Bella learns who her daddy is when she's six.

That is, she learns who else her daddy is. She already knew he was Charlie, the guy who pulls over the other kids' parents when they speed and can flash a badge to make people stand down if they make awful scenes in service establishments threatening to call the cops. She already knew he was Charlie, who likes fishing and Renée's macaroni-with-ground-beef and Bella's doodles. She already knew he was Charlie, who brought her to Disneyland and buys her all the notebooks she wants even when her handwriting's so big she fills them up in scarce weeks and calls her "Bells".

When Bella's six, she finds the trapdoor in her parents' closet, subtle seam in the carpet and hinges hidden under shoeboxes, and opens it up, and there is a costume she recognizes from TV. Helmet and armored leather in royal blue and a dotted line in white down each arm.

Okay, so her dad isn't Eidolon or Legend or anything, but Transit is still a superhero, a cool one. He can teleport. He's got a wide threat-response range, since he can go so far so fast, and he's evacuated hundreds of people from all kinds of disasters and he fights bad guys.

Mostly in a support role, but that's okay. It means he's not the main target and he is still alive after years of heroing.

Bella plants a kiss on the hidden helmet and then closes the trap door and goes to tell her parents that she found it.

They tell her she must keep it a secret; they were going to tell her soon, but even though she found out by mistake she mustn't let anyone know that Transit is Charlie and Charlie is Transit.

Bella nods.

She carefully excises her habit of calling him by name when she's talking about his secret identity, and she avoids talking about Transit at all, lest she call him "Daddy".

Sometimes she pretends she's a superhero, one who can fly, one who's invincible, one with the highest Thinker rating of all time who can just notice that problems exist and flick her fingers just so and watch everything settle into not-problems. She'd call herself Pinnacle. Or something. But she likes the sound of it.

-

Bella sees an Endbringer up close when she's fourteen.

The Simurgh is screaming a song. It's awful in its own right, calculated to set up expectations as though it were music and then subvert them. That is not the worst thing. Bella would listen to it for a year solid to get away from the knock-on effects. Because her leg is broken, and the piece of rubble that's trapping her is too big for her to move, and she inhaled too much kicked-up dust for the evac teams to hear her weak shouts. And now she's the only non-cape in the song's radius, and she can't get away.

Her mom must be frantic. This was supposed to be a nice just-girls trip to San Diego - Mom has always liked warm climates, even if she tolerates Brockton Bay since Transit was moved to their Protectorate chapter - and Mom is already out, Mom went to get her hair done and would have been evacuated, and Bella stayed at the hotel to sleep in and then Bella went out to take a walk.

And now she's stuck and the evac team couldn't find her and the Simurgh's taken out all the cell towers and her leg fucking hurts and Ziz won't stop singing -

And if Bella doesn't get out of here in the next three minutes and change, her best case scenario will be a life of acausal obscurity, affecting nothing, living on her dad's insurance money and watching television and sleeping, because everyone knows if you're in the Simurgh's audience for too long you aren't fit to work, write, live, you'll blow something up, give the wrong person the wrong idea, set in motion something horrible.

The song wears on. Bella's crying, helplessly, choking inaudible curse words at her leg and the Simurgh and the entire world.

Two minutes, fifty seconds.

A life of nothing. Best case scenario, nothing, nothing, nothing: dissipation, uselessness, filling time with activities that have no effect beyond the walls of her room, if she twitches wrong after this people will die. For all she knows they've struck the balance of risk wrong and it would be better for her to die now, even though she still has, in theory - she checks her phone again.

Two minutes, forty seconds.

Her phone still has juice. Just not bars. She tried 911 already; whatever safeguards supposedly make that keep working when all else fails are not in operation either.

Come on. Come on. Brain's trustworthy for another two and a half minutes. What do I fucking have.

