Earning Her Stripes

Part Six: Tests Passed and Failed

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Armsmaster

"Console to Armsmaster."

"Go for Armsmaster." Colin leaned the bike into a turn. It was responding well; the newer version of the ring-laser gyro gave it cleaner balance, and it recovered even keel just a little faster. He might have to look into moving the centre of gravity back about a foot, to give optimal grip for both the front and back tyres in all conditions, but this iteration of his iconic vehicle was holding up well.

Action figures featuring the "Armscycle" accounted for thirty-seven percent more sales and fifty-three percent more profit than standalone figures, or so Marketing had told him. He didn't care about that so much, but he did like it that the bike had its own recognition factor. It was all part of being an effective superhero.

"Yeah, we got a call from near the Trainyards. Merchants territory. A bunch of new heroes apparently captured them, and they want to know who to turn them over to."

"Well, that's different. Armsmaster, attending."

"I hear that. Copy Armsmaster attending. Sending you the location and details now."

His helmet speakers pinged to indicate an incoming file. With a flick of his eye, he opened it; it unfolded into a map with a flashing red dot somewhat to the north and west of his current location. His GPS filled in the rest of the information, and before he'd made the next turn, he had a glowing line on the map leading toward the red dot. At the same time, a broad yellow path appeared in his HUD, indicating the way forward.

Trusting the bike to handle acceleration, braking and obstacle avoidance, he scanned through the packet of data that had arrived with the map. The caller had been a teenage girl, calling herself Firebird. No matches popped up in the database for that name, in Brockton Bay or elsewhere. She had claimed to be part of a team called The Real Thing. The only significant links to that online were in relation to music; either a song or an actual band. Neither one was helpful to him at the moment.

Ten minutes later, he rounded a corner on to a dingy street, to see a bunch of people seated on the curb in a row. More than a few, he noted, bore bandages on their arms or legs. Others had their limbs actually splinted. All were secured in some way, either at the wrists or the ankles. One was in costume, though he was currently blindfolded and secured at both hand and foot. Colin recognised the grimy outfit immediately; Skidmark. A little distance away from him, her wrists and ankles likewise secured, a trashily-dressed woman wearing goggles (his HUD gave her a 95% chance of being Squealer) looked mad enough to chew up horseshoes and spit out nails. A third man, wizened and undernourished, had likewise been thoroughly secured. He surmised this might be Mush, from the few descriptions the PRT had of the man.

"Armsmaster to Console. I'm just arriving on site now. It appears as though the Merchants have indeed been captured. There are injuries. I would advise that medical-trained personnel attend the pickup." His eyes scanned the row of prisoners. The HUD, picking up on the motion, helpfully advised him that there were thirty-two persons sitting and three standing. A moment later, it stuttered to 'two standing', then back to three again.

He wasn't surprised by its lack of certainty. Of the three heroes standing behind the row of captives, two were quite apparently human. The third was an eight foot tall robot built of some shimmering grey metal with a blocky black shape on the chest that looked like the crenellations on the wall of a medieval fortress. The robot, or suit, looked far too clunky for his liking, and the hoses connecting one part to another spoke to him of poor planning. Still, he figured it wasn't too bad for a first try, especially as they'd managed to capture the Merchants right out of the gate.

The other two heroes were both recognisable as teenage girls, but he knew which one had made the call immediately. She had identified herself as Firebird, and only one there had a fire-themed costume. The other one, Shadow Stalker, had been making waves now and again with her brutal takedowns of muggers. It hadn't gotten so far as to necessitate the PRT stepping in, but the possibility was not off the table yet.

He pulled the bike to a halt and stepped off in one smooth motion. The bike maintained its upright stance after he let go the handlebars, then lowered its stand as part of its self-parking routine. Paying no attention to that, he stepped forward to inspect the prisoners more closely. They all looked awake and alert, though some seemed to be sweating or even tweaking. The bandages appeared to have been relatively freshly applied, and some had bloodstains on them.

Next, his eyes flicked up to the three heroes of The Real Thing, if that was all of them. To have captured an entire active gang, even such a screwed-up one as the Merchants, was a good trick for two unknowns and a B-class loner vigilante to have pulled off.

"Good morning," he said. "This is good work. Do they have any life-threatening injuries?"

The girl he was assuming to be Firebird, who looked about fifteen or sixteen, shook her head. "Not that I'm aware of. Some were suffering from blood loss, but we bandaged them and got food and water into them." She stepped between two of the prisoners and held her hand out. "Firebird. I'm the one who made the call. You probably already know Shadow Stalker. And that's Blockade."

He shook her hand, finally paying attention to the details of her costume. The broad discs attached to her forearms looked like they could be used as shields, but they seemed too unwieldy to be just good for that. Her knees and elbows, and the toes and heels of her boots, all had metal guards; on her head, she wore a metal helmet with a gold-coloured visor. Long red hair spilled out from under the back. Each metal piece, including the discs and the bracers they were attached to, had a fire motif that seemed to be based more on interference patterns than actual painted-on fire shapes, given the way the flames appeared to shift as his perspective changed. Underneath, she wore a black bodysuit that looked like it incorporated significant padding, and served to draw attention to the metal guards.

"Armsmaster," he said out of politeness. "But you knew that. So you have fire powers?"

She chuckled. "No, it's just my theme." Lifting her arm, she showed him a short nozzle emerging from the wrist bracer. "I do have a short-ranged flamethrower in there, but there isn't much room for fuel, so it's mainly for emergencies. And surprise attacks. For the most part, I find that punching people works just fine, when I'm not bouncing my discs off them."

"Ah, so they detach." He looked again at the discs. "Are they easy to learn how to handle?"

"I wouldn't know." Her voice held subtle self-mockery. "Anything like this, I seem to automatically know how to use, like I've been training all my life to do it."

