Day 22, Wednesday January 26, 2011
+700CP 1050CP banked
7 rolls:
Artistic License100 CPQuality: AppearancePERK ALREADY PURCHASEDDead Men Have No Secrets600 CPKnowledge: Reverse EngineeringINFINITE FUN SPACE WORLDS200 CPFacilities: MundaneGerudo Crafting200 CPCrafting: ArtisanPromethean Hacking Apps400 CPToolkits: MundaneBasic CR-Units200 CPSupplies: Mundane Large ScaleBiotechnology600 CPKnowledge: Future TechClick to shrink...
Is this how it's going to be now? I get to pick from a list each day? Without knowing what these perks actually do. Oh well. At least I get names and fields and costs. Well, time to break it down as much as I can. I already have Artistic License and I can't purchase that again. Dead Men Have No Secrets doesn't really say much about what it does, and it's kind of expensive, so I'll avoid that. Infinite Fun Space Worlds is also a little unclear as to what it does, but I already have a world of resources. I'd say I probably don't need it, but it's listed as Facilities, rather than Supplies, so maybe it would be useful. I have no idea what Gerudo Crafting is, but Crafting: Artisan is what got me woodworking... that I have only used to fix the front step. I'm tempted not to invest more into that field. Promethean Hacking Apps reminds me of the AI Seed I got yesterday. It might be a related tech. But hacking apps sounds appealing because I was behind in the information war yesterday, and I don't want to be again. I resolve to get that one. A checkmark appears by it. Basic CR-Units is a frustratingly unhelpful name. It isn't that expensive, but resources don't seem to be my weak point right now. Biotechnology sounds neat because it's Future Tech, but at the same time, it brings to mind Nilbog and Bonesaw. Biotinkers are pretty vilified. No reason to become more of one.
So is the hacking apps all I want to get from this list? I do want to keep some CP on hand in case something good comes up tomorrow, but I have plenty right now. I do a quick search of Gerudo, and the only reference that comes up is from Zelda. CR-Units give me no information. I figure Uber and Leet might like it if octoroks start showing up in my resource world, so I add Gerudo Crafting to my purchases and confirm my choices.
Spoiler: Gerudo Crafting (200 CP)Gerudo Crafting (200 CP): You are a Gerudo Craftswoman, with all the skill that implies. You can make clothing for both voe and vai that can keep them cool and even help protect from lightning, fashion gorgeous swords and shields designed to be used by the greatest warriors, and Shock Arrows that encapsulate the fury of the storm itself, releasing a mighty shockwave on impact. Any item made by Gerudo hands can be shaped by yours, so long as you have gathered all needed ingredients.
Spoiler: Promethean Hacking Apps (400 CP)Promethean Hacking Apps (400 CP): A collection of dizzyingly advanced software tools that can turn an average Joe or an AI into a reasonable hacker, and give an excellent hacker the chance to beat a TITAN at their own game - assuming a level playing field, of course. Not even this software will out-hack a TITAN if your hardware, connection and mental speed are lacking.
450 CP banked
Quest prompt: Have you met the Dallons yet? Amy could use a friend.
Well, Gerudo Crafting is neat. It's not just blacksmithing. It's limited jewelrymaking, fletching, tailoring, weaponsmithing, and shieldmaking. A few semi-magical effects, minor elemental damages or resistances. Not bad for being an artisan perk. Promethean Hacking Apps is pretty much what I expected. And what is up with that quest prompt? Is it trying to get me to do something? Probably, but it's not coming right out and telling me what to do. Still, it's probably worth it to get another nice perk. Plus Laserdream, Glory Girl, and Shielder came to help me out yesterday. Saying thank you is a good excuse to say hello to them.
Anyway, it's time for my morning run. It's doubly important since I missed yesterday. I make a clone to wake up Je'Lu and take off for my run. I meet him at tai chi and we go through the moving meditation together. It feels good. My mind needs a little clearing. It's a brand new day and life feels more approachable. As always, I continue my run. Unfortunately, I don't have my cell phone any more. I'm not sure where it got to after Coil took it from me. I'll have to get a new one.
I head home, have breakfast and a qi pill, then take a shower. I head downstairs and dad is waiting for me. I ask him what he wants, and he says he wants to help me. I tell him I was just going to do my online school and tinker for now, but I planned on my shadow clone going to visit my lawyer and the PRT and the Dallons later. I take a look outside and dad's truck is already gone. I don't know if this is the real dad or the shadow clone dad. I suppose it doesn't matter. I gave him the ability to be in two places at once and he wants one of them to be here with me.
He goes off to bug shadow clone me for a while and I ask him to dispel her so I can resummon her with more comfortable clothing. I settle in to some schoolwork and soon receive my clone's memories, she has been working on the motorcycle. I summon a new one and get to work. School feels good. It feels normal. It feels energizing knowing I'm also tinkering while I go to school. After a while dad comes back to check on me. We watch the news together for a while. They run a story on the big cape event yesterday. The news says that several Protectorate and independent heroes came together to defeat Coil. As a result of the battle, a structural instability required a building to need to be evacuated.
We can't spend too much time watching the news because I have another class coming up. I put my nose back to the grindstone and log back into school. The morning passes quickly. I fix some lunch and work on some homework. Then I'm back online for more class.
After I'm done with that, I head to the garage. I have an obligation to fix Leet's Atomic Assembler, and I want to get that done. It takes a long time because it's a large device that is almost entirely designed on the nanoscale. As such there are a lot of details to complete. Literally quintillions of them. But the only thing to do is to start and hope I can finish soon.
Je'Lu stops me after only a little work. I had wanted to check out the fencing class on Monday, but never made it there. This was my next opportunity to go. I didn't want to miss this because I forgot or because I couldn't bring myself to re-create the steps that led up to my abduction. I head back to the house, then for moral support, I ask my dad (or maybe his clone) to come with me. We take off for Clarendon. I did keep my flashlight/pepper spray keychain in my hand at all times.
The car ride is as uneventful as one could hope. I make it past the parking lot and a good measure of the fear abates, but I'm not exactly brimming with confidence. Social interaction hasn't been great for me the last few years. I see the rest of the club and I immediately feel out of place. Everyone else is wearing special fencing armor and carrying their swords. And this is why I never should have considered this. Fencing is a rich kids' sport. You can't participate if you don't have the money for the special gear.
I try to slink away, but dad doesn't let me. Then a guy there spots me and asks if I am interested in fencing. I tell him that I wanted to check it out, but I didn't think I could afford the gear. He says that's no problem, the club has some spare armor and foils, but I didn't even need that to start learning. His name is Chaz Connor, and he's the club president. He is also the instructor.
I'm somewhat relieved to learn I'm not the only newbie. Another kid just joined three weeks ago. Chaz has us go through some stretches, exercises, and conditioning. Then we practice a few basic moves (with sticks, not real swords). Most of the rest of the class is dueling with each other, but I'm not to that point yet. But I suppose this is about what I had hoped for. A chance to learn how to use the weapon I made myself.
Dad and I take off. I'm not sure if I'll be back.
Back at home, we head to the garage to start tinkering, but shadow clone me is already back. She gives him a healing necklace she made. Then Je'Lu ropes us into his D&D game instead of tinkering. Dad had made a half orc barbarian with an axe and an intelligence that barely qualified him as sentient (4). We make it through that level of the dungeon and start into the next. It was pretty nice to spend recreational time with people (and a robot and a spirit of intellect) that are my friends.
At least after the session I get some repair work done with my clone. I take a break for dinner, but she keeps working.
I walked down the tunnel again. We really should just start having dedicated shadow clone clothes that we keep at the garage so I wouldn't have to re-walk this every day. I distracted dad by having him try on the power armor I had the R&D center fabricate for him last night. I got back to the Fenrir motorcycle. It was really neat. The basis was a souped up standard motorcycle, but it's got a really interesting inertial manipulation field that keeps the rider on it, lessens falls, and can do some neat tricks. And it's very fast. Some time while I was working, dad came to watch me. I put the finishing touches on the repair job.
