Earning Her Stripes Pt 4 (Patreon)

Part Four: Preparations

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Three Days Later

An Abandoned Warehouse

Emma Barnes

Madison lowered her goggles and hefted the device she called the Cutter. “Cutting! Stand clear!”

Emma wasn’t quite sure what principle the thing worked on, except that it ran off of regular building power. About the size and shape of a dust buster, though a lot heavier, it narrowed to a point at the business end. Holding it to metal and pressing the trigger caused a neat cut in the metal. Apart from that, there was no outward sign anything was happening; no sparks, no noise, no heat, nothing. The main reason Emma was careful to stand clear was that there was no way to tell if it was cutting until the cut actually happened.

“Standing clear,” she replied, ready to assist Madison with wrestling slices of metal bound for the ever-hungry mouth of her furnace. As her friend touched the Cutter to the engine block of the third derelict car they’d found, Emma glanced over toward the furnace, making sure it was still doing what it was supposed to. Raw heat emanated from its open mouth, from the bubbling metal inside. She wasn’t certain how the bits and pieces of the car Madison had constructed the furnace from were able to contain the molten metal, but there it was.

Getting hold of the cars themselves had been simultaneously the easiest and most strenuous job. Sophia had been able to locate cars that had been stolen and dumped, broken down or just abandoned on the side of the road. Madison’s Tinker abilities let her get them running (or at least rolling) long enough to deliver them to an empty building on the edge of Merchants territory, where they were ready for the next stage.

After exerting herself all night (and in some cases, pushing cars for several blocks at a time), Emma had crashed for two hours then woken up fresh and ready to go again. Madison had been out for the entire day, and Sophia hadn't woken up until late afternoon.

On the second night, Madison had constructed the Cutter, then demolished one car to make the furnace. This night, they were feeding bits of the other two cars into it. Sophia hadn’t shown up at all, which made Emma wonder if she was starting to get bored with the whole project. She’d spent the previous evening lecturing Madison on how the Tinkers she’d heard of did stuff, until Madison snapped and yelled at her. Then she’d gone off in a huff, saying that there were muggers out there who hadn’t been beaten up yet.

I hope she’s still on board with everything. My powers are so awesome; I can’t wait to kick the shit out of Taylor with them.

Another slice of the engine block dropped free, leaving a smooth mirrored surface, and Madison moved the Cutter away. “Cutter off.”

“Cool.” Emma moved in and dragged the chunk of steel and whatever else off to the side, to join the other pieces. They were due to go into the furnace to make ready for the second pour, after the first one had been completed.

“Okay, that’s enough for now.” Madison wiped her forehead with the back of her heavily gloved arm, and carefully set the Cutter down. As an added precaution, she unplugged it from the extension cord. “Time for the first pour.”

“And this will be the second furnace, right?” Emma thought this was the case, but she wanted to be sure.

“Yup. This one’ll be made of good steel, and I’ll be able to make more good steel stuff from it without ruining it.”

“Ruining it?” Emma frowned. “So what we’re doing now is ruining this furnace?”

“Oh, yeah.” Madison leaned up and tapped a gauge. “One more good pour after this one, and it’ll be ready for retirement. Well, recycling.”

“So what’s ‘good steel’, anyway?” asked Emma as she followed Madison on an inspection tour of the moulds that had already been laid out.

“It’s my name for it. Dunno what it’s really called. You’ve got to put just the right materials in at the right moment, and let it stay at a certain heat for a certain time. If you pour just at the right moment, it’ll come out a whole lot stronger and more durable than ordinary steel.” Madison shrugged. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“Makes total sense to me,” Emma agreed, mentally adjusting her definition of the phrase ‘total sense’. “So, what do you want me to do?”

“Make sure nobody comes in at the wrong time and disrupts the pour,” Madison said, heading back to the furnace. “And stay well back. It’s gonna get real hot in here.”

“Okay.” Emma ran toward a shipping container that sat nearby in the warehouse. Jumping lightly into the air, she kicked off from one of the door hinges and vaulted on top with an ease that she never would’ve come close to equalling before. As far as she could tell, her eyesight was a bit better than it had been before, but not superhuman; just smoothed out to maximum human capacity. She’d asked Madison about the chances of having night-sight goggles made, and her friend had sketched out a helmet that would’ve weighed about twenty pounds. The design contained built-in goggles capable of emitting a microwave beam capable of frying bugs at ten paces, but Emma decided the weight would be too much. From her sketches, Madison could build a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, ‘miniaturised’ didn’t exist as a descriptor for any of it.

Another question she’d asked was why Madison hadn’t just used the shipping containers themselves for the furnace. Madison had looked at her as if she’d asked why the sky wasn’t green and explained that shipping containers didn’t have the materials that she needed.

Moving with a level of precision that Emma had never seen in her friend before she’d gotten her powers, Madison went to the side of the furnace and pulled a lever. As liquid metal spilled white-hot down a channel into the first of the moulds, Emma felt the wave of heat hit her from across the room. What it must be like for Madison, she had no idea. Keeping one eye on the entrances, she watched with a level of fascination as the petite brunette managed the pour, moving levers and adjusting dials as though she’d been training for this all her life. One after another, the moulds filled exactly to the brim with molten ‘good steel’, whatever that really was.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

The harsh voice cut into her musings, and she snapped her attention around to the side door about ten yards from the end of the shipping container. They’d closed the door, but there had been no way to lock it; or rather, Madison hadn’t felt like constructing a lock for it right then. Besides, the metal wall beside the door was so rusty and full of holes that a moderately determined kick would smash it in.

Pulling the bandanna she was wearing up to cover the lower part of her face, Emma moved to get a view of the door. It was now open, and people were now entering. She could tell that there were five of them and, while the lighting in the warehouse was uncertain to say the best, they looked a lot like Merchants to her. Well, crap.

