"There was no long-term, and trying to cling to one would only spoil it all."
This article contains spoilers regarding the ending of Worm and plot of the sequel. Click here to visit a redacted version, although remember that all articles contain minor spoilers.
Kenzie Martin[11][12] is a hero known publicly as Lookout and formerly as Optics.
Personality
For better or, often, the worse Kenzie is a people person. She likes making connections and helping people, to the point that a former teammate of hers called it a "people addiction".[13]
Kenzie tended to think everybody and everything was "pretty neat", which could devalue her compliments somewhat.[14][15] She was almost always ebullient and enthusiastic, even painfully so, but when discussing her fears she spoke more slowly and deliberately and tended to talk passively or passive-aggressively.[15]
She felt that she tended to drive almost everyone away as a result of a lack of boundaries.[15] She would go to extreme lengths to please others and receive positive reactions while often endangering herself in the process, to the point of losing hair and vomiting from stress. Examples of this include devoting all her spare time to watch camera feeds, pulling consecutive all nighters to work on school projects, and at one point volunteering to be a replacement for a woman's dead daughter after seeing it online. [16]
Heart_Shaped_Pupil's typing style was unusually sloppy,[17] with lots of typos and extensive use of emojis and abbreviations.[18] She displayed some familiarity with PHO's search function, but seemingly less than Strange Mammal's.[18] Strange_Mammal claimed that K would almost certainly check how long Mangled_Wings had been online and catch her in a minor lie.[19]
Kenzie was familiar with details regarding the true nature of passengers.[20]
Due to her young age she has a hard time grasping that others[21] would have a hard time using her tinker technology.[22]
Relationships
Baltimore Protectorate
Kenzie had largely alienated the members of her old Wards team, a fact she regretted. However, she did discuss the possibility of one day working with her old leader again.[8]
Treefort
Heart_Shaped_Pupil was a member of the Treefort_Lookout chatroom on Parahumans Online, a room for discussing current events and searching for info. She seemed friendly with the users there, who provided them with information.
She was also a member of the connected chatrooms Pillowfort_Lazytalk (where they discussed their personal life) and Snowfort_Mission.
However, in reality the chatrooms ware filled entirely with chat-bots Kenzie had constructed herself, that acquired their information from automated PHO searches.[8] She was in the process of constructing chatbots that would mimic her teammates' conversation styles when she was forced to disable the system.[23][24]
Chatroom Group
Heart_Shaped_Pupil is a member of a group of parahumans that primarily communicate via PHO.
HSP's writing style irritated their teammate Strange_Mammal.[17]
She professed to be an admirer of Mangled_Wings,[25] and had agreed to work with them as an independent villain at a later date, although she was initially unsure if Mangled-Wings was serious about this. Mangled_Wings considered them one of the few people worthy of her attention and investment.[8]
She claimed possible romantic interest in Strange_Mammal.[7] In conversation with Strange_Mammal, HSP revealed that she had been observing Mammal's private conversations with other users. Mammal had known they were being watched for some time, noting that their stalker was too skilled not to be watching their activities on PHO.[7]
Parents
Kenzie keeps them in makeshift 'rehab program' under threat of sending them to prison again. They hate her enough to try to kill her regularly, despite known dead man's switch.[26]
Appearance
Civilian
Kenzie was a young black "tween" with long skinny limbs and large eyes, proportionately to her size. She had "kinky", glossy black hair. She was the same height as Chris.[14] When she was happy, she would bounce one foot, like a dog wagging it's tail,[15] as well as other types of fidgeting.
On one occasion, she wore her hair in two buns at the back and with a star-shaped hairpin to keep it in place, with a blue corduroy dress and sequinned shirt. Her general appearance was immaculate, with carefully-chosen clothes that were freshly ironed, fashionable and matching (in colour and with a running "star" theme throughout), and hair that looked like it had taken at least half an hour. She noted that she wanted to look good because she was meeting Victoria for the first time.[14]
Cape
Originally she wore a type of optical camouflage as Optics along with a high tech mask and oversized gloves.[27][28]
Later after taking the identify of Looksee Kenzie wore a green jumpsuit and helmet which also had various settings.[29]
Abilities and Powers
Looksee is a tinker[8][30] who has stated she specializes in cameras and immobile terminals, with little ability for offense or defense.[31] Her former team leader Houndstooth, however, described her as a (counter)surveillance tinker.