"Ah." On an impulse, he reached back and unracked his halberd. With the correct signal, it unlocked and opened out to its full length. Another signal ensured that the various mechanisms within it would stay shut down until he woke it up. A third signal, not yet sent, would teleport it straight back to his hand if she did anything unwise with it. "What can you do with something like this?"

Behind her visor, he saw her eyes widen, but she managed to hold back her reaction, beyond a slight parting of her lips. At the same time, Shadow Stalker rapped her knuckles against the leg of the robot and casually gestured their way.

"Let me see," Firebird murmured, taking the weapon and looking it over, then adjusting her grip as if she'd been … training with it all her life, she'd said. Even Miss Militia had required some instruction in how to hold it properly. Intrigued, he watched as the girl took a few steps away, then turned to face him. The halberd snapped into a vertical salute, then blurred in her hands into a complex evolution that incorporated strikes, parries, deflections and blocks, taken in lightning-fast sequence, never once interfering with the discs on her forearms.

He watched, trying to prevent his jaw from dropping open as a girl half his age used his chosen weapon to perform manoeuvres that even he was only just getting the hang of, and some he'd flat-out never seen before. Finally, she brought it around to a whirling finish that ended in another salute, then she handed it back. "I figure I could make it work for me," she allowed.

Mentally, he blessed the fact that he'd had his helmet recording the whole thing. He had watched videos and read books on how halberds had been used in the Middle Ages, and considered himself to be more than just 'good' with it. But he'd just been schooled in no uncertain terms by a teenager who'd never picked one up before in her life. His software was able to take that visual footage and translate it into a training regime, and he was absolutely going to train with those moves that she'd just pulled out of nowhere, until he was at least as good as her.

"That was very impressive," he said gravely, fully aware that he had just committed blatant understatement. Causing the weapon to fold up again, he slotted it onto the rack on his back. "I'm going to presume Blockade is the Tinker who incorporated the armour into your costume?"

"That's me." The robot took a step forward, its voice gravelly over the speakers. "Firebird hits people. I make things for her to hit them with." Buried under the electronic distortion was a certain amount of humour. "I like your halberd, but it looks a little fragile to me."

"I beg your pardon," he retorted, stung. "That's the finest miniaturised Tinkertech you'll see on the east coast. There's nothing 'fragile' about it."

"Oh, please," retorted the person in the armour. "I bet I could break it just by stepping on it."

He looked the armour over, trying to calculate how much it weighed. Unless it was built over a light frame of aluminum, he figured it was at least a ton. "Well, of course," he snorted. "That's not 'fragile'. That's to be expected."

"Not for my stuff, it's not," Blockade stated flatly. "If I can break it, it's not strong enough."

This call-out had suddenly gotten a lot more interesting. Colin's Tinker instincts came to the fore as he raised his chin. "You always have to consider utility over durability. If it's too heavy to be useful, then what's the point of making it so strong?"

"There's no such thing as being too heavy to be useful," averred Blockade. "If some jerk villain can break it with his powers, then it wasn't strong enough."

Colin drew in a deep breath for his rebuttal, a smile spreading across his face despite himself. This was a true meeting of the minds. "But if you can't lift or carry it easily, how can it be useful …"

Emma

As the argument went on, Emma found herself more and more impressed with Madison. Not only was she debating the finer points of Tinkertech with Armsmaster, she was doing it with confidence and the willingness to totally disagree with him on matters that were obviously dear to his heart. Not that she was winning the argument, if 'winning' meant turning him to her point of view; he'd been doing this for years, after all. But it seemed she was certainly forcing him to re-evaluate some of his stances.

"Gotta say, never thought she had it in her," murmured Sophia as the back-and-forth kept up between the two Tinkers. "If I was her, I'd be asking him for his autograph right now. Hell, I still might. The man knows how to lay on a beatdown."

Emma nodded, entirely in tune with her sentiment, though perhaps not every single aspect of it. She personally wondered if he would agree to spar with her at some point, if only to see what she could learn from someone who'd been doing the superhero thing for almost her whole life. Also, she'd give anything to be able to say that she'd sparred with Armsmaster. Just being able to handle his halberd and put it through a solid workout had been a dream come true.

"I can see why he uses a halberd," she replied, keeping her voice down. "It's so versatile. There are so many possible moves. I mean, it's not like a baseball bat or something. It's good for offense and defense."

"Yeah, I saw the love affair you were having with it," jibed Sophia derisively. "Do you think maybe if you showed off with it any more, he'd let you borrow it for a while? Because that's what it looked like you were trying for, to me."

"It wasn't like that!" Emma shot back, irritated. "It was just so well-balanced and properly constructed, I had fun using it."

"Hah, so that's the way it is." Sophia sounded amused. "Always wondered why you never got a steady boyfriend. You just had to find one with a long, hard—"

"Don't even go there," hissed Emma furiously. She jabbed Sophia in the ribs, the metal elbow-guard catching her in just the right place to stop her from talking. "He's old enough to be my dad."

Sophia, caught off-guard, let out a whoof of expelled air. Lurching sideways a step, she put her arm up to where Emma had hit her. "Fine, be a wet blanket," she wheezed. "Can't even take a joke."

"There's jokes, and then there was what you were about to say." Emma shook her head. "That was rude, crude and not funny at all."

"Funny, you never had a problem with making jokes like that about Hebert." Sophia sounded resentful, but she didn't seem to be about to resume her remarks.

Emma rolled her eyes. "That's different, and you know it."

She would've said more, but just then the first PRT van rolled around the corner. Clearing her throat, she stepped forward to keep an eye on her prisoners until the PRT took charge of them.

Establish ourselves as a team. Check.

The plan was proceeding apace.

End of Part Six