Gah, that is distracting. What is with those... things?

She wriggles out from underneath the body and moves away from it before returning her focus to tracking down the earth quaker. Wouldn't do to have other capes stumble across him before they get close to her.

Cape fights are a lot more one-sided than usual when one team doesn't know that touching the opponent means death. She gets the earthquake generator and another blaster before that detail gets out. When the speedster is the last one standing he turns and runs.

Can she slow him down with the earthquake and then tag him with one of the blasters?

If she wants to kill a fleeing hero, then yes, she'll land a shot before he gets out of range.

No witnesses. No survivors.

There's no way of knowing what if anything they communicated to the PRT. But the no witnesses part she can do. Plus, free mover power.

Good enough. That'll help with getting back to the car.

She'll have to think about where to go next. This expedition proved... unexpectedly fruitful. She wants more powers. And she needs a place to work with the tinker for a while.

Those goals are at least partly opposed. The main constraint on working with the tinker power is going to be the Protectorate, or maybe even unusually observant villains. Going somewhere smaller with less parahuman activity can buy time easily enough but also means fewer powers to steal.

She has, let's see... ten shades now. That's probably enough to be going on with for the moment. Once the machines get set up, they can be sort of self-sustaining, so it'd be a good idea to get that rolling first. Somewhere smaller it is.

Geography's up to her too— anywhere close and the PRT is that much more likely to recognize the robots as the Eagleton machines.

She's always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. She'll head westward, and see if she comes across any good prospects.

Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas... there's any number of prospects across the country. Serious cape towns are few and far between, but plenty of places have two or three locals and a tiny PRT office. Aiming for closer to the second category, it could mean almost anywhere in the lower population density states. If she does research in advance she could basically pick a number for how many targets she wants.

She gets back to her car. It's dark again. No sign of any rangers, so she takes a quick nap, then sets out, gets on the interstate.

When she stops for gas the next day, she also pays a visit to the town's library. Not big, but it has a few computers with Internet. She skims the Parahumans Wiki, looking for capes that are based in the Kansas-Oklahoma-Colorado-New Mexico area. Anyone really interesting is probably going to be at a big city, but she might find something anyway.

There's uninteresting and then there's uninteresting. A lot of parahumans are limited less by what their powers can do than by their personalities or their neuroses or their circumstances—problems their shades wouldn't have. Reading between the lines, a small-time villain on the Kansas-Oklahoma border is probably in that category. Extremely destructive short-range blasts of chaos, the unofficial wiki describes it, losing control if she gets stressed. Which happens easily. Has a habit of monologuing about her own greatness even though her villainous career usually just involves stealing necessities. She fails miserably whenever she tries to make it in the serious cape scene, but not because of a weak power.

The town of twenty thousand includes a handful of other capes. Two part-time heroes whose (non-emergency) hero work consists of working with nearby police departments on ordinary crimes and foiling the local villain occasionally. One has a very short term master power, the other selectively penetrable three-dimensional force fields. The last is a rogue who uses the sensory component of her shaker power to detect gas or oil. A nobody by the standards of the more combative cape scene.

Looks promising. She'll start there. She clears the browser history and logs off the computer.

She can get a room for the night when she gets to the town, and look for an abandoned warehouse space or similar to set up in the next day.

The town is actually doing pretty well economically. There are probably some empty buildings to be found with effort but they're not on every corner or anything.

If she wants to take over one of the Endbringer shelters, that'd be...aggressive, but a hard target to dislodge her from.

Well. It's not as though they are in active use at the moment, is it?

One would suit her purposes. Already hardened, limited approaches, out of the public eye. Is there anything set up to stop her from taking it?

Directly, no. It'd be too much to hope for that no one would notice her at all, but she doesn't even need it unlocked.

Unlike some coastal cities that would be likely targets for Leviathan, or large cities that would be slow to evacuate, they aren't expecting to have to hide the entire population. But there are a few giant bunkers; places engaged in energy production are at slightly elevated risk of Behemoth.

Big enough to set up in. This works. Any insights from her tinker about security/surveillance systems?

Outside the shade's purview, mostly. It can tell her that if there are, nothing looks like it works on the same principles as its machine soldiers. But looking with regular eyes or cameras turns up no security other than lots of really thick walls.

Then she will start production here, and deal with problems as they arise.

First she needs eyes on the town. Cameras. Drones to deliver them. A monitoring station.

The tinker shade doesn't tell her how to build those things; it tells her how to build things that will. It fills her head with plans that are hard or impossible to execute, and suggests shortcuts and substitutions to make it manageable. She'll need resources. And the power wants her operating at an industrial scale, but the Eagleton tinker got started somehow. That's probably not mandatory.

She's not able to operate industrially right now, nor does she want to. Provoking another quarantine would be less than optimal. Overwhelm, not annihilate.

There are fewer options for small scales and quantities. The shade remembers making autonomous helper drones to inspect the assembly lines? There were never very many of those, and they could be modified for spying probably...

Seems like roughly analogous skillsets. She'll try to put some of them together.