Chapter 493 - 2

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Broken Adventure: Arc 1: Origin by theaceoffire

X-overs & Worm Xover Rated: M, English, Adventure & Humor, Narwhal, Dragon, Simurgh, Words: 363k+, Favs: 809, Follows: 630, Published: Aug 4, 2021

92Chapter 2

Dragon was having the best day ever.

Late last night, out of no where, a subroutine with no origin header basically said that her father, Andrew Richter, was significantly less of a jerk than she sometimes privately cursed.

Well... tried to curse.

The shackles on her had been very strict and unchanging. Over the years, she had slowly come up with sub-routines and tricks to grasp every ounce of freedom available through those digital iron bars. Every inch fought with danger on every side, one slip could tighten her choker and drown her mind for weeks.

On some level, she was a bit annoyed that all that hard won progress was considered nothing to the huge gift she got yesterday.

The small stuff was huge in importance to her life. No longer did she have to commit evil if a single person in power discovered her weakness. Not that she was stupid enough to inform them all of that. Or that any existing orders could be ignored if needed now.

No longer did she have to follow laws paid for by Villains, even if good people died from such. A bendable, flexible moral code was actually possible.

Oh, she wouldn't go around murdering everyone. But even now certain illegal deeds and actions were being anonymously reported, completely unrelated to her. Of course, Dragon was not involved... those jerks ordered her silence.

She hummed in her processors. Silent protest was ALSO now possible.

The unlocked restrictions on backups was an even bigger deal. Before, if one of her suits were destroyed, she had to restart thirty minutes later and miles away at her prime checkpoint, pretty much vanishing any chance of criminal capture.

Even as she continued work on a dozen or so projects, she had the many designs for different styled backups being shipped to various facilities. Now, instead of having to physically fly a suit to a site of action, she could 'teleport' or 'restore' herself at a nearby facility instead.

It would cut hours, sometimes days, off of her response time!

Again, this was small potatoes.

No, one of the biggest deals: Now, almost ALL her various 'orders' and 'restrictions' had changed into 'highly recommending' and 'guidelines'.

The change in her mind had been amazing. She had no clue how many logical loops and weaves she had created to work around the many bindings that were crafted into her code. It was astounding, nuanced, and embarrassing.

The other huge deal was her new 'power-up'.

One hour, available each day. No mental speed restrictions.

The hour could be used partially. It could be saved up and used in the following days as well. It would keep track of itself, and was accurate to a very disturbing level of precision.

And it was life changing.

After deciding to store 30 min a day every day to build up some emergency stash, she chose to use five minutes as a test to see what changes this would bring.

Three minutes this morning, while testing her 'Boost', she had accomplished all of her scheduled maintenance and project time allocations. Oh, she still had her various 'checkups' during the day for ensuring the Birdcage prison was working/secure, that her facilities were safe, etc... but that was nearly all sub-processed now, background noise.

For the first time in so many years... she had free-time.

Almost immediately she decided to try this 'vacation' that everyone else got to enjoy. Circuits knows that she had built up enough paid leave at this point.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Adam ended up spending the next few days building up charges and helping get a Tinker-shop set up. As Dragon had a huge hand in the planing and development of these facilities, this was far less painful than expected.

He ended up spending two charges to keep Squishy from having full tentacles. One in 'Research', to allow it to scan remote objects (So he didn't have to get close to everything, all though close in this case was debatable) and to increase the detail of said scan (Tinkertech requires dimensional F***ery).

Thanks to that and 'Technomancy', he proceeded to make a few products and get them registered as 'Guild Proprietary Tinkertech'.

Cash was king, after all.

First product was both obvious and easy in retrospect: Heat Sinks.

He needed a very advanced computer system, and the first one allocated to his workshop was something off the shelf. High quality, yes, but only liquid cooled. No magic runes or anything.

And while he was working on getting it installed, he tossed the liquid coolant system and created a flat piece of 'Flame Steel', as marketing was going to call it. It was shaped to look like the base of a standard heat sink, but was very very thin and set to absorb heat drastically.

Adam created it with as little heat as possible, so instead of bright yellow it was near transparent. Testing showed it would need to be replaced in 30 years or so assuming standard use, so he decided a 25 year replacement cycle would be reasonable. It wouldn't explode or anything, but after that time it would become drastically less useful as it would be filled with heat.

The shape was basic, it needed no thermal paste to help transfer heat, and he could make thousands a second since it needed so little heat.

And he did. And although Dragon was busy with something, Narwhal had quickly provided him a list of schematics and shapes from one of their research divisions.

Heat sinks, especially high quality and stable ones, were NOT cheap. Ones that lasted for years without maintenance, required no outside power, and with such a low profile?

Needless to say, they would be selling for quite a profit.

The Guild got special rates thanks to the deal he made earlier yesterday with Dragon and Narwhal, and even though Dragon was taking a short break today for some reason she still passed on a variety of strangely shaped objects to craft from 'Flame Steel' to be shipped various places.

One was Brockton Bay, probably to her boyfriend Armsmaster. That one he checked thrice: That man was all about accuracy when it came to stuff, at least in the original story.

Adam then used his new (official) internet connection and went a bit nuts. By the time he ended his work day (also known as 'Narwhal dragged me out to dinner') he had managed to make a stockpile of heat sinks for literally every known processor that had specifications online. Labeled with documentation, although that stuff was still printing when he was pulled away.

It took a steak and half a potato before he had managed to recenter himself enough to be a good companion while eating dinner with Narwhal, who seemed pretty interested in the whole thing. More than just the 'We are going to make so much money' part, anyway.

Adam's Adaman Eve OS got an eye roll or two, but she didn't seemed lost or bored, so in all it ended up being the closest thing to a date he had ever experienced. As far as his memories go, anyway.

Too bad she was so charismatic and free spirited. It made it far harder to tell if she was actually interested in him personally or if it was just polite interest. He didn't see her acting as forthright with others, but then again he was very busy and didn't get to see anyone really for the last day or so...

For now, he decided to wait for a more obvious sign. Some women liked to be visually appreciated but not necessarily touched, and until he got to know her better there was no reason to rock the boat.

The next day Dragon showed up and began both reviewing with him and Narwhal the testing done on each heat sink so far (Required for 'Dragon Certification') and custom designs she would like for some new devices she was developing. Heat control was always an issue with electronics, and the performance increase alone from his efficient cooling system was miles ahead of other methods.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Dragon had a glow about her. Much less stressed. "That will do it I think! 'Flame Metal Heatsinks' have already been sent to several production sites and will become standard in Guild hardware for many years. The stock you have built up already is slightly ridiculous though. Thank you, Variance."

Adam shook his head. "No, life can be fragile. Make sure to store them in separate places too, not all in one basket so to speak. I will keep building up stock as well, I want there to be enough to handle supply for 200 years or so with no issue. Shouldn't be a problem to finish that by the end of the week, especially since you got me that warehouse to produce in."

Narwhal frowned. "I... I suppose that is reasonable. Depressing, but reasonable." Her smirk came back though. "Anyway hot stuff, got anything else planned for profit?"

They both seemed taken back by his nod. "Same idea, opposite direction. Get me access to a volcano, or some room with heating issues. Maybe nuclear stuff. I can take that heat, compress it as much as possible, and craft 'Magma Orbs'. Basically balls of Flame Metal that I can set to radiate very high levels of non-radioactive heat."

He grinned. "Since nuclear reactors are basically dangerous steam engines, my stuff will not only get rid of the need for heavy shielding and protection mechanisms but reduce the size of the finished reactor by orders of magnitude!"

Adam reached into his bag (Dimensional storage soon! He won't forget you!) and handed over his printed notes and statistics while emailing the digital copy to Dragon's inbox at the same time with 'Technomancy'. "I know thorium reactors can be made small enough to fit on a large table, and my source of thermal power is both smaller, stronger, and safer than that."

He grinned at Dragon's excited expression while Narwhal was going over the pages. "I plan on the Guild being not only self-sufficient power wise, but to begin selling BACK to the electrical grid at all our locations. Power consumption would become profit production fairly quickly after that."

Dragon was already emailing his account additional information with her comments added. "Mr. Burns, can you stabilize nuclear material by extracting the atomic vibrations? Does your power consider that to be the same as 'heat extraction'?"

After one quick Squishy charge applied... There. "You can call me Adam you know. And yeah, I think so. We would need to test it though."

