“This is highly unnatural.”
Alyssa’s voice was utterly deadpan as she stared at the ceiling. A quick glance over at the cheap digital clock on the room’s nightstand had her sighing again. The clock read 5:07am, just three minutes after she’d last checked it. The problem, of course, being that she’d only gotten to sleep a little before 1:00am…and was now wide awake. Moreso than she’d been even yesterday, which had already been the clearest and most energetic she could ever remember being in her life.
The cause was obvious, of course.
She had a Tamaranean-templated physiology now, not human. Even if it had been corrected and adjusted to a more human-appearing body. Tamaranean’s had superhuman stamina, superhuman recovery rates and, strictly speaking, didn’t even need to eat if they didn’t want to. She somehow knew that it wasn’t healthy for her to subsist, long-term, only on the energy she was getting from her power. But she could do it for several days, even a week or two if she didn’t use her abilities heavily, without side effects. Even a single meal a day would stretch that out indefinitely, which was why she’d hadn’t really gotten hungry the day before, despite only eating a couple of meal-replacement bars.
The lessened need for sleep that apparently came with all of that wasn’t the issue.
That was awesome, honestly. As was the fact she could think properly without tons of caffeine in her bloodstream.
No, the disconcerting thing for her was that she had never been a morning person. Not ever. Not as a child, not as a teenager or college student, not even as an adult! It had actually cost him a couple of jobs in his original world, as he was almost entirely unable to function before noon. Even if he’d gotten up after a full eight hours of sleep, pumped himself full of caffeine, and forced himself into work…his brain had just refused to properly do brain things adequately until roughly noon. Then, like clockwork and without any outside stimulus that he could ever identify, it would suddenly kick into gear and he’d be perfectly fine.
Honestly, being wide awake with her brain perfectly sharp at this hour was fucking with her more than even the gender change had. Who knew that being a Night Owl had been so utterly ingrained that it would be this disorienting to not be one?
“Well…might as well get up, I guess? What does one even do in the mornings? Plot world domination? Is that why almost everyone else always seemed more cartoonishly evil than I was? That they woke up before noon and that was when you plot kitten kicking, employee sabotage, and general asshattery?”
Deciding that made an uncomfortable amount of sense, Alyssa floated off the bed and toward the laptop in pure defense of her continued sanity. The laptop had finished its factory reset and update overnight, now running far more smoothly than it had, fully cleared of viruses and porn. Deciding she might as well start with something simple, she tapped into Motoko’s skills to increase the security of her current primary information gathering device…and promptly lost an hour and a half despite a patently absurd typing speed.
Even then, the information in her brain was classifying that the from scratch anti-malware software she’d written for a barely recognizable operating system was ‘barely adequate.’ If she didn’t already have a far more secure option in her power-that-be-provided smart phone, she’d likely have been sucked into another three plus hours of additional coding. Which was another oddity that was fucking with her brain, since she’d always hated coding, even if she’d been fairly decent at it.
Sighing, she leaned back from the laptop as she realized she didn’t even have anything sensitive she actually wanted to look up. It had just been an easy thing to start her day with, or so she’d thought. Apparently, inheriting the security awareness of someone who was a professionally paranoid world-class hacker came with side effects. Who knew?
Okay. Stop. Plan instead of just reacting.
Yesterday had been a required series of basic events. She’d needed to handle the whole food/shelter thing. She now had enough money to see her through for a bit, and that gained time could easily let her create a lot of what she might need in material assets/resources with her power. So, her immediate needs were satisfied.
On to long-term planning, then. What did she need? No, more than that, what did she want. What was a long-term goal here, or at least a mid-term one? Once she had that sorted, she could work through the needs to accomplish it with more accuracy. Even create sub-goals that would help her reach whatever endpoint she wanted.
Wealth?
Not really a concern. She’d never been very materialistic in the first place, genuinely hadn’t understood people that chased after some delusion of owning a mansion and five Lamborghinis. What the unholy fuck was the point in that, exactly? Wealth was nothing more than a tool to apply towards other goals or dreams.
Besides, with her creation power, wealth was hilariously easy to literally create. Gold exchange was honestly low hanging fruit. Being able to create certain highly sought-after industrial parts that required rare earths could make her millions in days, with no one complaining even if she did it openly, as there wasn’t a market to crash in the first place due to either difficulty or rarity.
Fame?
Fuck no! She was still an introvert, thank you very much. Fame sounded horrible, unless she could separate the Fame into another identity. Which, you know, was entirely possible with the Hero thing. So if she got fame as a side-effect it would be manageable. Seeking it out on purpose, under her ‘real’ identity, was a flat ‘no thanks,’ though.
Making a difference.