“The fuck?” The leader of this group, or maybe the least stoned, pointed at where Madison was still working on getting the pour just right. “Someone Tinkering here and not fuckin’ working for us? How the shit is that fair?”

Emma sighed and jumped down from the shipping container, absorbing the impact with a casual flexing of her knees. “Walk away, boys,” she advised them, doing her best to pitch her voice for maximum intimidation. That was something she was still learning from Sophia, though the black girl had given up on teaching her anything about fighting. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

“Shit!” The lead Merchant stopped and pulled a pistol from his waistband. The others brandished pipes or knives. “Cape!”

“She’s not a fuckin’ cape,” jeered another Merchant. “She’s just a wannabe. If she had powers, we woulda seen ’em by now.”

“Oh, yeah.” The gang member brought up the pistol but before he could point it at Emma, she was in motion. Dashing forward with a level of explosive acceleration that not even Sophia would’ve been able to match in her best day at track, she closed with the guy before he was properly aware that she was in his face.

All five began to move, but with a sluggish inevitability that let her plot out her moves more than a second into the future. Her reactions were already fast; with the chance to plan her actions in advance, she was even faster. Lunging forward into a jump just before the pistol would have come into line, she grabbed his wrist with one hand and his pistol with the other. A twist in midair let her wrap one leg around his neck, the unexpected weight sending him stumbling backward as he flailed for balance.

Digging her thumb into the correct pressure point released the pistol into her hand. As the Merchant began to collapse backward, she threw her newly acquired weapon at the head of gang member number two, who was carrying a pipe. Landing on her feet as gang member number one fell heavily on to his back, she drove her elbow into the jaw of number three. Then she caught the pistol as it rebounded off the head of number two and kicked the falling pipe (also from number two) so that it smacked hard into the jaw of number four; one of the knife guys.

The second knife guy (and fifth gang member) stood staring, right up until the pistol (Emma really liked its throwing balance) smacked him between the eyes and dropped him to the ground. As part of the throwing motion, Emma spun around and delivered a back kick to the jaw of the first guy, who was just starting to sit up and look around. He promptly slumped to the ground again. With a satisfied hm, she reached up and back, just in time to catch the firearm as it bounced back off the fifth gang member’s skull and into her hand.

“What’s going on over there?” called out Madison. “Is there a problem?”

“No, no problem.” Emma sighed in irritation as she looked down at the feebly twitching gang members. “Just a pest control issue. Do we have any zip-ties?”

A shadowy form came through the wall, then reformed as Sophia in her Shadow Stalker costume, performing a dramatic diving roll. She came to her feet, crossbow out and pointed at the downed gang members. “Don’t move!” she shouted. “I’ve got you … oh.” Walking closer, she stared at the five guys. “Holy shit, uh, girl. Was this all you?”

“I guess?” Emma said with a shrug. “It wasn’t really challenging. More like solving a kid’s math puzzle, you know? I knew all the answers, I just had to figure out how to make it happen in the shortest possible time.” She frowned as she looked Sophia over. “I have to say, it’s amazingly coincidental, you bursting in just after some Merchants show up here.”

“I was tracking them,” Sophia said, almost defensively. “I didn’t want to bust them if they weren’t doing anything wrong. Soon as I knew they’d gone in, I came in after them.”

Really. Emma wondered how much of that was truth, and how much was Sophia trying to grandstand a little within their burgeoning team. Since getting powers of her own, she’d become a lot more cynical about superheroes in general. But it probably wasn’t worth calling Sophia on her bullshit, so she changed the subject by hefting the pistol in her hand. “I’ve never even used one of these things. Should I start? I mean, I don’t want to get crossbows and step all over your shtick.” She remembered the abortive attempt by Sophia to tutor her in using a crossbow. After six bullseyes in a row, including the one where she’d bounced the arrow off the wall to get it into the target just to see if she could, Sophia had declared the whole thing bullshit and refused her access to the crossbow again.

“No, you shouldn’t.” From the sour tone of Sophia’s voice, she was remembering the same thing. “Heroes carrying guns sends the wrong message, unless you’re Miss Militia, and the PRT gets really antsy. Maybe get one of those big-ass compound bows that look like someone’s construction project. I figure you could do stuff with arrows that would make ’em all swear blind you were carrying around Tinkertech.”

“Yeah, but then I’d be lumbered with a big fragile bit of gear, or I’d have to get an actual Tinker to make me one that could collapse into a small space.” Madison, she already knew, was not the right person to ask about something like that. A bow capable of taking out a Mack truck with one arrow; sure. One that could also collapse to hang off her hip? Not so much.

“Pfft, yeah, nope.” Sophia shook her head as she bent over the gang members, zip-tying their limbs together. “I still can’t see why she can’t build one like that for you, though. I mean, if Armsmaster can …”

“Because she’s not Armsmaster.” Emma wondered if her friend would ever get it. “Her Tinker stuff is always bulky, because it’s too tough to … waiiiit a minute.” The epiphany that broke across her mind almost blinded her. “Hey, M, could you build a bow that I could also use as a melee weapon?”

Madison looked around at the shouted query. “A bow? I guess. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. Not if you also wanted to hit people with it. Why?”

Emma waved the pistol. “Because ranged weapons would be a good idea? I’m currently limited to what I can punch and what I can throw.”

“Huh.” Madison seemed to think about that. “Can you throw stuff that can bounce back to you? If I made it so it wouldn’t break?”

“Sure.” Emma tossed up the pistol and caught it again. “Why?”

Madison’s grin gleamed in the dying glow of molten metal. “Let me get back to you on that.”

Part 5