Sorry that this one took so long, my weekend unexpectedly filled up and I lost a lot of time. I think going forward that weekends that have holidays should be assumed to come with a chapter delay of a day or two. Ill keep everyone posted
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Chapter Twenty Six:
Conservation of Gnollmentum
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With a thunderous bang, the Mark XVII EMST (Electro-Magmagic-Slug-Thrower) exploded in a dazzling display–an aquamarine cloud of aerosolized mana poured from the steadily melting device and filled the room, sparking with brilliant flashes of azure lightning. The electricity snaked through the air in twisting tendrils–which promptly ignited the gas with a bassy thowmp! Leaving a massive fireball to claw its way to the ceiling.
With a sigh, I threw the breaker open, shutting off the supply of mana from my generator. Stepping out from behind the glowing energy barrier of my Sanctuary spell. I let the steaming, melted pile of adamantite and steel cool off before padding my way over to it.
The resulting sludge puddle was a rainbow-hued mix of many different alloys, swirling about as it hardened into an inseparable ooze. I could even see the semi-solid remains of the blocks of Seiros floating around. Those I would have to cut out later, as they were a pain in the ass to get, but the rest I could just chuck into the garbage bin. It wasn’t worth my time to try and separate them out.
“Snarf!” I hollered to my trusty mechanical companion, who had been dozing in the corner of my workshop. “Mark down version seventeen ‘D’ of the EM-Sut as a failure.”
The poor machine just cocked his head at me, utterly befuddled at whatever I was ordering him to do. “Also, add a reminder to invent myself a better AI companion. Like JARVIS, or Clippy.”
The lion-like robot let loose a sad electronic whistle, his chin falling back to his forepaws as he gave me his best puppy-dog stare.
Ignoring my sulking military-grade iDog for the moment, I peered down my impromptu indoor firing range to find that the straw dummy I had set up had been completely annihilated–leaving only a few scraps of straw to float sadly down to the floor. At least the Mark XVII fired in the right direction this time. Both the Mark V and XII had shot straight backwards, blowing a yoga-ball-sized hole in the wall separating the workshop from the storefront. Thankfully, Hestia hadn’t been up front today, or I don’t think she’d have ever forgiven me for putting her on a first class direct flight back to Tenkai via hypersonic adamantite BBs.
Yes, in the end, I was unsuccessful in making an electromagnetic-driven arrow. Sure, I could easily get a simple metal spike to an appreciable percentage of C if given half the chance, but the second I tried giving it a flared broadhead or fletching, the aerodynamics would be shot to all hell. The client specifically said he wanted an archery bow, so I couldn’t just throw in the towel and make him a sci-fi railgun. Thankfully, however, my human side had the solution! A hybrid Dual-Use Compound bow–capable of seamlessly firing ball bearings or normal arrows on the same string.Luvis could either fire arrows normally or switch to a hand-held Anti-Starship gun by simply swapping to the magazine of BBs.
I haven’t been following the gossip surrounding my works too closely, but according to Hestia, the few compound bows I’ve made have become a hot button issue amongst the local bowyeries. Some have been vocally decrying them as not real bows, while others have been desperately trying to get an example of their own to study. Especially the magazine-fed repeater I had sold off to an elf who ‘wanted a better quiver’.
This one… this one would blow all of the other ones I’ve made so far out of the water. If I could get the damn thing to work, that is. The problem, as always, was Newton and his bitch-ass rules. Man, if I ever got my claws on that nerd, I’d give him the mother of all wedgies. They’d have to invent a new term for the horrors I’d inflict upon the very soul of his underwear.The EMST was functionally identical to Betty and Lulu. Monster-Stone supplied mana, guided by mithril rails, which was then exponentially agitated by a series of Seiros capacitors. The problem was that my two bouncing baby girls had somewhere to direct all that volatile energy. Namely, the ground via induction. Or in layman’s terms–by slamming the hammer really, really hard into the anvil.
My railgun, on the other paw, had no such luxuries. The BB carried away a lot of the energy produced by the gun; but the rest of it was left with nowhere to go… save for the launcher itself. Thus, the pretty explosion.
I’d need something to slow down and then safely release all that kinetic energy over time. The wielder's body was obviously one mechanism that could be utilized. Luvis was Level Three, and therefore more than strong enough to withstand something that kicks harder than an M-1 Abrams cannon. But I’d still need a way to direct the blowback safely into him, as opposed to all the EMST's delicate mechanisms. A gel piston, maybe? No, no, that’d never work. The thing would tear itself to pieces after a few shots.
