Decision Time

My plan had been to spend the rest of the day Crafting.

There were so many ideas floating around in my brain now, some of which were completely unattainable and others that could be completed fairly easy with my current materials.

That was the real bottleneck next to time, materials.

It was a well-known fact that new Crafters tended to pilfer things from places like the Reclamation Yards and the various other scrap sites around the community, and crafters were like gold to the Powered community.

Think of it this way, someone with a Power like Quasar, as strong as his power was, tended to be a known entity. He could do a certain set of things, and only he could do them. Crafters, on the other hand, were a little bit different. They could build an almost limitless array of things if they had the right materials to hand, and anyone could operate that Crafter tech. It was like having a Powered that could distribute powers to the unpowered.

A very valuable resource indeed.

In other words, I needed to be careful.

That wasn't all that was holding me back at the moment, though.

While crafting was definitely at the forefront of my mind, so was the message from Crashcourse.

It was clear that she wanted to meet up so that she could repay me for saving her and her teams lives the night before. It could have been a trap, of course, but other than my Crafter powers there was no real reason for her to want to go after me.

Not only that, I was pretty certain that if I went to pick up my gauntlet first I'd have the upper hand in any one on one encounter.

The real worst-case scenario would be if the message hadn't actually come from CrashCourse, and instead, it was some Coventry Mob goon who was trying to play some sort of angle because he knew what had happened last night between myself and their leader, despite the fact I'd let Quasar take all the credit for bringing them in.

But that wasn't the sort of vibe I was getting, all things considered.

The message was similar enough to how Crashcourse had spoken that I was pretty sure that it was actually her reaching out, though that didn't mean I wouldn't be careful, they were villains after all.

That was the rub, too.

They were villains, and they were villains that most people knew almost nothing about.

Wildthing and Bastion were just about getting by, Bastion much more so than Wildthing, and now they had both teamed up with Crashcourse and Pulsewave and were suddenly on the radar of people like Quasar and Phet, the biggest of the big in the community.

Wildthing and Bastion from before and the team now seemed like two completely different lots of people, differing entirely in the targets they hit and how they hit them.

Who had drawn this group of people together, and why had they done it?

It was, of course, possible that either Pulsewave or Crashcourse were the hidden link between the four of them, but I really couldn't see that being the case.

Pulsewave had been stoic and silent, he hadn't really said anything during the encounter, which gave me the vibe that he really wasn't the one running the show.

While Crashcourse was certainly charismatic, and very clearly the leader of the group, I somehow just couldn't imagine her being able to bring someone like Wildthing onto the team without getting her head ripped off by the Shifter before she was able to.

I was starting to see why Quasar and the PHA was having so much trouble pinning these guys down. It was all a weird mishmashed mess that made no sense at all, made even worse by the fact that Crashcourse and Pulsewave seemed to be ghosts in the machine.

The streets thronged with people, I'd almost forgotten that it was lunchtime and that most people in the central quarter would be on their breaks trying to get food.

My stomach rumbled in discontent as I passed a little stall of someone selling meat and potato pies. I checked my pockets but came up empty. Pies were a few quid, and I didn't have any.

The school would have fed me if I were still there.

I suppressed a sigh and tried to push the thought of school as far away as I could. I didn't need to bring myself even further down by thinking about what had happened there.

If Crashcourse wanted to repay me for saving her life, maybe I could get her to buy me a bang-up lunch in one of the Central Quarter restaurants.

I almost lost it over that mental image. Ah yes, a table for three, the superhero and his two supervillain companions would like some bangers and bacon, thanks.

As my mind lingered on the thought, the idea of taking Crashcourse up on her little meet and greet nagged at me more and more.

If I took her up on the offer of a meet then I could talk things over with them, see what they wanted to say and fish for some more information of my own. If I did manage to score any tasty nuggets of intel, I could then craft up a radio and call on Quasar just like he'd asked me to.

Going by what the more experienced Powered had said, and the fact there was barely any information on them online, getting some actually useful information would be an absolute win.

Sure, taking this course of action would open me up to making some enemies, but I was going to be a hero fighting villains anyway, of course I was going to make enemies.

I stopped dead in the street, fighting over the implications in my mind, until eventually I decided to turn on the spot and head toward the library where they had a few computers tucked away.

I was going to do this.