After that, I decided it's time to visit my lawyer. I took my new motorcycle and merged it into my soul. Then I cloaked and roof hopped until I was at the intersection where I like to appear. Then I hopped down to the street, unmerged the motorcycle, uncloaked and hopped on. It was fun, but I have a feeling it would be more fun if I could feel the wind rushing through my hair, rather than it being split by my power armor. Still, the speed, mobility, and freedom was a rush. I parked outside my lawyer's office and walked into the phone store next door. I bought a few prepaid burner phones and a few thumb drives. Then I went back to Gursky's office.
"Hello. Does Mr. Gursky have a minute?"
"Just a second. Mr. Gursky, Palladium is here for you."
"Oh good. Send them in."
I enter his office. "Hello."
"Hello. I have been trying to reach you. The PRT wants to speak with you."
"That makes sense. I want to speak with them too. Sorry Nicole missed your calls, she lost her phone."
"That's quite alright."
"I just bought new ones. I'll give you the numbers when I finish activating them. But why I'm here is I was abducted off the street Monday afternoon. In my civilian clothes."
"Oh dear."
"Coil did it. He mentioned Nicole Thomas. Which as far as I knew is a name that did not exist outside this office."
"That's not entirely true. That name is also on the purchase agreement for your company."
"It doesn't matter. His power was to run an alternate timeline. He tended to use them to torture people for information. I believe he got most of the information on me from me. But he also broke into this office at least once and had information from that event. Of course, that only occurred in his alternate timeline, so there was no evidence left here for you to find."
"That is disturbing."
"Imagine how it feels to be one of the ones he tortured in another timeline. Anyway, I escaped. I called in help. And we took him down. I didn't kill him myself, but I have a hard time regretting his passing."
"Okay. So what can I do for you?"
"Well, Nicole could use some more cash. And I've got another delivery of cubes for you. But really, I want someone to come with me to the PRT. I salvaged some data from Coil that I'll want to pass along. I'll also want an appointment to get a motorcycle addendum now that I have a motorcycle."
"Are you still interested in the commercial addendum? Mrs. Ortiz put these materials together for your study." He presented me with several thick books of driving instructions and truck operations manuals.
"Yeah. I want to drive those too. That's a lot of reading. How about next Friday?"
"I'll pass that on to Mrs. Ortiz."
"When did you want to meet the PRT?"
"This afternoon. Maybe 2?"
"Sure. Let me set up the appointment."
I fiddle with two of my phones while Gursky calls the PRT. I get them activated and write down the numbers for my lawyer. One is for 'Nicole' and the other is for 'Palladium'. He finishes up after I do.
"Okay, you have an appointment to give a statement to the PRT at two. I am not available this afternoon, but my associate Mr. Calle is. He's a better fit for this task anyway since he covers the criminal portion of cape law."
"Did I do something illegal?"
"Not that I'm aware of. But best to be sure. Plus he'll have a better idea of what the PRT will want to know. But there is one other thing I would like to discuss with you. The PRT has tested the healing formula you gave them and provisionally accepted it for public use. That means that people exposed to it will be monitored for complications and master influences, but it is believed safe. That's good news. I've drafted a pilot program with Brockton General Hospital for them to buy five doses a week. They would like deliveries on Mondays. Not a huge financial windfall yet, but it should serve as proof of concept for your usage model, so when the provisional designation is removed, we can have a proven financial plan in place. I will go to visit the insurance companies this afternoon, actually. If we can get them to lower malpractice rates for having your cure on hand, it should raise the price you can expect significantly."
"Okay. Sounds good."
"We've drafted a questionnaire about the compound. Please answer what you can." I looked over the sheet. No questions about how healing potions were made, but there were questions about interactions with allergies. Specifics about how the potions interacted with certain types of injuries. Asking again if there were any master effects involved. Straightforward stuff. I started filling out the form. When I finish, I hand it to him."
"Excellent. Thank you. Now I'll leave you with Mr. Calle to discuss the PRT this afternoon." He gets up and escorts me out of his office. "Here you go."
I entered the other lawyer's office. He was a handsome Latino man with a scar across one cheek. He asked me to tell him what happened. I did. I went through the abduction (though I don't give out any identifying details), my escape (leaving out the nature of the powers that let me escape), my call to Uber, him connecting me to Faultline, meeting her, raiding Coil's base, the device I made to counter his powers, his base's self-destruct and what I did about it. He gave me a few suggestions on how to better frame the story. Don't mention Uber and Leet, just call them "a friend". A little more stress on the threatened family member. Don't mention loaning Faultline any tinkertech. He said he didn't think I had anything to worry about.
Then I told him that I had salvaged a drive from Coil, and had some data I wanted to give the PRT. He didn't think that would be a problem and he told me he'd meet me at five til two outside the PRT building.
I went back to the garage, using my usual disappearing spot, then it was time to use my new perk. I'm supposed to meet the Dallons. Glory Girl helped me out yesterday, so I figured a thank you gift would be appropriate. Victoria Dallon seems like the kind of girl that likes jewelry. Her force field protects her from most damage, but I'm guessing when she flies around she still gets cold. So I made up a Ruby Circlet for her. It was easy to make a ruby, and the rest of the materials are fairly common. It was just a matter of putting in the time to craft it.
I wanted to make some Amber Earrings for Laserdream. She had the more offensively oriented power set than her brother, so giving her a little defense made sense to me. Unfortunately, it turns out that Amber isn't a crystal, so I couldn't just make it. Instead, I had to set the Chemical Synthesizer to make some. It took a while to program because it isn't just a compound, but a huge mess of organic compounds and peptides that have been polymerized with each other. But once I got it programmed, it was just an hour to get it produced.
I also wanted to make something for Shielder, but I didn't know what. So I asked my dad. They had been chatting the day before. He and Shielder hadn't talked about many personal things, though. I end up giving up on that line of inquiry. Searching for info on him on PHO didn't turn up anything terribly useful either. He's the slowest flier of New Wave and is more defensively oriented than his family. But I don't want to make him a weapon and I can't make something to make him fly faster.
In the end I move on to the other jewelry I want to craft. The last few days, Roberta has been going off to find runes. But not the Diablo type runes, the runecrafting I got first. And she has taught Je'Lu to craft runes too. Which boggles my mind because I have a runecarving kit and I still can't. But that does mean I have a very small selection of runes with which to make glyphs. Most importantly, I have an Okoma rune. I put that with my best additive potency rune and aspect rune to form an enchantment that will slowly heal the bearer. But while going through my limited stock, I also notice a Kaderi rune, which can form a Glyph of Shielding. So I formed that glyph for a piece of jewelry for Shielder. I need the actual jewelry to put those things on, however, so I take off a while before I need to to get to the PRT and stop by the boardwalk. I shop at the jewelry stalls and find a fairly generic cross for my dad, and a shield pendant for Shielder. I attract some attention shopping in power armor, but I keep my interactions short and stealth away before too many people gather.
Then I was off to the PRT building. I parked my techno-motorcycle outside and waited for Mr. Calle. As I did so, I applied the Glyph of Shielding to the shield pendant I had for Shielder. The gift was probably too on the nose.
Mr. Calle showed up right on time and we went inside. They escorted us to a conference room and I went through my story, just like he advised me. They didn't ask for details on the abduction, which I'm thankful for. But they did ask for details about how I prevented the base from self-destructing. I told them about the three charges I destroyed and the one column I tried to reinforce. They pressed for more answers, but Calle shut them down.