I gave the still-smoking puddle another glance. “Well, a clean break might be better than that. Snarf! Put down ‘Sacrificial Gel Piston' as a plan B!”
Another static-filled growl was my answer.
Note to self: Double time on that Clippy AI.
Hmmm, I might be looking at this from the wrong angle. I had been thinking of it as an engineering problem, but what kind of options does magic provide? Could I build a comically huge gel piston, and just hide it in a BoH hanging off the back of it? No, that would throw off the weight of the bow too much. What about… oh, I’ve got it!
A wicked, no-good grin slid over my lips.
I know what I could try next, and I think I might even already have the materials on paw to make one for testing.
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My solution was as elegant as it was hair-clenchingly horrifying for anyone with even a passing understanding of physics.
A Rod of Absorption, with a few minor modifications, could easily be reconfigured to store mundane energy as opposed to magic. After cobbling together another mock-up of the EMST using spit and some homemade duct-tape, I installed the rod vertically–adjacent to the muzzle of the gun and held in place by a series of pneumatic pistons. If this worked, it could easily be reconfigured later to be part of the bow itself.
After propping up a fresh dummy, I quickly ducked back down behind the safety of an overturned table. I flicked a Sanctuary spell into being and threw open the breaker. The ear-rending crack of something ripping a gaping hole straight through the sound barrier shattered the air. Again, the dummy vanished in a puff of straw and tattered fabric, as well as a huge dent being gouged in my wall–but far more importantly, the EMST survived!
I shut off the power and ran over to give the Mark XVIII a thorough inspection. All the rails seemed fine; no warping. The Seiros was also in good condition, and while there was a bit of soot on the last few ones in line, some vacuum tubes should solve any oxidation problems going forward… Now for the real test.
I carefully plucked the Rod of Absorption from its cradle and clicked it into place along the rails.
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Hestia took a pull from her artisanal coffee, savoring the rich flavor of one of Waaqa’s personal blends. The imported beans were worth their weight in gold, but they were worth every last Valis. Valis she could now spare thanks to her boss’s absurd generosity.
“Do you think he’s finished with whatever it was that he was doing?”
She turned to her old friend Miach, whom she hadn’t seen since he descended all those years ago. She never realized that he had settled in Orario until they had stumbled across one another the other day. She was in a rush to get back to work at the time, so they had agreed to meet up later. When Max had unexpectedly given her the day off, she was quick to go and fetch him for brunch.
Now, with their outing complete, and Hestia apprised of the… unfortunate situation her long-time friend and his familia was suffering through, she agreed to take Miach and his captain back to introduce them to Max. Maybe the big lug could do something to help.
“I’m not sure,” she said, snuggling back into the comfortable warmth of her scarf as they leisurely made their way through the Black District. “All he said was that he needed to conduct some sort of tests, and that it would be best if he had the store to himself.”
“I just… I wouldn’t want to intrude.” He demurred in his usual soft-spoken ways. Miach was always a bit of a pushover; Hestia had been worried that his captain had been taking advantage of him and his generosity, until she had met the woman herself–and saw the fierce, unwavering affection burning in her eyes whenever she looked his way.
Hestia shot a slightly less affectionate glare at the side of Miach’s head. Because, of course, this dunderhead was completely oblivious to his captain's true feelings. Ugh, men. In the safety of her own mind, she quietly wished the poor girl the luck of Tyche and the blessings of Aphrodite.
“I wouldn’t worry ‘bout it,” she waved him off with a lazy flap of her hand as the two of them turned onto Max and her street–his workshop now fully in sight. “That guy’s got the attention span of Inari on one of her sake benders. He’s probably moved on by no–”
The side of Max’s workshop exploded–Marble bricks weighing hundreds of pounds sliced through the air as if they were lighter than paper–billowing clouds of dust trailing them across the sky. The blurry, indistinct after-image of a searing golden-white line pierced through the center of the chaos, terminating into the building on the other side of the street, which had also exploded.
In the distance, she heard a third explosion ripple outwards as one of the far off derelict buildings listed dangerously to its side with an agonized groan.
The two of them stood there, dumbstruck, staring as the dust settled and the gaping hole in the side of Max’s house was revealed.
Then, Max’s big, dumb head stuck itself out the hole, blinking stupidly at the destruction littering the street. As he reached up to scratch his mohawk, he finally noticed the three of them. “Oh, hey Hestia! Who’re your friends?”
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“So, how have your ‘tests’ gone?”
Huh, Hestia put a really weird strain on the word ‘test’. But, she was smiling, so I’m sure it was fine.
