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Using fire control, I cut a four-ton piece of metal away from the interior of the ship. I lifted it for a moment, then stacked it to the side.

I could have inventoried it, but I was hoping that I'd be able to add to my strength, something that I hadn't done much of because inventory was so much more convenient.

However, I could only planeshift what I could lift, and Blasto was hoping for more and better things for his lab. I wanted to create my own lab as well as there were things I wanted to create.

It'd be easier to sell inventions if I had a proof of concept.

Blasto was relatively content with his storage unit lab, although over the past three days I'd had to add another two units.

I wanted a place I could sleep and not worry about being interrupted by cannibal attacks. They wouldn't be able to hurt me, but they could wreck my stuff.

Also, I wanted something nicer than a few storage containers.

I could have found a place on the Harvester world, but I was a celebrity there and I'd have a stream of tourists passing by my island paradise.

So, finding an uninhabited island had taken me a few hours. I'd settled on Tahiti; there were no people there or anywhere within a thousand miles as far as I could tell.

Once I'd hollowed out a half dozen container ships, I began filling up my inventory.

YOUR STRENGTH HAS INCREASED BY 1!

Finally!

This was only the second strength point I'd gotten working on this; my strength was now 34. Considering that my strength doubled every five points, one more point would let me lift eight tons, and that would make plane shifting a lot easier.

I could use growth, which would give me a 20% boost to strength; I'd be able to lift sixteen tons then, but I'd have to have clothes made for someone who was six foot eight. Still, it was an option for if I needed to planeshift something really heavy.

Blinking to the scrap yard, I walked up to the window.

"You guys still buying scrap?" I asked.

"People have been bringing things in since the bombings," he said. "I can't give you the best price for it."

That was only partially true. He was doing a little gouging, since it was a buyers' market, but his conscience wouldn't let him completely cheat people.

"How much can I bring you?" I asked.

"How much do you have?" he asked.

"Eighty tons," I said.

"What?"

"I've been stripping the Boat Graveyard," I said.

I'd thought of putting up a piece of…something, and then looping chains around it to use it as a pully to help me drag some of the boats. It would be like using a tree trunk that would never bend or break.

However, two seconds wasn't large enough to do much even for me.

"You a tinker?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I tinker sometimes."

He nodded.

"I knew Kid Win before he joined the Wards. He always needed money for some project or other. I can take maybe eight tons. I won't know how much I can give you until I see it."

"Where do you want it?" I asked.

There was a lot of scrap in the yard, but there was a clear area.

I brought out two sections of metal.

He stared, then looked up at me.

"You're that girl," he said. "The one that started the zombie plague."

"I'm the one that killed all the gangs," I said. "Except Lung."

He frowned.

"I can give you fifty cents a pound," he said.

He'd have offered someone off the street thirty cents, but he wanted to stay on my good side, for some reason.

"But you'll have to break it up into smaller pieces," he said. "I can't fit that into my machine."

"How small do you need it?" I asked.

He showed me, and I touched the top piece of metal. I hadn't been able to affect part of anything less than an inch thick unless the item itself was smaller.

That still meant I could affect an area of almost three and a half feet on each side and an inch thick. I'd had images of completely stopping a meteor ten miles tall and wide by affecting a micrometer's worth of material on the front end.

At those speeds it likely would have completely turned to rubble as the back end crushed the material in front of it as everything came to a stop from a speed of thousands of miles an hour.

I'd have to level it up a lot if I was going to reach the asteroid stopping stage.

"You're fifteen, right?" he asked.

"Yeah…?"

"How are you going to cash the check?" he asked. "It's not like you have a driver's license or anything."

"You don't have cash?"

"For a few hundred dollars? Yeah. I'd be crazy to keep eight thousand dollars here; people would be robbing me every day."

I frowned.

"How do most people deal with it?"

"They don't bring eight tons at a time," he said.

"Well, I'll trust you," I said. "Give me what you can afford to give me now, and I'll come back later for the rest."

"You'd trust me?" he asked.

"I trust that you wouldn't stiff a cape who killed hundreds of people," I said pleasantly. "I'll come back tomorrow morning for the rest…and if you can't come up with it, I'll keep coming back until you have it."

He paled a little.

As it turned out, he had six hundred bucks, and as it was the end of the work day, it wouldn't hurt him to be out of cash. It'd take him two days to get to a bank for the rest of the money.

"I'll be back," I said.

I blinked, and I was suddenly out front of Carmen's pizzeria. Mom had loved this place, and I'd heard that they were struggling in part due to problems with getting consistent power.

