Calculator looked at me, and I looked back at him. He raised an eyebrow, I shrugged. I had nothing to say unless he asked an actual question. I could do this all day. Plus, I didn’t actually know what he wanted. I could tell he was mad, but that was it. Midnight wasn’t in the room, but all I could feel from him was resignation.

“So, Mage,” he slid a tablet across the table towards me, showing a video. “What would you say this video shows?”

“Looks like… me punching a reporter in the face.”

“And this one?” he said, tapping it to the next video in the playlist.

“The same video again?” I tilted my head.

“Pay attention to the details. It’s the same thing from a slightly different angle… with a different news channel’s logo on it.” He tapped the next video. “And this one?”

“Another news channel,” I said. “I think I get it.”

“Do you, though?” Calculator crossed his arms. “Normally by now you’d have a reasonable explanation. I would ask what the video shows, and you would say something besides you punching a reporter in the face.”

“I… punched him in the jaw?” That definitely wasn’t the answer Calculator wanted, but nothing was coming to me.

“That’s not helpful. Now, it is part of my job to deal with stuff like this, but I would very much prefer you had an explanation. Any sort of excuse or something.”

I stroked my chin, “I’d have to talk to my therapist.”

“That might be something,” Calculator shrugged. “So, do you remember the exact words spoken to you? I’m finding it hard to get anything good from before your punch.”

“How do you feel about arresting orcs like yourself,” I quoted. The screen on the tablet cracked. “Sorry.”

He slid the tablet over to himself, “We have repair supers for things like this. One of which you helped get on the brigade, so we appreciate that.” He cleared his throat. “Now then, about the official response. First, the reporter was too close to an active villain threat.” He held up a hand to stave off any response from me. “They were subdued, but the actual containment team hadn’t come up yet. They really shouldn’t have been interrupting at that point. Second, that’s actually… kinda racist.”

“I’m not like them.”

“Mhm. Alright, so, I can potentially salvage this situation. Also, don’t punch reporters.”

-----

There weren’t just a few orcs who appeared in New Bay with fancy tech, but a whole mess of things. Some of which were going to make things complicated for not just myself, but others. Lycanthropes and vampires also appeared, similarly outfitted by Doctor Doomsday. There was no doubting that fact, and it was clear he hadn’t been trying to hide it. Not that he should need to hide it, now that he suddenly had an army. Another army? It was never really clear how many minions the tech super had except for ‘many’, plus robots and technological crap. He just had more now, and there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that these had come through in the last portal incident. It was probably just a cover up to distract people while he fulfilled his actual purpose. Or, if people were to be believed, the distraction also did exactly what he wanted.

There was no way everything could work out precisely how one person predicted, super powers included. Oracles weren’t perfect, and tech supers might be extremely intelligent in their narrow areas, but they couldn’t know everything. Even Calculator got surprised by things, and thinking about things was his whole power and job. He just wasn’t as focused as a tech super on making potentially impossible pieces of technology, but a general increase in brain power of all sorts.

I had a lot of time to look at the news while I was on ‘administrative leave’. I could tell the Power Brigade really liked me, because I was still employed by them. It would be so much easier for them to just drop me off on my behind. Or to deal with a single lawsuit according to their obligations and then kick me to the curb.

Doctor Doomsday was up to a lot of stuff. Seemed like someone should probably do something about that.

-----

“... and that made me angry, so I punched him in the jaw,” I said to Doctor Patenaude.

His sensory stalks waved around as he nodded. “It is good to acknowledge your emotions. But I believe we should also explore in this case why you felt that way. Was it being compared to a criminal?”

“Mmn…” I furrowed my brow. Certainly, that thought didn’t feel good, but… “Nah.” I shook my head. “That would have only made me a little bit angry.”

“Then… I wonder what it could have been,” Doctor Patenaude said in a manner that let me know he already knew what he thought it was. And that I was supposed to figure it out to see if I agreed with him. He never claimed to always be correct in his assumptions, though so far I couldn’t really say anything in particular he’d been wrong about. Either way, I was supposed to manage things with only sometimes-helpful prodding.

“... I don’t like being compared to other orcs,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“Because they’re angry and violent without reason.”

“I see,” Doctor Patenaude nodded. “Could you elaborate?”

“Well, it’s… pretty obvious. They were loading up their getaway van when we showed up. They should have just tried to go, but instead they immediately turned towards us and charged. They didn’t even think about accomplishing their objective and just chose to fight. Of course they were all angry berserkers.”

“I see. And were these orcs from your world? Would they also have class powers like yourself?”

“Yeah,” I nodded reluctantly. “They probably were. Or from one similar enough. They definitely had mana powered rage.”

“So their class would be berserker, then?” Doctor Patenaude asked.

“Well… barbarian, technically.” I shrugged, “Or maybe whatever it would be called in orcish.”

“You don’t speak the language, correct?”

“Of course not. I wasn’t raised by those psychopaths. And I had no reason to learn it later.”

There was an awkward period of silence. Notes typed or scratched with a pen. Thoughts swirled in my head with nowhere to go and nothing comprehensible inside them. “You didn’t like fighting them?” Doctor Patenaude asked. “Normally you enjoy combat, correct?”

