by Macronomicon
Shoulda just stabbed him in the throat.
In Jeb’s mind, if he didn’t get the names of the nobles involved, he’d be missing the root of the problem, and his attempt to get those names had given the keegan the extra second he needed to get away.
Fuck. Jeb hadn’t been expecting him to be that tough. It seemed like the trafficker might be dipping into his own supply of kids intended for nobles.
“Did a steel ball that embedded itself into rock just bounce off of him?” Colt asked.
“Go round up your friends, make sure they’re not dead,” Jeb said, pointing over his shoulder toward the fourth-story roof where several heads poked over the edge to watch them. “He’s not coming back right this second.”
“You gonna be okay, old man?” Colt asked, glancing down to where Jeb sat flat on his ass in lube-mud, one-legged and sans crutch.
Jeb assessed the situation, glancing over at the empty spot where the judge had disappeared from. He heard the rattling of broken-ankle-lady’s carriage in the distance. Zlesk looked like he’d been put through a meat grinder, limping up to them.
He’d failed to catch the main culprit. He’d failed to catch any of the people funding him. He had a consolation prize of a dozen or so hapless servants restrained by Zlesk. And he had squishy mud slowly invading every orifice.
“I think I might cry a little.”
“I think I see your foot,” Colt said, pointing to a little dot of white in the hedges under the eaves.
Jeb reached out with telekinesis and grabbed the errant foot, sliding it on and strapping it down good. Welcome back, traitor.
“Grab Ron’s bed on the way down,” Jeb said as Colt turned away. “Don’t carry him directly. And get rid of this damn lube so I can walk.”
Colt complied, and the mud in his ass crack turned to sand.
Insult to injury, am I right? Jeb thought sourly, climbing to his foot and thinking about what could have gone better.
I was unacceptably sans weapons, Colt needs some boot camp, Zlesk needs more support. Ron needs a bodyguard….
Jeb glanced up at the castle.
At least we got the kids.
“Are you all right?” Zlesk asked, limping up to them. The former sheriff’s clothes were shredded, and he was leaking trace amounts of keegan blood all over.
“You’re asking me?” Jeb asked, raising a brow. He touched the scrape over his ribs. It burned and oozed a little blood, but it wasn’t bad.
“We should hire a bodyguard. Maybe more than one,” Jeb said, rubbing the blood between his fingers. Injured like this, Jeb and Zlesk wouldn’t be able to stop someone from setting fire to the orphanage. Or worse.
“We angered the wrong people today, didn’t we?” Zlesk asked.
“Pretty much.”
“E’choken’is, Jebediah Trapper, you have some talent for putting me on the wrong side of the wrong people,” Zlesk said, glaring at him.
“Hey, look at that: a bunch of children you helped save!” Jeb said, pointing at the front door, where Colt was leading a stream of children between the ages of four and ten out into the courtyard.
They were carrying three twin beds between them, with Ron on one, and six wounded children on the other two. Seeing this, Zlesk stood just a little straighter, his chest puffed out, and Jeb knew he’d managed to distract him.
“Good afternoon, children,” Zlesk said, wincing as he bowed. “My name is—”
“AIII!” A girl shrieked and dropped the corner of Ron’s bed to hide behind Colt.
“He’s gonna kill us!” another boy shouted.
“It’s okay, Mr. Zlesk is a nice bone-head,” Colt said, pointing to the tattered sheriff. “He helped us get to you.”
Try as he might, Colt couldn’t make the children warm up to Zlesk, and they mostly avoided his gaze or hid behind Jeb or Colt when he was near.
Jeb hadn’t ever seen the sheriff look so hurt. Even with all the battle damage, being shunned by children was what got to him.
Jeb found it hilarious.
There were six children who were badly wounded, but they seemed to be stable, so they formed a train and brought the kids back to the orphanage.
The teachers were alarmed and shot Jeb accusatory looks when he made it back with the injured around dusk, as if it was somehow his fault the kids had been hurt. They bundled the children up in bandages and immediately set about making sure they would recover.
