If you want to read 20 Chapters ahead, be sure to check out my P-Tang12!!!
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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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The meal provided the perfect setting for Caleb to formally introduce Nikola Tesla to the members of the gang who had not yet met him. "Everyone," Caleb announced, raising his glass. "I would like to introduce Mr. Nikola Tesla. He is the most brilliant scientific mind of our generation, and he will be joining our operations here in Saint Denis." Several members looked at the tall, gaunt inventor with intense curiosity, while others, like Bill Williamson, were still trying to understand exactly what the man actually did.
Tesla remained polite, though he was visibly somewhat awkward with the intense social attention of such a large, unconventional family. Mary-Beth masterfully helped make him feel welcome, seamlessly drawing him into the conversation and treating him like an ordinary, respected guest rather than a scientific curiosity.
The lunch allowed Tesla to sit back and quietly observe the profound loyalty, the easy laughter, and the deep affection that bound Caleb's organization together. It was a stark contrast to the cutthroat, backstabbing world of corporate science he was used to.
After the meal, Caleb personally showed Tesla to the guest room he would occupy for the time being.
"The room is comfortable, Nikola, but this is only temporary," Caleb explained, opening the door to a sprawling suite with a large desk and a view of the gardens. "You are more than welcome to use my private study downstairs for writing schematics, reading, performing theoretical calculations, and discussing ideas whenever you need a quiet place."
Caleb then raised a finger, setting a firm boundary. "However, the study cannot be used as an actual experimental laboratory. You will need a proper facility with heavy ventilation, grounded electrical systems, reinforced safety measures, and room for massive high-voltage experimentation. The mansion cannot support that."
"I understand completely, Caleb," Tesla agreed, looking at the desk. "Theory must precede application."
"Construction on your laboratory and the adjacent factory begins tomorrow," Caleb promised him. "I will personally push the foremen to complete the facilities as quickly as reasonably possible."
Over the next several days to a full week, the transition from blueprints to reality moved at a blistering pace.
Caleb personally inspected the western construction site repeatedly. He reviewed the architectural plans, spoke directly with the foremen, and made immediate, ruthless changes where necessary. He demanded that the buildings be highly practical, heavily reinforced, and perfectly grounded, rather than merely architecturally impressive.
The laboratory was designed exclusively around Tesla's precise, demanding needs, while the sprawling factory next door was designed to eventually mass produce the electrical machinery, industrial equipment, and revolutionary inventions that Tesla would dream up.
At the exact same time, Caleb and Tesla spent considerable time together in the mansion's study, discussing ideas late into the night.
Their conversations were incredibly dynamic, covering high voltage electricity, mechanics, manufacturing logistics, alternative energy generation, transportation, industrial automation, and the boundless possibilities of the twentieth century. Tesla constantly challenged Caleb's assumptions, forcing the Don to think critically, while Caleb continued introducing carefully chosen, highly advanced ideas derived from his previous life knowledge.
Caleb was not magically superior in every scientific discussion. It was abundantly clear that Tesla was the more creative, naturally gifted theoretical thinker. He could visualize magnetic fields and alternating currents with terrifying clarity.
Caleb's overwhelming advantage lay in his max level practical knowledge, his understanding of efficient manufacturing, his memory of future concepts, and his unique ability to see exactly how abstract ideas could be turned into highly profitable, world changing products. Their friendship deepened profoundly through these intellectual sparring matches.
During this incredibly productive period, Caleb received an important, priority telegram from New York.
The message had been sent by Herr Strauss.
Caleb read the telegram in his study, a satisfied smile crossing his face. Strauss informed him that the initial outreach to Detroit had been successful. Henry Ford had agreed to a meeting.
However, because Caleb had already returned to Saint Denis, Strauss proposed a slightly different arrangement.
