Long week, Perrry thought with a sigh as he took off the bucket on his head and ran his fingers through his helmet-hair.

High Tide was only three days away, and already things were getting…a little weird.

Mom and Dad were fighting less than usual, for one. It was a strange thing not to have them duking it out on the morning news. Felt like their marriage was in jeopardy, or something.

The wall was a bustle of activity, heavily armed soldiers with prawn guns interspersed with Supers, constantly patrolling it as the ocean gradually crept its way up to the base of the wall.

The city proper was above the level that High Tide should reach, but there were never any guarantees.

Things got weird around high tide. People were Triggering left and right, insurance premiums went through the roof, and statistically speaking, one of Perry’s school-mates was most likely donning a mask and engaging in some super-shenaniganry for one team or the other.

Lord, if you’re there, please don’t let Vanessa Brown Trigger. Please and thank you…

On the other hand, if she did Trigger it would then be morally acceptable to punch her in the face, since we’d be on the same footing and gender mores are a little vaguer for supers.

Gosh, that’s a tough one, Perry thought as he walked over to his projects. Dear Lord, I’ll leave the decision up to you.

Perry’s CNC machine was cutting out bits and bobs rapid-fire, having been re-fitted with parts Perry had modified himself in order to drastically boost it’s speed. Speed was money, after all.

Perry hadn’t sold out his parts immediately as he was a relative unknown, but what little he did sell had easily allowed him to afford getting more aluminum plates and get started on a wider variety of parts. More lines in the water, more chances for the Tinkers at large to recognize the benefits.

Perry aimed to dominate the ‘good enough’ market. There were certain applications that you simply didn’t need the best parts for because the job didn’t require perfection. You didn’t need the springs in your car to be able to support a thousand tons. You didn’t need your coffeemaker to be bulletproof.

Perry was going to be the king of cheap and good, but not the best.

Once he was rich enough he could simply buy some of the best parts, preferably those rare ones he could modify to apply his multiplier to.

I wonder what the multiplier will be?

Was it possible for his multiplier to turn negative, or would he just make the best parts a little bit better?

Who knew.

Perry’s Mk II was sitting against the wall, finished since the day before.

And yet, Perry was already designing features for a Mk.3.

I like the disposable armor angle. Perry thought, weaving through the mess that was his lair.

Dang, I need a bigger lair already. I already paid twelve hundred for this one and it’s completely full. In a week!

Perry picked his way through the mess and sat down at the computer, booting up his CAD program.

The first issue with the Mk.3 was he wanted it to be resizeable so he could both sell them and loan them out as necessary. A cheap suit of power armor was practically unheard of, and he figured even if he sprung for some of the bells and whistles, he could field one of them for about five thousand dollars.

Perry would eat his cardboard helmet if he couldn’t sell them for less than a hundred thousand.

Money is starting to lose all it’s meaning.

But first. The resizing. Perry was thinking two curved straps of steel under the rest of the armor that ratcheted open and closed, sliding the armor apart as they moved.

The question is, how do we make sure the armor retains its functionality?

Making joints and internal moving parts work with resizing was a huge issue, forcing him to reconsider his entire design to accommodate.

Perry fell into the fog of the Tinker Twitch, the world ceasing to exist around him as his fingers flew across the keyboard. Perry must’ve been in the zone for a couple hours when he was distracted by the blinking light indicating his spell-discs were done training.

Woot!

Perry stood and took each of the disks out and inspected them briefly before he put them on their dark, warm shelf for night-night.

Gotta let them rest up when they’re not in use.

After just a week of hanging out with Titan’s Crew, Perry had already noticed several issues with both his suit and his spells.

Namely that most of the spells were tied to the suit. Perry wanted to make a spell-frame small enough to strap to his wrist, if he could manage it. Wearing that belt around was a pain in the…belt area.

Perry idly itched the area the belt was strapped to under his shirt.

It was his insurance. The belt was composed of leather, aluminum and scrapped printers, and could trigger the Floating Armaments spell in a fraction of a second.

It also didn’t breathe worth a dang.

Perry’s observations led him to believe that the size and intensity of the symbol marked on him was one of the keys to duration, speed and responsiveness of the ghostly equipment. Which meant if he made a watch-sized one, he’d be faced with unavoidable loss of effectiveness.

Unless…what if I made a watch that could crawl up my arm to inscribe the symbols? That could work. More moving parts, which generally meant more could go wrong, but perry’s creations only suffered from user-error, as their individual parts never broke or wore down unless subjected to extreme stress.

There’s an interesting idea, Perry grabbed his notebook and scribbled down some gibberish that would raise a few eyebrows. In this case:

Watch crawl up arm? – print bigger.

That also means space is at a premium. I only have so much skin, after all.

The rest of the spells could much more easily be converted to smaller attachments Perry could wear around in his everyday life. It would just take some time and work.

Robotic welding arms are surprisingly inexpensive, Perry thought as he went back to his desk and began fiddling around with the cad program, trying to figure out how he could make the watch’s rollers that climbed up his arm double as the printers.

When his parts started selling more steadily, he could invest in some robotic arms and begin making the process of making things semi-automatic.

Perry glanced around the tiny little lair.

A new lair would not be a bad idea, either. One with ventilation. Perry really wanted to get into chemistry and try his hand at creating some supermaterials, because with his Spendthrift perk picking up the slack and covering for mistakes and contaminants, he could more easily create some amazing stuff in his garage…

But he took one look at the ventilation in his tiny little storage unit and compared it to the warnings on the bottle about growing silicon crystals in your lungs, and decided to wait on that one.

Bummer. I can only imagine what I could do with aerogel that was twenty times stronger.

