Vehiculer Tinker - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Premise - A CYOA form hastily filled out, taking our MC (Simon) from a regular run of the mill no fantasy Earth to Earth Bet, armed with a few perks from the ROB, chief being a tinker power - [Vehicular Tinker]Said interaction with ROB already fading from his memory, watch as a regular paranoid man stretches the definition of the word Vehicular as far as he can to maximise his chances of not just surviving in this death world but also thriving and God forbid, actually help this grimdark world.

Disclaimer - Worm belongs to the one and only absolute chad, Wildblow. Enough said.

Earth ?

—Simon–

“Ugh.” His head hit the steering wheel, a pained groan escaping his lips, partly because of the self-inflicted impact he had just been subjected to, and partly because of the situation he had found himself in.

Or rather, the Universe he had found himself in. 

Well, it was more akin to a cluster of universes, with multiple parallel worlds accessible to a secret cabal of–

You know what? It was complicated. 

But long story short, he was now in the godforsaken grimdark world of Worm.

The same world that was notorious for grinding down what little good people had left in them, in a way that did not feel forced or by some evil person. The setting itself was so evil that any good was punished disproportionately, and the world itself seemed to enforce that, which is why he cursed his drunken self for filling out that form.

Yes, he’d read the CYOA fics, more than often during his soul sucking commute, to make it a bit less soul sucking. But! In this defense, the form was nothing like that. 

It was just a run of the mill google form that gave him a bunch of options of worlds, along with a severity number right next to them, with the catch being that the higher the severity number, the higher tier ticket he would get to roll, with standard Gacha rules applied.

He’d gotten a Level 5 Ticket, for which he had no frame of reference, but he had hoped for the roll to be good. A higher number means higher rewards, right?

Nope. As it turns out, the ticket got him a bunch of stuff but nothing that would give him the sheer relief that he needed to function properly like a sane adult in this grimdark world. Nothing that would make him uber powerful immediately, or ever really. Nothing that would help him with the many, many S- class threats in this world that could go through his body without even noticing anything. Nothing that would upgrade his squishy mortal body.

With a sigh, he got his head off the steering wheel and looked out the windshield, only finding nothing but grassy plains as far as he could see. It was just so peaceful, and had it been his home universe, he would have just gotten out of the car and laid on the grass, sleeping away his worries, but NOPE!

This was Worm, so he had to huddle inside the relative safety of the car, even though realistically there were many people out there who could treat the metal shell of this car akin to a paper shell, and think about his next steps in this world.

For starters, he recalled the powers that were granted to him as part of a Level 5 Ticket, whatever that meant anyway.

The most important part of his toolkit currently was something called [Vehicular Tinker]. The first thing that came to his mind when he read about that was Squealer, a cape from a certain Gang in Brockton Bay, a place he would rather never visit if he could help it, but from the very nature of this setting, he could tell that a visit was going to scheduled in the near future, either by him or by the world itself.

Either way, he recalled the Cape Squealer being a Vehicle Tinker as well, creating giant, crude trucks equipped with weapons and much more to help the Merchants maintain their hold over their territory.

But his power was an upgraded version of that. An upgraded version of any Tinker power, really. He had an explicit awareness of the fact that his works would not need regular maintenance, as long as they were not damaged, and that he would have none of the drawbacks that came with being a Shard cape, like the conflict drive and being knocked out if a trigger happened somewhere near him, or the detection methods used by scanning for the Corona Pollentia.

He could build any Vehicle. As long as it could be used for transportation purposes, he could build it. 

Ship, Bike, Car, Truck, Helicopters, Aeroplanes, freaking Jets. Anything and everything was within reach.

Upon concentrating just a little, he could tell that his power would allow him to kit out the vehicles with some weapons as well. Nothing unreasonable, but guns, missiles, and even energy based weaponry were on the table.

That was the most important tool he had in his arsenal that could help him survive for longer, but that did not help him immediately. Just like any other Tinker power, it needed time to ramp up properly. Time that could be used by literally every evil gang in this world to scoop up yet another Tinker, as Tinkers were force multipliers of the highest order.

The second part was the Car. It was a decent all terrain car, with a full tank, and was basically brand new. It was supposedly capable of running for hundreds of thousands of miles with the only requirement being gas, which was a godsend. Only this particular car did not have a registration, no plates, nothing that wouldn’t make any decent cop pull him off the freeway, so it was the road less travelled for him for the foreseeable future, or until he somehow came up with a way to get plates for this thing. Well, at least it could off road properly, and needed basically no maintenance for the foreseeable future. Small mercies, he supposed.

He sighed, his head hitting the comfortable headrest behind him, as he came to the next item he got from the roll.

It was called [Sleight of Hands], even though the actual function of the power was nothing like what the name said. It was basically line of sight teleportation for anything that wasn’t currently tied down to something else. 

It probably had some sort of weight limit that he didn’t know of. The clump of grass right next to the car was the unfortunate victim of his experimentation with power. The teleportation itself was clean, no sound, no flashy lights, no visual indication of the power being activated. He had no idea what the energy output required for such a thing was, and if it could be detected by other Tinkers or not, but aside from that, he could probably steal quite a lot of stuff, simply by using the handy binoculars he had in the car.

The SUV had a lot of stuff that was useful for a camp, like the air mattress thingy, along with the handy dandy air pump. Binoculars, First aid kit, large water tank, large fuel tank, and more. Thankfully, that tied in nicely with the next power he got from the Ticket.

[Sun Lover] was something that replaced his need for food and water with sunlight. He didn’t know the conversion rate yet, but he would be curious to find out once he had the necessary facilities to carry out experiments that were not immediately useful.

