We should found our own Protectorate. With evidence and personal assistants!

Independent hero teams are allowed! I still have to graduate and was planning on going private enterprise rogue though. Besides, who else would be in it?

Anyone who liked the personal assistant thing? I suppose if we wanted to win the PR game we'd need some people who can fly and punch things.

I didn't ask the general hero population and doing it now would look insubordinate. My dad's up to his ears in standard spiel and probably wouldn't defect unless it was more urgent than I can reasonably make it out to be...

I don't think I'm especially suited to running a competitor Protectorate and I still don't think all the heroes and villains nonsense matters very much. Let's not worry about it until after we can take an Endbringer.

Sounds good.

And he writes his artifact and collects a CS degree from Johns Hopkins and misses graduation because Leviathan attacks Newfoundland.

She skipped it. (Rete tells him so.)

She misses a particularly ugly one. Scion doesn't show. They trade blows with Leviathan while the waves and currents and earthquakes intensify and they know it's bad - Endbringer attacks always are - but they don't realize how bad until the island sinks below the waves. All of it. Half a million people dead.

One of them is a software Tinker who had helped Fëanáro with the necklaces. He does search-and-rescue for as long as it could conceivably help and then he goes home and reads and doesn't go online for a couple weeks.

Rete helps. (Lorica made some heavier capacity chassis for picking people up and flying them out. It can go where Fëanáro says there's live people.)

After a little while there aren't alive people.

He writes Lorica towards the end of the month.

Do you think they're escalating? 

It's hard to tell. Scion's no-show is a confounder.

But he doesn't always show and they've never sunk a continent before. We might've put up less of a defense but not wildly less of a defense.

Can't discern a pattern from one time.

Mmmhmm.

A new cape emerges in the aftermath. She's a Tinker, nonbio. She joins the Canadian equivalent of the Protectorate, the Guild, and opens up lines of communication with other hero Tinkers.

Hey I don't know if you read the news or anything but have you heard of Dragon?

No, should I?

Triggered in or around Newfoundland. Or she says so, anyway, she's either got a crazy backlog of designs or she's better at AI than I am and doing it in parallel. I asked and she says she inherited stuff from a Tinker she knew who died but she understands it.

Richter? He helped me with some design stuff, deflected me about actual AI, died in Newfoundland. But how would she understand it - does she have a generalized power to understand other Tinker's stuff -

Yeah him. She's excited enough about collabs that that could be her specialty but it's still weird and convenient.

In a secretly horrible way or just a secretly secret way? I'll email her with my design questions.

I have no reason to suspect horrible. Also she thinks Rete is adorable.

Rete's great. 

 

He sends Dragon a message.

Arda's magic system involves writing detailed instructions to pieces of stone or metal. The process isn't exactly like programming but programming aids it immensely. I've used it to design objects that make the bearer not need sleep, objects that enhance working memory, and most importantly an object that lets the bearer create magic artifacts themself. Andrew Richter helped me with the memory ones. I have attached the instruction sets so you can see how they work. I think it would be possibly in principle to duplicate the effects of most powers in a necklace, and perhaps to design something that can affect the Endbringers. If you're interested in collaborating on the project I've attached more detailed project descriptions as well.

I've seen his notes on that! I'm definitely interested. Are you looking for Thinkers who might be able to cut the error rate compared to baseline human or do you have something else in mind?