Tree Of Life [Worm SI, Yet another CYOA Fic]

[anechoic]

I figured I'd get in on the fun and make a Worm SI of my own. This is unbeta'd and only minimally checked over, so please alert me if I've made any errors. Any volunteers to beta future chapters would be greatly appreciated as well...

---

PROLOGUE

It was a fairly normal night really, drinking a bit, playing computer games with far-flung friends, listening to some music, generally enjoying myself. As often happens given my high tolerance and fucked up sleep cycle, I found myself awake after all others had crashed, more than a little tipsy. I'd already read all the latest updates to the stories I was following at the time and it was past the point in the night when any further gaming would be enjoyable, so I was seriously contemplating brushing my teeth, drinking a bit of water to keep myself from being hung-over the next day and turning in for the night when my phone chimed and the alert box in my browser flashed; someone had sent me an email.


Figuring that it probably wouldn't delay my sleep too much unless it was something important, I decided it was worth my time to check it out before crashing and clicked through. IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ, read the subject line. The sender was Q@continu.um. Clever. It occurred to me that I'd never heard of a .um domain before, but I figured it was probably one of those rarely used TLDs that you could get for cheap or the national domain of some obscure (probably 3rd world) country, and in any event, buzzed as I was I could well have seen it before and just forgotten.


The message was pretty straightforward

Hey, I found this: imgur.com/a/CaVa4 recently, and I was wondering what you'd choose, if you

were going to be doing it for real, first thing tomorrow morning...


Toodles,

~Q

Click to shrink...

Clicking through to the picture, I found that ridiculously overpowered CYOA that had been spawning a metric fuckton of fics on the SB/QQ/SV trinity recently. Hadn't a lot of those stories started with basically this exact same scenario...? Being emailed the CYOA and asked to choose, before getting dumped into the worm-verse with whatever powers, perks and complications you'd picked?


I couldn't remember if my email was publicly visible on any of those forums or not, but even if it wasn't my address is pretty much the same as my name there, so it wouldn't take too much effort to figure it out even if you couldn't find it there, so I wasn't too surprised that someone could have tracked it down to prank me like this, but considering I wasn't particularly close to anyone on any of the boards and that I lurk a lot more than I post I did kinda wonder who would be motivated enough to do it.


In any event, it wouldn't take very long to throw together I response before I went to bed and it wasn't like I was planning to do anything tomorrow so I figured I might as well respond. I mean, someone clearly cared enough to put in the effort, and I wasn't so flush with friends that I could afford to snub the efforts of someone who showed all the signs of wanting to become one.


I quickly started throwing putting a response. The type of run-through you were signing up for was an interesting choice, all three had their advantages and disadvantages. In the end though, Self Insert was the only option I could realistically take. Endbringer would make interacting with other people too much of a chore, and reincarnation would raise all sorts of ethical and practical issues I didn't want to touch with a 10-foot-pole. I mean, what happened to the person I overwrote? Who was gonna come out on top when our memories merged? What was I supposed to do with all the friends, family and other ties I'd suddenly usurped? No, much easier to come in as a blank slate.


As for difficulty, I've always been a fan of the phrase "Go big or go home.", so there were really only two options I could possibly pick, World Breaker or Skitter Mode. "Full power, total destruction!" Or maximum challenge. Anything else was a half-measure for the weak willed. I vacillated between the two for a while, but after flicking through the rest of the images in the CYOA to ballpark costs, I quickly realized that 12 points was just too damn much for me to spend. I'd always preferred my heroes to have a fairly narrow powerset so getting more than a couple of the powers available wasn't that appealing, especially considering how OP they all were. While there were several Perks that I considered more or less vital on the list, the rest were fairly 'meh' and some of the Complications were half-way to being perks in their own right as far as I was concerned. While some of the companions could have been interesting main characters in their own stories none of them really leapt out at me as especially useful given the scope of the powers you could get. Since I had an almost pathological aversion to leaving points unspent in this sort of scenario, this made my choice pretty easy: Skitter Mode it was.


For complications, I chose Marked (by the Empire 88), Leviathan and The Slaughterhouse is Hiring for a total of 7 points. I'd be a pretty piss poor leftist if I didn't go out of my way to beat down fascist-scum, so being marked by the E88 just meant that my punching bags would come to me, much easier than having to hunt them down on my own time. Likewise, if I was going to have to live on Earth Bet the 9 would be on my shortlist of people to kill, so having them come to me was just the mountain coming to Mohammed. I'd be inclined to show up for Endbringer fights anyway, so the Leviathan 'complication' just made sure that he'd show up wherever I was, and made it so I didn't have to worry about butterflying things to the extent that he hit a different city than he did in canon.


Complications decided upon, my powers were pretty simple to choose. Shaper and Inspired Inventor, since the only stories I'd seen than had either of those as a primary power were still in their infancy and the only other powers that appealed to me had either been done to death or were outside my scope of expertise. As for perks, I chose Blank, Shattered Limiter and Invictus. Blank was pretty much essential if you wanted to keep any kind of agency in the face of Simurgh plots or PTV bullshit, Shattered Limiter counteracted the immediate effects of Skitter Mode, provided immunity to trumps and ensured eventual god-hood if you could live long enough to see the growth of your abilities really start to pay dividends and Invictus made sure your puny mortal mind could stand up to the stress of your situation and prevented the first master you came across from turing you into a meat-puppet.


Satisfied with my response, I gave my reply a once-over and sent it off before leaving my computer, getting myself ready for bed and sleeping away what might well have been the last night I ever spent in my native dimension.

 

[anechoic]

Prologue: Look up!
Arc 1 - Seedling: (1.01)(1.02)(1.03)(1.04)(1.05)

Spoiler: Inspired Inventor Specialties

Programming: 1
Computer Security: 1
Algorithmic Trading: 1
Computers: 2
Biotech: 2
Nanotech: 2
Materials Science: 1
Excavation: 1
Architecture:1
Personal Transportation:1
Life Support Systems: 1
Cybernetics:1
Railguns:2
Power Storage: 2
Power Generation: 1

Spoiler: CYOA Choices

Difficulty: Skitter-mode
Mode: Self-Insert
Powers: Inspired Inventor and Shaper
Perks: Blank, Shattered Limiter, Invictus
Complications: Marked x1, The Slaughterhouse is Hiring, Leviathan

 

[anechoic]

Seedling
–
1.01


Upon awakening, it doesn't take me very long to realize that something has happened. Slightly chill air on my face when I should have been in my nice, warm bedroom. Damp pavement under me and rough brick at my back when I should have been lying in my bed. The feeling of being fully dressed in jeans, boots, a t-shirt a light hoodie and a knit hat on my head when I should have been in my sleep-clothes.


No, it's pretty obvious that strange things are afoot. My eyes snap open, revealing a grimy alleyway lit by the pale gray light of early spring or late winter. Or at least several feet of one, the rest is probably just more of the same but it's hard to tell because whoever dressed me up and dumped me here seems to have forgotten to grab my glasses, leaving me quite near-sighted. My head starts to throb, a bit too much to drink last night, what feels like not enough sleep and too much stress and sunlight. I have no clue what's going on, but I desperately wish the little man inside my skull would stop pounding in nails, so I could at least think clearly about whatever the hell had happened to me.


As if my desire had thrown a switch, I'm suddenly aware and in control of every cell of my body. And more besides, starting with my own gut-flora my new awareness spreads out from me like an oil-slick on the surface of a still pond, every living thing within a hundred meters unfolding before my new-found senses. It should be impossible to take it all in, but understanding comes as easy as breathing, and is just as unconscious. Control is no more difficult than understanding, the slightest mental nudge wiping away my hangover and refreshing my body, leaving me pain-free and as wide awake as if I'd just slept 8 hours and drank a pot of coffee. Another tiny mental nudge and my vision clears, better than 20/20 and far better than it had ever been through glasses.


