Lorica clanks when she sits down.

"What about?"

"...I can hurt Leviathan, a lot."

"What do you need to do it with?"

"You need to be supplied a gun to augment in some way or you're going to make one but need the field clear?"

"Keeping Leviathan still is another matter. He's a speedster."

"Yeah, I know," they sigh. "But maybe just make it be in the gun's way once it's ready charging? Or push it through the beam while it's going on, or something like that."

"Armsmaster's working on something that might or might not do that, he hasn't told me much, but I don't think it's ready. And one does not push an Endbringer. If we get you high ground can't you just aim?"

They make a show of thinking about it. "...maybe. I'll try." Pause. "Actually... yes, I know how to do it. High ground is good."

"Okay. Top of an evacuated building maybe."

"I'm gonna check out a map of Acapulco for candidates..."

They wait, looking more like their usual calm and confident self.

"Got an option in Las Playas and one in Costa Azul and one in Las Brisas, it'll depend on what he's already wrecked when we're there and where you'll be able to best get a clean shot."

"Awesome! You're the best."

"Thanks. Pay me back by putting a big hole in the bastard."

Glam flies after her to the appropriate spot.

"Not right now, though if you could tell people to try to redirect him away from this building as much as they can that'd help. If any cape that can create protective energy fields or stabilise the place is feeling idle, I'll welcome their help as well."

Leviathan is making his way into the bay. The torrential rain has been falling for a while, now, and the sea has started invading the city, tideline higher than its ever been in history, though with the sheer amount of rain flooding the streets that's not a very meaningful statement.

When Leviathan hits shore, a robot lands on Glam. "I found a forcefield Tinker whose gear just shorted out in a wave and they can't get anywhere with my tools. If you can help with that you have yourself a forcefield."

Glam has the skeleton of a base for their gun set up when they get the message. "Can you show me their location?"

Leviathan stops moving, his whole body is oddly still with the exception of the head, moving this way and that in complete silence.

"I can bring him to you if you think it'll work."

"Hello."

"Hi. You can make the stuff I need to fix this?"

"Probably. What's wrong with it?"

Leviathan

moves.

Directly into the city, his afterimage aimed at a group of arriving capes.

At the same time, the water in the bay starts getting significantly more restless than it already was. Cities surrounded by water are very good for him, but cities surrounding water are a close second.

"Rated for rain not flood. I can't explain all the wiring to you, can you help me or not, she seemed to think you could."

Tinker hands over sparky basketball.

"The fuck are you even doing," says the tinker dubiously.

They purse their lips—inside the mask, not outside. "I can make the stuff I want appear with various nice properties without having to actually build it," they say confidently and smoothly, without pausing their bullshit work. "Look." They stop for a second to make a tinker-looking gun appear in their hand and laser-shoot a small shallow hole on the roof. "Just trust me. I can fix this." Please trust me.

The tinker prods some buttons. A forcefield flickers to life around the workspace on the roof.

"Drawback, the stuff I make disappears half an hour after I stop paying attention to it. The timer's reset whenever I do pay attention, though. And when you're telling other people who fixed your stuff, tell them it was Glam. They pronouns, please."

"That's not going to work in Spanish," says the tinker.

Pause. "Okay well avoid gendered pronouns in general and switch them up when you must. Now it's time to kick some lizard butt." They crack their knuckles for effect.

Lizard butt has been busy with destruction and general mayhem.

And the shoreline starts very quickly receding...

(Lorica's robots warn her, she grabs as many civilians as she can carry and gets airborne -)

A tidal wave hits.

...a hydrokinetically controlled tidal wave, coming into the bay and spreading out in all directions and into the city, toppling less stable buildings and absolutely destroying smaller ones.

The force field holds, but it's not that big. The building trembles; the base is chipped away.

"...fuck." You know Glam's pissed when they actually swear. "Okay, tinker person—what's your name anyway—new plan. I'm gonna need your help to finish this faster."

"Sanctuary," says the tinker person. "What do I do?"

"I'm gonna make various pieces of this appear, and tell you where you should put them, and you'll put them there. Don't look too hard at the pieces—my power doesn't like it when other people than me use its stuff, so better not remind it you're not me." Not quite true but good enough, and maiming an Endbringer is worth it.

Sanctuary helps and doesn't talk much.

Well, it could be worse.

