Once Galatea and I had agreed on a new face for me, I carved the inlays needed to make it a reality. Using my new glasses, it was rather easy. I was carving a pliable plastic and the glasses allowed me to measure it as I went, giving me extremely precise dimensions to work with, so it just took some time.

When I looked at the clock, it was a discongruent feeling. I was used to get up early in the morning, go to school and go home after, giving my day a rather rigid structure. After leaving my father’s mansion for the final time and retreating into my bunker, I had fallen into a deep sleep, exhausted from little sleep the days before and the emotional rollercoaster I had endured. My body had simply said, enough is enough and shut down. It had been afternoon when I woke and watched the news.

Now, it was easily after my normal bed-time but I was wide awake, the artificial light of the bunker screwing with my circadian rhythm. But maybe that was not too bad, if I wanted to focus on my Metis-persona, late nights and night-shifts would probably be the way to go.

“Galatea, can you put up the maintenance-data for the armour?” I asked and for a split-second there was no answer. It was interesting that I started to notice those minor discrepancies in the incredibly efficient processing of Galatea.

“The analysis-process was interrupted by the Pyre-Protocol. There was no feedback, so I never checked up on it. I restarted the process.” Galatea answered me, after she had tracked down the problem.

It was a problem that I had not anticipated. As part of the Pyre-Protocol, all active processes had been halted and most of them had an automatic restart, but not the analysis of my armour. I wondered if anything else had slipped through the cracks, so I asked Galatea. She checked all halted processes and there was no other, important processes halted. I also instructed her to add a feedback to all future processes, so she would know if something got stalled, halted or interrupted. Just now, it had been a minor problem, but it might turn into major trouble down the road. For example, if I had a need to don my armour that night, I may have gone out with a damaged suit without knowing. Not a particular pleasing process.

While the analysis-program was running, I mentally did a bit of after-action-analysis for the two operations I had been involved the days before.

Part of me was quite happy with the events, but another part was unhappy. To break it down, the operation against the gang had been a mixed bag. Sure, I had blown up their stash but it highlighted multiple, major problems. If I was fair with myself, I had majorly screwed up. My actions could have easily killed a good many people and I highly doubted that either police or heroes’ league would let it slide if that happened. It was an interesting question to research, how did the actions villains took affect the severity of the pursuit those villains were getting?

Logically, someone who only copied research-data and caused a bit of property damage would draw less ire than someone who went out and willy-nilly slaughtered non-combatants. Or someone who left heroes that fought them beaten but whole was less hated and hunted than someone who humiliated and finished their opponents off, no matter what.

In any case, I did not want to kill, unless I had to, so I got tremendously lucky, or something like that, when the gangbangers all left the building before it went up in flames. I would have to find a way to make sure that I could make my own luck, ways to take out larger groups of enemies without killing them, or maybe even without seriously hurting them. Some kind of literal crowd control, to use a gaming term.

My mind went to the operation against the scourge. In a way, it went incredibly well. In another way, it had been a total disaster. At the moment, the official version of the heroes’ league claimed credit for the explosion, praising Voltic, I guess an impression of her power had been left behind. I would love to gather more data on that but somehow I doubted kidnapping Voltic and having her use her power in an experimental data-gathering chamber would be looked kindly upon.

During the operation, I had gambled on her power, using a single point of data as an indication, her blowing up my drone during the raid Anath and I had carried out together. My data-point had been that her power somehow managed to blow up the hardly shielded energy-crystal of my drone and my gamble had been that it would happen again. Well, it had worked, according to Galatea’s calculations, all four drones and the power-crystal from my railgun had blown up virtually at the same time, the moment they came into contact with her special brand of electricity that was flowing through the path my plasma-cannon had created. It was a little annoying, I had yet to come up with a reliable mechanism to cause a detonation myself and she was able to do so by virtue of the genetic lottery.

Maybe I would have to convince her to help me gather some data, at some point. The thought made me smile a little. I felt a little like a certain doctor, searching near and far for answers and in the end making a stupid bet with the devil on his quest for knowledge. I was certain there was a moral to the story, but just what that moral was, I did not know.

But back to the operation against the scourge. The gamble was not my worst blunder, in a way. No, my worst blunder was the idea to cause an explosion in the first place, even with a reliable mechanism in place it had been an idiotic idea. No sane governing-power would allow someone not in their control, access to the equivalent of nuclear weapons in their area. Just the idea was ludicrous. But I had blundered and now I could only hope that there would be no negative fall-out.

“Preliminary Damage Report done. You will have to do quite a bit of maintenance, I lack the necessary tools to do so.” said Galatea before showing me the report on my glasses.

Those were incredibly useful, I would have to make myself another pair with clear glass, so I could wear them outside during times going outside with sunglasses on would make me stand out too much.

The report was rather lengthy. My plasma-cannon was quite literally toast. The wiring guiding power from the crystals to the generator-units had taken on far too much energy, just under the threshold that would destroy the intended break-points and disrupt the flow before a catastrophic failure would occur. Galatea had driven the weapon to the red-line and beyond to give me the required function for my stunt. The connections between the armour’s energy-crystals and the cannon’s energy crystals were in a similar condition, fried, but at least I could leave those alone and use the base-armour without the cannon, if there was a need.

For necessary armour-functions, it looked in a halfway decent shape. There was some wear and tear but not enough to impair the armour’s function, making me a happy camper. What I had done to the thing was easily a stress-test of the highest level and I would not have been surprised if it had taken serious damage, beyond the damage caused by the reckless, unplanned, untested usage of the plasma-cannon. I had done the equivalent of strapping rocket-engines to a car, using a piece of equipment in a way it had never been designed to and far beyond its normal tolerances. And it had worked.

Part of me wanted to pat my back, call it genius engineering and bask in my own, reflected glory, but I knew better. I had probably used up all the luck, good karma, or whatever supernatural force one believed in for that stunt. Even thinking of a repeat would be foolish. No, I would take my good fortune and eat a large dose of humble pie. I had been lucky.

I started to pull the burned wiring and slowly fell into a different sort of trance. Normally, my trances were caused by extreme focus on the work I was doing. Right now, it was the opposite. My hands were on auto-pilot and my mind started to work on another problem, the weight and general ‘un-stealthy-ness’ of my armour. Using it to sneak into anything was more or less impossible, it was heavy, it was cumbersome and the current boots had metallic soles for the hover-tech I had incorporated. There had to be some way to get an adequate level of protection, some self-defense capability and be able to move without sounding like some sort of giant robot.

Of course, I could easily make myself something similar to the suit I had made for Anath, forming my compound into threads and weaving them into cloth and it would protect me from piercing and slashing attacks just fine but it would transfer the force of those attacks into my squishy, fleshy body. For Anath, that was not a real problem, her body was seriously durable on its own, but mine? Not so much.

Part of me wanted to design enhancements to make my body less squishy but I quickly reigned the ‘mad scientist’ in me in. Doing so would give another an easy way to identify me as a powered individual, something that I believed to be generally impossible, how else would there be villains like me? But if I started to walk around with metallic bones and synthetic muscles? Those would be dead giveaways and mark me as powered, from now, forevermore. In addition, just before I had admonished myself for my hubris, now I wanted to play God? No, there had to be better ways.