Sure, he had never done this whole camping and living off grid thing before, but hey, there was a first time for everything, right? After all, he was in a new world, and if he did not adapt to stuff here, then he might as well kill himself right here, because this world did not give a shit about who you were. It seemed to have a sole function: to beat down anyone unfortunate enough to be born here.

Even the really strong ones, the capes, were not immune to that, and he, for one, had no intention of being added to that list.

Speaking of really strong capes being implicit in the current condition of this world, the last but certainly not the least item he got from the roll was something that filled him with equal parts dread and relief.

[Blank-ish] was something that was the one thing he needed to be undetectable in this grimdark world. If it protected him from the boogeywoman of this setting, then all the better. Alas, the perk had an ish added at the last for a reason. He didn't know exactly how the mechanics worked, but from what he understood, as he was safe from most of the Thinkers, basically all but the strongest ones.

Even the strongest ones would have to fulfill some specific conditions to track him down. Maybe they needed to talk to him for a long period of time, or they needed to physically see him or they tracked down his general location. Basically, Contessa couldn't just divine his location out of thin air. She had to work for it, which was good for the short term. Not really sure about the long term, especially with his plans for this world.

So, with a long suffering sigh, he got out of the car and stepped out. Almost immediately, his neck was on a swivel as he tried to anticipate the location of a portal opening, through which a bullet could come and kill him immediately.

After what felt like minutes of crickets, and no portals, or any cape dropping from the sky or the ground beneath him turning into a portal, he sighed and instead of letting his mind drown into a toxic puddle of what-ifs, he decided to lock the car, since it was the one thing keeping him sheltered, and walked all around the grass clearing he had found himself in.

He had no idea of the time period, or the location, or hell, he had no idea if he was on the right Earth or not. Well, what was the right Earth here?

Was it Earth Bet, where the majority of the cape population was? Where the highest number of S-Class threats originated from? Where Cauldron had its highest attention and presence?

Or was it some random ass Earth? Resembling human civilization so that he would have the tools necessary to build the tools necessary to build the tools to finally build the advanced vehicle blueprints just bouncing around in his head.

Was it an uninhabited Earth? An Earth full of Dinosaurs? A paradise Earth? 

As his mind inevitably went to conjure up nightmare scenarios for him, despite his best efforts of touching the grass, as it were, he just shook his head violently, as if the physical act was going to help in any way, and plopped his ass down on the ground, feeling a bit dizzy from the constant head shaking.

That just served as yet another reminder that he had not received any meaningful body upgrades. He was just as squishy as any other human here, just one that had a body that substituted food and water for sunlight, and that bit just terrified him, so much so that instead of crying his eyes out, he began laughing bitterly at the whole situation.

At his own stupidity, and at the stupid ROB who probably sent him here.

Who could have known that filling out a stupid CYOA form would lead to this?!

____xx___

After laughing at himself and his condition for a few minutes, during which a few more clumps of grass became his victims, he finally felt a little bit lighter, as if he could do this, could take one more step in this world.

So, with the determination to step forward in this world and move ahead with what he was given, which was something that many people would weep with envy for, as they were literal superpowers, he decided to go back in the car and turn on the heater.

Because it might not have snowed, but to his previously tropical sensibilities, even this temperature was chilling. While he knew it was irresponsible of him to waste fuel just for luxury right now, especially since he did not even know if he was on an Earth that even had a fuel station or not, he remembered reading somewhere that ICE cars use excess heat from the engine to heat the car instead of using a traditional resistance coil heater.

Random nerd lore aside, he shifted the car into Drive and moved forward gingerly, still unfamiliar with the terrain around him. Thankfully, he could see very far, and visibility was not an issue right now, not in this SUV, so he could move forward a bit.

This being the first time he was driving an off road focused SUV, he was careful at first, but after the first 20 minutes of slow poke driving, he got a bit confident and accelerated, not knowing what he was looking for. Since he was smack dab in the middle of some grasslands, with no water, buildings, water body, or signs of civilization in sight, he just picked the north direction (Thank god, the Dashboard had a built in compass) and drove forward.

___xx___

After over an hour of driving, he finally reached the end of the grasslands and now had a steep climb ahead of him to get past the small hill in front of him. Keeping the Car on, he got out to check if it was even doable or not. If not, he would have to make the entire drive back and then drive another hour to reach the other end of the grassland.

He spotted multiple smaller rocks, but none that should be a problem, as he could just drive around them, and the SUV seemed to have a lifted suspension, so smaller ones were not an issue. There was no path to indicate that other people used this place, so he was not confident about making the climb on his own.

Of course, he had seen other people do this and more with their upgraded SUVs, but he was a complete novice to this. Hell, he hated driving before this, as he had ample access to public transportation and did not see the hassle of owning a car and everything that came with it.

Shaking his head, he turned the engine off, locked the SUV since it held all that he owned in this world, before walking up the hill, which seemed possible to him since he was wearing shoes, and he figured that he could climb if he walked sideways instead of straight up.

Yeah, excellent trekking advice, he knew that, but in his defense, he had not yet entered the phase of making physical exercise his own identity outside of work.

That stuff was for millennials. He was still Gen Z, or so he hoped. He felt quite a lot of disconnect from the current mainstream Gen Z, atleast from what he could see on social media.

Dismissing the ramblings regarding his previous world, that was no longer accessible to him now, or was it?

He froze on the spot, closing his eyes and concentrating on his power despite the dangers of doing such a thing in the middle of nowhere with no safety whatsoever, and asked his power the one question that he should have asked the moment he woke up in this world and realised what his power was.

Can I go back home?

A/N - The name of the story will be abbreviated to VT, from the next chapter onwards.