[SLTS]—❈—05:: PRT Negotiations [III]

“How do you know so much about the workings of the PRT anyway?” I ask José the following morning as we head to the meet-up spot with Hannah.

It was 7:49 in the morning, and we’re to meet Hannah there at eight.

“I was in Military Intelligence in the Army,” José says. “Then I was a journalist and a cop; you hear things.”

That makes sense, I suppose.

To the average person, the workings of government agencies may seem inscrutable, but I guess once you peer behind the curtain of one, figuring out the others becomes a simple matter of deduction.

Hannah eyes José, who’s unmasked, and unbothered by it, for a moment when we show up with him in tow, but she says nothing, simply introducing herself to the man.

Despite the time of day, she’s still wearing those shades from yesterday, and I only now realize that it’s to keep me from seeing her eyes.

As Hannah she covers her eyes, and as Miss Militia she covers her mouth; if my nose hasn’t already told me that she’s Miss Militia, odds are good that I wouldn’t know it if I were to meet her in costume.

That’s actually pretty smart.

Hannah doesn’t drive us to the PRT HQ (or whatever that building she took us to yesterday is) today, she takes us to The Rig; The Protectorate ENE HQ  three miles off the coast of The Bay.

Many people have theorized why The Rig is, in fact, a rig. Why The Protectorate didn’t just build something within the city that was both easier to access, and easier to maintain.

The theories span from everything between The Protectorate wanting it away from the civilian population in the event of an attack or an accident, to The Rig being a radar to track the whereabouts of Leviathan.

Dad had called it a status symbol.

And as we pass through the armed checkpoint and enter onto a three mile long bridge made of light, heading towards a work of architecture more sci-fi than reality, I can’t possibly agree more.

Doesn’t stop me from being awed by it though, because that’s the thing about status symbols, you can recognize them for the gaudy, overpriced, and likely inefficient trivialities that they are, but odds are good that they’ll impress you all the same.

Hannah parks the car in a surprisingly normal looking garage, and hands the three of us masks. Then, she leads us to a large, cavernous room with white, metal walls with lots of antennas sticking out, zero windows, and three people, a woman and two men.

One of the men is Armsmaster, and I know this not because of my nose, but because he’s decked out in his familiar armour.

His really cool familiar armour.

Introductions are made, me, Mom, and José going by codenames; Musa for me, Mama Bear (my idea) for Mom, and PI for José.

I forget the names of the man and woman almost as soon as I hear them, but the last participant sticks out in my mind; Dragon, participating remotely from wherever she is.

After the introductions, Armsmaster speaks up. “So, Musa, based on the descriptions you gave us for the two of your powers that we’ll be testing today, we have set up several tests that we will run through over the course of the day. Are you ready?”

I nod. “Yeah, I am.”

The man and woman whose names I’ve forgotten, along with Hannah, lead Mom and José out of the room to what they call an observation chamber.

Mom wishes me luck as she goes.

I wave.

Armsmaster walks about ten feet away from me, and, with a spray nozzle that comes out from the wrist region of his armour, spray paints a large X on the ground.

I smile. “Wow, the straight-laced Armsmaster drawing graffiti,” I say. “Someone call the cops.”

The tinker smiles back. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he says.

I snort.

“Create a portal to the X,” Armsmaster commands, then takes two steps back.

“We’re starting small?” I ask.

Armsmaster nods. “Until we understand what kind of exotic radiation, if any, your power produces, it would be irresponsible to jump to an unrestricted location.”

I raise an eyebrow at The Protectorate cape. “You know I’ve made dozens of portals at home, right?”

The tinker looks pained. Over the speakers, Dragon giggles.

“It never hurts to be certain,” Armsmaster says amicably.

Well, I guess I can’t argue with that.

Reaching down near the ground, I stretch out a hand, looking for the—ah! There it is.

Taking hold of the invisible (to everyone but me) zipper that holds the fabric of space together, I slide it up to it’s limit, leaving a seven foot high opening in space into an inky, black void dotted with giant blinking eyes.

Oh right, I forgot to mention those.

As the exact same time, a similar opening zips open right on the X Armsmaster said to open the portal to.

The Protectorate cape goes still for several seconds, simply staring into the portal before him.

“Are those… eyes?” he asks slowly.

“Yeah… don’t worry too much about them,” I say. “I’m pretty sure they’re just aesthetic at this point.”

“Pretty sure,” Armsmaster repeats deadpan, somehow giving me a pointed look despite the lenses in his helmet and being over ten feet away.

“Yeah,” I say, unrelenting, “I’m… ninety-nine percent sure.”

“Ninety-nine percent sure,” he repeats, still in that tone.

“The passive scanners haven’t picked up any readings on any of the wavelengths,” Dragon informs diligently.

“See, Dragon agrees. Come on, that has to mean something,” I say, ignoring Dragon’s immediate disagreement that her report is less her agreeing with me and more her doing the job that she’s here to do.

Armsmaster gives me a long look, then finally, he sighs, pulls out several doohickeys from compartments in his armour, and begins to scan the portal in front of him.

“Anything?” I ask after five whole minutes of watching him work.