Yes, yes it could.

Presently lizard butt has decided to start exploring other areas of the city, where "exploring" means going to them really really fast, destroying property, and swatting various capes on his way.

And his way is roughly along Avenida Cuauhtémoc, roughly in the direction of their building. Not quickly and purposefully enough to make it seem like he's heading towards them—after all, they could just cross the water if they wanted to do that.

Sanctuary goes and pushes buttons on his force field generator. It shrinks, a little, but looks stronger.

One's been looking in on them now and then. Here it comes.

A hero—probably Eidolon—beats Leviathan through a building.

The shoreline starts receding again—

"Of course not, but I'm going to do some damage," they say, bracing for the tidal wave.

The new robot projects a map of Acapulco with the shelters highlighted.

Glam flicks the switch. The gun starts making a low humming noise, and a soft bluish glow lights it up from the inside.

The tidal wave does the same thing it did before, entering the bay and then spreading out in all directions, destroying less since most destructible things are already crumbled, but widening the mess and crashing onto people who weren't fast enough.

"Soon would be good!" Lorica's voice says from her robot.

"On it!"

The gun gets louder and brighter, its sound increasingly higher pitched, and Glam does their best to aim at Leviathan. He's not moving the second the gun finishes charging so Glam—

—shoots—

A large laser beam appears, making a noise like a siren distorted to be much lower and louder than sirens ought to be as it travels the air. Its light visible even through the rain—Glam should really have thought of the rain problem, this was not well-planned at all—it hits Leviathan's left leg, causing him to lose balance and topple. The laser does some more damage to the Endbringer's hip and tail as he falls, but eventually runs out of juice.

Damage to the leg is... quite extensive, if nowhere near as extensive as Glam'd hoped. Still, several layers have been stripped off his leg and a deep gash is visible where the laser hit him while he was falling.

"That was really good! Can you do it twice?"

"Yeah! Charging!" They flick the switch again.

Okay, now people expect the mysterious laser to cause as much damage as it did, so it'll probably stabilize there...

Leviathan is having none of it. He takes a few seconds to learn his new balance but then starts making what is apparently a beeline toward their building.

Sanctuary hugs his basketball and starts praying loudly in Spanish.

"Shit shit shit shit..."

Leviathan is underwater, crossing the bay invisibly and—

—very quickly. He's out of the water after one second, and has crossed the distance toward their building in less time than that.

"Madre de Dios FIRE THE FUCKING GUN -"

They do. It hasn't had time to fully charge—not even a half-charge—and Glam curses their power as they press the buttons to fire, spin around and grab Sanctuary to fly away from the Endbringer.

Leviathan is hit in the face with the undercharged laser, and it burns some, but not enough for his plans of hitting the building with his afterimage to be significantly hindered.

Sanctuary clutches the basketball. It shelters them from the worst of the wall of water.

Glam for their part is hugging Sanctuary and flying away from the Endbringer as fast as they can. They don't even question if their suit's supposed antigrav would realistically carry them both, they just fly.

"Can you put it together again somewhere? Now that you've done it once?" demands Lorica's robot, chasing after them.

"If we can get lizard butt to not attack us as soon as we land somewhere, yeah!"

Lizard butt seems to have lost interest in the two and has disappeared amidst the buildings.

"Fucked if I know but I have a roof for you!"

They land on the roof. "Tell as many people as you can that I'm building this here!"

"What? Why? Do I need to evac the block?"

"I cannot waste people's time on keeping them apprised if they don't need to take cover, everyone has their own shit going on!"

They groan but continue building, thinking fast and trying to decide. "Look, it's related to my power, I can't tell you right now but I swear it's important that as many people as possible know about this gun and what it's supposed to do!" Their eyes flicker to the tinker (the mask's drawing does not reflect this) when they say they can't tell Lorica at the moment.

Lorica pauses, then she makes an exasperated noise and gets on the comm. "All capes be ready for another one of those lasers coming from west-northwest of bay, mark two upgrade, might boil the rain, might cause bits of Leviathan to enter orbit, twenty bucks says it gets rid of him no bet if it hits simultaneously with something -" That's as far as she gets before somebody kicks her off.

Leviathan is suspiciously silent and nondestructive.

...that is, with the exception of the hydrokinesis and torrential rain and non-tidal-waves.