Ah. That was it. The person or being that had sent her here had said that the ‘nudge’ this world needed was ‘in her nature.’ They hadn’t had specific goals for her, because they’d already known that Alyssa’s basic nature would drive her to try and ‘make things better.’ She’d always been a bleeding heart, even if depression and poor health had eventually robbed an older her of the ability to care without extreme pain. Restored to good health and with plenty of opportunity dropped into her lap, the half-remembered desire to help was beating strong again.
Well…why not? It was a heck of a lot better of a goal than most, and she could probably find other things along the way. Some Power of Friendship arc kicking in or some such. Even if it didn’t work out, if she understood her new lifespan right, she could always try something else later. What was a few decades of trying to fix a few problems here and there?
Now, what did she need if she wanted to make a difference?
More resources, obviously.
A better understanding of her powers, too.
A legal identity wouldn’t be remiss, either. The Bats had failed so spectacularly because they didn’t follow through with actual solutions, after all. Most such solutions required public helping hands. Throw someone in the looney bin? Congrats, she’d checked into Arkham and it was every bit the cesspool with a revolving door that its various fictional counterparts had been. Blackgate existed as well, but was only barely better. At best, throwing someone in either was a band-aid that stemmed the bleeding on a wound that wasn’t actually healing.
Assuming that Batman was Bruce Wayne in this reality, he likely was trying to help repair some of the damage with outreach programs. At least, she bloody well hoped so or she’d call him a moron to his face. But it clearly wasn’t taking for some reason. Possibly related to actual curses on Gotham. Or, equally possibly, simply because the corruption ran too deep and one man, even an insanely wealth one, couldn’t counter the actions of dozens of others that were trying to keep the status quo intact.
So, resource acquisition. Power exploration. Research.
She could do those things. In fact, Gotham was a darn good place to handle a couple of them, including the ID situation. With the corruption inherent in the city, it would be hilariously easy to insert herself in the system. Best to get that part taken care of relatively quickly, as the longer she had to build up a ‘history’ the more convincing it would be if someone eventually ran a comprehensive background check on her civilian ID.
Of course, to really make use of Motoko’s skill she needed some hardware upgrades first. The laptop she’d grabbed wasn’t bad as an information gathering tool, but this world had a proper VR Dive Net. She couldn’t fake an ID without either proper Net Diving gear or physical access to servers, and even the physical access to servers would require tools and some serious upgrades.
She could work with just the electronics that she’d traded for at Bart’s. That was the whole reason she’d acquired a couple of half trashed smart phones, a high-quality tablet a bit on the fritz, and a few other bits and bobs. But it would be a heck of a lot faster if she just jumped the queue a bit and got a lot more cash to work with. The last Pawn Shop she’d earmarked was down near the Narrows. Not actually in the Narrows, but close enough that it was obvious what sort of clients the place serviced. It was part of why she’d given it a pass with the sun going down yesterday.
The question was how to do what she was thinking, offload a lot more in the way of gold, quickly. Most critically, without getting attacked or outed as a Meta/Para human. Slumping into open space to just float, enjoying the way she could do that now, she hummed in thought. Then, slowly, a wicked grin built on her face. To her own surprise, she giggled, the sound coming out much lighter than the mezzo-soprano she’d pitched her general voice too. Startled by the sound, but more amused about that than anything, she grinned and threw her arms up. This was going to be fun~!
After all, there was nothing quite like taking refuge in audacity, and Gotham was exactly the right sort of place to get away with it…
… … …
Alyssa checked her special effects carefully, one last time. It had taken her most of the day and some serious experimentation and research with her creation ability to make everything she needed. Which was honestly a positive side effect, given one of her goals was to expand on her powers. The hardest thing to make, by far, had been a super-primitive version of the Thermoptic Camouflage Major Kusanagi had, in fact, known the exact workings of.
The primitive version she’d managed to hack together wasn’t actually capable of rendering her invisible. The system that allowed that was complicated, to the point she’d need a lot more practice with creation before she could pull it off. But that was fine, she wasn’t interested in hiding. No, she actually wanted the simple distortion effect that was all the current version could manage. Combined with a few lights to create an eerie glow, a deliberately threadbare and worn looking duster jacket, and a tricornered hat…and she was ready for her rendition as one of Gotham’s crazy bullshit encounters.
Reaching out with the telekinesis that she’d also spent the day practicing, she grabbed the very real antique and battered seaman’s chest she’d acquired from an old and rickety shop. Acquired and filled with highly accurate Spanish doubloons that she’d artificially tarnished and chipped as she created them. All of them were 4-doubloon coins, containing 6.2g of fine gold each. There were 578 of them in the chest, totaling 126.4 ounces of fine gold. Or, if one went by today’s gold price, roughly $153,664,48 at full market value.
Of course, even striking fear into the proprietor of Queen Karat’s Pawn Brokerage, she was unlikely to do better than sixty percent of that value. Even that much was only because said proprietor would likely think the gold coins, which she’d applied the aging process to as they were created rather than with chemicals afterward, were the real deal and worth more to a collector than their value in gold. Come to that, they might even fool a collector, at least short of a museum-level expert. So it was dubious who was cheating whom, here.