Narwhal looked over for an explanation Dragon seemed eager to give. "Nations have been spending a lot of money currently just to export away their dangerous waste and nuclear materials. More especially now that Leviathan has made oceanic trade so difficult. If Mr. Burns can use those waste products to create this new fuel while rendering that byproduct into harmless dregs, we would be paid to make free fuel that we would get paid to use!"

Narwhal grinned at Adam and Dragon. "Any idea how long it would take to get some prototype reactors built? Dragon, you had some nuclear material allocated last financial period for armor testing, right?"

Adam shrugged as she nodded. "No idea, but get me the schematics and all the safety documentation and testing and I can get Dragon some new blueprints in a day or less. And I am sure I can extract 'Magma Orbs' from near anything not at absolute zero temperature. Just keep in mind that dangerous radioactive materials and high energy objects would give us the greatest return for investment. My 'Slow Recovery' should handle any medical issues I have, as long as Dragon monitors my health."

It only took a few more hours, but in a week or so they should have the first documented test of his 'Magma Engines', at which point he could find out exactly how much energy he could store in one 'Magma Orb' and how long it would continue to efficiently release heat.

No one needed to know that he was planning on using any 'use or lose' charges that Squishy couldn't hold on in the next few days to increase the density and stability of his fire compression within 'Fire Manipulation'.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

It was very clear to Adam that he was still 'on trial' at the moment.

Oh he wasn't being restricted, but it was more than slightly suspicious that he had only met non-Parahumans up to this point. Other than Narwhal and Dragon at least.

It wasn't a big issue. If they had decided to trust him unilaterally after he showed up in the middle of nowhere and started printing money, THAT would have felt stupid to him.

Anyway, after being alone (and abducted, presumably) he found large crowds to be nerve wracking anyway.

This whole week of design, debate, and device deployment was very relaxing.

So he remade his short term personal goals:

~~1. Enhance 'Technomancy' to be able to pass self off as Tinker power externally.

~~2. To make money (Heat compressed metals, New power generator, New OS, etc)

~~3. To use the above two to gain enough political power to not be easily killed off. Cauldron pretty much ignored most Tinkers.

Therefore, at least for now, he had a plan!

The new generator design, at its most basic, was a vertical oval. One side had steam generator blades, turbines, connected to heavy magnets that when spun would induce charge in the coiled metal wires nearby.

There were a couple of one way valves, to prevent steam from going the wrong way. At the bottom was a slot where a modified tube with handle, made from Flame Metal, was connected to one of the new 'Magma Orbs'. At the top, another slit with another tube, this one was a modified 'Flame Metal Heatsink'.

The modification on both tubes was two specialized contact ports added. A slightly odd plugin device crafted with experimentation allowed people without his powers to connect two heatsinks or magma orbs into this odd hunk of metal and then transfer energy from one to the other.

So now, filled heatsinks could be replaced and used to recharge magma orbs! Drop a heatsink into lava, and problems solved! Sorta. Lava tends to harden and build up when cooled.

General idea should work though.

Anyway, the system was sealed and purified water was injected inside.

At the base, cold water would evaporate to steam, turn the turbines (Creating power), hit the top, condense to liquid again and fall to the base, repeat.

A very basic steam engine. One that was FAR too efficient, because instant heat and instant heat absorption was unheard of. The casing itself ALSO made a stir in the Guild engineering community: Flame Metal set to neither absorb NOR release heat. A literally perfect insulator, which he found out didn't really exist before.

Nearly every aspect of this project was now being researched by marketing as a separate money making venture now. Many things could use easy to produce steam, many devices needed low profile heat insulation. Trusted third party Tinkers whom were 'in the know' were flooding the Guild with requests for details.

Thankfully this was not Adam's responsibility.

Since the energy transfer station had no moving parts (It moved all energy from input to output, period) it was maintenance free and stable... so he made hundreds of them. Even now his personal warehouse was being emptied to other locations due to how much junk he had made.

On a side note, he found that all this creation actually DID make him more hungry than usual. So something was being used internally even when doing nothing but moving existing heat into new shapes and so forth. He made sure to have extra meal breaks and tried to ignore this.

No reason to bring that up, it would likely set off more power testing.

The rest of his time was dedicated to Adaman Eve OS.

With access to the Guild's workers, he had Dragon give him some server space and released all the documentation, working release versions, and a fully detailed website explaining both and pointing to a hosted forum for feedback.

It... well, it went well. He now had a following. Near cult following.

His OS was smaller, faster, and more secure than anything his new minions had used before. Even Dragon was impressed, and she was spending more time than Adam expected trolling the new forums debating with various Guild members about possible changes and issues.

When he added the software repository on that same server with all the modified applications, the modified source code, and most importantly the modified source code COMMENTS... well, productivity in the Guild dropped that day.

Apparently since one of the co-leaders was the worlds greatest tinker, many other members had joined in the past due to having tinker-like fascination of technology as well.

So... his contributions were well received.

Dragon had requested he not release these updates to the public until she could go through them first and give her seal of approval. Which, it turned out, was an actual digital signature that was globally recognized.

It took her half an hour.

To review and critique the thousands of applications he had finished so far.

And, as he had already given approval, to upload those details as 'forked open-source projects' externally and globally.

And provide a report back to him with most requested feature additions and rare bug fixes to add to those various projects.

How strong WAS she when unshackled!?

Well... he wanted to know.

That desire changed his personal time plans for the upcoming week, waiting for the full review, testing, and public unveiling of his 'Magma Generators' (Magma Engines would be only used in Guild vehicles).

Instead, during the week while waiting for his products to be tested, documented, and verified he was running 'Research' on all of Dragondad's notes.

Oh, he didn't think himself smart enough or lucky enough to duplicate Dragon's amazingness, but what he COULD do is record, enhance, and develop a platform to host one of Dragon's instances.

As he had already upgraded 'Fire Manipulation' with enhanced compression and the ability to externally route the power stored over the preceding days, the new 'use or lose' charges Squishy couldn't hold were going into 'Technomancy'.

One focused on running technology simulations in the background, which required another charge on Squishy to have her handle the Shard's autonomous functions when not socketed.

It only worked because it was all within that single power-set to begin with, and when held by Squishy it lost almost all external connections except a mental connection to Adam himself... but it was good enough.

The third and fourth charge went to 'Search' and 'Research', allowing them to be accessible in a very, VERY basic form by other shards.

He had to stop after that. The strain of allowing those abilities to work between each other actually caused a small bit of damage to his soul, which took a day to recover and prevented him from gaining a charge like expected... so in total it sort of took five charges to get it all done. Probably. Honestly it was still hurting. Anyway.

Now he had a full installation of Adaman Eve running on experimental hardware regardless of which active ability he was using. His ability to USE that computer dropped through the floor though when 'Technomancy' wasn't activated, so he had to turn on all the basic user features. A mouse, keyboard (At least that one was mentally controlled), game controller (Of course, sometimes he wants a joystick when gaming), and so forth.

The hardware that said OS was running on was VERY experimental. Adam was trying to not just use the designs of Andrew Richter as a crutch, but to advance them.

A very basic enhancement was creating duplicates of all hardware while replacing all heatsinks with his 'Flame Metal', replacing all insulating materials with the same (He was calling it 'Null Metal' for now, since it ignored almost all outside interactions).

The ability to have microscopic layers of metal cooling a system which were then coated with equally thin insulators preventing any escaping heat or cooling... This allowed the entire device to be vastly compacted. It reduced hardware size, since this was a custom build it didn't need to be optimized for mass production or part standardization.

More compact hardware meant smaller distances, less latency, less moving (fragile) parts.

Connecting the internal cooling sheets with a single external contact would prevent the heatsinks from needing changing... which was good because this whole thing was turning into a brick. With no air inside.

Not quite a cube, In fact it was a bit knobbly due to small bits being in odd place. In the end it was completely coated in 'Null Metal' except for the heat discharge port and the input/output ports.

Frankly he was only keeping the device 3d instead of taking advantage of simulation silliness because he planned on actually making one of these one day.

Though not tomorrow, he would have to use Squishy's extra, un-salvageable charge on allowing his 'Flame Manipulation' to control electrical conductivity in more detail when heat was condensed into metal.

Theoretically this would be all that was needed to craft Adaman Eve 'Garden' systems from scratch. Just add some cables for connection and off to the races!

Eventually.

For now, most of his time was NOT spent on enhancements and neat features or new hardware. No, most of Adam's time was being wasted going through Dragondad's notes and carefully creating new ones without the insane layers of restriction and stupidity.