Phone with no signal and some battery. She can reach the junk on the ground for a few feet around her if she stretches and ignores her leg: discarded Pepsi can, assorted bits of plastic, torn shoelace, stripped bolt, filthy torn t-shirt, someone lost their eyeglass repair kit -

Two minutes and twenty seconds and it's time to try something. Bella doesn't know where this idea came from or whether there's a hope in hell it'll accomplish anything, but for two minutes and twenty seconds she can afford to try things, and she tips the little screwdriver into her hand and cracks the phone's case open and starts reconnecting the wires.

If Transit's near enough to get her in the next two minutes, five seconds, he needs to know where she is.

He operates on a kind of radar, right? Not enough to use it for anything but navigating while he teleports, but when he lands in a place he has a loose sense of object positioning, for just an instant, can tell how far he got in the hop. Phones use radio, too, right? She doesn't need a cell tower if she knows exactly where she needs to aim the signal - right at her dad's sensory secondary power - if she just targets it precisely enough -

One minute, fifteen seconds.

She shocks herself, dropping the wire she tore out of her headband, tries again.

One minute - ish. The phone's screen has gone dark and all its buttons are locked up. She can't keep time anymore. If the Simurgh would stick to a single damn beat she could use the song as a timepiece -

The song's still going.

(Bella's rewiring step is completed. She yanks the pull tab off the soda can and pinches it into shape until her fingers are bleeding, wedges it in.)

The song's still going and she's - only as annoyed as if someone were singing those notes. Some human. Some unpowered ordinary human singing a terrible song.

It's not fucking with her head anymore.

It's just terrible music.

(Thirty seconds. Ish. She twists the pull tab, drops the stripped bolt into place so it'll form the last connection she needs to wire in -)

Her phone makes an ungodly screaming noise, like everything has gone wrong with it at the same time, and some part of Bella's brain notes that if she wants to replicate this effect without the audio emissions on top of the radio she'll need at least a pair of goddamn pliers.

Maybe he got the signal.

She grabs the disgusting T-shirt and pulls it over her face; if he's near enough to have gotten it, he's near enough to be working on the Simurgh response, he'll be wearing one of Dragon's armbands to monitor the action, and Bella just spent two minutes rewiring a phone to do something it was not even slightly designed to do and the Simurgh barely bothers her anymore, so she thinks ahead a little, doesn't want to be 'unmasked' before she's ever masked.

Ten seconds. Transit appears, some yards away, and at that point it's not worth taking chances on his uncontrolled distance with another jump. He breaks into a run.

A second, maybe, and he grabs her hand in his, and she's trapped under a rock but that doesn't matter because all he has to do is be theoretically capable of supporting her weight to take her along.

The air pressure changes six times in rapid succession, and Bella's leg hurts more with the rock not on it any more but the singing is gone and Transit's hugging her tight to his chest and saying "kiddo" -

He couldn't call her "Bells" anyway, not while he's in costume, to say nothing of her, but he must have figured it out too.

She's going to need a new name.

-

She doesn't call herself "Pinnacle". That was for a six-year-old's idea of an omnipotent benevolent mirror of the Simurgh. She can't fly, for one thing - yet - and she certainly can't see causality and how to flick her fingers just so.

She does, technically, have the highest Thinker rating of all time, and it's almost a joke. They don't know what else to do with someone who managed to shut down her emotional reaction to the Simurgh's song, and it does a few more things, too, Bella wears one of her dad's old cracked helmets as a temporary identity-concealing measure and proves herself immune to all the Strangers and the one person-affecting Master they test her with. Definitely either a Thinker or a Trump, and they settle on Thinker because her power is so utterly passive. And they do believe her - Transit makes them believe her - that it applied to Ziz too. If you can block the Simurgh's psychic attack, that's an automatic 12.

They take longer to settle on her Tinker rating. She has to build a portfolio and figure out her specialty before it comes clear.