"I'm getting chewed out for that, make it fucking good," Lorica mutters.

Leviathan:

appears.

And his nature is being pretty fucking fast and vicious, if they're favoring one leg it's not immediately obvious. Someone hits him with a laser—that was probably Legend—and he's pushed back, but he dodges from the laser and throws his afterimage at the hero, who has to quickly dodge.

Shoreline recedes—

"This would be a good time."

"Fuckin' A!"

The FWOOM noise is noticeably louder and the laser noticeably brighter than before. Leviathan is hit on the upper-right part of his chest, and suffers significantly more damage than before, being thrown back a-ways. The shoreline stops receding and slowly returns to its normal (for the fight) position, no tidal wave.

"Gun's warmed up now," Lorica says, "so it should be able to do that again right away, shouldn't it, Glam."

Roll with it, roll with it, "Yes!"

Leviathan's not having any of it, and disappears amidst the buildings again.

"There goes twenty bucks," mutters Lorica. "Robots say he's that way." She snaps her fingers and the nearest robot hovers in Leviathan's direction, hovering to match as he moves.

Lorica mutters into her helmet. The tracking robot lands on the nose of the gun. "Let it turn the turret! Grease it or something if it can't follow that quick!"

"I can make it turn that quick!"

They make a thing—it's not particularly clear what it is, but it has a pointy end—appear in their right hand and duck under the turret to do—something. It does become significantly easier to turn, though.

This will, apparently, not be too necessary. Leviathan disengages from the two heroes and starts making his way towards the bay again—not in their building's direction.

"Is he leaving...?"

"Hell if I know, you're the one with the tracker robots!"

He seems to be, indeed, leaving. He has taken more of a beating than he does most fights, especially without Scion, and the fact that other capes keep adding injury to injury is not helping.

He dives into the ocean.

There is some tense waiting.

Glam lets out a whoop and makes waterproof holographic fireworks appear as they dance a little on the spot.

Sanctuary turns off his forcefield, activates a different smaller forcefield, and jumps off the building.

"...it was nice meeting you," Glam tells empty space, still grinning a lot, and showing that through the mask.

"I can probably help evac!"

"Follow that bot, it'll show you people who need help," says Lorica, indicating a bot, and then she goes a different way.

Glam follows the bot, and this time they do hum happily after it.

The bot, as promised, finds people who need help and shows Glam where they are.

Glam can carry one person at a time, they don't want to strain credibility and have one of their passengers doubt their abilities while they're fifty feet above the ground.

The bot figures this out as soon as a group of three are removed to high ground one at a time, and it leads them to individuals and in a couple cases a pair of children.

After fifty-five minutes the bot stops doing this thing and zooms up to be collected into the waiting airplane.

Glam follows!

The plane leaves five minutes late when the last flier straggles into it, and it zooms back whence it came.

There are a range of moods present in this airplane. Lorica's helmet is as always opaque.

The fact that Glam's power doesn't allow them to create slips of paper with stuff written on them that actually last long enough to be read is pretty annoying.

Lorica is oblivious.

Glam can't see through the outside of it, but there is a fairly obvious section that she's probably looking out through.

Lorica scrubs at her visor and throws a robot at them. The robot clings to Glam's mask.

They grin. "Hullo."

"Hi," whispers the robot in Glam's ear. "What is it?"

"Just checking up on how you're holding up. Also I'm a bit restless and like talking," they whisper back.

"I have noticed this about you. I'm fine."

Pause. "I don't actually know what to talk about. It just feels like there should be something to talk about after an Endbringer fight."

"Well, you could confirm my guess."

"Guess...?"

"About your power."

"...no one else can hear what you're saying, right?"

"If there's somebody in here with boosted hearing can't swear to it, but not by default unless you lean this robot near your seat neighbor."

The robot crawls off of Glam's face and goes to sit on Lorica again.

And eventually they arrive.

The Wards go to be post-mission debriefed and chinned-up.

And Glam—

—goes check out the forums!

They are foruming as usual. Loricas_Bot makes occasional topical remarks on germane threads.

The press release from the Protectorate and one from its smaller Mexican equivalent has just broken. Glam's name appears in it, credited with "three hits of varying efficacy" and "working with Brockton Bay Ward, Lorica, and Guadalajara hero, Santuario". Six paragraphs down, but they're there.

