[Archived Short Story] A Stable Suit

*Soft tuneless whistling and the sound of some kind of leather material being rhythmically pierced over and over*

*The sound of numerous zippers being zipped and unzipped*

*A jet engine being lit off*

Jully Argyle smiles as her last commission due this month was handed off. It was a little complicated as JetSet wanted to use it in his jailbreak, but that is just the kind of thing that comes up when you sell to supers.

This sends her thoughts back to when she was just starting out. At that time, the idea of someone being neutral hadn’t quite been as mainstream. You were either a hero, a supervillain, or a civilian and if you had powers that third option just read as “supervillain in the making”. She sighs to herself and chuckles.

They really didn’t know what to do with her at the time, after all, she didn’t have any powers. Various supers and scientists had thrown every test they could think of. After all, to make gear for a super you had to be some sort of powered! Nevermind the fact that most people who make clothes for professional athletes never even come close to pro level in any sort of sport. Those brainy powered types still haven’t let it go, to be honest.

Nevermind the fact that half of them can’t invent stuff for others to use and even the ones that can tend to be stuck in their theme. Sure, making your own gear candy themed is a nice aesthetic, but Bone Crusher the Titan’s Son isn’t going to want to gallivant around in a licorice leotard. So, of course, after they finally let the whole “powered” issue be settled, they couldn’t handle the fact she sold suits to anyone.

A silly thing to worry about when after the powered started breaking out in large amounts, the whole issue of gun control sort of became a laughing stock. Now if someone wants to go and buy a sniper rifle, you can pick your brand down at the local home appliance store. In the past, such a weapon might only be really needed by the military.

Now though, when any random sewer rat could suddenly bulk up into a metal plated killing machine, the size of a rhino and the local low-level thug could suddenly develop diamond skin, a little extra firepower was needed by everyone. Sure, Jully would have preferred better laws around the issue, but even the most high-tech section of a city couldn’t keep out animals.

Admittedly, the lax laws certainly helped her keep her business above board. While Jully wasn’t an arms dealer, a super suit had some expectations of at least a little bit of firepower hidden away somewhere. Though this thought brought her attention to her next commission.

A rare commission at that, as it was the only one for the coming month. Not that it was complicated, but when an ultra-rich superhero decides to call themself the Millipede, they can afford to make the “milli” part a reality. Though the reason for it costing so much comes more from how brain-numbingly boring the task is than any tech.

Sure, figuring out how to make the many mechanical legs work with the guy’s water manipulation powers was interesting, but seriously? A thousand of them when most times Jully almost never had to duplicate something even when making a duplicate suit. After all, a new suit is a new chance to include a trick or two.

Also, what is up with the millipede theme? The guy has the ability to manipulate water! Water! Sure, that will allow him to control his suit through pneumatic mechanisms, but that is almost worse. The fact he could control things on that fine of a level means he could do so much more!

Jully takes a deep breath as she pulls out some micro-tubing and fires up her nano-CNC. This task was going to take some fancy microfluidics chips and garden variety pressure magnitude manipulators. The last bit because while she didn’t have powers, nothing said she couldn’t use their tech.

Jully sighs, so many of the powered think they’re oh so clever and so don’t register their inventions with the proper authorities. Even the heroes like to keep their secrets. At least it makes things cheaper not having to deal with licensing. Sure, she doesn’t quite understand how many of the things work, but then again, not many people understand their computer even if they’re the techy type and built their own.

By the end of the month, though, Jully felt she had a grasp on the principle behind the pmm. Shame that it seems most of it relies on the classic copout the super science types end up tapping into. The quantum realm can be used for miracles, sadly it tends to be used to cheat physics in the simplest ways.

It was like getting a wish spell in an rpg and using it for a handful of coins. Sure, it can do that, but there is just so much more it can do! But yeah, the pmm basically just tapped into the creator of the technology’s personal bandwidth in the quantum realm. Extra stupid because if the bloke ever kicked the bucket all the stuff would stop working. Though it did add another such bandwidth to her ever-growing collection.

The discovery did mean the costume took an extra few days of mind numbing work. She wasn’t going to hand off a costume that could stop working at the drop of a hat if some idiot calling themself the “Press Manip” gets themself offed. It did reduce the power output by a few percent of a percent because she had switched it over to just pull on the general quantum foam. Good thing the pmm mostly relied on gears, because of course it had to be gears.

The Millipede was happy with the work at least. That and he paid an absolute premium to make the insect parts absolutely realistic. An oddly easy task, though she wasn’t going to inform him that she used actual parts of a millipede for the suit. It wasn’t a normal millipede, mind you. Some sort of extra-dimensional world eater. Well, the swarm was a world eater.

The individual specimens weren’t too outstanding, but their exoskeletons made decent armor. At least it was decent for what The Millipede was paying. Plus, Jully had a bunch of the stuff stockpiled. Another little fact she wasn’t going to mention.

Once the Millipede left, Jully pressed a button, and her chair leaned back. Then the windows closed and a security system activated as the chair lowered into the ground. She was planning on taking the next month off, always had been.

