[centre][img]https://i.imgur.com/7NSt6Na.png[/img][/centre][b]Tandems | PRT Headquarters, 8:46AM
June 19, 2021[/b]
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Upon arriving outside the meeting room, Ashley briefly contemplated using her power to conjure a clone directly into the room. A moment’s consideration later and she'd scrapped the idea; while she was pretty confident the stunt would make for a good first impression if she could pull it off, that was easier said than done. Without a decent level of familiarity with the layout of the room in question – not to mention the locations of the people inside it – there was a substantial risk she'd end up teleporting somewhere awkward, which would make for a decidedly less good first impression. Oh well, there would be opportunities to show off her powers, and more importantly, to see her teammates’ powers, soon enough.

If anything, despite already being a bit late, the moment Ashley spent loitering outside the room, was somewhat of a blessing in disguise. It gave her the chance to check everything was in order, and in doing so, realise she'd forgotten to put her mask on when she'd left the dorms. She was absolutely going to get chewed out for that later – no doubt dozens of people had seen her blinking down the halls completely unmasked, not to mention the guy whose office she’d accidentally teleported into while trying to shortcut across floors – but getting yelled at could wait until later. Besides, as far as Ashley was concerned, it really shouldn’t have mattered in the first place whether or not she wore it, the veneer of plausible deniability that had been built up around her identity was so thin it was probably transparent, though PR emphatically refused to listen to reason on that point.

Slipping on her mask Tandem copied herself twice over, dismissing her remaining unmasked self in the process, and then stepped into the meeting room. She was quick to recognise the three Protectorate capes present; Axiom – the local Protectorate branch’s resident tinker and the hero that had inducted Tandem into the Wards – Nightstalker – Bridgewater’s preeminent monster cape – and Grandmaster – quite possibly the strongest cape in the city and the leader of the Bridgewater Protectorate. Tandem had seen all three of the older capes in action at one point or another over her own five years as a cape, multiple times even, but that didn’t change how cool it was to be in the same room as so many interesting people. 

Speaking of interesting people…

Tandem turned her attentions towards her fellow Wards, excitement building up between her copies. 

One of her selves quickly locked on to the tinker looking cape, currently engaged in conversation with Axiom – a tinker conversation perhaps. She promptly identified the Ward as most likely being Wattson. Her thing was making stuff that let her turn invisible, right? Or at least that was the obvious and/or PR approved aspect of her creations – as far as Tandem understood it, Tinker's were rarely so limited in scope, though what additional range of technology the Ward might be able to employ she could only guess at. Tandem wondered if her own thinker ability would help her use or understand the other Ward's technology; she’d never gotten the opportunity to inventory tinker tech before and was eager to find out. Even if she couldn't it'd definitely be worth asking Wattson about it – despite the maximum size of objects Tandem could store being fairly limited, she imagined there'd still be plenty of devices that her inventory could store which would otherwise be too cumbersome to bring into the field, and more importantly, she really wanted to see what her power made of the tech, even if it couldn’t help her use it. 

While one instance of Tandem was observing Wattson, another Tandem’s interest had immediately been drawn to the large bird(?) creature. Right… She'd heard there was a bird monster on the team, not to mention having followed the rumoured sightings of the cape when he'd first showed up. Moonnin of something, whatever that meant. In any case, hearing a drunk vagrant ranting about Bridgewater’s Mothman was entirely different from actually seeing the guy in person. He had to be like 20 feet tall! Actually, was she even sure it was a guy? She’d kind of assumed it was but she wasn’t sure. Shifting her gaze downwards failed to provide Tandem with any insights – not that she knew what bird person genitals were supposed to look like in the first place – should she just ask them?

The third Tandem split her attention between two other Wards, whom she mentally labelled Hood 1 and Hood 2, based on the shared design element between their costumes. Did PR like hoods? Should she get one as well? Tandem was pretty certain that one of the hooded capes was Richter – one of the other live-in Wards who she hadn’t really interacted with much – and since the remaining hooded cape didn’t particularly look like a bee she figured they were probably either Ethos or Keystone. Why did everyone have to make things difficult for her by choosing really obscure names for themselves?

The Tandem examining the Muninn shifted its attention to the girl that was speaking to him. It was Faith she realised – or rather Decree while she was in costume – another one of the live-in Wards and for the time being Tandem’s only cape friend, though she hoped for that last part to change shortly. Faith was probably the least interesting cape in the room right now, if only because Tandem already knew what her power was and had had several opportunities to train with her, but still she was nice and the presence of a familiar face was somewhat comforting if anything.

Her scan of the room's occupants completed Tandem wondered if she should go up and introduce herself to some of her teammates. Already dozens of questions for her fellow Ward’s had begun to bubble up within Tandem’s shared minds. 

