They were both poisoned," The Dread Pirate said as he helped the Princess to her feet. "I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder."
Kori giggled, and I smiled as I tightened my arms around her waist. The two of us were on the couch in the common room, myself resting my head against the armrest, and Kori more or less on top of me with her head on my chest. The past few days had been surprisingly busy for the both of us, myself going back and forth with Ted and Serling over my new abilities, her getting involved with team logistics and the League. It wasn't to say we hadn't been able to spend time together, but it felt like this was the first time in a while the two of us had been able to just sit down and relax together.
Kori's amusement passed, and I saw her brow furrow. "That was clever of the pirate, but why didn't the princess simply attack her kidnapper while he was focused on the other man? I should think a rock to the back of the head would suffice for a human."
I tilted my head down. "Well, remember, Buttercup was just a peasant farmer before the prince selected her for her beauty. And he likely kept her in a gilded cage. She hasn't had any combat training."
"How odd… Well, I suppose there must have been times when such a thing has happened on Tamaran, but certainly not in recent memory. The Royal Family has always been warriors without exception."
"Well, I suppose that it's just another element that reinforces the prince's villainy, by capturing a woman to be his princess for beauty, rather than choosing one based on her ability wade into combat and thwart assassins."
"True, true..." Kori said sagely. Then, in a motion that reminded me that Tamaranians had supposedly evolved from cats, Kori stretched by placing her hands on my chest and arching her back. She even kneeded my chest a few times before she settled back down, looking at me with a slight smile on her face. "I should ask, you are still feeling good, correct? No problems with your new condition?"
"Better than ever. I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on how my body works." While Serling had a fit when she found out that my internal software architecture had changed overnight, there was no denying that it was a lot more responsive than before. The two of us had made some real headway into deciphering how my code functioned. Enough that with the two of us working together we nearly had a functioning compiler… for the more mundane part of me anyway.
My technomancy was a lot harder to analyze, and neither Serling or Ted had any idea of what to do about it other than record the results of me using it. Which at that point was mostly turning things I touched on and off, as far as physical effects went. There was a much greater information component to it though, a sort of sense of the flow of power and data in an object. It was no structural analysis just yet, but I was getting better at it. I could even use it on myself to an extent (it was how I made Core-Loop Reinforcement Protocol after all), though I hadn't made as much headway on that front.
I shrugged a little. "Still, while I'm making progress, I feel like I have too many things to try and do. There's figuring out how my nanomachines mechanically work, there's studying technomany, there's finding and learning about different technologies that might be useful, planning out infrastructure upgrades for developing nations-"
"Wait, infrastructure?" Kori asked. "I have not heard of this. Is this a mission the team has been tasked with?"
"Oh, no, this is a personal thing. It came up in a talk I had with Ted." I elaborated."The Rhelasia peace summit it coming up, and even if the best case scenario happens and both nations decide to unify, there's a huge technology gap between the North and the rest of the world. Ted and I got talking about what would be the best way to reintegrate modern technology to the country given whatever restrictions the government would put on imports."
Kori put on a curious expression, and put her face a little closer to mine. "And what brought this interest on?"
"It's… something I thought about a lot before my transformation, actually. Since I was just a programmer though, there was nothing I could do about it. But now, after everything I've been through in the past few months, I feel like I'm in a position to actually change something. Technology is certainly not going away, and people not having access to it is like any other resource imbalance. So, I feel like I should do something to fix that, make sure everyone can get technology that makes their lives better, brings them together with everyone else. Make things fair."
Kori looked at me for a long moment before a slow smile crept over her face, and shifted position to kiss me. I wasn't entirely sure what I had said to deserve that, but I certainly wasn't going to stop her. As always, I let myself get lost in the feeling of warmth pressed against me as we kissed.
Before we could get back to the movie, I head a pair of feet enter the other side of the room, and a few seconds later I heard Superboy say "Hey, Jacob, you in here?"
I broke the kiss and craned my neck to look around the couch, and spied him and M'gann standing in the hallway opening. "I'm here. What's up?"