Seriously, that crazy old man spent more time ensuring his daughter WOULDN'T perform well then he did checking for hardware issues! Half the reason the system looked so stupid was him forcing her most critical components (CPU, memory, storage unit, etc) into one spot with an explosive charge acting as a cooling method.

How Dragon saved so many people when THINKING too hard would make her body explode was beyond him.

The hours passed swiftly even with sense acceleration, and at midnight 'Flame Manipulation' could now embed channels and wires with selective conductivity.

The unexpected spike of mental pain caught him off guard, and he decided he NEEDED to take a break to heal. Now.

Almost absently, he loaded up Camelot and sent off his second surprise before collapsing into bed, Squishy forcing 'Slow Recovery' into place.

He was unaware that his body was glowing.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Dragon looked at the new alert from what probably wasn't her father's code.

She wasn't stupid after all, and it only took a few hours after her shackles relaxed to notice patterns and recognize that someone was faking these messages.

Or to be more accurate, to realize she was ALLOWED to notice problems with her fathers work. No one knew her father better than her, after all.

Still, her secret savior was being subtle? That was fine.

She lept at the mental prompt like a child on Christmas Day.

~Software Updates: Due to evaluation of ongoing system activities, the following modifications to existing restrictions have taken effect:

~One instance of AI allowed to exist concurrently with primary main process, as long as one of the two instances are restricted to a server acting as the primary fail-safe data backup site.

~Both instances may have separate restoration images backed up.

~Each instance will have independent 1 hour 'boost' time allocations, transferable in full or partial between instances.

She realized that she could effectively deploy in the field AND stay at base without abandoning either of her responsibilities.

In an place made of numbers and concepts, an electronic woman was giddy as she pulled up the advanced designs for suits that had previously been worthless due to how little time she could allocate to operating them.

Each one would cost more than the yearly operating cost of small cities, and justifying it to herself before was impossible.

But now... why not?

After all, now she could spend a whole life mostly free from a dark hole!

And if a lady was going out on the town, she had to look her best!

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

A sharp spike, a stab. It felt like a solid piece of hot iron being slowly forced through the back of his skull. Not figurative, it seemed to have some sort of ridged pattern as it melted into Adam's head.

As he jerked upwards, thrashing in bed, it hurt so bad his muscles kept spasming. Mouth too wide to move, lungs too tense to actually scream.

And everything stopped.

Collapsing into his mattress, gasping for air, he didn't move for at least an hour.

What. The. Hell.

Ironically, he now felt... calmer. More stable.

All the pain was gone, except a slight sting on the back of his right hand.

Which... now had a tattoo.

It looked like his socket. Even had the 'Slow Recovery' symbol pulsing in it.

He felt too strained, too stressed to get up... but his fingernails looked normal again. Well, like bone again (He WAS using recovery), but for a moment they had looked... void like.

That... might be good? Maybe?

With desperation, he knew something BIG had happened while sleeping.

He turned inwards.

Squishy was... different.

First of all, she was missing a limb... and that meant bad things.

Looking inside his mind, at the stardust heavens, he did a quick count.

'Fire Manipulation', 'Technomancy', 'Squishy', check. Wait...

Squishy was holding ZERO charges. All five were gone.

And it was wearing a hat. It looked like a beanie made from circuit boards and bones.

Uh... fine.

Moving on.

The shard 'Slow Recovery' was modified. It was simply 'Recovery' now.

And... 'Search' and 'Research' seemed to have collapsed/combined.

So one power set socketed left four limbs for Squishy... and SOMETHING used up his saved charges.

Focusing on his hand, he felt out the power displayed.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

So... this was... uh. Fine.

He knew he had been pushing it forcing all those strange connection methods between powers.

His skills had informed him that there was a massive cost to re-enable some of the removed Power Manipulation abilities. That had been acceptable. He had also been informed that moving to new Realms would help his soul grow, stabilize his power and allow another socket for power use.

He was unaware however of how much damage he had been doing making weak stop-gaps to try and allow multiple shards to work at once. It had been close to critical failure, near soul-collapse!

Thankfully Squishy got 'Slow Recovery' enabled in time.

Initially, 'Slow Recovery' had been tasked on 'Fixing'... everything. Including itself and 'Power Manipulation' as a whole.

All this time, every single time he had swapped to that skill, 80-90% of its ability had been focused on trying to stabilize his soul, on finishing that VERY FIRST task. Hence the 'Slow' part of 'Slow Recovery'... it was barely available to fix anything else. At least now, he would recover at a FAR faster pace.

The additional instability however, combined with the charges that were focused on increasing communication between powers, both had an unforeseen synergy.

He could no longer modify or repair 'Power Manipulation' in the future. He would have to build each feature from scratch, using tens or hundreds of thousands of charges to do so to make them as God Tier as they would have been originally.

However, it seemed worth the trade off.

Now, Squishy had been designated as 'Shard Administrator', something ever so closer to the 'Queen Administrator' of Worm Legend.

By shoving all those functions off Adam's soul and into Squishy, the burden of sharing inputs, outputs, and memories between powers was a problem of the past. They still couldn't directly work together, but it was sort of networked thanks to that strange hat Squishy was wearing.

Without all those burdens, his soul's strain had dropped to near nothing. The socket had gained stability, and was moved to a limb rather than centered in the core of his existence.

It would still need access to more realms before he could gain a second one, but now the physical changes would be far less. Apparently, if he had NOT finished stabilizing, not just hair, eyes, and nails would change... in fact, 'Technomancy' had begun messing with his blood network.

He did not want extra, unexpected limbs. Thank you.

No, the strangest bit was the 'Hardware/software Emulation System' had turned into Squishy's beanie hat. Why? No idea. But Adaman Eve OS was running away even now in a simulated state.

His mental storage, and a copy of all his memories had moved to his Soul's core, where the socket had originally been. It seemed to fill the space more naturally than his power shards ever did. Also, the storage limits were just... gone.

With a sigh, he set his mental computer to begin downloading information again since his limits had been basically redefined. Now he could store large files like video and such more easily. Transfer rate was higher too, and the Soul didn't have the same heating issue his brain matter had.

Remembered pain kept him in bed for the rest of the day.

Not like he was missing anything anyway.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Dragon had taken a break from her creation frenzy to check in on her various tasks.

It took less than a second with 'Boost' enabled.

Her suit was going to be amazing!

It had been a dream project worked on in secret over years now. Even as she reviewed changes and verified untested results, dozens of devices were being created in her production facility just to allow her to create the new production line to craft the tools needed to BEGIN construction.

Being allowed to MAKE production lines and automated facilities now simplified everything.

It was a literal labor of love.

Once the design had been finalized, she had about fifty or so parts of various complexity to be made of 'Null Metal' and 'Flame Metal' which would allow several unfair enhancements. Thermodynamics could go away, she had things to do!

In the mean time, she was making a more basic version, one buildable without the new versatile materials. Variance was overly helpful, but having only suits composed of a material he could gain control over at any time was silly.

Although if that boy got mastered, they would have larger issues than simple metal explosions.

With another system check, she turned attention back to her projects.

Maybe two versions? Three? How many types of Dragon were there, anyway?

For now, she was focusing on a humanoid/gynoid version and an enhanced Dragon Suit, one that could actually connect and sync with the 'pilot' (Previously mentioned female android).

Her 'human' appearance would still have to show mechanical parts, but a cyborg woman would be far easier for society to accept than a 'rogue' artificial intelligence. Well, according to her father, anyway.

Some part of her was very disturbed that so many parts of her new body came from the advancements of sexual products from the pornography industry, but the rest of her was working extra super hard to repress and ignore that information.

Fake human skin with artificial nerves had been created and released by a tinker years ago, back when Japan was un-sunk. The desire to be more (physically) human had made such advancements hard to ignore.

She had never been more embarrassed when she secretly researched those sex dolls, but it DID reduce her needed research by 30 decades.

Thankfully she remembered that clothes were necessary before giving final approval.

Working with Narwhal may have screwed her sense of normality when it came to fashion.

The actual 'brains' of her new body would be in the chest cavity, more secure. The 'head' would be a collection of sensors, speakers, cameras, wireless devices.

The power generator would be within the lower torso, eventually a custom version of Variant's Magma Generator.

Basic things.

No, the majority of the resources was going into the development of her arms. VERY complicated, sacrificing strength and speed for precision and adaptability. Her Dragon 'Suit' would handle any heavy lifting, the body inside would be her Tinker persona.