Stepping inside, I took a deep breath. It smelled the way it always had, which brought back pleasant memories.

The girl at the register was new, and she didn't recognize me.

"How much Pizza would six hundred dollars get me?" I asked.

She blinked.

"What kind and what size?"

"Half pepperoni, half cheese-large."

"Fifty pizzas," she said, checking. "Including tax."

The place had always had good prices.

"I'd like to order fifty pizzas," I said.

She winced.

"It'll take a couple of hours," she said, "Assuming the power holds out."

"I might be able to help with that," I said. "Can I talk to your manager?"

She nodded.

"Joey!" she called out. "Customer wants to talk to you."

He stepped out of the back a minute later.

"I'm sorry," he said. "We've been having some trouble keeping the electricity working."

It was then that he noticed me.

"Taylor?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry about your mother," he said.

He really was, too.

"I'm a cape now," I said. "And I'd like to help you guys."

"You aren't very popular in some parts," he said. "I'd hate to have Lung show up."

"Yeah," I said. "Although, if you see him, give me a call. I still have some business with him."

He was silent, debating the ethics of calling and potentially getting a man killed, even if it was Lung, who had a kill order.

"I'd like to put some solar cells up on your roof," I said. "They're not exactly tinkertech, but they're better than what's available."

"I can't let you…" he began.

"I made them with my power," I said. "It didn't cost me a thing."

He frowned, but in his mind, I could see that he was tempted. He was losing business every day because of the brownouts, and unhappy customers often didn't come back.

"How much power?" he asked.

"Nine and a half kilowatts," I said. "At the peak, anyway. You might get half that in the morning and evening. I can't do anything for you after dark."

There were different rules for solar panel installations over 10 kilowatts in Maryland, more stringent one. I'd actually managed to eat a skill book on the building codes and another on relevant laws.

"Wouldn't it require an electrician to hook things up?"

"I've hired one," I said. "Technically I'm just his assistant, even if I'm the one doing most of the work. He'll check over the wiring and make sure everything is up to code. He'll also finish connecting things down here."

I was already installing the panels; I had them in inventory and I was using telekinesis and my eyes to put them in place. I had used some of the metal from the ships in the Boat Graveyard to create a framework to hold each set of panels. And it was all settling in place.

With any luck, the building inspector wouldn't notice that they were non-standard panels. In any case, there was nothing to link them to me, except for the electrician, who had been a friend of Dad's.

I'd actually paid for an inverter and for new batteries. I'd managed to take the batteries apart and I'd rebuilt them on the inside; they could now hold ten times as much energy and they would last five times as long. Putting the whole system back together, it looked like it was a factory standard system.

"O.K," he said.

"All right," I said. "I've got the solar cells up on the roof. All Joe has to do is hook it up to the system."

"Boss," another employee said, coming from the back. "A weird electrical box just showed up in the utility closet, and some batteries."

I grinned sheepishly and shrugged.

"I'm pretty quick when I want something. Joe is outside and he's ready to hook everything up. He's got a ladder to look at the solar cells, and he already has the inspector ready to take a look."

It was important for the electrical company to know about systems that were producing electricity. There were going to be a lot of people working on the lines in the next few months, and if they thought the lines were safe to work on while electricity was still flowing…well, I might not be there to save them.

Normally it would take months to get an inspector, but a quiet word about the mistress his wife didn't know about had mysteriously cleared up his schedule.

The whole process took a couple of hours.

I ate one of the pizzas while I waited, and I inventoried the pizzas hot out of the oven as soon as they were produced.

This place was part of the Brockton Bay of my memory, part of the reason I didn't simply jump off to better worlds. While I didn't have close connections to this place, my father had.

He'd wanted the city to live again, and if I could make that happen before he was revived, I could make him proud of me.

It wasn't as though I was stupid enough to think I could save a city through buying pizzas. This was a drop in the bucket. But people here had lost hope. They were deserting this place like it was a ship that was sinking.

The only way it would get better was if they started to believe that this might be the kind of place they would want to live.

It was likely that cleaning the boat graveyard wouldn't be enough, not any more. I needed to create jobs and I needed to repair infrastructure. I could do both of those things, but I needed to avoid the PRT trying to Clockblock me at every turn.

As soon as the Inspector signed off on the project, and I saw through his mind that it would actually pass muster and he wasn't just signing because he was afraid I'd show his wife pictures that I'd claimed to have, I left.

I didn't actually have pictures. I just had images in his mind.

Appearing in front of a small office building, I was happy that I was going to make my appointment.