Strauss asked Caleb to allow him to meet Ford personally in New York first. The accountant explained that he would speak with the engineer, learn more about his financial situation, and gauge Ford's personality, his ambitions, his confidence, and the current operational status of his automobile project. Strauss wanted to determine if Ford was genuinely worth investing tens to hundreds thousands of dollars into before dragging Caleb back into the negotiations.
If the preliminary meeting went well, Strauss would then offer Henry Ford a fully paid, luxury trip to Saint Denis, covering all travel expenses and premium accommodations for Ford and anyone he needed to bring along. The purpose would be to allow Ford to meet Caleb personally and discuss the future of the Detroit Automobile Company, and the distinct possibility of the Thorne Holding Company becoming a majority investor.
Caleb immediately agreed with the plan.
He drafted a swift reply, approving the arrangement and instructing Strauss to make an excellent first impression.
"Do not frighten or overwhelm him, Strauss," Caleb wired back. "Make Ford understand that we are very serious about supporting radical innovation. Frame the invitation as a massive opportunity, not a corporate trap."
Caleb completely trusted his brilliant accountant to handle the initial meeting properly.
With the automotive venture temporarily in Strauss's capable hands, Caleb turned his focused intellect back toward the cornerstone of his empire, the Thorne-Marlin Firearm's Co.
He realized that his company had gained a massive, dominant advantage in the market with the Vanguard rifle and the Sweeper submachine gun, but he had absolutely no intention of allowing Winchester, Colt, or the Europeans to catch up.
Caleb retreated into his heavily secured, private workshop beneath the mansion and began designing the next generation of warfare.
Drawing heavily from his maximum level Crafting Skill, his exhaustive Firearms Knowledge, and the lethal memories of his previous life, Caleb began drafting schematics. He used firearms from later eras as conceptual foundations, specifically, designs and internal mechanisms that resembled the reliable, mass produced infantry weapons of the Second World War.
However, he did not simply try to build an impossible, futuristic laser rifle. He meticulously adapted and simplified the futuristic designs so that they could actually be manufactured using the materials, the stamping machinery, and the industrial capabilities currently available to him in 1900.
The technology did not appear magically effortless. Caleb spent hours agonizing over manufacturing tolerances, the tensile strength of available steel alloys, the reliability of current ammunition primers, tooling costs, and battlefield maintenance.
His goal was to keep Thorne-Marlin several lethal steps ahead of every other manufacturer on the planet. He deliberately designed weapons that were highly practical for the era, significantly easier to mass produce than their complicated, exotic prototypes, and reliable enough to instantly gain widespread military and civilian interest.
He also began drafting blueprints for improved explosive devices and standardized battlefield equipment.
He designed safer, highly practical fragmentation hand grenades, utilizing specialized internal fuzes and segmented cast iron bodies. These compact explosive systems were intended to eventually, completely replace the crude, highly dangerous reliance on volatile dynamite sticks and fire bottles that most militaries and outlaws still used.
Caleb thought highly strategically about how these inventions would be introduced to the world.
He did not want to release everything simultaneously. He intended to keep several advanced designs locked in reserve, hidden in his vaults, so that when his competitors finally believed they were catching up to the Vanguard, Thorne-Marlin could instantly unveil another devastating generation of improved weapons. It was a strategy designed to reinforce his reputation as a man who was always, terrifyingly, several steps ahead.
At the same time, Caleb remained acutely mindful that his rapidly expanding firearms business was attracting intense scrutiny from military officials, jealous competitors, politicians, and wealthy foreign buyers. He carefully calculated exactly how much technology to reveal to the public, and how much should remain highly classified, proprietary secrets known only to him and his most trusted machinists.
But while the billionaire Don waged a relentless, sleepless war for the future of industry, Mary-Beth remained his vital, grounding emotional anchor.
She would occasionally slip into his underground workshop or the study late at night, gently placing a hand over his blueprints, reminding him that he needed to eat something other than coffee, get some sleep, and spend time away from his relentless work.
Caleb always made a genuine effort to listen, setting his pens aside and pulling her into his lap, pressing a tired kiss to her forehead.
