“What are you wearing?” Heather asked, motioning to Perry’s faintly iridescent embroidered vest with dark purple undershirt and fancy slacks, completed by a hefty silver love charm amulet in the center of his chest.

He looked like he’d walked out of the cover of a women’s billionaire romance novel: In short, cheesy. The love charm was real though, but Mom insisted it was the legal kind.

Perry didn’t even know what kind the legal kind was, so he just took her word for it.

“My mom insists this is a date,” Perry explained, motioning to himself. And she’s real old fashioned. She literally wouldn’t let me leave without dressing up, and I can’t exactly tell her we’re going to go rob some gangsters…”

Perry frowned, taking in Heather’s skin-tight dress that ended at her upper thighs.

“What are you wearing? You look like Sara Bellum.” Perry asked.

“That’s a dated reference. You just dissed yourself, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“I told my dad I’m going on a date,” she continued with a shrug. “I can’t tell him I’m robbing one of his clients.”

“He’s okay with you dating someone?”

“Pretty sure he doesn’t care,” Heather said, her eyes narrowed.

“O-okay then,” Perry had no context for a parent not caring, and had no idea how to address it.

“Shall we?” She asked, looping her arm through his own.

Perry took her to the meeting place which turned out to be Lunescence, which was not only a fancy restaurant and a popular date spot, but also undeniably pompous.

“Really?”

“We’ve gotta plan somewhere,” Heather said, walking in front of him for the first time that night. “And I like this place.”

The dress outlined the curve of her back perfectly, all the way down to her –

She glanced over her shoulder at Perry. “You coming?”

“If this was a complex plan to go on a date with me,” Perry said, joining her on the steps of the restaurant. “You didn’t have to go this far. I would’ve said yes.”

“I don’t really like the concept of ‘dating’. Why does applying a specific label to hanging out change it somehow? Doesn’t matter what you call it.” Heather said as they were shown to a table.

“Well, calling it a date would make me really really nervous. That’s one thing it would change,” Perry said taking his seat

Heather grinned and shook her head. “You can relax: It’s not a date.”

“Oh,” Perry said, deeply relieved and simultaneously disappointed.

“Unless it is.”

“Ng,” Perry’s eye twitched. She’s messing with you, Perry, fire back! Unfortunately, Perry was too dumbfounded by the tiniest possibility that it could be a date, and Heather looked like what would happen if you hooked nitro up to the word Ravishing. The way she looked made Perry’s lizard brain froth at the mouth, bite and scratch to get to the control panel, infecting the rest of his mind with debilitating rabies.

She’s like rabies. But the kind you enjoy.

“Anyway, enough of this silliness, let’s get to the point.” Heather said, pulling out a large blueprint and laying it out on the table.

“Where were you keeping that?” Perry asked frowning.

“I taped it under the table last night. Anyway, this is the warehouse where they trade off trucks.”

“Eh?”

“It takes forever to unbox the cargo and move it to different vehicles. That only happens in their home base or movies. What they do instead is ride in two similar cargo trucks, confirm the contents of the shipment, switch the plates and the drivers, then leave.”

“So your dad’s men are gonna leave at the exact same time the other guys do. There’s no way to catch the gangsters by themselves.”

“Can the suits fly?” She asked.

“Of course, they weigh fifteen pounds each,” Perry said. His estimate was a little low, especially once he added the computing, motors and wiring. Still, fifteen pounds was ultra featherweight for power armor.

A tiny Yamaha desk fan, when properly mounted and channeled, provided nearly a hundred pounds of lift. Four of them for each suit was plenty.

“The question is, can we fly the suits?” Perry asked, sipping on his soda.

“They’re not making the handoff until three A.M. we’ve got plenty of time to practice. So we’re gonna follow them until they hit this spot.” Heather pulled out a street map from under the table and pointed at a spot on it.

“They’ll be forced to wait for the inter-city train to pass through, a good five minutes. That’s where we’ll hit them. Then we do the same trick that they did, take the cargo truck and leave. I’ve rented a storage space right over here. It’s big enough to park the whole thing inside.”

She pointed out a building a few blocks away.

“…so why follow them from the handoff? Why not just wait at the train tracks?” Perry asked.

“Because I don’t know for a fact that they’ll be at the train. These are criminals. They’re naturally suspicious, and they have a tendency to change up their routes.”

“But the warehouse is a constant?” Perry asked.

“No, I stole the info about the drop. There’s always a chance we could be sitting in the rafters all night.”

“Exciting.”

“Hey, that’s hero work. Totally dull until it isn’t”

“Is this hero work?” Perry asked. “What’s the priority, getting high-tech weapons out of criminal hands, or getting high-tech weapons into your hands?”

“I don’t see why it can’t be both.” Heather shrugged.

“…I want a share.” Perry wasn’t gonna turn down some high-quality parts. His ability was cool and all that, but where was he going to get a cheap knockoff cortex/CPU interface? Nowhere. ‘Cheap’ didn’t even exist for that kind of stuff.

“One fifth.” Heather made the first offer, seemingly intent on haggling.

“Deal.” Perry said, causing Heather to blink.

“Really? A fifth? You don’t…want more?”

“Not really. I built the suits for about three hundred dollars apiece.” Perry said with a grin. One fifth of a truckload of high-end weapons was more than enough compensation.

Heather’s eyes narrowed as she mentally calculated Perry’s profit margin. “you son of a –“

“Your order, madame,” The waiter said, arriving with Heather’s food, waiting for her to clear her maps off the table before setting down her dinner.

***Later***

“Behold!” Perry said, raising the lid on his own hastily rented storage container. Fifty bucks a month.

“You need to get your own lair,” Heather said, scrunching up her nose as she inspected the grimy environs.

