“Yeah that’s a bit of an understatement,” I said before turning my attention inward, “Codex, are you good? Does the base still have power?”
“Seems like it, luckily for me,” he replied. “This is fucking crazy though…”
“Yeah, Pinneedle had mentioned that Clockwork Tyrant had been amassing some droids near the Astoria Power Plant… he had said he was going to handle it, but it's possible that something had gotten past him, I really don't know just where he falls on the scale of power...” I said.
“I don’t know if it's a matter of him being able to stop a single power plant attack or not… I mean... I don’t think this could be caused by just a single power plant,” Jon said. “I mean, yeah one might take out a section of the city… but for the whole grid to go down…”
In a sudden whir of energy, lights suddenly started to turn back on across the city and I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. I reopened my chat window with Pinneedle, eager to figure out what the hell had happened.
I waited for a few moments but unlike the last few times I had messaged him, a response didn’t immediately come back. While I could have worried about it, I assumed he was busy wrapping up whatever had caused the blackout and figured he’d get back to me when he was finished, though I felt an itch in the back of my mind to at least fly by the Astoria Plant once we left the island.
“Is.. Is that it? Was it just a flicker?” Swansong asked and I shrugged.
“I’m not sure, I’m poking Pinneedle about it now,” I said, staring toward the city, waiting to see if the power would go back down as the chat window stayed noticeably blank.
I felt a nervous wave pass over me and looked over to the Raid Group. His name was still there, but I couldn’t see anything past that. I was honestly starting to wonder what the point of the group even really was given the limitations in range and what was visible but given that nothing like this had happened in the time since Augments had first started to appear, it was entirely possible that this was the first time a group was being used this way.
“So uh… where did the token go?” Swansong asked as she floated down to the ground and I sighed.
“I’m guessing Barracuda grabbed it in the sudden chaos,” I said with a shrug.
“Don’t you want to rewind to stop him from grabbing it?” Jon asked and I just shook my head.
“Nah, it’s just one,” I said internally and looked over toward their retreating water spouts. “Hell, I could catch up to them right now if I wanted to and Skim seemed to know who I am, so I think he would know that. If I chase them down, I’d be willing to bet that Barracuda would think I was trying to attack them and I don’t need any more enemies right now. Maybe they’ll take it as a sign of good faith.”
“Yeah, no offense Loophole but I don’t think any of us are ever gonna make a bet about the likelihood of something happening with you again,” Swansong giggled, causing Duskbreaker to look over at her confused.
“Am I missing something?” He asked. Swansong and I briefly met eyes before I shook my head.
“Sorry, squad stuff,” I said, briefly highlighting him and noticing that he had gone up to level 13. “Swansong and I both have our new level stats to apply, not to mention a few loot boxes to open, we were thinking about taking a minute to go get that stuff taken care of,” I said, knowing that it wasn’t technically a lie.
While Duskbreaker had pretty readily moved to work with us, we had only known him for barely fifteen minutes. I knew I couldn’t spend my life paranoid of every other Augment that I came into contact with, but I also knew I had to keep certain parts of my powers a secret, just in case. After some deliberation and the near reveal to Pinneedle, I decided that my Hidden Power was one I intended to keep only within my squad. It was just too perfect of a trump card to risk letting the secret become general knowledge.
“Ah, yeah I just got to Level 13 myself and have my own things to open,” Duskbreaker agreed. “Um… should we stay teamed up like this for now?”
“Yeah, it will keep you in the Raid Group so we can coordinate easier if needed. It only gives us location information and comms if we are within neighboring regions, but if you’re working out of Harlem, we should be able to keep close enough that we can assist each other if Clockwork Tyrant sends out more waves of these droids,” I said with a nod. “Sorry this went as wonky as it did, I think I kinda need to start living up to my powerset’s name a bit more.”
Duskbreaker shrugged it off and shook his head, “There was always the chance things would go sideways with Miscreants and those two were… interesting.”
“Maybe a bit of an understatement,” I said with a laugh. “Are you going to be able to get back over to the city on your own?”
“Yeah,” he said with a nod as the shadows around him started to pool up beneath him. “I can travel through the shadows, though it takes me longer the further I’m trying to go.”
“Huh, that’s neat,” I said, looking down at the pool that was growing darker and darker beneath him curiously. “Do you have to know that there are shadows near there?”
“It’s… complicated,” he replied cautiously. “I can’t just appear anywhere if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Hey I can respect keeping your secrets close,” I said with a nod, walking over and holding out my hand to him. He looked down at it curiously before reaching out and shaking it. “Even if it went sideways, it’s nice to meet another level headed Augment. It’s a good change of pace.”
“You’ve uh… had some bad experiences with the other Augments?” Duskbreaker and I just laughed.