Her power was useful, so much so that she worried she might be kidnapped by people seeking to exploit it.[32] Chris stated that she would make a terrifying villain should she choose to.[15]
Kenzie was able to construct a parallel Parahumans Online server, giving her a faster connection and allowing her to view private information on the site. She also constructed a group of relatively sophisticated chatbots (see Treefort above), although she stated that this was not her specialty, and she was not capable of creating true AI.[8] She claimed that she would likely be able to construct immobile teleportation terminals, although they would require regular maintenance.[33] She could fix her devices and make them work better[34] simply by hitting them,[35] likely assisted by her Tinker power.[36] She claimed that she could probably defuse a bomb, provided she was there to do it and not over a phone or similar.[37]
Kenzie took pride in her skill at paperwork when she was with the Wards.[14]
Equipment
Kenzie had a tinker workshop she used to work on her technology, first located in Baltimore and later at her home.[30][38] It may have been the same workshop used to maintain Sveta's prosthetics.[39] Her workshop needed to "warm up" before she could use it, so she would call ahead to have her parents start the process.[38]
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History
Background
Both of her parents are high-functioning psychopaths. Once their abusive behavior was revealed Kenzie was send into foster care.
Aerobat talked to her when she was placed in state care for the first time and offered some souvenirs and his contacts. Later, she called him immediately after her trigger event.[26]
It is known that Kenzie bounced around foster homes before and after her trigger. Her trigger was a result of her recontacting her first foster parent, which she previously unwittingly framed and alienated, while trying to ensure adoption.[26]
Given her over gregariousness she has been known to get into several very embarrassing incidents with people in both her civilian and cape life.
Despite all of this Kenzie was considered a prospective candidate for a Watchdog project. She was put under strict regiment of camps and exercises with frequent relocation, which brought attention of Youth Guard. Youth Guard forced PRT to stop frequent travels and over-training.[71]
From that moment in the spring of 2013, at ten years old, Kenzie was assigned the Baltimore Wards team alongside capes named Aven (or AvenG), Houndstooth, 10-59 and Pigeonhole. This ended abruptly with Gold Morning.[8][72]
Gold Morning
She was stated to have participated in Gold Morning and "actually helped".[73] It's safe to assume that, as all involved tinkers, she participated in the building of inter-dimensional cannon, that finished off Zion's true body.
Glow-worm
At some point, she met up with the other members of the Chatroom group.
When she asked to meet Strange_Mammal privately and he refused, Kenzie revealed that she had been surveilling them and asked about details of their power.[7]
Kenzie used her Treefort bots to track Tattletale and Weld as assistance for her new teammates (of5 and Strange_Mammal, respectively).
Shortly afterward, Parahumans Online moderators discovered traffic from her Treefort (see above) and asked her to shut the shop down, since it provided undue stress to PHO network. When she volunteered to donate her DYI Parahumans Online server, they requested she shut that down as well because of security reasons.[74]
Early Ward
Met with a new coach and had a lot of fun practicing.
Was not looking forward to having her story told by someone else.
She was instrumental in the Mathers Compound Assault both postively in helping the capture of Mama Mathers, and negativly by cutting off Tattletale when the thinker wouldn't respond to her texts.[75]
Was able to get victoria to agree to come to dinner with her family.
Post-Fallen Fall
Was instrumental in saving portals.
Tried to use a doctored video to save Ashley from a trial.
Was able to use her past-camera to find a lead on the portal sabotage that acted as impetus for Breakthrough to stay together. The group's investigation took them to Earth N and the court of Lord of Loss. Before the group, calling itself Breakthrough, announced themselves Kenzie changed her cape name to Lookout at the last minute.
