Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 43: Worrisome Side-Effects

Okay, I think my theory might be correct. Perry thought, looking at his status.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Garage Tinker

Level 4

HP: 5

Body: 4

Stability: 4

Nerve: 8

Attunement: 18

Free Points:5

XP to next level 2441

He’d been at 16 Attunement when he’d gone from level three to level four.

1.05^16=2.18

He should’ve gotten three free points this level. 1 base +2 for the Generalist perk. Instead he got five. One plus double the Generalist perk.

The question is when does the exponential growth level out? And what form does it take? Every exponential curve in the real world flattened out when it ran up against the limits of reality.

Well, I’m not gonna look free stat points in the mouth. We still gotta make the stealth armor and spells to take down Chemestro if necessary. Attunement makes that a heck of a lot easier.

Perry dumped all the points into Attunement.

“Whoah,” Perry murmured as the outside world ceased to exist.

“Whoah what?” Heather asked, frowning.

“Everything outside ceased to exist,” Perry said, walking over to an empty locker and opening it to discover a random assortment of tools and cleaning equipment.

He closed it.

The tools ceased to exist.

He opened it.

Is that the same configuration of tools? Perry couldn’t tell. Was he experiencing quantum uncertainty on a macro scale? That was nuts.

“Are you high?” Heather asked.

That is also an option.

“No, it’s just never lasted this long.” I wonder if it’s long enough to check on something. Perry pulled his phone out and took a picture of the tools, then closed the door.

“Perry, your eyes are super dilated.”

He opened the locker door again.

All he saw was the star-studded void of space beyond the flimsy metal edges of the locker.

Perry took a picture.

He closed it.

“Okay, I think my mental state has been compromised. Can you guys keep me from hurting myself?” Perry said, laying on his back and staring into the bright lights of the ceiling.

“What’s going on?” Hardcase asked, approaching.

“Possible Minder attack,” Heather said, clamping Perry’s wrist down to the ground. “Get his other side.”

“O-okay,” Hardcase said, putting her entire body weight down on his wrist. Perry was pretty sure he could still toss her off.

A few minutes went by and the sensation of nothing existing outside the room faded.

“Okay, I’m over it,” Perry said.

Heather gave a sadistic grin.

“You of all people should know that you’re not the one that gets to call off a Minder alarm. We have to confirm you’re still you.”

“Crap,” Perry muttered.

It was another fifteen minutes of checking his pupils and heart rate, asking probing, personal questions to serve as gossip fuel before they released him. The two girls walked away, laughing about his distaste for fennel and unpermitted usage of the phrase ‘mouth-feel’.

What the hell was that? Perry thought, scratching his head. I should ask dad about that. And mom. And maybe an exorcist.

Perry frowned.

Attunement was described as how attuned to The Tide one was.

Maybe…maybe Attunement isn’t always a good thing. Especially during High Tide.

Perry’s veins ran cold as he realized that if he was riding the edge of something bad, his next level might push him over that edge without even giving him an opportunity to mitigate it.

Okay, investigating out what Attunement does to me is my next goal…right after I test it’s new power level on making stealth hyperweave.

Perry relaxed as he went back to tackle the stealth hyperweave, sinking into the Tinker twitch

What I really need is fiber optics that can function to an impossible degree. What he needed was a material that could catch aphoton, note it’s trajectory, then spit out a photon on the exact same trajectory, regardless of the orientation of the cloth.

He didn’t need invisible spandex. That would just make Heather look like she was naked.

Perry paused a moment.

…

…..Nah. It’s not worth it.

What he needed was a fabric that made the wearer invisible along with itself.

Which meant he needed some kind of microcircuits that could transmit a signal to the other side of a body and emit an identical photon.

And it needed to be ultra durable and stretchy

This might be where graphene comes in. Perry thought to himself. He needed microscopic circuits, along with really good fiber optics.

I don’t think I can create this traditionally, but maybe I can grow it.

Perry walked past his skin-growing experiment, which was growing larger every day. It was a patch of skin that had started about the size of a pinhead, but had reached silver dollar size in the last couple weeks. When it was the size of a throw rug he could get started on inscribing magical goodies on it and experimenting with the chaining technique he’d hypothesized.

Past that was Perry’s chem lab. It was a bit more modest than if he’d gotten all his stuff, but actually performed better than the original setup would’ve, on account of Perry having to build it himself.

I should’ve just ordered the ingredients I needed to make them, rather than try and save time. Probably wouldn’t have gotten robbed and had enough to finish Locust’s order, too.

Ah well.

Perry was still getting a handle on his powers.

Perry’s idea was to create a mat of densely packed microscopic fiber-optic shards all aligned in the exact same direction, then grow light sensitive material beneath them, and crumpled up monomolecular graphene wires between them, to transmit signals from fiber to fiber.

Easy, right?

Hardcase came by and they discussed the theory of grown microchips. She had some insights that allowed Perry to bypass studding the inside of the fabric with microchips, keeping the fabric clean and decreasing the total amount of work he’d have to do.

I guess you could hardly call it a fabric at this point.

When Perry came out of the Tinker twitch, he had a square of the grown material about the size of his palm. It was black with a strange shimmer to it. almost like an oil slick, or the iridescence of a raven’s plumage.

Hmmm.

When he bent the material, a burst of light would travel across the surface. It was certainly interesting, but it wasn’t making things invisible.

