GSA 15-16 (Patreon)

Chapter 15: Cheese the Healer

It took Jeb a little over ten minutes to track down his team, since they’d been weaving around conflicts the entire time, they were a little off-course from where he thought they’d be.

They seemed surprised to see him. Jeb took a wild guess that it was because of the copious amounts of blood and the naked teen and her baby.

“Is she hurt!?” Amanda demanded, jumping up on the zombie-hauled palanquin as he alighted beside her.

“Probably not, I just wanted you to watch her, make sure she doesn’t have some kind of bad turn.”

“I can do that,” Amanda said, jumping off the palanquin and running over to the luggage, grabbing a cloak and printing back, wrapping it around the sleepy looking Casey in a professional manner.

She was shifting the baby a bit to tuck the cloak around the two of them when Smartass squirmed out, heaving a huge gasp of air.

“I LIIIIVE!” he shouted, unfurling his wings in a power-pose.

“Eep!” Amanda squeaked before hauling back to smack the little guy.

Jeb caught it a moment before she made contact, stopping her hand with a gentle cloud of Myst.

“He’s a friend,” Jeb said, picking up Smartass and putting the faerie on his shoulder. Ron watched the exchange with a chuckle. The three Myst users in the party could all see the faerie perfectly well, but Brett and Jess were unaware of what was going on.

“What happened?” Brett asked.

“Got bogged down,” Jeb said, relaxing. “Casey was ready to pop, so we had to stop and deliver the baby…except the monsters caught wind of it.”

He glanced at Brett. “You can’t afford to stop for anything. They don’t stop coming. Not anymore.”

“First thing we gotta do is find somewhere they won’t go, or else they’re gonna wear us down to nothing.” Jeb said, pointing to the west.

“Let’s start with the fire-mountain. Worst case scenario we can seal ourselves in a cave to sleep.”

“Aren’t those caves filled with fire?” Ron asked.

Jeb shrugged. “Not all of ‘em.”

“Well, I wish you fellas luck with that,” Smartass said, standing on Jeb’s shoulder and flexing his wings, drawing the attention of the spellcasters to himself. “I’ve got to get back to my acorn commodities business. Hopefully that ruckus scared away the devil squirrels.”

Jeb winced. Smartass had been buried between baby and boob when his entire tribe had been toasted. He still didn’t know.

“Now,” Smartass put his hand under Jeb’s nose, wigging his fingers greedily. “Payment for helping deliver that baby. I take payment in rare metals, candy, acorns or lenses.”

“Unless you want the girl to settle her debt herself, with her…” Smartass adopted a spooky, melodramatic voice. “Firstbooorn!”

Jeb reached into his vest and pulled out a snickers and passed it to the faerie. It was his last one.

“Muahahaha! Seed money!” Smartass said, petting the candy bar with a malicious grin that split his face.

“It’s been nice knowing you chumps! Next time we see each other, I’ll be head of a multinational syndicate!”

Smartass made to fly away, but Jeb gently stopped him with a cloud of Myst.

“What?” Smartass demanded, turning to face him and clutching the candy bar possessively. “You already gave it to me. No take-backsies. Wait. Do corporations have take-backsies?”

“I just wanted to tell you something.” Jeb said. “No matter what happens with your corporate empire, you’ll always have a place with me. If things don’t work out, I’ll help you get back on your feet. I owe you that much.”

Smartass peered at him suspiciously for a moment, his face dark.

A moment later, he grinned. “’Kay!”

Smartass zoomed up into the sky, lugging the heavy snickers bar beneath him.

“What the hell was that?” Brett asked, mouth slack.

“Faeries.” Ron said, shaking his head. “I wish I’d thought of the candy angle. I just ate most of it.”

They kept on heading westward, avoiding combat as much as possible, streaming along at a human sprinting speed, carried by the zombies. There was something to be said about the fact that they didn’t get tired or slow down, no matter how long they went.

While they moved, they talked strategy.

Jeb opened the floor to discussion, when Ron spoke.

“Have any of you guys ever played F*re Emblem or F*nal Fantasy Tactics? Or any tactics game?”

Jeb shrugged.

“I played a bit on my brother’s Nintendo, but I didn’t get very far.” Brett said.

“Okay, there’s this tactic that always works,” Ron said, glancing at Amanda. “I call it Cheesing the Healer.”

“So we...use her as bait?” Jeb asked, unable to understand why they would cover her in cheese.

“What? No!” Ron stared at him agog. “Alright, so here’s how it goes. The healer is the anchor of any team. As soon as they go down, you’re basically fucked, so people tend to keep them in the back and only use them when necessary.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Jeb said.