“Oh, it's been going swell,” I beamed at her. “I think I’m really on to something with the Mark eighteen. Maybe if I added two Rods of Absorption, but keep one in its standard configuration, I could have the mundane one–actually, that's kind of a mouthful to say. Let’s call the first one the Kinetic Energy Storage Rod–KESR for short, and the unmodified one the magical version, MESR. So, if I have the KESR store the energy load produced from firing, and have that be fed over to the MESR, it could be converted back to magical energy. Then, I could probably recycle a huge amount of the expended energy. It wouldn’t be a zero-sum equation, obviously, the projectile would have stolen a bit of power as it went, but if I could feed the MESR back into the EMST, then I would be able to save a huge amount of the needed initial power load. My original estimates for what this puppy would need was a Level Three or above Monster Stone at the minimum. And even that would only last ya’ ten or so shots. But with the recycling system in place, then I’d easily get away with a Level One Stone for the same amount of juice! And, as the coup de grace, the KESR could be pulled from the system and used as a projectile itself, using every last crump of all that harvested energy as a payload!”
Hestia stared up at me in silence, that same smile fixed firmly upon her face, unmoved by the strides I’ve made in magical engineering. A cold, biting wind swept through my workshop, the tarp I’d hastily affixed over the hole in my wall fluttered in the breeze.
“That’s great, Max. Truly.” She said, woodenly. Gesturing to the strange, blue-haired man who had followed her in, along with the Dog-shifter girl who had been glaring fearful daggers at me the second she first laid eyes on my handsome face. I wonder what her problem is, because I don’t remember doing anything to her. “This is my friend, Miach, and the captain of his familia, Miss Erisuis.”
“Oh,” I said, leaning in to peer at the two strangers in my house. “I was hoping that you had finally suckered some people into joining your familia.” Hestia twitched violently as I put a claw to my chin. “Miach. Miach… where have I heard that name before?” Irish mythology, right? Or was it Celtic? Or was there even a difference between the two in terms of ancient religion? Hell, I don’t know–All I remember about the Ye Ol’ Irish is that the only thing they liked more than bearded axes and blue facepaint was English gold. Oh, wait a second, I remember now!
I padded my way over to my workbench and opened up one of the lockboxes built into the shelf, from which I withdrew a test tube rack filled with many different styles of health potions, each one carefully marked with the name of the familia I had bought it from, scrawled across a piece of tape. Over the months, I’ve acquired samples of healing potions from the various ‘healing’ familias around the city–I wanted to see what my competition would be going into the medical industry. Most of them ended up just being side-hustles run by the in-house healers of the various exploration familias, looking for a bit of pocket change. The only real contender was the Dian Cecht familia, the undisputed champions of all things medical in the known world.
And as much as I was loath to admit it, that old fucker made some damn good potion. The vial marked with his name was a flawless crystal glass, within which the gorgeous blood-red potion glinted in the Monster Stone light. From my testing, it was proven capable of stitching together even fatal wounds in record time, while also being minimally toxic. Meaning that one could guzzle back loads of this stuff without having to worry about overdosing on the potent magic.
Even back in Exandria, this would have sold at a premium.
At the other end of the spectrum, however… I withdrew a pink-tinged conical flask from the rack, small and dingy by comparison. I didn’t need a special magical array or a spectrophotometer to know that this was an inferior product in every single way; Dangerously so. It was thin and runny, with most of the actual ‘potion’ having sunk to the bottom, separating from the water it had been cut with, like platelets from plasma.
“You’re the fucking scumbag who’s been watering down your potions,” I growled, holding up the proof. “Probably getting a lot of good folks killed doing it, too.”
Hestia scowled as Miach’s eyes widened in what might have been genuine surprise; it was hard to tell with gods. The captain, however, was quick to turn away with a pinched expression. Huh, interesting.
“He wouldn’t do that!” Hestia was quick to jump to the healing god’s defense. “Miach is one of the good ones!”
“Explain this then.” I tossed her the vial, the fraudulent potion spinning end over end through the air as she scrambled to catch it.
Miach leaned over her shoulder to examine it with a severe frown pulling at his lips. “That… is one of my vials. But I would have never let a potion of this quality leave my practice, let alone fall into the hands of a customer. Maybe–did the seal fail somehow, has the cork cracked? No? Naaza, do you know anything about this?”
The Dog-shifter’s chocolate-brown floppy ears were pinned flat against her head as she refused to look anywhere near her god, or the damning evidence of misdeeds held tightly in his hand. I only noticed then that only one of her hands was gloved, the other fiercely gripping the sleeve of her right arm.
The god’s frown shifted from confused to horrified. “Naaza, please don’t tell me-!”