Now that I can see clearly, it rapidly becomes apparent that I'm in a rough part of town. All the buildings around me are dilapidated and the few people I can see walking past either end of the alleyway all seem to be curled in on themselves, as defeated and run down as the town around them. Further down the alley, a tag on the wall catches my eyes. 'Empires Exist Eternally', bracketed on either side by a pair of stylized lightning bolts. Subtle.


It's becoming increasingly obvious what's happened. I should be panicking. Instead, I'm probably in the calmest, most confident state of mind I've been in for years. All the self-doubt, the nagging worries, that little internal voice saying "you can't"... it's all just gone. I know what I need to do next and reach inside myself, actively looking for another new sense along the lines of my biological control. It hardly takes any effort at all, five packets of potential springing to my attention, feeling oddly like a cross between eager to please puppies and thick text-books with the subject blurred out, a huge well of potential knowledge that could be about anything, at least until I open the book up and give it definite form.


If my situation is what I think it is, then the first thing to do is pretty obvious. I won't have any identity here, nor much in the way of cash. Checking my wallet, I find a hundred dollars in it that wasn't there yesterday. Embarrassingly, that's actually more money than I had to my name when I went to sleep last night. But then, I also had room and board and all of my possessions, which I now feared were beyond my reach, locked away beyond dimensional walls.


I could just beat up some gang-bangers for cash, maybe find a storehouse to pillage if I was lucky and found someone dumb enough to lead me to one. I might still end up doing that, but it wouldn't really help me establish myself legally. I had some ideas that would, and would probably be safer and more lucrative besides. Putting thought to action I reached out to touch one of the packets of potential knowledge I held inside me. I started tentatively pushing ideas at it, getting a feel for the scope and strength of the power each idea would result in. Much as I suspected it would be, the narrower I focused the charge, the deeper the information and skills it created would run.


If I chose computers, I would have access to a huge array of generalist knowledge, all of it better than state of the art. But none of it better by a lot. I'd be able design, build and program the sort of machine you'd expect to see in a decade or so. If I narrowed it down to programming, all the information about hardware fell away to nothing, but the breadth and depth of my skill with code grew exponentially. That was more than fine by me, I didn't expect to be able to do any hardware work before I got my next round of charges anyway, so I locked in programming to give myself a solid base for what I had in mind.


It was amazing. A sudden torrent of information flooded my mind, the knowledge to make any computer I sat down in front of dance to my will. I'd dabbled with a bit of coding before, but I was strictly amateur hour, barely past the "Hello World" level. This... wasn't. This was big leagues, beyond big leagues. I had all the knowledge and skill to be the next Stallman, Gates, Jobs, Torvalds, Wozniak and Ritchie. At the same time. To revolutionize computing in a way that hadn't been seen since the likes of Turing. And I was just getting started!


I spent two more charges in rapid succession, giving me vast insights into computer security and algorithmic trading. At this point, I would be surprised if there were more than a handful of people on the planet that could keep me out of a networked computer I wanted to break into or bypass the security on a system I wished to protect. Dragon and perhaps a few other tinkers or thinkers with relevant specialties and better hardware than I would have access to probably could (for now, at least), but for anyone else it would be the digital equivalent of a toddler picking a fight with a world-champion boxer. A profoundly unfair fight with a forgone conclusion.


My algorithmic trading specialty was no less impressive in it's own way. I now knew how stock markets worked like I'd been trading for decades. I knew all the signs that foretold short and long-term trends and how to create a program that could turn a tiny bit of seed money into a vast fortune within weeks. Of course, doing so would be a dead give-away that something fishy was happening, but my specialties were already synergizing, giving me any number of ways to mask my trail, to keep any one set of transactions from going to far and attracting unwanted attention.


I decided to save my last two charges for later, the sort of tinkering I'd be wanting to do in the immediate future would depend pretty heavily on how the next few hours went for me. Coming out of my daze, I made to leave the alley I'd arrived in, but stopped short after only a few steps. I could still see the gang-sign in front of me. This was obviously a bad neighborhood, and given the choices I made before coming here, I could have skinheads descending on me at any moment. It would probably be best to experiment with my biomancy a bit before I went tearing off into an unfamiliar city to look for a library or a net-cafe I could make use of.


I turned my attention to the biological senses that had been pushed to the back of my awareness while I'd been nerdgasming over my new tinker powers. I quickly found that I couldn't generate biomass from nothing, which was a bit of a pain but not the worst way skitter mode could have gone about nerfing this particular power, so I guess I couldn't complain too much. It would make building large-scale minions and constructs difficult later on, but since walking around with some sort of mutant hell-beast as a bodyguard would have drawn unwanted attention anyway it wasn't exactly pressing at the moment.


I figured that the best way to keep myself safe for the moment would be to give my body a little tuneup. With 6'2 of stocky, somewhat-chubby ginger guy to work with I had plenty of biomass for any changes I'd want to make. To start things off I gave myself a general once-over, fixing any health problems I could find and giving myself a nice clean slate for further work. Stage two was fixing all the weird little compromises that result from our bodies being a product of evolution rather than something designed. Rerouting my optic nerve so my eyes no longer had a blind spot (and several other similar routing issues in different places), fixing up all the little things that didn't quite translate right when our ancestors went from quadrupeds to bipeds, etc, etc, etc... Nothing to make me explicitly superhuman, just patching up the obvious flaws in the underlying structure. I'd known what a kludge the human body was for years, but it was so much more visceral when I could actually feel and understand every detail of it. Fixing everything had me feeling better that I could ever remember.


At this point, I felt like I had a pretty solid frame to hang some actual upgrades on. I left a small layer of fat for insulation, but the vast majority of my spare tire melted away into free biomass for me to use on upgrades, my skin taking up the resulting slack and becoming clear and blemish free as it did. Continuing my optimization work from earlier, I started tweaking all of my internal organs. I'd already fixed a lot of routing and placement issues with my general tuneup, but now I started enhancing and miniaturizing, pushing each organ's ability to do its job to the limits of biology, freeing up internal space for future upgrades, releasing nutrients and biomass when I deleted unneeded tissue and otherwise setting everything up for maximum efficacy and efficiency.


That done, I increased the strength and density of my bones and connective tissue. The durability would be useful in it's own right, and I'd need some strong anchor points for what I had planned next. An external observer would have seen my muscles ripple under my skin and bulk out slightly, but that only told a small part of the story. While I hadn't added very much in the way of external volume, looking more like someone who did a bit of aerobic exercise or had a physically demanding job than a bodybuilder, I had vastly increased the strength and density of my muscle fibers, and wove in a lattice of biologically grown carbon-nanotubes to let them apply all their new-found strength without tearing themselves to shreds. With the right grip, I could probably lift a small car now. Almost absentmindedly, I wove a thin mesh of nanotubes under my skin and into thicker sheathes around all my major organs rendering me, at the very least, highly bullet resistant.


Now it was time for my senses and nervous system. The world exploded into a riot of new sensations as my eyes increased in sensitivity and gained the ability to see into near-spectrum UV and IR, my nose sharpened to blood-hound levels and I my hearing grew keen enough to make a bat jealous. My last change for now was perhaps the most important of them all. I improved all the nervous tissue in my body, boosting my reflexes and increasing the speed at which I could think. Going further, my brain folded tighter inside my skull increasing in density and making room for a new layer of enhanced gray-matter with a great degree of neuroplasticity to form around it. I'd just done a lot of work on my body, and I figured giving myself some highly adaptable brain-meat would go a long way towards letting me get the most out of it.