She later had Victoria come to her house but her parents embarrassed her.[76]
Trivia
- Kenzie displays behaviors symptomatic of an attachment disorder known as Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder or DSED. Depending on when her behavior started (i.e before the age of five), she could be reasonably diagnosed, and she could have been given appointments with Dr. Yamada. As a corollary, given Tristan and Ashley defense of Kenzie's behavior and improvement to Houndstooth Kenzie may actually be fine. This could only be their opinion though and the improvement is due to treatment from therapy with Yamada and similar.[77]
Fanart Gallery
References
- ↑ “Kanzi?”
“My name. I never liked having to explain it. I’d always have to spell it out.” - Excerpt from Torch 7.10 - ↑ 2.0 2.1 Dogtooth: Heya, optics. Good to see you.
[...]
Dogtooth: Heya, optics. - Glow-worm P.7 - ↑ Shade 4.1
- ↑ Shade 4.4
- ↑ Torch 7.8
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Shade 4.4
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Glow-worm P.6
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 Glow-worm P.7
- ↑ Pitch 6.7
- ↑ Torch 7.7
- ↑ AvenG: ?
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: Hi Aven. It’s Kenzie
AvenG: Oh. Kenzie M?
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: That me. - Glow-worm P.7 - ↑ Glare 3.2
- ↑ Houndstooth looked toward me and Tristan. “There was a time, about a year back, where I was talking to a teammate. He said a food addiction was the only addiction that you couldn’t go cold turkey on. You can’t not eat, and that’s hard, when the addiction makes dealing with food in moderation next to impossible. Immediately, I thought of Kenzie. I thought, within a second or two of him saying that, he was wrong, there was another addiction like that. You say she’s human, but she’s a people addict. She’s addicted to humans. You can’t expect a young girl to not interact with people, and you can’t expect her to deal with people in moderation.”
“And you think the way to solve that is to… minimize that interaction to the barest bones?” I asked.
“Over months and years, gradually loosen that belt. If the therapist okays it.”
I sighed.
“She’s doing exceptionally well,” Tristan said.
“You could hold a gun to my head, and I wouldn’t say she lacked a work ethic,” Houndstooth said. “She’s brilliant for her age, she’s good-hearted in her way, and she doesn’t deserve a thousandth of what she’s gone through. It’s heartbreaking and worrying.”
[...]
“Powers and agents don’t even really play into this,” Houndstooth said. “If you took away her powers and the influence of her agent today, I’d give you all the same warnings tomorrow.” - Excerpt from Shade 4.4 - ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 Flare 2.7
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 Flare 2.6
- ↑ Kenzie sat in her chair at the table-turned desk, the projector showing the camera’s image of Cedar Point. “Did you skip class to get here as quick as you did?” I asked. “No,” Kenzie said, not turning around. “I went to class, I stopped in at study hall at the start of lunch and asked if I could go early. They said okay. You can call if you need to check.” “I don’t need to check,” I said. “You’re honest.” “Sorry for all the emails. Sveta yelled at me. Well, she didn’t yell, but she came close. I sent her almost as many as I sent you.” “Did you eat lunch?” “It’s in my bag, in case I get hungry.” “Too nervous?” I asked. She turned around in her computer chair and smiled. “Yeah.” “Houndstooth wanted to make sure you were okay first. Making sure you weren’t getting too much homework,” I said. “He had some tips about how we should make sure you aren’t tinkering yourself to the bone after hours.” “It helps sometimes. Distracting myself with it.” “We should figure out a balance. He was suspicious you were staying up late, watching and rewatching camera feeds.” “When I can’t sleep it’s nice to be able to watch that stuff with my laptop beside me in the dark room. I doze off.” I nodded. “Did he say the embarrassing stuff?” “I don’t know what qualifies as embarrassing,” I said. “Problems with teachers, school. Tristan and Ashley defended you pretty fiercely.” “And you?” “I just want to figure out what needs to be figured out,” I said. “So everyone’s happy and healthy, and the team stays together and positive overall. I shared some of the good stuff I know of.” “Did he mention the old lady?” “I’m not sure.” “She was on the internet and she wanted a replacement for her dead daughter and I almost went with her, and then later we started thinking she killed her daughter. Embarrassing.” - Excerpt from Shade 4.4
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Heart_Shaped_Pupil: so x-ited to b working with u.