The bad guys were gonna kill the kids. How could I have done any better?
Jeb wanted to collapse into a puddle on the floor, but he had some issues that needed addressing. First was the lack of ass-kicking potential around the orphanage. Jeb was wounded, Zlesk was wounded, Colt was a teen, the teachers weren’t fighters, and Eddie wouldn’t come out of his shop except at swordpoint.
Frankly, Jeb didn’t think the roboticist would notice if the orphanage burned down above him.
I need fighters until mine are back on their feet. Which meant Jeb needed gold, which meant a trip down to Eddie’s shop.
Urgh.
Jeb peeled himself off the chair and limped down to where Eddie was working.
The shop smelled like diesel, ozone and motor oil, and Eddie was standing there, staring intently at a drone about three feet wide, hovering silently in front of him.
“Who’s that?” Jeb asked, picking his way through the scrap-laden area, over to the gold-processing plant in the corner of the room. It was a permanent structure they’d built around the chip of a gold-laced quartz lens.
“Legolas,” Eddie said. “I stripped some smartphone processors and now I’m working on making them play nice with each other. Once I’m done with that, I’ll be able to work on his AI.”
Jeb glanced over at a pile of smartphone casings that had been torn apart, their exceedingly small microchips scavenged from their circuit boards.
“Is he weapons ready?”
“Not yet.” Eddie glanced at Jeb. “I need another Myst engine for that.”
“They’re military issue, as far as I know. I don’t know where we could get more yet,” Jeb said, channeling a thin thread of Myst into the gold refiner. The mechanism split Jeb’s Myst into several parts, threading them into a homemade regulator that allowed a tiny spool of his gold Myst to interact with the chip. The resulting quartz gravel tumbled into the furnace, which got the lion’s share of Jeb’s output. The rest went to stirring the mixture and mechanically separating gold from rock.
The reason Jeb had to do it personally was because Myst engines were imperfect. The engines shot out the full spectrum of Myst as radiant energy, and a tiny fraction of that spectrum was the antithesis of the lens it was being shoved into. Therefore, lenses fed by engines would slowly degrade.
They degraded when Jeb used them too, but much, much slower. Jeb imagined the only way to get a lens to last forever was to pour an exact match into it. Eddie was investigating a way to filter Myst, but he said not to get his hopes up.
“Set Buddy outside the orphanage as a watchdog until I can come back with some mercs.”
Eddie glanced at Buddy in the corner, and the bomb-robot’s engines rumbled to life before he headed for the stairs.
“That’s spooky.”
Eddie chuckled evilly and continued his work on Legolas, staring at the robot, his eyes flickering from side to side like he was reading something.
By the next morning, Jeb had enough money to hire on a handful of adventurers from the Hunter’s Association willing to defend them for a couple weeks. The mere sight of half a dozen brutes on the property should convince their enemies to seek legal options rather than violence.
And that would buy time.
After that, Jeb grabbed all the lenses and wands from his room and brought them down to the shop, all the while mulling over the poor showing against Kebos. He had been systematically stripped of every advantage before he’d even met the guy, and Jeb hated it.
I need more, better weapons, Jeb thought, unloading his
backpack full of goodies. He never wanted to go into a fight naked again, if he could help it.
Click. The cellar wall beyond Jeb resolved into an image.
“Hi there! I’m Amanda Courvar!” his former healer said, bouncing into frame.
“And I’m Brett Courvar,” Brett said, putting an arm around her waist. “And we’re here today to talk to you about choosing the right build for your profession, why balance is important, and why you might want to save some of those Ability points for a rainy day!”
“But first, we’ve got a new segment where we read your fan mail and answer frequently asked questions!” Amanda said.
They get mail? Jeb thought, brows rising. Of course they get mail, they’ve got a fixed address!
Chapter 22: Factory Settings
The lens merchants looked at Jeb like he was going to get everything dirty and/or plot some kind of terrorism, but when Zlesk walked in covered in wounds, they bent over backwards to accommodate him as soon as they saw his Citizen club card, selling him whatever he wanted without question.
