The Reality Engineers
Dizzy Weatherspark built a suit of powered armor in a university basement. This is the kind of thing that sounds impressive until you learn that the university didn't know about it, the basement wasn't technically hers, and the suit's first successful test ended in a small fire and a large amount of paperwork.
But it worked. For forty-seven seconds, it worked - and for the first time since she was eight years old, Dizzy ran under her own power. Which, if you think about it, is really all you need to know about the kind of person she is. The fire was secondary. The paperwork was irrelevant. The running was the point.
Her team - and they are very much her team, in the way that a litter of enthusiastic puppies belongs to whoever happens to be holding the leash at the time - call themselves the Reality Engineers. There's Jetta, who plays a guitar that is also, depending on your perspective, either a musical instrument or a localized violation of several laws of physics. There's Terry, who has recently developed the ability to move objects with his mind and is handling it with the quiet calm of someone who has not yet fully processed what is happening. And there's Misto, whose code does things that code should not be able to do, and who would very much like everyone to stop asking him about it.
They built their inventions separately. They assumed - because people always assume this - that they were working alone.
They were not working alone.
Something has been distorting reality across the city in ways that look suspiciously like all four of their technologies running in concert. And a man named Von Wolfenstein, who is far too old, far too patient, and far too well-dressed to be anything other than trouble, has taken an interest.
The thing about reality is that most people think of it as a solid. A given. A floor you can trust to be there when you put your foot down. The Reality Engineers are about to discover that it's more of a rough draft - and someone has been making edits.
Whether those edits are an improvement depends entirely on your definition of "improvement," your tolerance for things that shouldn't exist, and how you feel about the color blue-purple.
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