As the super Dazzle did not make it to processing by Nexus, the request for a capture payment is void, additionally, the super Paradox freed Dazzle from police custody, which carries with it a fine of $80,000 and up to two weeks of time Drafted.

Nexus understands the extenuating circumstances involved and have elected to follow through on payment of the Invasive Species Extermination bounty, waiving the Draft and deducting the fine assessed from the bounty.

Total earned: $20,000

“Dangit,” Perry muttered as he inspected the letter from his bank.

“Wwwhhhhat?” Heather asked, sidling up behind him, holding her own watermarked envelope from the bank. “Are you upset because you got screwed out of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars ? That must be terrible for you! Why, I’d go so far as to say that’s worse than that time I missed out on three million. Tell me, how is that fifty million dollar deal with Locust going again?”

“Bah.” Perry rolled up the bank statement and bonked Heather with it.

“Ow,” Heather winced as the paper had zero give.

“I don’t even know how I’m gonna finish that order without an infusion of a couple more million,” Perry said. “Believe me, it’s stressing me out, having to go beg for more from-”

Honk!

Perry cocked a brow and came around the customer service counter of the motel and peered out the bulletproof windows.

Parked in front of the motel were two semi-trucks, with three more pulling into the parking lot from the road.

“Nevermind, I love being rich.”

Perry put on his domino mask and ran outside.

“Afternoon, Mr…Paradox,” The lead trucker said, climbing out of the truck, checking his clipboard. He was an overweight and balding, with a walrus beard.

“Afternoon,” Perry said, desperately struggling to keep his grin contained, and not rub his hands together while laughing dramatically.

“We’ve got your orders here, just need to give your signature to the Nexus notary here, and we’ll start unloading.”

He nodded towards a woman who peeked out of her modest sedan at his motion and began walking towards them. She was dark skinned with curly hair and a harried look to her.

“Alright, Mr. Paradox, let’s go somewhere private and confirm your identity.”

She ran him through a short battery of questions confirming he was who he said he was, and that he wasn’t under duress or mind-control, then took his signature.

Then she signed off on the shipment with walrus man, got back into her car and took off, leaving them to unload.

Perry guided them around to the back lot, where he had a secret bay capable of opening up once the trucks were gone.

When the backs of the trucks finally opened up, Perry felt like a kid at Christmas, practically dancing in place.

The walrus-faced guy waddled over to the truck and opened the padlock on the gate before he slammed it open.

The truck was empty.

“Buh…” the lead shipper was speechless for a moment.

In the center of the empty shipping container was a pale rectangle of paper.

Perry climbed up and retrieved the tiny rectangle with black print.

It was a business card.

You’ve been had!

Courtesy of

Chemestro

“Ooooh,” Heather said, climbing into the empty semi-trailer behind him. “I was wrong, your fifty million dollar deal with Locust is stressful.”

“I’m gonna go work out,” Perry choked out, his vision clouded by red. If he didn’t find an outlet immediately, he had a feeling he might behave a little uncouth.

Half an hour later, Perry was still punching the bag, which had recently been officially named Chemestro, when Heather came in from outside, where the workers were scratching their heads and assessing the damage.

“Alright, good news and bad news.” She said.

“Bad news.” Perry said between punches.

“Bad news is shipments to supers aren’t insured because this kind of thing happens way more than you might think.”

“Good news?” Perry asked.

“Good news is the two late shipments, and Dave’s delivery weren’t robbed, leaving you with a few things to work with…and Chemestro seems to be a newbie. Can’t find him anywhere on the wiki.”

“That’s a good thing?” Perry asked.

Heather shrugged. “Means it should be easier to get your stuff back from him by force.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now, the inventory of what was stolen,” Heather said, reading directly off Walrus-face’s clipboard.

“All but two of the assembly line cells. All but one of the robotic arms. All of the industrial chemistry equipment. He didn’t seem to have much interest in DIY stuff, because he left your bulk materials. The bulk steel, glass, plastic, aluminum, copper, rubber, graphite, and seawater were untouched, which is nice because the copper was actually pretty expensive.”

“Aw man, I wanted the chemistry stuff,” Perry lamented.

“Dude’s name is Chemestro. That was probably his primary target.”

Yeah, probably,” Perry said, catching the punching bag. He felt like he’d finally calmed down enough to address the problem without throwing a hissy fit.

“Alright, here’s what I’m thinking,” Perry said, wiping his brow. “I can cannibalize most of the raw ingredients meant for the suits to cobble together substitutes for the vast majority of the infrastructure that was stolen, then convert the remaining materials into a mark three suit and some gadgets for the marketplace. The income from those can be used to fund a steady, albeit slow stream of mark three suits until I figure out a way to get another two million dollars in bulk goods.”