Strange_Mammal: @ K / Heart_Shaped_Pupil…
Strange_Mammal: …type like a grown up…
Strange_Mammal: …my eyes are already bleeding - Glow-worm P.3 - ↑ 18.0 18.1 of5: Wanted k actually.
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: yuss! \♥/
of5: you know this site. I want search terms to find some people. Articles, anything else. Would need to cover a lot of bases. Normal site search limits # of terms.
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: uh. that hard. you want packaged search string
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: i can try
Questionable_Mammal: you’re looking for others in your set?
of5: yes
Questionable_Mammal: I can make attempt. gimme time. you might want to fine tune after. - Glow-worm P.4 - ↑ Strange_Mammal: for your information…
Strange_Mammal: …others can see time you spend online on your profile. you spent longer than one hour…
Strange_Mammal: …you’ve been online all day.
Mangled_Wings: I am at the library. Something to do with that, I’d think.
Strange_Mammal: it doesn’t work that way. I am 95% sure.
Strange_Mammal: there is no need to lie, A
Strange_Mammal: the reason for this project is supposed to be we know each other
Strange_Mammal: K will find out if she does not already know. she pays attention to those things - Glow-worm P.3 - ↑ Heart_Shaped_Pupil: If you think about it, with powers and all, the center of your being could include the vast monster in another dimension that’s all hooked up into you. Passenger stuff. The center of mass could be in the middle of an alien god monster the size of a mountain or moon. I imagine it has the energy of a small star stored in it. - Glow-worm P.7
- ↑ Kid Win mentions, when modifying the earbud with Armsmaster’s lie detector, that anything he does will naturally be less elegant and the work will suffer for it. The same applies for anything in regular use with non-tinkers. - comment by Wildbow on Scourge 19.6.
- ↑ Tristan was still fiddling with Kenzie’s remote for the projector box.
“It doesn’t make any sense. Why isn’t it easier to move forward and back in time?”
“Because the box doesn’t perceive time, you dummy. It perceives images.”
“Why not have it perceive things like time, so you can go backward and forward in time without doing… whatever arcane thing you’re doing right now?”
“Because if it perceived time,” Kenzie said, patiently, her focus on the smartphone remote, “Then it wouldn’t perceive images. And that would be a dumb thing for a projector box that works with images. Dummy.”
“You can stop calling me a dummy now.”
“I will if you stop being dumb. This stuff is obvious.” - Excerpt from Glare 3.3 - ↑ Executioner404: /Kill Goatfish
Goatfish: WIP_Capbot is disconnecting…
Goatfish has left the conversation.
Executioner404: /kill Shameful_Manatee
Shameful_Manatee: WIP_Chrisbot is disconnecting…
Shameful_Manatee has left the conversation. - Glow-worm P.7 - ↑ *HSP goes idle again. She returns to chat and an 'Executioner' joins chat, doing the rest of the /Kill work. HSP changes the channel name and deletes the text from the topic, then leaves while the executioner continues its work with her gone. - Synopsis by Wildbow
- ↑ Glow-worm P.3
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 Interlude 7.x II
- ↑ Glare 3.2
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 I could see Kenzie. She looked tiny, a singular lens dominating her mask. Her arms were very skinny, and her hands were buried in gauntlets that made each hand look the size of her head, each with a lens on the back. “There you are, as Optics. With camera hands?”
“I called them mugshots. They weren’t very good and they never let me use them outside of training. If you squint, you can see my flash gun.”
“I can. That’s really cool,” I said. “The old team.”
“I miss them. There’s Avian, Stungun, Keychain, Blush, and there’s Houndstooth. And that’s Mayday, you see, and Turtleshell, Aerobat… and some I never even got to have conversations with. They were always busy.”- Excerpt from Torch 7.10 - ↑ Shade 4.5
- ↑ 30.0 30.1 “They weren’t a horror story for me. They said I was being moved around too much and I needed to go somewhere to stay. Not going to the fun camps and training sucked, but I went back to Baltimore, and I got to set up my workshop, fi-nuh-ly.”