They also asked about the thing I made to shut down Coil's power. I didn't have a clear idea what it did (that wasn't part of the perk), but I did know that it had run its course and probably wouldn't work again. I wasn't worried about it because Coil was dead. Then I got to the point where I salvaged Coil's hard drive. They were a little freaked about that. They wanted the drive. I didn't want to hand it over because it contained identifying information about me. I was able to explain what Coil's power was, and how he liked torturing people for information in alternate timelines. He kept rather thorough (and grotesque) notes. I did tell them that his most common (alternate timeline) victim was Tattletale. In the end, they accepted the thumb drive of salvaged data that I offered them. They even gave back my original burner phone (which they found elsewhere in the base).
Mr. Calle and I parted ways outside the PRT building and I headed to the Dallon residence. I knocked on the front door, and a minute later I'm confronted by Flashbang, or I suppose Mark since he's in a Polo shirt and slacks.
"Hello. Is Glory Girl around? I wanted to thank her for her help yesterday."
"Who might you be?"
"Oh, sorry. I'm Palladium. New independent tinker."
"And what did Victoria help you with?"
"Uh, there was a situation with Coil, and a few heroes stepped in to help out with it."
"VICKY! PALLADIUM IS HERE TO THANK YOU FOR HELPING FIGHT COIL YESTERDAY."
Man, did he have to shout? A few seconds later, Glory Girl came downstairs. I waved. Flashbang left the doorway as she approached.
"Hey there. Palladium, was it?"
"Yeah. We didn't really get a chance to meet yesterday. But I wanted to say thank you for helping out yesterday. Coil put me in a really bad position, and I really appreciate everybody's help."
She whispered at me, "I ditched school to help out and my parents didn't know."
"Oh, sorry. I didn't realize. Anyway, I brought you a thank you gift." I held out the Ruby Circlet. "It should protect you from cold environments. I figured it might make you more comfortable when you're flying."
"Who is this?" A wiry haired girl said from behind Victoria.
"Hey, Ames. This is Palladium."
"New suitor, huh? Jewelry on the first date comes off as pretty desperate."
"No, it's nothing like that. It's just to say thank you."
"Riiight. Hey, aren't you the one that is trying to put me out of business."
"What? How? Oh, the healing potions? No. Those won't put you out of business. They only treat trauma. There's always cancer and genetic disorders and regrowing things. There's no replacing you, Panacea."
"Oh, now who is the one he's interested in? I know a fanboy when I hear one. Hey, do you want to go on a double date with Amy? I'll bring my boyfriend."
"DON'T YOU DARE!"
"Uh..."
"Come on, you two would be great together. You're both independent heroes. You both heal. You could be the medical miracle couple. It would be so perfect."
"I'm not the one he brought jewelry for."
"He knows I have a boyfriend, don't you Palladium?"
"No. I didn't pry into your personal life. But if jewelry is the mark of romantic interest then you have competition. Apparently I'm interested in both of your cousins too." I held up a pair of amber earrings and a shield necklace.
Victoria turned beet red and ran away and Amy started laughing. "I'm sorry, she's just tweaked because you're getting her in trouble for ditching school. And she's meddlesome."
"Sorry for the trouble. I really did just come to say thank you. Please give her my apologies."
"It's her own fault. She should have known she couldn't hide it. It's nice to meet you, Palladium."
"Nice to meet you too. Do you prefer Panacea or Amy?"
"I'm not in costume, so Amy."
"Good point. Nice to meet you, Amy. Here's my number. I only check for messages once each morning right now, though." I gave her the number of the phone that the PRT just gave me back.
"Thanks. New Wave likes to have contacts in the hero community."
"Have a nice day."
I headed back to my motorcycle parked on the street. While I'm thinking about phones, I texted Mr. Gursky that I got the phone back from the PRT. I may as well only have one phone to check each morning. Next I visited the Pelhams. That's a much calmer affair. I talked to Mrs. Pelham and gave her the jewelry for her children. She thanked me, and expressed her relief that things worked out well for me. It was all very polite.
Then I headed back to the garage. I quickly finished off the Glyph of Health Recovery for the necklace and gave it to dad. Then we got to play D&D and Arfean rode again. Or well, snuck instead of rode. Whatever. After the game session, me and the original worked on the assembler for a while. Then she went off to get dinner and I kept working. A half-hour later I was tired and dismissed myself. The next clone could do tonight's repair work.
That night my clone and I work on the atomic assembler. It's a daunting project. I'm amazed at how quickly Leet was able to assemble it. Still, with both of us and the servoskulls working on it, it's only a fraction of the way repaired by bedtime.
Day 23, Thursday January 27, 2011
+400CP 850CP banked
4 rolls:
Stylish Mechanic100 CPQuality: AppearanceMicromanipulators50 CPToolkits: MundaneUrkel's Intellect600 CPKnowledge: IntelligencePromethean Man600 CPKnowledge: Reverse EngineeringClick to shrink...
I guess this is how it's going to be. I look through my choices. Micromanipulators grabs my attention. I've seen very few perks that aren't worth a multiple of a hundred CP. I just have the 50 CP left over from the cheap perk that Databases: Magical gave me. So Micromanipulators would be nearly free. Certainly would compete with very few other perks. I lock that one in. Stylish Mechanic is cheap, but I don't think I really need more ability to make things look better.
But that leaves two big perks. Promethean reminds me of the computer perks I got yesterday and the day before. But Promethean Man doesn't make sense. The Prometheans seem to be AIs or something in that universe, which would mean they are specifically not men. And the field is reverse engineering. That could be useful when dealing with Leet's tech.
On the other hand, there's Urkel's Intellect. A search for that brings up a TV show from the late eighties. It's one of the earlier examples of divergence as in Earth Bet's Family Matters, Urkel was a tinker, but in Aleph, he was a genius that invented bizarre things. The name of the perk indicates that it's more of the Aleph version. But once I start looking up what he invented, I knew I needed it. There were a lot of things he was able to invent that were neat, like the shrinking device, the snooze juice, and the jet pack. Then there were two things that really tempted me: the transformation chamber and the teleporter pad. The former could give me a social life back. The latter could solve my problems with getting into my base without being noticed. But the things that really sealed the deal were none of those. The cloning machine was incredibly appealing. I had a memory backup in my skull now, but if I wanted to take advantage of it, I would have to have a clone body to upload them into. The other was the time travel watch. Just the possibility of seeing my mother again was too much to pass up. And now that I think about it, I could clone her too. That is, IF that perk lets me make those things. I lock that perk in and accept.
Spoiler: Micromanipulators (50 CP)Micromanipulators (50 CP): These rather delicate gloves were meant for scientific purposes. They're reinforced with small motors and electrically contracting artificial muscles to allow you to perform delicate work on the scale of one millionth of a meter. While they're definitely more suited to scientific experiments, they can be put to use in any situation that requires steady hands like aiming a rifle, conducting brain surgery, cooking, defusing a bomb, or even bypassing some redirection and shielding abilities.
Spoiler: Urkel's Intellect (600 CP)Urkel's Intellect (600 CP): You are beyond brilliant. With a standard public school education and the resources of a middle-class teenager, you could invent technologies that previously only existed in science fiction. The best way to describe your mental prowess is to say that you are a comic-book genius, potentially capable of inventing technology to allow cloning, neural downloads, teleportation, shrink rays, genetic manipulation, or even time travel. What is more, you possess the same level of ability in all sciences and technologies that you put any effort into, whether it be computers, robotics, biology, chemistry, physics or any other. Any gains made in one area are equaled in those other fields.
200 CP banked
Quest prompt: The Archer's Bridge Merchants are still out there.
Well that is everything I could have wanted. Teleportation, cloning, time travel, all at my fingertips. And it just so happens that I have a standard public school education and the resources of a middle-class teenager. I actually have significantly more resources than that. In fact, this even gives me a way to dig into the problem of stabilizing the Extremis formula. Plus an annoying prompt urging me to go after the Merchants. It's an exciting way to start the day.
