Apocalypse: Generic System

by Macronomicon

  So Jeb was sitting there, using the BSF (Blue Serpent Furnace) to heat up the tons of fancy ornaments dangling from every part of the armor until they were white-hot and shaving them off with telekinetic force. It was almost like whittling down a block of wood, if it weren’t for the extreme heat blasting Jeb in the face as he worked.

  Once he had all the extraneous decorations off, he started fitting the armor to Amanda’s measurements, heating the metal cherry-red and bending it with telekinesis. He made a mistake here and there and had to patch it, but there was gobs of material to work with sitting right next to him, and the furnace was the most precise heating and welding tool he’d ever had the pleasure of working with.

  Jeb had found a little workaround to the problem of being unable to bend an object. As long as he kept the force external, it was a simple matter to bend something.

  Jeb wanted to add the Myst Engine to his furnace, but the Myst coming out of it wasn’t telekinetic, so even if he could make a permanent flame, he couldn’t make the telekinetic aspect of the item self-sustaining.

  Ah well, it’s still awesome.

  Once he was done with Amanda’s armor, Jeb got around to making Ron a better tool for self-defense. He carved the necromancer’s Geysering Flame Lens into the right shape for the fire to manifest all in the same spot, then experimented, using a worm lens to calibrate exactly where the fire would manifest.

  Once all that was done, he put it on the end of a ten-foot pole.

  Safety first.

  “You wanna do the honors?” Jeb asked, handing Ron the pole.

  “What are we talking here?” Ron asked, grabbing the pole, grinning like an idiot. “Fireball, flaming arrow, Flame beams?”

  “Flamethrower.” Jeb said simply.

  “Awww,” Ron pouted at the common nature of his magic item. “We could pull that off with a super soaker and a gallon of gas.”

  “Maybe, but we don’t have any more lenses to modify the way this one works. As far as I know, the only thing we can do with it is have it create fire at the focal point. That’s it.”

  Ron frowned. “I guess we’ll see what we got.”

  He held the ten foot pole way out and Jeb saw him thread a tiny bit of his neon purple Myst into the lens at the end.

  BOOM!

  Jeb and Ron were catapulted backward, tumbling through the air until they landed on the barren mountainside.

  Jeb smelled burned hair as he tried to sit up, trying to blink the huge black spot out of his eyes. Through the ringing in his ears, he could hear Casey III crying.

  “It did say,” Ron said, coughing. “That it was energetic.”

  “Damnit Ron, how much did you use?”

  “You saw me,” Ron shot back. “Barely a drop.”

  The necromancer held up the steel pole, and they noticed the front half was faintly glowing with heat. After desperately setting it down to check the lens, they were relieved to find that flame lenses weren’t flammable. Go figure.

  “Maybe you two would like to take the explosions further away from the baby?” Casey said in a way that was distinctly not a question.

  “Yes ma’am.” Jeb said, nodding before he scooped up the pole and retreated, Ron following close behind.

  “Yep. Yep, yep, yep.” Ron hustled after Jeb, glancing over his shoulder nervously.

  Once they were far enough away, they got back to trying to figure out simple Myst physics.

  “Dayum.” Ron glanced at Jeb. “I’d say that qualifies as a fireball, not a flamethrower.”

  “Yeah, but if it always blows up in our face, how do we use it?” Jeb demanded.

  Ron scrunched up his face in consideration.

  “Rangefinder?” he asked, peering at Jeb.

  “Yeah, but how do we…” Jeb stopped as an idea occurred to him. “That might work.”

  “You got something from that?”

  “Yep,” Jeb said, nodding. “I’m gonna see if it’s possible to make a sliding focus.”

  Ron squinted.

  “How do you think lens focusing works?” Jeb asked, “It’s just a matter of…getting two or more lenses to play nice with each other. I think.”

  “You sure about that?” Ron asked, brow furrowed.

  “Eh, couldn’t hurt.”

  “Where are you gonna get the lenses? Ron asked.