Guess who?

"Hi."

"Hello. I'm sorry for your losses."

"Thanks."

Patrol patrol.

"Quiet. Althaea shouldn't have been there but she thought it was worth a try. But she had no business getting that close to him in the first place and we still don't know if it could've worked."

"You did a good job. Is this setting private enough for you?"

Glam blinks—mask and all—and looks around. "Uh. Yeah, I suppose."

"Nobody but me and my bots. I have a guess, but I don't know how close I am except 'close enough, probably'."

"...I don't suppose I could ask you to forget about it?"

"You need somebody backing you up. I get it if I'm not your first choice here but at least get an unpowered assistant to cheer you on."

Cheer them on. Right. "That's—okay, what's your guess?"

"Something in the neighborhood of expectations or attention or social support. There was no good reason for you to have me tell everybody I possibly could about the laser unless it's something like that or you were just fucking with everybody during an Endbringer battle."

"That wasn't my read on you, either. I got a reprimand for that, you know? All 'yes, I understand that placing bets on the comms mid-combat is inappropriate' and 'I am sorry for my out-of-character behavior' and 'I didn't mean to disappoint you', it was tons of fun, so did I at least help?"

"Yes. Second blast was definitely stronger, though it could have been better, I think. The bet part—best if we avoid that part in the future." Still quietly.

"Wasn't planning to replicate it."

"...it would help if lots of people expected it to work next time. Actually if they expected it to work better that'd be, well, better."

"Okay. Look. If that's how you work you need help, you need your story corroborated. I am happy to help you, especially bringing down Endbringers, but I need information to do that."

Sigh.

"Yes. Alright. Well, your guess is—kinda right." They swallow and sigh again. "I really, really, really need you to not tell other people this, I might as well not have a power if this gets out."

"Noted."

"It's, um, belief. If I believe a thing exists, or should behave a certain way, then it does. If other people believe it as well, that's a plus."

"And you can be canceled out? How's it weighted?"

"Okay. So what you need to hit hard is a rep. Eidolon has never actually killed an Endbringer but if the news reported it everyone would believe it, because he's freaking Eidolon. Like that."

"Yes. Yes, I do. And I think some of our past conversations should probably make more sense now."

"I don't have time to read through all my transcripts; remind me?"

"Well, when I said that I wanted to be famous, and talked about my wiki page, and mentioned taking on Purity. That kinda thing."

"Okay, but you have the little problem of coming off as reckless and naive and completely green, not badass."

"...Come to think of it, I'm sort of surprised your power works around me and wonder if it takes my beliefs into account at all."

...and now they're not flying anymore.

Lorica catches them. "Whoa! Hey! I didn't mean to freak you out, I just have a secondary power that blocks mindready shit!"

They close their eyes, then say, "You can let me go now."

Lorica lets them go.

And they're flying.

"...I really can't doubt myself, I come off as reckless because I need to be cocky, I need to believe I can do anything I want. It's—I bootstrap it some, it's easy to believe I can do something when empirically I actually can but in this case belief is the cause and not the consequence so I need to tie my head around in Escher-esque knots and not think too hard about it."

"Gotcha. So. What I actually meant was, I have this secondary power which won't let powers that mess with people's heads mess with mine. Since your power is basically solid illusions it would have been not outside the realm of possibility for me to either not see the effects, or to see only the effects that were not, themselves, things you were creating. But apparently it's real enough that I'm not noping it. There remains the question of whether your power takes me into account at all or if, for its purposes, I am not even here until I say something the wrong way and throw off your game."

"...well, there's an easy way to test it. Can you, like, not believe this Rubik's cube is here?"

There is a Rubik's cube in their right hand.

Lorica squints at it. Not a real cube. Did they even bother to have the faces in the right orientations? It probably doesn't even have those internal mechanics, to the extent it's there, which it's not.

"All right..."

"Yes, to the extent that I can disbelieve things on purpose at all, which is limited."

"Okay. Now let's try this." No magic 8 ball in their hand. "My hand is empty. Can you focus on that fact? Like, keep expecting it to be empty or something."

"Sure."

"That's reassuring."

"Not to me it isn't."

"Why? I can't make things you make go away. I can't help, either, but that wasn't such a huge drawback that you noticed it back in Acapulco."