“Workshop, huh?”
“Kenzie,” Mrs. Yamada spoke up. She still sat at the desk. “You might want to be mindful of what you reveal. I’ll get into that more when things get started, but take a moment and think before revealing things that might tie into your cape identity, or identifying parts of your background.”
“Yes, Mrs. Yamada,” Kenzie said. Then she leaned close to me, whispering, “I took a moment to think and I think I’m safe telling you I’m a tinker.” - excerpt from Flare 2.5 - ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 “Are you hiding a jetpack inside that raincoat, or are those rocket boots?” I asked.
“I wish,” Kenzie said. “I can’t do that stuff. I make cameras and inconveniently big boxes. My best stuff is inconveniently big, box-shaped cameras.”
“Big boxes?” I asked.
“The term in my file is emplacements. Terminals, tech, and computers big enough they’re hard to move around. Like turrets, but I can’t really make good weapons or defensive things.” - Excerpt from Flare 2.7 Cite error: Invalid<ref>tag; name "II2.7 e7" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ Heart_Shaped_Pupil: you’re a smart guy and you were a good leader. you know how these things work. you know my power has its uses. others would kidnap me for it. I am offering myself to you and you would be stupid to turn me down. - Glow-worm P.7
- ↑ “Kind of confident,” she said, sounding anything but. “I haven’t done teleportation or breaking movement devices before, but if I made it a series of emplacements and built them big, then if I traveled once a week or so to visit the send-receives and make sure they don’t break down, it might work.” - excerpt from Flare 2.7
- ↑ - Excerpt from Torch 7.5
- ↑ I looked at Kenzie.
She hit a button on her camera. When it didn’t boot, she hammered it with her hand a few times.
The projector came on. The two missing members of our group appeared. Ashley was projected, her lower body a static black dress. She’d be sitting on a bus right now, a laptop beside her, to capture her face and anything she said. - Excerpt from Pitch 6.7 - ↑ 36.0 36.1 If you have a tinker who makes armor/powersuits that have white hot metal as a key feature, yes, he could theoretically equip his teammates, but so much of it is intuitive that it's hard for that tinker to really specify some of the particulars.
There are a lot of little things that go wrong in the field, or things you need to adapt to. Did a cape slime the entire battlefield? Maybe that affects coolant venting, which affects the cremation fist's charge-up rate. That affects the hyperthermal reactor which means the entire suit starts feeling sluggish. Really easy to fix if it's the tinker, but nobody else will have a clue of the big picture. Did something get broken? If it's not the tinker using it, then it's going to be broken until the tinker gets their hands on it again or you might even have to abandon it. If the tinker's in the pilot's seat, then it might be a simple adjustment here or cinching something shut there.
Generally when gear is given out, it's heavily restricted in capability ("Okay, well, it's the suit I usually use, but I had to adjust the dampeners so it's slower, weaker, and you don't have access to the meat hammer or related tech"), it's a oneshot thing ("Press this, then this, aim using this"), or both. - Wildbow on reddit. - ↑ Pitch 6.9
- ↑ 38.0 38.1 “All caught up. Stir fry for dinner, I’m going to pick up broccoli, and my workshop is warming up for later.”
“You’ve got a workshop, like a proper tinker,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Kenzie said, dead serious. - excerpt from Flare 2.7 - ↑ Questionable_Mammal: …she will be back I think. We still waiting on S. Technical issues. She’s @ workshop later this week… - Excerpt from Glow-worm P.4
- ↑ A dark shape flew within a foot of me. For an instant, I thought it might have been one of the small birds that had arrived with Tattletale.
It was a sphere, consisting of several layers like an onion, alternating blue and red. The lens was a white circle, and as it roved, the layers moved to accommodate it looking around. Several fins extended out from the two most external layers, moving independently of one another to correct its position and hold eerily steady in the wind.
