RWD: 5.05

The morning did not announce itself. It accreted. Light bled into the clouds above the city—gradual, unceremonious. Paul fit himself to this

5.05

"The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose."

—REVEREND MOTHER GAIUS HELEN MOHIAM

The morning did not announce itself. It accreted. Light bled into the clouds above the city—gradual, unceremonious. Paul fit himself to this lack of drama, engine already running by the time the rest of the day began its performance. Taylor sat next to him, hands folded in her lap, her eyes turned outward to the derelict corridors of the city. Between them, the radio murmured local news: another ABB safehouse raided, three unpowered Nazis arrested attempting to rob a pawn shop, the ongoing investigation into "terrorist activities" by the quote-on-quote “Peacekeepers”. 

They, however, spoke little. Silence, in its own way, sharpened things.

A security camera tracked their entrance to the compound as Paul parked the vehicle neatly alongside one of the building's loading docks and killed the engine. Taylor slipped away at once, hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket, with only a dry “I’ll be at the range.” Paul nodded, watching in the rear mirror as she retrieved her bag from the truck bed and headed for the entrance. He waited a few moments more, eyeing an odd raven perched some distance away. In the end, he concluded it was harmless and alighted from the truck. Inside the warehouse, he noted that Paige was already at the range, the staccato of suppressed gunfire echoing with muted regularity. Brian and Rachel—locked in a contest of force and pace, flesh and bone—sparred, sweat-slick and wordless in the gym. Alec was a glassy-eyed lump on the now-stained couch in the lounge area, the frantic clicking of a controller the only sign of life from his end. A familiar tableau. Functional, but only barely so. Lisa, in comparison, was the model employee; still absent, she remained for the moment at Old Saybrook, overseeing the foundations of Paul’s grander strategy.

He nodded to the group without breaking stride. They'd learned to read his moods, to distinguish between moments requiring attention and those demanding solitude. This was the latter. His workshop called—He let himself recede into the heart of the structure, past the oil-stained brick partitioning and double doors.  

The air was cool and filtered, smelling of ozone and hot metal. In one corner of the main room, beneath the focused glare of a single, powerful work lamp, sat an imposing silhouette. The custom crystal puller dominated the corner, its chrome housing reflecting the harsh work lights. Inside its vacuum chamber, a crucible glowed with incandescent heat.

Paul ran a diagnostic on the machine. Its hum was a perfect, unwavering tone. He knelt, eyes narrowed, and studied the tiny crystals grown within the transparent chamber. Five lay in the tray—each refracting motes of colour, each no larger than a thimble. He pulled out the rotary tray and turned them in gloved fingers, searching for the telltale threads, the minute occlusions that would render a seed unfit. Two—minutely flawed—were crushed between polymer callipers, the sound sharp, almost ceremonial. The rest, flawless as diamonds, went into a foam-padded box, sealed and labelled in his neat hand. These were the hearts, the irreplaceable cores, around which his most complex technologies would be constructed. They could not be bought. Without accessing this room, they could not be stolen or reverse-engineered. They could only be grown. Here. By him.

Content, he turned his attention to a row of mannequins standing against the far wall. On them were the finalised costumes. He ran a gloved hand over the fabric of Brian’s uniform, a composite weave of Darwin’s Bark spider silk and polymer filaments. He tested the seams, the flexibility of the integrated plate carrier, the seal on the rebreather mask designed to work with his powers. Paul checked the quick-release tabs on Taylor’s insect dispensers and the wiring on Lisa’s tactical data tablet. The suits’ sensor contact-points, armour overlap, cooling mesh. He renumerated on the feel of silken fabric, hand-dyed and woven to spec, expensive in the patience burned in its making. Everything was to his specification—he would not put these on his people and accept failure. Not here, where every mistake had its cost paid in blood or leverage.

Satisfied, he crossed to the far wall where, discreet, stenciled crates were stacked—all sealed, some labelled DELICATE in red block English letters, others stenciled with biohazard warnings and fragile-handling labels in German, Mandarin and a dozen other languages.

