Conversations: Objective

[Quinn]

The hint of a smile quirked Tom's mouth, and he shrugged, picking up his mug and taking a long draught before replying.

"Just what I mean. You've had a big shock to your system, you're reeling, and taking a few days or weeks off with a loved one's a great way to get your head back on straight. Trust me on that one."

He picked up the sheet and looked at the names, then folded it up and put it in a pocket.

"I'll put some feelers out with AE...uh...Mr. Black later today. And if they find these guys, I'll give you a call. If they've got anything to say, I reckon you'd deserve to hear it."

The kineticist winked, feeling mighty happy he was going to be able to help out for once. He liked Jessica and Blake, the two were good people, and he owed them. At least, he figured he did.

"So, how are you and Blake doing, anyhow? I hear the dude's opened up his own buisness now."

[Raveled]

Jessica blushed at the idea of just her and Blake somewhere, maybe for a weekend... or even longer. She took a long swallow of her coffee to hide it, but her face was still red, from her ears and down her jawline. "I don't think we could just jet off spontaneously," she stammered. "I mean, I've got the Lab and he's got work and we're both heroes." She went to drink from her cup again and was surprised to discover that it was empty. She put the mug down on the table and twiddled her fingers instead. "Yeah, he's got his magic detective thing going. I kinda wish he'd stayed in school and gotten his diploma, but I'm proud that he's making his own way and he seems to have a lot of customers. I'm kind of worried, though, because he has his house in Southside. It's all magic'ed up, but I still worry about him." She smiled uneasily and put a hand over her belly. "Is this what a relationship is like? Worried and proud and you can't get him out of your head?"

[Quinn]

Push took another long draught on his mug, a wan smile creasing his features.

"Oh, there's more. Panic at the thought of any harm coming to them, feeling like your heart's about to burst out of your chest when you see them arriving, going shopping and unconsciously looking at half the stuff on sale for them, dressing in the most outrageous things to impress them..."

The wan smile turned somewhat lopsided, and he chuckled.

"Yeah, relationships are like that. Hang onto him. And don't...well, keep the mad science in the lab, trust me on that one. Heh, long story."

[Raveled]

Jessica looked down at her fingers suddenly. "We, um, already did the shopping thing. And the dressed up thing. And, um, the almost getting caught thing." She was blushing more furiously now, from her hairline all the way down her neck. "But Blake had more common sense and so--" She coughed suddenly, stopping herself before she went too far. "Anyway! Speaking of changing the subject drastically! Blake and I were talking about a beach party some weekend, when it warms up a bit. Would you want to stop by? We'll probably be grilling something."

[Quinn]

Tom's expression was actually rather humorous when Jessica mentioned a beach party. It was a mixture of excitement and apprehension, and he masked it quickly by taking a long chug from his cocoa, finishing it. Coughing momentarily, he abruptly swept up both their mugs, walking swiftly over to the small kitchen and beginning to refill them.

"I...uh...ehe..."

He rubbed the back of his head, facing away from his unexpected houseguest.

"...I'd be happy to. Would you, uh, want me to bring some stuff for my famous chili?"

Push turned, showing a somewhat wry smile as he mentioned the chili, and walked over to pass her a now refilled mug.

[Raveled]

Jessica quirked a smile as she remembered his chili from Christmas. Come to think of it, where was her little cleaning droid? Oh well, that wasn't important right now. She took the coffee gladly and snuggled down into the couch. Cool or not, Tom's man-cave wasn't exactly a warm hide-out. "Sure," she replied, "bring the chili. Can't promise how many folks will want to eat five-alarm chili while walking around in bathing suits, but you can always bring it.

"So," she added, watching Tom bustle around, "it looks like L.A.I.R. is doing well. How's the security system?"

[Quinn]

Push's mouth quirked before he took a draught from his mug (his fifth of the day now, actually), settling back in his own chair.

"Think you asked me that earlier, but since there's no local bystanders, I'll give you the whole crop."

He sat back and started rattling off a few of the more recent troubles that had been brought to his doorstep, the Ninja Versus Pirate affair (he still didn't have the bloodstains out of that costume), that guy Corbin who'd hucked him downstairs and helped him hold the fort against a small army of thugs (he omitted the fact that they had to be rescued by AEGIS), and the excellent performance and reaction time of the security systems during both.