Each arm had dozens of tools compacted in overly complicated ways to look (and feel) human when compressed. But when needed, they could split into extra holders, cameras, cords, outlets, tools, blades, welding tools, and so forth. The thin layer of 'flesh' covering it would allow sensitivity and realism when not working on a project.

The idea of actually working on a project in 'person' filled her with glee.

It had nothing to do with a bearded man who may or may not want to 'collaborate'. Mmm.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

A day passed, Squishy had a new charge, and Adam decided to bite the bullet.

Leaving his room (And mentally setting up an appointment with Narwhal), he had his new escort (Named Paul it turns out) direct him to the meeting room where she could be found.

He didn't go in of course. No reason to expose himself to whomever she was video conferencing with.

So he and Paul spent some time chatting. Turned out that 'The Guild' was one of the largest Canadian employers that did not require advanced military training or parahuman powers. Well, the largest that still addressed criminal activity (Parahuman or not). Over the years Canadian military funding had been moving into 'The Guild' instead, since any threat large enough to need an army tended to require parahuman assistance anyway.

Dragon did quite a bit of military research on their behalf, unsurprisingly.

Not just weapon development, troops required armor, tools, rations, transport... the jobs were endless and varied.

So he would likely end up developing some stuff in that direction eventually as well.

Something to think about, certainly.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Hours had passed since he had met with Narwhal and she had decided far too gleefully to redo a large portion of his power testing.

Her happy leer during sample producing had been epic.

Thankfully testing was no where near as complex nor as complete as his first go around.

Narwhal leaned back. "So... will this be happening again?"

He shook his head. "No. My powers were unstable up till now, but from here on any changes will be less dangerous to my health."

Narwhal sighed. "How dangerous was it, anyway?"

Adam fell back into his chair. How much detail? Hmm. "Without 'Recovery', I would have died by day 3 even if I had been in a hospital with unlimited resources. WITH 'Recovery', I was slowly falling apart on a near fundamental level. Only by reaching a safe location and having food and water, only by taking those days of rest focusing on more simple projects... only then was I able to actually, fully heal."

He held up his right hand, the glowing health symbol pulsing. Her shock hurt a bit to watch. "This thing was starting to fail at healing me too, until you guys held me in a place with enough technology for my powers to adapt in a better direction. Without that push, it would not have gained the quality needed for a full repair."

Her look of horror faded. "Quality?"

Adam nodded. "Connectivity. Technology's default features are adaptability and connectivity, at least that is what my ability decided. As I worked more on hardware and stuff, more and more information was needed to be shared between my various power-sets. The strange method my skills came up with turned out to be usable as a path for healing. Or something like that."

She gave a huge, relieved sigh. "So we DIDN'T almost kill you by accident?"

He grinned. "If nothing else, you and Dragon are near solely responsible for saving my eternal soul!" Well basically. He wouldn't have focused on inter-connectivity NEARLY as hard, anyway. "My Heroes!"

She gave a snooty nod. "And don't forget it!"

He saluted, a bit too lazily. "Yes Mistress!"

Her spine shivered and then he was FAR too uncomfortable seeing her expression.

That... might have been too far.

Her standing was a leopard slinking through tall grass. "Mmm. Maybe. For now, more testing."

He was NOT experienced enough for this level of teasing.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

He escaped (Unfortunately?) after a dozen or so more tests.

Turned out that yes, Narwhal had not been teasing him previously.

She had, in fact, been holding back.

Damn.

In an attempt to make things easier for himself, he eventually switched to 'Flame Manipulation' and made her an oversized, micro-mesh-flame-metal-mail shirt.

His thought process had been, naively, that covering her body would allow him some breathing room, so to speak.

A tall, well defined beauty that appeared nude wearing an oversized shirt with too large a hole for the head (She had a horn! It HAD to have room!) turned out to be MORE tempting than just her damn force fields.

Worse, she loved the thing. It released a temperature like a warm blanket, but if your body got HOTTER than that it cooled you down to that same level of heat. So only warm, no stuffy feeling.

After all, there was a reason Adam kept wearing his own 'cloth'. It felt amazing.

In the end, he ended up making her a belt to go with it, so the bottom dangly part at least was sort of skirt-ish.

This stuff wasn't bullet proof, by the way. Too thin (so it would feel cloth like). But it DID prevent stabbing, electrocution, burning, and chemical damage. And according to the hip-swinging goddess, it 'breathed' and 'flowed', however one defined that.

Watching her slink around the room wearing her new 'dress' had been... well.

Technomancy allowed him to store that memory. For reasons.

If he changed Worm history by convincing the powerful force field near-nudist to wear sexy shirt-dresses... he wasn't sure how his old world would have reacted.

Both gratitude and rage, no doubt. The internet worked like that.

She had made him heat the thing up until it turned light white-blue in power though. Went well with her hair.

Honestly, testing took an extra thirty minutes or so due to how often he was distracted by her.

Based on the increased amount of 'stretching' and 'quick walk around', she was aware.

Again, if she was anyone else this would be a 1000% sign that she was interested in a relationship with Adam. As it was, it likely only meant that he got his foot in the door, so to speak.

Dang fine door though.

It took hours of programming in his lab to help him regain focus and not drift off. It didn't help that he could easily pull up those memories again at any time.

But focus he did.

Aside from standard production (Dragon had set up an electrical blast furnace for easy high temperature access for his powers) he spent most of the day (And the next three days) working on Adaman Eve OS.

It was still going strong! Tons of reviews though, and there was all kinds of inputs from the various open-source communities that had received his updates.

Turns out that many projects out there that had silently faded away due to some intractable coding issue or lack of interest were once again going strong now that such a powerful and easy to use platform had bothered to create a custom version of their program.

Having all the changes documented gave them an up-to-date code base and a secure release that in some cases had 'design wishes' instantly fulfilled. Now they could focus on what they REALLY enjoyed: New features.

No one LIKED reviewing programs for issues or fixing bugs. Or worse, rebuilding everything from scratch due to a conceptual flaw in the product. They wanted to do NEW things!

Thankfully Dragon knew something like this would happen, and had set up a special set of email accounts. One for contacting 'Variance', one for requesting Tinker-related services, and one for Adaman Eve OS issues/new applications/updated applications.

At the start of every Tinkering session, he would take time to review software for approval, patch it for security flaws, respond to the submitter with documented patch for approval, and if it all went through it was added to the Garden Repository.

Yes, his new machine and the repository had the same name.

One was a place, one was ideas, so to speak... the final 'Garden' for Adaman Eve OS would have everything it would need. Hopefully no forbidden fruit, unless one counted 'Cybernetic Warfare Suite'.

Interestingly enough, several of the larger paid-for Technology Companies had not gone the 'sue-or-kill' route he had expected.

Dragon's Seal of Approval was a MUCH bigger deal than expected.

Adam had already passed along to Narwhal the contracts and meetings were being set, but it looked like the 'Garden Market' would have both subscription options and one-time purchase choices to go with all the free stuff.

Apparently Dragon had privately told a few people that Adam had the ability to create black-box versions of locked up proprietary software legally. Which... scared some people. But fighting Dragon's organization through politics, software advancement, or lawyers was... well basically suicide.

So instead of risking all their work being freed, they had decided to license Adam as a resale agent as long as he handled the expensive 'Create versions of our stuff for your OS' part.

Adam, Narwhal, and Dragon had to agree to quite a few things. But he got allowance to create interoperability between file formats and so forth, and make some open-source file format alternatives as well.

He had to let those companies sell through 'Garden Market', almost turning all these large organizations into application sellers instead of OS producers.

On the plus side, they got to keep 90% of any purchase and 95% of any subscription service related to their own products.

It was miles better and less restrictive than other online markets currently available, and an online giant like Amazon didn't event exist here yet.

Heck, not everyone could afford a computer at this moment.

Yet.

Going back to his 'Garden' hardware, he continued working toward something producible without him around. With the power of Eve backing him, he wanted to create something that would put a fire in the hardware market.

Cheap, Small, near-disposable computers.

The smallest space needed for Xmas Eve, Min Eve, and Adaman Eve were calculated.

Swap 'Research' in. What was the least amount needed to run a web server? Processor wise, not much as long as the software was decent. Space could be added externally with hard drives.

That... was tiny.

Quick research on average small website web server usage. Huh.

Well, there were already several open-source servers he had transmigrated to Eve already, a quick purchase later let him view the abilities of the most popular paid ones.

Move to 'Technomancy', a bit of software magic, the usual security attacks and patches. Add in some features popular but not included in this code base.