Knowing that trying to lie to a god would be pointless, let alone two, she grit out through clenched teeth. “We needed the money.”
“Not that badly!” he cried. “We’ve been good, paying down the debt on time–there’s no need to be cutting corners and putting people in danger!”
“We’re not ‘good’!” Naaza roared back, bitter tears pushing out from the corners of her eyes. “That bastard gets more pushy by the day! It’s only a matter of time before he ‘reorganizes our finances’ again! We can barely afford to live in a shack in these blasted ruins! Let alone buy food! And it certainly doesn’t help that you keep-!”
She cut herself off, swallowing back what she had been about to say with a grimace. But based on the hurt on his face, Miach must have known exactly what she was talking about.
Hestia and I shared an awkward glance, the fiery anger she had earlier having fizzled out in favor of pure confusion. Whatever this was, I don’t think it was supposed to have an audience. I beckoned her closer and leaned in to whisper. “Who the hell are these people, and why are they having couples therapy in my workshop?”
“Miach is one of my best friends, we used to hang out all the time up in Tenkai,” she stage-whispered beneath the rapidly rising argument unfolding before us. “And it’s your damn fault! They had been fine before you threw that, that, that social Evilus bomb right in between them! I brought them here so you could help them, not ruin their familia!”
“Do I look like a therapist to you!?” I hissed back, incredulous. “How in the Nine-Hells did you confuse me with someone who’s good at interpersonal relationships?”
“No, you dummy,” she said, not even trying to lower her voice now. “I wanted you to help Naaza with her arm!”
I gave the Dog-shifter another look, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with her, save for the fact that I couldn’t see even a hint of skin on her right arm beneath her long sleeves and glove. “Why, what's wrong with her? She looks fine to me.”
“She lost her real arm Dungeon diving, along with the rest of her team.” Hestia shook her head sadly. “The poor thing. She hasn’t been down since; She’s given up Adventuring for good. They had been able to get a pretty decent prosthetic from the Dian Cecht familia for her. But the problem is that they couldn’t afford it at the time, and that jerk tricked them into financing it.”
We shared another look, and she was madder than I’d ever seen her before. “He basically owns the whole familia through perpetual peonage. The rest of Miach’s kids have already jumped ship, so it's just the two of them now.”
“By Moradin’s pendulous balls!” I cursed under my breath. “I knew that slimy fuck was no good the second I laid eyes on ‘em! Does the Guild really not police that kind of stuff? I thought slavery was illegal in Orario?”
“It is,” She hedged, clearly upset by the topic. “But there are ways around it. The first gods were sure to leave loopholes in all sorts of nasty ways when they founded the city and wrote her laws–debt slavery being one of them. There are some, like the Ishtar familia, that are basically all slaves, but the Guild can’t do anything about it.”
When she saw the dawning look of horror on my face, she elaborated. “Slavery is outlawed, but the Guild has no authority on how a god recruits, or even treats his or her familia. So when a slave is smuggled into the city, they are quickly sold and stamped with a falna, putting them out of the Guild’s jurisdiction, regardless of how the mortal in question feels about the situation.”
She shook her head. “Miach fell for one of the other ways gods shackle potential recruits. With chains made of debt or obligation. I can only guess, but I think Dian actually wants something from Miach, or else he wouldn’t have kept this charade going for so long. He would have just fleeced them and been done with it.”
“Remind me to fucking annihilate the Ishtar familia.” I snarl, already dreaming up weapons that could be used to surgically cut that particular cancer from the city I had just started to think of as home. Engineered pathogens? No, no. That might evolve and catch the innocent in the crossfire. A global-spanning satellite Graser Grid? It’d work, but that would take too long to set up. I’ll put a pin in that idea for now.
“I’ll pencil it in between the annihilation of the Apollo familia, and Dian Cecht’s,” Hestia said sardonically, but there was a hint of her usually cheerful self peeking through the tug pulling at the corner of her lips.
“Actually, can you bump Apollo's appointment to later? His doom can wait until after I’ve rubbed the very concept of slavery out of the material realm. Alright!” I said, clapping my paws together to interrupt the near-screaming match these two strangers were having in my damn house. They both spun around, tears tracking down their faces. They looked surprised to see me there, as if they had forgotten why they came all the way out here in the first place. “I’m sorry to have brought up the potion thing, but Hestia said that you have something you wanted to show me?”
The two shared a heated glance, clearly agreeing that that ‘conversation’ was nowhere near finished. The Dog-shifter sniffled sadly, and while refusing to even look in my direction, pulled up the sleeve of her shirt.
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