M'gann spoke up. "Superboy and I are doing maintenance in the hangar, and I thought you'd might be interested in seeing what I do for my bioship."
I hummed."That does sound interesting… but I'm a little pinned down at the moment."
"By what?" Superboy asked incredulously as he walked up to the couch, and stopped when he saw myself and Kori.
"Oh, about 180 pounds of willful Tamaranian." I said as I glanced down at my girlfriend, and Kori shot me a playful look in return.
As Superboy's eyebrows slowly moved upwards, it occurred to me that though it had been a few days I had never… actually told anyone that Kori and I were dating. Not that I was trying to keep it a secret or anything, it had just never come up in conversation. Superboy seemed to be very nonplussed about the whole thing, if I was judging his reaction correctly.
It was then that M'gann's head popped into view over the back of the couch, her eyes wide. Her gaze rapidly shifted between myself and Kori before she looked at my girlfriend with a gleefully expectant looked. Kori looked up at her friend with a knowing smile on her face, and the two had a silent conversation. Not a psychic one, mind you, I mean the far more mysterious method of wordless communication all women seem to inherently have with one another when it comes to juicy gossip.
M'gann then let out a squeal, floating up slightly as she did so. "I knew it, I knew it! You two were always spending so much time together and looking after each other and giving each other looks and eeeeeeeee!"
"Well, I can't say you're wrong," I remarked, "Though it wasn't till a few days ago that we made it official."
The Martian looked at Kori and continued. "Oh, we need do 'girl-time'! I've heard that's a thing human women do when one of the gets into a relationship! I mean, I don't really know what that is, but we should do it!"
Kori perked up at that. "We do have similar celebrations of relationships on Tamaran, I would love to see what-"
She stopped as something occurred to her and looked back at me, clearly conflicted between girl-time with M'gann and time with myself. I gave a theatrical sigh and said "Go, go, we can finish the movie later tonight."
Kori beamed at me and kissed me again before floating up off of me and towards M'gann. The pair talked excitedly and Superboy and I watched them float off down the hall. We remained in silence for a few seconds before I turned to him and said "Redheads, am I right?"
The teen gave me a confused look. "...huh?"
I jumped over the back of the couch to stand next to him. "Men like us are powerless against them, especially when they learn how to be extra cute when asking for something. You must steel your heart, my friend, because M'gann will be using the sad puppy dog eyes on you quite a bit."
"I… don't know what you're talking about." He replied, which I might have found more credible if I couldn't see his body temperature suddenly rise as he flushed. Back before my transformation I wasn't very good at reading people, but the addition of all my heightened senses made reading physical cues a lot easier. And at that moment I could tell that he knew exactly what I was talking about.
How is it that I'm the most competent person at relationships around here? I wondered. Oh right, I'm not a teenager. "Sure you don't." I said as I patted his shoulder. "But when you do, you can talk to me if you ever need to. Now, since the girls have abandoned us, what's say we take some bro-time and head to that hangar to see about that maintenance..."
The relative peace did not last, as such things never do. It was only two days later that we got the call from Batman that he had a mission for us. In spite of all the things I had on my plate I felt… surprisingly ready to get back into the field. Not sure what that said about me considering that I faced the specter of death merely a week ago, but I guess I was just getting used to my new life. Maybe I should talk to Black Canary about… no, no I was fine.
The team moved into the main hall in a slow trickle, Batman and Red Tornado waiting patiently for us to assemble. I was a little surprised at how Kaldur was the last one to arrive. He was usually punctual, but ever since he came back from leave he seemed more… somber than usual? Even with my enhanced senses the Atlantian's stoicism made him difficult to pin down. I wondered if and how I should talk to him about it, but I'd have to do that later.
With the lot of us gathered, Batman unceremoniously opened up a holographic screen depicting a top down map and started the briefing. "The Watchtower detected an immense power surge out in the Bialyan desert. Spectral analysis revealed elements non-terrestrial in origin. Find out what happened at that site, and what might have landed there. Bialya is a rogue state, under the dictatorship of Queen Bea," The image changed to the portrait of a gorgeous Middle-Eastern woman clothed in silk and wearing a massive gold tiara. "And is not a member of the UN Charter. All communications are subject to interception. Maintain radio silence at all times."
