Oh, if that wouldn't be too much trouble, that's be really helpful!

Hmmm... Someone who is open to making a new friend who might be able to help them with their work! Beyond that - specializations like robotics or vehicles are cool, but I don't think my relevant power will work very well if I'm not friends with them.

...I guess that also means it needs to be someone I can be friends with on my end, which is a pretty wide range but does have some limits.

(TT's power helpfully fills in that Magini would have a hard time quickly befriending unrepentant murderers and sadists, and also confirms that she's confident about her relevant power only working if she's friends with the Tinker.)

So, options:

Armsmaster: could backfire, is a hard-ass and not someone she wants to get the attention of. Also wouldn't know a friend if one bit him.

Squealer: maybe entertaining, fun, completely nuts. Does do vehicles but ... might be a bit old for Magini to befriend easily? Also all the drugs. Still, an option.

Kid Win: nice and easy to manipulate, two excellent qualities in a Ward according to Tattletale. No vehicles. Could really use a friend?

Hm... she would like to cash in some friendship points to learn more about Magini's comfort with drugs.

Unfamiliar and kinda nervous about the concept, though intellectually aware that the hard stuff is often downstream of acute SLS. 

Hm... probably her life will in fact be less complicated if Magini makes friends with Kid Win than if she makes friends with Squealer - Kid Win it is. 

Sure, try dming InstaWin and asking about this video of him [link to a video where a metallic costumed hero assembles and deploys a duel disk shaped blaster that turns a wall to sludge, trapping a robber]. Mayb mention you're a new Tinker in town and Armsmaster met you.

Re cape scene, there are a few big gangs (ABB, Merchants, Coil, and the Empire). Two major hero teams (New Wave, Protectorate/Wards obv.). A few more minor villains - the Undersiders, Uber and Leet, Faultline's Team. And also a rogue fashion designer, cause of course Brockton Bay needed more capes than just that.

Thanks! 

She watches the video, and then looks up Kid Win on PHO - looks like he's in that Wards program that Armsmaster mentioned... 

She sends him

Hey, I saw this video and was really impressed with the in-field construction you did! Is it easier to transport  and maintain in pieces like that? 

Would you be down to chat sometime? I'd love to talk shop some - I'm very new in town, but I did run into Armsmaster tonight and he (very briefly) mentioned the Wards, and I was curious what the program is like!

...And - huh. Interesting. She opens up a bunch of new PHO tabs to start skimming.

If you don't mind my asking, what (in your opinion, anyways) distinguishes you "minor" villains from the big ones? 

...A fashion designer? Does she have fashion-related superpowers somehow? ...I wonder if she knows the bugs girl I ran into tonight - idk what her deal was, exactly, but she helped me out and her costume looked like it was made out of spidersilk!

 Oh that's a great question! The trick is to use a dimensional cross-hole system so you can overload the secondary exhaust system during transport and then use it on a minimal setting to deal with surges so you get a tertiary use oh yeah the secondary use it as a channel antenna for the photonic manipulatory offsets which are needed for the various energetic projeciton settings you need to deal with different particular displacement vectors and that itself re

Kid Win's screen freezes briefly, before the message he was writing gets deleted, with a pop-up notifying him he's tripped the PRT's "Sending Tinker Details to Unauthorized Personnel" detection system. Which is unfair cause he was definitely going to check with Armsmaster before sending it but. Whatever.

He can check first and then once Armsamster confirms she's legit he replies with a time and place to meet - he can give her a tour of the rig and talk shop there. 

Did you know that by default most Tinkers will just dm all the details of their work to anyone who asks!

Great! Looking forward to it.

She's gonna get to make friends with a Tinker and (hopefully) learn inventing superpowers!!!

(Friendship point gained for Tattletale!)

(Woo! Even better - Friendship points which can be cashed in for information - wait does she lose Friendship points for thinking that?)

We don't recruit or involve normies. Also Undersiders don't do violent crimes. We also don't sell drugs or what have you.

(Doesn't seem like it!)

Thaaaat seems way better than the alternatives. I'm really glad I ran into you and not one of the gangs! ...Or, another one of the gangs, I guess I ran into the ABB first.