As I walked through the door, I switched into one of my red outfits. I'd wore my hoodie to the pizza joint. I hadn't wanted to get pizza sauce on the old one, or have the smell of pizza to permeate it.

I knocked on the door.

A receptionist opened the door and ushered me into a lobby. Everything was tastefully done, with mahogany and leather. It was a very masculine looking lobby, even though my lawyer was a woman.

Page Dorman stepped through a dark doorway, and gestured for me to enter her office.

"Miss Hebert," she said. "I'm not sure what I can do to help you."

Her office was just as masculine as the rest of the place, with shelves of law books behind her.

She'd inherited the practice from her grandfather, but she'd previously been employed in Boston. She'd clawed her way up through the ranks there before missing out on a partnership when she had an affair with a coworker.

Despite that, she was apparently a very good lawyer.

"I don't do criminal law," she said. "And I don't know anything about how to reverse a kill order. It's never been done."

She'd been worried about even agreeing to see me. I was fifteen, and not all fifteen-year-olds knew the difference between a contract lawyer and a defense lawyer.

However, she'd also been worried that I would be irrationally angry if she refused the case out of hand. She'd heard that I was unstable, and she knew about many of my murders.

The fact that the PRT seemed unable to deal with me had also factored into her decision.

"I'm not worried about that," I said dismissively.

She stared at me.

"Really," I said. "The more people try to kill me the stronger I get. I'm kind of like Crawler, but presumably prettier."

Taking a sip of water, her hand shook slightly. Her face didn't show any sign of anxiety, which I felt was favorable for a lawyer.

"I need help setting up a charity designed to restore Brockton Bay. I also need to get patents set up…these aren't Tinkertech; they can be replicated by normal people."

"You may run into problems with NEPEA-5," she said. "Especially if you plan to coordinate with other parahumans."

"The money from the patents will be funneled into the charity," I said. "I will retain no ownership of them, and I'd prefer that my involvement in this remain anonymous. Other than providing a million dollars to get them started, I will have no official relationship with the charity."

"And unofficially?"

"I may have suggestions," I said mildly. "I want this city back on its feet. That's not going to happen unless people start working to make it happen."

"You…aren't what I expected in someone with a Kill Order."

"That was totally overblown," I said. "They were worried I'd start a zombie plague accidentally."

The look she gave me wasn't friendly.

"That totally wasn't my fault! I'm immune to diseases, but the Wards I took traveling with me weren't. I told them to take care of it, but they had to experiment on it."

For some reason she seemed to think I was unstable.

Well, she planned to take the case. That was the important thing.

"Do you have anyone in mind to run the charity?"

"I've got a couple of candidates," I said. "It's really important that nobody outside of here knows that I'm involved. The last normal people I was involved with had their heads exploded, and I had to kill several hundred Asians in revenge."

"I can see the need for secrecy," she said.

"People try to come after anyone close to me, probably including my lawyer," I said. "They can't come after people they don't know about, though, right?"

She nodded slowly.

"Your receptionist is listening at the door," I said. "And she should know that they'll probably come after her too if she puts any of this online or tells her grandmother or anybody else. My enemies like to torture people."

"Linda," Page said. "Come in here."

The door opened, and the woman looked sheepish.

"I was just trying to see if I needed to call the Protectorate."

"I've healed several thousand people here in town," I said. "And the last time the Protectorate tried to kill me I stuck them in a world of cannibals with no food for a couple of weeks. I'm not worried about the Protectorate."

The secretary was terrified of me.

What I'm worried about is the fact that I've killed more thana thousand people in this world alone, and most of them had families who would love to hurt me by say, blowing up my lawyer or her secretary."

"None of this inclines me to take the case."

I gestured out the window. She was apparently wealthy enough to have had it replaced with a kind of plastic that didn't involve glass at all.

"Look outside," I said. "There's a city here that is dying. The people who can leave are abandoning it in droves. Soon the only people left will be the ones who don't have the resources to leave. The government is going to abandon us, like we were victims of an Endbringer attack and there isn't enough to save."

She'd grown up here. She had the skills to go to a richer city, a better city, but she'd chosen to work here because she had her own fond memories of this place.

She'd take the job. I was sure of it.

"I'll do it," she said.

She glanced at her secretary.

"If you tell anyone about this, we can all die."

"Not me," I said. "I'll be fine. But I would totally murder a lot of people to avenge you!"

Both of them stared at me like I'd grown a second head.

"It gets easier the more you do it," I said reassuringly. "It won't be any problem at all."