  “Got any glass on you?” Jeb asked. He could use pieces of the worm lens, but that would be wasteful, especially if his idea didn’t pan out.

  “Nope.”

  And the sand in the ground is way too impure to make any kind of clear glass, even if I could melt it and shape it with the Blue Serpent Furnace.

  What has the ability to change the way light behaves? Air does it. Especially if it’s denser. Could I compress air to make temporary lenses? Wait! Water refracts light like nobody’s business. That would at least allow a proof of concept.

  “Got it,” Jeb said, digging the water lens out of his pocket.

  He made water-based lenses by filling a piece of hardened air with water, big lenses about three feet on a side so that Jeb and Ron could both crowd their heads around them.

  “Now, what we wanna do here is make it so the myst goes in the primary lens, is converted to rays,” Jeb tapped one water lens. “Then somehow, the distance between the two lenses sets the focal point.

  “Well, obviously they can’t both be regular lenses,” Ron said, putting his hand on the other side of the lens. “Focal point is right here. The damn thing would explode.”

  “So we make the first lens concave, so it spreads the focus out, then it hits the back lens which corrects it,” Jeb said. “Would that do anything more than move the focus of the lens by a couple inches?”

  “You got me, man, but I think we’re onto something here.”

  As it turned out, it was a little more complicated than Jeb thought, but it was still doable. Using the light from the sun as a baseline, they were able to figure out that by making a small, extremely concave lens, and a much larger convex lens, Jeb was able to move the focal point drastically by shifting the small concave lens just a little bit back and forth.

  The final lens had to be so much larger because the extremely concave lens spread out the rays at a terrific rate, and without a larger lens to catch them all, the power would be lost. Or perhaps fire Myst would get caught in the tube and melt the container to slag.

  Whichever.

  So the closer he got the two lenses together, the further out the focal point was, and the further away they were, the closer the focal point was to the two lenses.

  Perfect.

  Now Jeb just needed to prove it worked with the worm lens before he tore Ron’s flame lens into several pieces.

  Jeb knew the same Myst could travel through multiple lenses, as evidenced by both the firefly lantern and the furnace he’d made.

  Now, if it could travel through the same type of lens and alter its focal point, he should easily be able to make a range-setter for the Geysering Flame Lens’s explosion.

  On a whim, Jeb switched the positioning of the lenses and found that they behaved exactly the same, if not slightly better.

  As soon as this tutorial is over, I’m getting a book on optics and reading it cover to cover.

  College was a long time ago.

  Once that was taken care of, Jeb made a pair of lenses out of the gargantuan worm lens, and spent the next hour trying out different configurations.

  It turned out poorly at first, the distance was somewhat inconsistent until Jeb thought of using a third lens at the beginning that was perfectly flat to be what turned the Myst from a vapor to a perfectly flat ray.

  When he added that, the range-finder stabilized, and they were able to get repeatable range adjustments.

  That taken care of, all Jeb had to do was design a corkscrew internal mechanism that would shift the middle lens back and forth by twisting it.

  Jeb’s inhuman Nerve allowed him to picture every part of the contraption and then m
ake each piece using the castoff shavings from Amanda’s armor, injection-casting it into telekinetic hollows.

  Once the machine was done…

  “It looks a lot like a spyglass.” Ron said, peering at it.

  “Or a wand,” Jeb said, holding it the other way, the way it was supposed to be held.

  “Holy shit, you’re right!” Ron said, eyes widening.

  “Now, let’s figure out the range on this thing.”

  With a twist, the corkscrew inside the narrow tube moved the middle lens back, shortening the focal length until it was presumably right in front of the end of the wand.

  “Alright, let’s start with the shortest range,” Jeb said, aiming the worm-wand in front of him, putting a tiny amount of Myst through it.

  A foot long worm popped up directly in front of the end of the metal tube.

  “Label that zero,” Jeb muttered to himself, using the furnace to heat the metal and stamp a ‘0’ at the collar’s spot.

