“Fascinating… But you have no actual powerset of your own? What level of interaction with the system do you have?”

  “Some, though I have to be inside this room to access pretty much all of them. I have a little bit of a HUD, but it’s limited to tracking information on Loophole and Swansong. It could also extend to you and Pinky now that the squad’s are merged, but you basically have to opt in,” Jon said as he lounged backwards in his chair.

  “Incredible… And you said that it comes through a piece of gear that integrated itself right into your body when you put it on? That seems to go contrary to what I was hypothesizing for how the Augmentation system works, though it's likely that the two processes aren't identical at all,” BrainCraft said, standing on the other side of the glass that kept Jon’s Command Room separated from the rest of the base.

  “Yeah, it's technically two pieces, a helmet and a pair of gloves, but they both vanished the moment I put them on when my title changed to Guy in the Chair. I think technically it’s still there and I can take it off, but Loophole’s P.A.I. suggested that was a really bad idea,” Jon said before perking up, “oh that reminds me, if you do opt in, I’ll also be able to communicate with your P.A.I.s as well and they’ll be able to cross communicate through the Command Room here, though I’ve been testing the actual limitations on that. It hadn’t really mattered when it was just us over in the city, but now that we’ve got a West Coast presence, we might need to actually experiment.”

  “You’re absolutely right, with some time, we could set up proper trials and get a full range on what the limitations to your assistance are. Perhaps there are ways that we could extend your functionality if we could find out exactly how your integration works.”

  “Oh god… what have we done…” Swansong said and I let out a laugh.

  While all of us did manage to get a bit of sleep, to call the sleep I got restful would have been little more than a bald face lie. Just a bit past two in the morning, just a bit over eight hours after the Raid Group was formed, the group disbanded with a “Group Time Limit Reached” warning flashing over my vision and just two hours after that, Duskbreaker was removed from the Temporary Team-Up with the same warning. I sent him a message that we’d be in touch and after nothing came back for over an hour I assumed that, like Swansong, he had been able to actually get some sleep.

  I found myself restless, and I couldn’t stop myself from going out and patrolling around the city, though I told myself I wouldn’t engage with any of the droids unless they were actively causing destruction. Maybe I was still just a bit more surprised by it than I should have been, especially given Axio’s clear involvement, but Clockwork Tyrant was standing by his promise and the destruction happening throughout the city ceased completely, even before the news reported that the Mayor had in fact given in to Clockwork Tyrant’s demands.

  It was actually more than that though. The large scales that had shot off of the pangolin weren’t budging from their positions impaled throughout the city and the pangolin had still not budged even an inch from its spot blockading the bay. But even then, there were more than a few groups of droids that were actually going around and repairing most of the damage that had been caused, though the Brooklyn Bridge seemed to be more like a lost cause.

  “I don’t know… I think we might just be watching the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Pinky said with a wide smile. She had found her way over into the kitchen and jumped up and onto the counter to take a seat as soon as BrainCraft had made a b-line for Jon’s corner of the room when we had met back up in our newly merged base. “Who designed this place? It’s so much better than the layout Brain set up for us.”

  “I told you that you can change it if you don’t like it, didn’t I? It’s not my fault you’re too lazy to do it yourself,” BrainCraft said over his shoulder before returning to his conversation with Jon.

  “Codex did the initial layout, though I did most of the decorating,” Swansong admitted. “I guess we might need to do a bit of tinkering with the layout again now that we have your guys lounge and the extra rooms you brought with you. The expansion spots we have were just slotted into the hallway, though I modified our bathroom to be a little less industrial feeling, plus I wanted to have the Advanced Relaxation Shower. It guarantees sleep that lasts for 6 hours that will leave you with the Well Rested buff but it only works if you actually use the shower.”

  “Yeah… well here we are,” I said as I felt myself prickle slightly when Swansong shot me a glare and Pinky let out a guffaw of a laugh.

  After a very short meeting with Swansong and Jon, we had decided that merging squads with Pinky and BrainCraft’s squad was practically a no brainer. Even if we ignored Pinky’s place on the leaderboard and the increased points we’d get from sharing Ascension Token gains, that was hardly the most important factor toward sharing this secured space with them.

  I didn’t want to keep my guard up still, but I couldn’t ignore the looming threat of Techwarden just because another asshole decided to make my life harder. Pinky, having already trusted me enough to turn off her Acceptance Matrix, and BrainCraft who had turned his own off out of his own instincts, may have been the only other people on the planet that I knew I could put some of my limited trust in.