Forget the fact that Jeb was actually planning on doing violence with the supplies; it still rankled to be viewed with suspicion.
Bah, Jeb thought as he fed another Annihilation lens into the grinder. The grinder was a modified belt sander with a case/funnel around the business end. Just throw a lens in and the machine would make short work of it.
RRRR! The machine sanded the lens down into a murky powder, depositing it into the small bin underneath. Jeb brushed off the belt and made sure the funnel was perfectly free of Annihilation lens particles. That’s the kind of shit you don’t want floating around your shop.
There wasn’t enough spare Annihilation lens to go around, even though Zlesk had bought a handful of cleansing wands. Not for what Jeb wanted to do.
When you go big game hunting, you need the proper equipment, Jeb thought, glancing at the Beautiful Revenge, hung up on the shelf. It was a beautiful piece of gear, but Jeb wanted something with a little more shock and awe.
He carefully dumped the lens dust into the machine that he’d helped Eddie make.
The Squeezer.
At its core, the machine was a hydraulic press that allowed two halves of a die stamp to press against each other at outrageous pressures. Then the magi-tech got involved. You couldn’t just press lens dust together and expect it to come out as a whole, functioning lens.
While a pressed lens would work for a couple uses, the whole thing was incredibly brittle and tended to fall apart from the slightest touch. After quite a bit of experimenting—and Jeb was ashamed to admit, a couple tiny deer getting squished by a hydraulic press—they were able to figure out how to make The Squeezer reconstitute a solid lens.
Myst had three states of matter: Ray, Thread, and Myst. Ray was anything that came out of a lens or engine, and acted like you’d expect: like a ray, travelling in a straight line and delivering its effect on whatever the focal point was. It behaved very much like light.
Thread was when the Myst was coming from a person’s Core. It was malleable and generally connected back to the user’s Core, forming a thread-like shape.
Then there was Myst, the neutral form that didn’t seem to want to interact with anything except engines and living creatures. It didn’t even overtly interact with lenses, except possibly to shift their state of matter at a microscopic level.
They knew this, because in order to sinter Myst lenses, a high concentration of neutral Myst of the same type basically filled in the microscopic gaps of the pressed material and allowed it to form a cohesive solid.
The setup had a thick gold box at the top that was designed by Eddie to catch a ray before its focal point and hold it in place, compressing it until it reverted to neutral Myst. It was a similar concept to the Myst capacitor, he’d explained to Jeb earlier. From the box, a feed-tube ran down into the lens-shaped die, which Jeb had made using the Blue Serpent Furnace. Only neutral Myst could make it past the half-dozen switchbacks and down into the dies.
Jeb put the last available Annihilation lens into the converter, making absolutely sure it was close enough to the edge of the box that it wouldn’t carve a chunk out of the gold rather than get stopped and neutralized.
Jeb closed the lid, made sure it was screwed on tight, then fed the business end of the Myst engine through, connecting the nipple of the optical fibers to the neutralizer.
Once that was done, Jeb checked everything one more time before feeding the black dust from the Annihilation lenses into the dies, making sure it was piled up nicely, allowing the dust to fill every tiny crevice.
The dies themselves had a thin coat of gold which had to be peeled off the finished product each time. Without the coating, the Myst infusion would simply dissipate into the environment. Gold was an excellent Myst insulator, and likely one of the reasons it was so expensive.
“Alright, I think we’re ready to get started,” Jeb said, reaching for the lever on the hydraulic press.
A motion out of the corner of his eye grabbed his attention. He glanced over and spotted Eddie lying down on his belly, a fair distance away and partially behind some rather sturdy furniture.
“What are you doing?” Jeb asked, frowning.
“We’re taking Annihilation Myst, a highly dangerous, refined magical substance that literally erases things from existence, and compressing it at about five hundred megapascals of pressure. If the system were to fail and eject Annihilation Myst out, it would most likely vent laterally, and it would be...energetic. In short, I don’t wanna get cut in half.”
