It was not actually a very long walk. Considering that most people wound up awakening when they were young adults, BSA facilities being close to college campuses in the heaviest residential districts just made sense. It was a depressingly efficient piece of social engineering, like putting a liquor store next to a rehab clinic. The BSA got a steady stream of walk-ins, and we Alphas got a convenient path to institutionalization. Everybody wins, except for the part where you lose your basic human rights.

  While we were walking, she asked more about what I could do. Fortunately, I had prepared responses for exactly these questions, polished to a fine sheen during countless sleepless nights spent wondering how I’d explain myself without getting thrown in a black box. She was a lot less… invasive than the BSA examiners were likely to be. Their idea of a friendly chat usually involved a truthseeker and a rectal thermometer.

  “So you said you were sort of like a widgeteer?”

  I nodded, the very word leaving a bitter aftertaste. “Yeah, sort of, but it’s more of an odd talent. The label for it was microkinesis, which is a fancy way of saying I can manipulate small things very precisely. It’s the superpower equivalent of being really good at assembling IKEA furniture without throwing the instructions across the room.”

  She nodded, “That sounds like technopathy, sort of.”

  I nodded, “The way I use it is. After training it for a while, I realized I could go microscopic. It’s not a huge power—my personal highlight reel involves fixing a watch and un-clogging a sink—but if you use it right, it can help in a lot of ways. I can merge together alloys, reshape small masses of materials, optimize devices, and even repair damage as long as I have material available. That even includes things like minor trauma as long as it’s not too deep.” I left out the part where my most common use was ensuring my cheap coffee maker didn’t give up the ghost entirely. A man has to have his priorities.

  “How deep is too deep?”

  “About three inches. That’s why it’s microkinesis. I don’t have any real range, and I have really limited power levels. In some ways, it’s amazing; in other ways, it’s the weakest possible option. I’m basically the guy who brings a single, perfectly sharpened pencil to a nuclear war.”

  “A true healer can fix stuff like… internal injuries, and disease or poisons in some cases, but their power is generally limited to what they call life force. I don’t know how that works, but it means that if an injury or something is too deadly, they can’t do anything about it.”

  “And you can?” she asked, her voice tinged with a hope that felt like a physical weight.

  I nodded, feeling the familiar cage of my own making close around me. “It’s not about severity, it’s about depth. Regeneration is rare, but for something like a finger, as long as I have some of your living tissue to work with to rebuild the cells, it’s not a problem. If someone cuts your throat, even if they cut it three inches deep, as long as I get to you before you die and have enough energy, I can seal it up quickly enough to keep you alive. Honestly, though, the throat-cutting thing is a lot easier as long as you haven’t lost too much blood, because rebuilding cells is a bitch. It’s metabolically expensive. Like, ‘sell a kidney to pay the electricity bill’ expensive.”

  She almost looked breathless as we walked, watching me with wide eyes, “That sounds… incredible. That’s like class five healer territory!”

  I chuckled, a dry, raspy sound. “It is and it isn’t. That’s why I am not trying to work as a healer. First off, I have to know what you were like before your injury or whatever damage it is I am repairing. Most humans are pretty similar, and I have fixed injuries before, so that’s not too big of a deal, but supers have all sorts of weird genetic, biological, and energy quirks that if I don’t get a chance to look you over before you get injured, I might not be able to fix you.” I didn’t add that this ‘blueprinting’ process was how I’d almost gotten myself killed the first time, trusting a smiling face that hid a knife.

  “Secondly, if someone loses a finger or an eye and I have to fix it, well, I am a microkinetic, not a healer… on a molecular scale, three inches is HUGE. Reforming all of those cells, pulling them out of your body and modifying them, and then replacing them and giving them the energy to regrow… Well, I’d probably be down for a week from energy exhaustion. We’re talking a metabolic despair so deep I’d be comatose, surviving on a IV drip of liquid bacon and regret.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Okay, that was not precisely true. If I had to do a full-body reset for someone who was barely alive that I had already blueprinted, I’d probably be down for a week. Those three-inch things were mostly for rebuilding stuff I didn’t already have a pattern for, but I had been careful to avoid actively lying except about the ‘who I was’ stuff. The art of the con isn't in the big lie; it's in carefully arranging a hundred tiny truths to point in the wrong direction.