  After a final bit of discussion, Pinky and I had met up at the registration office to initiate the process. Surprisingly it didn’t actually make us adopt a new name immediately, which was good given the fact that none of us could think of an idea that we actually liked. Even though Pinky and the Brain had been a registered squad longer, due to the fact that I was both higher leveled and higher ranked on the leaderboard, the registration system determined that Fortune’s Cadence was the senior squad and their team was merged into ours.

  As BrainCraft had suggested, this didn’t erase their squad’s name, only setting it as a sub-squad within Fortune’s Cadence for the time being. Pinky did complain just a bit that the system designated me the Squad Leader, but she let it go without making too much noise about it.

  “So speaking of those expansion spots, am I good to assume you’re gonna be busy talking Codex’s ear off for the next hour Brain? I want to put that Garage Gym of theirs to use,” Pinky said, rubbing her hands together greedily.

  “We’ve had this squad together for 10 minutes now, the Ascension Tokens have begun spawning at their regular intervals, and you want to take time to go increase one of your stats by a point?” BrainCraft asked curiously and Pinky just nodded.

  “Well I was ready to start talking strategy but you were going full geek mode on Codex’s tech that you can’t even access, I figured that would buy me at least an hour…”

  “I mean, I could certainly pick his brain for at least that much time, probably more,” Jon called out and I let out another laugh.

  “If you had it your way, we’d pause everything just to let you talk to him for the rest of the day,” I said, causing Jon to just shrug.

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  “Technically you three can still go out and run around, doing whatever you want to do,” he said as he sat back up, hitting a few buttons as more windows opened on the glass on his side of the barrier. “As fun as that would be though, I do think we should maybe start strategizing. There wasn’t an alert at 8 for the Token’s location here in the city, meaning someone else already managed to scoop it up. What about you guys BrainCraft? You guys hadn’t merged the squads just yet, did you happen to get lucky on your end?”

  “Nope. While we managed to retrieve the first one that spawned last night, we didn’t have the same luck here this morning,” BrainCraft explained, finally turning from Jon’s glass wall and walking over to the pit at the center of our base where Swansong and I both sat, moving to take a seat on the same side as I was on. “Unfortunately for us, as best as I can tell, our region is significantly larger than yours is, meaning we have a much wider range in which to search for the Tokens when they generate. I have been trying to determine just what variables Axio was considering when he created the regions, though it’s more a side project than a main one.”

  Pinky hopped off her perch, coming over to join us as she dropped over the back of the couch and took the cushion next to Swansong.

  “You’re gonna find Brain over in his hole most of the time when we are in the base by the way, I’d argue against touching anything cause he gets reeeeally mad when you look at his tech before it’s ready,” Pinky said and BrainCraft scoffed.

  “It’s not about touching it before it’s ready, it’s about not touching the tech before I can explain how it works! You blew up a set of explosives directly next to the drone system I was trying to perfect!”

  “Why would you keep explosives right next to a system you were working on?” Swansong asked and Pinky threw her hands into the air.

  “That’s what I said!”

  “Guys, let’s stay on topic,” I said as I could see BrainCraft starting to noticeably get riled. The two practically bickered like they were siblings, but there was a weird levity that that simple act brought to the room. Even then, that didn’t change that we did have things we needed to discuss before we all got too comfortable.

  “It’s a bit hard to stay on topic when we don’t even really know what we are supposed to be doing…” Pinky said, her tone shifting quickly as her brow creased. “Finding the Tokens is going to be hard enough without having to dodge around the tunnels and blockades that The Colony have been establishing in the more rural areas over here. I went for a run near the ant hill closest to our base exit this morning and the drones that Hive Queen has guarding it only started posturing when I got a bit too close to it, so it’s not like they are going out of their way to attack us on sight.”

  “That lines up with my own experiences from flying around this morning, even the Clockwork Falcons that I had to fly past didn’t try to attack me just for being out and about, though they did seem to follow me around. I’m lucky I can go invisible, otherwise losing them before coming back to the base might have been a bit trickier,” I explained.

  “Hmmm, I’ll assume that it worked given that no one is storming the place at the moment, however I’d advise against using that method too often,” BrainCraft said, reaching up and rubbing at his chin. “It would be rather simple for a tech Augment to add infrared vision to their androids.”

  “True, he did modify them to be able to resist one of my other moves, it would be stupid to believe he won’t modify them again if he needs to. Thanks for pointing that out,” I said and BrainCraft nodded.

