"Test 3, lifting strength."
With Mike's prompting, I went down behind the largest car in the lot, a white camper trailer with blue, horizontal stripes circling it and placed a firm grip on the bottom of its rear end.
Careful not to squeeze too much, I pushed with my legs and transferred the force to my arms. The camper creaked but came up easily, going past my head and above it till my arms were ramrod straight above me.
"How is it?"
"I'm feeling it, but it's like holding your backpack at the start of the school day. Not at all difficult."
"Proceed to test 3b, lifting overhead."
"Affirmative," I said with faux enthusiasm, the sight of the rusted and cobweb ridden underside of the trailer giving me pause.
"Don't tell me you're afraid of spiders, spiderman?"
"Shut up," I bit back and slowly pulled one arm back, the other one shouldering the likely more than a thousand pound weight easily. Slow and steady, I went forward, always making sure I had one arm keeping the car stable.
I arrived at the middle of the vehicle soon enough, the giant hunk of old metal nearly flipping over. Wall sticking came online on my palms and I pressed them flat against the centermost parts of the undercarriage.
After a few light pushes to test the integrity of the spots I'd chosen, I pushed with my legs again and straightened, arms following suit and directing the strength above.
I felt every muscle in my body get engaged. My breathing also picked up just a tad, and dust, rust, and a host of other things fell around me like rain as the trailer left the ground and wobbled above the tiny stands that were my hands.
"Test 3, lifting strength, is a success."
"Uhh, not entirely."
"Elaborate."
"You know how the candle flame makes me ultra precise and stuff? Well, I can tell how much strength I'm using right now."
"Perhaps we should create a different test suite for it as well."
"The candle flame?"
"Yes."
"True. Create a file. But first, note down I'm using roughly… one tenth of my strength to hold up the trailer."
"One tenth… done. We'll ascertain the make and model so we can check its weight later."
"Right," I said, sputtering right after as the abominable rust intruded into my mouth. "Now to set this down."
With another bout of caution and precision, I returned the rickety vehicle to its gravesite and stepped back, hands dancing all over my form and doing away with the dirt in my hair and clothes.
"What's next?" Mike chimed in.
I brushed my hair one last time and looked straight at the museum. "I wanna check what's inside. First of all though," I walked to the side door of the trailer and peered through the dust stained glass. "The make and model, like you said."
"How are you going to get in? I'm assuming they're locked."
"Hmm, I can break the glass or pry the door open, but I bet we'll find keys inside the building."
"Breaking and entering it is then."
"How do you know what breaking and entering is but not casinos?"
"I know what casinos are. It's your description of the night life I didn't understand."
"Ohhh… that's good then. Stay innocent."
"Knowledge is not a crime."
"Tell that to crime bosses."
Normally, a regular person breaking into a place locked tight but abandoned would try the front door, a side entrance, or the brave and slightly smarter ones, a window.
For someone like me though, simply leaping over the chain link fence onto the tiny security booth and then catapulting off of that straight to the museum roof brought me to an access door.
It was locked, but a simple poke removed the lock from its socket and a light push swung the door open. I waved away the welcoming dust for a moment and then descended the stairs into the darkness.
The museum had a simple layout. It was a wide open space filled with cars, old cars that I'm sure were shiny and polished every day back when this place saw traffic.
My controlled steps were faint, but they still echoed in this mass grave of a car exhibit as I meandered between the displays.
"Mike, I'm thinking this could be the workshop."
"Let's examine the facts. It's secluded, as we observed on our way here. It has few entry points, all that can be reinforced. There is enough space to accommodate large projects, and the cherry on top, the large amount of spare parts and materials to work with."
I stopped reading one of the texts hanging on the wall and grinned. "Exactly what I was thinking."
"Great minds think alike."
"Ha. I think you mean thieving and opportunistic."
"Is that humility I hear?"
"Shut it," I rolled my eyes and turned away from the tiny list of facts about the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. Ted Bundy sure did the impossible with this car.
"Let's find those keys. There has to be a storeroom around here somewhere. I hope they have tools. I mean, you can't have a car museum without the tools to fix them right?"
"They were displaying the cars, not driving them."
"Thanks, captain obvious."
"I aim to please."
.
.
.
.
