Orb Weaver: Investigations, 1

When I got back home I was tired but… jittery.

Dad was camped out in the living room, like he expected me to make a break for it.

Ridiculous.

Neither Coil nor the ABB were currently the kind of group I could go after immediately. But—

I blinked.

An Email from Greg on my Investigator account. It had only been a few days and—

Holy Shit. Three hundred pages? Had he even slept? Okay, first note, ask his mother to make certain he was getting enough sleep and homework done. There was no need to be unhealthy about this, after all.

Secondly…

I ran the file through my various phones. I’d have to be more careful around the PRT, but when I had been… indisposed, they’d all been silent, and my bug reactors didn’t have any electronics actually in them. I kept the drones and other equipment elsewhere.

It would be very odd if a “spirit of hatred” as Clockblocker had said, needed to use drones, now wouldn’t it? But they helped me get through the…

Introduction.

Greg desperately needed an editor but… He’d actually done an impressive amount of research. Much of it I could dismiss, but on the other hand, if he did find an editor, there was a lot of work here about the difference between Earth Aleph and Bet games and how Leet had used some of them…

Well, I’d consider mentioning that to his mother. But right now…

The work went quickly. Much of it I could dismiss. However interesting the development of Pong was, it wasn’t that important, save as it related to Leet, but…

Ah. That was very interesting. Greg talked about how Leet hadn’t found his specialty for a while.

And he assumed Leet’s specialty was video games.

But looking at his early work, Leet had no specialty, but half of his creations were impressive, very impressive. Biotech, robots, A scanner that could detect life forms from a mile away through anything other than feet of solid rock…

And then, more and more stories. Leet had once been considered a rising star, but as quickly became a joke. “Leet’s new fountain explodes…”

And then, the gaming theme. Every device based on a game. Based on the progression of a game in many cases.

And oddly… the explosions, for all we joked about them today, became less common, less dramatic. For a time at least.

And his gear became less impressive. A joke.

Not a specialization. Not in any real sense of the term.

Tinkers specialized, but within their specialization, they were unmatched. And it was almost always a strict upgrade, at the cost of flexibility in most cases.  Once they had them…

Well. Firetruck had developed a specialty in vehicles, which she could build easily, but her current work in New York had assistance from the PRT and other tinkers, helping her move beyond that specialty—which was difficult. Installing a fusion power plant into a truck was easy—installing it anywhere else, was nearly impossible for her.

But… If it was his specialty, why is it still unreliable?  And it really isn’t focused. Sure, the Gravity Hammer might be a game device just like the teleport pad, but that’s a vastly “wider” if we’re considering it one, speciality than any other tinker.

Not a speciality?  But a… Framework?  Something Leet had created himself?

Some Parahumans had very strong personality… quirks. Was it that Leet didn’t believe his equipment could work unless he fitted them into a game?

But then, how did that explain his initial appearance and brief time in the sun?

A deception operation? Leet realized how valuable…

No. That would require a level of cleverness and deception that Leet had never displayed. More importantly, if he wanted to lay low, all he needed to do was be quiet. Many tinkers, especially those with niche or low-level abilities, made a quite adequate living as artisans, turning out equipment valuable enough to make them wealthy, but not powerful enough to make them targets.

Leet was doing the platonic opposite of that. Taking the deal from Timmis was sign enough of that. He could have easily attracted the kind of attention that had the PRT gunning for him seriously. Hell, if one of his stunts exploded at the wrong time, a Birdcage order wasn’t out of the question.

And yet…

His flexibility is what I need to research… Orb Weaver? My Power?  I also expected if need be I could, or rather, Orb Weaver could intimidate them, but…

I pulled out my other routines, ones to track Internet traffic and such and… Leet had been losing subscribers. People had started showing up to mock them…and many hardcore gamers weren’t exactly swimming in cash. They’d also—

I rolled my eyes.

Really, Leet? “Save the Union?”  A game put out by the E88 in 2002, or rather people completely “unrelated” to the E88. But after their game of using “marker guns” — really paintball guns and hover suits to “mark” minorities for later collection, their subscriber numbers went down. More than the GTA losses, which many people assumed were just paid actors.

So I expect they’d be open to bribery, not that I’d trust them.  On the other hand, hinting that doing contract work for the E88, no matter how far removed might attract Orb Weaver’s attention…

I might not have to do that, but it would be good to have in reserve. I quickly wrote a simple routine to check to see how many recorded Leet sightings had ended with equipment malfunction.

And I saw that the rates had increased. And since I would assume Leet would do his best for his gaming shows, I could assume that he wasn’t keeping his best equipment at home.

So, they’re going up. Not the initial dramatic disasters we saw before he choose the gaming theme, but still going up. Which means that this can’t be his specialty, unless it’s different from every other specialty out there.

So, had Leet never found his specialty, or was something wrong with his power and I was seeing a desperate attempt to build a framework for it. There were parahumans whose powers just didn’t work right. Many of them Case-53s, but other, “normal” parahumans if the term meant anything, had also been found with uncontrollable or otherwise “broken” powers. I recalled an East European Tinker who had a compulsion to install self-destruct devices in everything he built.

So I couldn’t assume that this was Leet’s power working as intended.  It could be broken. It could be Leet was broken and doing this for some unrelated purpose.

Uber… supposedly Uber could become better at anything, but I didn’t think so. His appearances showed that he often developed skills, but they were limited. One thing. And the next time he appeared he might have a completely different skill, but no sign of any ability in any previous skills he’d displayed.

A copier? Like we’d thought Victor was?

Possibly. But if so he had far more limitations than Victor.

Well, that you’re aware of.

But the biggest problem confronting me was the truly impressive number of misdemeanor and felonies they’d racked up. That would make working with the PRT difficult, since I doubt Armsmaster or Director Piggot would be willing to work with the two unless I could come up with… very compelling reasons to let them ignore their criminal record.

Their very large criminal record.

Mostly crimes against property, with the worst assaults, the GTA incident, not resulting in any crimes due to the refusal of the prostitutes to press charges, one thing that some thought proved it had been set up.

But even without that, Uber and Leet were… Well, the attack on myself and the Robotron game had, by the end of the day, cost the city and bystanders just over 150,000 dollars well beyond the felony threshold for vandalism. I supposed it was fortunate that they were seen as such jokes, because the DA hadn’t charged them with—

I shook my head. “Don’t be an idiot.” The DA didn’t have to charge them right now. Most of their crimes against persons were recorded, and the statute of limitations was at the shortest, 6 years for most felonies, and 3 years for lesser felonies. The DA could bring an entire raft of charges against them if they were caught, starting with illegal confinement and depraved indifference regarding their unwilling audiences…

But under the general rule of “don’t terrify the Tinker,” they’d wait until they had the two in custody.

I wondered if Uber and Leet had considered that or were just unaware.

I—

“Taylor?” Dad asked, his voice soft through my door. “They did say you need rest, and do I have to take the PRT up on their offer of a tranquilizer-dart gun?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. I hadn’t spent that much time…Okay, it was 12:30.

“Right, Dad, I was just checking a few things.”

“The Investigator can take a night off.”

“Okay… night.”

“Good night, Taylor.”

I sent a 250 dollar bonus to Greg and then I turned off the computers. Dad was right. I was tired, and this wasn’t anything that needed doing right now.

I could spend the weekend planning how to make a… proper introduction to the gaming duo.

With that, I lay back, and in minutes I was asleep.