Jeb glanced at the welded-together machine, a touch more ominous now.
“Scoot over,” Jeb said, moving over next to Eddie and lying down behind a thick hunk of greasy engine.
Jeb reached out with telekinesis and flipped the switch.
The press kicked on with a loud whine, pressing a huge steel die down into another. Jeb saw a faint plume of shadow as microscopic bits of lens were ejected from the edges by the pressure before the two sides of the die clamped down together.
The whine of the machine increased in pitch for a moment as it strained against itself, then stopped, locked in place.
“Okay, moment of truth.”
Jeb flicked the switch on the Myst engine.
Nothing happened. There was no telltale hiss of an Annihilation lens ripping the air out of existence, and the press wasn’t showing any signs of being torn apart by the dangerous substance.
“Well, it didn’t blow up immediately. That’s good.”
“Agreed,” Eddie said, peeking out from behind the leg of the table.
“Shall we go see if it worked?” Jeb asked.
Eddie glanced over to the press and met Jeb’s gaze. “Let’s have Buddy do it.”
Poor bomb-defusing robot, always getting the short end of the stick.
“Agreed.”
The two of them shuffled out of the basement and sent the robot in to open the press and turn off the neutral Myst compressor.
Thankfully nothing bad happened, and Jeb wound up holding a gold-plated plano-concave lens about the radius of a golf ball. He carefully peeled the soft gold casing away and tossed the lens into the Appraiser’s roiling cloud.
Processed Synthetic Annihilation Lens (small)
Myst that passes through an Annihilation Lens removes the first thing it touches from existence, making these both useful for industrial and military applications, but also quite dangerous.
These rare lenses are found in the Mines of Seeping Death before being sold to businesses and governments to be broken down into safer sizes. It is illegal for a private entity to own an Annihilation Myst Lens larger than tiny.
“Did that say it’s illegal?” Eddie asked as Jeb took the lens out of the roiling cloud of grey and red.
“Yep,” Jeb said, carefully placing the lens in the protective mold and pouring resin over it. Unlike gold, resin insulated basically none of a Myst ray’s energy. It did, however, have a lo
t more physical toughness than the soapstone-consistency lens.
Resin also took well to being machined, allowing them to bolt lenses in place without drilling into the actual material.
While that was drying, Jeb started on the Stag lens, switching out the dies for a much larger plano-convex lens.
Jeb hand tooled a small lens off the main antler for the Myst compressor, then ground up the rest of the Stag lens. The lens itself was lumpy and oblong. It could only be fashioned into a much smaller processed lens using traditional means, but by filling a mould with dust, Jeb was able to scrape every millimeter of possible size out of it. This was important, because the angle at which the rays met each other dictated the strength of the creature.
They solved the width/strength formula a couple weeks into experimenting, when they noticed that larger lenses would often create smaller creatures with an identical amount of Myst being fed into them by the same capacitor.
Relative to their size, though, they were much stronger and faster. It was effectively a higher concentration of power in a smaller space. They confirmed this by lowering the Myst input on the smaller lens to make both creatures identical in stature, then testing their strength and speed.
They repeated the lens-stamping process, and Jeb wound up with a large Stag lens, perfectly round and at the exact angle they wanted it, about the width of a baseball, with enough dust left over to make another, easily.
Then came Eddie’s contribution to the weapon. After experimenting for weeks, the old man had found the material with the highest reflective value of anything they’d found yet, which was an amalgam of silver and mercury.
This must have been what was on the inside of Xen’s Scrivener, Jeb thought to himself as Eddie coated and polished the inside of a dish with the shiny amalgam.
The frame of the dish was created by the 3D printer, and it was about the width of a soccer ball, its angle carefully calculated to mesh with the other lenses. Jeb briefly winced at the idea of carrying around something that big on top of his staff. On the other hand…super-summon.
They made a mirror by lining a flat plate with amalgam, fixed it in place above the dish, then began assembling the lenses into the shaft.