Coming out of my trance, I tried to take a step forward and damn near face planted. I lurched over to the nearest wall and leaned heavily against it as the world seemed to spin and surge around me. My enhanced senses were overwhelming me with information and all the proportions and reactions of the body that I'd spent the last twenty-five years getting used to were now subtly (and in some cases not so subtly) different.


I was left with the sinking feeling that I may have gone a bit overboard here...

 

[anechoic]

Seedling

-

1.02


After a few minutes leaning against the wall I started to get a handle on my new senses. Not to say that I was really used to them yet or anything, but I wasn't completely incapacitated at least. For my next trick, I decided to work on standing up without the help of a convenient wall. There was a bit of swaying at first, but soon enough I found my balance and managed to take a tentative step, and then another. Before too long, I'd even managed to leave the alley behind! I must have looked a bit odd at first, tottering my way down the street, but after a block or so I managed to get to the point that I could walk more or less normally, though I wouldn't want to try any acrobatics just yet.


Once I got into the swing of things, I actually started to find the new me pretty enjoyable. Yeah, there were plenty of nasty smells (especially in this part of town); yeah, it was really bright outside with my new eyes; no, loud noises weren't fun with my new ears.But the amount of extra information all my new senses were giving me was frankly amazing, even with the lingering awkwardness my body felt like a finely tuned machine, I had a head full of mad science and feeling every living organism within a couple hundred feet of me was fucking metal.


I'm not quite sure how long I spent wandering aimlessly like that, luxuriating in my new body, my new powers and taking in everything around me with my new senses without really paying proper attention to it, but by the time I got my head back into the game I seemed to have covered a good bit of distance. Not in a useful direction though, unfortunately. If the alley where I'd entered this world and the neighborhood it was in were run down the area I found myself in now was practically dystopian.


The buildings around me hardly looked livable and I passed by more than one junkie openly shooting up, smoking things out of little glass pipes and otherwise finding new and interesting ways to poison themselves. Watching the effects of some of the stuff people were using through my bio-sense was enough to make my skin crawl.


It seemed like every other wall was tagged with gang-signs, almost all of them featuring Nazi imagery and references. There weren't very many normal people out and about, and the few that weren't white all looked afraid for their lives. The whole scene had me feeling a bit on edge, so I took note when I noticed the biology of four fairly fit young men lingering in the alley ahead of me, and four more in the next alley down, separated from the first group by a run-down tenement. They all felt slightly keyed up to my senses, not stressed, but primed and waiting for something to happen.


It was a pretty obvious trap, almost cliched really, but the thought of ignoring it barely even crossed my mind. The next person to stumble on this little scene probably wouldn't have super-powers, and who knows what might happen to them if they weren't white? No, the only real question was whether I wanted to do this easy or hard. Not much of a choice really, in the end. I needed to learn the limits of my new physique and using my actual power on these jokers would just be overkill. Needlessly risky overkill at that, since I'm definitely an S-Class threat now, and given the local PRT Director's personal history exposing my true nature would probably bring all sorts of shit down on my head. Not that I didn't think I could handle it given a bit of prep time, but who wants that sort of hassle?


I'm somewhat attached to my appearance though, and would rather not needlessly out my base form as a cape. With that in mind, I paused for a second to check for any observers before making some cosmetic changes. My skin darkened a few shades, my eyes faded from bright blue to muddy brown, the red flowed out of my hair to be replaced by a deep black, my facial features shifted slightly and patchy stubble in my new hair-color sprouted on my face, all over the course of a few seconds. My new look was pretty generic and could have belonged to someone of just about any ethnicity. I didn't look particularly white any more though, which played right into my spur of the moment plan.


I started walking again, going straight past the first alleyway full of thugs. The sound of fingers tapping away on a cheap cellphone reached my ears from the alley behind me, echoed shortly by the buzzing of a second phone receiving a text from the alley ahead. I heard someone's shoulder get grabbed, the material of their jacket rustling as they were shaken alert followed by the sound of sixteen heavy boots stomping on pavement as two sets of goons charged out to block me in, front and rear. Through it all, I retained perfect awareness of every one of their bodies, my shaper powers working with my enhanced senses to give me perfect tactical awareness of the situation.


Within seconds I was surrounded by eight neo-Nazis. I can't remember ever seeing so much as a single skinhead in my previous life, probably because I never really lived anyplace with gang problems. I would have been damn near pissing myself in fear if something like this had happened to me as I was before though. I could hear chains rattling and grips shifting on knives and pieces of pipe behind me. Ahead of me, the meanest looking one of the bunch ahead of me took half a step forward, hand resting near a gun-shaped bulge in the side of his leather jacket.


"Now now, what do we have here?" he sneered, looking me up and down derisively.


It was all I could do to keep the smirk off my face. Sounding fearful was right out, not when I could sense every detail of the eight bodies around me and knew, instinctively, that I could end them all with a thought.


So I just kept my mouth shut instead, and did my best to paint what I hoped was a resigned expression on my face, rather than talk and risk giving the game away early.


"Now, we're fairly compassionate folks here, right boys?" This drew a chuckle from his affiliates "So if you don't put up a fight, and hand over any valuables you might have we probably won't rough you up too badly..."


This was now well past the point of any kind of misunderstanding. I met his eyes, and let my emotions show. He must have realized something was up when he caught sight of my manic grin, because he started to reach for his gun.


Now, I should take a moment to say that I haven't been in too many fights in my life. I've done the usual horseplay, screwed around in boxing gloves with some of my friends before, even taken a few months of Karate lessons some years back, but about the best you could have said of me was that I more or less knew how to throw a punch without breaking my own hand in the process. And to be brutally honest, none of that had changed. In fact, in terms of raw skill I was probably worse now than I'd been before. My body was still a bit off from what I was used to, after all.


It didn't matter though. My new reflexes were lightning fast, and with my new muscles I could hit like a truck. Before the lead Nazi could even get his hand on his piece I'd rushed forward into him and driven a vicious punch into his solar plexus. He hadn't even hit the ground yet and I was already past him, lashing out with a slightly clumsy but blindingly fast kick to the knee to drop another of my wanna-be muggers. By that point, the third person on that side of the ambush had finally gotten his wits together and came at me with a knife. It didn't do him any good though, with the adrenaline singing in my veins and my amped-up nevus system he might as well have been swimming through molasses. I grabbed his arm and wrenched it hard, the bone breaking with a sickening crack as I used it to flip him over onto his back. The last gang banger on this side turned to flee, screaming about capes as he did.


I didn't bother to chase him down, instead turning around to leer madly at the other prong of this little trap. Their eyes darted between their downed compatriots and my insane grin. I subtly prodded their biology, increasing the production of several stress hormones that tied into fear, tugging lightly on the levers of their emotions. It didn't take very much before three of them turned and ran.


The fourth was made of slightly sterner stuff it seemed, or maybe his flight or fight switch was firmly stuck on fight. Either way, he charged me, fist cocked back for a wild swing, shrieking like an idiot. I sidestepped at the last moment, sticking my foot out to send him on a date with the pavement as I did. Just like that, it was over. Four barely conscious skinheads at my feet groaning piteously, four more scattered to the winds. I'd barely used my powers to a fraction of their potential. I felt incredible, like I could take on the world. My stomach chose that moment to gurgle loudly.


I suddenly realized that I was hungry as hell, almost as though I'd completely restructured my body, massively boosted it's performance in a way that would probably make it burn a lot more calories, walked a couple of miles and then beat the shit out of a bunch of Nazis, all on an empty stomach, after a night of heavy drinking. Damn it!