“Yeah... that’s also a bit of an understatement.”
The shadows started to move up Duskbreaker’s legs as he let go of my hand. His body began to descend down and into the puddle and just over fifteen seconds later he had completely submerged, his name on my interface greying out just as Pinneedle and Miss Mist’s names were displayed.
I looked back out toward the city and then toward my chat window with Pinneedle. While it wasn’t exactly like I had extensive experience with the older Augment, the continued silence from him felt unsettling.
Another few seconds passed without a response and I felt my gut tighten as I considered our options. I looked over at Swansong as she floated toward the head of the Statue of Liberty, still laying on its side only a few dozen feet away from the lawn that we had turned into a battlefield. She had already mentioned feeling drained before we came over here and I didn’t necessarily want to put her into harm’s way if she wasn’t fully prepared for it.
Her red hair glimmered in the moonlight and the smile that normally sat on her face was missing as I could see exhaustion linger in her features. I thought back to how I had found her earlier in the day, curled up on a beanbag in the base barely past 5:30 in the morning. We had spent most of the day tensed up and waiting for whatever Axio was going to throw at us, which had taken its toll. That lack of rest had clearly caught up with her and the repeated depletion of her Stamina bar, even with continued replenishment, hadn’t been helping.
It was an interesting factor to the feature that I had never really considered before, mostly because it really hadn’t come up. Even though we were Augmented with superhuman abilities, normal physiology still did seem to apply in some ways. We still got tired and we still actively had limits to just how much energy we really had, meaning we couldn’t just keep going endlessly. It didn’t come with any sort of debuff, at least not one that was visible to us. It was just good ol’ fashion human exhaustion.
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“Hey, why don’t you head back to the base,” I said, causing her to look over at me.
“And where are you going to go?” She asked curiously.
“I think I’m going to put on the speed and head toward the power plant… Pinneedle still hasn’t responded. I think it might be a good idea to check it out. You know, just to make sure,” I said.
“What if there are droids there? You can’t go alone,” Swansong said, floating over toward me and setting herself down only a few feet ahead of me.
“Yeah, not to mention Pinneedle would have already scanned them, so they’d all be around level 60 at the very least,” Jon added in.
“I’ll switch to my Stealth bar and focus on not being seen if I can’t immediately find Pinneedle. I don’t have to go all the way into the plant or even into the neighborhood, I just have to get close enough that the voice comms reconnect and then I can ask him what’s going on,” I explained, looking down toward Swansong who continued to stare at me. “What?”
“When have you let a big level difference stop you from trying to attack something anyway or going somewhere you’re not supposed to?”
“I did that one time with the pterodactyl! You don’t see me flying over to the Pangolin and trying to take it down on my own because I’m really not that dumb,” I argued and I heard Jon laugh.
“To be fair you could and then just rewind if things got too dangerous, but that would be a kinda dumb use of any of your bank,” he said.
“See, he’s that dumb,” I said and I saw a smile tug at the corner of Swansong’s lips. “A lot has happened tonight already. Grand Strike already died, if Pinneedle is fine and I’m just worrying for no reason, then I can just turn around and head for the base to take a break too. But if something weird is going on and I didn’t at least check…”
“Okay yeah, I get it,” Swansong said with a sigh before slowly starting to rise back up into the air. “We should get going then right?”
I shook my head as I looked at her. “I can get over there in less than thirty seconds if I really put on the speed and I haven’t used a Stamina syringe recently so even if I burn through my stamina to do it, I can replenish it that way. You should head back to the base and take a break while the droids aren’t being actively sent to destroy things.”
She stared at me again before sighing and looking over toward the city. “I’d argue but it’s not like I could stop you from just leaving me in the dust when you do fly off... Fine... Hey Codex, how much of his bank do you think he’s gonna burn doing this?”
“Oh at least half a minute, probably more,” Jon laughed and I rolled my eyes.
“Look, if I only spend half a minute to stop some crazy shit from happening, I think that’s a win,” I said, lifting up and into the air. “Now stay safe and let’s hope for the outcome where I’m just being paranoid for no reason instead of having to use any of my draining bank.”
“Yeah, that's a good way to jinx yourself into using way more of your bank then you'd want to,” Swansong said with a giggle. The laugh was short lived and she stared at me just as I reached the same height as her. “Just… stay safe… okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said with a reassuring smile. She nodded before gesturing toward the city. I turned and immediately started to ramp up my speed.