I get out of bed to go for my morning run. I leave a clone behind to start the repair work I still need to finish. The run goes smooth. Although I do get a confusing text from Amy Dallon saying "Damn your trickery. Vicky says getting your number means you were hitting on me more than her.". I text back "LOL. Not trying to get a date, just wanted to say thanks." Uber and Leet left a message saying they were behind in their shooting schedule and want to know if we can swap back on Saturday instead of tomorrow. I reply with a cryptic "Sure. But you might want to start thinking about Zelda." Also, my lawyer says my license addendum appointment is set up and they are ready to receive the next batch of gold.
As my habit, when I get back I have breakfast and a qi pill. Then I take a shower and meet my dad.
"I never did find out. Are you the shadow clone or the original?"
"I'm the original. The shadow clone is handling work. I haven't gotten hurt worse than a paper cut in a decade. I figure the danger of being outed is minimal."
"Okay. I've got news. I got something good this morning. I got a pair of gloves that help me with very precise control and fabrication. But the important thing is ... do you remember the show Family Matters?"
"Yes. Not my favorite show, but I recall the basic premise."
"Well, basically I can invent stuff like the neighbor character."
"The tinker?"
"Yeah, but like the Aleph version where he's just an inventor. And there were a lot of huge inventions in that show. If I couldn't make robots already, I could now. But the important things are these: I can make a cloning pod. One of the powers I got on Tuesday gave me a memory backup in my skull. And now I can make a clone I can upload those memories into."
"That's good? It could keep you safe, but it does bring up some existential questions."
"Oh yeah. The soul. Me from a month ago wouldn't be concerned because I didn't think souls existed. But me from today has two different soul manipulation powers. So I guess they do. And that bonus Resleeving perk even lets me transfer my soul to a new body, but it doesn't actually specify that the Cortical Stack would save my soul if this body were to die. Fortunately, one of my new perks lets me catch souls. I just have to figure out how to shrink the mechanism and transfer the soul into the new body once its cloned. Things are complicated. But there's more. I can also make a time travel watch. Which means I can go back to before Mom died. I can clone Mom."
"Taylor. That's amazing. But slow down. If you make a time travel device you have all the time in the world to finish it. But... why don't you just save her?"
"You have to be careful about messing with history. It can change everything. Like what would happen if I save her and have a happy life, but never get powers? Then I can never invent time travel and save her, causing a paradox. Anyway, I should also be able to make teleportation pads."
"Okay. So what first?"
"Well, I've got school and some extra reading to do. My shadow clone is already working in the garage. I want to go to that kickboxing class later this morning. My shadow clone will take over school for me then. The self-defense class tonight. Other than that, just tinkering all day. Je'Lu will probably want to finish his D&D adventure. I think we could get that done this afternoon."
"Sounds fun. I'll be there."
Online learning goes okay. Just another iteration of the daily grind that is school. But I used to love school, back before Emma turned on me. A day of distance learning that doesn't involve getting bullied is almost enough to make me love it again. If it wasn't so far behind where I am academically. Between classes, I have driving manuals to read. And they are intensely dry. I turn it into a puzzle, trying to figure out the context of each feature and precaution. The hidden history of truck brake failures opens up to me. A quick search on my internal wifi connection confirms my inferences. It's more interesting than the original text, but it still seems like something that somebody should have foreseen. I can't tell if I'm projecting from my current intelligence or if this is just hindsight being twenty twenty. I guess introspection isn't a skill I've developed yet.
When it's time to switch off with the shadow clone, she's made more progress than I would have expected. I take the bus to the gym and get dressed for some kickboxing. I do a little better than my previous kickboxing sessions, but I'm still struggling for breath by the end. And my punches and kicks are not terribly effective. I ask the instructor about it and he says I need to build muscle for power, and muscle memory for effectiveness. So I ask for some workout recommendations. He gives some, and I do some searches for more, and come up with a workout plan. I spend two hours lifting weights. I don't limit myself to one part of the body (against recommendation) because I'm going to heal myself when I get home. Of course that means my whole body feels like jelly for the whole ride home. I feel paranoid about someone coming after me while I'm so weak, but nobody does. That settles it, I need to tinker up some alternate forms for this pepper spray/flashlight I can carry around inconspicuously.
Back at home, I catch some flack from my shadow clone. I was supposed to be back to cover the last class, but I wasn't. Then she dispels herself so we can both tinker.
I headed to the garage and took the micromanipulators with me. I told Roberta about my perk acquisitions today while I got back to repairing the atomic assembler. And boy did they help out. They were exactly what I needed to put together the billions of arrays of billions of nanoscopic parts. To that end, I managed to finish fixing it.
Then finished, I took a good scan of the assembler. I scanned the other Leet-tech that I have too. Feeding that into the R&D center produced some huge gains. The Fenrir motorcycle gave enough data for it to complete research on the Mass Effect drive that goes into the Nomad that I wanted to build. The gravity gun helped out on the mass effect drive too, and turned into tool attachments for the mining drone. The hard-light costume reminded me about a Star Trek episode about Exocomps, so that also turned into variable tools for the mining drones. Given those together, plus the actual mining equipment I scanned earlier, I have enough for the mining part of the drones. But the atomic assembler was probably the most important. It is all the research I needed to upgrade the R&D center itself enough to be able to make the Nomad.
But I noticed some irregularities in the assembler, and took a closer look at its code. And I didn't know what's going on. Was Leet subconsciously suicidal? The first thing it wanted to produce was a supercritical mass of plutonium. I very much doubt it was going to have the materials to make that any time soon, but if it did, then this whole city will cease to exist. Another problem was that it wanted to store helium and lead together as polonium, nice dangerously-radioactive polonium. And upon being fed enough organic matter, it would have coated objects in nitroglycerin.
I wasn't sure what Leet was thinking, but I started putting safety lockouts on that sort of thing. I shut down production of explosive compounds. Not even gunpowder. And I did it in the hardware. I left a bypass in case I wanted to enable it, but I used Hands Off! to prevent anyone else from using the bypass. I similarly locked out anything nuclear. There were some productive uses for nuclear material, but it's hard to use safely, and the last thing I wanted is to be considered the tinker that let Leet irradiate everybody. While I was looking at it, I also locked out anything that's a blatant poison and forced warnings on anything toxic. In fact, I have it show a material safety data sheet for each thing it produces. It could still make a knife, so it couldn't be considered completely safe, but I figured Leet could just buy a knife if he really needed one. I was sure it could be used to make a bunch of other dangerous things, but I couldn't foresee everything. I did try to foresee as much as possible, though.
While I was doing this, Je'Lu woke up. I asked for his advice on how to make it safer, and he came up with a few ideas, which I had already implemented. Oh well.
I rescanned the assembler. It was an incredibly complicated device, but all it did was break down objects, stored the atoms, and reassembled those atoms into new objects. It was a fantastic way to make anything you want, if you can afford the energy cost (which I could because I was powering it on magic crystals) and if you had the raw materials (which for most things were fairly easy to come by) and if you had a design for it that was accurate down to the atom. I wondered if I could get it to copy itself. I set up my diagnostic computer to run an hour-long scan of the assembler using the Monkey Tool before I went off to spend my time at school.
The classes I had to sit through were boring. And I knew the other Taylor was studying driving, and since I didn't want to duplicate, I preread our school textbooks between classes. It's dull, and I ended up compiling an errata for them just to keep my interest. I was already way past this in physics - and most of the other subjects. Unfortunately, Taylor didn't come home from the gym, so I had to stay at the online classes for the rest of the school day.
After classes were over, I took our stored up gold and made a trip to the law office as Nicole. Not much happened on the way. I decided to stop at the library on the way home and find a few books on more advanced topics: time, cloning, quantum physics. Checking them out could be suspicious, so I skimmed through them and took scans that I can read through at a more leisurely rate later. I might need to find a library that has more scholarly journals in stock for further research.
When I got home, Taylor was just getting home, I started to give her a piece of my mind, then just decided to give her all of it by dispelling myself.