“Recorded it all,” the camera said, Kenzie’s voice with some synthesizer mixing things up.
"You got the sound, too?”
“Of course,” she said. “Can I listen to it?” - Excerpt from Glare 3.1 - ↑ “I’ve got one camera with good aerial camouflage that I really don’t want to get damaged because it took a whole weekend and a lot of stuff to put it together. I have two more that don’t have special camouflage, they’re just painted to match the sky, and I can only use them if the sky is the right color, or if I don’t mind them being spotted. They could get destroyed and I wouldn’t mind them breaking that much. It would take me something like two days to get more advanced sound built into any of them, and then I’m putting a lot of eggs in one basket or I’m making a disposable camera not so disposable.”
“But you can do it?” I asked.
“I’m better with visuals, but yeah, I can do it.”
“Even if we decided it was worth building, it would take a while before you had that kind of microphone online,” Rain said.
“It’s a sound camera, not a microphone,” Kenzie said. “But yeah. And I’m trying to figure out the teleporters and the longer ranged cameras and I’ve got to fix up some old stuff so it’s ready if we need it, and that’s all stuff I really should do, and if I’m doing that I’m not doing any of the fun stuff.” - Excerpt from Shade 4.1 - ↑ - Excerpt from Shadow 5.5
- ↑ Shadow 5.4
- ↑ - Excerptfrom Shadow 5.7
- ↑ “I’ve got some things,” Kenzie said. She opened a case. “Two of these things I had as just-in-case things when I was a Ward. I got them fixed up recently, and I even made an improvement. Eye hook-”
She pulled out a coil of metal. She stuck it on the corner of her cube, then held her phone in one hand, moving her thumb around. The coil unfurled, prehensile, and its tip unfolded from its teardrop shape. Three claws, extending from around a circular lens with a pupil. Kenzie moved her head and body in time with the movements of the thing.
The thing moved closer to me, until it was two feet from my face, the three claw-blades opening and closing a little. It blinked at me, shutter closing momentarily.
“It was made to look through vents, to start with. it’s delicate enough it can turn screws and drill holes, and I can swap out the lens for others. - Excerpt from Glare 3.2 - ↑ 46.0 46.1 Kenzie’s pincer-claw grabbed for my arm, then pulled my arm away from Chris. I let it, grabbing the prehensile length of it between Kenzie and me. Not a huge factor.
Kenzie’s eyehook extended from her belt, through one of her hands, and out to Tristan, with a grip on his leg. She was simultaneously trying to circle around to get at an angle where she could shoot and blind Tristan and she was using the claw at the end of the prehensile arm to try and drag him out of the cover, helped by tugs with her hand. - Excerpt from Glare 3.3 Cite error: Invalid<ref>tag; name "II3.3 e44" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ “On that topic,” Ashley said. “Eye. Mine’s bothering me.”
“Oh, sure, I’ll get it,” Kenzie said. She ran to her desk, then ran back to Ashley, who bent down, one hand on Kenzie’s shoulder.
Sticking a pair of tweezers into Ashley’s eye, Kenzie grabbed and withdrew the camera. It had a flat head like a nail, but the camera’s body more closely resembled a pin in how thin and long it was, with wires encircling its length in a double-helix.
I winced a little, watching it come out. Ashley didn’t seem to mind.
[...]
“It’s phased out, you wimps,” Kenzie said. “It’s not actually stabbing anything. It treats the eye as a portal and a model and unfolds in non-space using that framework.”
“I felt it moving around,” Ashley said.
“It’s mostly not actually stabbing anything,” Kenzie corrected her statement. “One to three percent in reality at most, stabbing at things. Sorry. I’ll fine tune the phase. It might be responding to your power.” - Excerpt from Shade 4.2 - ↑ Beacon 8.4
- ↑ Glare 3.2
- ↑ All three faces of the cube that I could see had lit up. Numbers were apparent. ’10’… ‘9’… ‘8’…
“It’s worth remembering that she can remotely control the cube,” Tristan said. “Hm.”
