I shivered a little at that thought. Bakuda had been able to make bombs that threatened hundreds, thousands, or even theoretical millions of lives. Bonesaw worked on one subject at a time, but her ability to make actual monsters and set worse things in motion made her scarier, in my books.

I distracted myself from thinking too much about that, focusing instead on how that the names I was pulling up were so divided along the gender lines. Chariot, Armsmaster and Kid Win on one side, Bakuda, Bonesaw and Lookout on the other.

If I thought about it harder, putting effort into finding exceptions to that gender rule, extending my line of thought to tinkers I didn’t know but could make guesses about… it was really hard to imagine Dragon talking about the minutiae of her work with anyone that she wasn’t very close to. Past a certain point, professionalism had to take over. She couldn’t risk revealing weaknesses, right?

Trainwreck from Brockton Bay had been both a Case Fifty-Three and a tinker, reportedly. The guy had taken the oversized silicone testicles meant for hanging off the back of pickup trucks and incorporated them as an ‘easter egg’ in his power armor at one point, to be revealed if the heavy metal ‘kilt’ of his power armor moved the wrong way—usually when he vented enough steam. No surprise that he’d ended up with the Merchants when everything had gone to hell. I hadn’t interacted with him in any casual capacity, but I was on the fence about whether his demeanor meant he’d be less guarded about talking tech, or if the fact that he’d had to build his Case Fifty-Three body made it too personal.

Had I been able to go to college and study parahumans—it still stung that I hadn’t—even something as simple as the dispositions and presentations of tinkers could be something really, really interesting to look into for a paper.

I wanted to be able to do research and dig for answers. We’d already unraveled some of the big mysteries, and by some tragedy, we couldn’t actually work on them. We weren’t sharing information.

Time enough at last.

Either way, it tied back to my general observation: as Bakuda’s personality had been colored by the same traits that made her ramble and rave about tech to even her captors, Armsmaster had taken the taciturn tinker approach and extrapolated it to the rest of his personality. He stayed by the door, silent, knuckles of one gauntlet still resting on the frame, and he volunteered no small talk.

In fairness, I’d given him something to think about. The Leviathan attack had to be something that weighed heavily on him.