“Well yeah, but I have reasons for that. These orcs are just violent by nature.”

“You only get experience from combat, correct?” Doctor Patenaude tapped his fingers. “It was from some Aspect you possessed, right? What was it called again?”

“Aspect of the Barbarian.” I didn’t think about it at the moment, but later I realized he made me say that for a reason.

“You didn’t have any information of such a thing’s prevalence in different groups, correct?”

“Yeah, not really… some people studied that, I think, but information was pretty sparse.”

“How unfortunate.”

-----

Being on ‘administrative leave’ was much worse than injury leave and all the other stuff. For one, I couldn’t use the Power Brigade’s facilities. I had so many things I wanted to do, sparring for experience and testing out all sorts of things. Like, maybe improving my spell ranks on purpose. Because I apparently could do that with… everything? Maybe. I was at least willing to accept it as a possibility, having not observed it yet for some of my categories of spells.

Spells I was willing to use inside my apartment included Storage, Grease because it left no traces after the magic passed, Force Armor, Mage’s Reach, and other spells that had either a good number of ranks already or no way to practically train them. I assumed they had to actually… do something. I couldn’t learn just by throwing them about arbitrarily. No, with Basic Light Magic I’d been trying new, specific things. That one only had two upgrades, but I was kind of hoping for something with no rank increases. Which kind of left me with Water Breathing, Scrying, and Locate Object. Disguise would probably need someone else and Midnight was at work. And Gate was… not something to play around with inside a room. If I could even use it without passing out. I was quite certain my previous successes were due to special circumstances, circumstances I pushed for with all of my power.

I looked down at the sink, full of water. “Should have gone for an apartment with a tub.” Then I shoved my face in it. It was uncomfortable, not because I thought I would drown or anything but because the position was unpleasant for my back and neck. I didn’t have a chair tall enough to make this reasonable. Sinks really weren’t made for this- neither bathroom nor kitchen.

This was also incredibly boring. I wondered if my phone was waterproof. I knew that option existed somewhere, but did I have it? Best not to try to find out. I heard bad things about mixing electronics and water.

What was I even trying to accomplish? Was I going to breathe water… better? I could breathe it. That was really it. It could be cheaper and last longer, but those were more side effects of rank rather than the path to rank itself. Probably. I could concentrate on increasing the duration or something for a shorter duration spell but… this spell lasted literally forever.

Maybe I should go to the park. No, they didn’t like swimming in the pond there. The bay? Some of that was swimmable, as long as I stayed away from bay monsters. There weren’t really that many of those. But the bay was also guaranteed to be uncomfortable, with this being the cold season.

Then I got a call from a number I definitely didn’t have in my phone but showed up as a contact regardless. ‘Vilhelmiina Koskinen’. That name was… vaguely familiar. Had it come up in the Power Brigade database? A tech super, maybe? Maybe they would take over my phone and steal all of my data. Though anything actually important was secured with Power Brigade stuff anyway.

I was planning to say hello as I clicked answer, but my words were bulldozed. “Turlough-Mage, come to my lab!” Then she started spouting off a street address, and then she hung up.

A quick search brought me to public information on Vilhelmiina, where I got just the barest of overviews about the mad scientist before my phone redirected itself to a splash page with a primary color background and eye melting text. I actually thought it was an attack of some sort for a moment.

I was on the ‘about me’ page of a personal website. It was mostly text, but there were also animated images crawling around the page as I read the text. Mostly, it was saying how awesome and smart Vilhelmiina was.

Inventor of the patented ‘Quantum De-entangler’. A postmodern Einstein. And a whole bunch of other garbage titles with no explanation. “Hmm.”

Then the text morphed on the page. “Oh I forgot to say your apprentice dropped off a cool box and I want you to come look at it with magic.”

Ah. Jerome did mention meeting a mad scientist with the thing he retrieved. Government sponsored and all that. Well, I was bored anyway so I might as well.

As I opened my GPS to try to type in what I remembered, a location automatically plugged itself in. Convenient. Also I should look into magical antitech wards for my phone. I wasn’t even sure if mages could get those things, but maybe Khithae could do it? She was an Artificer or something. Speaking of which, I should get her to walk through a portal. That seemed like it would be useful, if she ‘completed’ her powers.

The coordinates were nearby for some reason, so I just walked. I stopped when I arrived, but found nothing. Then a sound came from a metal box nearby. It was a ringing. Sure enough, it said phone on it- and it had a phone inside. It wasn’t a phone booth like media had led me to believe existed, but just a phone in open air, protected by something like a fuse box.

I picked up the phone, and then the ground fell out from underneath me. A few moments later I was inside of some sort of glass tube with light strips being the only thing I could see as I was pulled along by gravity and some sort of air pressure. Then I suddenly curved up, launching into the open air inside some sort of light filled room. I managed to orient myself to land feet first, but I wasn’t expecting the ground to give way in such a manner. It was… bouncy and soft. A trampoline, maybe, like in the gym.

“Good, you made it!” I turned my head to see a mad scientist, complete with tubes and vials and something vaguely resembling a lab coat. “I wonder if I should have something to make it so people don’t land head first? Nah, it’ll be fine.” She took a wide stance, pointing at me. “You! Show me magic!”