Does he have any security arrangements at home?

Not that she can see without sending the drones in to check, which of course hypothetical security arrangements might notice. But he does leave at exactly the same time every day.

If he has a consistent schedule, she can catch him while he sleeps.

Is his bedroom visible from outside?

Yep. Not from an easy angle from the street, but the drones can identify it easily.

Then once he's safely tucked in, she can infiltrate.

Tunneler, danger sensor, and the resilience brute to mitigate the effects of any poisons.

As soon as she's in something awakens him and he sits straight up. But he's still half asleep, and she's charging straight at him with three superpowers and an instant death touch, so he really doesn't have a chance.

No, he really doesn't.

–two monstrosities spinning through space, shedding pieces of themselves and watching the fragments fall to the planet below–

There are several of the large bottles nearby. Unlabeled. Her new tinker power might be able to tell what's in them later, but there's no time.

She has what she came for. Time to get out of the house, and then the city.

This whole strategy of bursting through walls and killing people is so effective there should be a rule. Some kind of unwritten rule, that capes follow out of enlightened self-interest because they don't want other people going after their own secret identity next. No, that'd never catch on.

Anyway, she gets away clean and is halfway out of the city before the sirens go off.

If she had a secret identity she cared about, a rule of that sort might matter more to her.

Next step is find a trashy motel room a town or two over with a proprietor who cares more about the money she hands over for its use than any trendy jewelry she may be wearing on said hands.

The proprietor starts warning her about what records he's required to turn over to the police on request, then sees how much money she's handing over and doesn't bother finishing.

It is pleasant to deal with a reasonable person.

Now, what sorts of things can her new tinker do?

Makes elixirs that give better-than-human abilities. Strength and endurance are ones this shade knows well; same with healing. It's not outright regeneration, but if there is a hand left after getting out of the cuffs this can restore it to perfect condition. Cask also used it for reflexes and even mental speed. It's possible that with a well-stocked lab and time to tinker she could come up with more and better options.

Multiple potions work fine together. The catch is just that she has to physically drink about a liter and a half per dose.

That's less than ideal. No wonder he called himself Cask. She doesn't have a well-stocked lab and isn't likely to acquire one. Is it going to be possible to make a potion that will fix a hand she breaks badly enough to slip it out of the cuffs?

As usual, it depends on the quantity of robbery. She can do it easily if she has a decent supply of cookware and the entire contents of a drugstore.

Stealing an entire drugstore so soon after Cask's unexplained death is going to get her noticed and found by a person with the right cast of suspicious mind. She'll have to do multiple smaller thefts, spread out in space and time. Still noticeable, but hopefully harder to track. Randomize where she hits across the state, and travel off the grid as much as possible. She can lay out more cash for an extended reservation on this room.

A series of connected robberies definitely alerts the PRT that something is up, but that by itself doesn't help them narrow down where. A few crimes later she's got her alchemy.

Can she also do an anesthetic?

If she sits down and invents for a few days, probably. It's not something the shade knows off the top of its head.

If she doesn't have to deal with the pain, she'd prefer not to. She will take the time to come up with something.

The end result is a neurologically dubious effect that should turn off all feeling while still allowing her to move. Would probably be really dangerous if not combined with the healing draught.

Good thing she is combining them, then.

Right. First the anesthetic draught. Losing feeling but not control is quite odd. She follows that up with the healing potion, it works slowly and it would be hard to lift the bottle with broken hands. Then- it's time to break some bones. She summons a brute, and crushes her hands until she can shake the cuffs off. From the way they flop around, this would be excruciatingly painful to experience.

They slip out, or maybe more like ooze out; they're not in great condition.

Watching her hands re-settle is differently weird. The disconnected joints get realigned, and the tissue she tore grows back. The healing is sped up but not immediate. The anesthetic wears off first, but by then she's healed enough that it's less an unendurable agony than a bizarre feeling like her hands are expanding.

So much for being comfortably numb. But she can move her hands and arms freely now, and is no longer the target of immediate suspicion on that basis. Whether she will be on others is something she needs to check on. Library time again.