We stopped at a truck stop for lunch. It was a surprisingly nice place, with a large sitting area with two microwaves, a toaster oven, a large tv, and several vending machines on top of a back room for traveling truckers to do their laundry. It made for a nice place to stop and get some lunch at.

I elected to stay outside, as I really didn't want to shock anyone inside with my presence. Shadow Stalker, Ergo, and Biohazard both decided to stay behind with me as I found a shady tree to sit under and rest my wings. It had almost been two hours and my wings were absolutely throbbing from the weight of my three passengers. I took out a vigor potion and slurped it down before taking a magic one for good measure.

Biohazard took out her fuel tanks, large cylinders she was keeping in her shoulder blade area, and handed them to Ergo who immediately took out a toolkit and started fiddling with them. Biohazard walked over to a picnic table and opened her arm up and began doing some repairs on her thrusters. Shadow Stalker sat down on the grass as looked like she might fall asleep with her back against the tree. Purity decided she was going to stay as high as she could to avoid attention. Leaving Cheshire, Desh, and Flower Knight to disappear inside and shock some truck stop attendant.

"So Ergo," I began in an attempt to start a conversation. "You were a villain first right?"

"Yes,' he answered simply.

"Right," I said slowly. "And what do you think about being a hero then?"

"I don't really mind," Ergo answered. "So long as I get a lab to continue my studies I don't care what I'm called."

"So why become a villain in the first place?" I asked. "It seems like a lot more work."

"Well, I didn't have much of a choice," Ergo answered. He lifted up the fuel cell and started to adjusted something on the bottom of it. "Biohazard has always been a little... misunderstood. And when she got her powers, no one really got the gravity of how badly she wanted to improve herself. The two of us were in trouble with the law before I even understood what was happening."

"Oh," I said. So Biohazard was the only reason he had become a villain at all? I guess I could understand that, but there were just some things about Biohazard I found rather unnerving. I decided to change the subject.

"So, your power," I started. "You said you wanted a closer look at The Sentient Kinder gas, but shouldn't your power already tell you how it works?"

"My power tends to be really good with 'how does' questions, but not so well with 'what is'," he answered. "I understand that Kinder gas works by releasing a dense combustible gas cloud, but I don't know what compounds they're using to create the gas. I don't know what release mechanism they use on the canisters that allows the can to stay sealed. But for all I know, they could be taking the first steps toward reproducing Tinker tech."

"Reproducing Tinker tech?" I asked.

"A running theory I've been working on," Ergo said, setting aside the fuel canister and standing up to pace. "I've been trying to understand the barrier between Tinker tech and normal tech for as long as I've had my power and I've made some significant strides."

"So what's the theory?"

"Good question," Ergo said with a clap of his hands, his tone suddenly shifting from his calm demeanor to excited. "Counter question, do you understand how research and development works?"

"Not really," I answered honestly.

"Simple really," Ergo said with a wave of his hand. "A scientist picks an area of study and spends their entire life studying and experimenting with it. They pick up interns and apprentices they teach everything they know along the way, and when the scientist retires or otherwise the next person in line picks up the slack. Scientific advancement is a several generation effort spanning across the globe. Scientists that branch off into new areas of study only ever get the low hanging fruit of the new area else they are particularly brilliant. But past that is could take generations to actually make progress after that. And that is only half the story!" Ergo declared with a raised finger.

"In something amazing like, say air travel, you have whole teams of engineers for the plane engines alone. And then maybe even a hundred more to build the rest of the plane and all its parts. And that is just normal flight let alone something as complex as space travel! Tinker powers are shoving the innovation of several generations of combined global research into a single person with the amalgamated talents of entire teams of engineers.

"Bur of course, if that were true," Ergo spun around to face me as he had paced several feet in the other direction. "Then someone with the right amount of intelligence could conceivably discover the processes that makes Tinker tech work by slowly gaining more and more of an understanding of how its basic functions work!"

He held his hands up in an impressive pose when he seemed to realize he had run out of things to say. Having once again paced several feet away from me, he spun around with his hands still in the air as if to see if I was impressed at all. I heard clapping behind me and looked to see Biohazard clapping one bone hand against a flesh covered one while giggling.

"Wow," Imp said as she popped into existence next to me. "You are a giant nerd."

"It's the age of the geek," he answered, dropping his hands and offering a light smile. "And you try not being excited about science when you are probably the only person in the world with a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics and gravity."

"You still don't know what an electron is," Cheshire said, approaching us with several sub sandwiches in hand, Flower Knight walking next to her with all the chips in hand.

"That's your job," Ergo countered.

"Have you two discovered the origins of the universe yet?" Imp asked dryly.

"Oh don't be silly," Ergo said. "We discovered that only three hours into our first conversation."

"Black holes reaching punching the through the fabric of space and time into other universes to create white holes that made the Big Bang and what not," Cheshire said with a wave of her hand. "Not all that important, really."

"You two are kind of weird," Biohazard said, walking up and plucking a sandwich from Cheshire's arm before opening her mouth to about three times the size it should have been and eating the sandwich whole. Including the plastic it was wrapped in.

Most of us rolled our eyes.