"Security systems you rigged up saw 'em coming a mile away, and with those wards your better half threw up, those ninjas didn't have a hope in hell of kicking down the door, heh. And the thugs that did try to go through the garage door with blowtorches got a nice big faceful of electricity from your stun guns. Hah, I swear the garage smelled like bacon for a week!"

The kineticist laughed, slapping his thigh in amusement, and winked at her. The awkward air of a few minutes earlier had dispersed with the regular shoptalk, and he seemed somewhat more at ease. For a moment, he stroked his chin, then he tilted his head and asked another question.

"By the way...didn't you say a while back you were interested in some of my more technical gear? Never caught the specifics, sadly."

[Raveled]

Jessica's face blanked as her mind raced to place the reference, then she suddenly remembered the first time she and Push had met. He'd used an oversized warhammer that had splashed bad guys very successfully, and the underlying weren't obvious at first; of course it had caught her attention! She sat up and leaned forward, eyes sparkling suddenly. "Yes! That warhammer from November! Is it around? Can I take a look? What's the energy it works with?"

[Quinn]

Push blinked at her enthusiasm, then laughed, shaking his own head. He pushed himself out of his chair, walking to one of the doors at the rear of the room.

"Good grief...y'know, those were close to the exact same questions I asked when I got the damn thing?"

He pulled one door open, revealing a storage room stuffed with parts, crates, an armored manhole, a messenger bag on a hanger, and the hammer. Picking it up as lightly as he would a feather, he carried it over slung on one shoulder and thumbed at the ceiling.

"C'mon, we better do this up in the garage where there's more room."

[Raveled]

Jessica left her coffee on the table and hurried up the staircase behind Tom, almost chivving him along in her hurry to get upstairs and examine the hammer. Any gloom seemed to have been dispersed by the opportunity to learn more about an interesting bit of tech. "Questions you asked? So you didn't make the hammer yourself? Who did? Are they still around? Can I talk to them?" Standing in the middle of the garage, she looked around for something to rest the weapon on. A well-equipped lab table would be ideal, but since one wasn't available...

Jessica hurried to a heavy machine which seemed to be mainly several thick chains connected to an overhanging arm. She knew it was mainly used to remove engines from cars, but she figured it would be able to handle the hammer easily enough.

[Quinn]

Tom lifted up the hammer, placing it in the chains, which actually creaked and groaned as he let go. The strain was actually visible on the metal, and he motioned for Jessica to take a look.

"Way back when I used to tussle with this guy named Professor Wyrd. Sorry, The Notorious! Professor Wyrd!" He grinned and shouted The Notorious, causing it to echo around the large garage room. "It always irritated him like crazy when you didn't add that. Anyway, he was a fun guy to fight sometimes, and he really did have good intentions, even if the way he was goin' about them qualified him for 'bad guy' status."

He patted the head of the hammer, smiling as he reminisced.

"Said he'd unlocked the secrets of combining magic and technology, he called it WyrdTech. I dunno if it was genuine, but he had a lot of funky gear, I mean a *lot* of funky gear. So one time he makes a whole pile of giant golems out of metal and wood, said it would revolutionize law enforcement. Except these things worked off of the principle of arson, murder, and jaywalking all being equal. Which he only figured out after one tried to squash a bystander with a car. Anyway, my usual blasts weren't doing squat against these things, and the guy actually tried a 'stop, I am your creator!' Does that ever work?"

Push shrugged, pulling up a wheeled stool and sitting on it, leaning back onto a toolbox behind him as he rattled off the hammer's history.

"I hauled him outta the way before that golem turned him into a smear on the pavement, and the two of us had to retreat back to his lab to come up with a plan. Yeah, it was 'enemy mine' and all that, and he was not happy about it. But we needed a giant can opener, and he threw together some parts and came up with...that. It conducts and amplifies any kinetic energy that I shove into it using both magic enhancements and tech boosters, and there are wards on it to ensure only a person who can manipulate kinetic energy can lift it. Otherwise, you'd need a forklift to carry that thing."