---


I was back to looking like myself as I slurped down the last of my soda and heaved a contented sigh, putting the empty paper cup on my tray alongside the other vanquished remnants of my orgy of fast-food. I took a moment to dump my trash and put the tray in it's designated spot atop the bins before walking out of McDonald's. Just as greasy, gross and somehow delicious as it was in my home dimension, though being able to sense the 'food' on every step of it's journey through my souped-up digestive tract took something away from the experience.


I took one last look at phone I'd scored when I was rolling the defeated E88s (remember kids; pillage then burn!), using the mapping app to make sure of my route to the nearest net-cafe. Confident in my path, I popped the back-plate on my new smart-phone and removed the battery and sim-card. It was a bit lame to the eyes of someone from four years in the future in a dimension that hasn't been in a severe economic depression since the early nineties, but it looked new and was probably pretty decent by local standards. I'd want some time to mess with the thing and possibly another tinker specialty or two before I actually started using it though, just in case the ganger I'd stolen it from decided to report the theft and have his cell company try and trace it.


Since I'd also managed to grab several-hundred in cash after my little scuffle, I was no longer especially worried about running low before my current plans started paying dividends. I saw no reason to dally though, proper documentation and a steady cash-flow would make my life a hell of a lot easier. I stopped by a likely-looking shop along the way to grab a flash drive (it was pretty small by the standards of home, and with a relevant specialty I could probably whip up something that would make it look like one of those old floppies that actually flopped fairly trivially, but it would serve well enough to store any data I wanted to keep on hand when I was done today).


Plonking down the cash for a few hours of time at a small cybercafe a few blocks from the boardwalk, I found a computer situated so no one could read over my shoulder and got to work. I started by doing a little recon online, getting a feel for Earth Bet's internet, and finding out some of the things I'd need to know to make full use of my new computer skills. That done, I downloaded a few open-source tools to save myself having to start from scratch, and got to work coding up a storm.


My first creation was a nifty little virus to let my seize control of one of the smaller local bot-nets. I needed deniable computing power to throw at the rest of my problems, and plenty of it. Once I had a legion of zombified computers under my command, I created something damn close to a VI and set it to work tying various criminal groups to their hidden bank accounts. It hardly took it any time at all to start getting results, and before long I had around a million dollars lined up to take.


I could have gone for a lot more, but I didn't want to draw too much attention or step on too many toes just yet. With Dragon, the Number Man and any number of other capes prowling the net here I didn't want to risk it before I was properly established. Besides, this was just the seed money.


I added more modules to my new VI, setting it up to hack the banking system. With the flip of a bit, a million dollars came under my control and immediately started bouncing between banks, eventually trickling it's way into large number of relatively small bank accounts scattered across ten different countries. I fed in my last commands for now, instructing my little helper to start playing the market, doing it's best grow every account it controlled at rates that were impressive, but not overly so, and to split up any account before it got big enough to draw serious scrutiny.


That done, I got to work on creating a legal identity for myself, quickly finding out that it was shockingly easy to do. Between the Endbringers and the various S-Class parahumans that were running amok it wasn't terribly uncommon for people to lose every extant hard-copy of their records, and the government had gone heavily digital in response. It took me all of twenty minutes to make myself a native of Madison Wisconsin who'd been out of town when the Simurgh attacked and had been wandering around the country ever since (once I'd found the relevant databases to break into, that is). Once I'd arranged some lab-space for myself it would be pretty trivial to print out a Wisconsin ID and use it to get hold of any other documents I might require.


After that it was just a matter of covering my tracks on this computer and copying the access keys to my VI and any other data I needed to keep hold of onto my thumb-drive. Since I still had forty minutes or so left on this computer before I'd have to cough up more cash, I took some time to make an account at PHO and gave the infamous forums a once over.

 

[anechoic]

I may do another segment later tonight if I'm feeling motivated for it because this is slightly shorter than usual, I just came to a really got stopping point and wanted to get this out there.

Enjoy~!

---

Seedling

-

1.03



PHO was... weird. It was this sprawling, anarchic mess of a site with literally millions of users divided up over hundreds of sub-forums. I didn't really have time to properly dive into the parts of it I found more interesting just yet, but even my short stay was more than enough to reveal vast discrepancies in the quality and quantity of moderation between different boards. I didn't bother making an account just yet though; even if I was fairly confident in my security measures, registering something that I intended to tie into my official cape persona from a public computer which I'd just used to steal a large amount of money seemed rather foolish.


Moving on from the cafe, I spent a few hours poking around the edges of the boardwalk, exploring the small shops that weren't quite high-end enough to afford rent there, but weren't so hard up that they had to settle for a dirt cheap little dump deeper into the docks. Sunset was still pretty early this time of year, so before too long I stopped by an office supply store to get a few packs of pens and a stack of spiral notebooks, grabbed some snacks for later from a convenience store, picked up some Chinese takeout for dinner then found a cheapish motel that didn't look like a complete dump to spend the night in.


Nothing could have prepared me for what came next though. I could detect pretty much anything organic with my mind. I was in a cheap motel. It may have looked decently clean, but holy shit! On the plus side, by the time I was done corralling all the dangerous bacteria, rodents, cockroaches, flies, fleas, lice, bedbugs and other vermin infesting the place it was probably the cleanest motel in Brockton Bay, and I had several hundred pounds of undifferentiated biomass that I wasn't quite sure what to do with just yet stashed under my bed as something along the lines of a pile of fungus, just self sustaining and structured enough that I didn't have to actively focus on it to keep it from oozing out over the floor. I did tweak it to release a light, piney scent into my room though, so that was nice.


Cleaning done, I devoured my takeout and decided to spend one of my two remaining tinker charges to gain a more generalized knowledge of computers. The influx of new knowledge was still a rush, my already fearsome programming skills becoming further augmented even as a flood of designs and ideas for advanced hardware poured into my head. I decided to save the last charge for now, mostly just to test if it would roll over or not. I figured it was worth risking a single charge to see if I had the ability to stockpile the things. Having a reserve would definitely come in handy if I suddenly needed a new specialty. If I couldn't, well, better to find out with one charge than a full day's worth.


I thought about jotting down my future knowledge, but decided against it for now. I didn't really have the skills to encode it in a thinker-proof format just yet and I didn't want to risk the secrets I held falling into the wrong hands if someone got hold of one of my notebooks. In the end, I spent a few hours idly doodling plans for tech that was already in my grasp and making a wish-list of future specialties before turning in for the night at a fairly early hour. I'd had a busy day, and tomorrow would probably be just as busy (though hopefully in different ways). As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if I'd be happy or sad to wake up in my own bed and find that this had all been a strange dream.


---


I woke up early, the sun just cresting the eastern horizon, still in the rat-trap motel room I'd rendered surgically sterile the night before. On the plus side, I now had six bundles of potential hovering at the back of my awareness. Not even bothering to get out of bed yet, I immediately started selecting my specialties for the day. Two charges went into a biotech specialty. As the rush of knowledge seeped into my mind, I felt a savage grin spread across my face. It worked exactly like I'd been hoping it would. Over the course of my experimentation with my shaper powers yesterday, I'd noticed that I wasn't quite as fluid or instinctive with them as you might expect from the description of the power. The biggest issue was that it was hard to reach past the limits of my own knowledge. If I had to describe it, I'd say it was like being in a huge library with only a tiny candle for illumination. You know there's a lot more stuff to be had, but it's hard to get at it outside your tiny circle of light. On its own, my new biotech specialty wouldn't have done much to fix that. Even with two charges fed into it, at best it would have filled in a few gaps in the shaper instincts that had apparently been hobbled by Skitter-mode.


