That's okay, out of the smoke she can recruit her drones to help her out and coordinate with her team. The bot alerts the nearest hospitals to make sure they know where their antivenin is.

The Undersiders manage to get away in the aftermath, Grue's darkness obscuring exactly where they disappeared too. No one ends up actually getting bitten.

Lucien reports that one of the dogs they fought was wearing a harness with empty bags on it, and as far as they can tell the Undersides never got the chance load up those bags with cash. Easily twice as much could have been stolen. No one was captured, but their also weren't any fatalities and they learned a lot more about the Undersiders then they did before. He calls it a middling success, though most of the wards don't seem to agree. 

"Hey, you holding up okay after your first fight?" Lucien asks Lorica later, after he's gotten a chance to debrief with Piggot and then the team.

"I'm not hurt, though I have a lot of repairs to make. Not as many as I was worried about, dead bugs jammed but didn't fry my drones and I can just clean one of them and have it clean the others. I feel like probably we collectively approached the situation somewhat stupidly but I'll wait for you to tell me what we ought to have done instead."

Lucien wearily takes a seat.

"I assumed the Undersiders would stick with their normal tactics and be aiming to sneak out, and didn't adapt well when they attacked us head on instead."

"In retrospect, we should have backed away once it was clear they had still had teammates in the building and didn't have any cash on them - there wasn't a good reason to engage them right there. And once we realized Panacea was in the building I should have checked on how dangerous the black widow venom was and reassessed how dangerous things were for the hostages."

"The bot checked that, it'd be painful but recoverable with antivenin - bot told the hospitals to get theirs ready. Didn't seem obviously worth the comms chatter, should I revise?"

"Probably? It would have changed how willing I was to send Glory Girl in if it seemed like there wasn't unacceptable risk to sudden escalation. I didn't actually look up the black widow venom info until after the fight, when ambulances were coming in and I was figuring out how worried to be about any spiders that got left behind."

"Overall you handled yourself great and kept a really delicate situation from escalating out of control. Doing that with one villain is difficult enough, doing it with three on your first time in a fight is grounds for a raise in your tinker budget. Which you're getting by the way."

"Oh, sweet. I did have a question, which was did it make tactical sense for me to get in the way of that dog - you don't look heavily armored, should you maybe wear more gear? -"

"You made the right call. My costume is tough enough to take a stray bullet but I typically value moving fast, so I can get behind someone better equipped to take a bullet then me. Though since that's only two people on the team right now I should probably reassess. Part of the reason I was able to get Piggot to approve the budget increase was because we don't actually have enough heavy hitters at the moment and you seem flexible enough to fill that gap."

"I'm making my dad a suit. I don't think most people would get along well with my suits, unfortunately. I can make some bigger bots, too, but my top priority right now is actually getting them some kind of reckoning that works through that dark smoke stuff."

"Seems like you're the one best equipped to make that sort of call. Though right now only Shadow Stalker has a good way of dealing with Skitter - that's what we're calling the bug girl - and I can't trust her in tense situations by herself like I can you." 

"Yeah, I'm thinking in parallel about solutions for being covered in bugs. I'm gonna get some of the oxygen pucks they use in airplanes for if I have to spend a long time without air intake, and maybe run a current through my scales, repel them by static and zap them if they land anyway."

"Oh neat, though you'll have to be careful of touching Shadow Stalker, her shadow state doesn't take kindly to electricity."

"The bot will take that into account. - I don't directly control practically any suit features, power doesn't work if I try to make it too manual."

"Huh, that sounds disorienting."

"It works fine for me but it's why I shouldn't just make all our guys suits."

"And upkeep time, I'd assume?"

"Yes, though that's less of a problem for me than it is for the average Tinker, since I can make robots that can do a lot of the basics."

"My impression is that given enough time and resources Tinkers are upper-bounded by how much tech they can do maintenance for. Is that ceiling higher for you?"

"Oh yeah. Even staying well clear of outright self-replicating tech, my bots are good for it."

"Do you have a timeline worked out for your tech buildup?"

"A tentative one! Obviously I have to expect that sometimes I will have new priorities inserting themselves high in the stack."

"Yeah, frustrating how that gets in the way of longterm gains for heroes so often. Uh. I don't know if it's private but I'd love to see anything you have on a timeline, even if it's tentative."

SHORT TERM (COMBAT READINESS):
Sensors/comms routing around smoke
Drone repairs (4/12)
Suit repairs (40%)
Power synergy testing?

MEDIUM TERM (COMBAT READINESS):
Suit upgrade (bug management, air system tweaks)
Increase flock size (12/24)
Larger combat bots (design)

SHORT TERM (NONCOMBAT):
Complete Transit suit mk 1
Complete Transit pathing software
Overhaul assembly station
Refine algorithm in [REDACTED]

MEDIUM TERM (NONCOMBAT):
Add routine for [REDACTED]
Push update to jitter compensators
Troubleshoot subserver 7 uptime
Improve Internet interfacing starting at comment block ""WHY DO I STILL HAVE TO SLEEP""
[REDACTED]

LONG TERM:
[REDACTED]
Overhaul assembly station more than that
[REDACTED]
Flight speed improvement

Schedules!

"How far in the future is long term?"