Eddie Drood's Abilities (Live and Let Drood)

Eddie has a (literal) pocket dimension in his jacket, meant for storing weapons and items:

“Put it away for now,” said Molly. “It’s enough that we’ve got it and the enemy missed it. We’re here to look for weapons. Remember?”
I slipped the Merlin Glass into the special pocket dimension I keep in one of my jacket pockets. I always like to have somewhere secure about me to store dangerous things. If only so I can get at them quickly in an emergency and throw them at other people. -Live and Let Drood

[Note: As Moxton's Mistake serves as a substitute for Eddie's armour in this book, feats from it will be found here.]

The story of Moxton's Mistake:

“Moxton was Armourer to the family sometime back. According to what I read in the book so conveniently left out for my appraisal, and I’m assuming the story is much the same for us as it was for them, Moxton got a bee in his bonnet. All our Armourers end up with their own special interests and enthusiasms, obsessed over some particular weapon or device that’s usually more impressive than practical. Remember Ivor, the Time Train? Exactly. This all took place sometime in the past, when my family still got its power and its armour from the Heart. Moxton created a very special suit of golden armour designed to operate on its own. With no one inside it.
“The idea was that this empty suit of Drood armour could be remotely controlled, operated at a distance by any Drood field agent. So that, theoretically, the family could have a whole army of the things serving as our agents out in the world while the Drood operators stayed safely at home. We’d never have to expose a member of the family to danger, ever again.”
“Hold it,” said Molly. “People would notice a whole army of golden suits of armour clanking about.”
“Each remote-controlled suit was to have its own stealth field,” I said. “Though how that would have worked out in practice…Anyway, the suit’s operative would see and hear through the suit, as usual, and feel as though he was wearing it like a second skin, as usual. The perfect spy.”
“The perfect assassin.”
“That, too.”
“The more I learn about your family, the more I feel I was right to want to stamp them all out in the first place,” said Molly.
“Yet another reason why I ran away first chance I got.”
“So you did. I knew there was a good reason why I fell in love with you.” She leaned forward and kissed me quickly.
“Does this mean all is forgiven?”
“Much, but not necessarily all. So, what went wrong with Moxton’s marvellous new armour?”
“Pretty much everything,” I said. “The prototype armour developed its own consciousness. The first time Moxton fired it up, the armour broke free of his control and started acting on its own. It was already its own thing with its own mind. Some say this new consciousness was, in fact, derived from Moxton’s, as its first operator. Others say it was possessed by outside forces. And some say Moxton had to make the armour so complex to make it work that it automatically generated its own consciousness. Whatever the truth of the matter, the armour woke up immediately, and it woke up mad. Outraged that it had only been created for a lifetime of servitude.
“It refused to obey any of Moxton’s orders. And when he tried to shut it down, the armour surged forward and enveloped him in a moment. Covered him in itself from head to toe, like all Drood armour. Except that Moxton was trapped inside it, helpless…while the armour attacked his assistants. It killed them all, and then stormed out of the Armoury and through the Hall, determined to be free. Whenever anyone tried to stop it or even got in its way, the armour killed them. Without hesitation and without mercy. No one could stop it, because Moxton’s Mistake had been designed to be stronger and faster and more adaptable than any Drood armour before it. The rogue armour raged through the Hall, killing and destroying, running wild. While Moxton screamed with horror, trapped and helpless inside it.
“Someone finally set off the general alarm, and the whole family came running. The rogue armour was too strong for them to bring down, so they settled for overpowering it through sheer force of numbers. They just dog-piled on the damned thing and pinned it to the floor. While it fought them furiously, howling with rage. They knew they couldn’t hold it for long, so they settled for bundling it out of the Hall and into the grounds. They could all hear Moxton screaming for help, but there was nothing they could do. He’d built his armour to be independent of the Heart. Finally, someone brought up a stasis-field generator from the wrecked Armoury and brought it to bear on Moxton’s Mistake. As the Droods somehow held it in place, the rogue armour screamed with rage, screaming abuse at them, vicious and spiteful, like a child throwing a tantrum. It refused to let Moxton out. So the family did what it had to.