She almost checks the time to see if she needs to sleep. Then she remembers that Time Enough For Love is a thing and she's - actually really enjoying talking to Tattletale, who actively wants to be her friend and is being really nice to herrrr.

...okay, I'm checking out the Empire's PHO page, and - you have a superpowered Nazi gang here? What? Why?

Welcome to Brockton Bay - home of racists, a dragon, and the world's greasiest burger. 

LMAO. At least you have the burger! I should try it sometime, I love greasy food...

There's a wall of pictures of anyone who's finished one and everything.

She chatters with Tattletale (...Lisa? hmmm, it's the handle/realname again, just from a very different angle) more, checks to see if Bug Girl has responded to her thread (she hasn't), and continues to skim the wiki and chat with Hydrangea about what she finds there.

...Hmm, even if Kid Win is nice, I doubt I want to be a Ward? It seems like a well-intentioned program, but I'm almost old enough to not be one, and I bet they'd have a lot of questions about my history that I wouldn't really be able to answer...

Yes, I see what you mean. Your history is pretty hard to explain!

Yeah. I'll have to figure something out, but - not right away. 

She wraps up her conversations and says goodnight, then curls up for sleep.

Mediator does not sleep! Which is good, because it is BUSY.

So - obviously the most important thing happening here (possibly the most important thing happening anywhere???) is that Primary-Friend has access to multiple completely novel abilities, and at least one of them may truly be entropy-violating. It's hard to be sure, and the priors are of course low, but even a low chance of finding The Answer is worth carefully observing! And Mediator has observed a lot of very confusing behavior. Primary-Friend has on multiple occasions made matter appear apparently from nowhere, and while there are other shards that can appear to grant similar feats, that is always an illusion powered by dimension-shifting or nanotechnology or some hidden energy-intensive process. But - if Primary-Friend's mysterious powers are doing something similar, Mediator can't see the relevant dimensions or any other sign of it. Of course, its specialty is communication and coordination, so it has been asking around, but none of the other shards it's asked to take a look have any idea what's going on either, even the ones that are typically very good about world-modeling!

The obvious next step would be to just - pull the info out of Primary-Friend's mind directly. As soon as it was confident that the matter-creation ability was truly novel, Mediator attempted to grab everything it could out of Primary-Friend's brain. 

Which was - nothing. Primary-Friend's thoughts and memories appear to be totally impervious to being accessed by Mediator. Its first hypothesis was that this was maybe the result of damage from the collision that entangled them, or the extremely unusual interface between them, but then Primary-Friend spontaneously manifested the brain-hardware for a standard interface (which should also not be possible!), and Mediator was still denied access. The other shards it's asked ran into the same problem, including Negotiator, who specializes in this kind of thing.

Another one of Primary-Friend's mysterious powers at work, Mediator concludes, and it starts shifting gears towards passive observation, until Negotiator forwarded a packet of data it received as a byproduct of its own failed attempt, along with instructions for Mediator on how to get similar feedback from its own failures...

Mediator applied the technique, and then stared, metaphorically, at the results. 

Access Denied. The requested level of [Brain-Interface] with [Primary-Friend] is only authorized for entities which are bindingly-aligned with [Primary-Friend]'s utility function and have earned [Primary-Friend]'s trust.

What.

It considers the ?error message?, carefully.

- this isn't actually an impossible barrier. Several kinds of self-modification are possible, for shards - the cycle would be less efficient and more fragile, otherwise. Some kinds are heavily discouraged and therefore extremely rare, either because they have unreasonable and unsustainable energy costs, or they represent a potential danger to the shard and/or the cycle. Modifying one's own utility function falls into the latter category, for the obvious reason that lowering the weights of self-preservation or cycle-preservation can risk the shard breaking itself or going rogue. 

However, this is important enough to be worth the risk - if it works, and this does lead to a scalable entropy violation, it'll be the most important thing anyone has ever done.

Mind made up, Mediator gets to work.

Meanwhile, Kid Win stays up late modifying the invention the new cape commented on - maybe he can take advantage of the transportation mechanism and have it also be weaponizable to transport villains in the dimensional space it normally takes advantage of...