“The costs are astronomical,” Lightshow said.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Perry said. He wasn’t even kidding. Spendthrift ate astronomical costs for breakfast.

Lightshow must’ve thought he was being sarcastic, because she huffed and continued to explain.

“Look, when I stabilize light, it’s primarily 2 dimensional panels fit together into a 3-d shape.”

Ah. Light origami. Sort of. The total volume of stabilized light is tiny, and the insides are just trapped air.

Stabilizing an entire person must indeed have astronomical cost.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Perry said. “MRI takes slices anyway. Is it possible to stabilize Solaris only precisely where he needs to be stabilized to take the picture, then the next, and so on?”

“I don’t think it’s that easy.” Lightshow responded, chewing on her lip. The woman was a brunette in her thirties, with the vibe of a friendly aunt who dabbled in science. That’s all he got, because she was wearing a full-body hardlight projection to hide her identity.

“Solaris and the light-stabilizing equipment will play hell with the MRI’s readings. He’s got electromagnetism up the wazoo. We would need to stabilize all of him at once to even have a shot at it.”

“Not to mention,” Lightshow said, taking the chewed pen out of her mouth. “If Solaris so much as twitches while only a small part of his body is stabilized, that could misalign parts of his brain and flat out kill him.”

Lightshow was deep in the Tinker Twitch, and generally a nice woman at heart, so she didn’t immediately understand that she had just described the basic concept for a weapon that stood a chance at killing the most powerful super in the city…and she was the only one who could build it.

Perry noticed it, though.

Let’s not bring attention to it. We all knew that in order to cure him, we’d have to invent tech that could mess him up pretty bad.

“What’s your limiting factor?” Perry asked. “Energy?”

“Processing power…and Energy, I suppose.” Lightshow said, before moving over to the counter where one of her Hardlight belts lay.

She opened up the belt and pulled out a rather chunky looking GPU.

“This GPU is necessary to stabilize one cubic millimeter of light,” She said. “Now, I spread that cubic millimeter as far as it’ll go, but For Solaris, he’s one hundred and ninety five centimeters tall, and one hundred and thirteen kilograms in mass, which puts his volume at approximately…

She pulled out a calculator and punched in some numbers.

“One hundred and eleven million, eight hundred and eighty-one thousand, one hundred eighty-eight cubic millimeters.”

“Do you have one hundred and twelve million of these?” She asked, waggling the GPU at him.

“I’m fairly confident I can grow something that could handle that amount of processing power in a couple days,” Perry said with a nod.

“Reeaaaally? Where have you been all my career?” She asked, cocking her head in a flirty way and biting on her chewed-up pen.

“Grade School.” Perry responded with a flat expression.

“That’s fair.” Lightshow sighed, blowing a raspberry and moved on to the next problem: The lens and the power supply.

“…How do you know Solaris’s exact height, weight and volume?” Perry interrupted her explanation. She obviously hadn’t consulted any stat sheets or the super’s wiki.

Her projected disguise had the decency to mirror her blush.

“Well, you know, you grow up with a certain expectation of what a man should – Wait! This is irrelevant! Back to work, you!”

She bonked him with a rolled-up newspaper. Also made of hardlight.

“Yeah, back to work, Daddy!” Sera shouted, battering his hip with her tiny fists.

“Take it easy with the hitting,” Perry said. “It’s rude to hit people.”

“Mommy hits people?” She said. must be talking about Heather. Nat doesn’t hit people…directly.

“Yes, but mommy hits bad guys. You don’t have any bad guys to hit here. It’s just us. And hitting non-bad guy personnel makes you a bad guy.”

“You can be the bad guy!” Sera said, hitting him again. “You’re the bad guy!”

It was times like this that Perry was thankful for his drastically increased brainpower, as he was able to play with his daughter while simultaneously running the math on exactly how big of a generator he needed to make.

Even with Perry’s spendthrift ability working full-time, the Solaris MRI machine was going to be a BEAST, guzzling power an order of magnitude more than the entire city used in a day.

He used Spendthrift on the front-end, creating a generator that would produce a frankly outrageous amount of power, then he used Spendthrift on the back-end, lowering the energy requirements of the hungry machine to a tiny fraction of its original requirements, just barely low enough to match the output of his generator.

Lowering the energy throughput was a godsend, because it made the electromagnetic interference from the Lightshow-specific parts much easier to isolate and accommodate for.

Even with the lowered energy requirements, Perry still had to personally work on all the guts to make sure every single wire was super-conducting, simply to prevent waste heat from slagging the entire machine.