I spin off another clone and together we get to work on new inventions by Urkel. The problem is, we know it is possible to invent these things, but we don't know how to do so yet. We actually need to study some high-level physics to come up with hypotheses as to how to proceed. You only ever saw the miraculous inventions that appeared in the show, not Steve's long hours of learning the science and engineering that formed the basis for them.
To that end, I start the research with the most advanced tech I could, namely Leet's assembler. I have the detailed scan of it, so I start to study the device with an eye to recreating it. Basically just translating the scan data into a blueprint with enough resolution to actually use. Then I can use the assembler itself to make another assembler. Meanwhile, my clone is going to study the assembler with the point of understanding the teleportation that it does in the hopes of scaling it up to a teleportation pad.
I didn't leave Je'Lu and my skull idle during all this. I asked Roberta to look into adapting the diamandoid cortical stack in my head to be a single soul infinity circuit. It wasn't a strictly magical process, but I figured anything soul-based was at least somewhat magical. Unfortunately, she begged to differ. She considered soul-stuff to be something that can be seen and quantified, but all the faith-based stuff around it was mumbo-jumbo to her. Technology made more sense to her. Meanwhile I had entrusted the hacking apps to Je'Lu, with the goal of getting me info on the gangs in town. I didn't have much to go on there, but Coil had managed to identify Hookwolf's secret identity, so we could build on that work.
Of course, by the time Je'Lu starts the game, neither of us has success at our tasks. The game is fun, though. We finally finish exploring the Sunless Citadel, fought a bunch of twig-blights, defeated Belak the anti-druid, burned down the Gulthias Tree, reached level three and saved the town of Oakhurst. At least the initial group reached level three. Roberta and dad were still level two. I suppose it's a pretty pleasant way to pass some time.
My shadow clone decides to try to base the Urk-pad on the Portal Gun instead, and moved on to scan and study that. Meanwhile, I keep studying the assembler, and try to mash the scans I had into a file that the assembler could use to print one. I meet with some success on that count. I still don't understand all of how the assembler works. There are portions of it that just shouldn't work. But I do manage a faithful recreation of the device in an assembler design file. I set it to print one out and give the servoskulls instructions on which materials to feed into it. The actual printing will take at least all night.
Then I move on to my soul saver. Roberta was an invaluable resource on magic, but the original knowledge was mine, and the downsizing technique is another power of mine, so I'm probably the only one actually able to complete the project. I discuss with Roberta and the first hurdle is that the cortical stack is the wrong material and not formed to gather, hold or release souls. The wrong material problem is something we think can be overcome by fusing the diamondoid cortical stack with the appropriate material originally intended for that purpose by using the Fab-Unit 20,000. The next problem is shaping. We think that laser ablating could etch the appropriate designs. Unfortunately, both those procedures will require cranial surgery on myself. The shaping requires much more extensive surgery than the fusing.
I'm a little worried about planning surgery on my own skull. I do have those medical skills, so I'm pretty sure I can handle it, but I think any surgery can be daunting. I'm also not looking forward to convincing dad to let me do it. But it's better to let him get used to the idea.
"Dad, I need to talk to you."
"That doesn't sound good."
"It's not good. Not that bad. Just scary sounding."
"I'm trying to come up with a way to protect myself from death. I have this cortical stack that is supposed to back up my memories. And I'll be working on a way to build a clone body for myself. But I need to protect my soul too. The basic idea is to turn my current stack into a tiny, one soul capacity infinity circuit. So if I die, the stack gets both my memories and soul, and when it gets implanted in a new body, I'm back."
"You mentioned those things."
"Well, in order to do that, I'll need to alter it a little. Which means I need to get to it, and it's currently inside my head. So it means cranial surgery. I don't want you to worry. I have three relevant medical perks. I should be plenty skilled enough to do it. Plus I have healing potions if something goes wrong."
"That's still a pretty big risk."
"It's fairly safe. I'll use sterile technique, I won't touch the brain. I'll avoid all the cranial nerves. And heal myself afterwards with a potion."
"I won't have you rush into doing surgery on yourself."
"Oh, no. I was thinking about scheduling it for Sunday. That gives me a chance to examine some permutations, refine my designs. Print out some antiseptics and stuff. Just wanted to give you some heads up."
"Okay. I appreciate that. And this isn't permission. But I'll think about it."
After dinner, dad takes me to the self defense class at the gym. As much as I want to spend another couple hours working out and building muscles, it would be suspicious. The class itself goes well. Dad bites the bullet and gets himself a gym membership and signs up for a boxing class.
When we get home, the clone is still working on adapting the portal gun technology to a teleporter. She has actually made progress. She doesn't quite understand how the portal gun works. Once again, it looks like it contains some pieces that just shouldn't work. But she thinks she understands the basics of how the portal gun works, and has hypotheses about how to adapt it to the uses we want.
In other good news, the R&D center is done upgrading itself to create larger items. Then it's time for me to sleep.
Day 24, Friday January 28, 2011
+400CP 600CP banked
4 rolls:
Ritualist600 CPSkills: MagicGenius Intellect600 CPKnowledge: IntelligenceThe Honed Edge100 CPQuality: DurabilityHeavenly Flame800 CPSkills: AlchemyClick to shrink...
Another day, another perk choice. Right away, I can eliminate Heavenly Flame because I just can't afford it. The Honed Edge is cheap, but gives a durability type bonus. So it's probably just that edged weapons keep their edges better. I don't use enough sharp things to care. That leaves Genius Intellect and Ritualist. I just got an Intelligence perk and it was good, but I'm not sure I need yet another. On the other hand, Ritualist is a Magic skill, and those can be pretty powerful. Arc of Embodiment is a very strong ability. So I decide to lock that in.
Spoiler: Ritualist (600 CP)Ritualist (600 CP): Ritual magic is an extensive form of arcane practice that allows those using it to accomplish great works even as fairly weak mages. You have gained considerable knowledge, both practical and theoretical, on the workings of ritual magic and, by extension, sacrificial blood magic. This allows you to create far reaching and incredibly powerful spell matrices that can be supplied over time by anyone, or fueled by the life force of sacrificed creatures or blood. Such spell matrices last much longer than common spells, able to persist for weeks on a single casting. Additionally, each casting can be built up over time, allowing it to be stretched out in small portions that, if interrupted, can be restarted without losing all the progress made on the ritual. Even fast rituals, using sacrifices of life force (from yourself or a suitable sacrifice), can be quite persistent, lasting hours where a similar spell would only survive minutes.
This is extensively used by the races of the demiplane to create Rituals of Propagation, complex rituals that can be used to turn humanoids into another race, designated by the ritual design. An individual may undergo multiple such rituals, but may become unstable, either physically or mentally, if too many are done without enough recovery time between such uses, which can take several years. You and your companions will automatically recover at the start of each new jump.
As a Denizen, you start knowing the ritual for your race, otherwise you must learn or design them from scratch.
Spoiler: Welcome Package (0 CP)Welcome Package (0 CP): Working together, the people of Ravenwood made sure everyone had something to help them survive. To that end, just for entering the jump, you gain three sets of sturdy clothing, a set of reinforced clothing that can act as basic armor, and a waterproof cloak. On top of this, you gain a pack with basic necessities; trail rations, a waterskin, tablets to purify water, flint and steel, a coil of rope, a knife, a hand axe, and a lantern. These items are simple, easily replaceable, and designed for function over form.
0 CP banked
Quest prompt: Case 53s are people too!
No! That is a terrible power. It lets me do rituals, but I still don't have any spells to do with rituals. And if I did, the rituals seem to be all about sacrificial blood magic. The one spell I know about that it could have given me (but didn't because I'm not a denizen) only lets me turn people into... humans. It's not until I bother reading the quest prompt that I remember that there are people who might really appreciate being human. It might be worth it to those people. I suppose it would be worth looking into. The ability comes with bonus equipment, but it's all simple old stuff, except maybe those purification tablets.