Of course, Jack knew her well enough to call about halfway through to ask for something “simple”. Jully never could take a proper vacation. She might not have been a Mad Scientist, but she was a mad scientist and so her hands got itchy.

Jack’s request was actually somewhat simple. The trick to it was that it was a completely new thing. He had “picked up” a super suit from an alternate future timeline. Nasty piece of work that place and now not anyone’s problem until someone manages to bring it back from non-existence.

Anyway, Jack wanted her to deconstruct the suit and see if there was anything to incorporate it into a new suit for him. Of course, the new suit would be a separate commission. Though even if that didn’t pan out, the fact the suit continued to work despite the place and time of origin didn’t exist anymore. That meant at least something in the suit used some core principle of a prime reality, likely stolen from a present timeline currently going through an integration.

Once Jully got the suit into her investigative lab, she started some very in-depth scanning. Of which the first thing she figured out was that the suit actually came from a newly primed past alternate shifted to the present. An odd combination as time shifted dimensions tended to sub-realms of a true present realm. Kind of like that old saw about there being a forgotten world in the center of the planet.

That wasn’t true, of course, but there was a small realm adjacent to our own, which was shockingly similar to that. Well, not really all that shocking when you realize the place was the source of all those stories. Same with the realm of the mole people and any number of other similar subterranean bits of nonsense. Sure, there were a few similar places connected to the surface, but being able to see what was around you on the surface made them less likely to connect.

Next, Jully found something contradictory in the suit. The fact it shouldn’t be working. Because yes, some of the tech came from a prime realm and didn’t involve any cooky quantum mad science, magic mad science, or any of the similar yet completely separate methods through which science can go off the rails and into nonsense land. Really, we should have been thankful when our biggest problem with compatibility was the old programmer problem of “it worked on my system”.

Though once she figured out what that piece of madtech did, she was tempted to torch it and tell Jack it self-destructed. That, however, was against her ethics. Since he trusted her to deconstruct it, she needed to keep that trust intact. So she called Jack over and he of course showed up in his “street clothes”. Very loose with that definition as it was basically a reinforced set of Jester clothes in the style of a tailored suit.

Jully invited him down into her most info-secure bunker. No one else knew about it before she invited Jack into it and once this was done it would be destroyed and a new bunker constructed. Once all the security measures were in place, she turned to Jack who at this point had very much lost his characteristic grin. “So we have a problem.”

Jack licked his lips as they had gone dry on him at some point. “So, uh, I guess I’m not going to need a new suit?”

Jully sighs, “You could, if you’re willing to let our dimension find out about the tech involved.”

Jack’s breath hissed through his teeth, “What’s the damage?”

Jully gestures toward the super suit, which is currently in a large secure case along with every bit of diagnostic tech she had used as well as the walls, ceiling, and floor of the place she did the checks. “What you have there is a super suit made mostly of one of the largest and most varied collections of madtech that shouldn’t work.

“Tech pilfered from across numerous destroyed realms which had been invented by a prestigious who’s who of very dead mad scientists. Their alts and dupes of course since these weren’t prime realms, but they’re still nasty to deal with. That and users of tech, which very much required the originator to be alive.”

Jack’s eyes are in full on squint mode. “But the suit works. I’m not a techy or a madder, but I was more than able to confirm that.”

Jully nods, “I said the suit was mostly made of that nonsense. There was one single piece of true tech, proper tech! In fact, capitalize that, this is True Tech! It should work in any realm within a few magnitudes of divergence. You might need to go far enough that humans can’t even develop. Not didn’t develop, can’t develop. Find a place like that and you have a small chance that this tech would stop working at full capacity.”

Jack takes a step back, “That’s almost on the level of the seven simple machines!”

Jully grimaces, “Eh, I wouldn’t quite put it on that level? Those things continue to work until even the basic rules of reality have warped. After all, to make a ramp stop working you’re going to need something fully messed up happening. Like, life as we know it now in all the strange variety could not exist.”

Jack rolls his eyes, “Fair enough, now get to the point.”

Jully shrugs, “It’s a stabilizer.”

Jack frowns, “And? There are a ton of different kinds of stabilizer. What does it stabilize?”

Jully, “It is a universal stabilizer. Attach it to a building? It won’t fall down in even the most serious earthquake. Attach it to a camera and it works better than any known steadicam. Attach it to some madtech while it still is working? That madtech will continue to work even if the creator dies, their realm is reduced to complete non-existence, and all evidence that it ever existed besides that tech was erased from reality.”

Jack turns to a big red button, “Does that destroy everything related to this knowledge?”

Jully nods, “I’ve even got it set so that the knowledge will be erased from the mind of everyone in this room. Then we get ejected and the room is dumped into a sun in the process of being absorbed into a black hole for which I have confirmed that it not only doesn’t have a connected white hole, but that it is a reality sink. After all, something needs to be removing matter when reality manipulators and so on keep adding it.”

Jack slaps the button.

...

Jully looks up at her ceiling and frowns. Not often does she manage to relax for an entire month. By this point, something should have come up to distract her. The fact nothing did meant that something did and so she puts it out of mind. Really, a full month of vacation was always the most stressful of times.