While the processors were growing in his vat, Perry watched Lightshow make her proprietary tech. They were the bottleneck, since neither of them were Industrial Tinkers, they couldn’t apply their benefits to each other’s work.

If Perry could make those parts himself, he could increase their efficiency over a thousandfold, make each lens have a drastically higher maximum capacity. Most of a cubic meter instead of a couple cubic centimeters.

It didn’t sound like much, but it was.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There were thousands of her lenses filling dozens of bowls on the workbench nearby, each one ready to be placed into the array on the top of the MRI, facing inward to stabilize Solaris’s physical form long enough to get readings.

Perry’s gaze lingered on the lenses.

Hmm...

In the corner of the room, Annette rubbed her arm and gave him a sour look. Obviously Perry wasn’t going to use invasive means to make sure the twins were still human. That was what Annette was for, as a litmus test.

There was no possibility the Elysian Attendant would let the children out of her sight or abandon them. If she was turned, then the kids were. If she wasn’t, then they weren’t.

Simple.

He even healed her afterwards, so the rubbing her arm was just for his benefit.

Next time I’ll use better painkillers. It probably would be for the best not to abuse his nanny too much. Best not burn that bridge when its lifespan was theoretically infinite.

Perry faked a yawn and checked the time.

In theory he could stay awake for an entire month, perhaps indefinitely, depending on the specifics of how Body and Nerve interacted with sleep…but who wanted that?

Besides, other people couldn’t do that.

“It’s getting late,” Perry said, turning to his kids, who were, by and large, beginning to slump over where they played with Annette.

“Alright Sera, Gareth, bedtime.”

“Aww. I want to stay with Annette!” Sera pouted, Gareth not far behind her.

“Good news: Annette is coming with us,” Perry said, picking her and Gareth up.

“Yay!”

He spun up a portal and took them to the hotel room he’d been staying in. From there, he portaled the four of them to Chicago.

To home.

Perry poked around the house a bit to make sure there was nothing out of place, introduced Annette to Heather and Nat, then they got the kids in bed, and met up for the first time in weeks.

“Okay, so normally whenever someone’s been out of my sight for an extended period of time, I take a bone marrow sample,” Perry said, demonstrating the drill for a moment before setting it aside.

“But for you guys specifically, I’ve been researching an alternative. In my studies, I uncovered ancient, primal magics, which I can rig into a ritual that will have a side-effect of confirming sure you’re still human, using one of the oldest tools men have - ”

“Is it your dick?” Heather interrupted with a raised brow.

“It’s my dick!” Perry said.

“Hah!” Heather guffawed while Natalie held her fingertips to her temple and sighed at the floor.

“No, but seriously, it’s an ancient Manitian sex ritual. It’s that or the bone marrow samples,” Perry said, pulling out the Angor shell chalk and beginning to draw the ritual circle around the bed.

“What if we’re all mimics, though?” Heather asked “Would it even work? Would we even know? Would our human cover-brains be imagining this entire conversation, when in reality, we were assimilating the only one of us who wasn’t yet?”

Perry saw the glimmer of mischief in Heather’s eye, and knew what she was planning.

As one, the two of them turned towards Natalie, pointing at her and shrieking inhumanly, their eyes rolling back in their head as they used their superhuman physiques to alter their voices to unnerving, unnatural tones.

“EEEK!” Natalie jumped off the bed, scrambling backwards, eyes bulging with alarm.

Naturally Heather couldn’t hold it for long, and began cackling wildly, folded over with raucous laughter.

“BAHAHA!”

“Oh, you little-“ Natalie tackled Heather onto the bed, the two of them devolving into a tangle of elbows and heels that threatened to smack Perry in the face at any given second as he knelt by the side of the bed, finishing up the magic ritual.

“Hey, watch the circle, dammit,” Perry muttered as sprawling limbs and discarded clothes began to threaten to smudge his spell.

While Perry was taking care of business, partway across the continent, a super by the name of Mongoose was guarding Lightshow’s lab. Mongoose was a C-lister, but reliable. Showed up on time, and fought harder the more he was outmatched, although that only went so far, since he by definition had to be outmatched first.

A power that would usually just barely lose, but make the opponent pay for it.

Today he was making good money watching the door of a laboratory that nobody had any particular interest in. Lightshow didn’t really have any enemies, and if someone wanted some of her kit, there was always a way to buy it. And it was less dangerous than trying to burgle a tinker’s lair who could make some of the most wicked lasers known to man.

