Amy Dallon wiped her face down with a towel. She’d just completed a grueling workout at the gym and was feeling a bit wiped out. She grabbed her water bottle and took a deep drink after taking a moment to let her breathing calm down. Working out was hell. The gym was hell. Running was hell.

  On one hand, she hated it. Every time, she had to force herself or work herself up into going.

  On the other hand, she loved it, and it excited her. She looked forward to going and seeing her results get better and better, bit by bit.

  If she didn’t have greater motives and reasons for going, she wouldn’t. The dislike did outweigh the like, although not tremendously.

  But Amy was going to become a hero. A real hero, a front-liner, someone who engaged directly and fought with others. Not support. Not someone acting after the fact.

  For a long time now, she’d hated healing people. It felt like a burden, a drain on her psyche, and it upset her deeply having to do it. Both because of outside motivational forces, like Carol, but also her own sense of obligation.

  But Morgan had changed everything. Opened her eyes to new possibilities. Helped her get over her own paralyzing internal fears and doubts enough to reach out and test the waters in new areas. Had been there for her when she needed the emotional support to talk about her issues with her family. And what had been the result? Support and affirmation.

  At least in part.

  Carol had done her best to convince her to ‘see reason’ and reconsider what it was that she wanted to do, but ultimately, she had relented. Vicky had been supportive, of course. A little confused at first, but once she’d had a chance to explain herself, she’d understood. Crystal and Melody had also been supportive. Things were going well.

  That brought her back to the here and now. Someone who wanted to try and fight directly couldn’t be an out-of-shape couch potato with any level of success. And her power didn’t allow her to cheat in ways that other people’s powers allowed them to cheat. Her fitness was going to have to come through work and effort, and not a gift of super strength or speed.

  If only she could use her power on herself. Things would be so much easier. Finishing up at the gym, she packed up her handful of loose odds and ends and headed back home. She’d get cleaned up in the comfortable and familiar space of her own bathroom and shower.

  In the past couple of weeks that she’d been working out, she’d already started to see results. She’d lost some weight and had been making steady gains on her ability to get through a workout regimen without collapsing into a pile of limp noodle limbs. Morgan had been right. Things did get easier the more you stuck with it.

  Quitting the hospital had been easy by comparison. Carol had drafted a small statement for the media. They had decided to bend the truth just a little to make things easier on Amy. Officially, the story was that her power had shifted somewhat, and she wasn’t able to really heal people as effectively as she once had been able to, and that she’d be pursuing a hero career change as a result.

  She’d never really considered the people she’d worked with in the medical field as friends. Some of them were very nice and extremely thankful for having her around, but she’d heard whispers behind her back. How it wasn’t fair that they’d gone to school for such a long time to study and practice medicine, for some random hero to fix everything with a wave of her hand where they’d failed. Things like that were just one of many things that had weighed on her conscience the longer she had gone on as Panacea.

  Amy’s walk home had gone by quickly while she’d been lost in her thoughts. She entered the front door and locked it behind herself, calling out to the household to announce her entrance. Mark wasn’t home, and Carol had to go into work on the weekend to do some work on one case or another. Vicky was out as Glory Girl currently.

  Amy sighed and headed upstairs to get cleaned up.

  She was trying to be a better person, but she always felt like she was the weakest link and that she had immutable character flaws. She still felt like she was a coward, despite Morgan’s insistence that she was not. She did not dare to speak up and tell Mark that the night she’d come out about her desire to quit being Panacea, she had broken her hard rule. That when they’d hugged, she’d reached out with her power and interfaced with him, specifically his brain.

  His clinical depression was due to a deficit of a neurotransmitter in his brain, and the deficit was caused by a tiny, negligible amount of traumatic brain injury and the formation of some scar tissue in a key area. It had been laughably easy to fix. Barely took even a single iota of effort. Fixing that part of his brain had been immediate, but it would take time for the neurotransmitter levels to come up to a normal range. That had been weeks ago, and he had started perking up and being more active just recently.

  His not being home right now was likely a direct result.

  Amy had felt deeply guilty about the fact that she could have fixed the problem a long time ago, but had refused to treat any brain-related medical conditions. Her refusal had been rooted in fear, and her willingness to break her rule in that instance had been borne out of the feelings of support she’d had from both her father and Morgan after they’d accepted her desire to quit healing.

  Towelling off, Amy dressed herself in some comfortable casual clothing and headed downstairs to make a snack.

  She wanted to eat something terrible. A bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup and a bowl of cereal. Instead, she’d have a turkey sandwich and some milk.

  She was going to be a hero, and it wouldn’t do to toss all the hard work she’d just put in at the gym to the side by ruining her efforts with a heaping of junk food.

  She sighed and ate her lunch.

  Her mind wandered to Morgan.

  Morgan was on her mind often. She’d been on her mind often for a very long time, but she’d been an even larger percentage of her thoughts in the past few months. Ever since that fateful night.