Forcing the grin off her face, waiting until right as twilight struck to trigger the mist-creating machine she’d rigged under the duster, Alyssa hopped off the roof with the distortion field fully active and her flight fully in effect. More than one person caught a glimpse of her as she started to land, almost all of them doing the sane thing in Gotham by shying away from the very convincing impression she’d managed to create of a ghostly pirate. Complete with tricornered hat, cutless, and a brace of ye-olden-style black powder pistols.
Ignoring the looks, she didn’t bother to truly touch the ground as she pushed into the Pawn Shop, ‘treasure chest’ floating behind her. It was really hard to keep her cocky smirk, warped as it would be by the distortion, as she watched the widening eyes of the man behind the counter. Pretty obviously not Queen Karat, unless he was secretly a drag queen, she noted his hand flashing under the counter to press something. A silent alarm of some sort, though hopefully the variety that meant he was summoning his boss instead of the police or local gang.
Thankfully, even as she waved the Treasure Chest forward and dropped it was a weighty thunk onto the counter, her guess was proven correct.
“Gerald, what is it no—”
The heavyset woman’s voice chopped off as she stepped through from a backroom, her eyes narrowing at Alyssa. To the woman’s credit, she recovered almost instantly from the sight and nodded her direction, before shooing ‘Gerald.’
“Go stock shit or something, I’ll take this one.”
The man scurried away with considerably less composure than the woman, who reached under the counter and casually pulled out a sawed-off shotgun to lay on the counter, though she didn’t point it at Alyssa.
“You’re a new one. But I’ll cut you fair deals, fair for me at least, either way. Just don’t get any funny ideas.”
Stretching her face in a wide smirk that she knew the distortion would make look distinctly unnatural, Alyssa nodded.
“Aye, we understand each ‘ther then. I mere be lookin’ to tern some of me stash into somethin’ that work en this ‘ity of fools.”
Using her telekinesis for better effect, she waved a hand and tipped open the lid of the chest. The woman gave her a wary look before taking a step closer and looking inside. Alyssa saw the moment it clicked for her what she was seeing, as avarice sparked behind the woman’s eyes.
“I asked their worth already, so de’n try ta cheat me, wench. But a fair deal is a fair deal, yea?”
The woman’s sales smile flashed out fearlessly, despite who and ‘what’ she was looking at.
“A fair deal I can do, now let’s see just how fair I can make it…”
… … …
Alyssa chuckled as she settled back into her room an hour and a half later. She’d gone to some effort to distance herself from ‘Captain Al Hurra,’ after parting from the Pawn Shop. She’d gotten very close to the sixty percent value she’d aimed for, walking away with just over $92,000 in pure cash. An amount that would have been difficult for even most smaller banks to provide without warning. She’d not been at all surprised that a Pawn Shop very obviously serving the more disreputable sorts in a place like Gotham had been able to produce the cash. She’d even been assured it was properly ‘cleaned.’
Which, had she actually been a ghost pirate, probably wouldn’t have meant much to her. As it was, it was obvious the woman had meant that it was already laundered and wouldn’t cause her issues if she used it. Which was excellent, since that was an extra step of nonsense she didn’t want to deal with. Now, she just needed to wait until morning so she could go out and acquire some better hardware to work with. High-end consumer electronics, once she’d doctored them to her satisfaction and removed the inevitable backdoors, would be just the ticket for the next step of her plan.
For now, she had a few other things to do. Like eating the delicious smelling hamburger she’d brought back with her from a local hole-in-the-wall, and some study on her mental defenses too. While she’d discovered that her Tamaranean-based physiology had actually provided a serious resistance to mental intrusion, and she had some basic shields from her Knock-Off Force Powers, it very much was not the sort of thing she was willing to skimp on.
Also, she was seriously fucking horny again. So she was going to need to deal with that too…
... ... ... ... ... ...
A/N 1: I am forced to consider that Alyssa might be correct. Everyone else must do all their evil plotting in the morning. It all comes out as Cartoonishly Evil on account of them planning things pre-caffeine, and at hours man was not meant to use for plotting. This must be why I've had Cartoonishly Evil bosses in the past, and why most politicians are the same. I was simply never inducted into the Secret Society of Cartoonishly Evil plans, since I don't wake up before noon unless forced. My life makes much more sense now.
A/N 2: Why the fuck do SI's always seem to be scumbags? Is that actually what most people would be like if they could live without society condemning them? What the heck is WRONG with people. Yeesh. This is a rare moment where Alyssa is still very much echoing my thoughts. Wealth, Fame, Power? WHY? Seriously, WHY would those be the things you go after? What's the point? Wealth I can sort of understand, I'm poor as fuck, but even then there are sanity limits...
A/N 3: Hey, at least I made one of the Gold Exchange trope bits a bit fun, I hope ;-).