We found the keys and a toolbox, but a number of the tools in the latter had become unusable. The same went for the cleaning and maintenance materials; apart from a few oils, the rest had long expired.
They didn't detract from the gains though. Finding a perfect place for a hideout/workshop wasn't in my plans for today, so it was a welcome development.
I didn't leave with just the keys though. Seeing all those abandoned cars, especially those with their inner workings exposed tickled the parahuman tinker side of my brain.
All manner of words, shapes, and symbols flew across my mind like they owned the place, the candle flame allowing me to make coherent sense of what my powers were cooking up.
Tech Adapting, the perk I had dismissed as underwhelming, got the chance to show its true might.
Miniaturization and Efficiency had to do with shrinking tech and the amount of power they used. It stood to reason that, to apply these effects to a given piece of tech, I had to understand it first, and the perk facilitated this.
Not to the level of Tech Adapting though.
If Miniaturization and Efficiency gave me static, one line descriptions and functions of the parts of a machine, Tech Adapting gave me a rapidly expanding paragraph of information.
And that influx of information seemed to have a propulsive effect on M and E, slowly but surely refining the various designs and blueprints that seemed eager to jump from my skull into reality, condensing them into smaller, more powerful forms.
"Have I told you how much I love having powers?"
"This is the first time you're mentioning it," Mike said, much to my surprise. I thought I'd have said it at least once.
"Well, now you know."
After a long trek back to civilization, I found an open mart and bought a watch, a notebook, and a couple of pens, pencils, an eraser and a maths set.
The cashier was a delightful old woman who directed me to a thrift shop for my clothing situation and also kindly told me the opening time of the library.
"10:00 am. What are we going to do for 3 hours?" I said as I stepped out of the thrift shop in new, well not new, but comfortable and form fitting clothes. The white cotton shirt felt good against my skin, and my new jacket, jeans and boots no longer felt constrictive.
"We could do more tests?"
"What kin—" I paused and stared at the clearly drunken man staggering on the sidewalk on the other side of the quiet road. Normally, I'd be tempted to brainstorm the possible situations that would make someone end up this way.
The story behind it had to be something juicy. However today, my inquisitiveness had no more accommodations for anything else. It was completely occupied by my powers.
I started walking in the direction the drunk man came from and told Mike of the new plan. "Looks like you'll get your test after all."
"What'll be the subject?"
"How well I can hold my liquor."
"Metabolism and endurance. Got it."
That's how we found ourselves in a bar, seated in a corner with my cap on and head low, my face buried in the notebook as I scribbled. There were three beer mugs on the table, all of them empty.
Normally, I would never commit the sacrilege of indulging in self-torture, much less with this piss, but I couldn't afford to throw away money. Whiskey was expensive, so I had to settle for this.
A shadow creeped over me right as I labelled a drawing of a motorcycle engine with a short ruler and pencil. I looked up to find a familiar face, a smiling blonde with age lines that made her even more of a looker.
She nodded and packed up the mugs onto her tray and left, giving me a view many men had definitely pined over. "Two more mugs please," I called out to her.
"Two more mugs. Coming right up."
"I still don't get how Donna Smoak is here."
"Are you certain it's her?"
"Are you kidding? I'd remember that face and banging body anywhere. Plus, if she's here, it means Felicity might be too. Make me wonder who else from the Arrowverse is here."
"The Arrowverse?"
"Another DC continuity. I'll explain later."
"That list is piling up."
"Let's add one more to it. People of Interest. You ready?"
"Yep."
"Felicity Smoak. Curtis Holt. Ray Palmer. Malcolm Meryln. Tommy Merlyn. Ehh… who else, who else… Nyssa Al Ghul, Sara Lance, Martin Stein, Maseo and Tatsu Yamashiro, Chen Na Wei, Caitlin Snow, Harrison Wells, Anthony Ivo…. wait, Ivo already exists here. Add it anyway, we'll check."
The better part of the morning was spent this way, my focus divided between the tinker scribbles of various devices I had ideas for and the occasional recollection of a name which Mike would promptly record.
"Do you plan to find and recruit all these people?"
"What? No," I said and set my pencil down. "Some of them are straight up villains. I'm better off reporting or catching them so they don't hurt anyone else. Besides, this list is just to determine if they exist here. Confirmation first, then whatever comes next."
