Chapter Text
“Clockblocker to Room CF-24-2. Clockblocker to Room CF-24-2.” the intercom in the Wards common room chirped. Dennis groaned even though he didn’t recognize the room code. Oh, come on!
Sophia gives Dennis an evil grin. “Ooooh, what did you do this time?”
“I didn’t do anything! Promise!”
“Yeah, right.”
Sophia was prevented from making any more wisecracks when a PRT trooper walked into the room and gestured for Dennis to follow him. It took a few minutes to get there, since the elevator was in a finicky mood today and the PRT trooper refused to talk to him no matter how much he tried, so he was even more annoyed when he finally got to Room CF-24-2.
Then, he was just confused- the room looked like a storage room, lined with shelves full of various processed goods and fridges full of fruit and meat, and was very definitely not a conference room.
“Uh…are you sure this is the right room?” Dennis said.
“Yes. Go inside and wait for instructions.”
Dennis sighed and walked inside. The room was legitimately a storage room, except there were already two other people standing in the corner- Armsmaster and a homeless-looking boy about fifteen or sixteen in a hoodie that was probably yellow before it had been in a house fire along with the rest of his clothes.
“Clockblocker. This is Bart, your new teammate. Please be on your best behavior, as he hasn’t been officially inducted into the Wards yet.” Armsmaster gestures to the boy beside him. “Bart is a Trump whose other powers and continued health are dependent on consuming objects that other parahumans have used their powers on. We are going to see if your power would be a reliable and safe way of feeding him.”
Well, that explains the food. And hey, new teammate who probably won’t hate me! “Well, what do I gotta do?”
“You are to pick up one small piece of meat, fruit or dairy, use your power on it, make sure it doesn’t fall onto the floor, then give it to Bart to eat. Then we will wait five minutes, and both of you will report any side effects.”
Dennis grabs a strawberry, uses his power on it and then waits. Thankfully, the timer runs out after forty-seven seconds instead of ten minutes. That would have been an utterly agonizing wait.
Once it’s handed over, Bart pops the strawberry into his mouth, greens and all. “Oh, that’s good.”
“Please elaborate.” Armsmaster instructs.
“Well, I haven’t eaten anything besides dead rats and trash for weeks and actual fresh fruit is a godsend. But also, this is like the second most magic in one item I’ve had since the scrapyard.”
I sense a kindred spirit here…
That feeling is only confirmed when Armsmaster asks what the top spot was taken by and Bart grins and says “Oh, Lung lost a hand while I was following him around once.”
Armsmaster is silent for several seconds, and Dennis is tempted to give Bart a thumbs-up before remembering that ol’ Armsy probably has something built into his helmet to detect any sudden movements.
“Are there any problems or peculiarities with the…magic…in the food?”
“Well, it’s strongly stasis-aspected.” Bart pauses at Armsmaster’s curious glance. “Oh, right, aspect is separate from aura. It’s like your armor- the paint job and styling is the aura, identifying it as yours. The actual armor systems are the aspect- another Tinker could build something very similar in function, but they’d have different styling.”
“And what does “stasis-aspected” mean?”
“Well, all of the magic I eat has an aspect of its own, that can get converted to unaspected magic or left that way. Converting it is inefficient, especially for large quantities, but it means I can store more of it safely. If I leave the original aspect, that allows me to do other things with it based on the aspect. If I had enough magic of the right aspect, I could probably use a weaker version of Clockblocker’s power.”
“You can copy my power?” Dennis asks, internally very jealous.
Bart pauses for several seconds. “Yes, but very poorly. It would have a much shorter duration, limited uses and it can’t activate instantly like yours since I would have to activate it after I touch the target. Plus, it would be very magic-intensive to freeze something in time completely instead of just slowing it down. But yes, I could, given enough correctly aspected magic.”
Armsmaster looks pensive. “How do you know that for sure?”
“Again, I just…know it, from before the scrapyard.”
“Scrapyard?” Dennis can’t help but ask.
“Just kind of woke up in a scrapyard. Before that? Little things like my sister’s voice, but not what she looks like or where she is or what her name is. Or paying for something that cost 12.99, that could have been a dozen different things. Armsmaster says I might be a Case 53 or I might not be.”
Dennis surveys Bart. He looks completely normal as far as he can tell. “You don’t look like a Case 53, though?”
Bart grins, and then there’s a few crackling noises as his flesh ripples and shifts over the course of a few seconds. It’s not particularly unpleasant to witness, just kind of weird.