[...]
Little blue flags decorated the landscape on their side of the playing field. They were situated on every rock, in every crevice, on every flat expanse of ground, on every tree branch. Sveta was perched on a rock in the midst of it all.
I looked at Kenzie’s cube. One face of it was glowing. The projector.
[...]
Kenzie pulled out her smartphone.
The projector made a sound, and then images streaked the hill, before correcting. Ghostly images of all of us, life-size. The images included the constructions Tristan had made.
It looked like where we had all been standing earlier in the match, when I had been facing down Ashley.
The images zipped around as Kenzie changed the time, blurring and streaking before correcting into their proper shapes.
“I saved everything, so we can look back and watch how things played out or compare notes,” Kenzie said. “So we can do stuff like this…”
[...]
Kenzie was changing the perspective. She created a projection of the hillside and shrank things down, then created more projections, showing an image off to one side of our gathering, showing a zoomed in portion of what the little diorama-sized projection was showing as a whole. The focus started with the three emerging from the trees, trampling through and hurdling the barriers Tristan created. - Excerpt from Glare 3.3 - ↑ The motes solidified, and the box was encased in a thorny encasement of rock.
I turned to look, keeping one eye on Chris, and I saw the flags were still there.
“Nope! That’s not going to work! Good luck finding our flag!” Kenzie called out. She loosed an over the top, mocking laugh.
Tristan turned the encasement to water.
“I said it was waterproofed before! That’s not going to do anything!” Kenzie called out, before doing her level best to laugh harder, even though she had already been laughing at her limit. - Excerpt from Glare 3.3 - ↑ - Excerpt from Shade 4.1
- ↑ “On Kenzie turned around, and hit a key on her keyboard.
An image appeared in the center of our group, and most of us backed away.
A still image of a person. He had a sleek, Anubis-like helmet or mask that encapsulated his head. His actual outfit was sleek as well, but Western. Nothing of an actual houndstooth pattern, ironically. - Excerpt from Shade 4.2 - ↑ She continued drawing out math and lines. She had a steady hand when it came to drawing out the geometry. I idly wondered if her tinker power played into that. She began drawing out a gun, similar to her flash pistol.
The drawing of a woman’s face was comparatively, almost ludicrously crude compared to the gun she’d drawn out. Kenzie scribbled out the eyes, then wrote out ‘I gave boring angle homework and now I’m blind foreverrrr’.
[...]
I looked at the boxes near Kenzie, saw the projector box to Kenzie’s right had a face lit up. It was pointed at the whiteboard Sveta had been working on, but no longer projected the camera images of the faces.
Reaching down, I plucked the pen from Kenzie’s hand.
She didn’t protest or stop me, only leaning back as I picked up the paper.
I walked a few paces away, holding up the sheet, glanced back at the projector box, and then walked another two paces.
The projected image of the scribblings, tinker notes and doodles disappeared. I turned it around to show Sveta.
She took the sheet, then experimented with moving it inside and beyond the boundaries of the projector box. Kenzie perched on the edge of her seat, watching, her tongue sticking out between her teeth, where she lightly bit it. - Excerpt from Shade 4.2 - ↑ Shade 4.5
- ↑ I approached Kenzie. The image was projected onto the wall in front of her, moving between the two cameras. An addition had been made, and as each person walked down the street, stylized crosshairs tracked their faces. Most had logos and names. A lot of them were just things in the vein of ‘[New31]’ with the number changing, not names.
One of the cameras moved. It focused in on a scene where two people wearing aprons were smoking by the back stairs of a restaurant. The little space between four buildings didn’t really qualify as an alley, as it looked like back doors and fire escapes were the only way to get down to the area. An enclave, maybe. The camera moved until it tracked a person in costume. The guy’s mask looked like it covered all but a third of his face, the bottom right of his jaw and the top left of his forehead exposed, with ceramic shards framing each ‘hole’. Curved metal bars reminiscent of piping extended around to the back of his head, holding the mask in place.
