philadelphia, meet chevalier

[peterxy]

The next few days proceed as normal.

Until they don't: the Philadelphia and Brockton Bay teams have been talking, and they're thinking of trading Chevalier with a couple of Wards. Philadelphia has quite a selection of them, including a couple who triggered during the Behemoth attack on Pittsburgh, while Brockton Bay has the opposite problem.

The current Philadelphia Ward lineup is:

• Laser Tag, a Tinker who specializes in weapons that have cumulative effect. He has a laser gun that causes various conditions on its targets each time they're hit, usually taking them out on the third or fourth hit.
• Clasp, a Breaker-Blaster-Striker who can cause objects to be almost weightless and much more resistant to damage for as long as he's holding them. He can only do that to one object at a time, and the weightlessness of the objects he holds means he can both throw them very far or use them to hit things. He can also apply this property to his costume, rendering him much more resistant.
• Mirage, a Mover-Stranger who can toggle invisibility for a very short time when no one's looking and can teleport within her line-of-sight while in that state.
• Glimmer, a Brute-Mover who can create a forcefield around her own body that makes her glimmer and become very resistant and slippery.
• Transfer, tentatively rated as a Blaster-Striker who can draw heat from a source and then dump it somewhere else, or conversely dump extra heat somewhere that he'll later have to replenish.
• Blockage, a forcefield Tinker whose forcefields can absorb any impact but disappear upon doing so.
• Lightbulb, a flying-artillery type of Mover-Blaster that can shoot balls of kinetically charged light whose path he can influence as it flies through the air.
• Iter, a Thinker precog who can see where objects are slated to be up to ten seconds in the future, similar to the way Rewind sees the past.
• Silica, a Master who can animate statues made of sand. There's no limit to how many statues she can animate, but there is a limit to the volume of sand she can control at a given time.

Comments

[thinkering]

The bot starts up the induction procedure in Lorica's voice.

[mrglam]

And he's soon under.

[thinkering]

And then Lorica, assembling comm bits without even looking, decides not to tell him he's in a forest this time. She goes over the list of power classifications in her head and starts asserting that he can produce copies with quintessential versions of each - insofar as she can test things in this workshop, anyway.

She particularly wants to know if he can do a Rewind.

[mrglam]

Apparently not even hypnosis is enough for a copy to do a Rewind.

Speed: naive applications are limited by his maximum, shown with the ping pong balls that one time.

Strength: he can do the Siberian.

Shapeshifting: practically arbitrary.

Teleporting: can be simulated.

Forcefields: pretty good ones.

Lasers: best not test those here, but from Endbringer fights, pretty damn good, probably.

Space manipulation: nope.

Physical properties: he can do the Siberian. Various other imaginary properties can be simulated.

Enhanced cognition: nope. Knowledge doesn't appear out of nowhere, nothing thinks faster, his reaction times still limit stuff.

[thinkering]

Okay... and how's his teekay with non-homemade objects doing?

[mrglam]

After a few tests, they discover that he never could do that, and that the times it looked like he was doing it with the ping pong balls he had actually conjured wind that would get unconjured right after.

[thinkering]

...Okay, can she convince him that he's just really good at the wind thing and get more precise "teekay"?

[mrglam]

For stuff like ping pong balls, he can get pretty good, though not as good as with imaginary ping pong balls. He can't get good enough to "teekay" much heavier objects.

[thinkering]

That's weird, some aerokineticists can move stuff around... whatever. If he can't do it hypnotized he probably can't do it.

He's being a boy this time so she pops her helmet off and kisses him, then puts it back on and snaps him out of it.

[mrglam]

Probably most aerokineticists have enhanced senses related to detecting the air they're controlling that Sadde doesn't, or something. In any case, he slowly returns to the surface, blinks, and looks at her. "Video?" he asks.

[thinkering]

The bot plays it.

Lorica assembles comms.

[mrglam]

"Okay, that's interesting, especially the teekay thing. And did you kiss me there?"

[thinkering]

"Was I not supposed to?"

[mrglam]

"You won't see me complaining."

[thinkering]

"I didn't think so."

[mrglam]

"You're making one of those faces right now, aren't you."

[thinkering]

"Maybe."

[mrglam]

"You aaaaare!"

[thinkering]

"I still can't see myself, but you're probably right."

[mrglam]

"I love you," he says. "Have you talked to any higher ups about using those comms in Endbringer fights yet?"

[thinkering]

"Yeah, that's why I'm making so many."

[mrglam]

"Oh awesome. How will distribution go? Lots of bots and bot-copies flying around?"

[thinkering]

"For anyone who doesn't get one early - I'm sending them around in advance to people who go to all the fights."

[mrglam]

"They really should allow you to figure out a way to mass-produce these. Can your bots keep track of where each comm is?"

[thinkering]

"They're not explicitly forbidding me, I just worry they'd become unhappy in some way if I demonstrated the ability. And the comms track each other and I have the master comm which hooks up to the bots, but not directly."