  Morgan was… a problem. One that Amy didn’t quite know how to go about solving.

  She’d been infatuated with her for several years now. She’d been infatuated with her since before she was a hero, before either of them had been parahumans. Vicky had triggered, then Morgan, then Amy, and now Melody.

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  The uncomfortable truth of the matter was that at one point in her life, she’d harbored inappropriate feelings for her step-sister. A form of love and adoration that wasn’t entirely platonic. The realization had come one day and had been a bit of a shock to her, and she’d tried to find creative alternative outlets to address that issue.

  It just so happened to be the case that there were a pair of sisters who shared many of the features that she found attractive in Vicky, two of whom she’d known growing up. So she’d made attempts to channel those feelings towards the other two in Vicky’s stead, and had found some success in doing so. Of the two, Morgan had stood out more to Amy. She was the most similar to Vicky. Both had type A personalities, and, lucky for Amy, looked quite similar. So it wasn’t hard to change the focus of her attention.

  She’d been crushing hard on Morgan for well over two years at this point, but Amy was a coward, and she wouldn’t voice her opinions or make overtures. She’d wanted to, but she couldn’t get over her fear of doing so, the fear of rejection, or of damaging or losing her friendship with Morgan.

  Imagine her surprise when, a few months ago, Morgan had come out as a lesbian during a car ride to go see some movies. The news had been so shocking to Amy, the possibilities that it presented, that she’d made the same admission herself without even realizing that she’d done it.

  That had been before Morgan had started to tap into her abilities and undergone a complete metamorphosis. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed strong girl that she’d lusted after was lost, and something else entirely had taken her place.

  Amy had been there when she changed. She’d seen how things had happened on both the microscopic scale as well as the macro scale. And somehow, despite the grotesque changes taking place and the new, entirely alien appearance and form, she’d found that her desire had only grown.

  There were things that she knew about Apex that Apex herself didn’t know about herself. And she’d wanted to tell Morgan! But the night she’d changed, she had already sort of gushed and shown her inner oddity to both her sister and the other girl, and she hadn’t reacted entirely as she might have expected. She’d been angry, and scared, and emotional, and so she’d kept things to herself.

  Maybe she’d bring them up when they had the chance now, or sometime soon. Morgan had seemingly settled into her new form, adopting and making it her own. Now might be a better time to make some of those admissions and explain some things. She’d test out the waters and see how things went when the opportunity presented itself.

  As it was, they talked quite often via telephone and SMS, but both of them were quite busy in their own regard, and the city had been in a state of more or less total chaos now for weeks. The only times they had been together lately, other, more important things had been going on.

  Rinsing off her plate, Amy stuck it in the dishwasher rack and headed out into the backyard to experiment with her power.

  Love, lust, and infatuation aside, Amy still had to handle the business of trying to come up with ideas for a rebrand. Sitting on the picnic table in her backyard, she put her finger down and let a ladybug crawl onto her hand.

  She and Morgan had discussed very briefly and intermittently a handful of ideas about how she might go about becoming the hero that she wanted to be. Morgan had suggested a few ideas for ways she might be able to use her power. Acting as a close-range striker, using her power to knock people out, to drug them, or otherwise incapacitate them, like temporarily paralyzing them.

  Those were certainly all possibilities, but they had issues. Amy wasn’t tough or durable in the way that a brute or some other capes were. She couldn’t fly, and she couldn’t close the gap between herself and a ranged attacker.

  When Morgan had been over at her house with Taylor, she had mentioned an idea she’d had to try and grow or otherwise produce armor plating for use with Taylor’s costume. That had given Amy a number of ideas about how she could potentially use her own power to do something similar. That, in turn, had given her the idea of trying to do something along the lines of what tinkers often did, and make herself a suit of some kind. Something to protect herself with, as well as to enhance her ability to get into range and tussle with other capes.

  Tinkers often made mechanical exosuits and then wore them around to fight crime with.

  She was, in a way, basically a wet tinker.

  Why couldn’t she try and make her own exosuit, but one that was biological?

  The idea had captivated her from the start, but there were so many different challenges and problems that she had to work through before she could realistically make any kind of prototype.

  Her power allowed her to shape and change biomatter, but it didn’t mean that it had to be a living organism exactly. She could make things like shells or keratin easily enough. Organic materials that weren’t alive. But if she really wanted to maximize the potential of her ability, she’d probably want to have some kind of exo-suit that was actually alive.

  She needed inspiration for ways in which she could go about making such a thing, so she’d been doing research on various organisms on the internet, and taking some ideas from living things she could get her hands on around her home.

  Things like the ladybug on her finger. Using her power, she could see how the joints of the limbs were articulated, the ways in which the exoskeleton was put together, how it attached, and the way the tissues were able to move nutrients and resources about.