My mind a scene of quiet now that I'd vomited the chaos brewing in there onto the pages, I picked up the notebook and began to go over the drawings and things I'd written down. "Mike, record these as well."
"On it."
"This is a bike," I said after flipping to the first design. "Seeing all those cars and engines in the warehouse just screamed potential. A car would be nice, but you can never go wrong with a motorcycle as a superhero."
"I thought you didn—"
"Don't," I damn near shouted. "It'll take some time before I can get this baby up and running. But when I'm done, it'll be the fastest, quietest, and most fuel and power efficient thing in the world."
I flipped a couple of pages to the next item. "This is a pistol that can hold ten times more of a special, non-lethal ammunition, and makes less noise. I'm thinking of making each round a taser or a tranq, but I can already imagine the work ahead. Guns were not invented to be non-lethal."
Flip. Flip. Flip.
On the page I stopped on, a passable human hand had been drawn and the watch-like device was affixed on the wrist.
"These are the web shooters I spoke about. These pellets will hold the web fluid and they'll be slotted here," I said while tapping on the shooter. "A push of that button," I pushed my finger higher, "will send a line of it towards what I aim at, and letting go will cut off the flow, leaving me with a rope."
"The most difficult part will be synthesizing the fluid and getting it to behave the way you want," Mike stated, his natural brilliance on display.
"Yes, but we may have solved the synthesizing part. Remember Eric Needham?"
"Yes, you made me add it to the list."
"That's Black Spider's real name. Unfortunately, that's all I know. Hacking knowledge paired with a powerful computer would come in clutch right about now."
"Can't you make one? A computer, I mean."
Flip. Flip. Flip. Thump.
"That's what this is. The parts should be fairly easy to find in any electrical shop, or dumpsters, if I'm that desperate. I can build it before the month ends, at least, until my paycheck arrives."
I flipped the pages onto the next thing, explaining how the small lenses would give me night and thermal vision and also house tiny computers that would serve as a HUD.
From there on I showed him the boots and gloves that would mimic my ability to cling to stuff. He suggested creating bindings out of them, and I nearly slapped my forehead for not thinking of it.
If I was willing to make the design easily reproducible and also part with it, there would be a flood of cuffs even superheroes could not break out of.
After the boots and gloves came the jetpack, and then a grappling hook, the latter being something I added just to see how much rope I could stuff into it with the input from my power. It was a lot. Let's just leave it at that.
All in all, the three hours here were well spent. It was time to leave though. That library had evaded me for way too long, and one could only stand the smell of alcohol for so long. My sense of smell may not be enhanced, but it was well above normal.
The five mugs of beer likely gone from my bloodstream, I stood up and gazed around, finding my quarry immediately. She was on her way to the back, so I raised my hand to signal her.
She came over promptly and I prepared to tip her, but not before attempting what many, many men had likely done and would do in the future.
"Hi, miss. This may sound strange, but do you have a sister called Felicity?"
Her smile went from practiced to surprised to delighted in the span of a second. "Oh…" she laughed, and her whole demeanor followed suit. "Felicity is my daughter. Did you… attend the same college?"
I sensed a pang of longing in her gaze and in the way she asked me that question. "Oh no," I shook my head. "I just saw you and I remembered her. A random memory from school really. Wow, are you really her mother?"
She beamed and laughed even more. "Sometimes I can't believe it myself."
"Well, you're awesome. I'm sure she's making you proud."
"Thank you," she said, her spirits slightly lifted.
"No, thank you," I extended a hand towards her. "For this conversation and the excellent service."
She locked the tray tight with her left arm and shook my outstretched hand with her right before bringing it to her generous bosom right after and stuffing the folded note in the mass of flesh.
My eyes stayed on her face the whole time, my peripheral vision working overtime to capture the sight. "It was nice talking to you," I said and started moving. "See you around."
"Please, visit us again. The Nicenti Tavern would love to host you."
"I will," I said without looking back, simply raising my hand to signal goodbye.
"I am detecting increased blood flow to your pub—"
"Medical diagnostics is not part of your functions."
"But if it were, this is what I'd be detecting."
I just shook my head. "Focus. We've just confirmed that Felicity exists. The implications of that…"
"Let's get to the library. We'll know more there."
"Hm. That damn place better be open when I get there, else I'm breaking the doors down."