!|

Bruce does not have enough data to rule out either "stand-up guy" or "elaborate good-cop bad-cop routine"; he'll assume the former for purposes of social friendliness and the latter for purposes of not telling him anything he doesn't need to know.

The system bonus is nice. At least it is if Charisma works like Strength, and is just making him more socially adept rather than being some kind of freaky mind control shit.

Once a mutually agreeable version of the contract is printed up, he signs it. Oh hey, he's technically a superhero now. That's cool. "Achievement Unlocked", lol.

Little does he know there are multiple achievements waiting for him on the path of a protectorate hero...