The situation, however, occasionally became highly amusing, largely thanks to Nikola Tesla.
Caleb was now in the incredibly strange position of having Mary-Beth gently scold him to slow down and rest, while Caleb spent half his day aggressively telling Tesla to do exactly the same thing.
"You've essentially created another version of yourself, Caleb," Mary-Beth joked one evening, leaning against the doorframe of the study as Caleb practically dragged a protesting Tesla away from a chalkboard full of equations to force the man to eat dinner. "Except I think Mr. Tesla might actually be worse. At least you know what a bed looks like."
"I am perfectly fine, Mrs. Thorne!" Tesla insisted, waving a piece of chalk. "The resonance frequency is almost solved!"
"You are eating a steak, Nikola, and then you are going to sleep for six hours, or I am locking the study," Caleb ordered with a laugh, steering the genius toward the dining room.
The return to Saint Denis felt incredibly meaningful. Caleb had come home from New York with a new friend, a brilliant new technological partner, a web of powerful political relationships, and a massive, national expansion strategy.
The city itself felt different from when he had left. His influence was everywhere. The bicycle business continued to explode, fundamentally altering the flow of the streets as more and more citizens abandoned horses for the Thorne Cycle.
At the same time, the rapid, massive construction of Tesla's future laboratory on the western edge of the swamps stood as a towering monument to the future.
The morning after creating all of that schematics, Caleb did not go to his office at the holding company, nor did he remain in the quiet luxury of the mansion's study. His mind was thrumming with a different kind of frequency. He bypassed the carriage and walked briskly through the humid morning air toward the sprawling, heavily guarded complex of the Thorne-Marlin Firearm's Co.
As he stepped onto the massive factory floor, the deafening roar of industrial stamping presses, the hiss of steam-powered lathes, and the sharp, metallic tang of hot brass and gun oil washed over him. The company had already gained a dominant, terrifying advantage in the global market with the Vanguard rifle and the Sweeper submachine gun, but Caleb had absolutely no intention of resting on those laurels.
He knew that somewhere in Connecticut, Winchester's engineers were frantically trying to reverse engineer his weapon operation systems. He intended to make sure that by the time they succeeded, their achievements would already be obsolete.
When Caleb pushed through the heavy iron doors leading to his private, reinforced workshop at the back of the facility, several of his master machinists immediately stepped forward, wiping grease from their hands.
"Don Thorne," the floor foreman greeted him respectfully. "We weren't expecting you on the floor today. Do you need the drafting tables cleared? The boys and I can spin up the milling machines if you're prototyping something new."
"I appreciate the offer, Elias," Caleb replied, taking off his suit jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his pristine white shirt. "But I need you to keep the men focused entirely on the Vanguard production quotas. These new designs... they are things I need to work through personally before we involve the assembly line."
He wasn't rejecting them out of distrust. Caleb simply knew that the blueprints currently burning in his mind were derived from anachronistic knowledge and his maximum level Crafting Skill. He had to translate twentieth century mechanics into nineteenth century manufacturing reality. Until he figured out exactly how to bypass the era's limitations regarding steel tensile strength and spring tension, having assistants would only slow him down.
For the next several days, Caleb locked himself inside the workshop, disappearing into a haze of cigar smoke, scattered schematics, and the grinding sparks of the metal sander.
He began developing a triad of entirely new firearms, ensuring Thorne-Marlin did not rely on a single, monolithic design.
First, he created a weapon aimed squarely at the booming civilian and hunting markets. He called it the Pioneer. It was a sleek, lightweight, semi automatic sporting rifle which was the cheap version of Apex. It utilized a simplified short stroke gas piston, allowing a hunter or a rancher to fire five rapid shots without ever breaking their sight picture to work a lever or a bolt. It was elegant, reliable, and designed with gorgeous walnut furniture that made it look like a piece of high end art rather than a tool of hunting.