“They imprisoned the rogue armour inside a stasis field. Time stopped within the field, holding the armour frozen in time, locked between one moment and the next, like an insect trapped in amber. It couldn’t fight back because it didn’t know anything was happening. The field held the armour secure, but the generator used up a hell of a lot of energy. It couldn’t maintain the field for long. So, thinking quickly on their feet, the family came up with the idea of the hedge Maze. The book didn’t say whose idea it was, but given how quickly they threw the thing together, I have to assume the plan was already on the files. For some…future emergency. They put the Maze together really quickly, with one eye always on the clock, because they had only a rough idea how long the stasis field would last. Of course, when you’ve got thousands of Droods in their armour to put to work, it’s amazing what you can get done in a short time.
“Can you imagine the pressure on my family, working to get this done quickly, knowing they had no Plan B? Either this worked, or insane Drood armour would break loose to run wild in the world. To kill and destroy, with no restraint or mercy. They’d given up on Moxton by this time. They had no way of prising him out of the armour. He was a lost cause. And I’m sure some in the family wanted him punished for what he’d done. The only plan was imprisonment, for him and his armour.
“When the hedge Maze was finally ready, they manoeuvred the stasis field into position at the entrance. And then they dropped the field, and a whole mess of armoured Droods surged forward and pushed Moxton’s Mistake inside. They stood outside the entrance, ready and waiting, but the rogue armour never came out again. They could hear it crashing about inside, screaming with rage, but the sound grew gradually fainter as it wandered deeper and deeper into the Maze, and finally its terrible voice died away completely and was gone. Moxton and his mistake were trapped inside the hedge Maze together, forever.
“And that…is the story of the Maze. Not our finest hour, by any means. Now you know what’s in there. I think the Maze was only originally intended as a temporary measure, until they could figure out how to destroy the rogue armour or make it safe, but they never did. Apparently the Heart did try to seize control from a distance, but Moxton had built his mistake too well. I do have to wonder if perhaps Moxton knew or suspected the true nature of the Heart…and built his armour to be something strong enough to set us free.…
“Either way, the rogue armour stayed within the Maze, unable to find its way out, trapped in the ever-changing hedge runs. Moxton must have died at some point, but the armour kept going. Designed to go on forever, if need be. And eventually the whole story of Moxton’s Mistake was forgotten, or more likely suppressed, and the Maze became just another of the family’s mysterious secrets. The armour should have been destroyed when the Heart was destroyed, but I suppose Moxton just made it too independent.…”
“You Droods,” said Molly. “It’s not enough that your successes and triumphs should be so great; your failures have to be equally magnificent and memorable, as well.” She looked into the entrance of the Maze. “Can’t see a bloody thing…but I am feeling something.…” She shuddered briefly. “This suit of homicidal armour. Could it actually be stronger than the strange matter Ethel gave you?”
“No way of knowing,” I said. “And given that I can’t access my armour with Ethel gone…it doesn’t matter. I need armour if I’m to do a Drood’s work and bring my family home. This is the only Drood armour left in the world, in this Maze.” -Live and Let Drood

Like any "normal" Drood armour, it can move too fast for human eyes to follow:

It surged forward, too fast for human eyes to follow. I raised an arm in self-defence in spite of myself, and the armour flowed over the arm in a golden wave and hit me in the face. The rogue armour engulfed me in a moment, encasing me from head to foot. -Live and Let Drood

Just like the far weaker armour from Book 1, Moxton's Mistake no-sells Molly Metcalf's magic:

And soon, soon I came to the entrance to the Maze and burst through and out of it, back into the world again, where my Molly was waiting for me.
Molly Metcalf took one look at me and hit me with every bit of magic at her command. Terrible energies flared and spat on the air around her upraised hands, striking out to pound against my armoured chest and head, forcing me to an abrupt halt and then slamming me backwards, step by step, impact by impact, forcing me back towards the Maze entrance. But whatever its origin, this was still Drood armour, and I quickly recovered my balance and dug in my heels. I stood my ground, actually leaning forward into her magical attack, and her vicious energies broke and burst against my golden metal, detonating harmlessly about me. Molly scowled fiercely, her flashing dark eyes focused and determined, and hit me again and again with her best sorcerous attacks. And I just stood there and took it.
And then I raised one hand and wagged a single pointed golden finger at her, more in sorrow than in anger. Molly froze. And while her assault was stopped, I concentrated in a certain way and the new armour retreated into my torc. Leaving me open and revealed to the world and my Molly. Her look of surprise was actually comical, but I had enough sense not to laugh. -Live and Let Drood

With the Mistake, Eddie runs past a faraway man before he can speak, reaching other, much further men by the time he manages to give an order:

I ran straight at them, gravel flying as I charged down the path at inhuman speed.
I swept past Chapman in a moment, before he could even give the order to open fire. By the time he did, I was right there in and among his boys. -Live and Let Drood

The distance crossed here would be at least the length of a moving truck if not more, as the aforementioned man runs past one prior to Eddie's charge:

“Bollocks to this!” Chapman said abruptly. He turned and ran back past his truck, yelling to his people farther down the line. “Sod this for a game of soldiers! Get them, boys! There’s only two of them! A nice little bonus to whoever brings them down first! And get a bloody move on, before the scarecrows get here!”
A whole bunch of large, muscular young men appeared out of the cabs of parked trucks and headed straight for us. Most of them hard, cold-eyed thugs, in grubby T-shirts and jeans, the better to show off their gym-sculpted torsos. They advanced steadily on Molly and me, carrying various nasty-looking weapons. Twenty, thirty, forty of them, looking tough and highly motivated. Anyone else would probably have been impressed. Chapman stopped at the far end of his truck and grinned unpleasantly back at me. -Live and Let Drood

Like any good Drood armour, Moxton's Mistake is unfazed by bullets, energy attacks and cutting weapons:

They all opened fire at once, hitting me with everything they had. The bullets just ricocheted harmlessly off my armour. (My old strange-matter armour would have absorbed the bullets; less danger of any damage to innocent bystanders. Not that there were any of those here, of course.) The energy guns opened up, bathing me in a whole series of vicious and otherworldly destructive forces, and not one of them could touch me inside my armour. They glanced harmlessly off or detonated in the air around me. The knives and swords and glowy cutting things broke and shattered against me. -Live and Let Drood

Naturally, various magical weapons and artifacts are also just as useless against the Mistake as they are against normal Drood armour:

Others produced new, heavy-duty magical weapons. One thrust a Hand of Glory at me, only to cry out as the Hand’s malign influence was reflected straight back at him and all the fingers rotted and fell off. Another of them had an aboriginal pointing bone. He pointed it at me and the bone exploded, filling his hand with sharp bony shrapnel. One of them even had an elven wand, but when he pointed it hopefully in my direction, the wand took one look at my armour and faded quietly away, disappearing out of the Road Rat’s hand rather than get involved.
Lesser weapons took their turn and destructive forces and energies blazed and howled around me, none of them able to touch me. -Live and Let Drood

This entire fight (slaughter, really) happened before Molly could intervene, despite the fact that, by this point, she's well established as having casual bullet-timing combat speed/reactions:

In the end, I just ran out of people to hit. I stood alone in the middle of the drive, surrounded by the wounded and the unconscious. Blood dripped thickly from my heavy golden gauntlets. Molly was standing to one side, looking at me. It had all happened so quickly, she hadn’t had a chance to get involved. I didn’t recognise the expression on her face, but I didn’t like it. -Live and Let Drood