And when he’s done, his clothes have disappeared into some kind of Changer pocket dimension, and he’s a eight-foot snake with feathered wings and small, stubby antlers.
Bart stretches his wings, and the colors on his body slowly shift until they’re much brighter and vibrant- cherry-red, tangerine and sunshine-yellow instead of the darker maroon, orange-brown and muddy olive-yellow they were originally. The elaborate patterns of mottling, curving and jagged streaks and speckling that cover his whole body, especially his wings, are a lot more obvious with the brighter colors.
“This is my true form.” Bart informs him. His voice is strangely accented, consonants hissing and vowels over-resonant, but still mostly comprehensible.
Even Bart seems to be surprised by his own voice. “Huh. Is it weird that I wasn’t expecting my own voice to sound like that?”
He pauses, then speaks again. This time, he sounds exactly like he did as a human. “So it turns out I can make myself sound normal, but it uses a little bit of magic every time.”
Armsmaster’s helmet tilts in a way Dennis knows means he’s interested in something. “You can’t just shift your vocal cords?”
“Nope, the accent is from the shape of my head. My vocal cords are already pretty close to human.” Bart says, back to the weird snake accent. “Anyway, I don’t feel any side effects, and I’m pretty sure it’s been five minutes. And I’m hungry.”
Armsmaster pauses, then nods. “Clockblocker, do you feel any side effects?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Then proceed. Bart, how much do you require?”
“Uh, I’d say another…eight or so time-frozen snacks would fill me up completely. Then I’d just need a top-up whenever I use my powers, and I lose enough to passive bleed that I’d probably need a top-up once every couple days even if I haven’t used my powers at all.”
Bart has legitimately forgotten what having full magic reserves feels like. He initially thought he might have overcharged himself- but no, he’s just been on the verge of starvation for so long that actually having magic to spare is a shock.
Officially getting inducted into the Wards involves a large amount of paperwork(apparently not legally existing has downsides), but is largely uneventful, especially since he can finally focus again.
The next thing on his schedule after he’s done with his ten-pound pile of paperwork is apparently an exam by Panacea, who apparently has the required secondary power of being able to view the biology of anything living she touches, down to the level of chemical interactions.
Apparently there’s a standing request from the PRT for her to examine the biology of any Case 53s that join the Protectorate or Wards as soon as is convenient, and since she lives in Brockton Bay, the wait time is reduced from weeks to hours.
Bart isn’t sure exactly what’s going to happen, only that it’s going to be eventful.
Amy’s first impression of Impulse is nothing more than “huh, feathered serpent.”
Amy’s second impression of Impulse, after getting a good look at his biology, is “oh my god this is the best thing ever and also the most confusing thing ever EEEEEEE!”
Impulse’s biology was nothing like that of the other Case 53s she’s examined- sloppy messes that barely functioned and make her want to scream from the sheer idiocy involved in half of their alterations.
No, Impulse’s biology was a neatly-tuned machine, very close to the perfected designs that Amy knew she could make if she let her power go wild on a parahuman.
His organs and biochemistry were perfectly optimized in every way. The organs with human analogues were more efficient than she thought possible, thanks to aberrant cellular structures and layers of optimized tissue that she knew shouldn’t do anything productive on their own- yet somehow interacted with his power to increase efficiency and stress tolerance dramatically.
And the ones that had no human analogue were designed for a purpose, even if those purposes made zero sense.
There was a tubular organ made of metal-laced spongy tissue fused to the walls of his abdominal cavity, consisting of roughly evenly-spaced circular rings connected by lines down his spine and belly(much like a worm's circulatory system).
This organ was responsible for converting salt and various ingested metals into titanium alloy via an entirely nonsensical process, and its positioning, composition and shape meant that it effectively served as a second, flexible ribcage that protected his organs from damage caused by impacting with his ribcage or spine when moving at high speeds.
That wasn’t its intended purpose, however. No, it was storing the titanium alloy for later growth and healing. Impulse’s bones, keratin and enamel were all reinforced with that titanium alloy- the metal-reinforced tissues in his scales, horns, feathers, teeth and claws layered in a way that lets him store varying amounts of power energy inside them, in order to do something that partially included reinforcing their durability.
Impulse’s wings were also a marvel. The musculature and joints allowing him to use a set of four wing claws on his two forewings as weak hands, with each finger being able to oppose at least one of the others easily was intricate- yet more precise and less prone to stress injuries than basically every joint in the human body.
