the place to be

[point_b]

Bella finds it.

"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."

"You c'mere. Easier for you."

"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."

"Okay, fine, where are you?"

"Garage."

So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.

"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."

"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."

"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.

Nothing happens.

The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

"Hmm. I don't actually have any fixing-things magic myself, so I'm not sure it would be wise..."

[thinkering]

"It ought to last for years, I didn't mean to imply that tinkertech falls apart at the drop of a hat. If your fine control is really good and you have a memory to match, I can just make it almost entirely out of metal and you can hold it in place if it tries to snap?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, that's a good point. My fine control is excellent, but I'm not sure on what scale you're talking...I did this bracelet," she shows it to her. The detailing is really intricate and some of the details are small enough to be difficult to make out. "But I can't, say, pull the iron out of a piece of liver. Yet."

[thinkering]

"I'm not expecting to incorporate liver into the design. Uh, I could make a mockup but I don't have my computer, still, and it's sort of hard to just describe what I'm thinking without something to actually interact with."

[iamnotpolaris]

"And for a wide variety of reasons the solution we use when I have that problem won't work."

[thinkering]

"What?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I show Edie and she shows the other person. That won't work because you can't let her see what you're thinking and wouldn't even if you could."

[thinkering]

"Well, I might if she could just nip in and take the design schematic such as it currently is with nothing else, but I don't deny it would be freaky and I can't turn off my thinker power."

[point_b]

"I'm curious about all these classifications you keep alluding to."

[thinkering]

"Mover, Shaker,
Brute and Breaker.
Master, Tinker,
Blaster, Thinker,
Striker, Changer,
Trump and Stranger," recites Lorica. "May or may not be named to rhyme neatly. They're not exactly natural categories; Tinkers come closest to that. They're more like tactical guidelines for if you have to fight them. Loosely: capes who can get around quickly, vertically, or otherwise unusually; battlefield control powers; strong and/or tough people; capes who break laws of physics around themselves, especially if they only do it in certain modes or 'states'; capes who control other stuff to do their bidding, whether 'stuff' is created or collected from the environment or other people; tinkers have been explained; capes who do projectiles or laserbeams or whatever; precogs and hypercogs and me because it would be even sillier to call me a trump; capes with touch-range powers; shapeshifty stuff; power-affecting powers; and infiltration-friendly powers."

[whatamithinking]

"So I'd be...master, thinker or stranger, I guess."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Definitely shaker."

[thinkering]

"I mean, some of that winds up depending on your actual in-practice tactics as understood to whoever's doing the rating. General-purpose telepathy could be any or all of those, depending on whether you use it to control people, collect intel, or make them think you're not there while you stroll into a high-security facility. Could also be trump if you turn off other people's powers with it somehow. Metal control could be shaker if you warp buildings to inconvenience people, but you could use it as a blaster or brute power if you flung coins at people's heads or made yourself armor. Plus you can fly, that's a mover rating."

[iamnotpolaris]

She makes an inscrutable face at "flung coins at people's heads."

"Oh, I see, I thought it was an either-or thing. And I'm not likely to warp buildings, but I have been known to fill the air with flying metal on occasion. I do make myself armor...I seem to be something of a jack of all trades as far as your system's concerned."

[thinkering]

"Well, not all trades, nobody could call you a changer, but yeah, it's not one category and that's it. I'm a thinker - my rating is literally zero, but that's because the numbers are based on how threatening you are to a squad of trained unpowered people, not how dangerous you are to someone who relies totally on a power I'm immune to, and my thinker power is passive defense - and also a tinker. And depending on what I build I get sub-ratings. My current kit comes with mover and master and brute ratings because I can jump off buildings and I bring little robots everywhere I go and I'm stronger and tougher armored up."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Makes sense."

[whatamithinking]

"Whether I count as a master when facing trained unpowered people depends entirely on how much harm they intend to do to me or anyone else I'd rather not see harmed."

[thinkering]

"Then whether you get a Master rating would depend on whether the PRT ever hears of you facing off against someone who wished to do relevant levels of harm. These aren't the final word in what your power Truly Is, this is what a squad leader yells at the people with the containment foam and tranquilizers so they know whether to take cover or get distance or make sure they keep visual contact or run the fuck away."

[whatamithinking]

"Aha."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"What's containment foam?" Marie asks.

[thinkering]

"What it sounds like. Acceptably breathable, rapid-stiffening foam stuff that can be sprayed at parahumans. Won't do much useful to people who control stuff through purely mental actions and don't need line of sight. A lot of capes it works just fine, though, spray it at 'em and take them to jail."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Is that a tinker thing, or just normal engineering?" Marie wonders.

[thinkering]

"I'm not actually sure. It's in sufficiently ubiquitous use that if it ever was Tinker-made somebody has certainly figured out how to mass-produce it."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Huh. Hey, Bar, are instructions on how to make this stuff saleable?"

[alicornucopia]

The recipe is too classified. The substance itself I can sell.