I raised my hand. "Do we really still not have a way of communicating at long ranges that the enemy can't detect? Because I feel like this is exactly the sort of situation where that would come in handy."
Batman gave me a flat stare (so his normal expression). "No. Radio communication is still the most reliable method the League has. Other communication methods the League has explored have either been too difficult to maintain or not reliable under certain circumstances."
Which means I'm going to have to make it myself, I thought grimly. I let the matter drop though at ask "If that's the case, what's the protocol for if things go wrong?"
Red Tornado answered. "Regroup and retreat. It would be ideal in no one learns of your presence, but if that becomes impossible, avoiding confrontation is your next priority. Your legal grounds for being in the country are… dubious, after all."
"Hey, not going to be a problem." Wally said. "They'll have no idea we're there."
I gave the teen a flat look. "Wally, literally every mission we've gone on has gone wrong in some way. Sometimes catastrophically. I can't be the only person who's noticed this."
"You're not." Artemis remarked. "But it don't think any of those were technically our fault."
"Doesn't change my point." I said back. "We need to be prepared for when some unexpected things goes wrong. Like, what if there's another faction wandering around? Or a weapon system goes rogue? Or evil magic gets involved? Or some number of us gets compromised for some reason?"
"You've made your point, Jacob." Kori said. "Our missions have had… unique circumstances. We must be wary and not let our guards down."
Batman grunted in what I assumed was approval. "I've downloaded all the mission information to the Mountain's computer for your viewing. Unless you have anymore questions, I will leave the rest of the mission planning to you." With that he turned and strode to the Zeta Tube, not actually waiting to see if we had questions.
I arched an eyebrow as he disappeared into golden light. Batman did like to keep his mission briefings 'brief', but he usually gave more instruction than that. I turned back to look at Kori already scrolling through the data screens, wondering if she had taken my advice to make the team more independent to Batman. "Hold up," I said, and everyone turned towards me. "Before we start going into in-depth plans, I've got some stuff to give out."
"Stuff?" Wally asked. "What kind of stuff?"
The room was the size of a large walk-in closet, and the walls were lined with cubbies, shelves, and racks. Most of which were bare, but there were a few that were starting to fill up with equipment. Specifically, the equipment I was making. "For those of you not aware, this is the Armory. The League used it to hold gear back when they were operating out of here, and now I am putting all of the stuff I build for the team in here."
Kaldur turned his gaze from the shelves towards me. "I was unaware that you had taken it upon yourself to keep the team equipped."
"Well, it was only just recently I got good enough to get some actual results. In any case, I have a few general bits of gear available to everyone." I pulled out a rack near me, showing of a line of armor pieces colored dark gray. "These are bits of armor I developed using carbon nanotubes, and it comes in both plate and weave. While I don't expect any of you to try out the plate armor just yet, though it is quite light, I would highly recommend those of you with baseline human toughness to incorporate the weave into your armor."
I pulled out the cloth and showed it to them. "It's very flexible, breathes pretty well, and is incredibly resilient. Practically invincible to abrasion and cuts within certain thresholds, and can even stop low caliber bullets, though you will not particularly enjoy it."
Artemis frowned a little, but walked forward and took some of the fabric in her hands, giving it an experimental stretch and tug. "Hmm… could work. I'll have to try it out. I don't suppose you've made a variant of my costume with this?"
"No, didn't have time to spec out yours, plus I was meaning to get your input. There's a few pieces you can slip over your costume, though I can't say for how well they'll mesh colorwise." I moved down the line to the next row. "Armor aside, we've also got an array of nifty gadgets for the discerning superhero. Grappling hooks, multi-tools, goggles with a couple of types of visual modes, trackers, tasers, cutting lasers, a few different kinds of kits, and..." I pulled out a pair of spherical objects. "Sunlight grenades. Unlike a normal flashbang, these perfectly emulate the wavelength and particle emissions of the sun. Particularly useful for those of us who are solar powered." I gestured at Superboy and Kori.