“Except…” Ron said, raising a finger. “That behavior stagnates the healer’s growth. They wind up puny and underleveled. My favorite thing to do is give my healer all the extra growth items, spring for the extra powerful weapons and armor, and put them right in the thick of things, until they’re basically untouchable. And if the healer is untouchable, that pretty much guarantees a win.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“We should power-level Amanda until she can fight better than Brett,” He said. “She’s under level twenty with no class ability. Making her tougher and better at fighting would be a huge benefit to our party.”

“You think you could do that, Amanda?” Jeb asked.

“I’m against violence,” She said, wincing.

“Real world’s a bit different from a video game,” Jeb said, glancing at Ron.

“But if it helps save my husband’s life,” She said, glancing at Brett. “I’ll kill whatever I have to.”

“Boom.” Ron pantomimed a mic-drop.

“Casey needs leveling too,” Jeb said, glancing at the sleeping teen with the mussed up hair. “I’m fairly sure she couldn’t have got past level twenty that hugely pregnant.”

“Stands to reason. If she’s at least strong enough to run away, that’ll be a huge benefit,” Brett said.

“And you,” Jeb said, singling Brett out. “You have any Myst?”

Brett shook his head.

“We’re gonna get you some. We can’t have you being blind and deaf to half the stuff going on around you. And Myst abilities are powerful. Your Soldier ability is absolutely no good in a fight, so we’re gonna want to supplement that.”

“That isn’t so much ‘cheese the healer’ as it is…powerlevel everyone.” Ron said with a shrug.

“They need it.”

“True, but do we have the time to –“

Jeb showed him his scarab lens. “Food.” he pulled out the water lens he’d traded for. “Water. All we need is shelter. That’s what we’re looking for on the mountain.” He glanced over to the mountain in the distance, smoke gently rising off of it.

“Once we have those three things we can take as long as we have to. We’ll start with Amanda, then once she’s in her late twenties, we’ll switch gears and focus on getting Casey up to snuff. If Casey winds up as baggage, nobody wins.”

He glanced at Ron. “Sound good?”

Ron nodded.

Amanda nodded.

“Sounds good,” Jessica said.

“Yeah. I’m not exactly comfortable putting Amanda in danger, but making her damn near impossible to kill sounds like a good decision.” Brett said, adding his agreement to theirs.

They kept working on the particulars as they fled the gradually expanding swarm of monsters.

***Later***

Nearly eight tense hours later, the forest began to thin out, and Jess frowned.

“You guys see that?” she said, pointing at the fiery mountain.

“See what?” Jeb said, peeling one eye open. He’d been catching some sleep since the monotonous rocking of the palanquin had started making him nod off.

“There’s something different on the mountain.” Jess said, staring.

Jeb sat up and peered at the mountain, but neither he nor any of the others on the team could make out what she described to them, until about fifteen minutes had gone by, bringing them closer to the bald mountain.

There was a large opening in the side of the mountain, with a flat top and sides.

A gate? Jeb thought, frowning as it slowly grew larger. It disappeared behind individual hills, but every time they got to the top, it got bigger. It went from a pinprick, to a thumbnail, to a fist.

Finally they stood in front of it.

An enormous gate seemingly carved into the stone, leading deep into the mountain itself. It had gouts of flame rising off the sides, seemingly manifesting from nothing.

“That’s definitely new,” Jeb said, staring up at it.

He glanced back over to the forest below them.

The swarm of flying monsters had completely taken over the forest, only moving when the World tortoise took another earth-flattening step, sending up a cloud of creatures like flies on a disturbed carcass.

Right now, The tortoise was eating enormous old oak trees like heads of broccoli, chewing with a glazed look.

They didn’t seem interested in going up the mountain, thank god. The creatures filling the sky seemed to fly around the flaming mountain, giving the smokestack and everything below it a wide berth.

This might just work.

Jeb squared his shoulders and took a step toward the enormous hole in the side of the mountain.

Or we all die a horrible death. But that was always on the table.

He stepped into the darkness that seemed to fold around him.

You have entered a Dungeon!

Grave of the Titan.

“It’s a dungeon,” Jeb said, stepping back out. “Last one I went into was a deathtrap. Let’s find a different place to sleep.”

No matter how convenient its appearance, Jeb knew that it was no place for an infant and mother. Matter of fact, Jeb was suspicious of it because its convenience.

He’d flown all over these mountains just a day before the Safe zones dropped. He or Jessica should’ve seen something.

That night they slept in a tiny cave, the five of them crushed together by necessity while Ron’s zombies formed an unliving wall at the narrow entrance.