The camera seemed to recognize the mask, and labeled him as ‘[Kitchen Sink]’. We’d seen him before, but the label thing was new. - Excerpt from Shade 4.5 - ↑ The gunman behind Erin had lost his rifle and he held his hand in an awkward way as he used the other one to reach down for the rifle. Gilpatrick shot him before he could claim his weapon.
The metal- pieces from Looksee’s camera.
One dropped from the sky to hit the gunman’s hand. The other-
Children and other unarmed individuals emerged from the trees. A wall of bodies. the woman behind them was supported by two Fallen.
The woman was bloody, a scrape down one edge of her forehead and a messy patch of skin and blood toward the top end, hair already matted into it. Blood streamed down her face.
The blood meant I hadn’t immediately recognized it as Mama Mathers. The moment meant I hadn’t even realized the hallucinations had stopped.
Kenzie had dropped one of her flying cameras on her. - Excerpt from Pitch 6.3 - ↑ “I didn’t. My cameras were already fritzing out, so I sent them a slice of program, with facial recognition. I centered it over them, accounted for wind, and when things sounded worst I had my cameras stop hovering.”
“You weaponized… cameras?”
“I told you not to get on my case about it,” Looksee said.
“Am not.”
“I didn’t weaponize the cameras, just so you know. I’ve said I’m not good at making my cameras function like weapons.”
“I remember,” Chris’ snakelike voice came through the phone.
“I weaponized the off switch, obviously.” - Excerpt from Pitch 6.4 - ↑ - Excerpt from Eclipse x.4
- ↑ Torch 7.5
- ↑ Torch 7.10
- ↑ And I’ve got this flash gun too.”
She held up something that looked like a child’s toy, squat, blunt, with a lens on the front.
“It’s for when I had to get closer to the scene when I was with the Baltimore Wards. They wanted me to be able to protect myself and they wanted nonlethal.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Makes light,” she said. She aimed it off to the side and pulled the trigger.
It looked and sounded like a camera flash going off. - Excerpt from Glare 3.2 - ↑ I flew closer- saw Kenzie turn, aiming her gun at me, and changed course, covering my face and head, my forcefield up.
Even turned partially away, my arms up, the momentary flash of light blinded me. A full second passed, and my sight didn’t return. I could hear Chris’ laugh, Kenzie’s amusement. My forcefield hadn’t helped. - Excerpt from Glare 3.3 - ↑ He withdrew the flash gun, pointing it at the enemy group.
I turned my head, covering my eyes with my arm. The gun wasn’t even aimed at me, my eyes were shut, and my arm was in the way, and the darkness of my vision still turned pink, shaded slightly by bones between me and the group.
Rain emptied the gun, firing again and again. From the changes in the flash’s angles, he was moving while firing. - Excerpt from Shadow 5.5 - ↑ “Mask with a few settings,” Kenzie said. She pulled out a high-tech mask, metal around the edges to give a general circular shape to the clear pane for her face, but she didn’t put it on. She held up a disc, then clipped it to the front of her overalls, so it was directly over the pocket at her chest. “This is kind of a costume thing I haven’t finalized.” - Excerpt from Glare 3.2
- ↑ Glare 3.6
- ↑ - Excerpt from Shadow 5.7
- ↑ Glare 3.6
- ↑ Shade 4.4
- ↑ Torch 7.10
- ↑ Flare 2.6
- ↑ Flare 2.5
- ↑ Heart_Shaped_Pupil: iv’e grown up some
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: i was there for the end of the world
Heart_Shaped_Pupil: i did stuff. i actually really helped
Houndstooth: Absolutely - Glow-worm P.7 - ↑ She asks if they want to use her server, and gets an alarmed response: use of a server the way she describes it could give her a 'man in the middle' view and access to things. No - offer definitely refused. - the PHO staff member leaves. - Synopsis by Wildbow
- ↑ Pitch 6.8
- ↑ Torch 7.10
- ↑ Shade 4.4 - This whole chapter alludes to Kenzie's behavior, which shows her intense 'addiction' to people and interactions. It also shows how Tristan and Ashley respond to it.
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