The chains creaked somewhat ominously, and he smirked. The kineticist seemed a lot more animated when telling the story, it was one of his better memories. For all that Wyrd was a 'bad guy', he was still a hell of a lot of fun to recall.

"So we took down the golems, saved the city, and I gave Wyrd a bit of a head start before chasing him down and chucking him in a squad car. Kept the hammer. As for if you can talk to him..." He shrugged. "Haven't seen him since I left...well, where I came from. So...I dunno."

[Raveled]

Jessica crouched down so she was eye-level with the hammer in its chain hammock, listening to Tom's quick history of the weapon while she gave it a visual inspection, not even touching it yet. "Villain tech," she commented. "Racy." She didn't press him on the details, but made a not to look up Professor Wyrd in all the usual databases; if he was serving time at the moment, perhaps they could have a little sit-down.

After a couple minutes of close inspection, the young genius sat back on her heels. "So, what exactly can you do with the hammer that you can't do without it?" She knew that Tom had powers above and beyond owning a cool hammer, so if she was going to deduce how it worked, first she needed to know what exactly it could do. "Actually, while we're on the subject, how exactly do your powers work, if you don't mind me asking?"

[Quinn]

Push stroked his chin for a moment, pondering as he looked at the hammer.

"Well, like I said before, it was made as a giant can opener. My regular blasts are all well and good sometimes, but the hammer gives me that little extra oomph I need to get past, say...a solid steel door, or an opponent's force field, by taking my own physical strength (which isn't that much, really) into account, as well as a focus for the energy. Like I said, it's bascially magic technology, some parts of it conduct kinetic energy to make it so that only a manipulator of the stuff can lift it, other enchantments conducted through the tech augment the energy like I just described."

Jessica inquiring as to the nature of his powers surprised him, but he shrugged and stuck to the boilerplate answer he and Mike Sharpe had come up with all those years back.

"I manipulate kinetic energy, for lack of a better term, I'm a kinetic battery. I can leech energy from moving objects, though I'm still working on hitting that level where everything is still moving, maybe molecular or subatomic, though I don't think I'd get much energy from those....sorry, I'm rambling. Like I said, I siphon off movement energy from objects or living beings, whether through touch or at a distance, and I can store it in my body. Those blasts you see me throw, that's me releasing the energy in a concentrated form. As far as I can tell, it's concentrating the energy that creates the warps and static in the air when I make them, but I'm not sure. This kind of science wasn't my strong point, I'm just a gear head."

He eschewed the information that he could use his own energy, as informing her of the side effects he'd discovered probably would disconcert her greatly. And you didn't exactly want it to get around that overuse could result in neural shock, that would just be a bad idea.

[Raveled]

"So if you're a big kinetic battery... Than maybe this is the same thing?" Jessica squeezed her sinuses, working through the consequences. "I mean, the hammer just enhances what you can already do, right? Maybe Wyrd figured out how you siphon off kinetic energy and applied it to the hammer, so when you use it you have more energy to draw on. And probably created the whole thing out of some super-reinforced material so you don't break it apart the first time you swing it into a wall." She stood up and rested her thumb on the 'blade' of the hammer, careful to keep away from the edge. "Do you have to sharpen it? And do you mind if I took a sample of the material back to the Lab, for analysis? Or you could bring the whole thing in, actually; I'd be interested in attaching some numbers to your energy-siphoning."

[Quinn]

Push shrugged, thumbing the edge of the back-blade.

"So far as I can tell, that's just ornamentation. Blade's blunt, and I'm not sharpening it anytime soon, way too dangerous. Wyrd always did have a weird sense of the aesthetic."

When Jessica made her request, he leaned forward on his stool and looked at her intently, running the idea over in his mind. A lot of testing he'd done on his abilities were self-run, he had a whole pile of DVDs and videos hidden in the library with the results of those tests and notes on his abilities, but he'd never had it examined by an expert. Given his life situation, he'd never really ran into any geniuses of tech or biology that weren't either trying to blow him up or blow various and sundry parts of a city up.

"Well...provided I get lunch, sure."