But it's morning. Time for me to exercise. I form a clone and take off on my run. I feel an odd draw on my body's energies a few minutes later. I keep running. Je'Lu meets me for tai chi. We practice and it feels relaxing. The flowing movements are already starting to feel natural. I feel even more in touch with my chi than I have on previous tai chi practices.
I check my phone for messages. There's a message from Vicky laughing about Palladium wanting to date Amy. Then there is a message from Sarah Pelham apologizing for the behavior of her nieces and relaying that Eric and Crystal love their new jewelry. Nothing from the lawyer or the PRT, which is probably good news.
I finish my run, come home, eat breakfast, take my qi pill, and try to take a shower when Dad tells me he's willing to go ahead and take qi pills with me. So I spend some time running him through some basic tai chi and tell him he really ought to come with me to class those days when it happens, but before long, I feel grimy and have to go take my shower. I log on to my computer and start my classes, but as is getting common, I quickly end up bored. I end up rereading the materials that came with the academy introductory packet, and I notice that there's an e-lending library service on it. I look up e-readers and find one that is compatible with the computer I have and download it. Then I link that to the free account I got through school and start downloading books to read. I start with a few high school textbooks in subjects I'm not taking, like geology, home economics, and auto shop, but quickly notice that the service also has college books, including specialized upper division textbooks. I go nuts setting up a long queue of those to read. And I manage to polish off a few books between classes today.
After school, I head to the garage. I say hello to my dad, Roberta, my shadow clone, and Je'Lu. I could try to go to the fencing club again this afternoon. But I want to get a backup weapon together before I do. But I must have thought of that myself, because my shadow clone points out a round jeweled shield on the workbench. I recognize it, it's a Gerudo shield called Daybreaker. That's good. There's also a main-gauche, per the specifications of the Survey. That's excellent. I can start combining these pieces to form a holdout weapon. That will make me feel much safer going out. I take the shield and have my dad lightly attack me to practice some blocking. Then I ask where the gun is.
"Oh, the other clone has it."
"What other clone?"
"Roberta said we could make another shadow clone, so I did. She's with Je'Lu's clone and Joe hunting in the resource world."
Huh, that will increase our productivity. I combine the shield with the pepper spray/flashlight and the main-gauche. It's a good start. I still want to put some kind of pistol or two in there, but it's good enough for now.
"How goes the attempt to use the assembler to jump start our own crafting?"
"Frustrating. The copy we printed out overnight doesn't work. I keep trying to get it to work, but every time I think I find something that is preventing it from working, I check the original, and that's the way it is. But somehow it works. Even though it shouldn't. Anyway, I moved on to other things. I tried repairing the laser rifle we got from Coil and ended up incorporating it into the plasma rifle to condense the plasma beam. The only thing I can think of is that it must be Xenotechnology."
"It was an alien laser rifle? How does Coil have access to aliens?"
"I don't know, but I've also had an itching desire to incorporate the assembler into the R&D center. Which makes me wonder if all tinkertech is alien technology."
"That would be weird. Do you think aliens are giving out powers or something?" I consider for a moment, and wonder if I can incorporate the copy of the assembler into the R&D center, and don't get any ideas on the matter. Which would mean the assembler is alien tech and the copy of it is not, meaning it's either human tech, or it's not considered tech because it doesn't work. So what if it doesn't work because the alienness makes the original work?
"Hey, can you make the copy work by not copying the original? Maybe the alienness of the original is what makes it work."
"I can try a few fixes that I've thought about. No guarantees it will work."
"Anything I can do? I haven't learned everything you have about the assembler yet. Maybe examine the hard-light costume?"
"Knock yourself out."
The costume was not terribly informative. I learn a lot about the hard-light concept, and I can think of a bunch of applications for it, but the costume itself shouldn't work. I'm not sure why it does. It's like a few key components were missing.
I take off for fencing class. I clutch my pepper spray the whole way, but when I get there, I'm welcomed. I spend another hour learning the basics of stance and practicing basic drills. It's boring, but it gives me an idea. I could use these periods of boredom productively if I could emulate an e-reader on the computer in my head. Then I could be learning new things at the same time that I repeat my exercises. The newcomers like me don't get much attention from Mr. Connors, but he does make sure one of his more advanced club members gives us tips on technique and form.
I head back to the garage a little sore from the workout, but mostly okay. It felt good to have a social gathering that Emma wouldn't mess with.
Back at my base, I work on programming my Mesh Inserts to work like an e-reader. The basic idea of displaying text is trivial, but e-readers use digital signatures to enforce return policies, and those are much harder to deal with. I use the Promethean Hacking Apps to get past those safeguards. That also means I can keep copies of all those books if I want.
That doesn't take too long, but I head home to fix some dinner. I'm able to read up on developmental biology while I'm cooking. Dinner with dad is okay, but it feels like I'm spending a lot of time with him since I came out to him and taught him how to make a shadow clone.
After dinner we head back to the garage for more tinkering. Clone two is back from a resource world excursion. But the plan is for her to go out on patrol tonight. Clone one keeps working on leveraging the assembler. I end up talking to Roberta about Ritualist and immediately getting a headache as she asks me to start murdering things so she can figure out how my blood magic works. I flatly refuse (as I'm sure my clones did). I consider drawing a little blood for a voluntary blood sacrifice, but dad is squeamish about that. Not that I don't have the skill for it, but for the metaphysical implications of the act.
Instead of trying to untangle that moral Gordian knot, we settle on working on refining the design of the personal infinity circuit. Getting the circuit scaled down is the easy part. Getting it to catch a soul when it is implanted within the body, rather than the body being within the area of the circuit is an interesting, but solvable problem. The difficulty comes from how to allow the soul to migrate out of the circuit and back into the body. If we allow the soul to come out when memories are accessed, it opens the door to allow the soul to be completely drained away by a third party attempting to access the information. If we let the soul out when in contact with flesh, then it will try to stuff my soul into someone who picks it up. The more responsible way of doing it is to allow the soul to leak back out when memories are saved to the stack, but the direction is wrong, so it's hard to get any meaningful fraction of a soul out in that time. And I don't want to have to worry about being a soulless monster for days after a resurrection. In the end we decide to allow the soul out when memories are accessed and trust Hands Off! to prevent unauthorized access.
I was out on patrol. In the dark of the night, cloaked, looking for Merchants. I only had the vaguest notion of where I might find them. I hopped from roof to roof. I wished I had some better intel. Random searching worked fine in my resource world, but that seems to be because it's just packed with stuff. Out here on the streets things weren't so dense. Block after block of nothing happening, just the way it should be in a peaceful city after dark. People coming and going to bars and nightspots. I started to wonder if I would recognize a drug deal if I saw one. Probably not. Maybe I could make something that can scan for drugs. Or even a police band scanner.
But none of that was with me here and now, so I kept trying to find some crimes or Merchants or something. At least I had pretty good dark-vision. But sadly, despite four hours of wandering around in the worst areas of town, no drug deals made themselves apparent to me. Nobody came out screaming their allegiance to the Merchants, just a bunch of poor people who were down on their luck.
Day 25, Saturday January 29, 2011
+200CP 200CP banked
2 rolls:
Heart of Fire 200 CP Quality: Efficiency
Omni-Disciplinary 200 CP Knowledge: Intelligence
Well, that isn't a lot of CP I got. But at least my power is nice enough to give me a choice of things I could afford. I don't really know what Heart of Fire does or what Omni-Disciplinary does. Neither one is specific enough to give me a clue as to what fictional world they come from. So all I have to go on are the fields. I just got some Knowledge: Intelligence, and it was useful, but I'm already pretty Omni-Disciplinary. The perk might still help, I just don't know. Heart of Fire is in the field of Quality: Efficiency, which was what gave me Savant, which didn't seem to be related to efficiency. I decide to try Heart of Fire in the hopes that it would give me a better idea of how the category relates to efficiency.