He could also control the positions of the shafts of his flight feathers, tiny sheaths of muscle allowing each feather to be angled individually. The nerves set up to control them were designed to adjust their angles subconsciously in response to air currents, thus compensating for turbulence or sudden turns. Lift was apparently irrelevant, since the wings mainly acted as stabilizers and projection points for the power energy that actually let him fly.
His wings were also apparently designed to be used as weapons, either as a bludgeon like a swan, with heavy, metal-reinforced feathers enhancing the blow, or as a slashing weapon, with all of the flight feathers pinned back to the limb, except for one with fused barbules designed to be used as a finely serrated sword blade.
His reproductive system is vastly more elegant than a human one, too, with ovulation being entirely under voluntary control, a single internal organ producing both eggs and sperm and a uterus designed to accommodate a soft-shelled egg with its own internal food source rather than a mammalian fetus with a placenta attached to the uterine lining. Surprisingly, despite being a Ward, anatomically he was fully sexually mature.
He was also nowhere near finished growing. In fact, she was pretty sure he was going to be larger than Behemoth when he reached full size- in just under a thousand years.
His healing and immune system are an absolute beauty, too- even without the power energy enhancing every cell, basically no disease that wasn’t itself power-enhanced could so much as give him the sniffles, he was completely immune to poison(with the sole exception of ethylene glycol effectively being weak alcohol), and he could probably regenerate a severed limb in a few weeks with nothing more than a faint scar around the amputation point.
He didn’t have a corona pollentia as far as she could tell, because his entire brain acted as a corona pollentia.
His DNA was literally impossible, somehow existing in a state of power-created superposition that collapses into different forms every time she shifts her attention. It didn’t even have telomeres.
And as she watched, she could feel Impulse’s DNA and power incorporating the energy of her own power into its own reserves, directing it towards the healing factor. (Well, she thinks it's doing that, but all she's actually seeing is cells multiplying faster.)
“What’s your analysis, Panacea?” Armsmaster asks.
“It’s beautiful. I don’t know how it works, but it works, and it’s beautiful.” Amy resists the urge to squeal. “His biology is integrated with his powers so perfectly that he’s got organs that require power energy to function and somehow break all of the laws of physics in doing so.”
“Details, please.”
“I…I don’t know how to explain it to someone else, his biochemistry barely makes sense to me. All I can say is- he’s intersex, probably closer to female than male, and I can’t tell how old he is because his DNA is quantum foam and I have no idea how long it takes for his species to reach this size. He’s effectively the equivalent of a human twenty-something in terms of relative physical maturity, though.”
“Species?”
“Well, basically all Case 53s are sterile with DNA and anatomy that generally just look like someone poured uranium on a slug and then patched its DNA back together with duct tape, while absentmindedly adding half-baked power delivery channels.” Amy takes a deep breath. “This is not that. This is art, in a fully fertile biological matrix.”
“Uh…what?” Impulse asks.
“A species that is able to breed with pretty much any species capable of producing parahumans, producing offspring of its own species every time. A species that can evolve drastically in a single generation, adapting traits based on the environment of its incubation and early childhood, discarding unadaptive traits of its parents and keeping only the most suited for its environment.” Amy rambles. “A species that can survive in space, in a nuclear wasteland, underwater, in the core of a planet, on the surface of Venus or Jupiter. A species that can sleep for centuries in the heart of a volcano or the depths of the ocean, not needing to eat, breathe or drink. A species born able to hunt and speak, starting out the size of a rabbit and growing to be larger than Behemoth. A species that never dies of old age, and only ever gets stronger. A species born with parahuman powers that only get stronger as they age, and the ability to learn more.”
“I’m sorry- learn powers?” Armsmaster asks.
“Yep. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but they can learn new parahuman powers by absorbing the energy of other parahumans. In fact, just touching Impulse incorporated the energy from my own power into his own, though I’m pretty sure it’s temporary.”
“Impulse, is that true?”
“When she was touching me, I absorbed a small quantity of life-aspected mana. I assume it’s because her power is touch-based and it was actively being used on me- touching you, Lung or Clockblocker didn’t do anything similar.”
“Hmmm…” Armsmaster contemplates. “I suppose we’ll have to test that in power testing. Try analyzing his human form now."
"He has a human form?!" This time, Amy actually squeals out loud.