Technique (a day in the worm)

Adrian looked away from the window as the bus approached the boardwalk.  There were still cameras and smartphones pointing at him, and no one was trying to be subtle about it.  He adjusted his hood, tightened his grip on his bag and stood as the bus came to a stop, joining the flow of people off the bus and into the sunlight.

The boardwalk was always busy, and the tourists were out in force.  After the strange explosion of new parahumans in Brockton Bay the crowds had only grown thicker after reporters and cape geeks had found themselves shooed away from the local schools with rapidly increasing insistence.  Standing a head taller then most in the crowd and wearing what was practically a cloak garnered more than a few looks, but at least most of those that noticed were content with taking photos as he passed.  He picked up at least two men with oversized cameras and pointless attachments that followed for a fair distance.  The videos would be on PHO later, drivel posted for bragging rights, as if it was hard to get a clip of a cape in this city.  He picked up a third follower just before reaching his destination, but they were at least trying to be discreet, with a camera-in-a-bag poking out of a poorly-disguised peephole.

Bells chimed as he stepped into Parian's boutique with the cape-fan following close behind.  She'd been his first choice for clothes, and he'll admit, networking.  She was the only other real rogue in Brockton Bay, and the only place he'd considered going for the custom clothing he needed.  What he wouldn't admit is that he'd really hoped as a fellow parahuman she wouldn't treat him like a spectacle or a freak.  Their meetings had been thankfully far less awkward than he'd expected, considering he'd needed to undress enough for Parian to take his measurements and figure out what would be most comfortable to wear over fuzzy skin/chitin/whatever this body was now made of.

He'd kicked himself for waiting so long to take scans of her power, and brushed it off as just trying to be polite.  That he'd neglected to realize he should take scans of his own altered biology until Parian had made an offhand comment that day had left him hoping it would be the dumbest oversight he'd ever make.

"Technique!"  Parian stepped out from behind a display, offering her hand.  "How have you been?  I have your order packaged and ready."

"Thank you.  And I'm fine, as long as I stay away from PHO."

Her own mask tilted slightly, and Adrian, Technique when on business, no matter how mundane, could imagine the expression she was making behind it.

"I've got shippers now."

"Oh?  Who's the unlucky pairing?"

"You."  He reached up with a too-long finger and tapped his face.

(Mask.  It's not your face.  Just a mask you have to wear, until you find a way to fix this.)

"Because we match.  They're calling us 'Comedy and Tragedy.'"

Parian scoffed as a package floated down from the shelves behind her, and they made their way to the counter.  Commissioning things that didn't catch or tear on the un-classifiable hairs that wrapped his new body had chewed up a small chunk on his remaining funds, but this was the last batch he'd need to order for a long time, hopefully.  The package went into the duffle bag he was carrying as he paid.

"Matching outfits are a terrible basis for a relationship.  I can say that from experience."

The mask was flexible enough to let him smile, just a little.

His hood went up again and Adrian stepped outside to only a few cameras.  He picked a direction and walked, seemingly aimless, the shops here either too expensive or uninteresting for anyone that wasn't a tourist.  Enforcers looked his way as times, but meeting their gaze made them look elsewhere.

He stopped at a section of the boardwalk where the crowds were slightly thinner.  It was a good view, as long as you didn't turn enough to get the really kitschy shops in your field of view.  It let him relax for a few minutes until his PDA beeped.  It was time.  Nothing much for the few onlookers, just a few taps on a screen.  He'd go over the transmission later as the drone sunk deeper and quietly returned to dock.  Power consumption, maintenance schedules, resource collection.

He has his dorm for small things, and his empty home for larger projects.  But a safehouse wasn't safe if you made regular trips to it.  Power came from tinkertech generators that collected hydrogen from seawater, keeping it off the grid.  Drones scraped for useful materials from the seafloor and the wrecks of the boat graveyard, at irregular times with transmissions kept to a minimum.  Flecks of gold and other minerals could be pulled from the ocean itself.  Tinkertech made such enterprises viable, even if the setup took almost everything he could spare while secrecy demanded that he not try to draw on the benefit from it too much.

It wasn't paranoia if there really were a lot of horrible things out to get you, and cowering in a hole in the ground was preferable to being forced to confront any of them without a plan.  Several plans.  And a small army of sleeping drones that would have made the PRT very unhappy to learn that he had built.

But it wasn't like he could trust them.  Oh, he could have gone to work for them.  It would have made a lot of things easier.  But it would have made too many things harder.  Like working with Toybox.  Or killing the endbringers.  It had become painfully obvious after the Vial that the PRT was fighting a holding action against the state of the world instead of trying to actively fix things, and the motivations for their decisions continued to elude him.  There wasn't even a pattern that he could grasp.  It was as if they and the government sometimes chose to make the most contentious decisions possible for no apparent reason or gain.  Not helping to block NEPEA-5 drove many parahumans into the PRT's arms, that was an obvious calculated move...if you were completely unwilling to acknowledge all the ramifications of that decision in favor of a higher recruitment rate.

But political games didn't matter.  He had a sword to make, a proof of concept for developing stable energy fields that would be a part of the sonic weapon he was developing.  Endbringer flesh was just one homogeneous crystalline mass, after all.  Find the right frequency...