  I’d been Diabolus during our prior encounter, but she didn’t need to know that. I also didn’t want to spend my life learning blueprints of every damned hero in the BSA and be locked in a shed resetting them after every minor injury for the rest of my life. An ability like that would be considered ‘too valuable to risk’, especially since… technically… it could even revive the dead if they hadn’t been dead for too long. I’d be less a person and more a national resource, a piece of medical equipment with a dwindling soul.

  If the BSA didn’t nab me, the Secret Service probably would, locking me in a room in case some assassin got lucky. Either way, any freedom I enjoyed would be over for ‘national security’ reasons. I was a pretty good solo supervillain, but I didn’t harbor any illusions about a superhero team, or even a whole lot of normies with guns, being unable to bring me down, at least for a while. They might not be able to kill me, but they could certainly hurt me for a long, long time. My career as Blueprint would be replaced with a new title: Asset 7.

  “Basically, a cellular regenerator could do it. It would take a lot longer, and probably cost a lot more, but saving time and money is well within the limits of a class two, not a class three, especially with my downtime. But I have cooler stuff I can do that I think makes me a class three. Stuff that’s less ‘miracle worker’ and more ‘high-end artisan.’ Less messiah, more mildly useful mechanic.”

  “What’s that?”

  I dug into my pockets, and put down my bag to retrieve a pair of metal snips. “Do you have super strength?”

  She shook her head. I knew that, but I had to ask. The performance must go on.

  I held up a nickel and a penny. And offered them to her. “Here, check these out. Ordinary change, right? The detritus of a thousand forgotten transactions.”

  She nodded, looking them over, “They look like it.”

  “Go ahead and cut them in half.”

  She took the offered snips, and with a little grunt of effort managed to clip them both. Not very clean, but then she offered them back to me, “I am now officially a felon. My handler will be so disappointed.”

  I laughed, “Not really. Machines have been mushing pennies into keepsakes for a hundred years. That law was meant to stop forgery, hell the government would love it if you burned billions of dollars, since it wouldn’t have to honor their debt. Now watch this.” I carefully took all four halves, put them back together, and then pressed them together. After a few moments of concentrated effort that cost me a not-insignificant fraction of my daily caloric intake, all four halves became a slightly larger, mismatched whole. Poor Ben and Abe had pretty much ceased to exist, since I didn’t feel like reconstructing their heads on either side of the coin. They died for a cheap parlor trick. A fitting end, really.

  “What did you do?” she asked, peering at the new, singular metallic disk.

  I held it up. “I merged them together. Of course, nickels aren’t really much nickel, and cents are mostly tin and manganese now, but I blended the alloys, reinforced the molecular bonds, and realigned the crystalline structure.” I offered her the snips. “Try it now.”

  She nodded and tried to cut the alloy blend. After a few minutes of straining, she had a slight crease in one edge, but the snips were dulled and it wasn’t cut. “Ouch.” she said, handing the ruined tool back to me. “I think I just voided the warranty.”

  I smiled, “That’s my best power. I can reinforce things and make alloys and composites that are pretty much impossible using standard methods, at least on the small scale. I couldn’t put up a building, but give me a few minutes and I could make a ring that’s almost impossible to break short of throwing it into Mount Doom. Assuming I had the energy, and you had the several hours to wait while I napped afterward.”

  “That’s really awesome.”

  I chuckled, “It’s cool, but it’s small scale. I am also not a real widgeteer, I can’t make anything that can’t exist in reality, but then again, unlike a widgeteer, it’s permanent. That’s why my known name is Blueprint. Give me a design for something small like a watch or even an integrated circuit, and enough raw materials, and I will make you something that’s ten times better. Assuming, of course, you don’t need it this century.”

  She looked very thoughtful, “Can you make a diamond?”

  I nodded as we approached the squat, intimidatingly bureaucratic BSA complex. It looked like a DMV that had been crossbred with a bunker. “Yes. But I wouldn’t waste my time. The value is artificially inflated, and the compression energy cost of making one large enough to be worth selling, I’d be out for weeks, and I wouldn’t get any real value. I’d make more per hour flipping burgers. And I’d get free burgers. It’s a whole thing.”