Personal Gravity Laws was a really useful movement skill. While Echo Step was obviously cool because of teleportation, it was limited to my local area and had a rather large cost to use at 500 points of Stamina per jump. My flight did have a variable cost, but it started at a meager 4.5 points of Stamina per second of use to just float, but for every 10 miles per hour I wanted to move, I simply added 5% to the cost. And that wasn’t 5% of my total Stamina, it was 5% of the base cost, or just about .225 extra points of stamina for every 10 miles per hour and as far as I could tell, it didn’t have a cap.
So in theory, if I wanted to go 200 miles per hour, I just had to pay 9 Stamina per second to maintain the speed. And with my Stamina at 4600 even without the Well Fed buff active, moving at that speed for half a minute barely even put a dent in my bar.
I hadn’t really tried going that fast that often because I still didn’t exactly have enhanced senses that could let me see exactly where I was going. That meant that I really needed to be high up in the air in order to move at those speeds without risking running into something, but that was a trade off that I was willing to make. While my perception wasn’t high enough necessarily to sustain a high speed flight, my ability did seem to warp the air around me. While I still felt the rush of wind around my body as I moved, it didn’t seem to irritate my eyes or face.
It only took a matter of seconds for me to cross the bay as I angled myself up and over the city. While I didn’t necessarily know exactly where the Astoria Power Plant was, I did know that it was in Queens, and I had a hunch that, much like many of the city services, it was near one of the rivers. With that in mind I rocketed through the air like a bullet, whipping over the building. Once I had made it over halfway to Queens, I could see the stacks that I knew signified a Power Plant, slowing my pace down by just a bit so that I could ease my way in.
I kept an eye on the Raid Group, waiting for Pinneedle’s name to change. It was a minor detail that had been easy to miss when the chaos had first started, but when we were within range of each other our names would actually display in a brighter color, with a small counter for the Augment’s status directly under their name. It wasn’t quite the same level of detail as when I looked at Swansong’s name within our squad list, but it was still information.
As I crossed over the East River and closed in on Astoria, I found myself second guessing myself. I braked hard, coming to a stop and started to just float as I stared toward the stacks only a few blocks away now. I scrolled the chat window back up, verifying that he had said that Miss Mist had seen the droid army near the Astoria Power Plant. He hadn’t said that he was there though, just that he was going to help.
“Pinneedle? Can you hear me?” I said into the Raid Group, just in case I had been wrong about what the changes to the Augment Icons in the group meant.
“Nah, just me man,” Jon piped up. “I almost got a bit of motion sickness with that speed you were moving.”
“I’m gonna move in on the plant, see if I can spot the droids,” I said, slowly starting to move forward but moving down and closer to the buildings. There were still flocks of the Clockwork Falcons flying around and in the distance, but it was noticeable that none of them had been swooping down and trying to attack.
“It really is weird as hell that the power just came back like nothing happened,” Jon admitted. “Given all the other chaos and destruction, it felt like that was the natural next step…”
“Yeah it doesn’t make sense,” I said, setting myself down on a building on the other side of the street from the power plant.
I had been anticipating seeing an army of droids standing outside of it. The road was, however, empty. And not just empty of droids, it was completely empty. There weren’t any cars sitting on the side of the street and there weren’t any random destroyed remains of droids, which I would have expected if Pinneedle had come through to the station. The street hadn’t been destroyed either, so it wasn’t even like the droids had gone through their self-destruct procedures.
My attention was just about to return to the chat window to triple check the information Pinneedle had passed on, a growing pit in my stomach telling me that the older Augment had lied to me for some reason when something happened that I hadn’t been expecting. The power plant was highlighted by my interface.
“Platinum Level Droid Forge! So do you remember those Viper Dens you were dealing with back in Hell’s Kitchen last week? Did you really think you were done with enemy bases? That’s not how games work Loophole! You don’t just abandon a mechanic just because you get past the first stage. Miscreants have to be able to make their disposable minions come from somewhere! All that said, this is the first Miscreant base you’ve encountered that is higher than Gold Level. I’d say proceed with caution, but since when have you listened to me?”
I was just about to move toward it, ready to activate Spectrum Veil so that I could at least do a bit of scouting when Jon’s voice crackled back into my head.
“Dude, you have to get to Time’s Square, NOW. Swansong just found some civilians that risked coming out onto the streets and there’s three Level 14 Elite Clockwork Grizzlies, she needs your help,” Jon said and I found myself gritting my teeth in frustration.
This felt almost deliberately timed and I was growing increasingly suspicious that we were simply dancing to Clockwork Tyrant’s beat. Even if we were though, I didn’t know just how much harder a Platinum base would be to a Gold, and I had said I would only do the scouting that was absolutely necessary. Even if these bears had shown up simply because I had gotten close to this place, I didn't know if there really was anything I could do against it at this moment. I turned back toward Manhattan island, intent on circling back here once we had things settled again.
“Tell Swansong I’m on the way.”
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