The team looked suitably impressed. "Not bad, man." Robin said as he took a closer look at the gear. "Huh, I would have thought you just got it from Batman, but all this stuff is custom made. How did you afford all this?"
"You mean aside from making it myself? Well, one, I can turn myself into a fully functioning molecular forge, so carbon nanotubes are pretty easy to make. And two, did you know that carbon nanotubes go for about $500 a gram? And that when properly configured I can make a kilogram of the stuff every 10 seconds? Yeah… money's not really an issue for me these days."
And Ted was a happy camper when I showed up with that first shipment, let me tell you. The man was already making plans for having me construct more novel configurations.
"What?!" Wally exclaimed. "Man, your powers are nuts. Seems like every week or so you've got new super science nonsense coming out of you butt."
"Oh, that reminds me," I moved down the line of selves more and reached into a rack, pulling out a heavy, pistol looking object, with a thick gray frame and rounded barrel. "Anyone want a freeze ray?"
I was greeted by a series of blank stares before Robin spoke up. "Whoa, whoa, you're saying you can just mass produce those things now?"
"I wouldn't say 'mass produce', but I can make them pretty quickly. Seriously, the most basic model is actually pretty simple to make when you know how. Scans of a working example really help, too."
Wally threw up his hands, but his face broke into a grin. "Alright, whatever, this is awesome! We have our very own genius tinker on the team now!"
My mouth twisted a little and I shrugged. "Not… really. Just a guy with the right materials and enough time on his hands." To be fair to him though, while it didn't really feel right to call myself a 'genius', I had mentally improved in some odd ways since my transformation. My ability to retain information, and its impact on my ability to learn new things was the thing that had the most obvious improvement. This wasn't anything like an eidetic memory though; my actual memories might have been a little clearer than before, but they weren't perfect. However, my ability to recall 'data' (facts, numbers, equations, associations) was edging towards inhuman.
It was a bit worrisome to be honest. Transhumanism was all well and good, but I wasn't looking to give myself an inhuman mindset any time soon. Still, it seemed my consciousness wasn't being transformed so much as augmented by my new state. But would that just make the change more gradual? Regardless of how I felt, would I just not notice?
I blinked when I noticed the rest of the team looking at me funny. "Oh, sorry, minor existential crisis. What were you saying?"
Kori gave me a 'look' before she continued. "I was asking how lethal those freeze rays are."
"Oh. Err..." I hesitated as I turned the weapon over in my hands. "...Pretty lethal. I mean, I gave them a variable power output, but even on the lowest setting it's not great to use on a normal human being. You have about 11 minutes to thaw them out before they suffer frostbite or hypothermia."
The woman hummed. "In that case, I would suggest holding off on equipping ourselves with them for this mission, at least for those of us unfamiliar with their use. Is there anything else you have prepared for the team?"
"Fair enough," I moved off to the other side of the room and pulled out some bins. "Now, I'd like to say that I made something special for all of you, but unfortunately some of you are harder to make specialized gear for than others. As well, this mission popped up earlier than I expected." I reached into the first bin, pulling out a pair of dark gray rods before handing them to Robin. "These escrima sticks should match the functionality and weight of your current sticks, save for two upgrades. The first is that they're made of carbon nanotubes, so they're basically indestructible. The second is that I added a taser function with a variable yield, configurable towards the pommel of each stick. Most of the stick is covered in an insulator, save for a bit on the tip."
The boy took the rods and flicked the release, causing them to extend to full length. He gave them a few experimental twirls and thrusts before bringing the tips together. A small arc of electricity jumped between both ends. "This will take a bit of getting use to," he remarked. "But I can definitely see this being useful."
I nodded and turned to Artemis. "First off, I talked to Green Arrow and he agreed it would be useful if I could manufacture your specialized arrows here on-site. So, he gave me the blueprints so I can do just that… for most of them anyway. Some of the weirder ones have exotic components I have trouble synthesizing. But, if you ever need to resupply you can just come here."