The thing is though, my Inspired Inventor powers all synergized. The knowledge I gained with each new charge slotting neatly into that which I already had, each new specialty allowing new avenues to express the rest. Most of my programming knowledge wasn't directly applicable, and if that's all I had I probably wouldn't have been sure that this would work yet, but the computer specialty I'd gained last evening was, and so tied it all together. I could now build and program organic computers better than the best commercially available machines. Not quite as good at most things as a purely technological computer built from my knowledge would be, but slightly better in other ways. And best of all, a wetware computer was as easy for me to build with my shaper powers as any other biological system.


I pushed two more charges together and specialized them in nanotech then used my last two charges to bump computers up another notch and gain a materials science specialty. My mind was awash with new ideas for durable alloys and ceramics, computers decades more advanced than anything outside the labs of specialized tinkers, a huge variety of nano-machines and different ways to implement all of it using biological systems.


I checked the clock in my room, it was 6:30 in the morning. Before I could get too caught up in anything, I decided to attend to my cleanliness. I considered using the attached bathroom, thought of the state this place had been in when I arrived and set the bacteria on my body and in my mouth to work on the job instead. Without my biosense, it would have just felt like a slight tingle across the whole of my body, followed by suddenly becoming squeaky clean. While it was certainly convenient, I'd probably stick to regular showers and tooth-brushing once I had the proper facilities.


That done, I started working on the mass of pine-scented fungus lurking underneath my bed. Before long, a bone-white laptop was deposited on the floor with a squelch and a burp, still glistening with amniotic fluid. I'd probably need to get a cybernetics specialty and perhaps build a few tools to get things like this to play nice with regular tech, but for now it would serve my needs. The display was something along the lines of cuttlefish skin cranked up to eleven and back-lit with bioluminescence. Instead of a separate processor and memory it just had a mass of modified brain tissue. It had a small, hyper efficient circulatory system and a single small lung. It could run on just about any vaguely organic liquid, though it worked best with sugar-water or ethanol. It would only produce a small amount of liquid waste products from those, which could be evaporated off and released into the atmosphere easily enough. If you ran it on less ideal fuels or used something with a lot of contaminates the system would need to be um... purged... every few days.


The case was an incredibly durable ceramic close enough to bone that it could be made fairly trivially using my shaper powers. Speaking of, I reached under the bed to touch my fungus with a fingertip and drew some biomass up into my body, converting my skeleton to the same material. That done, I got to work setting up my new laptop. I'd already wired a bare-bones operating system into it's neural network as I was growing it, so it was a simple task to hack together a programming suite suited for use on this sort of architecture and then use that to bang out a CAD/CAM system. Now that I knew what sort of output to expect on the software side, I could get to work on the real point of this exercise.


Concentrating on the biomass beneath me, I set to work creating something that looked, outwardly, like a white box that was about thirty centimeters across on each side, with walls about two centimeters thick, a hinged lid on top and a small bulge jutting out on one of the bottom edges with a couple of places to add or remove fluids, an odd little input port, a small display and a single button. In actuality, this was my proof of concept model for a nanoforge. Design gets uploaded, raw materials get dropped in the box, lid gets shut and damn near anything you want comes out a few minutes later.


I'm sure there was plenty of exotic tinker-tech out there that would be tricky to duplicate even with something like this and anything that needed really scarce raw-materials could still pose problems, but this... this was a game changer. Or at least, it would be. Right now, it was a tinkertoy. Just another piece of exotic tech that needed a parahuman to produce and maintain it. The only people who could benefit from stuff like this were tinkers and those with the money or connections to make supplying them worth a tinker's time.


Once I'd iterated on the design some, and gained a few more relevant specialties though? These babies were gonna grow on trees. Literally...

 

[anechoic]

Seedling
-
1.04

I walked down the street, considering my options for the day. I'd shaped my unused fungus into a large backpack, with the space my meager possessions didn't fill acting as a portable store of biomass. Between the strength of my new physique and my shaper powers wiping away any exhaustion, the weight was a non-issue, though I might need to burn some biomass at some point to replace all the calories I was burning lugging it around.

I knew I'd want to buy some property soon so I could set up a lab and some permanent living quarters. I could almost certainly afford to do so right now, but for a couple of reasons I decided to hold off on it. For one thing, concentrating too much of my money back in one place too soon could lead angry criminals or investigating authorities back to me. For another, spending a large chunk of my seed cash would slow down my long term growth substantially.
Of course, just because I couldn't set up an official base today, didn't mean I couldn't set up a base. Having a completely off-the-books hidey-hole or two for emergencies and secret projects would probably be useful in the long run anyway.

I'd found another net-cafe while exploring last night, so I decided to stop in to check on some things and help solidify my plans for the day. To my delight this one doubled as an actual cafe, selling some half-decent food alongside the computer time. I got myself some coffee and a croissant to munch on, then grabbed a computer and got to work. I started off by looking over aerial imagery and USGS maps of the region, identifying some good spots for both of the bases I was going to end up building. After that, I spent some time browsing realty listings to get a rough idea of how much my official base would cost me, jotting down the more promising listings in one of my notebooks as I found them.

With that taken care of for now, I popped my thumb-drive into the computer and checked base with the VI I had working the stock market. As expected there wasn't really much growth yet, it had only been a few hours after all, but everything was running smoothly so far. None of the accounts I had it managing were showing signs of having been made and it was having no problems finding underlying market trends to exploit. Before long I'd have all the money I'd need to finance my plans.

I finished my morning by getting ahold of all the technical specifications I'd need to spit out a Wisconsin Driver's License on my maker and have it hold up as valid under scrutiny, taking a moment to verify the details that I'd fed into the DMV's servers the other day while I was at it. After all, It'd be pretty silly to make a perfectly forged ID and then go and print the wrong information on it.

By the time I'd finished up at the cafe and made my way to the nearest bus-stop it was mid morning, the spring sun already starting to make the day pleasantly warm. I'd thought about setting up shop in the boat-graveyard but it was such a cliched thing to do and really, with Leviathan coming, storing anything I actually wanted to keep by the water was just dumb. No, much better to make a base as far from the ocean as possible. Which was why I soon found myself trundling along on a bus. It took three transfers to different lines, a fair bit more waiting at different bus stops (though I did use one such wait to hit up a nearby grocery store for some supplies) and several hours that I would never get back, but eventually I found myself at the north-western edge of the city. Public transit would take me no further from here. I resolved then and there to address my transportation situation before I had to make this trip too many more times.

Still, it was a nice day out, and the way I was eating up the kilometers to my destination had me appreciating my new body more and more with every step. I'd done plenty of walking in my previous life but tackling hills with a heavy pack like this would have been exhausting, especially since I was slowly gaining elevation the whole time. I was definitely glad I'd thought to get some water before I left town though; new body and funky powers or not, I still got thirsty. I mean, I could easily pull any water I needed out of a tree or drink stagnant water out of a ditch without worrying about getting a disease, but it was nice just having a bottle on hand, ready to go.

The sun was starting to dip towards the western horizon as I left the main road and started following a long gravel track into the Brockton Bay National Forest. The bay was far enough north to have a pretty short growing season and between the poor, rocky soil and the hilly terrain there was never much incentive to develop this area as farmland, so a vast swath of land had ended up designated as national forest. It was pretty lightly visited even in the warmer months, so I was pretty sure I wouldn't run into anyone else out here now, as early in the season as it was.

Best of all for my purposes though, I had a fair bit of elevation on the city and a number of hills between me and the water to act as breakwaters. Anything I set up out here should stay nice and dry when Leviathan paid his visit, unless things went terribly wrong. Reaching the end of the road, I found a decently sized parking area with a neglected-looking notice board and several trails leading off into the woods. Not wanting to get lost, I picked a nice, healthy maple tree near the parking lot and started working on it with one of the more esoteric aspects of my shaper powers.