Perry’s eyebrow twitched as he considered taking out a loan with his motel as collateral. After all, he owned the place outright, giving him close to five million dollars in equity.

NAH.

If this happened again and he lost his lair, he really would throw a hissy fit and probably blow something up.

The lesson that had been learned here was that Perry had responsibility for the security of shipments to his Paradox super persona, and had to take steps to insure them himself. This was probably something Dad could’ve told him if he’d consulted on the purchase.

It was an expensive, extremely irritating lesson, but it wasn’t devastating to his livelihood. His Garage Tinker class allowed him to bounce back from next to nothing, and an entire shipping container full of bulk materials was a lot more than nothing.

All that had really happened was that Chemestro had set him back a couple days and about four million out of his final take-home from the Locust deal.

And put himself on Paradox’s Shit List.

“I got a long night ahead of me,” Perry said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Gonna take a break from nonstop adventures. Binge-watch something at the apartment, maybe.”

Perry winced as he thought about Heather living in an isolated apartment bunking with Warcry because she never knew when her dad would try and get back at her. She hadn’t actually been back to her house in weeks, and her dad was AWOL. There was no sign of activity from Karnos, suggesting he’d changed his face and skipped town.

“Sorry about bringing up your dad over a sandwich.”

Heather pursed her lips. “I’ll deal. Thanks.” She cocked her head. “I still feel like I should be looking over my shoulder, waiting for him to try to kill me again, then my rational brain kicks in and I realize, ‘hey, you’re a super now’ and that coward would never take on a fight he might lose. I also have Anya on me at all times.”

“Yeah,” Perry nodded in agreement. “I think he understands the risk of coming after you now.”

“You good to lock up?” Heather asked.

“Yeah, night,” Perry waved her off as she left.

“Night!” Heather waved before trotting toward the bus stop.

Once Heather was gone, Perry took a deep breath and got to work.

He locked up, then went down to his lair and opened up the loading bay, creating a massive hole in the back parking lot that led straight down to his basement laboratory.

Then he grabbed the Lair Control Center and headed back out to the back lot to survey his goods.

The modular assembly line parts and the robotic arm were packed up in wooden crates, while the bulk goods were wrapped up in thick plastic wrap on oversized pallets.

Dave’s delivery was a large aged trunk with scuffed up leather and silly stickers covering it, ranging from hippie era love and peace to more modern Calvin peeing on a prawn.

It would look completely at home in the closet of any young adult: A hand me down with maybe some clothes, old Playboys and nothing more of consequence.

It was dropped off by a nondescript minivan driven by one of Dave’s goons, and Perry assumed this Chemestro character wasn’t even aware of it, given that the two deliveries had no relation to each other.

Perry undid the latches and opened the lid, breathing a sigh of relief upon seeing all of the ingredients for his new spells neatly packaged and stacked to the brim of the trunk.

“Excellent.”

It could not be overstated how disappointed Perry would’ve been to lose his magical ingredients too. Some of them were extremely rare and difficult to replace, not like a giant pressure tank, which was largely mundane and highly replaceable.

Ingredients for summoning rituals were a lot more difficult to come by.

Perry took the head-sized chunk of realm-piercing crystal and turned it in his hands, studying how the light filtered through the massive slab of cloudy volcanic glass. Through the warped light from the other side of the pale blue glass, he could make out phantom forms drifting through other planes of reality, their forms indefinite and wobbly as the crystal itself.

It was a rather large piece with very poor clarity, which was how Perry was able to purchase it in the first place, as it was useless to a normal wizard save as a novelty.

Perry would see about that.

He confirmed the rest of the contents of the trunk and was pleased to discover that not only was it all there, Dave had also included the ingredients and instructions for a hair-growing spell for his piece of scalp, free of charge.

That gross unicorn made it difficult to dislike him.

Perry returned to his Lair Control Center and began lowering the new gear into his lair.

The Lair Control Center was the model of the lot. Dregor’s Binding had been so strong that its influence expanded to include anything and anyone that entered the area, and it hadn’t worn off since the building was done.

Since it wasn’t doing anything anymore, Perry was currently repurposing it into a security/utility system.

In the model, Perry saw a tiny, centimeter-tall copy of himself standing beside the boxes and staring down at something. On a whim, Perry reached down and very gently tapped his tiny duplicate in the back.

A force shoved him from behind, making both him and his tiny copy stagger in place.

Neat.

Perry couldn’t help but appreciate the setup’s potential power as a security system, allowing him to surveil his entire lair without a single camera or hackable system, and also remove enemies via flicking, or just program the tiny saws to cut people in half if they triggered the alarm.

The possibilities were endless.