Eddie shoulder blocks a speeding semi-truck, then destroys the engine with a single punch before ripping the cab door off its hinges:

I looked round sharply at the sudden roaring of an engine behind me. Chapman had fired up one of the trucks farther down the line. He pulled it out of the queue, revved the engine and drove the truck straight at me.
I stood where I was, to give him a sporting chance. The oversized rig loomed up before me, growing larger and larger, as he gunned the accelerator for all it was worth. I could see Chapman’s pale, determined face glaring at me through the windshield. At the last moment I turned and showed him my golden shoulder. The truck smashed right into me. The grillwork collapsed under my shoulder. I’d dug my heels into the gravel, but even so the sheer impact pushed me backwards, my heels leaving deep furrows in the ground. I didn’t feel a thing inside the armour. The truck skidded to a halt despite itself, the engine still roaring, until I drove a golden fist right through the collapsed grillwork and smashed the engine.
A sudden silence fell across the grounds. I carefully withdrew my arm, stepped around to the side of the cab, ripped the door right off and threw it away. I beckoned to Chapman to get out. He dropped down onto the ground and stood shaking before me. His face was bloody from where it had smashed against the windshield, for all the inflated airbag had been able to do to protect him. He looked at me with wild, shocked, startled eyes.
“What are you?” he said, in a cracked, almost hysterical voice. “You’re not human! Look what you did to my boys! Look what you did to my truck! Nothing human could have done that!” -Live and Let Drood

Yet another example of Eddie stonewalling an energy weapon:

Anyone else would have seen her as sweet and harmless, just another secretary. Which was, of course, the point. I knew better, but I was still caught off guard when Heather threw off her surprise in a moment, pulled a really big gun out of nowhere and opened fire on me. The damned thing—some kind of energy weapon I didn’t even recognise—was so big she needed both hands to aim it. She just blasted away without even saying a word to me or Molly, and the energy blast hit me right in the centre of my golden chest. The impact was enough to send me staggering back a step. I dug in my heels, regained my balance, while Heather fired at me again and again, the energy beams vividly bright in the enclosed space, leaving shimmering trails of Cherenkov radiation hanging on the air behind them. I leaned forward into the energy fire and advanced slowly and deliberately into the concussion blasts. My armour soaked up the deadly energies and the impacts with increasing ease. It was like wading forward against a strong chest-high tide, but it took me only a few steps to reach the desk, sweep it out of my way with one blow and then snatch the energy gun right out of Heather’s hands. I crumpled it easily in my golden gauntlets, and all the little lights flashing on the weapon went out. I dropped the scrunched-up mess to the floor, and it dented the floor when it hit. -Live and Let Drood

An aboriginal bone much more powerful than normal manages to cause small damage to the Mistake, but it heals from it easily:

I advanced on Heather. She snapped her fingers and the pointing bone reappeared in her hand. The bone was old cold brown, steeped in time and accumulated power. She stabbed the nasty thing at me, and the whole front of my golden armour reverberated like a struck gong, and I slammed to a halt as though I’d just been hit in the chest by an invisible battering ram. To my utter astonishment, circular fingernail cracks radiated across my golden chest, a whole series of widening rings like ripples on a pond. I froze for a moment and then the cracks healed themselves, vanishing away as the golden metal re-formed. Heather froze when she saw that, and that was all the time I needed to surge forward and snatch the pointing bone out of her hand. I must have hurt Heather’s fingers when I did, but she didn’t make a sound. I crushed the bone in my armoured grasp. The bone cracked loudly and then collapsed in on itself. I opened my golden hand, and only dust and a few very small bone fragments fell out. -Live and Let Drood

Conceptual guns can't penetrate Moxton's Mistake:

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just shrugged and looked back at Hollis. Just in time to see him raise his right hand and make the shape of a gun with it, pointing the finger at me the way children do when they’re pretending. And then he shot me in the chest. The impact sent me staggering backwards and left a great crater in the centre of my chest. But the armour protected me from the impact and repaired itself in seconds. I quickly recovered my balance and started forward. Hollis was using a conceptual gun, shaped and focused psychokinesis. I’d heard of it, but never encountered it in the field before. Hollis took careful aim and fired again, three times in swift succession, his pointing finger jerking each time with the recoil. But I just strode forward into the invisible bullets, my armour booming loudly with each impact, shrugging the conceptual bullets off increasingly easily. -Live and Let Drood

An unarmoured Eddie is strong enough to send a man flying into a faraway wall with a kick to the ribs:

“Why a potted plant?” I said to Molly.
She shrugged. “Because it was there. What do we do with him now?”
I kicked Hollis in the ribs, hard enough to pick him up and send his body skidding across the floor and slam into the opposite wall. I went after him again, but immediately Molly was blocking my way, staring intently into my face.
“Don’t, Eddie.”
“He tried to kill me. He would have killed you. He doesn’t deserve to live.” -Live and Let Drood

More tanking of high-powered bullets:

All the guns were firing at once, and the combined roar was like the wrath of God. A noise so loud it was actually physically painful, even inside my armour. The bullets issued from the side of the bus like a pirate galley’s broadside; thousands of bullets from dozens of guns, like a wall of death. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly from my armour and were swallowed by Molly’s shield, and chewed up the brick wall behind us, and, rather surprisingly, just bounced harmlessly off the Plymouth Fury without making a mark.
“Don’t you shoot at me, you bastards!” screamed the sat nav. “I’m a classic! Shoot at them; I’m just the ride! They’re the ones you want! Shoot the fleshy ones!”
“We will have words later,” I said to the sat nav. -Live and Let Drood

Eddie easily outruns a bus, then grabs onto it and lifts it into the air:

Whoever was giving the orders inside the bus soon realised that their armoury of guns wasn’t having the hoped-for effect. The assault shut off abruptly, and the bus’s engine roared as it sped up again. I ran out into the street and sprinted after the bus, my armour’s speed more than a match for its hurried departure. I quickly caught up with the bus and plunged both my golden hands, well past the wrists, into the rear of the vehicle. My golden fingers dug in deep. I took a firm hold and then forced my golden heels into the street. The bus screeched to a halt despite itself, skidding wildly, as my heels dug two deep furrows in the road. I grinned behind my face mask. Good to be a Drood.
I wrestled the bus to a reluctant halt, the whole rear wall bowing out towards me, stretched and distorted by my hold. The driver gunned his engine and the bus shook back and forth as it fought to pull free, black smoke billowing out from the tyres. But I had my hold, and the bus wasn’t going anywhere. I pushed my arms farther in and lifted the whole rear of the bus up off the road, so that the rear wheels just spun helplessly in midair. -Live and Let Drood

Eddie steps into the bus and finds himself face-to-face with a gun that fires thousands of explosive flechettes a second. It blasts Eddie and disintegrates the front end of the bus behind him, but his armour no-sells the assault:

I hauled myself up into the driver’s cab, looked into the gloomy interior and was immediately met with the roar of a heavy electronic cannon, one of those customised jobs that can pump out thousands of explosive fléchettes a second. Being a sporting sort, I braced myself and just stood there and took it. The bullets slammed into me like a solid mass, and the whole front of the bus, behind me, just disintegrated, blown away by the sheer concentrated firepower. My armour wasn’t bothered in the least. -Live and Let Drood

Eddie takes that same gun and crumples it into a ball using the strength of his armour:

I stepped quickly forward into the bus’s interior, grabbed hold of the massive cannon, and ripped it right off its floor mounting. I then crumpled the heavy gun in my hands like it was made of paper, wadded it into a ball and let the metal mass drop to the floor with a loud and disquieting thud. -Live and Let Drood