Jeb couldn’t help but be a tiny bit envious of the baby, the only one who wasn’t pressed up against a rock one way or another.

The morning came, and they had water and roasted scarabs for breakfast.

Before they got started with their plan to ‘cheese the healer’, there were some experiments Jeb wanted to run first.

He wanted to see how difficult it was to pick up or move someone’s body against their will, using his Myst.

When he used the ability on Brett, it was like a bird in the hand, similar to the lamprey-dragon.

When he used it on Jessica, she felt more like a struggling cat. Squirmy, but not particularly hard.

With Amanda, her resistance felt like wrestling a full-grown woman. Difficult, but a foregone conclusion. The amount of time spent forcing his Myst through hers would easily open him up to counterattack though, so it wasn’t an efficient way to go about it.

When Jeb tried to pick Ron off the ground against his will….

It felt like he’d called Schwarzenegger a sissy.

“I think it’s fair to say that the difficulty of using your Myst ability on another person is related to the strength of their Myst Core,” Jeb said, sweat beading on his brow.

Ron didn’t look much better off, having fought tooth and nail to stay on the ground.

Note to self: Myst users are going to require indirect methods to deal with from now on.

Once Jeb got that little experiment out of the way, they arranged their jobs.

Amanda, Brett and Jeb were the powerleveling team, Ron and Jessica stayed and kept the cave safe. Jeb was fairly sure that she still found Ron suspicious, eyeing the ginger out of the corner of her eye while the Necromancer wasn’t looking.

Either that or she had a crush on the kid.

They are about the same age, Jeb thought, glancing at his own weather worn hands.

Que sera. She’s only the prettiest girl I’ve seen in ages.

Casey was also on cave detail, though her hands were mostly full taking care of baby Casey.

That’s gonna cause some confusion. But Casey wanted her daughter to be called Casey Thompson the Third, so Jeb didn’t argue with it.

The exercise program for their healer was to stack up as many unique fights with monsters as possible, coming at them from every angle Amanda could manage.

The logic was such: Each person who currently had a class was offered three classes based on their performance within the Tutoral, or failing that, their personal history, the result of some outstanding achievement or their favored manner of fighting.

So it stood to reason if they decked her out in the fantastical full plate the zombies had been carrying and had her kill some monsters, she might get an armor-oriented class.

Or if she killed some creatures without armor, with her bare hands, she might get the opportunity to take a class that made armor unnecessary.

It took a few days of Jeb literally plucking monsters out of the sky or the woods below and tossing them on the ground for her to fight, but eventually, Amanda got the hang of it.

They had her fight in armor, without armor, even a nude brawl against a low-level monster, bludgeoning it to death with her bare hands in the hopes that she'd get a rare class for it.

That fight was awkward. Jeb had to watch carefully so he could intervene if it looked like she was about to lose. Brett and Amanda seemed less worried about it, but still…

They also tried archery and trap-laying at Jeb’s suggestion.

If Amanda got the Mystic Trapsmith Class, I would be absolutely thrilled. The ability to set aside packets of healing to be used at a moment’s notice would be invaluable.

He even knew how to unlock it, but creating a trap using healing magic was a bit of a stretch… he couldn’t think of any reasonable way to pull it off. Some gimmick with skin tension?

Who knows, Jeb thought with a shrug.

Jeb asked around if anyone knew how Eddie had gotten his class, but the consensus was that while Eddie had been stupid, he hadn’t been stupid enough to tell other people how he’d gotten his class.

Three days of battle later, and Amanda had her class selection.

Due to them carefully varying her fighting style, Amanda wound up with six different selections. Apparently three class selections was the minimum and most people didn’t have the luxury to experiment with things that might not work.

1.       Celebrant of Sabrin (A)

2.       Mystic Archer. (B)

3.       Ironskin Brawler (B)

4.       Healer (C)

5.       Courtesan (D)

6.       Companion (D)

The first three were earned recently through Amanda’s powerleveling, while the bottom three related to what she’d been doing in and around the camp during the first three weeks.

The Celebrant class was the rarest, and it offered a substantial bonus to Body, along with a smaller boost to Myst and Nerve. It also came with an attack ability and a passive boost to armor.

Amanda balked at reading the description of the class aloud, saying it was on the table, but waving off any further questions.

The Mystic archer was similar to the Mystic trapsmith, allowing her to infuse her arrows with her magic.

Jeb thought that was an amusing image, shooting people to heal them, but when Ron mentioned they might be able to bypass the restrictions by using a blowgun and needles, he took the class more seriously. It offered a decent boost to Myst and Nerve, with a smaller bonus to Body.