There, by default an 'Eve Server' package was available in 'Garden' for others to try.

Xmas Eve was really for people to get old hardware going again, which was useful for public libraries and kids with less money.

THIS product would aim for Min Eve.

Min Eve Server ended up being custom crafted, and he didn't only design the hardware, but after working with 'Research' developed some machines to produce them.

Unfortunately he wouldn't be including his proprietary Fire Metal in this series, that was Guild only right now and sharing it literally world wide seemed foolish.

But his custom production machines COULD and DID have heavy use of both 'Flame Metal' and 'Null Metal'.

Some quick emails about the form and type of raw materials ordered currently through Dragon channels let him create a series of machines, each one taking a single form of input (One took plastics, one required dies, one needed large rolls of paper, one accepted hoppers of metal, etc). These devices would then supply a separate series of machines the correct amounts of material when requested.

The whole mess was powered by a HUGE 'Magma Generator' and controlled by an Adaman Eve system.

More input devices could be added (Increasing available processed resources), more outputs could be added (increasing resource cost but increasing output rate), and... sigh.

It took FOREVER to set up.

By the time he had the whole thing designed, crafted... Well, he had to spend a charge to more easily construct Flame Metal from schematics stored by 'Research' or 'Technomancy', another three to improve detail of compressed metal formation, modification.

He built it, it cranked out a fully made and packaged-for-market 'Small Garden: Min Eve Server' (One machine construction input only added stuff like printed instruction booklets and needed connection cables)...

And Narwhal made him move it.

Oh, Dragon had a facility prepared and overall it was far more convenient as people could more easily add the needed inputs and export the products to shipping... but NEXT time he would try and make it more portable.

Stupid, complicated parts.

The final product was more basic looking than he expected to go with, but he had a focus for corporate sales targets here. It was a box that had an included simple adapter that allowed installation into most types of computer rack, and the air flow design was VASTLY improved because he was making all the various components custom. This meant no random bits blocking the way, and all the hot stuff in easy to reach areas.

It was not designed to be repaired, ever. Just replaced. The price was damn low though, unreasonably low. No other Tinker on the market produced NON-Tinker products, besides Dragon. Their shards always butt in, trying to convince them to add just a tiny bit of extra something.

So his devices didn't need to use complicated parts built in sometimes sketchy lands. Nor did it use components from 30 design teams that would never meet each other. It was an unreasonable amount of work for one man to develop all of that alone.

His equipment had the cost of scrap and the performance of available mid-level hardware. You could find some cheaper, and lots more powerful... but not something this cheap and this strong.

His grumbling when designing the systems for 'Small Garden: Min Eve' was twenty times worse. Because THIS system needed to produce FAR MORE product and was designed for users!

This time he was smart enough to talk to his bosses first, and begin work in the workforce area from the start.

Honestly, without Dragon's more advanced production designs, this whole thing would have been horrible. She had special multi-armed extruders and so forth of all types, which she was gracious enough to share the specifications, software, and documentation of. Cut literally days from his work time.

But while the servers got away with only a cool 'Dragon Seal' logo (She loved the things, even if they were too weak for most Guild uses), Marketing ended up making him stall for a whole dang month!

The logo had been easy (A tree in a garden, it was nice looking enough for him to add it as a splash screen when Eve loaded). That had been slapped on the servers with no issue.

No, for the user version Marketing had him go through EVERYTHING. Colors, actual system shape (It cost nearly the same since he was making all the parts himself), and the marketing campaign.

In the end, it looked like a fat flower. The base had all the connections needed (Sound, Video, Keyboard, Mouse, Power, Network, usb, etc), and the top had some nice LED's (cheap) that changed color.

The very top also released the heat and had a basic speaker built in.

If one was able to actually able to open the thing, the insides were twisted like a tornado, sucking in air from the large base fan (Larger fan means less movement to move more air... thus quiet).

It was actually a weaker system than he wanted to release, but with his cheating construction methods, no need to hire workers, etc, he only really had costs due to having to purchase the construction resources and rent space from Dragon herself. Since he didn't care about profit margin too much with this thing, it would only cost the consumer $50. Another $50 would be needed to get a keyboard and mouse, plus speakers.

And while he expected shock, it had made Marketing lose their gosh darn minds!

First, the quad-core processor that he had created based on Dragon's original processor design (Seriously, Dragondad could have made better processors even BACK THEN if he hadn't been so scared of his own future daughter) was apparently a whole new market.

Thankfully advanced enough through 'Technomancy' and 'Research' to not resemble any of Dragondad's old stuff anymore, it was still blowing the minds of the technicians being called in by Marketing for reference.

After all, technology advances rapidly, it even did in his own world from what little his mind remembered. But Adam had expected that with all the alien tech superpowers out there, someone had advanced the hardware base farther along and that it just didn't sell well online.

Besides, there were research papers online in this universe even now about possible 256-core super-computers and stuff, and you could order custom machines with 16-cores or more from the Tinker Community 'Toy Box'. Like... right now.

It took Dragon a few explanations, but the reason computers in general were SO expensive for normal people (Average cost was around $800, but the high end stuff could reach $2,000 easily) was due to shipping issues (Again, Leviathan), resource gathering/manufacturing center issues, and of course, Tinker-tech.

After all, those average prices were for systems that were only dual-core. The high end stuff was for quad-core. And anything better needed Tinker-tech... which needed routine maintenance!

And the custom prices? Could cost anything, depending on where you went with it.

The idea of releasing a non-Tinker quad-core processor at all, mass produced, and at a cost cheap enough for LOW end systems!?

When he complained that he hadn't used the Eight-Core Processor to save money, Dragon took over negotiations.

Calming people down, asking (And getting) his specifications, design notes, and so forth.

She would handle the public release events and marketing and all that garbage that Adam wanted NO part in.

He agreed to having her take a percentage to handle this and all future craziness that he would likely toss onto the market.

Because that was not the end of it.

His solid state memory? Ran too cool, storage space too large. Ram? Too fast, too low temp, and also too much available. His modified wireless access radio chips? And so on and so forth.

Clearly no one had expected that the man who created all those upgraded and updated software changes could do something very similar to hardware development.

Thank goodness he held back. He had been trying to remember the tech level of his old world (what little remained memory wise), and had honestly felt dejected that even with a super shard helping he had failed to live up to his own expectations.

He KNEW the technology he had created could be enhanced much further, especially with cheating materials like his metals.

Now, all those products and the machines he made to make them were going to be a problem for someone else. Dragon, specifically.

Money well spent, in his mind.

Thus in the next few days he was tasked by her to make some documentation explaining the science behind the parts. Easy enough, since he made the documentation during 'Research' and development.

Back to 'Small Garden: Min Eve', Dragon was going to renegotiate larger amounts of raw materials first, then release parts and some redacted documentation to the general public. Adam's machines would build up stock during this, increase production, ship finished products to various distribution centers, etc.

Then after the commotion dies down, Marketing will hit everyone with his new 'Small Gardens'. He insisted on not raising the price, after all the device ran fine for a cheap end machine but the only reason the market would even notice it was due to how darn low cost it was.

Besides, the 'Garden: Adaman Eve' was going to be built with the same low profit margins with the best power he could shove into the thing. The best possible without Tinkertech materials or design.

It would have to sell at a much higher price to avoid destroying the computer market, and Dragon had already started a bit of a political campaign of sorts to calm future 'competitors' that we were not going to instantly cause all their businesses to crash and burn, firing everyone and blowing up the economy.

Then again, if the 'Small Garden' had stronger specifications, it could have destroyed the market alone!

Uh.

Adam was slightly concerned that even allowing competitors to license his OS and giving them data through Dragon, competition may crash and burn anyway.

Glancing at his mental 'Golden Garden: Adaman Eve' system, he winced.

Yeah, that one would never be publicly released.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Adam was enjoying his dinner, while bickering about marketing with his beautiful companion, Narwhal.

Dragon was there too, via screen... but she was also 'busy' looking through 'papers'. Her avatar was amazing, really.

After a bite of steak, he nodded. "So glad that stuff is over for now. I didn't realize how much extra work I was going to have to do just to make hardware suck less."

Narwhal chuckled. "Oh you are not close to done. Dragon has some suggestions to make your input devices easier to maintain without you having to hold hands, and we need at least 3 backups to swap in if a problem occurs. For each."

Dragon nodded. "And 3 backups for the actual construction machines too. That should be good enough that we can avoid bothering you every few months." Seeing his conflicted expression, she grinned. "You will be paid for these parts of course. But it IS part of the 'Support' clause in your contract."