  “Let’s aim for…” he glanced at Ron. “Ten feet?”

  “Sure.”

  Jeb twisted the collar, moving the two lenses closer together, popping out worm after worm until they were fairly confident it was popping them out ten feet away. He stamped ‘10’ into the metal.

  As they got the two lenses closer together, the range of the focal point increased exponentially. The distance between zero and ten was much wider than between ten and twenty, each tiny fraction of an inch moving the focal point further and further out.

  After they confirmed a big worm appearing about three hundred and sixty feet out, they simply stopped. Moving the lenses any closer together than that simply didn’t work, likely because the focal point wouldn’t stretch any further than that with their crude contraption.

  Still, not bad, Jeb thought, imagining the Geysering Flame lens explosion aimable out to a range of three hundred feet.

  That could come in handy.

  I think I’m going to set a minimum range of twenty feet on the flame lens, though, Jeb thought, reviewing the design in his head. Firing it off ten feet away had nearly caused them some damage.

  “Now we need to do some more tests,” Ron said, petting the worm wand and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “See if we can aim this thing more…precisely.”

  “You’re thinking about popping a worm into existence in a girl’s lap, aren’t you?”

  Ron looked at him, jaw gaping.

  Guess I hit the nail on the head. Kid’s pretty obvious.

  Jeb put a hand on Ron’s shoulder and stared into the ginger’s eyes. “Ron, I’m going to give you some free advice. I haven’t tried to prank a girl to get her attention since I was fifteen. I want you to stop and really think about this for a second. Which is gonna go over better: dropping a big, gross, worm in her lap, or seeing if she’s interested in testing the wand with you?”

  Ron swallowed. “When you put it like that…”

  “Good.” Jeb said, patting him on the shoulder and going back to what he was doing.

  Next step is making an explosive version with the Geysering Flame Lens.

  Jeb sat back down and pulled out the large lens, picturing how he was going to cut it to maximize the amount of surface area they got out of it.

  He marked the circles he was going to cut out of the large lens with light scratches, making sure to mark the flat, concave and convex lenses. Splitting the lenses into three pieces was going to drastically reduce the maximum amount of Myst that could travel through the wand without breaking one of the lenses, but that didn’t matter too much.

  The drop of Myst that Ron had funneled into the lens the first time had created a devastating explosion, and Jeb was pretty confident that even though the lenses were smaller now, they could still take a lot more than that little drop.

  Being able to control distance was more important.

  Jeb split the large lens in half, then carefully crafted two sets of identical lenses, using the furnace to forge the steel of their wands around them.

  For Ron’s he made it the same as before, albeit making the minimum focal point twenty-ish feet.

  For the other wand, he was interested in pushing his creativity and skill to the limit, so after he was done with Ron’s wand, he made another one as the base.

  He studied the two metal rods in his hand.

  Crude training Wand of Fireball (Geysering) (Uncommon)

  This training wand has an external mechanical range determiner, so that an amateur Myst user can practice controlling their range without accidentally harming themselves. The workmanship is rough, and someone has replaced the Cool Flame lens with a Geysering Flame Lens, making this training wand far more deadly than it should be.

  Interesting. The description implied that wands like these already existed, and not only that, they suggested there was a way for a person to control the range of an effect even without the mechanism they’d invented.

  That’s something I should look into.

  Jeb took the myst capacitor and the myst engine from the scarab trap and started looking for ways to combine them with the wand. The capacitor was blocky, while the engine was small and round.

  Hmm. He laid the wand on the ground and arranged the pieces. Wand, then the boxlike capacitor, then the engine hanging straight down.

  Jeb drew an outline around them.

  That looks like a gun to me.

  Jeb flipped the capacitor so the trigger mechanism was facing –

  Pop!

  A giant worm appeared in front of Jeb’s face, writhing with disapproval.

  “Gah,” Jeb swatted the worm out from on top of his work and scanned the surroundings.

  He could make out some faint stifled laughter, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint where it was coming from.