They shrug. "I suppose. Though it's not exactly the most invasive of powers, as far as mental powers go."

"I know, but I don't want to have any gaps at all."

"It's really not much of a gap though. I mean, granted, it could be indicative of the efficacy of other similarly-small-but-otherwise-objectionable powers against you."

"I want my mind to be an impregnable fortress, not a fortress with a couple secret passages."

"That's an interesting preference, and it's also pretty interesting that you got a power that suits it so well."

"Yes, well, we might not be having this conversation if it didn't work real well."

"...would you answer if I asked?"

"I might. It's kind of a personal question, but I do have ultimate blackmail."

They wince. "When you put it like that it makes me really question the wisdom of telling you about it."

"I had it mostly figured out. And I do want to help you. I wouldn't usually answer the question you're proposing asking me."

"I... won't actually ask. If you want to tell me I'll listen, but you're right it's a very personal question so I don't think it's—okay of me to ask, like that. Even if you have ultimate blackmail."

"Up to you."

Patrol patrol.

"...so, any suggestions about the whole rep thing?"

"How long would you be stuck if you did join the Wards, ballpark?"

"Stuck?"

"Well, you can theoretically quit, but they get very fed up with people who revolving-door it. I mean how long till you'd graduate."

"Oh. Nine months."

"That's not that long. You could join up, use Branding for its ostensible purpose, get some action figures made, it's certainly the safest way to build up some attention."

"Hm."

"I mean, or not, but it's a strong contender."

"...You know what would make you really legit scary? You can conjure stuff up. You can fake Tinkering, but what you could also do is give a Tinker an effectively unlimited budget for a temporary-use item. Like, anyone who knows Tinkers knows that the phrase 'Tinker with an unlimited budget' means anything can happen."

"Yeah, that sounds pretty good actually. I thought about pretending to be a really versatile yet secretive Tinker, but the main problem with that is that it'd limit me a lot when I wanted to do anything that's not particularly Tinkerish. Your idea is a bit better there, though it'd still associate expectations with Tinker tech and would also shine less of a spotlight on me, which isn't bad per se, I don't care as much about attention as I pretend I do, but it would mean it'd take a while longer for me to be notorious on my own."

"Yeah. Also I'm probably not a good pairing for that because I couldn't adjust the collective expectations and if you don't know what the tool or part I want is, it might not come out right. Could it? How much does your power do the work on that sort of thing?"

"So maybe it would work with me. Might want an extra person around, though, a non-tinker who expects it all to come together by the power of tinker bullshit."

"The power of tinker bullshit is my best friend. And as far as Endbringers are concerned, tinker bullshit is probably enough to damage them a lot, but making everything look tinkerish in all battles is—not impossible, tinkers are the most overpowered things ever, but still, it's an extra constraint that should be avoided, I think, if it can."

"That and Tinkering takes time. I still wanna -" She pauses. "You should absolutely never go to a Simurgh fight."

"I should—why?"

"Think about it. Precog who likes fucking with people and has mind-affecting powers."

"It won't stand out too much. You don't go to multiple Simurgh fights unless you're outright immune anyway."

"I suppose, but I really wanted to kill her."

"You and me both."

"What's her safe distance? Maybe I could hit her from there."

"It's not so much a safe distance as the point at which people no longer feel the song effects. Her precognitive range is definitely farther than that."

"True, but can we really make any plans taking the Simurgh's precognition into account? She's always playing the game one level higher than you, whatever level you're playing at."

"You can't. I can."

"My judgment is you are particularly vulnerable and in more ways than most people and should not encounter her."

They nod. "No Simurgh."

"Kill the other two with my blessing."

Barest of hesitations. "I still need people to believe it can be done. I know I can do it, but as long as most people's expectations are to just drive them away, I won't be able to."

"...I don't actually know. They've never violated common sense physics. As in, I've never been surprised by anything I've made, though I guess saying it like that it sounds obvious."

"Yeah. How about you throw a thing, I'll have a robot figure ballistics and go to catch it while you close your eyes?"

"Okay. Should I try believing anything in particular?" they ask, making a rubber duck appear in their hand.

"...Try believing that the bot will catch it, but don't look."

They close their eyes, and their mask reflect this, then toss the duck somewhere.

The robot calculates where it ought to go. The robot goes just under where that is supposed to be.