I'd had a vague awareness that I could do something like this every time I'd put my powers to work, but it was still incredibly strange to pour something of my own essence into the tree I'd chosen, widening the link I shared with it further and further as I went. Without conscious direction on my part, a small nodule formed in the tree's root system, eerily similar to the structure in my own brain that allowed me to control my powers. As the changes finished, well, the closest thing I could compare the experience to is seeing double.

I could sense and control biology around the tree I'd chosen the same as I could around my own body, though given our proximity the ranges overlapped more or less completely, hence the double-vision. Above and beyond my normal biological sense, I could tell exactly where my new node was. It was like proprioception; this was part of me now, of course I knew where it was. Beyond even that though, my sense of the tree's biology was... different. Like my meat-body, the tree was me now, not just something external that I happened to have control over. I could feel myself soaking in the last of the evening sun with my new spring leaves, nutrient-rich sap flowing down into my trunk, water and minerals flowing up through my roots. It was an alien existence, and strangely humbling to experience.

Eventually my moment of wonder passed and, confident that I would be able to find my way back to the road out now, I set off into the underbrush. I made a point of deliberately avoiding any of the trails present, wanting to further minimize any chance of discovery. As I walked further into the trees, I could feel my radius of biological control stretch out, eventually separating into two distinct circles when my original body got far enough away from my tree-body.

Between the hilly terrain and the trees it got dark pretty quick once the sun started dipping below the horizon, but between my ability to sense everything biological around myself and my new eyes the dark didn't pose much of a problem for me, especially once I added a tapetum lucidum behind my retinas to make the most of the available light. I'd have to be careful with that once I was back in civilization though, having my eyes go all shiny and weird when I was trying to pass as a baseline could easily give me away. Out here in the woods it was pretty handy though. Even though the moon was only a slim crescent and despite a layer of clouds and a canopy of tree-branches obscuring even that meager light, it might as well have been daytime, everything warmer than air temperature glowing faintly with a red beyond red and everything else lit up in varying shades of gray.

It had been a while since I'd had a good nature hike prior to getting punted into this universe, and now here I was in a new and exciting place experiencing it with new and exciting senses. I hadn't had this much fun in ages, and I must have spent several hours walking deeper into the trees, just drinking it all in. Eventually though, I started getting tired. Not physically, but mentally. I'd done a lot today, and walking through the woods with my awesome new eyes had been quite the trip. I could erase the physical symptoms of tiredness fairly trivially, but I was somewhat leery about messing with my brain like that. So instead, I had a seat against a nearby tree, drawing forth a comfy chair from it's trunk with a thought.

As I sat there, half dozing, I realized that I'd been going about this in a really silly way. I knew I wanted to put a base somewhere in these woods but even if I knew exactly what I was looking for in terms of location (which I didn't), wandering around aimlessly was far from the best way to go about looking for it, given the powers I possessed. With a thought, I reached out to every tree in range of both my meat-body and my tree-body pushed with my power, and twisted new nodes into existence. Then I did it again, using all my new bodies to repeat the process. My awareness rushed out from my bodies like a wave and I became multitudes. By the time I forced my self to stop expanding, I was the forest. I was aware of every living thing for miles.

My leaves reached for the heavens, my roots gripped the soil. In the dark I was quiescent, burning my stores of energy and breathing out carbon dioxide, but come day I would soak in the sunlight and use it to replenish myself, refreshing the air for those that lived beneath my branches as I did. It was difficult to pull myself away from it, to push the awareness back down into the body I was born in, but I knew it was essential that I do so. The forest was so much bigger than I, and it would be all too easy to lose myself in the green if I wasn't careful.

Becoming myself again had turned my fatigue into exhaustion. Seeing to my physical needs with shaper, I had the tree body I was still sitting on pull me up into it's canopy. Once there, I wove a basket of branches around myself and softened the wood beneath me into a comfortable bed and pillow to lie upon. I drifted off to sleep under the stars cradled, from a certain point of view, in my own arms.

---

I'm not sure rather to say I woke up with the dawn or not, that morning. One the one hand, the part of my awareness that was a forest certainly perked right up as the sunlight hit it. On the other hand though, my meat-body stayed sound asleep for at least another hour. It was a strange experience, to say the least.

Eventually the novelty of existing as nothing but trees started to wear a bit thin and I decided to spend my tinker charges for the day. The flood of knowledge as I assigned my charges to personal transportation, cybernetics, life support systems, architecture and excavation was actually what woke up my original body. All the new information gave me a much better idea of what a good place to build a base would look like, so by the time I was done lowering myself to the ground, using shaper to see to my cleanliness and scarfing down a granola bar (there's still something to be said for actually eating once in a while) the part of my consciousness that lived in the trees had already picked out a good spot, about a mile away from me. I started walking to my chosen site, but didn't bother waiting till I was there in person to get to work.

Collecting biomass (mostly in the form of invasive species), I shaped it into a biological excavator. It was basically a giant worm, about three meters across, equipped with row after row of rotating, diamond hard, razor-sharp teeth at the front and a specialized nano-swarm in its guts designed to convert dirt or stone into a specialized epoxy that it could leave in its wake, sealing and reinforcing the tunnels it would dig. I had it start digging down in a gentle spiral, starting beneath a mighty oak. I shaped that particular tree-self into a hidden entrance for my new base, and had its roots flow into the tunnel behind my borer, extending my range of control down into the ground behind it and carting away excess stone and dirt to the surface for disposal. Using the biomass I'd gathered, I grew steps for the long spiral staircase I was creating and lined my tunnel with preternaturally dense and strong wood.

Once I felt my borer was sufficiently deep, I had it level off, digging a sixty meter long tunnel before melting into the roots that had followed it down. By the time I arrived at the entrance to my new base I had converted the roots below into biological jackhammers and set them to widening the tunnel out a bit and squaring it off to turn it into a long, narrow room. Seeing the impressive mound of dirt and stone that had accumulated around my tree, I shaped up a few simple automatons, closer to plant than animal, and set them to spreading it out a bit so it wouldn't draw attention.

Before long, the core of my new base was done and I had my roots line the exterior walls, form support columns and partition the interior space with dividing walls. The spiral staircase down now lead to a common area shaped like a backwards L. Along the left-hand wall were three decently-sized bedrooms (in case I needed to put up any guests here) with a small bathroom in the far right corner, against the wall that separated my lab area from my living space. For now, my lab here would be a ten by twenty meter room at the far end of my base.

I shaped a door in my tree so I could start on down, and immediately noticed that I'd neglected to light my base. A simple thought caused portions of my walls to start glowing at regular intervals, lighting my new bunker up with a soft blue-green glow. After I made it down, I spent the next few hours finishing out my base. Probably the most important thing I accomplished was shaping up a more powerful version of the bio-computer from my laptop to serve as a mainframe and tying it directly into an industrial scale fabber. Using my new cybernetics specialty at about the most basic level possible, I added USB ports to both my mainframe and my laptop. With access to the files on my thumb-drive and a few seconds of fab time I was finally able to forge myself some ID.

Not really wanting to spend another night out here when so much was going to be going down back in town over the next few days, I decided to put my new transportation specialty to use. Unfortunately, despite now having a driver's license that would check out as valid, I didn't have any kind of insurance or registration on hand, and I didn't have internet access out here to hack something up either. Not wanting to have a run-in with the cops over driving around in an unregistered, uninsured vehicle this rather limited my options.