Purity came down from the sky and joined us, my father coming back from the truck stop a few moments later. We then spent about twenty minutes just eating and conversing. It was nice to take a break from things for as short as time as it was. As a group, we all meshed surprisingly well together. In a larger conversation Imp and Purity shot back and forth with my father and Cheshire. Biohazard had a habit of asking if something morally dubious was an okay thing to do which tended to elicit different responses from everyone as to what was and wasn't acceptable. But then Flower Knight start talking with Biohazard about possible ways for them to combine their powers, which got Cheshire interested, which got Ergo excited, which lead to a four-way conversation combining biokinesis, Biohazard's specialty, and various complex sciences that left every other person here really confused.

I edged towards them and, just to see what would happen, I said,

"Think about putting magic circuits in the creations."

About five minutes later Cheshire and Ergo had crippling Thinker headaches.

The rest of us were able to enjoy a much slower conversation up until the time we decided it was time to leave.

Arriving at Boston we ran into our first issue; The Sentient wasn't active in this city.

On top of the fact that we didn't have Will's insight on structures here, although Cheshire and Ergo said they would work very similar to Brockton Bay, they weren't out in the open for us to interrogate. Which would have left me at a wall, but thankfully I had much smarter people with me.

We all landed on top of a skyscraper to discuss it, with me lifting Ergo and Shadow Stalker with my magic to bring him with us.

"We have a few options," Cheshire said. "The Sentient had spent years beforehand in Brockton Bay preparing traps like those holes for Hookwolf. Ergo and I could Think about the different threats in the city and how normal humans might fight them, and then we could investigate each possibility and hope we get lucky."

"Or," Ergo said, "We can head to the PRT and root out their moles to see if they know anything. But they typically don't know much about the main operations. We'd get a few names at best."

"Boston is the main city the operate out of," Cheshire said, putting a hand to her chin thoughtfully. "They probably have some capes in the local Protectorate they haven't cut ties with completely. That is also an option."

"All of those sound really time consuming with no real guarantee of working," Desh said.

"And stupidly boring too," Shadow Stalker said. "I thought we were going actually do something, not just snoop around."

"Well, there is another option," Ergo said slowly.

"We can go to Accord," Cheshire explained. "He is a Thinker villain in the city, the Thinker protocols would actually put them on his radar. The blind spots in his operation would be pretty alarming to him."

"Only issue," Ergo said. "Is that he might be extremely offended by your very existence." Ergo and Cheshire stared at me and heard Imp snicker somewhere behind me.

"What?" I demanded. "I know I'm a little strange but hate my existence? Isn't that just a little excessive."

"It is just the way he is," Cheshire said. "But it is up to you, what do you want to do?"

I was thrown off by the way she asked me, and then I realized that everyone was staring at me. They were waiting for directions, I realized. From me.

When did I become the leader of this group? I mean, I knew I was probably the strongest and most versatile here, but that didn't mean anything. Cheshire and Ergo were smarter, Purity had more experience, my father had been in charge of people for years, Shadow Stalker…. Alright maybe she wasn't as qualified, but even Biohazard had more experience than I.

It really struck me right there that I've only been doing this for a couple of weeks. A month or two at best, I wasn't keeping very good track. Yet I had done so much in that time that made it feel like it had been longer.

"Why are you looking at me?" I asked weakly, nervousness sinking into my stomach.

"Well, you are the one that brought us together, in a sense," Ergo stated. Cheshire nodded in agreement.

"Yeah," she said. "You helped me escape Coil, I learned that by the way, you gave Flower Knight there an escape from her increasing dysfunctional family and gave her a reason to not self-destruct at her job, Desh is only in it to help you, Purity and Imp came to you for help against these people, and Shadow Stalker has a strength fetish."

"Hey, you-"

"Point is," Cheshire interrupted her. "Ergo and his sister are the only ones here that you didn't directly help or give a reason to come along. You're in charge by default, you also make a great mascot."

I hung my head and sighed. Even if I could argue that logic, I was sure Cheshire would have a counter for everything I said. But there was a strange feeling of… being pleased by being in charge. I could do this, I was sure of it.

"Alright," I said. "Cheshire, why don't you make a list of all the different ways you can think The Sentient might fight the local threats and give it to Purity and Imp to investigate. Desh, can you walk around town in your civilian identity and use your rats to search all the warehouses and otherwise to see if you can find something?" He nodded.

---

A/N: So I went out of my way to pre-write some of the chapters for the next couple of days so I could take a break from this and work a little on my other projects. Which is why I posted this second chapter today, to give those projects some shameless self-promotion.

The Paranorms is a more OC heavy story, but stays pretty close to canon events. A girl named Riza triggers during the Leviathan attack with the ability to give life anime physics. She befriends Skitter and joins the Undersiders for a bit.

The Story of Night is actually the first story I had ever written, starting several ago when I was a very, very, very bad writer and now I'm re-doing it with the skills I've acquired since. It is a RWBY fic with Ruby as the main character, but she encounters an OC named Nox with more than a few dysfunctional behaviours. With the introduction of gods I attempt to slowly upheave and explain how to RWBY world functions in a cohesive way.

Thank you all for reading and please at least check those other fics out to see if they interest you!