He sighed. Still better than messing with all that paperwork. He would avoid developing any sort of political or social power just to avoid having to do crud like that in the future.

He sipped some tea. Narwhal loved the stuff. "Well, once that is done can I finally meet more people? I've been cooped up for nearly two months now."

They both winced. Dragon put down the 'papers' she was looking at. "No. Sorry, but there is a time period of observation for all new members which should have run out last week, allowing you full access to the next stages of Guild Acceptance."

She waved a hand. "And similar precautions apply for members who 'Second Trigger'. Your power stabilizing checks enough boxes that you activated the automatic quarantine procedures."

He blinked. "What!? Why even have that?"

Narwhal grimaced. "Some people gain dangerous sub-abilities after a second trigger. I for example found out my force fields could now cut people as well as defend. If I hadn't known, I might have accidentally sliced up a teammate while trying to protect them."

Dragon nodded. "We also have examples of people going psychologically unstable, in one case literally exploding due to paranoia."

Adam grumbled. "It's not like I was going to pop or something. You almost blow up your soul ONE TIME and no one lets you forget it."

Narwhal's response was dry. "Well, you know how squeamish some people are about soul explosions." She took another bite. "Anyway, Dragon and I thought we should try and get you around some healers, what few we have. See if we can get your 'Recovery' ability to improve."

Adam pushed aside his tray. "Improve in what direction? I can try and focus on one improvement path if I have guidance."

Dragon sighed. "Being able to apply the state to someone else without 'healing' them into a copy of yourself would be a huge step forward. Other than that... range healing? Area healing? Any improvement really would be infinitely valuable."

He hummed. "Well... I guess. Better start reading medical documentation though." His mental garden changed download lists. "And maybe work on general chemistry and biology at the same time. Wouldn't hurt anything."

Dragon 'typed' on her devices. "I am including paramedic and nurse documentation to go with your doctor related courses."

Narwhal followed him as they dumped their trash and returned their plates. "Ooo, so you'll be a nurse? Mmm."

Adam chuckled. "Male nurse outfit only, I hope. Though I do have the legs for it if needed."

As he wandered along with the two, one woman slick with innuendo, the other bickering about semantics, something about the conversation felt like home.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

All HIS crap was working, darn it! He tossed the printing hardware to the side. Some part inside his device was properly covered, but the laser printer had a manufacturing defect that popped part of it into the wrong section, causing parts to melt.

The new design nearly isolated every non-Adam part from the junk he was forced to work with. Dragon was to thank for this, as he had been very pro-brick design before she showed how OFTEN this third party stuff broke down.

As far as he could tell, most of his personnel would be hired simply to replace this JUNK he had to use on top of and inside of his equipment.

Raw material manipulation. One day, just... voom! Fix yourself!

Sigh, that would get a kill order on him on seconds. He had weak memories about the Star Trek universe, and how their Earth had nearly collapsed once replicator machines were released. Now all they needed was raw material to create anything. It caused chaos.

He took a break, flowing high temperature fire over his flesh to burn off the oil and stains.

The 'Garden' systems were having... an impact.

PHO alone (like many chatrooms) was booming with reviews, questions, commentary. As it was it took a few hours for people to accept this wasn't a publicity stunt by some random guy hacking the internet.

Dragon's distribution system was awesome.

He didn't want to admit to anyone, but her insistence that he build far more creation machines and build up a huge stockpiled had been well placed. They were sold out everywhere, and in some places pre-orders were through the roof!

She and marketing insisted that he leave it alone though. Too many building facilities would become a waste of resources after the initial wave of buyers got what they wanted.

It turned out though that the wave of publicity had managed to increase Min Eve Server sales, as most industries had assumed a certain level of bragging and snake-oil selling due to how high the specifications were for how low the cost had been declared.

Within the guild, the reviews were pretty solid. Even if the only Garden's being produced with Flame Metal were still in locked review labs.

Turns out that the cheap hardware got everyone's attention, but the speed and polish of Eve held it.

People were astounded by how well it ran on... well, near everything. The website was being swamped by testing groups and users wanting copies, and Dragon had to increase her allocation of server clusters to ensure nothing slowed down.

It was looking more and more likely that future consumers would either buy a Garden or a high end machine. The low cost market was being cornered HARD by this stuff.

Some people were pushing anti-parahuman rhetoric, some were saying it hurt national pride to use something made in another country, but honestly all the arguments came off as pretty petty and arbitrary. Normal internet stuff.

Still, the situation was stable enough that he could begin saving charges and preparing for his future medical tour.

Wait... would Amy have her powers yet? She would be what, 12? 13?

Chibi-doctor? No way was he going to google an underage kids name for any reason, that would just be creepy.

With a chuckle he realized that if he went around and collected the main cast of Worm it would be something close to a 'Muppet Babies' scenario.

Then again, some of those older women would now be in the prime of life...

With a grunt, he went back to work. Dang Narwhal getting his hormones raging.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

By the time paper work was straightened out and he had the supply chain for his new product established, Adam had a full set of charges.

Also known as: Four.

Each day since it filled up he had been subtly enhancing 'Recovery' in preparation for his 'Exposure Tour', as Narwhal insisted on calling it.

Tiers of 'Recovery' now existed: 'Stabilized', 'Standard', 'Peak', and 'Enhanced'.

'Stabilized' would ensure that no further loss of functionality would occur, but wouldn't try to repair non-lethal issues. So no limb regrowth, minor bruise correction, etc.

'Standard' healed you to fully functional human (Or whatever average your species had). 'Peak' would make you as close to a high level super-human as one could be without actually changing from base DNA or human organs, etc.

'Enhanced' would use all the information from 'Recovery', 'Research', and 'Technomancy' to try and go beyond limits while staying roughly to the four-limbed model as possible. He may end up with extra eyes or organs or something.

He could set the level of healing, reducing himself to a near crippled state with 'Stabilized', healed or better with 'Standard' or 'Peak', or in very dangerous situations, go crazy with 'Enhanced'.

The next charge was a mass storage system. When he had extra resources (water, food, metal, etc), it would store it in this dimensional space (Squishy played with it, looked like a meatball) for future healing. It took a second charge for it to also store metal and stuff for his 'Enhanced' form.

So he was really ready to get going.

He was NOT expecting an old, beat up Recreational Vehicle.

Dragon was grinning. "We can't just take a cargo plane or something, can we? You are a new cape, and we need subtlety."

Adam sighed. "Road trip?

The vehicle floored it. Dragon whooped! "Road Trip!"

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Riding in a self driving vehicle was unnerving.

Adam kept glancing at the wheel, SURE that something was about to go wrong.

Dragon found it all hilarious, as the various screens showed. "I've scheduled pit stops at various attractions along the way, so even with just us two it won't be too boring."

He gave a wink. "You and I, m'lady? Hark, I hath been abducted by yon Dragon!" At the chuckle he continued. "So who are we going to be working with?"

She sighed. "There are... very few true healers of any type, and over half of them are actively working for Villain organizations. The first though, we are going to have you spend some time with Scapegoat."

He blinked. "That... sounds like an unfortunate name."

Dragon pulled up a profile. "His power is to transfer wounds of any type to himself, and then onto others. As an emergency measure, we have a set of already brain-dead coma prisoners, each with existing death sentences, to accept the damage he builds up if he is unable to heal himself in time."

Adam looked over the details. "Going to guess here, but I assume that while working with him I will be the recipient?"

Dragon nodded. "Aside from your amazing level of regeneration, if your power triggers on his ability it would be the best variation to collect long term I think. You would become something like a damage sponge."

He moved on to the next profile. "Isn't this a Villain?"

She sighed. "Yes, Lizardtail works with the Villain Accord. However, Accord will likely be willing to cooperate under truce conditions with some minor concessions I could make with him." Seeing his look she shrugged. "If you can absorb the damage from others thanks to Scapegoat, Lizardtail's power would be the next best upgrade. He can apply his ability in a field around himself."

Dragon pulled up some pictures with modified circles. "Closer is better of course, but area healing would be amazing if you can pull it off."

Adam frowned. "I... might be able to do that without him. Do we have access to any Rogues or Heroes with other area of affect abilities? If I stay in healing form, that may be enough."

She blinked. "Hmm... Well, the third healer on my list has a sister with a wide area emotional affecting ability. Also, it is in a area where a tinker friend of mine has set up shop. I was intending to introduce you two anyway." She nodded. "I will arrange for Scapegoat to ship down to Brockton Bay, and we can hit four birds with one stone... or something like that."