  “Everybody gets one!” Jeb said loud enough for them to hear him. “If it happens again, I’m confiscating it.”

  No more worms.

  Jeb got back to work. He melted some more steel and built a housing for the capacitor and the engine, then took his several feet of fiber-optics, cut them to size and used them to connect the engine in the handle to the capacitor, then spent the next half-hour figuring out how to make a decent trigger mechanism.

  Once it was done, he closed the other side of the handle around it, and used the furnace to tack weld it together.

  All told, it looked a lot like one of those old nazi pistols, a luger, or mauser, or whatever they were called.

  It had a narrow tube at the front, with a blocky back end, and a rotund handle.

  It didn’t look like one of those slick high-tech modern models, that was for sure.

  Jeb inspected it.

  Crude Guerilla Wand of Fireball (Geysering)(Uncommon)

  Favored by rebellious peasants, these cobbled together wands carry their own stolen power source, and therefore do not require a proper Myst user to operate, making them ideal for insurgent forces acting against their rightful rulers. Carrying one of these wands is considered an act of treason in most countries and punishable by death.

  This particular one has been enhanced with a Geysering Flame lens, making it particularly potent.

  “Hmm…”

  Jeb wasn’t immediately concerned with the whole ‘treason’ thing, although it did worry him a little. He was more interested in the scrap of information he’d been provided.

  It seemed like Myst users were royalty? Or royalty had to be Myst users by default? Or Myst users were controlled by the government? There was no telling for sure, but it meant that Jeb was likely going to have an unwelcome amount of attention on himself, should they escape.

  “Ah got it!” Casey said, her voice brightening for a moment, accent slipping through. Jeb glanced over at her. The raven-haired girl’s enthusiasm was short lived, withdrawing faster than he could witness it.

  She gave him a flat stare.

  “I got my Myst core working.” she said in monotone.

  “One sec,” Jeb said, turning on the safety a
nd turning to address her. “What’s your Myst core do?”

  “Well, I was sitting there, getting bored with my eyes closed,” she said, rolling her eyes at him. “When I thought about the stories my mam– mom told me, about archangel Michael and how he’d vanquish evil with a flaming sword, and he was always watching over us.”

  Oh, crap.

  “And then it just clicked, I guess.” Casey said with a sigh. She closed her eyes and concentrated really hard. “Hopefully it’s not a pile of shit.”

  A pillar of light descended from above, nearly blinding Jeb as something descended from above. He couldn’t look directly at it, the light was so brilliant.

  A moment later the light was gone, and Jeb was finally able to open his eyes.

  The first thing he saw was a cheerful looking man in a white toga, bearing a flaming sword, about the size of a toothpick.

  “Salutations!” The little winged man said, flapping down to stand on Casey’s shoulder. The goth girl froze, looking distinctly uncomfortable with the angel on her shoulder.

  “My name is Michael, but you can call me Mike,” Mike said, stretching out his hand.

  Bemused, Jeb shook it gingerly as Casey buried her face in her hands.

  “Blessed day, strangers! I’m Casey’s Guardian angel!” he said, holding his sword up like the highlander. “Sworn to guide and protect. Her destiny made manifest so that this wayward lamb might find her way back to The Light.”

  “Oh my god,” Casey said into her palm, her entire face turning beet red.

  “Now you’re getting it!” Mike said with a grin.

  Chapter 17: Gear Up

  “Ooh, magic gun!” Ron said, hovering around Jeb’s construction. He didn’t seem to begrudge him the half a Myst lens he’d used to make it, instead simply being over excited for the creation.

  “I want to reiterate,” Jeb said, holding it away from the necromancer’s grasping hands, “That this is not a ‘magic gun’. There is no projectile. Exactly like your wand, it makes an explosion at a set range.”

  Ron deflated a little. “Yeah, but yours looks cooler.”

  Jeb fixed Ron with the withering stare he’d learned from his instructors in the army.

  Ron withered.