Second, he designed the Enforcer. This was a brutal, uncompromising weapon tailored explicitly for law enforcement, bank security, and his own syndicate capos. Drawing from his memories of trench warfare, he built a rugged, twelve gauge pump action shotgun.
It featured an exposed hammer, a shortened barrel for sweeping tight corners, and an internal tubular magazine that held six devastating shells. The slide action was terrifyingly smooth. It was a weapon meant to end a fight the exact second it was drawn.
The third weapon was the nightmare.
Caleb dubbed it the Behemoth. It was an incredibly heavy, belt fed, squad level automatic support weapon tailored exclusively for military contracts. Based on the foundational concepts of World War II era light machine guns, Caleb had to heavily adapt the design.
Making the receiver withstand the sustained pressure of modern smokeless powder without fracturing the era's available steel alloys was a grueling, agonizing process of trial and error. He burned through dozens of modified springs, snapped heavy firing pins, and spent hours cursing the unreliable seating of current ammunition primers before he finally balanced the cyclic rate.
While the guns cooled on the racks, Caleb shifted his focus to the next stage of modern warfare, standardized explosive equipment.
He was determined to permanently move his capos and military clients away from the crude, unpredictable reliance on sweating dynamite sticks and fragile fire bottles. He drafted a family of compact, cast iron fragmentation hand grenades, implementing a highly reliable, spring loaded internal fuze system.
He branded them the Storm series.
The Gale was a smaller, lightweight tactical model designed for breaching rooms and urban combat, prioritizing a concussive blast over heavy shrapnel. The Tempest was the standard, general purpose infantry grenade, featuring a heavily segmented iron body that would shatter into lethal, uniform fragments across a wide radius. Finally, the Hurricane was a larger, concentrated explosive charge designed specifically for anti fortification and destroying heavy barricades.
They were professional, deeply reliable, and branded with the crisp Thorne-Marlin crest.
But as the days bled into nights, the intense, obsessive pressure of the work began to take a severe physical toll.
Caleb lost all track of time. His usually impeccable hair was wild and dusted with iron filings. His white shirts were permanently stained with gun grease, his knuckles were bruised, and deep, dark circles carved themselves beneath his eyes. He skipped lunches, ignored dinners, and practically lived on lukewarm coffee and sheer adrenaline.
By the fourth day, the factory workers began whispering that the ruch Don was starting to look even worse than the eccentric Mr. Tesla did when he locked himself in the mansion's study.
It was near midnight on the fifth day when the heavy door to the private workshop swung open.
Caleb didn't look up from the workbench, currently attempting to file down the extractor claw on the Pioneer prototype. "Elias, I told you I didn't need the—"
"I am not Elias, Mr. Thorne, and you are officially done for the evening."
Caleb blinked, lowering the file. Mary-Beth stood in the doorway, her hands resting firmly on her hips. She was wearing a beautiful evening gown, presenting a staggering, ethereal contrast to the grime, smoke, and scattered iron of the workshop.
"Mary-Beth," Caleb sighed, offering a tired, grease smudged smile. "I'm almost finished. I just need to perfect the ejection angle on this bolt, otherwise the brass catches on the—"
"You haven't eaten a proper meal in two days, Caleb," Mary-Beth interrupted, her voice affectionate but laced with absolute, unyielding firmness. She stepped into the room, gently but firmly taking the metal file out of his hand and setting it on the table. "You look like you've been dragged behind a stagecoach. You are coming home, you are eating a hot meal, and you are sleeping."
"Sweetheart, if I lose the momentum on this spring tension—"
"I will personally throw the spring into the swamp," Mary-Beth promised, taking him by the arm and physically pulling him away from the workbench. "Do I need to ask Arthur to come down here and carry you? Because I will."
Caleb laughed, holding his hands up in surrender. "Alright. Alright. I know when I'm outgunned."