Armsmaster’s lips dip in a slight frown. “So far, no,” he says. “In fact, based on the readings from my equipment, the portal before me doesn’t exist.”

I blink. “Is that bad?” I ask carefully.

“Unknown,” Armsmaster says. “But it does mean that it isn’t emitting any harmful radiation.”

“Really? Great. So, we’re done, right? I can portal to farther places now?”

“No. I’ve confirmed that the egress portal doesn’t emit harmful radiation, but I still need to check the ingress portal.”

I sigh. You gotta be kidding me.

After scanning the ingress portal for traces of dark magic or whatever too, Armsmaster then decides to scan the interior next, and when that yields nothing, he attempts to communicate/interact with the eyes.

He beams all sorts of light at them, from all the colours of the rainbow to ultraviolet and even some that I’m pretty sure mundane science hasn’t discovered yet.

The eyes in the void all look perfectly human, and human eyes can’t see ultraviolet light last I checked, so I’m really not sure what the tinkers are thinking beaming UV light at them, but I keep quiet and let them work.

After five more minutes though, when the tinkers now begin to play different decibels of sound at freaking eyeballs, I can’t help but say; “How ironic would it be, if what you’re doing rouses those things into attacking when they ordinarily wouldn’t have?”

Armsmaster pauses, then says; “Better we know what rouses them here, than in an emergency or some other inconvenient time.”

I shrug. “If you say so,” I accept. “But, I should warn you, I can teleport, so if you do somehow piss off those things, and they come out looking for a fight, I’m leaving you to fight them alone.”

“As you should,” Armsmaster says. “You’re a minor, and not even yet a ward, your safety is my responsibility.”

I stare at the man at those words, then I Smell him.

He means them. With every fibre of his being.

I don’t know how to feel about that.

It’s thirty minutes later before Dragon and Armsmaster finally give up on trying to poke a reaction out of the eyes, and then Armsmaster makes me close and reopen the portal over a dozen times to different spots around the room.

Every time I reopen the portal, Armsmaster and I walk through, over and over, Armsmaster marveling at the fact that a trip through the portal always takes ten seconds, regardless of how quickly one moves within it, or the distance between the ingress and egress points.

Finally, after over an hour of exhaustively monotonous tasks, Armsmaster gives me the good news that I’ll be portaling longer distances now.

“Contact Boston,” he says to Dragon. “Tell them we’re ready.”

The plan is simple; the PRT ENE has contacted a dozen different PRT bases both in the US and Canada, and each of those bases have prepared a dozen people in need of healing who’ve all signed waivers (or, for those unable, had their next of kin do so for them).

The test for me, would be to portal to each of these places when a picture is shown to me, and (attempt to) heal the provided patients.

Soon enough, Dragon informs us that the Boston base is ready, and Armsmaster shows me a live feed of a room with a dozen people on hospital beds and a small team of medical professionals.

Two of the people on beds are unconscious.

Here we go.

My healing power works ten percent per touch per hour; meaning that each touch only heals its intended target ten percent, regardless of the seriousness or trivialness of their injury, and I have to wait a minimum of an hour before I can heal them again.

My healing power is not a healing power though, it’s some sort of striker power that takes a person to their physical peak for their age and gender.

When I used it on Mom, she went from being skinny and stressed to having abs.

She went from being a thirty-eight year old woman who could barely do two push-ups, to being able to do planches.

So, over the first hour, even with only ten percent of my power’s effect on the test subjects, improvements are already being seen across the board.

Not only have injuries and diseases suddenly reduced in severity, almost everyone I touch is now also healthier than they’d been for quite some time.

A man in a coma from a head injury wakes up; a woman with a missing arm suddenly finds herself with a stump inches below where it’d been; another woman whose eyes were burnt off by a villain suddenly has fewer scars in the region of the wound.

But there are no ‘miracles’. Not yet.

Not in the first hour.

Not even in the second or the third.

During my fourth round across the bases, a brain-dead man wakes.

In my fifth, a chronically depressed man who’s made several attempts on his life already, feels hope again; he describes it as a warm bubbly feeling in his chest.

Over the next four hours, my power finishes its work, taking people with all sorts of ailments and leaves them Olympic level athletes.

Almost everything that is put in front of it, physical and psychological, it heals. The only one it doesn’t for some reason is the psychopathy of some serial killer they brought in.

They made me stop when they noticed no change in his personality at sixty percent.

By the end of the day, I feel exhausted but energized, and there’s a pleasant feeling swimming around in my belly that I’ve never felt before.

When I see Mom and José’s expressions, I can immediately tell; we’ve done it. We’ve wowed The Protectorate.

And negotiations will definitely be going our way now.

There’s something that José pushes for first though, something that he says must happen first before we even begin to renegotiate my contract; he says I have to meet the wards, all of them, and decide that they’re people I want to work with.

He says; “Joining a team without knowing the members is like moving to a neighborhood without knowing the neighbours.”

When Hannah points out that that’s what everyone does, José says; “Sure, if they’re idiots.”

And that’s how The Protectorate agree to let me meet the wards the following day, Monday, and while it goes great at first, I decide within fifteen seconds of meeting Shadow Stalker that, no, I am never joining the wards.

I can barely even bring myself to care that I exposed my empath power.