Planning Session

Planning for the robbery began.

Lauren came up with something general, the rest of the team started to weigh in their opinions and thoughts. That mainly came from Greave, who pointed out flaws in the strategy that could lead to things falling apart. I wondered if that was an element of his defensive power coming to the fore or if it was something he had always been good at.

I realised, slowly and then all that once, this mission had become inevitable.

What's worse was, if I started arguing against it now it would probably ruin my undercover position and expose me to the group of villains.

There was no doubt in my mind that if I were to expose myself right now, Wildthing's claws would rip me to shreds before I could even think.

With that in mind, I started to throw out suggestions of my own. A slight alteration in attack angle, tech suggestions that were based around the ideas they were coming up with.

If I could help things go smoothly, I'd likely be able to scoop some more information about Hypogean and their mystery boss, but there was more to it than that. It would also lower the risk to any civilians that end up involved in the heist by proximity because if someone got hurt or killed I don't think I'd ever be able to live with myself.

The planning session went on for a while.

At some point, we'd all moved to huddle around the computer so that Lauren could plot out a map of the Vault's layout so that we could plan entrance and exit strategies.

Lauren's power was truly ridiculous.

All she had to do was look at the archive image of the vault and she was treated to its entire history, up to and including the part where the plans for the base had been drawn out by the Crafters who had built it.

Things may have changed a little bit from that initial blueprint, but the layout would have been similar enough that any plan we came up with would be bolstered by having it around.

I had expected the plan to include something crazy, like us all shimmying down some air vents to land in the centre of the vault undetected or something like that. Apparently, that wasn't going to be the case. The vents were far too small for a human to fit down.

Equally, messing with the power supply to the facility was out of the question. There were backups after backups involved and taking all of them offline would be impossible even with my Crafting abilities.

Eventually, Allen got bored and wandered off to make himself a sandwich.

I got the impression from him that planning wasn't really his forte. Whether it was because he didn't have a tactical mindset or if it was because he just didn't actually care about how things went down I didn't know, but something told me it was more likely the latter. He was a bit of a free spirit, willing to go with the flow, while Lauren and Greave were both much more hands-on with things.

When he came back over there were sandwiches for everyone, so if that was the result of him not caring then I didn't exactly mind.

"Right then," Lauren said, a grin on her face as the session came to a close, "I think that about sums everything up on the planning side of things. We know how we're getting in, we know what to do when we're in, and we know how to get out… however the chances of the plan staying watertight when the Juniors get involved is pretty low. Even with that, I reckon we've got a pretty good chance of pulling this thing off!"

"Yeah, about the Juniors," I cut in, trying not to visibly flinch at the fact that I was going to be fighting against heroes. "The only thing I've done so far is fight against Phet, and that didn't exactly go to plan."

"Hey, you didn't do too bad," Lauren interrupted, "Most people would have been turned into a stain on the pavement."

"Okay fine, lemme say it differently," I said, "Things could have gone much better, and that was just against a single Powered. There are going to be three of them, and none of them is going to be easy to deal with."

"He's not wrong Lauren," Greave agreed, "We should go over strategies and weaknesses in dealing with them.

"When I researched the local Powered's I got the information I could, but the PHA has always been cagey about revealing details about the Juniors, so that doesn't mean I know anything important," I replied.

It made sense that the main superhero organisation in the community wouldn't want their junior division's powers and weaknesses to be public knowledge.

In the early days of the forums, there had been a lot of discussion regarding powersets and potential weaknesses, but these days all of those threads were shut down just about as quickly as they popped up, with the people behind them being banned from the site temporarily.

Being a hero was dangerous, it was even more dangerous if you were a kid. To keep the parents of those Powered kids happy and the kids themselves safe, information on their powers and weaknesses had to be monitored incredibly stringently.

That being said, with Lauren's power it occurred to me that she probably knew all of their powers and all of their weaknesses just by the fact that she could look back at all of their past fights.

Hell, she probably knew exactly who they were in their civilian identities as well. I couldn't blame her for wanting to keep that secret, though. There were certain gentleman's agreements that all Powered stuck to in order to stop the community from devolving into chaos.

"Right then, let me break down the powers of the Juniors then," Lauren said, confirming my thoughts as if she could read them.