Perry used the tiny robotic arms to gently pick up the model boxes and lower them into his lair, watching with amusement as the materials floated down into his lab with machine precision.

Once that was done, he closed the bay doors and took the Lair Control Center back downstairs, getting started on the real work of the night.

As he stepped into the underground workshop, the smell of raw ingredients, ozone and wooden pallets drifted into his nostrils. Perry could feel the Tinker twitch building inside, shutting off all distractions. In the few moments of self-reflection before the urge consumed him, Perry had a small realization.

It felt a lot like when he raised his Attunement, and the world outside ceased to exist.

Problem #1. Perry only had a measly CNC machine that could only make smaller cuts when compared to the sheets he was working with, and one cheap robotic arm programmed to load it.

For that, Perry reprogrammed his cheap robotic arm to do the mind-numbing work of spinning threaded copper to make motors, while he laboriously loaded and unloaded his CNC machine, which cut sheeting to make skeletal frames for further robotic arms.

Perry spun plastic sheeting, copper and of awful handmade semiconductors into control hardware for the new robotic arms, his perks pulling triple duty as Tinker Twitch made the contraption work in the first place, while his Spendthrift perk ensured it worked well, and both of them were affected by his Attunement, which, at 16, increased BOTH perks by 218%.

With zero Attunement, Perry could make cardboard function at 24 times it’s original strength. That number was now 52.3.

Once Perry had about fifty arm’s worth of motherboards, he cracked them apart, the boards separating as if they’d always been perforated at those exact points.

Humming to himself, Perry began slapping his new bare bones robotic arms together, and in a matter of hours, he had fifty new robotic arms, ready to speed up the process of industrialization.

They were joints, motors, wiring, and motherboards, and no pretty casings, whatsoever. They would do.

Perry set them up around the room and began programming them. It was around then that Perry realized it would be great to buy an AI core butler from the Marketplace that could take care of the grunt work of reprogramming for him.

The arms would never be adaptive without either an AI or a ton of extra work. The biggest problem was how many orders of separation could Perry have between himself and the thing he was making?

Just telling an AI to make something seemed like it would have a good chance to bypass his Spendthrift perk.

How does the spendthrift perk work? Perry wondered to himself. He could flip the switch on Hardcase’s machines and modify his own goods, but could he have produced something new using Hardcase’s equipment? How did his perk know what was a good trait to have and what was a bad one?

If he made a sandwich like one of Hardcase’s would it be inedibly tough, extraordinarily tasty, spoil-resistant? Have more nutrition than it reasonably should? Or would the Spendthrift perk not apply to food he’d created?

Perry couldn’t think of a definitive reason it wouldn’t work. The Maillard reaction was a reaction, after all.

That is an interesting question, Perry thought, setting up his assembly line.

Now that he had a simple assembly line, it was time to start making better machines and tools.

The industrial chemistry equipment wasn’t too hard to replicate. His sheet metal walls were far below the industrial standard for safety, but his Perk made them tough enough that they were actually stronger than standard equipment. Less likely to explode, even, despite looking wildly unprofessional.

The trickiest part was making the valves and couplings and coils from scratch, but he’d managed.

Problem 2: Eventually the power draw of all of Perry’s machines working together began to be…a little much.

So Perry made some industrial sized seawater/aluminum into batteries, contemplating establishing a portal to a plane of lightning, but ultimately deciding against it for now.

The sheer size and scope of the batteries, multiplied by his perks, meant that it produced enough juice to keep the system going seamlessly.

Perry wondered for a moment if he could make some kind of infinite energy machine by leveraging his ability to make things overperform their intended design.

Random, stupid example: create a solar panel with 130% efficiency, and a full-spectrum bulb with 120% efficiency pointed at it. Harvest the difference.

That was assuming over one hundred percent efficient power generation was possible. Or even desireable.

I don’t wanna rip the fabric of spacetime so early in my career. Still, could be fun. If it didn’t break reality, would it mean whatever energy produced would essentially be coming directly from Perry’s Attunement?

Food for thought. Perry was pretty confident it wouldn’t break reality. So many other supers had abilities that defied physics. Why should cheap, infinite energy make reality bat an eye?

Perry’s batteries were generating WAY more than they should be.

So many experiments to do, so little time.

That wasn’t even including the trunk full of magical ingredients he had to get around to making new spells with.

Damn, I’m busy.

Perry’s phone went off, the second nagging beep dragging him out of his fugue musings.

MOM:

Are you eating sweety? You missed breakfast this morning.

BTW your grampa is going to be staying with us until High Tide is over. It’s not safe out there in the countryside right now.

Perry’s eyes widened.

“It’s ten thirty in the morning already!?”