Taking up a crowbar, he split the first crate. Within, insulation, foam, anti-static packets, layers like geological strata hiding the bones of another age. One by one, he unpacked the contents, laying them out on the sterile surface of his workbench. Each component was nestled in custom-moulded insulation. Servo-receivers, no larger than a thumbnail, each precision-tuned to the Communinet satellite constellation that had been clandestinely deployed on his behalf by a South African aerospace firm under the guise of a commercial imaging contract. Paracompasses, their casings matte black and weightless in his hand. Poison snoopers—half-assembled arrays of microfluidics and bespoke sensors that remained familiar in their purpose.

He inventoried the medpaks—military-grade trauma solutions containing wound-sealants, hypovials of plasma, concentrated stimulants, and newskin ointments—in preparation for scenarios he hoped to never face, but was too pragmatic to ignore.

Unmarked bags held the unassembled components, about half a dozen Lasguns and five times that number of Holtzman Drives—exotic coils, phase plates, dull, non-reflective black housings, each marked with cryptic codes and obscure batch numbers.

The procurement had been a blackhole into which hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared, never to be seen again. The process, in its entirety, had—to varying degrees—all been obfuscated behind legalese, shadow brokers and third-party fronts. Even the black market organisation, Toybox, had unknowingly participated and proven invaluable in establishing the supply chains, with the commissioned drones from Big Rig contributing much to how quickly the fabrication of certain critical parts were completed. In fact, he had been so useful that Paul had considered the group momentarily, assessing the potential value of bringing them under his direct control before shelving the thought as premature.

Having ensured everything was accounted for, Paul began the delicate work of integration: Servor-receivers into headsets, paracompasses at the wrists, snoopers on the collars, dampers modules—complete save for the miniature H-drives that powered the things—slotted into the utility belts. The lasguns were also left in half-finished states, but more so because Paul had yet to grow the essential phase-crystal barrels that would propagate the continuous waves they are famous for.

Once the last laser rifle had its trigger assembly, power cells, and resonance chamber pre-fitted, Paul finally turned his attention to the final and most complex task. He picked up one of the three perfect seed crystals and began to assemble a Holtzman drive. It was not for a shield—not yet. The proliferation of lasers and energy-based powers in this world made the lasgun-shield interaction an unacceptable risk, a suicidal variable he had yet to solve. This drive was for something more fundamental: a suspensor. A localised gravity-nullification unit that would be built into the load-bearing structures of each suit, allowing them to carry the weight of the new armour and gear as if it were nothing. To move with a speed and agility that their heavy protection would otherwise make impossible.

The seed crystal was locked into place. The drive coil was wound around it. The phase plates were aligned. He worked silently, his entire being focused on the task. This was not tinkering, a frenzied process of inspiration and guesswork. This was engineering. This was science. Reproducible. Refinable.

He connected the finished suspensor unit to a power source and calibrated the controller. He placed a heavy, two-pound wrench on the workbench and slid the small, humming device beneath it. With a final adjustment of a dial, the wrench lifted a fraction of an inch into the air, hovering in perfect, weightless stasis. A small, quiet miracle of physics.

It was then the workshop door slid open, and Brian stepped through. The young man's face was drawn tight with distress, anger etched across his features in lines of raw anguish. Paul turned slowly, deactivating the suspensor. The wrench fell to the workbench with a dull clang. He looked at his subordinate, his mind processing the variables: the ragged breathing, the tremor in his gaze; heat and cold both, fear, the crackle of some ancient familial nerve.

"Brian," Paul said simply, voice calm yet penetrating. "What is it?"

The cape stood frozen for a heartbeat, fists clenched tightly at his sides, before he forced the words out, each syllable raw and strained.

"My mom's dead," Brian said quietly. "Fentanyl overdose. Hospital called a few minutes ago. I—shit, Greg, I need a ride."

A pause…

“Come,” Paul said, sighing as he plucked the keys to the truck from the table with deliberate calmness and rose to his feet. 

“I’ll drive.”