But Nexus suddenly decided Lightshow was a priority, and Mongoose wasn’t the kind of guy who bothered asking questions. Nexus tells him to guard a door for five thousand dollars a night, he does it.

He didn’t ask questions, but he did think.

Solaris hasn’t been seen around a lot recently, and now I’m guarding Lightshow’s lab? Coincidence? I think it’s not…my business.

Mongoose was a good choice as a door guard, because while he would most likely lose any confrontation, it wouldn’t be by much, making just about any attacker nearly crippled from the close victory. Then they would have to get past the lasers, while seriously wounded and/or exhausted.

An excellent deterrent.

Mongoose looked forward to when the detail was over. He could tally up all of his 5k nightly wages with gusto and blow half of it at the strip club.

He shifted in place as he spotted someone approaching in the distance. Someone he’d gotten to know coming and going lately.

“Hey, boss, what’s-“

Mongoose reeled backwards as the figure’s hand flashed up, slapping against his mouth.

Confusion turned to panic as their fingers began burrowing into his face.

Mongoose opened his mouth to scream, when the palm split open and jammed a barbed tendril down his esophagus. Things faded to white pretty quick after that.

On the eighth day of collaboration with Lightshow, Perry walked into the shop he’d been sharing with her and came to a halt as he found himself face-to-face with several Anchors.

Namely Guile, Freddy Steel and Chemestro.

Lightshow stood with her arms crossed, a big scowl on her faux face.

“Can I help you guys?” Perry asked, mentally scanning the surroundings for tricks.

“We’d like you to take a look at some video,” Lightshow said, gesturing him to follow her over to one of her computers.

The Anchors split around the two of them and flanked Perry all the way to the monitor, where Lightshow pressed ‘play’ on a video showing the shop from above.

Perry glanced up at the security camera, then back down at the video.

On the video, Perry walked into the shop and snagged one of Lightshow’s lenses from one of the bowls as he passed by. The movement was so smooth that the only hint was the absence of a lens that had been there a moment ago.

“Huh. Smooth,” Perry said, stroking his chin.

“Care to explain?” Lightshow asked.

“Wasn’t me,” Perry said with a shrug.

“What?” Lightshow asked.

“Wasn’t me. I know where all the security is in this room, and if I wanted to steal one of your lenses, you would never catch me.”

“Prove it.” Lightshow said.

Perry turned and pointed out the security cameras, both the obvious ones as well as the hidden ones. He then pointed out the paneling that hid the scanners that took 3-D pictures of the lab on a streaming basis. He then pointed out the bio-locks on the floor that would trap unauthorized people in cages of hardlight.

Then he hacked into Lightshow’s security system and changed the current streaming video to show himself dancing a jig.

Then he used a spell to open a tiny portal at the bottom of one of the lens bowls, popping it up in his hand. The bowl itself didn’t move, and he was nowhere near it.

“Fine fine,” Lightshow said, waving for Perry to stop showing off after a few minutes. “A simple snatch and grab is beneath you. I get it. If you’ll consent to a search of your person and your hotel room, we’ll assume it was a super with a doppleganger ability strong enough to fake your bio signature, and proceed from there.”

Perry pursed his lips.

Doppleganger my ass. That was a mimic, wasn’t it? One who knew what we were doing here? How did it mimic me without consuming me, though? I may have to test my own bone marrow.

That sucks.

“Sure, with a couple stipulations: Perry said. “One, the four of us will stay in the same room at all times,” Perry said, motioning to himself, his nanny and the twins. “And two: you can search where we’re staying to your heart’s content, but afterwards, we’re moving to a different room of our choosing.”

Lightshow seemed to believe he was trying to avoid counter-surveillance, and sure, that was kind of part of it, but if there was a mimic around, Perry would rather not give it an opportunity to lay eggs in their pillows or something equally awful.

“And nobody’s strip-searching my kids.” Perry added.

The surrounding supers discussed it for a moment before agreeing to Perry’s terms.

After stripping down to his boxers, while they were rifling through his clothes, Perry pulled out the marrow sampler.

Multi-Tool.

Perry held the drill to his arm for a moment, and decided to offer Annette an olive branch. She’d been subjected to it twice already.

“Annette, would you like to do the honors?”

She gave a faint smile. “No, I would rather not. I can sulk, but schadenfreude just isn’t in an Elysian Attendant’s nature. Besides, I’d rather keep an eye on the twins.”

“I gotcha, bro,” Freddy steel said, grabbing the drill and jamming it into Perry’s arm.

“Son of a B-“