Working with a new specialty at an almost painfully simplistic level for the second time that day, I soon had myself a bicycle. Its frame was based on carbon nanotubes, it used ceramic disc brakes and the tires were a nice compromise width, skinnier than a mountain bike because I wasn't really planning on off-roading it, wider than a touring bike because I had a pretty long stretch of gravel road between me and pavement right now. The whole thing only weighed in at a couple of pounds, and with my new musculature I was sure I'd be able to make it fly. With that in mind, I fabbed up a spiffy looking ceramic helmet (even stronger than the stuff my bones were made of, since I didn't have to worry about keeping it close enough to organic for my shaper power to work on), slung my new bike over my shoulder, walked up my long-ass stairway, locked down the entrance to my base and then started making my way back to the road out of here, which wasn't exactly hard given that I basically was the forest, and the underbrush pretty much leapt out of my way.

It was just past noon by the time I got to the road out, but my new ride was sweet as hell. Easily the best bicycle I'd ever ridden. I had to dial my speed back pretty considerably while I was on gravel, but once I hit pavement I was off like a rocket. I didn't have a speedometer on this thing yet, but I'm pretty sure I was breaking the fifty-five mph posted speed limit on level ground without seriously pushing myself. I'd have to be careful using this thing on roads with more traffic, or I could get myself into all sorts of trouble. Still, it definitely made the trip back into town a lot shorter than the trip out had been. I still had a couple hours of daylight left by the time I hit the city limits.

It took conscious effort to keep my speed down to that of a baseline human riding a commercially available bike, but it was still a lot quicker than walking and a lot more convenient than waiting for the bus. I put my remaining daylight to good use, checking out several of the potential sites for an official base I'd found yesterday and getting better acquainted with the docks in preparation for tomorrow night. I definitely wasn't going to let Taylor's debut play out like it had in canon. Just the fact that I was present could have potentially butterflied things enough to make her encounter with Lung a bad end and though the Undersiders had been friends to her when she desperately needed them, her descent into villainy had royally screwed up her life.

With the sun going down again, I grabbed some takeout and found a slightly cleaner motel. After eating I actually got to take a proper shower, and boy was it nice. I did run into a problem after I got out though. I'd been able to keep myself relatively clean with my powers but, the effect didn't quite extend to my clothes. Considering the amount of physical effort I'd been putting in the past few days they were starting to get quite ripe, in addition to being somewhat ill-fitting after the changes I'd made to myself. Not wanting to put a filthy outfit back on after I'd just gotten myself properly clean, I ended up whipping up a few sets of clothes to wear out of my store of biomass.

With my belly full and my hygiene taken care of, I decided to have some fun. Using my new cybernetics specialty, I designed a few new components for my meat-top and printed them out on my personal fabber. It took a bit of fiddling with my shaper powers to get everything integrated properly, but soon enough I could actually get onto the motel's free Wi-Fi. Since I wasn't planning on doing any hacking from here, I took the opportunity to register a PHO account and then spent the rest of the evening browsing the boards and seeing what else there was to do for fun on Earth Bet's internet, not falling asleep till the wee hours of the morning.

 

[anechoic]

Seedling

-

1.05


My forest woke with the dawn again. I let myself sleep in and spent the early morning hours growing well-camouflaged eyes and ears throughout my woodland domain to supplement my bio-sense, paying special attention to the area around my base. It was amazingly easy to stitch together all the different sensory input into one coherent picture, another thing to thank my shaper powers for I suppose. Splitting my attention; I spent some time embellishing my base, growing complex geometric patterns into the wood.


It didn't take long before I had satisfactory coverage of my forest my base was about as decorated as it could get without looking tacky or overdone. I decided to start another project, and shaped up several 'birds'. They had very little to do with actual birds internally, but from the outside they all looked like typical examples from a variety of common North American species. Each one was equipped with a highly efficient metabolism, a body optimized for endurance and carried one of my nodes within it.


I spent some time enjoying the thrill of flight before heading on my way(s). My goal was simple, to spread out across the continent, putting nodes in out of the way spots as I went. The dreamlike feeling of being here was starting to fade and though I wasn't exactly afraid, it was really starting to sink in just how dangerous this corner of the multiverse was. The further I spread out my nodes, the harder it would be to wipe me out in one go. Beyond that; once I started acting on a larger scale each node represented a jumping off point, someplace to form an avatar and start interceding in local crises or taking advantage of local opportunities.


It was already late morning when I felt my human body start to rise. I'd been thinking about how to spend my charges while I slept, given my half-formed plans for the night, so I had my choices locked in before my eyes had even finished opening. My body surged awake as I dumped two charges each into railguns and energy storage and a single charge into power generation. As I cleaned up and dressed to meet the day, I decided to deal with this 'needing to sleep every night' bullshit. I had a lot of work in front of me, and being able to pull an all-nighter hacking or doing cape stuff without becoming a zombie the next day would be invaluable.


I didn't quite trust myself to skip straight to no sleep at all just yet, but I managed to tweak a few things so I could get by on about an hour of sleep every three or four days. It was surprisingly easy, and even with my current level of skill and knowledge eliminating my need for sleep entirely wouldn't have been much harder, but I didn't. Even though it was becoming more and more apparent with each new node that this brain wasn't really the seat of my consciousness anymore, or at least not the only one, I still felt like some caution was due. With my power, driving myself crazy could easily turn into an extinction level event.


Before I left my room, I took five minutes to design a simple speedometer, tossed some random crap in my maker for raw materials and then mounted it on my bike (which had spent the night in my room, rather than outside where it almost certainly would have gotten jacked while I slept). I justified it in my head as a way to make keeping a reasonable speed easier, to help me blend in. Really though, I was just itching for an excuse to find a deserted area and see exactly how fast I could go with a featherlight bike and superhuman musculature.


For now though, I kept my pace reasonable and headed north. The boat graveyard maybe have been a bit too cliched and a bit too close to the sea to be a good location for a base, but I'd be needing some steel soon and all those hulks are a public nuisance so... win-win. The salt air blowing in off the sea is a bit chilly this time of year, but that just means people are even less inclined to hang out in this part of town than they normally would be. I roll past the abandoned warehouses and decaying industry that made this part of the bay home before the bottom fell out of the shipping market and I start doing my pied piper impersonation; calling all the vermin in range to me, converting a few to nodes to extend my range as I do. I walk out amongst the beached ships, and find a fairly isolated spot to set up shop, followed by a living carpet of rats and mice, eerily silent under my thrall.


Piling up a good portion of my rodent minions next to the rusting hull of a grounded freighter, no doubt already stripped of anything valuable, I dissolve and reform them into a fridge-sized maker. I link up my meat-top with my new fabber, putting the rest of my swarm to use gathering up the raw materials I'll need while I whip up some designs. The first thing I create is a roll of foldable solar cells which owe their design to some nice synergy between my nanotech and power generation specialties. Next up, a simple machine that runs water through a nanotech filter before electrolyzing it into hydrogen. Other than the filter, nothing too impressive. The next machine I make is anything but simple, taking hydrogen gas one one end and feeding it through a series of nanotech catalysts while slowly upping the pressure until metastable liquid metallic hydrogen pours into a detachable reservoir at the other end.


I unfurl my solar blanket to catch the spring sun, wire in the machines, drop my electrolyzer's feed hose into the sea and start building up a nice store of fuel. Next up, comes a couple of carbon nanotube based high-density capacitor-packs, and two railguns sized to use them: a pistol and a rifle (technically, it's actually smooth-bore, but given the form factor and intended purpose I think calling it a rifle is appropriate). Both are scaled to my current level of strength, though I'll have to lean into the rifle when I fire it lest it knock me on my ass. If someone without a brute rating tried to use either weapon they'd probably break some bones. I fab up another roll of solar cells and a charger for my capacitor-packs and get them filling up in the sun. While they do, I convert a hefty pile of hull-metal from the nearby wreck into ammunition and magazines. I could do better than simple, fin-stabilized steel perpetrators, but not with what I have on hand.