She gets a cast on her leg and she signs up with the Wards and they give her a workshop and she sits there in Dad's old helmet. (She could unmask to the Wards, if she wanted. They're going to be her team. Dad's friends on the Protectorate already know who he is, and Bella has three candidates who've been to her house for dinner who might be heroes. But she'd rather wait until she knows them better. And she's barely talking to them, yet. "Just triggered, lots of tinkering to do" is a pretty good excuse for building herself all the armor she needs to feel safe again.)

The first thing she needs is a cure for her clumsiness. Something to mitigate it so she doesn't knock all her expensive tools and materials (thank you, Protectorate) onto the floor. Something to cover it up so she isn't identifiable. Her first pass is just jitter compensators, to juke left when she suddenly jukes right and vice-versa, around her wrists and knees and ankles, and this goes a long way. It's a stopgap, but the more sophisticated options are going to take longer and her next priority is data security.

Notebooking isn't going to cut it; she started ciphering when she found out that her dad was Transit, but that was a weak measure to compensate for the negligible probability that someone would try to read a child's thoughts without first finding out who her father was. Now she's a superheroine - or will be, anyway - in her own right; unauthorized people are liable to want her schematics, she might acquire enemies who want her identity independent of Transit's, and nothing she can do to a piece of paper will make it safe to put secrets on it. So she builds herself a fancy little computer.

In the course of putting it together, she figures out her specialty, almost by accident. The plans come together - on paper, just this once - and the design that coalesces for her turns out not to have a keyboard. Or a mouse. Its screen isn't even a touchscreen. It's bristling with sensors - it's going to know more about its environment than humans know about theirs - but not controls. She can't even come up with a way to build an on/off switch unless she borrows from other designs. (Access to Dragon's stuff, score.)

This limitation lives in her head, even if it's not quite original to her head, so she can pick it apart.

She does contingencies. If-then setups, independently acting tech that reacts to conditions with programmed responses.

When she has that figured out, she comes at the computer plans with a better understanding, incorporates a keyboard after all, and has the thing built in a day and a half (not counting a four-day wait for some parts) and over the next two weeks writes it an OS that's architected entirely around her specialty. She's barely going to have to tell the machine to do anything, although she'll still have to supply things to do it to (text, images, all manner of data). It's an elaborate software Rube Goldberg machine with branching paths.

And once she has a suitable environment to draw up her plans in, she works on a suit.

She wants to come up with one for Transit first, but the Wards are breathing down her neck about publicizing her existence, and for that she needs a non-temporary mask and a cape name. So she builds herself better anti-clumsiness swag: a little metal clamp dug into the back of her neck under the skin (it pinches, for just a moment, then stops) and little bead-shaped receivers in all the big joints, six in each wrist for fine subdivided control of the fingers and wrist rotation all at once.

Her leg heals and the cast comes off. She dabs the insertion scars with makeup and resumes school. Ninth grade is her first year at Arcadia High, and nobody there knows her well enough to find her ability to walk without tripping suspicious. She doesn't do anything obtrusive in public, like dance or turn cartwheels.

There's a code to make the school handicapped elevator go down to a tunnel that leads to the Wards headquarters. The tunnel has lockers in it to store costumes. Bella goes through it every afternoon after school, and dons the helmet, and works on the suit.

It's steel-blue jointed plates, with cunning nooks and crannies to hide gadgets in when she builds them. Without add-on gadgets, the suit still amplifies the feedback from her anti-clumsiness beads; in it she's faster and stronger. There's enough underlying structure to it that she doesn't have to support all of its heaviness, and she carefully keeps the total mass down so that she doesn't exceed Transit's carrying capacity in full kit. (Even antigrav wouldn't help. He doesn't have to actually support passenger weight, he has to be capable of doing so, and antigrav doesn't change mass.) She caps it off with a helmet, smooth and with a tinted pane for later HUD installation.

She puts on the whole thing for the first time a little over a month after she triggered.

She introduces herself properly to her teammates (they've been calling her "new girl" and "Transit's kid" and "the tinker who hasn't picked a name").

She calls herself "Lorica".