This intervention quickly became a recurring, highly amusing situation. Over the next days of prototyping, Mary-Beth had to personally march into the factory three separate times to drag her husband away from the grinding wheels.
The irony of the situation was entirely lost on Caleb until one evening when Mary-Beth found him and Nikola Tesla sitting on the floor of the mansion's study at two in the morning, both men covered in chalk dust and grease, furiously debating the kinetic energy transfer of a rotating bolt.
"You both need to go to bed," Mary-Beth announced, standing over them with a crossed pair of arms. "Right now."
Caleb looked up, rubbing his tired eyes. "Just ten more minutes, Mary-Beth. Nikola doesn't understand that an electrical sear requires a mechanical failsafe—"
"I understand perfectly well, Caleb, but your failsafe is entirely redundant if the circuit is grounded!" Tesla argued, waving a heavily smudged blueprint.
"And I understand that neither of you has blinked in five minutes," Mary-Beth countered smoothly. She looked directly at Caleb, an amused, wicked spark in her dark eyes. "It's quite fascinating, Caleb. For quite some time, you have relentlessly lectured Mr. Tesla about the importance of rest, proper diet, and looking out a window. And yet, here you are, behaving exactly like him. You have absolutely no right to lecture this poor man ever again."
Tesla looked at Caleb, his gaunt face breaking into a wide, immensely satisfied grin. "She makes a flawless, empirically proven point, Caleb. You are a terrible hypocrite."
Caleb stared at the inventor, then at his wife, before throwing his head back and laughing loudly, deeply appreciating the absurdity of it all. He had met his match in stubbornness, and Mary-Beth had somehow become the only person on earth capable of keeping the two most brilliant minds of the century grounded in reality. "Fair enough," Caleb conceded, using the desk to pull himself up from the floor. He offered a hand to Tesla, hauling the lanky inventor to his feet. "To bed, Nikola. The failsafes can wait."
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Name: Caleb Thorne
Age: 23
Body Attributes:
- Strength: 8/10
- Agility: 8/10
- Perception: 9/10
- Stamina: 8/10
- Charm: 8/10
- Luck: 9/10
Skills:
- Handgun (Lvl MAX)
- Rifle (Lvl MAX)
- Firearms Knowledge (Lvl MAX)
- Past Life Memory (Lvl MAX)
- Knife (Lvl MAX)
- Blunt Weapon (Lvl MAX)
- Sneaking (Lvl MAX)
- Horse Mastery (Lvl MAX)
- Poker (Lvl MAX)
- Hand to Hand Combat (Lvl MAX)
- Eagle Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Dead Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Bow (Lvl MAX)
- Pain Nullifier (Lvl MAX)
- Physical Regeneration (Lvl MAX)
- Crafting (Lvl MAX)
- Persuasion (Lvl MAX)
- Mental Fortitude (Lvl MAX)
- Cooking (Lvl MAX)
- Teaching (Lvl MAX)
- Trilingual Language Proficiency - G, I, & C (Lvl MAX)
- Inventory System (Permanent - 100x100x100)
- Acting (Lvl MAX)
- Alcohol Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Treasure Hunter (Lvl MAX)
- Drugs Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Business (Lvl MAX)
- Leadership (Lvl MAX)
Money: 2,772 dollars and 60 cents
Inventory: 283,392 dollars and 61 cents, 11 gold nuggets, 74 gold bars, 1 Double Action, 1 Schofield, 2 Colm's Schofields, 1 land deed (Parcel), 1 Mauser, 1 Semi Auto Pistol, 1 Lancaster Repeater, 1 Old Wood Jewelry Box, 1 F.F Mausoleum small brass key, 1 Ruby, 1 Broken Pirate Sword, 1 Milton's Safety Deposit Key, Proof Of Marlin-Thorne Firearms Co., 10 Dynamites, 1 LeMat, 1 M1899, 1 Carcano, 1 Ownership deed of Doyle's Tavern, 3 Diamonds, & Important Documents & Deeds Of Cornwall
Bank: -