That done, I make a much larger bank of capacitors, a railgun that practically fills my fabber and a few rounds of appropriately sized ammo. I quickly knock together steel frame, a fuel cell designed to run off metallic hydrogen, a heavy duty motorized gimbal and a computer to control it all, complete with a cybernetic interface. Disconnecting my now full metallic hydrogen tank from the condenser, I lock it into place in the center of the frame before slotting in the rest of the components and hooking everything together. Reaching out with my shaper powers, a wave of rats collapses onto my new toy before coming unmade. My weapons platform rises up a bit, cradled in a mound of pulsating flesh, before a ceramic skeleton starts to form, growing out from a number of hardpoints built into the frame.


Looking like a somewhat grotesque time-lapse film, something that resembles a pitch-black big cat with a serious steroid problem rapidly forms, my heavy railgun mounted atop its back. Dark gray ceramic plates rise out of its skin to cover vital areas as I finish plumbing its insides. A specialized nano-colony digests its food, processes waste and produces any necessary hormones, eliminating the need for almost all its internal organs other than its heart, lungs and brain. Which is good, because most of the space that would house guts on a normal animal is full of support equipment for the penis-compensation sized railgun on its back.


Giving everything one last once over with my power and finding it satisfactory; I push on my new platform in by-now familiar way with my power, turning it into one of my nodes. It's different in a way I'm not entirely sure how to describe. So much quicker than anything I've been so far, a lot smarter than the rats or birds, and a lot more focused.Its brain is very visually focused and heavily optimized for combat, including a built in biological targeting computer that ties directly into the controller for its railgun. When the mechanical systems are on, I should even have a HUD for targeting. Not wanting to burn my hydrogen yet, I walked my new platform over to the solar cells that had been powering my hydrogen condenser rig and then use my human form to hook up a lead.


That taken care of, I fab up some new capacitor packs sized for my personal weapons and swap them out for the now fully charged packs at the other solar panel. My heavy railgun would probably be a bit much to test in public, even in this part of town, but my rifle and pistol shouldn't be a problem. And considering my level of marksmanship, I'll definitely need some practice before tonight. I've only fired a gun a few times in my life, and not in years.


I set up a few targets along the beach, arranged so any so any stray shots would go out to sea. Which they did, a lot. Not only am I a bad shot, but both of my new guns are brutal to fire, even with my strength and durability. I kept shooting for ages, having to heal up bruised shoulders and sore wrists more than once in the process, and I did see some improvement. Not enough for what I needed to do tonight though. While I would still do my best build some genuine skill, for now I'd have to do with copying the organic targeting computer I'd built into my gun cat earlier. It was a bit different without a cybernetic link tying it directly into the guns I'd be using (something to work on for version two I guess), but it was easy enough to work around that. It was weird suddenly having an instinctive ability to point any gun I held so it would hit what I was aiming for wedged into the back of my consciousness, but actually being able to hit my targets was definitely worth it.


Having gotten to the point that I could actually hit the broad side of a barn, I decided to do a damage test. I shouldn't have been surprised by the results, having built them and felt how both guns kicked, but seeing the size of the holes they made in the hull of another derelict ship, further up the beach from my work-site, was still something of a jaw-dropper. If I hit lung with the rifle before he ramped up, he would almost certainly die. If this was the sort of damage my hand-held guns could do, I could scarcely imagine what my heavy railgun would be like. One thing was definitely clear though, I couldn't shoot anything with these weapons unless it had a really high brute rating or I wanted to turn it into chunky salsa.


Target practice done; I spent a while fiddling with my fabber, turning out a few bits and bobs for tonight while I waited for things to finish charging. A collapsible baton and a combat knife for close quarters, some hefty steel-toed boots, a holster for my pistol, a sling for my rifle and belt with spaces to hang my equipment and some ready reloads for my guns. By the time I was done making gear, everything was finally charged. I booted up the cybernetics in my Gun Cat form. All the self-diagnostics checked out, the gun had a full range of motion and the HUD seemed to be working fine, though it wouldn't be fully accurate until it had had a few shots to calibrate itself. Given how destructive (and loud) my personal-scale railguns had been, that definitely wasn't going to happen right now. If all went well tonight, I wouldn't have to fire the big gun anyway.


Dissolving my fabber back into biomass, I usedsome of it to form a dark gray, flame-retardant unitard to act as the base layer of my costume. Next, I created a dark red bulletproof vest made of something more like spider-silk than Kevlar (with some trauma plates made out of my bone ceramic insidefor added protection) and a thick pair of black jeans with an armor-weave of the same not-quite spider silk in them to wear over-top of my unitard.Finally, a thick pair of black gloves with dark red ceramic plates woven into the backs, an open faced ceramic helmet in the same shade of red as my vest anda black domino mask rounded out my look.


Costume sorted, I used the remaining biomass to make a few node birds for use as scouts. Then I stashed my solar cells, hydrogen condensation rig, weapons and costume under a tarpin a nearby abandoned warehouse. I kept watch over it all with my Gun Cat body and, after making sure I hadn't left anything behind on the beach, spent the remaining daylight hours cruising around the docks, getting a better feel for the area. I found a neat little hole-in-the-wall pizza place for dinner then, with darkness starting to fall, headed back to gear-up for the night.


Soon after, I found myself looking at my costumed human form through the keen eyes of my Gun Cat, and couldn't help but feel that something was missing. I liked the colors but as it was my look was a bit mookish for my tastes. Not particularly inspiring and not even distinctive enough to register as a proper villain.A symbol of some kind would probably help, but to pick a good one I'd need to decide on a name. Normally I'm the type to dither over this sort of thing but given my powerset and my intentions, there was really only one thing I could reasonably call myself. With a thought a white, upwards-pointing arrow faded into view on the front of my flak jacket, identical arrows showing up on the sides of my helmet at the same time, over my temples.


The splash of lightness on my dark costume added some much needed distinctiveness and took me from villain to darkish hero, at least to my eyes. It would make me stand out a bit more at night, but image was important and I was already damn near unkillable anyway, so it's not like it mattered overly much. Not wanting to give any easy handholds (or leave anything flammable hanging out) I absorbed my long hair into body, the strands reeling in till they were all safely hidden under my helmet. Satisfied with my new appearance, I stashed my bike and my backpack under the tarp with the rest of my gear, left a node rat behind to keep watch and headed out into the twilight for my first night as a super hero.


Walking south into the docks I had my rodents and birds fan out, scouting for me while I walked at a leisurely pace, shadowed by my gun cat. If I remembered correctly Taylor wouldn't be running Lung for a few hours yet; but if I could find the ABB thugs grouping up, or spot Taylor's swarms with my biosense or otherwise find the players before the action started, it would make things a lot easier for me. I was definitely faster than a baseline, but I wasn't about to trust to luck that I'd see Lung's fire when the fight started and be close enough to intervene.


It was quite boring at first, with the way this place gets described in a lot of stories you'd think you couldn't throw swing a cat without hitting a super villain in the midst of a dastardly plot, but mostly the docks were just deserted this time of night. I did spy the occasional drug deal and more than one prostitute with my scouts, but I'm not a cop and I've never really thought that sort of thing should be a crime in the first place so I wasn't about to stick my nose into any of it. Don't get me wrong, if I saw someone being forced into things against their will I'd have stepped in to save them, but as long as everyone involved seemed to be doing it of their own free will then it really wasn't my business what they chose to do with their bodies.


Finally, not long after midnight I felt something through one of my birds, a mass of insects and arachnids acting in a strangely organized fashion, moving from shadow to shadow as one organized mass. Now it was just a matter of scouting the area till... got it. Teenaged girl, abnormal growth in her brain, walking in the same direction as the unnatural swarm, at the same speed, wearing an outfit made of spider-silk and bug bits. Now, how did I want to play this?