Dragon

A thought dawned on me.  It was a half-formed thought up until the moment I devoted some attention to it.  Then it clicked.  Tinkers had a knack, a specialty, be it a particular field of work or something they could do with their designs that nobody else could, and I knew Dragon’s.  She could intuit and appropriate the designs of other tinkers.

It put everything in perspective.  The machines she was using, half of them drew on ideas I’d seen other tinkers put to work.  The drone model had used Kid Win’s antigravity generators and Armsmaster’s ambient taser, the wheel-dragon might have used the same theories as the electromagnetic harness Kid Win had been packing when we attacked the PRT headquarters.

It also served to explain how she could invest the time to make the suits.  If her power afforded her the brainpower and raw thinking power to understand and apply the work of other tinkers, then she could put all of her resources towards manufacturing.  Armsmaster made the base design, she appropriated it and then turned artificial intelligence or her own power to creating the necessary variations.

Monarch 16.5