"...he's the fastest speedster on record, he can do that thing where everything stops, he has super telekinesis, and he cured that one guy's cancer when he showed up?"

"I have no cancer patients handy, nothing much is moving... try the teekay thing." Lorica tosses one of the golf balls that is around for testing exactly this.

No go.

"Okay, so maybe he can't get around your fundamental nothing-doing problem areas like telekinesis," says Lorica. (No bots catch the golf ball. The flock is all waiting still and silent on the floor, except for shoulderbot, which is too small to catch a golf ball.) "Although we should still test that next time you're under. But blaster shit is well within your power set. And Scion's more impressive-looking than a big gun on the blaster front. If you can blow up an Endbringer with a fake Tinkertoy you can do it with a Scion."

"Yes. Definitely. If I can do it at all, a Scion-copy should be able to."

"So roughly the same set of people who know about the Siberian idea should hear about the Scion idea too."

"Should they? Mightn't that lower their expectations about the powers? Diminishing returns could get this Scion to be much weaker than it otherwise would if even a handful of people know he's a fake. The Siberian's power is pretty qualitative; Scion's isn't."

"I bet you at least one of the Triumvirate is getting mid-combat updates on Scion's location. You don't think that'll tank it?"

"...okay, that's fair."

"Maybe test the Siberian first, get a solid reputation in with the applicable people of being able to copy really heavy-duty powers."

"Yeah, that sounds sensible. ...except for the part where using the Siberian first does mean facing the Nine."

"They don't have anybody who could necessarily figure it was you..."

"If you were Jack and thought like Jack and you saw a Siberian fighting an Endbringer, what would you do?"

"...Massacre even more people than usual until the Siberian came out of the woodwork, probably."

"Yeah. It would be just like him to decide to kill the people the Endbringer never got around to, out of some warped sense of fairness or something."

"Yeah. It's not guaranteed he'd hear about it, though - people don't exactly spectate - I wouldn't put it past him, but still."

"Right. But I'd still feel responsible if it happened, and I do very much want to kill him."

"I'd even say you've got a decent shot at it, but I'd say that about lots of people and he is still alive. I don't get it, he doesn't have the Siberian riding piggyback at all times."

"Yeah, and his power's pretty useless, too, but apparently his thing is being a master manipulator or—something."

"It might help that you and I don't have to actually be nearby to fight someone."

"He has managed to survive various other ranged capes, too, though. Maybe not as ranged as us, I guess."

"We don't have to be in the same state. As long as I have bots, and you can replace bots as long as I have any real bots. I'm still working on and off on cloaking, but I'm not sure whether that'll go anywhere."

"Couldn't maybe we get that from some other Tinker? Surely there's some Tinker or other specialized in cloaking devices."

"Maybe, but integrating it so the bots could use it would be a separate and possibly harder problem. And so would inter-cape diplomacy."

Sigh. "Couldn't it be, like, some cloaking device they just—switch on? I mean, you're not the person I should be asking this of, are you."