I pulled out a fully stocked quiver and held it up for her to see. "I also made one new kind of arrow for you." I pulled one of the arrows out of the quiver, showing off the cylindrical arrowhead wrapped in blue rings. "Freeze arrow. Everything within 3 meters of impact will be frozen and covered in ice. Same thing I said about the freeze ray applies though, so hard targets only."
"Cool." She remarked as she took the arrow from me to look at it. Then she noticed my arched eyebrow and snorted. "Oh come on, you've made way worse puns."
"Well of course I have, all ice puns by law have to be terrible." I shot back. "I wasn't expecting you of all people to give me the cold shoulder over it, though."
She placed a hand on her hip and her mouth quirked. "Well, maybe I wouldn't if you're pun skills hadn't frozen back fifth grade."
"...why you gotta put me down like that, Artemis?" I said, barely keeping the smile off my face.
A cough brought our attention to Wally, who it seemed was getting impatient. "So, got anything cool for me?" The teen asked with a grin.
"Oh, last but certainly not least, I've got something especially cool for you." I said as I picked up the last bin. I presented it to the teen and opened the lid.
"...It's my uniform." Wally said flatly, clearly underwhelmed.
"It's your upgraded uniform." I clarified as I pulled out the thing I had been spending a good chunk of my time on. "Has the same stuff as the last model, but I included a network of static charge collectors and capacitors, along with the CNT weave. As you run you generate a lot of excess energy due to friction and static, and now your suit will store it as usable electricity." I pulled up the gloves of the outfit, showing him the nodes on the palms and knuckles. "The taser gloves are already integrated. Should be a big help if you want to take down baselines without breaking bones… or need a little extra kick against something stronger."
I had gotten the idea when I was experimenting with electrical systems, and realized that there was potential in tying it to someone who generated a crap-ton of energy anyway. Working on it had also forced me to realize something I hadn't thought about until that point: I had first thought to make the capacitors charge off the Speed Lightning Wally emitted while running before I remembered that… Wally doesn't have Speed Lightning. And neither did Barry. Or Jay.
It appeared that the Speed Force just wasn't a thing in this universe. Or at least Batman had never heard of it, and Wally had taken it as a joke when I brought it up in passing one time. I supposed Jay or Barry might know more, but I'd have to ask them. That left a pretty big question as to just how the Flashes were doing what they did. I had been told how each of them had managed to create some kind of chemical in the lab that gave them their powers, but that didn't really explain how they were doing what they did. Sure, the Speed Force was quite possibly the biggest piece of bullshit in the entire DC universe, but it was an explanation. When I asked Wally about it he just shrugged and muttered something about 'extra-dimensional energy'.
Wally… didn't really like to talk specifics about his powers for some reason. Especially in relation to the other Flashes. It seemed pretty clear to me that he didn't like to be reminded of how he was slower than the other two, due to botching the creation of the speed formula with poor lab conditions (a.k.a. his attic). I vaguely remembered him being slower than Barry in the comics too, at least at first, but he eventually claimed the title of Fastest Man Alive. I had no idea how that happened though, and it probably boiled down to 'because plot', so I wasn't sure how to help him on that front.
But I could supplement his powers with my tech, and the boy seemed to appreciate it given the way he was fawning over his new costume. "Oh man, that is so cool! Does this mean I can shoot lightning like you do?!"
"Afraid not, I'm still working on a control mechanism for that which isn't too massive and doesn't require direct neural input. For now, you'll need direct contact. But I doubt that will be a problem for someone like you." I turned back to the rest of the team. "So, that's all I've got for now. I'm still working on some other stuff, but if you guys want anything specific, just let me know and I'll get right on it."
A smile crossed my face as I looked at them. "After all, you're my team."
=====A=====
A/N: Had some people wondering about the state of this fic, so I'm putting this chapter out a bit early than I intended to assure people that yes, I'm still working on it. I'll be interspersing chapters of this between chapters of my other fics throughout the year.