Still, would it really be a good idea to just approach an unknown parahuman? One of the ways she’d kept herself alive and out of any gangs until recently was by being cautious – a process that absolutely didn’t include approaching several parahumans, who’s powers she didn’t know, in a setting within which she couldn’t easily run. Tandem supposed it might be okay since they were all meant to be teammates and heroes, but she also knew they were letting former villains onto the team – it was perfectly plausible that one or more of the new Wards was still secretly a member of some other gang, and was planning on bombing the room or using a shaker power to eliminate the new Wards team and cripple the local Protectorate. Or maybe one of them had been mastered or was just a master projection. Or any number of other horrifying prospects for that matter. 

One of Tandem’s clones blinked out to be promptly replaced by a new one in one of the rooms far corners, a moment later she repeated the action with a different clone on the other side of the room. She was about to repeat the manoeuvre with her third clone when she thought of a better idea and instead shunted it to the floor below. The new clone ended up appearing in a relatively quiet hallway where it promptly took a seat near the edge of her range; that got it a few odd looks, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t also where she was supposed to be, and bomb threats were serious business so Tandem ignored the stares. 

Thinking about it, she had introduced herself to Decree, which had gone fine, but no, that in itself was probably appropriate caution given the scenario – that was a parahuman living in close proximity to her, for all she’d known Decree could have had the power to slowly give you cancer or master you by spending enough time near you, actually that second one was pretty close to her actual power…

Shaking one of her heads, Tandem unanimously decided that now probably wasn’t the time to introduce herself to her fellow Wards, even if at the same time she really, really wanted to do so. No, she’d at least wait until she had a better idea of what she was dealing with, which would hopefully be very soon. 

And if things broke down before then she’d make a beeline between floors until she was out of the building and then lay low until things cooled off. Tandem briefly contemplated slicking the floor with lubricant and ball bearings and blocking barricading the door with sandbags in the event that her escape became necessary, but quickly realised that unless everyone in the room turned out to have been mastered or to be part of a gang, that was off the table. And if it did turn out that everyone was secretly her enemy, then she should probably just drop a bomb before running… wait no it’d be wrong to do that to someone that’d been mastered and there were plenty of ways good people could be forced into gangs, not to mention the probably innocent civilians in the surrounding rooms. 

Tandem settled herself in, fidgeting impatiently, her several pairs of eyes looking out for threats while she continued to ponder escape plans and waited for the meeting to actually get started. Perhaps if it were only one enemy she could throw a bowling ball at their head? Maybe not, she wasn’t meant to have those, maybe a manhole cover or one of the weights she’d stolen from the gym then…

Tandem was still pondering the matter several minutes later, when something interesting finally happened. Axiom producing a tinker tech cube, which she quickly demonstrated to be a storage device of some kind. Tandem wondered if it worked similarly to her own ability… some tinkers took inspiration from other capes right? So it was entirely possible Axiom had based the design off- the Tandem in the hallway shuddered as she pushed any thoughts of her cluster mate from their minds. 

The things that’d been stored in the cube turned out to be more tinker tech, devices to protect against master effects according to Axiom. Did they work against all master effect? Would they mess with her ability to coordinate herselves? What would her thinker power make of it?

Tandem briefly wondered if she’d be able to spin things in order to get her hands on three of the devices since she had the bodies, but somewhat dejectedly realised she’d pretty thoroughly explained how her instances worked – why had she done that!? In any case she’d be able to create three instances of the device at least, so she should be able to keep on in storage for her power to analyse, provided she was willing to leave on of her clones unprotected that was, which if anything might be the right play – at least until she could be certain they weren’t secretly tinker tech bombs or mastering devices or something like that. Tandem felt pretty confident that Axiom was trustworthy and probably wasn’t secretly part of a gang, but caution was the name of the game. 

Before Tandem could get her hands on the tinker tech and Axiom could finish explaining the function of its casing they were interrupted by a loud bang as the door was kicked open. Both Tandem’s in the room startled at the sound, and the instance that had still been fixated on security very almost tried to drop several litres of paint on the newcomer before initiating its escape plan, only barely being stopped by the Tandem in the hallway who’d been spared the brunt of the panic by virtue of separation. 

As the hallway instance mentally offloaded some of her other selves’ anxiety onto herself, those in the meeting space identified the newcomer as the remaining live-in Ward, Shattercrash, even as the girl announced as much herself. Tandem couldn’t say she knew much about the girl other than having a vague idea of her power and that she was kind of intimidating. She’d tried to question the girl a couple of times previously, but not wanting to cause team friction, ended up retreating each time when she’d gotten the distinct impression she was about to get glassed. 

Tentatively Tandem returned to what she was doing, one of her clones vanishing to be replaced by a new, far calmer copy, in proximity of Axiom, while her other instance returned to scanning for threats, its efforts only enhanced by the lingering panic.