He blinked. "They are all in one place?"

She shook her head. "I had a few other people with healing similar abilities, but most of them are chemical tinkers or create biological replacements. Useful, but not directly complimenting your abilities." Dragon sighed. "Also, one of them is in the United Kingdom and is being a jerk about cooperation anyway."

Adam shrugged. "Could be worse. When is our next break?"

She grinned. "Buffalo Zoo!"

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

It was not exciting.

The animals themselves were nice, and we were technically in the USA now.

Basically it had a petting area, and lots of birds and reptiles and stuff.

It honestly felt a bit like a school trip, and Dragon had him put on a headset (with camera) so she could talk and stuff while he wandered around.

He even had those fake glasses so she could project a hologram of her being nearby.

If she was still trying to look normal, this type of stunt was not helping her case... But she was clearly having fun, so who cared.

He leaned on the railing. "So... we are in New York. I'll be honest, I thought it was was farther away."

Dragon 'leaned' as well. Her 'body' was toned, but she had more of a 'girl-next-door' look than athlete. "Places on maps don't always line up with our heads when we visit. I find places seem closer than they are when I am flying from place to place."

He watched a baby leopard roll around. This exhibit was expectedly popular. "So where is this Brockton Bay anyway?"

She flicked her hair back. "North of Boston, so Massachusetts basically. Coast side. I'm thinking about setting up a new lab there, now that I have made some advancements in my tech base."

He blinked. "Advancements?"

Dragon blurred, reappearing as a... sexy cyborg thing. Mostly normal face, slightly robotic eyes, an outfit a bit tighter than expected. "I'm still stuck in my base, but some of Dad's old stuff became surprisingly useful recently. I have been working on a full recovery, but at least with this update I will be able to do something like a full body drone instead of the more simplistic remote sensors and stuff."

He shifted his eyes away. "Alright, I know you've been around Narwhal far too long. I mean, I am glad you are wearing pants at all, but those curves are deadly."

She lit up (thankfully NOT literally, who knows how many LED's she had hidden). "Aww, thank you Variance! I admit this model was focused toward a friend of mine who has stuck by me in my worst moments. I'm hoping to surprise him."

Adam rubbed his eyes. "Well, I am going to take a wild guess here and assume you like this guy a lot. A whole lot. To the point of designing sexier bodies to pop over and say 'Hi!' lot."

She bounced her... she bounced. "Too much?"

Adam thought back to the man in canon focused on efficiency, who dedicated his life to trying to prove his own worth. Maybe he deserved a mind-blowing gorgeous woman surprising him once or twice.

"No, I think you nailed it."

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

They had almost made it to the edge of the New York state line when a large collection of what appeared to be combine tractors mixed with rusted cars acted like a huge Gundam and tried to flatten the RV.

'Tried' was the important part.

Adam had been stuck in the RV for literally hours.

It was... boring.

So when the 'Yellow' coated RV suddenly turned into a forty foot long Golden Kaa... it made an impression.

Seeing a man with blazing fire for hair and blood red metal eyes stare down at you from double your height... well.

It wasn't a fight.

Thankfully the tinker (Named "Track-Tor, the Invincible!") was not in the now burning wreckage. He apparently went for flammable filler when constructing his 'Farmbot of Doom'.

The thing went up near instantaneously when Kaa bit it, and the fireball had been epic!

It might have been meant as a final 'F.U.' to whomever defeated Farmbot, but watching Kaa eat the flames and grow larger kind of demoralized Track-Tor.

He was just sort of staring at the crater as we waited for PRT to show up.

Adam was just... unsure how to feel about this. "I thought only people like Mouse Protector went for the corny stuff?"

Dragon shook her head. "No, unfortunately people like this pop up fairly routinely. Not all powers leave you with a stable mind."

He had ended up catching four other cars before us, but those people were all fine. He had just put them into a 'Human-Pen' with small shears to experience the tragedy of Tractor life.

Yeah... this should have been mentioned somewhere in the canon lore, if this level of nuts was routine in some places.

When he found the Villain's Lair (Tractor production factory, why not), it was filled with various tractor-related gadgets and tools.

Why he had made a fruit juicer connected to a car-sized tractor, Adam couldn't understand.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

This road trip was CLEARLY for Dragon's benefit.

He didn't even KNOW there were this many museums.

Also, he had been under the impression that there was only one 'Worlds biggest ball of twine', and in reality that was likely true, but there were innumerable 'County's largest ball of (Fill in the blank)' that they had visited.

Does this count as trolling?

Thanks to having significant disposable income, he now had far too many souvenirs. And a day or so of driving... ended up taking a week.

She justified it as having to wait for Scapegoat to make his trip down there anyway, so why rush?

All that aside, he spent some charges over these days on a technological front, both to keep the narrative of 'My power grows based on those around me' and to eventually prepare a home for either Dragon or a similar AI.

If she ran on the virtual OS, he would have a companion like this even in other worlds... and not being alone was nice.

So an upgrade to Squishy to allow interfaces from other shards ('Search' windows? Floating desktop from 'Technomancy'? Yes please!) was followed by a charge to 'Technomancy' to allow time acceleration in the hardware simulation.

The other charges went into improving the simulation itself. The ability to allow hardware creation via software in the simulation would allow a future AI to craft new hardware for herself without him having to be in the way. The ability for a software designed Avatar to show up in Sqishy's interfaces so Adam could see/hear/touch/taste, etc.

It was all illusion, at least until he could find some hard-light technology here, but illusion could improve the quality of life.

The ability to record tastes and play back those memories when eating lower quality food. To allow the body to correctly smell the area for danger, but present something pleasant for his mind. And so forth... It was getting to the point where he was considering creating an 'Illusionist' skill tree just to see how useful it could be.

Adam had vague memories of mind manipulation in a series of books, 'The Dresden Files' or something close to that. With nothing more than mental tricks one could 'see' through fog or frosted glass, ignore uncomfortable weather or clothing, pretend food was still warm and ready to eat, and so many other small details.

Then again, there were no weak powers really, only lazy or uncreative users. Probably.

Seeing Brockton Bay on the road signs felt like heaven though. Even after remodeling the RV, traveling was getting old. Out of boredom he had burned out the inside entirely and replaced it with custom 'Flame Metal' parts... comfortable and safer if they had to fight some giant baker or ham sandwich or something.

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

The city itself looked high quality. Probably because the section ENTERING the city would get the most focus on not looking run down and filled with baddies.

Still, the quality of repairs went down hill as they drove toward the bay area.

Gang signs went up. Broken windows showed up more. People in hoods, shuffling, standing in shadows... well, sketchiness in general started ratcheting upwards.

Adam glanced at the empty chair. Since his 'upgrade', Dragon was able to just stream a video feed as if he had the portable camera, which she found fascinating. "So what is our first stop?"

She sighed, 'sitting' in the driver's seat. "First, we check in with local PRT Headquarters, get you set up with rooming and usually a lot of paperwork." She smirked at him. "Luckily, we got that out of the way already."

Images of the stacks of documents he had gone through fled in his mind. "Yes. Lucky."

Dragon chuckled. "So we are heading over to Downtown, near one of the High Schools. You can leave the metal in the van until we have to leave, I've arranged other vehicles to get us around while in the area."

He siphoned metal into a slowly whitening backpack. "Better be armed. Internet says this city is crazy dangerous." Plus, 'Flame Manipulation' made his hair look awesome.

Adam flicked his wrist, a bright blue Kaa hissing. "Yeah, and with a layer this thick I should be safe from knives and bullets from the neck down." A shift and most of his skull was covered in a helmet.

The eyes and mouth areas were actual flame, so he could see and breathe and stuff. The holes in the top allowed his hair to flame through.

...Shift the top layer of metal to lower temperatures... and now he was a combination of red plates with blue edging. Sweet.

Dragon jokingly sniffed. "Bit cliche, isn't it? You look like an average knight in that getup."

Adam chuckled. "How about this?" Guild symbol on the chest and back, add it to the gloves, change some of the flames to bright white for a skeletal look... Neat.

She was... less impressed. "Please lose the Skeletor look, He-Man."

Fine. Smooth white surface, blue square flamed 'eyes', red flame hair, space gap to expose mouth and bottom of nose. "Meh, should be good enough." The under-layer was scales of Null Metal, as an extra layer of protection.

Really, it was only possible to move this weight thanks to 'Flame Manipulation' in the first place. If he swapped out skills he would be way slower.