To be fair, aerogel was about the same strength as a soggy graham cracker, so twenty times wasn’t going to do much.

But…If I could make it slightly more flexible than standard aerogel and then multiply the effectiveness of that, it would make amazing insulation for the armor.

Another one of the issues he’d noticed was that his suit didn’t handle flamethrowers very well.

After watching a science professor dump molten rock on his hand with aerogel between them, he was sold on the idea of using it as a heat dispersion material for his suit.

Problem was they only came in little crumbly squares that he couldn’t do anything with, so Perry needed to upgrade his chemical capacity…by a lot.

And that meant he needed a new lair. With a huge hood, and tons of Co2 and a giant tank that he could make Co2 go supercritical in so he could dry the aerogel without capillary action destroying it.

All these things did not come cheap, which was why his CNC machine was running full tilt, making cogs, gears, armor plates, and other simple pieces enhanced by his power.

Once he had enough cash, he could build a second CNC machine and dedicate this lair simply to printing out money while he moved to a new, nicer one.

Money, money, money. How do regular Tinkers even manage to get their first suit of armor up and running?

Obviously the reality-warping aspects of their power were clutch for that, but still…So much money!

Having been exposed to the process, Perry had been forced to mentally ratchet up his estimate of The Mechanaut’s personal wealth.

Dad’s gotta be in the 0.5% club at the bank.

You don’t just throw together a suit of heavy steel, a swarm of crab-bots and crash through buildings willy-nilly.

I wonder if fighting mom is like golfing for him? Rich person hobby?

“Perry!” Heather’s dad said from the corner of the room, an edge to his voice.

Meh, Heather’s dad. Whatever.

Perry turned back to his desk, his mind already flitting to the problem of how to automate the production of both the Mk.3 and his bread and butter.

Wouldn’t it be funny if it became so automated that a vendor delivers a stack of aluminum plates to this address, the door opens, and a robot arm snatches the delivery, pays the confused courier, then shoves a box of parts in his hands, addressed to the Marketplace?

I’m fairly sure there’s gotta be Tinkers out there who operate like that already. Living the dream, man. Of course, I have to wonder, at what point does my perk cease to apply to the parts that I create?

Sure it applies the perk to the parts when I use a CNC machine to cut them out, but I’ve never cut them out while I wasn’t in the room. That could be a hard cap.

Food for thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work when I’m…

Wait…Karnos is in my lair.

Perry stiffened and turned around, inspecting the blond, blue eyed shapeshifter who was seated casually on a chair in the corner of the room, his arm hanging off the edge of the seat, a gun dangling loosely from his hand.

“There he is,” Paul Skinner said, a faint smile on his lips. “You’re definitely your dad’s son, I’ll give ya that.”

“Does everyone know where my lair is?” Perry asked, heart thumping in his chest. He hadn’t seen Karnos come in. he hadn’t heard anything either. Had the man simply oozed in the crack under his door? With the gun?

How did I miss that!?

“Everyone who matters,” Karnos said with a shrug.

Yep. That’s the last straw. To heck with dad’s opinion about underground lairs. I’m making one.

“Haven’t seen my daughter in a week,” Karnos began. “Normally when a girl runs away from home, she starts crashing at her boyfriend’s house, he keeps her in his room, or on a couch in the garage or something.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Perry said, mentally tabbing through his possible options here. Karnos’s fighting method was usually to lead with the gun to put the opponent on the back foot, then shove a tentacle into the enemy’s mouth and suffocate them. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

Which meant Perry would need to play for distance and keep the shifter at range as long as possible….should a fight break out in this tiny eight by twenty room whose exit was dominated by Karnos.

Dang.

“But you…” Karnos’s eyes narrowed as he continued his monologue, heedless of Perry’s thoughts. “You’ve got her bunking with a group of capes. Can’t really send any non-supers to retrieve her, can I? I’d have to do it myself.”

“A few days back, I got a security alert and video of Heather snooping around my office. I expected her to try something, attack one of my shipments out of some idiot heroism mostly motivated by spite. But to my surprise…nothing. You don’t happen to know why that is, do you?”

“Blackmail loses its effectiveness once used.” Perry said.

“Now you see, that’s the problem.” Karnos said. “When teen girls lash out at their parents, it’s supposed to be impulsive and poorly thought out. That’s part of growing up.”

Karnos stood up, his cold eyes staring down at Perry.

“But now I can smell cold calculation from her actions. You wouldn’t happen to know where that came from, do you?”

“Yeah that was me,” Perry said. “Heather wanted to ditch your ass, so I provided her the plan to do it.”

The heat in the room bumped up a degree as Paul Skinner reddened, standing from his seat.

“That stupid girl has no idea what she’s doing. She belongs to me! I dictate where she goes, what she does and who she knows!” He shouted, gesticulating wildly with his gun-hand. “You think I’ll tolerate this!?”

“I mean, it depends on whether it’s worth it to you. Monetarily speaking.” Perry said.

“You failed to account for pride and spite.” Karnos said, his face gradually losing the color from his outburst. “The pride of a father and the spite of a cowl.”

“You think I can just continue my merry business when word on the street is you stole my daughter and I did nothing about it?”

“Frankly, I don’t care.” Perry said with a shrug.

“Well put,” Karnos sneered. “Well, let me tell you something that you might not be aware of. The unspoken rule against killing family members only applies when you’re in your civvies.”

He pointed at the cardboard helmet on Perry’s desk. “When you put on that helmet, you’re no longer off limits, understood? Something bad could happen to you. Will happen to you.”

Heart slamming in his chest, Perry reached over and grasped the helmet without breaking eye contact.

He put it on.

“You were saying?” Perry’s modulated voice echoed through the room.