  “As I had mentioned when you had first approached me for my thoughts on his creations, the best spot to start is probably going to be finding just how Clockwork Tyrant is managing to control all of these creations at the same time,” BrainCraft said. “Unless he has an absolutely massive range, there will need to be some sort of network that he has created to allow for his signals to reach the droids. I will need to do some tinkering and we’d have to do a lot of testing, but I should be able to isolate out his signals with enough points of data to work off of. Between that and the device I am going to start working on for the Tokens, I will absolutely need to be in the Mechanics Den for the rest of the day.”

  “Wait, what device are you building for the Tokens?” Jon asked. Though he wasn’t right there with us seated in the pit, his voice still carried to us as if he was.

  BrainCraft looked over to Pinky who nodded before reaching out and pulling out the Ascension Token that they had collected the previous night from her B.E.L.T.. Just like the one that we had seen at the Statue of Liberty, this one was about the size of a basketball and immediately began floating and rotating in the air directly overhead of the console at the center of the pit. Unlike the one we had seen there, this one didn’t immediately become a beacon for other Augments to come find. I was sure there was a reason for that, but I held the question back before I sent us off on yet another tangent.

  “These tokens, as pretty as they are, aren’t just giant metal coins. In fact, I’m relatively certain they actually have some sort of computer or system in the center of them. While there’s no obvious entry point, fans, or anything of the like that would actually be used to maintain those systems, I have done some initial tests on this one that speak to a minor signal that is being continuously sent out from the Token itself,” BrainCraft explained, materializing a small handheld device and holding it up toward the spinning token.

  There was a small needle on the device that seemed to be continuously bouncing back and forth, only coming to a stop when it was a few inches away from the Token. The Token actually noticeably slowed down and stopped spinning the closer the device got to it, though it didn’t even drop a millimeter from its place floating in the air.

  “The signal is nothing like I’ve ever seen or even read about but it exists enough to interfere with my isolator here and I believe it’s what becomes the beacon when the Tokens haven’t been found by their deadline. In theory, I should be able to pick that signal out and give us a way to track them before they go into their “active” mode,” BrainCraft continued as he dematerialized the device. “However, until we have a second token for me to analyze, I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole. There’s always the chance that each Token’s signal will have a unique edge that I can’t anticipate. I believe if we can get our hands on one of the Tokens from your region, I should be able to determine if that uniqueness exists or not.”

  “Which means the best thing we can do right now is just try to hunt down the Tokens here in the city,” I said, looking over at the clock attached to the phone mod on my interface. “We have about a half hour until the deadline for the current Token, so if it’s gonna appear, we want to be ready to grab it.”

  “You’re a lot faster than I am, I think we need to leave a standing rule in place that if one does appear, you’re the one in charge of rushing for it,” Swansong said.

  “Yeah, probably a good plan,” I said thoughtfully before I looked over to BrainCraft. “That sort of gives us some direction on dealing with these droids, but what about you guys? We don’t exactly have an insect expertise here, kinda feels messed up to have you help us without returning the favor…”

  “I’m working on that as well, though I have been delayed a bit due to my drones getting blown up,” BrainCraft said and Pinky groaned.

  “Oh come on! You can’t seriously blame me for you being terrible at organization!” She said as she hopped to her feet. “I will take them over there and show them your room right now if I have to show them the mess you leave in there.”

  “My point was simply that I did have a plan, just that it had gotten delayed due to some unforeseen circumstances,” BrainCraft explained.

  “Unforeseen!?! You could have left the bombs deactivated! This was totally foreseen!”

  “What exactly was your plan to deal with The Colony then?” I asked, plowing forward. I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about it entirely, but it certainly felt like I was suddenly in a position where I was basically trying to herd cats.

  “Honestly, it’s similar to what I believe you should be doing, just the execution requires a much different technique,” BrainCraft said. “I only started to work on my small drones, but I intended to use them to try and scout through the cave system that The Colony has managed to build under Northern California. Just like you need to be able to isolate and find where the droids are actually coming from, we need to cut off the insect infestation, but again, given the wide range, it will take a good bit of time to be able to do so.”

  “So what I think I’m hearing you say, is that I do have time to go and use the Garage Gym,” Pinky said and BrainCraft let out a long, slow sigh.

  “I mean, even though I really only need the Ascension Token from their region, I think it would be irresponsible of you to go and train when there’s the chance of a beacon appearing here in the middle of that time,” he responded and Pinky let out a groan as she pushed herself up from the couch.

  “Fine, but I don’t exactly have that big of a charge, I’m gonna be moving pretty slowly,” she said before she looked over at me, a smile suddenly spreading over her face. “Although… Now that we are a team, I suppose I could use you to charge me up a bit. What do you say Loophole, want to help a girl out?”

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