The duck is nonetheless in a position to be very catchable. In fact, even if the robot doesn't try to catch the duck, the duck will still at the very least fall on top of the robot or get stuck in an appendage or something like that. If the robot tries not to catch the duck, though, it will succeed.

The robot waits until the duck ought to be sailing over its rotor, then reaches for it.

The duck has been caught! Hooray!

"Try it again?"

The robot attempts to be obliged to chase it.

The duck permits this.

"Again?"

New duck!

This one the robot attempts to let sail past.

Should the robot not move, the duck will still somehow find its way to it.

Rubber duck, I choose you!

The robot attempts to give it an even wider sailing-past margin.

The duck obeys the laws of physics.

"Okay, I'd want to do that about ten more times to come to any really firm conclusions, but it seems like your power can calculate ballistics, it'd just... rather not have to?"

"Why? What were the results?"

"When the robot didn't try to catch it but it was near where a real object would have traveled, it juked into the robot to be caught anyway. Had to give it a wider berth to not catch it."

"Huh." The various ducks disappear. "So it does break the laws of physics, but only a little. I wonder if I can make it break them more by adding more energy? More entropy and such."

And without waiting for an answer, they close their eyes and throw a new duck directly up.

The robots, not expecting such a thing, do not attempt to catch it.

Unless the robot that tried to catch it the previous times dodges at the last second, the duck will fall on and bounce off its—head? Top?

"Landed on the same robot that was playing catch before."

They open their eyes. "I was meaning to have it catch the duck but I suppose I can't really force the robot to do it, so I guess the duck did its best."

"Can't you? Could you not give one of the robots an extra arm?"

They tilt their head. "Probably, I wasn't really thinking about that in specific. My power can be creative but I still need to be broadly expecting something to happen."

Eyes closed, chuck duck up—

—new robot arm, not under robot's control until it has caught the duck.

The robot attempts to move its new arm.

It moves under the robot's control.

"...You just gave my bot an arm. That my bot can move. That's. Really something. You don't know how the bot's trying to move it, I do but your power can't read my mind, and the bot - shouldn't qualify as having a mind..."

They open their eyes again. "Is it that different from creating bullshit parts for a forcefield tinker's forcefield basketball or inventing a stun gun? Hell, the fact that my power doesn't care that you think this should be impossible is probably helping a lot, here."

"I just don't understand where it's getting the information. If it can read my bots I can make you a pet bot that believes its little heart out that there are fairies and claps its hands, but separately I have an infosec problem."

"...well, if you had made it seem that impossible earlier I may not have been able to believe hard enough. I can't actually get any information from this arm, though, I do not have the faintest clue how it works."

"It might just be reading the bots. I haven't made a true AI, but I'm only sure of that because I ask the central software every couple of days and it always says no."

"I think if the bots were actual intelligences this would probably not have worked. I'm pretty sure having a new limb counts as sufficient squinting."

"So your power can read non-mind things about the environment. That's potentially huge. ...Oh god we've been standing here doing powers tests for way too long." Lorica takes a flying leap to the next roof.

They follow, giggling. "Sorry."

"Not your fault. Pros column: power testing is a legit pastime."

"Right? I wonder if my power would be considered an exception to the Manton effect."

"You can make live stuff?"

"I meant more in that it draws information from both living and non-living sources, in different ways. Haven't been able to voluntarily produce anything alive, though."

"I don't think that constitutes an exception. My stuff is all strictly inorganic but it can take inputs from whatever."

"Yeah, fair enough, I guess."

"Have you been able to involuntarily produce things alive?"

"...Huh?"

Sigh. "When I triggered, I was in—a bad spot. The first thing I created was some—one? To get me out of there."

"Yeah, that one I have been trying to reproduce, for a long time. ...I was a bit delirious at the time, that probably helped."

"Yeah."

"Breaking out of unconscious expectations is consistently the hardest part of using my power. That may be so obvious as to not be worth stating. But."

"It seems like it'd be a major obstacle. You could maybe be profitably paired with some kind of Master, if they could doublethink well enough or just have broader range than your power sweeps for."

"Broader range?"

"Like - your power can't literally be sweeping the globe to check what everyone thinks. I'd be surprised if it swept farther than visual range or a few blocks. If you made friends with someone who directly affected beliefs and wanted to tell them what the deal was, and they happened to be able to stand outside your 'range' and keep you in theirs..."