  She could scale that up to be something large enough that she could fit in, but there were issues. Exoskeletons didn’t scale as well as endoskeletons did when it came to larger life forms. Exoskeletons had to become thicker and heavier to support the same amount of mass as an endoskeleton could. Of course, a biological exosuit couldn’t very well have an endoskeleton if she were to fit into it.

  That was one issue. One of the other big issues was maintaining the basic needs for homeostasis in her human body inside the suit. For example, the suit itself would generate heat through metabolic activity, so she couldn’t very well be sitting inside a sealed suit that was 120 degrees inside for any length of time. She’d have to be able to breathe through it, have her body temperature maintained, and ensure that the range of motion of the limbs more or less matched her own.

  She needed to spend some more time with Morgan and look through her body for ideas.

  Looking at Apex using her power was an experience like no other for Amy. It was entrancing, quite literally. She could spend all day looking through things and not feel a moment of boredom. Most organisms were a mess of traits and anatomy that didn’t always make sense or serve any purpose. Either because they were evolutionary features that were leftovers or in the process of being phased out, or they were new features that were the results of mutations, and it would remain to be seen if they would work their way into the genome of the species.

  This was not the case with Apex. Absolutely every single thing in Apex, from the smallest cluster of cells up to the shape of the largest bones in her body, looked like it had been specifically purpose-built and designed for it. There were redundant and layered systems, but there was no system or organ that didn’t serve a specific function. And the sheer efficiency at which everything operated was on an altogether different level than any organism that Amy had ever seen.

  There were things in Apex that didn’t make sense to her, also. Which was strange, because her ability gave her an innate, fundamental understanding of how and why things worked. Most of those things were related to or directly attached to her core. It was a mystery that perplexed Amy and something she really wished to investigate further.

  Yes, she really needed to spend some more time with Apex and look into things. Her body was a treasure trove of ideas and resources that she could extrapolate on and potentially repurpose for her own goals. As things stood right now, the idea she’d be working towards was this idea of making an organic suit of some form or fashion. It would be a living organism, possibly a symbiote of some kind, she wasn’t sure.

  The suit would grant her additional speed, mobility, strength, and durability. From within the suit, she’d be able to make changes on the fly or repair damages. She made a mental note that she’d have to include some kind of generic biomatter storage that she could use to effect repairs on the go. She’d have to do further testing, but she felt that it might be possible to sort of trick her power into allowing her to use it through the suit to affect people outside the suit if she could find a way to make a bridge between herself and the other person.

  Amy was roused from her apparent daydreaming session by Vicky’s voice coming from behind her.

  “Hey, what’s up, sis?”

  Amy started, and the jolt sent the ladybug on her hand flying away to seek shelter.

  She turned and looked over her shoulder at Vicky in her Glory Girl costume. It really was a great costume.

  “Oh, hey, Vicky. I was just thinking about ideas for the whole hero thing.”

  Vicky grinned and floated over and around to take a seat opposite Amy at the table. “Yeah? Anything cool?”

  Amy nodded a little absentmindedly. “Yeah. I think I’m going to try and make like a tinker exosuit and use that.”

  Victoria blinked rapidly, then broke into a wide grin. “Whoa! Really? That’d be amazing! You think you can do that with your power?”

  Amy nodded again. “I have to figure out a bunch of stuff, but I think I can start working on some individual pieces here and there and then try and tie them together into a cohesive suit later on. Start small and find out what works and what doesn’t.”

  “So you’ll have a suit like Armsmaster or Kid Win, just… made out of organic stuff?”

  “Mhm. That’s the idea. Best idea I have at the moment. Morgan had some ideas too, but I feel like I’d be a bit less scared trying to do fighting stuff if I had a solid layer of protection between me and whatever else is out there, you know?”

  Victoria smiled and agreed, “Yeah! That’s sort of how I feel when I have my shield up. Like I’m invincible so long as I know it’s present. I don’t worry about something punching me or someone throwing something at me.”

  Amy thought back over the list of problems she had to solve and sighed. Looking over at her sister, she brushed some hair out from in front of her face and asked her, “What are you doing home anyway? Slow day?”

  Vicky chuckled and shook her head. “Nah. I was popping in to get some lunch before I head back out. Have you already eaten?”

  Amy nodded and stretched her arms over her head with a soft grunt. She was sore, but it was the feeling she was associating with good results at the gym.

  “Okay, I’m going to head inside then, we can chat while you eat. I wanted to ask you some questions about your experiences fighting face-to-face.”

  Vicky broke into a huge grin and stood up. “Sure! This is going to be so cool, I can’t wait to see what you wind up coming up with!”

  “I’m sort of worried what Carol is going to say about my ideas…” Amy said, trailing off as she held the back door open for her sister.

  “Pft. You let me worry about that. You do what you think is right with your suit ideas, and we’ll work through the rest of it as it comes!”

  Amy smiled at the thought.