“Dad says digging underground to make a lair is a nightmare. Not only is it a pain in the butt, but every other Tinker with enough power has already made an underground lair. The city is practically a spiderweb of new and abandoned underground bases, and there’s a good chance of tripping automatic defences when you do so, whether the base is fresh or abandoned. It’s just not worth the trouble anymore.”

“So if I were to get a lair, it would have to be an overland one. And if you’ve got a million dollars to buy a building, I’m all ears,” Perry said, closing the sheet metal door behind him and reaching up to tug on the chain leading to the fluorescent lights.

A moment later, his pet projects were bathed in light, standing against the far wall.

“Ta-da! Your power-armor, madame.”

“Is it behind the pile of junk?”

“Rude.”

Perry hadn’t had the chance to put the finishing touches on the armor, smoothing out the rough edges, spraypainting them to make them look like steel, or anything like that. He’d been far too busy just making sure they worked, putting every waking second he wasn’t in school or doing homework into them.

Heather peered at the armor for a while.

“It’s cardboard.” She said.

“It’s more of a laminate material.”

“You expect me to wear cardboard!?

“You know any other Tinkers?” Perry asked, crossing his arms.

“Where are the guns? There are no guns! What are we supposed to do with this?” Heather asked, turning to him. “Politely ask them to get out of the vehicle?”

“Sounds like you need a demonstration,” Perry said, unlatching the front of his power armor and climbing in.

“Oh my GOD, are those plastic lego gears!?” Heather cried as she spotted some of the suit’s inner workings.

“….Technically, yes.” And tiny little lego dc motors. $3.99 apiece. $30 a dozen.

“I understand now. You’re an insane person. I can’t believe I was seriously thinking about doing this with you.”

Heedless of Heather’s muttering, Perry closed the chestpiece and turned on the armor, which whined to life in a fraction of a second, it’s modest processing power hugely magnified by his Perk.

“Let me demonstrate,” Perry said, his voice modulated by the suit’s built-in speaker.

He stepped forward and grabbed Heather around the waist.

“Hey, what are you DOOOOOING!”

Heather’s indignation turned to a satisfying shriek as Perry lifted the garage door, stepped outside and threw Heather into the air, some fifteen feet straight up.

When he caught her again, she had a tiny .22 in her hand, pressed to his helmet.

“Impressive,” She said, through gritted teeth. “Is it bulletproof?”

“Well yes, but –“

POW!

“Did you just shoot me in the face!?”

“I trusted that your armor could handle it.” She said, smoothing her dress and re-hiding the tiny gun. “Just like you trusted that a bunch of plastic gears and cardboard could catch me.”

“Touche,” Perry reached up and pried the .22 round out of the suit’s forehead. “Don’t shoot me again though.”

“Don’t throw me again, and we’ll be fine.”

The two eyeballed each other for a moment.

“Let me show you how to use yours,” Perry said, breaking the stalemate.

“Why is mine so much smaller than yours?”

“Because it’s a loaner, and you’re a shorty?” Perry said. It was also because the infrastructure for the spell disc and spell-frame demanded a lot of extra space.

Perry hadn’t mastered Kolath’s floating Armaments yet, because who the heck knew what unit of measurement a jangle was, and a pinch was notoriously inaccurate by itself.

And he only had a block of corrupt Areonite about half the size of his palm to experiment with. Not exactly ideal for running tons of tightly controlled experiments to narrow down the ideal ratios.

It worked, though. Spendthrift successfully rendering the corrupt metal non-toxic and the spell functional, but his original test only lasted about five minutes, which was plenty for a fight but when compared to floating armaments of legend that could last days, it left something to be desired.

As for the shapes for the floating armaments, Perry had chosen to make a tiny mold, a little under one tenth of an inch long. It had the shape of sharp crystal on one side, blunt on the other side. The blunt side was covered in faux paneling designed to make the thing look…techy. A little bit of misdirection.

Sure, a four-inch spike that was blunt on one end wasn’t as impressive as a huge floating sword, but Perry was operating on a budget here. He could make a couple hundred or more tiny little floating armaments for the same amount of Areonite as the giant sword.

The major reason the wizards of Manita made huge floating swords in the first place was because it was way too hard to inscribe the control symbol by hand on something about the size of a grain of rice.

All Perry had to do was get his hands on a couple modern printers from a garage sale and he was good to go. Speaking of good to go, your mind just wandered, and Heather is staring at you.

Perry painstakingly instructed Heather in every step of the process of entering, securing, and turning on the armor, followed immediately by learning how to fly it, which was…terrifying.

Flying was awkward and unintuitive, and the human body was never meant to do it, especially when it was just glorified levitation on jets of air, rather than a wing and stabilized tail.

Perry got first-hand data on the armor’s impact resistance as he crashed into the storage building and the concrete several times. Thankfully the fans were protected by cardboard tubes, and were none the worse for wear after several flailing crashes.

But they got it eventually, hovering in front of each other about fifteen feet above the paved ground outside the storage unit.

“Okay, we’ve got about an hour and a half until the meeting,” Heather said, her voice modulated through her helmet. “Let’s get there early and get set up somewhere they won’t notice us.”

“Somewhere we can fly away from,” Perry added, nodding. Escape route first.

“How do we switch to the internal comms system?” Heather asked.

“What internal comms system?”

“Oh, my god, you suck at this,” Heather said, flying south.

“Oh, I’m sorry, is a flying suit of armor that can crush steel made out of household ingredients underwhelming for you!?” Perry demanded.

“Two cheap children’s walkie talkies is all it would’ve taken, is all I’m saying.”

“I can’t think of everything on the first try!” Perry shouted, following after her.