Perry thought back to the burgers.

This is burger number one. My perk needs to build a mental category for stealth hyperweave.

Perry’s brain already had a strong image of what a burger should be. He’d had plenty in his life. He had significantly less experience with hyperweave.

Would he still be able to dial in the effects of Spendthrift to nudge this in the direction he was hoping for?

Probably not, because higher strength was a minus to a burger. I was actively shaving bonuses off the burger to make it edible. Armor doesn’t have a lot of Spendthrift bonuses I’d want to get rid of. One way to find out.

Perry did it again, correcting a few of the mistakes he’d made in the first iteration.

This sheet turned out a bit better. It no longer sent flashing lights when it bent and when Perry formed the material into a tube, it went from black to semi-transparent, allowing Perry to faintly see through to the other side.

When he put his finger into the middle of the tube, it was nowhere to be seen.

Ehehehehe.

Perry made six more pieces of Paradox Brand hyperweave before he was satisfied that it wasn’t going to get any better.

At least until he got a better technique or raised his Attunement.

Yeah, I’m gonna have to ask Mom and Dad about that.

The fabric hid anything it was wrapped around, transferring about eighty percent of the light that struck it from one side to the other.

It wasn’t complete invisibility, but it made camouflage look weak by comparison. It would be a great start for Heather to sneak up on people. Given her ability to make her body stretch or compact and cling to the ceiling…it would be more than enough.

It cost him about $50 to make a patch about this size of his palm.

Damn. I was just kidding about charging for it, but a full suit of this would cost about…

Perry did some quick math.

He had a hard time finding the square inches on a full bodysuit, until he got the idea to look up the average square inches of skin on a human body. Hyperweave was skin-tight, after all.

Two thousand eight hundred square inches on an average body. Heather’s slightly smaller than average, so let’s say two thousand six hundred square inches.

at 12.5 bucks apiece…

Thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars. Cool. Cool….

The cheapest stealth hyperweave cost a cool ten mil, so Perry was making it a lot cheaper than it might otherwise have been.

It still stung, given he could make fifteen Mk.3’s for that price.

…How much does power armor cost?

Perry opened up his Tinker marketplace app, eyes widening at the number of zeros marching across the screen.

“Dangit, Locust got a great deal.”

Supervillains, man.

Perry shook his head and got back to work. Regardless of how much of a lowball offer he’d gotten, he was still walking away with forty million dollars. It didn’t matter that much to Perry.

Drive the price of the material down. Ensure it’s as stretchy and protective as typical hyperweave. Make full-body cast of Heather to form the suit.

….make Heather-shaped decoy ‘bots.

I should probably make full-body casts of all my friends. Never know when it might come in handy.

Brendon was high up on that list. Ever since he’d started working here, there’d been way more suspicious drive-bys with the driver leering out at the oversized meathead doing simple accounting behind the wall-to-ceiling bulletproof glass.

That was worrisome.

Perry’s lawyer had gotten the paperwork taken care of to start the motel as an official business, and Brendon as an official employee, with a W-2 and all that adult crap.

The smattering of people who’d decided to stay in the shabby-looking motel out of desperation barely covered Brendon’s salary, but Perry had never been particularly concerned with his cover business turning a profit.

Perry was heading over to his computer to CAD up some designs for a machine that could produce his invention at a lower price point, when his phone went off with a nerve-wracking siren, not unlike an Amber alert.

Perry fished his phone out and scanned it.

POSSIBLE WALL BREACH IN YOUR AREA.

STAY INDOORS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Paradox, Hardcase, and Wraith caught each other’s gaze and nodded.

Perry ran for his armor, while Hardcase climbed up the knee of her mechsuit, compressing down into the tiny cockpit.

“LCC, open the bay doors.” Perry said, causing the ceiling above the northeast corner of the lab to retract, allowing the torrential rain outside to begin spattering the floor.

Wraith was out first, her legs swelling for a moment before she jumped like a human grasshopper. A moment later her body flared out into pseudo wings, carrying her beyond the edge of the bay.

Perry followed behind, blasting into the open sky, followed by Hardcase, using her jumpjets to clear the bay. Once they were past, Perry had the doors closed.

The three of them hovered there for a timeless moment, watching the distant wall with it’s red flashing lights.

“It doesn’t look great,” Hardcase said, the cameras on her ‘head’ zooming in on the distant wall. “They need-“

A nuclear beam of light interrupted Hardcase’s words, incinerating a massive swath of the wall, which was roiling with prawns.

A moment later it was roiling with ashes, as Solaris blasted away, transforming into a beam of light in the sky, hitting another spot on the wall, then another, and another, bouncing down the miles and miles of wall like a blazing superball.

Perry had a unique view of the distant ocean illuminated by Solaris’s passage: It was boiling with activity.

Perry’s phone chimed.

WARNING RESCINDED

“I wanna volunteer on the wall.” Perry said as his eyes captured the scope of what the number one hero dealt with on a daily basis. Solaris was obviously putting out fires at a non-stop pace, and a hair’s breadth away from losing the wall at every minute.

Perry could carry some small part of that burden.

“Agreed,” Heather said.

“Me too.” Hardcase added.

“I need to make some lethal weapons.” Perry said, descending back into his lab.

This time he wouldn’t let the prawn treat him like a chewtoy.