Spoiler: Heart of Fire (200CP)Heart of Fire (200CP): Fire Elementals possess a form of magic called the Ember. This magic grants incredible resistance, bordering on immunity, to heat and flames, though it does nothing for the pain that heat can cause. However, that is merely a side effect. The true use of Ember is as a form of refinement, materials exposed to ember infused flame have their traits enhanced. Food becomes tastier and more nutritious, metals become more resilient, and potions last longer or have an increased effect. This does, however, require the material to be exposed to flame, so this will not work on certain materials.
Spoiler: The Light of My Soul (0CP)The Light of My Soul (0CP): The primary and most utilized source of power in Nexus is the very Light of the Soul itself, appropriately called Light, represented as pinpoints of Light with tiny threads of holding them together spread evenly throughout the body. This power naturally strengthens the body and its functions in its base state. A person is limited to the Light they have on reaching full maturity, around the human equivalent of 25, with the power constantly growing at a slow rate up to that point, with it slowing further after puberty. However, this alone would not make Light particularly useful.
There are two ways to manipulate Light. The first focuses the pinpoints into a smaller area to add more power to that area or be able to shift how it manifests. While this shifting takes a bit of concentration and time, it is fairly easy to train to the point where it's near instinctive to shift the pinpoints of Light around.
The second method is the most potent, but also the most time consuming. By looping the strands connecting pinpoints together around a series of pinpoints, it's possible to create a Seed. A Seed will continuously grow brighter over time, creating a small well of power. This is the basis of Seed Sorcery (see below). However, even those that do not use Seed Sorcery will find this useful, as cracking open one of these Seeds gives a boost to the effects of the user's Light based on how strong the Seed is.
Post Jump, you may awaken Light in others, complete a capacity to form Mistlight Manifestations.
Spoiler: Seed Sorcery (0CP)Seed Sorcery (0CP): Creating a Seed is an easy task, the basis on which Seed Sorcery is built, but using it for anything other than a short term boost that fades quickly takes a good deal more. Every being with access to Light also has access to Lenses, the tools that a Seed Sorcerer uses to shape their Seeds into a more useful state. A Lens is a focus through which Light can be passed through to color it and give it purpose, in unbound light, this dissipates too quickly to be useful, but a Seed will keep the color and purpose given to it until it is cracked.
On average, a Light user will have anywhere from two to four lenses, though certain races are known to have more or less, as is the case with most goblins. With this perk alone, you gain three lenses, with this being modified appropriately for your race, though if you would gain less you still gain three, but would have any excess lenses locked until after this jump is over. A Lens can be nearly anything, from Arrow to Form to Fire to Self, though it never gives a specific descriptor such as a person's name or place. It is possible to gain additional lenses, though the process is usually exceptionally difficult to accomplish.
Once a Seed has been colored by one or more Lenses, it can be cracked to create effects akin to spells based on the Lenses used. The effect varies based on how long a Lens was used, what combination of Lenses were used, and what order the Lenses were used in. The Light from a colored Seed lingers for longer than a normal Seed, but does not enhance the normal Light of the user as it would have unless designed to do so. It is instead used up to manifest the effects of the Seed. A variety of related effects may be manifested, but they are always similar enough that you can tell they're from the same Seed.
Additionally, it's possible to feed the energy from one Seed into another, though doing so too quickly may risk it Cracking on its own. This can, and often is, used to build up Seeds faster and is a well known method used by Blood Goblins in particular.
Post Jump, if you possess The Light of My Soul, you may form Lenses within someone's Light at the same time you awaken Light in the person.
Spoiler: Mist Collector (0CP)Mist Collector (0CP): When any creature with Light dies, they leave behind a small echo, a wisp of glittering Mist, colored similarly to the Lenses the individual possessed in life. These wisps are also touched by the memories and emotions of the being's life, altering its properties somewhat. The collection and manipulation of these wisps of Mist are the basis on which Mistlight Manifestations come into existence.
Collecting a wisp of Mist is easy, simply touching it will stabilize it and allow it to be stored indefinitely. But utilizing a single wisp of Mist to create a Mistlight Manifestation will result in a lackluster Manifestation, weak enough that even humans, who lack the reserves of light necessary to become proper hunters, prefer to make at least a few modifications before doing so. To that end, there are three methods of strengthening a wisp.
First is smelting or fusing. Taking two or more wisps of Mist and combining them into a single, new one with the traits of both. This is by far the easiest and fastest method of empowering a wisp of Mist. However, unless you know exactly what your wisps of Mist are and how they'll react, combining them in this way may lead to complications, such as opposing traits canceling out or mutating into a new trait that has a negative impact on the whole.
Second is cultivation. By 'feeding' a wisp of Mist, it is allowed to grow organically and produce new qualities and traits over time. Allowing a wisp of Mist to grow in this way is fairly simple, and with its organic growth it's unlikely to have any complications, but this process is time consuming, potentially taking weeks or months to yield the results on par with smelting or refinement.
Lastly is refinement. This is a rather difficult process that removes unwanted traits from a wisp of Mist, much like cutting and polishing a gem. This process has you excise traits and qualities from a wisp of Mist, allowing the other aspects to grow in strength as a result. This is a quick process and is unlikely to cause any real trouble, but you must be very precise and careful during the process or you may leave behind bits of what you wanted removed.
Additionally, wisps of Mist are useful for another purpose. By binding a wisp to a Seed, it can act as an artificial Lens in the use of Seed Sorcery. Seeds formed with a wisp are, however, slower to grow than those that use your own Lenses. Cracking a Seed with a wisp will often cause the wisp to dissipate, though some Seed Sorcerer's have learned how to reclaim the wisp used for this prior to cracking the Seed.
0 CP banked
Quest prompt: Saint is a big threat.
Well, that's not exactly what I expected, but it's a pretty good bonus. Makes me regret forging the backup weapon yesterday. If I did the same today, the Heart of Fire would make it even sharper and stronger. Still, I could maybe try to blue-back the main-gauche with ember infused flame to make it more resilient. Same for the shield. And I can probably do that to the rapier as well.
The system of magic that came with the main ability was interesting. There's lots of potential turning wisps of mist into seeds. Unfortunately, I would have to awaken the light in other creatures in order for them to leave wisps behind when they die and that seems dangerously self-serving. Seed Sorcery doesn't have the same requirement, but it's limited to a few concepts. Apparently my lenses are electricity, crystal, and form.
In any case, I summon some clones and get ready for my morning run. While out of the house, I check messages. Uber and Leet verify the trade back this afternoon. I confirm we're on, including confirming with my lawyer that they'll provide a van again. My lawyer also wants to verify that I'll deliver the first batch of healing potions to the hospital on Monday, and I confirm that too. The run is more interesting than previous ones because I can also be reading textbooks while I do so. This is going to greatly increase my reading time, and that should mean I can learn a whole lot more. The topic I study this run is quantum tunneling.
I get back home and it's time for breakfast and a shower. I make eggs and toast for breakfast just to test out my new perk. It's the best breakfast I've ever had. I make the toast over the stove flame. I burn myself on the flame (accidentally and purposely) and that's annoying. It doesn't cause any damage, but the pain reflex is supposed to be a warning to the brain that damage is occurring. A pain response without damage is counterproductive. I suppose it's at least not damage without a pain response, which would be downright dangerous. I take my daily qi pill too, then I head to the garage. My dad joins me. I check on the status of my projects.
Last night the version of me working on duplicating the assembler gave up on making a straight copy, and tried designing a whole new thing from the ground up. She came up with something and had it print out overnight. It's still pretty rudimentary, taking much longer than Leet's version, but it should be able to function. Right now one of me is testing that out. It seems to work, but it's way slower than Leet's.