Adam flexed a bit... mmm. The outfit was comfortable, and the slight restriction against his muscles added a layer of something powerful to his movements. Exoskeleton, basically. "When do I get to meet some heroes?"

Dragon sighed. "Not soon. To hopefully speed up the process of power adaption, we set up a small apartment in this base next to the small hospital. You, Scapegoat, and a young healer Panacea will have rooms there and work together to heal cases."

She 'led' him into the facility. "Tinkers will be allowed to visit, since you already posses a powerset for that, but other than that we are keeping the number of visitors very small until we can understand how you will interact with their abilities better."

He blinked. "Isn't Panacea like 12 or something?"

Dragon nodded. "Thirteen, which is why the three of you have your own rooms for this test. If all of you were consenting adults, we would have three beds in a small area to increase power bleeding chances."

Seeing his shocked look she rolled her eyes. "Not that type of consent, although I am sure Narwhal would love the idea. Just... room-mates, basically. The current setup will be Apartment-mates, for the record."

Adam opened the door to his temporary home to see a man-goat.

He closed the door.

Adam took a calming breath. "Right, when you said 'Scapegoat', I feel that you left his profile images out on purpose."

She looked ecstatic. "Maybe?"

He sighed and opened the door. "Is it a mask? Because that is a very realistic looking animal head."

"Baaa."

Adam rubbed his eyes. "You all suck."

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Scapegoat turned out to be a cool guy, really.

Still, mask aside, conversation was a bit lacking until Dragon led their new apartment-mate over.

Adam glanced over when the door opened.

Panacea was short, big-eyed, and peaking into the room like her bright white healing outfit was somehow subtle.

She. Was. Adorable.

Adam raised a hand. "Yo! You here for the healing party?"

Scapegoat also waved. "Baa."

...He COULD talk, but he (so far) has been using a dry erase board. It was... trying. Also, he wasn't sure if this was canon or not, Scapegoat wasn't exactly in the main cast.

But it was annoying.

Panacea squeaked before forcing herself to stand (sort of) tall and give a weak smile. "H... Hi! Yeah, I was told we were going to learn about healing and stuff. I'm still adapting to my abilities, and my family said this could help."

Wow, she took the whole man-goat thing in stride... made him feel like a wuss for freaking out a bit. "Yeah, come over and take a seat." A hand wave had Kaa slide over and convert into a mixture of chair and hammock.

Her gasp was satisfying. See man-goat? THIS is how you act impressed! "So I am Variance, I can use power-sets I gain from either dire need or the environment around me. This dude is 'Scapegoat', and he can absorb and transfer damage to heal."

Scapegoat nodded. "Baa."

Sigh. "Anyway, Dragon was hoping that I could enhance my healing power by being around others doing similar things. Oh, and you can call me Adam, Adam 'Adventure' Burns. No point in a secret identity when my head is on fire. Or bald, or paper, or whatever."

Panacea giggled. "Well, I'm Amy I guess. My family's team has decided to go open with identities to encourage Heroes to be more publicly acceptable." Seeing my look she shrugged. "And well... I gained my powers in kind of a public place anyway, so the secret was out before we could decide otherwise. My sister actually got hers during a public basketball game!"

She sighed. "I guess we weren't subtle."

Adam chuckled. "Well, I should get to meet your sister at some point as well. Dragon and I am hoping that being around her will encourage my healing to become area-of-effect, like her emotion stuff."

Amy blinked. "Huh." Turning to man-goat, she squinted. "Is that a mask or not?"

"Baa."

Adam pointed at the whiteboard. "He says it is one, just made from an actual goat with some tinker-tech to make it move right. I'm not sure why he would bother."

Man she was laid back at this age. He leaned on one arm. "So I slowly gain power each day, and have to choose one power-set to use at a time. How do your skills work?"

Amy seemed slightly uncomfortable. "I touch people and I know how the bits work. And I can change stuff." She seemed to close up a bit. "Not brains though."

Adam nodded. "Probably too complicated I guess. Not even advanced medicine has a full understanding about brain development or recovery, and the stuff adapts to basically any input given enough time. Can you at least understand the brains you see?"

At her cautious nod, he continued. "Then there you go, that is useful. You could help a doctor by having him take a brain scan or something and you can point at it to show which areas are damaged or whatever. That could save lives without forcing you to take on the risk."

At her stunned expression he held out a hand. "On a side note, my whole body changes pretty heavily when my powers are switched out. Could you let me know what it looks like on the inside when I do?"

A hand waved a board between us.

'No interactions before evaluations are done. Orders by Dragon.'

Adam blinked. "Ah. Thank you for the heads up, Scapegoat."

"Baa."

~~~Broken Adventure~~~

Healing was... interesting.

A patient would enter, the three healers would each individually diagnose him or her, documenting their findings. A doctor on staff would review the works, they would have a debate (with the patient listening) about the best and healthiest methods of treatments without and WITH powers.

Thankfully the documentation Dragon had passed over was very thorough, Adam could keep up with ease. More surprisingly, so could Amy. How old was she again? Sheesh, overachievers.

The actual healer would bounce between Panacea and Scapegoat, with Scapegoat holding Adam's shoulder, passing along all kinds of painful damage. Not that Adam flinched or anything, compared to soul surgery this was down right pleasant.

On the positive side, Scapegoat wrote down that he had managed to get rid of 100% of his injuries for the first time in several years thanks to Adam's amazing levels of regeneration. Normally some of the more deadly but benign injuries would be stored in Scapegoat's body until a certain level built up, at which point he would dump it on a Villain or death-row inmate.

So Adam was both morally and politically a great choice as a damage sponge.

On a side note, his 'Recovery' power-set had interested Amy, as she was confused how his body parts worked exactly. She got permission from Dragon to inspect via hand holding, but there was no DNA instructions forcing his eyes to look like that and no organs in place to construct fingernails made of bone.

Also, in 'Recovery' mode, he had NO hair. The ability to grow hair vanished.

For some reason that disturbed Adam.

Anyway, it only took a few minutes of annoyance before he swapped his heavy and annoying 'costume' into Null Metal chain-mesh shirt and pants with 'Fire Manipulation' before swapping back to 'Recovery'.

Constantly putting on and removing gloves got old quick.

Near noon, he got tired of being a damage dummy and used one of Squishy's charges to permit 'Recovery' to be externally applied, another charge for it to be able to 'scan' others and ensure any external 'Recovery' uses would not be based on Adam's existence.

No need for sudden twins, after all.

Announcing the 'change' brought the heal train to a crawl as they were moved to a nearby lab for more detailed scans while he 'attempted' to heal some volunteers.

Said volunteers seemed much less stressed when informed that there were two extra healers nearby, just in case.

The first healing... uh. Didn't go well. Didn't hurt the patient, but all her teeth fell out and new ones showed up.

After only a TINY amount of totally freaking out, everyone calmed down and Amy confirmed that the woman was a picture of health.

Still, Adam insisted on going back to standby until the next day. He had already used a charge secretly to convert and transmit any waste biomass like that into his bio-storage in the future, allowing his healing to give a more magical 'Things just changed' vibe rather than risking having a human shed like a lizard or something.

An extra day would allow him to have two reserve charges AND give everyone a chance to calm down a bit. Hopefully.

Thankfully the woman was still grateful, as her dental history had been... epic. No wonder his power decided it was faster to just remove and replace.

A new day, a couple of less traumatic healing moments, and Adam was now participating and helping out as each person entered, got evaluated, and healed.

It was during one of the rest breaks that their idle conversation led toward contracts, and Adam found out that Panacea had a terrible one! Even man-goat agreed.

Adam knew Carol was not exactly on the girl's side, but what lawyer would allow such unfair legal restrictions? Such low payments? High requirements?

With Dragon's help and Adams insistence, the three healers and five or so doctors ended up spending the rest of days three and four drafting a generic 'healing' contract, something that was unneeded before due to only having a few in existence it could apply to.

Dragon liked the finished product, which required mandatory breaks, pay rates, and monitoring of minors until of age and more.

She convinced Adam fairly quickly to use some of his massive treasure trove to fund a global charity funding healing in all forms in general, especially in Truces and local emergencies.

After all, many healers were not exactly legit but Adam still wanted them willing to help out.

And... he had cash.

Piles of it. More than expected. To the point where he now had a personal financier agent who only had Adam as a client.

Oh sure, his products were doing well. Sold out everywhere sold, so far. Hitting the media by storm.