Kid Win’s eyes went wide.  He glanced at the laptop.

Recognizing yourself in that description?

“I know enough other tinkers to know that look.  You just had a stroke of inspiration?”

“Sort of.  More like a bunch of half-assed ideas all at once.”

The ADD life.

“Don’t let me distract you.  If you want to take a minute to make some notes on whatever came to mind, I won’t be offended in the slightest.”

That seems especially helpful considering the ADD. It’d be so easy for it to slip back out if he didn’t take notes.

“It’s okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.  I-” Kid Win paused.  “I guess I’d rather keep talking to you than write down ideas that probably won’t work out.”

You’re letting it show a bit more, just how much this conversation means to you. 🙂

“Thank you.  I’d say you shouldn’t worry too much about trying to emulate Hero.  It’s heartening, if I had to put a word to the feeling, that you look up to him and carry on his legacy.  But you have your own specialization and your own strengths.”

Alright, so we are looking at Kid’s confusion over his specialty today, then. Nice.

I’m not sure whether I want him to have a really similar specialty to Hero or not, honestly. Having a similar specialty would really drive home their similarity and the fact that someone like Kid can become great, but Legend has a point. There’s emulating and then there’s letting their identity take over yours.

Kid Win nodded, a little too quickly.

“He was the first real tinker, you know.”

What do you mean by “real”?

And are you sure? Surely there were plenty of parahumans you didn’t find out about, even back then when triggering was new and exciting and prone to creating news stories.

“Before we knew tinkers have specializations,” Kid Win added.

“I’ve thought about it.  The disintegration gun, the jetpack, the sonic weapons, the power sources and explosives that were surprisingly effective for their size.

I remember someone asked me about Kid Win’s specialty after his chapter of Sentinel. At the time I speculated that it was the relatively broad “manipulation of energy”.

And honestly, all these examples Legend lists here seem to support that.

I’m just worried it’s too broad. If you get technical, you can make “manipulation of energy” cover just about everything. Hardly a specialty at that point.

I suspect his specialty tied into manipulating and enhancing wavelengths and frequencies.”

Oh, he was talking about Hero’s specialty, not Kid’s. Of course, that makes much more sense.

Wavelengths and frequencies… so electromagnetic energy, pretty much. Though not only that – any kind of wave, which is where the sonic weapons and explosives (shockwaves) come in.

I wonder how similar Kid’s power is?

“You can talk about it,” Legend assured him.  “It’s okay.  It was a long time ago that he passed.”

“I sort of modeled myself after him.”

Ahh. He knew it might be a sore subject for Legend.

Oh hell yes. So this big important guy Legend is comparing Kid to was already Kid’s role model. Kid is already trying to be like Hero, and Legend just reinforced the idea that he’s succeeding.

Legend studied the boy.  Red and gold body armor and a red-tinted visor.  There were additions that seemed to be more recent, judging by the lack of wear and tear, but if he looked past those, if he imagined the boy with a helmet covering that brown wavy hair, replaced the red with blue chain mesh, he could see the resemblance.

So basically, the Ravenclaw version of the Wards’ Gryffindor Kid.

“I can see that.”

“I didn’t mean to copy him, or to ride off his fame or anything.  I was younger when I started, I totally meant it to be respectful-”  Kid Win stopped as Legend raised a hand.

You can just hear Kid getting slightly more frantic as he goes along here, trying to make sure Legend doesn’t think he’s disrespecting the man’s dead friend.

…friend? Legend does seem to have taken Hero’s death hard. That’s very much believable and understandable with them being good friends, but it did just occur to me that Hero might have been more than that to Legend.

“It’s okay.  I think he would be flattered.”

How does Legend keep finding all the right things to say?

Kid Win smiled a little.

“You remind me of Hero.”

…ouch. We’re heading into that territory.

Is that why Kid is even in this chapter, besides whatever he’s doing on the computer?

The smile fell from Kid Win’s face.  He looked startled.  “Really?”

“I imagine he was very much like you when he was younger.”

And now this big important guy is telling Kid that Kid is similar to another big important guy (one whom Kid can also relate to on the tinker front), perhaps inspiring confidence that Kid can become a big important guy himself one day in spite of his difficulties.

I love this. It’s such a lowkey conversation for Legend, and Kid isn’t showing signs of realizing it either, but these are all things that Kid needs to hear.

Kid Win looked uncomfortable.

“You can follow in Hero’s footprints, young friend. Just don’t follow them too far. If you’re about to get torn to pieces by Siberian, you may want to turn back.”

I suppose part of Kid’s reaction could stem from the fact that those are some big footprints to fill. Maybe he’s not sure he can fill them as well as (he thinks) Legend might expect him to.

“I’ve seen your records.”

That’s not a great line to say if you want to not be intimidating.

Kid Win cringed.

“No, don’t act like I’m going to say something bad.  The Deputy Director in charge of the Wards, I can’t quite remember his name, he had some glowing praise for your ability to engage with the public.”

Kid’s cool in multiple ways, so this seems legit. 🙂

The thing about not remembering the deputy director’s name seems too conspicuously mentioned to not be an example of lasting memory holes left by the miasma.

“Engage with the public?  I don’t remember doing much of that.”

I suppose, while he’d be good at connecting with the public, the people in charge might not want to put the responsibility of the role on him?

There’s also passive engagement, in the sense that people like him because he looks cool while fighting villains.

…

Oh! Is Legend mixing up Kid and Weld?

“Something about speeches to other youths at school?”

“Oh.  That wasn’t a big deal.”

To be fair, the people who say something isn’t a big deal tend to be the ones who are good at it.

“The guy who’s rating your performance seems to think it was.  Can’t quite place his name, the suits sort of start to blur in with one another-”

That’s fair, even without the miasma.

“Deputy Director Renick,” Kid Win supplied.

“Yes.  Thank you.  He seemed to think you connected with the crowd, and you did it better than any of your teammates. You were frank, open, honest, and you stood out because of how you handled yourself when the students started getting rambunctious and heckling you.”

That sounds like Kid, yeah! 

I’d actually like to see this. Especially the heckling part.

“It’s just going to be another minute or two.  The data has to compile and upload.  It’s not my work, so I played it safe and went for the slowest, heaviest compression method that I could.  It’s going to take a bit.”

Hmm.

Are we dealing with Dragon today? It’s not going to be her Interlude because she already had one, though, and the same goes for the primary suspect for who we’d see talking to her. So if that’s what we’re getting, whose perspective is it?

“my work” implies that whoever is talking has skill in dealing with data like this.

Coil had some people decrypting PRT data a few Arcs back, but surely they’ve finished that by now.

“That’s fine.  Thank you.”

My mind immediately went to Taylor here, but this really doesn’t say a lot about who this might be.

I suppose it’d be nice to get two different perspectives on Taylor in a row, though.

Kid Win shifted position uncomfortably, falling silent.

Ooh, hello!

I take it he was the first voice, given the paragraph break? Then again, that might’ve just been to make sure the name (the topic of the paragraph, in a meta sense) came first.

Ooh, could the other voice be Legend?

The other voice is almost certainly the POV character (Kid Win’s already had an Interlude, unless Interludes that aren’t technically labeled as such don’t count), and I would be very okay with it being Legend.

You don’t have to be intimidated.  I’m just a man.

Yeah, that sounds like an issue that would be central for Legend, alright. I’m calling it with 90% certainty: this is Legend’s Interlude.