Another me is taking a morning excursion into the resource world. I want to spend the morning working on a cloning chamber, but the assembler clone pushes a shoebox sized computer over to me and I wilt. I have been ignoring the nascent AI that I got. It's not going to harm it psychologically since it's not running. But this supposedly six hundred point perk is sitting around doing nothing. So I spend the morning playing with a computer baby. It's basically just digital peek-a-boo and baby talk. But I do manage to rig up an interface for other people to interact with it (without having a computer built into their brain). That way I can get dad and Je'Lu to help with the next phase of raising a digital baby. What is it next, bottle feeding? Potty training? Teenage rebellion? I don't know, AIs are weird.
Late morning, I take off for kickboxing. Class goes well, they tend to spend one day focusing on each of the main strikes in kickboxing, so by this point I've been exposed to all of them. By the end of the session I'm a little worn out. I brought a couple healing potions, though, so I take one and go to work out. I lift weights for a couple hours (I get plenty of aerobic exercise running each day). At the end, I take another healing potion and head back to the garage. I expect by the time I get there my clone will be done returning Leet's tech.
Uber and Leet were at the warehouse when I got there. And all my robots are sitting there. I unload out of the van, coming out with the portal gun, atomic assembler, and Uber's hard-light costume.
"Hey there. How's it going?"
"Not great."
"Oh, right. This was probably a bad week for you. Sorry to bring it up."
"No, it's not that. Although that did suck. I tried to go out patrolling last night. Couldn't find any Merchants. I don't suppose you guys have any tips on them."
"Nope. Sorry. We stay clear of the gangs, and they usually stay clear of us. Kind of a side benefit to being a laughing stock."
"Yeah. But we might know someone who does know something. Let me make a call..." Uber headed outside.
"The costume and portal gun work fine now. Thanks for the use. The portal gun really helped out on Tuesday. We need to talk about the assembler."
"Oh no, it blew up, didn't it? No, you're still here. It just doesn't work."
"Oh, it works. But the way it was set up makes me worry about you."
"What?"
"Are you suicidal?"
"No!"
"Okay. Because there were a lot of dangerous presets built into it. It was collecting Helium and Lead and combining them as Polonium. That stuff is seriously radioactive, so that's a terrible idea. Cavities in assembled items were by default filled with nitroglycerin, which means that most anything you would have assembled would also be a bomb. And if it ever collected enough Plutonium, it would have assembled a super-critical mass of it automatically. This is scary stuff, man."
Leet blanched. "I'm not suicidal, I swear. I just... Sometimes I think my power is trying to get me killed."
"I've put a bunch of safeties on it. No nuclear material at all. No explosives, not even gunpowder. Toxic compounds will show you an MSDS and you'll have to okay it before it can be used."
"Okay. Those sound... reasonable. I just... I want to make awesome stuff from games. But my power is so limited."
"I'm okay with you making stuff from video games. I just don't want you to hurt anyone. On purpose or on accident. Even yourself." I pulled out the copy of the atomic assembler. "Anyway, I printed out a copy of your assembler, but I couldn't get it to work. Hey, is this supposed to be alien technology?"
"Uh, no. I didn't take this from a game. I went all out to create something to help me make stuff. Hopefully I can make more skins and mundane components without breaking into tinkertech, which will let me conserve my tech trees."
"Huh." I gestured for the bunbis to get in the van, and started moving the metools. Leet started playing around with the copy assembler.
"Please don't tell Uber about his power level."
"What?"
"The scouter." I supposed he had just noticed it on my face. "It doesn't tell people their own power levels, so he never got his own number."
"Oh. I suppose it seemed a little low. It didn't seem like my place to comment."
"It's just, I've never seen a parahuman below a hundred. Once you use it more, you'll notice that too. That's because Uber doesn't have a power. When I got my power, I wanted my friend to have powers too, so I made a skillsoft system for him."
"Skillsoft?"
"It's from Shadowrun. It's cyberware. You plug chips into it and it tells your brain how to do things."
"Oh. That's pretty clever. Why is this a secret?"
"I never told him."
"That's kinda messed up man."
"Yeah, I know. I'll tell him. I just need to..." Uber came back in for the next load of my tech.
"Hey, Uber, how did the call go?"
"Good, she's willing to talk. Might be a little pricey, though. Small time thinker, recently independent, needs the cash."
"Okay. Sounds good."
"Goes by the name Tattletale."
"Oh." I supposed that made sense. She was working for Coil. Almost certainly not by choice. That's why she killed him. And Uber knows her, so he probably called her in for help, not knowing her relationship with Coil. I'm not sure I wanted to work with a murderer, but I do empathize. It might make sense that the Undersiders would have broken up if Coil is no longer around to keep them together. "So... how did the episode shooting go?"
"It went great, man. Got the whole level worth of play-through shot. Thanks for the stuff. Any thoughts on using those critters of yours for one of our shoots."
"A couple. First of all I want to show you this." I took out the monkey tool and projected an image of a one-eyed bat thing that I thought was a keese, then a rock throwing octopus that I'm sure was an octorok.
"Awesome. You weren't kidding about that Zelda comment."
"Nope. And the other thought is that I'm working on some teleportation tech. I was hoping to have it done by this meeting, but I still have some research to do before I can really get going on it. But that should mean you can come to my lab without actually knowing where it is."
"Cool. Great minds think alike."
"Teleportation tech can be dangerous."
"Yeah, I suppose it can, depending how it's done."
"I've made a couple teleporters in my day. Want to borrow one for a while?"
"Sure. That could really help, thanks."
Uber wheeled in a dolly that had a four foot wide, three foot tall piece of green pipe on it. "We had the same thought about a teleporter. So here's one of his pipes. We've got the other end. And we can just hop in there and hop out into your workshop."
I took a look at it. I may not be a video game nerd, but Emma did get a Nintendo emulator for her birthday when she was eight, so I recognized it from the Mario Brothers games. There was no outward indication of how it worked, so I took out my scanner and started scanning. Inside there was a complicated device. I would need to study it to hope to understand it. This would be great.
Still, I had to think about what they were asking. They wanted to use my resource world to shoot episodes of their show. I didn't want to encourage Uber and Leet's criminal shenanigans. But on the other hand, there was nobody in that world they could hurt (other than me and Je'Lu and dad if we went with them). To that end, it would be good for them to not have to worry as much about collateral damage. Then again, my resource world was dangerous. Clones had been dispelled there (Je'Lu's both times). Fortunately, the rest of the team had been able to bounce back and recover the armor, but there was very real danger.
And if I did invite them over, I'd have to make sure they don't see outside. That meant setting an enclosed zone for them to traverse inside my base, and making sure Je'Lu and my dad can take precautions to protect their identities. It was manageable, but not something I could do later today. And I had cranial surgery scheduled for myself tomorrow. Monday could work.
"Okay. You can come over. But not today. I've got an important project tomorrow, so not then either. Monday?"
"Sure. Monday can work. How about six pm?"
"Uh, okay. Seems like a late start. We should set a cutoff. You should be out by midnight."
"Okay. We can work with that. We're not limited to Monday, right?"
"No. And I don't know how much we're actually going to get done on Monday. After I explain the situation, We may need to take some precautions."
"This is gonna be great!"
"Maybe. We'll have to see how many of those games we can adapt my previous inventions for. It's gonna be a marathon of tinkering." Leet finished checking over the printed assembler and turned it on. It fired up without problems. Then he printed out a square of nylon to check that it works. "Hey, no problem, just needed a quick maintenance cycle. Neat. Now I have two of them."
I looked at the newly functional assembler and wanted to incorporate it into my R&D center. Whatever Leet did turned it into alien technology. I took a scan of it, asked him to power it off and took another quick scan. My safety functions should be in this copy too since I applied them before I copied it, but I'm still a little suspicious.
"I should be getting back. See you on Monday night."
"Yeah, see you soon!"