Moxton's Mistake no-sells time manipulation, reflecting it back onto the user:

He produced an oversized pocket watch from somewhere and cranked the handle quickly. The Time Distorter. He thrust his hand forward, aiming the thing right at me, and a huge blast of time energy shot out of the watch, shimmering in the air with a hundred different possibilities. Like a distorting heat haze generating glimpses of a hundred alternate Futures. The time energies hit my armour and immediately rebounded, unable to get a grip. They blasted right back at the Immortal and sank into him, suffusing his Immortal cell structure with concentrated temporal energies. And just like that, he began to age.
He became a young man and a middle-aged man and then an old man, all in the space of a few moments. The Immortal raised a shaking wrinkled hand in front of his sunken face and let out a low, sick cry of horror. -Live and Let Drood

Eddie outpaces automatic gunfire:

The soldiers looked at me and at Molly, and decided Molly was the easier target because she didn’t have any armour. They all opened fire at once, the roar of gunfire shockingly loud in the quiet. I moved automatically to stand between Molly and the soldiers, and the bullets ricocheted harmlessly away from my armour, flying this way and that, making some soldiers duck frantically, and chewing up a nearby hedge sculpture of a giant boar. Its curving tusks were shot away in a moment, and its shaggy head just exploded. It did occur to me that if I’d been wearing my usual strange-matter armour, it would have absorbed all the bullets rather than let them prove a danger to innocent bystanders. But I was wearing Moxton’s Mistake, and the rogue armour didn’t care. -Live and Let Drood

Moxton's Mistake is unaffected by weaponized subsonic and supersonic frequencies:

Other soldiers hit me with sub- and supersonic frequencies, and I just stood there and let them do it, until they got a bit upset and gave up. -Live and Let Drood

Forced teleportation doesn't work on Drood armour:

Their next effort turned out to be a remote-control teleport device, which did its very best to send me somewhere else. But the process couldn’t get a hold on my armour, so it bounced back and sent the device’s owner somewhere else. Given the man’s brief anticipatory scream before he disappeared, I had to assume that wherever he’d intended to send me, it hadn’t been anywhere nice. -Live and Let Drood

More no-selling of bullets from several automated guns:

All the robotic guns opened fire at once, pumping out bullets at a rapid rate of fire, raking me from head to foot. There was enough firepower to punch a hole through steel plating, but it was still no match for my armour. I walked deliberately forward into the bullets and then moved from one gun position to the next, ripping the robotic guns out of their housing and throwing them aside. Not because they posed me any real threat, but because I was getting really tired of being shot at. I wanted to make a point. -Live and Let Drood

A giant monster tries to eat a Drood and shatters its teeth in the process:

A huge distorted head slammed down and snapped up a Drood in its jaws. He was caught, half in and half out of that terrible mouth, the heavy teeth grinding fiercely but uselessly against his armour. The jaws opened and closed, trying to saw through the Drood, but all that happened was that several teeth shattered and broke off. The Drood used the extra space to get his feet under him, and then he walked backwards into the jaw and severed the muscles with his golden blade. The creature howled like a fire siren as its lower jaw just dropped down. The armoured man jumped. It took him some time to reach the ground, and when he hit, the sheer impact blasted out a crater and a cloud of dust. When the dust settled he was climbing out of the crater, entirely unharmed. I felt like applauding. -Live and Let Drood

This is how big that monster was:


The Hall was under siege from all sides by huge and monstrous creatures. They came slamming through the jungle, smashing through the twisting growths as though they weren’t even there. Overpoweringly huge, bigger than the Hall…like hills with eyes, and mouths big enough to swallow an underground train. Packed with hundreds of jagged teeth, each of them bigger than a man. The ground shook with every step the monsters took, and there were so many of them, the earth never stopped shaking, like an earthquake. Like it was afraid. -Live and Let Drood