"One, pretty sure it's something like 'visual range,' since my visual range, or something approximately like it, is my limit when creating. Two, that sounds really tactically useful. Three, I may not be as wary of people detecting what I'm thinking as you but my reaction to imagining letting someone else mess with my mind like that is utter terror, so tactical usefulness may not be the most relevant criterion here."

"Yeah, don't blame you, but I know I'm an outlier so I thought it bore mentioning."

"Yeah you probably are an outlier, but detect versus affect is way different and the latter is terrifying."

"Mmhm."

"This physics discovery is way fun, though," they say, and throw a rubber ball down into an alley and watch as a contrived set of bounces causes it to fly back within their range so they can catch it again.

"Have fun with that."

"The number of other powers you could fake with yours alone is actually staggering."

"Part of the reason why I don't want to associate my future image too strongly with tinkers."

"I don't follow."

"People associate me too strongly with tinkers, they'll be expecting tinker-related stuff and not expecting non-tinker-related stuff, faking other powers becomes that much harder. And a failed demonstration is fairly catastrophic as such things go."

"You can work cold, though, nobody on the field knew what you could do and nobody was expecting you when you showed up with those gangs. Just 'not expecting' is not crippling."

"I guess it's more like 'expecting not' than 'not expecting.' As far as powers go, making small objects appear in the middle of a battlefield isn't that unimaginable. Carrying a stun gun isn't either. Or flying, though in this case it's my suit doing the work, I can't actually believe myself into having other powers."

"Branding'd tell you that not having a theme is death to image. The theme doesn't have to be power-limiting, necessarily. If everything you made was white that would also be a theme."

"Ooh yes, that makes sense. Guess the next time I fight an Endbringer I can make my turret gun all white and shiny and stuff."

"If you don't want to be locked in to turret guns you could also maybe just fly around, glowing and blowing theatrical quantities of dust and debris away from yourself?"

"Heh. I really should work on my image. I wonder if a cape would help." Poof, now there's a cape.

"You expect that to tear away in a pinch, right?"

"Naturally. Maybe it could billow even when I'm not actually flying."

"An important attribute in a cape."

"Of course. Mysterious light shining from nowhere in particular. Maybe there could be a watermarked G on my chest." And to demonstrate, one such G appears. The suit is still white, but movements of the light catch a slightly differently textured part shaped like the letter. "Is the reason for my cape name obvious yet?"

"Not all that obvious."

"Glamour, like fae magic."

"Cute. Mine's Latin."

"What's it mean?"

"Armor."

"Fitting! Did you only pick the name after the armor was done?"

"No. You ever hear, like, a bulletproof vest, referred to as 'body armor'?"

"Oh! The mind thing."

"Yeah. I think 'body armor' is actually to distinguish from, like, tank armor, but the obvious question to me was 'is there such a thing as mind armor'. But it passes as a reference to the suit. My passive power's not public per se."

"Yeah, it's not in your wiki page."

"Deliberately. The other Wards and the Protectorate know and there's protocols for listening to me if I seem to be acting bizarrely for some reason, that kind of thing, but I don't want anyone to have a chance to figure out how to work around it if they have nefarious intentions."

"You're immune to the Simurgh, the only people in the world I could believe would be able to work around it would be Eidolon or Scion."

"By 'work around it' I mean more 'get a teammate to do something non-mental to me' or 'find me out of costume via my immunity and shoot me in the head'."

"Oh. Yes, we would like to avoid that."

"Yeah, I can't really bring an army of defensive robots to school with me."

"...pro: High School in Arcadia High."

"It's still, you know, public school."

"Yeah but I bet you have all sorts of concessions and stuff. And I mean, if you wanted to explain it to someone else saying it's 'public school' would be misleading enough it'd border on being a lie."

"I'd drop out if they'd let me."

"...you would? Why?"

"Because the ability to threaten to call the Youth Guard on my superiors if they waste my time is not worth letting school waste my time? Like, I'm a fucking tinker, is it supposed to be a career advantage? I'm smarter than everyone in my classes even though my thinker rating didn't touch my IQ, is it supposed to enrich my intellect?"

"Oh. Well, I was thinking mostly of. You know. The people. Friends?"

"I assume some people find that a meaningful advantage of attending school."