Ironskin Brawler was exactly what it sounded like, giving the healer the ability to strengthen her own skin at will. It offered a large bonus to Body and a small bonus to Nerve.

Healer’s ability added more utility to her Myst powers, giving her a passive bonus to heal others, as well as the ability to recognize and treat ailments above and beyond simple injuries, including diseases and poisons. It came with a decent boost to Myst.

Courtesan was discarded, along with Companion. The two classes were pure support, and did very little to help her defend herself.

They suffered an hour or so of decision paralysis, but Amanda eventually chose the Celebrant of Sabrin. The only class with a well-defined bonus to her ability to attack, as well as good stat increases.

She apologized to Jeb for not taking Healer, as that would have likely been the shortest path to him getting his leg back.

“You act like you cut it off yourself,” he said, waving her off. “I can fly. I’ll be fine.”

They weren’t done after she got the class though. They swaddled Amanda up in armor again, noting how much easier she moved in it than before. And the attack ability…

Amanda’s entire body would glow with soft light moments before she charged forward and split some unlucky creature in half, where before she struggled to pierce their hide.

Not bad.

They were returning for the day when Jeb heard fluttering off to the side and spotted Smartass, with a hobo bindle full of acorns over his shoulder –five or six, maybe? – and an empty Snickers wrapper being used as a tunic.

He landed on Jeb’s palm, his expression hollow.

“How’d it go?” Jeb asked.

“I was on top of the world, human. Naturally, I was distraught about the loss of my clan, but I decided to forge ahead. I joined a new clan. The things you taught me made me a god among the Free Folk. I had the world in my hand,” He said, shaking a tired fist.

“There I was, snorting lines of pollen off the back of a Rhapsody beetle. I could have anyone or anything I wanted. I was powerful. My company was expanding rapidly, turning over clan after clan to my control. I had supply lines that stretched from one end of the forest to the other.”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “We even had plans underway to establish contact with faeries from the next country over, corner the market. Consolidate. Umm…Leverage our assets?”

“So what happened?” Jeb asked.

“One minute I was doing pollen, the next minute, the ungrateful bastards were throwing me in prison for embezzlement. I rotted there in that hollow log with the scum of the forest. I got hard. I got mean, just to survive.”

Smartass gave the mountain a thousand yard stare.

“After what felt like years, they finally let me out, but my company was already in someone else’s hands, and believe me, I wasn’t keen on hanging around watching someone else in my seat doing my pollen, so I got the hell out of there. I spent the next three days after that looking for you.”

The next three days? We’ve only been here three days.

“You created and subsequently cheated a company that spanned the entire forest, then did hard time…in one day?” Jeb asked.

“You humans lack the focus to get anything done quickly,”  Smartass said, rolling his eyes. “Ooh, what’s that!?”

Chapter 16: Optics

“Check this out,” Jessica said, tugging Jeb off to the side.

“What is it?” he asked, stumbling a bit as his new pegleg slipped.

Jess handed him Razorback. “Take a swing at me,” she said.

Jeb glanced down at the brutal black jagged longblade in his hand and shrugged. “’kay.”

He took a sideways swipe at the stubble-headed assassin. He briefly considered protesting, but that was just a waste of time at this point.

In the blink of an eye, blackened steel gauntlets snapped into place on her hands, allowing her to catch the sword with her palms and wrench it out of his hands, nearly toppling him over.

“Nice,” Jeb said, blowing on his stinging hands.

“I can do it for my head and feet as well, but anything bigger than that is going to take more Myst.”

“Did you try making a weapon or enchanted gear yet?”

Jessica flicked her hand, and a throwing star whizzed into the distance and sank into a rock before it began to gradually fade away.

It’s not permanent. I wonder why creatures are permanent then.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Color me impressed.” Jeb said.

“I can’t do enchanted gear yet,” Jessica said with a shrug, “But I feel like it’s possible, just too expensive to do with my current Myst reserves.”

Jeb nodded.

Brett and Casey Sr. were sitting outside the cave entrance, which had been cleared into a cozy little campsite.

Both the aging fitness model and the teen mom were sitting cross-legged, focusing on starting their Myst core.

The last of Casey’s goth makeup had been washed away, and now she just looked like the girl next door. Her hair was still black as night, though, and her attitude hadn’t improved much, glaring at every man in the camp like they represented the patriarchy.

The only time he saw her crack a smile was when she was cooing to Casey Jr.

One thing they don’t tell you about babies:

Newborns are ugly.

Right now, she was soul-searching in an attempt to unlock her Myst abilities, which should help her kill monsters.

The teen girl was even less prepared to powerlevel than Amanda had been. Amanda had the benefit of experience and a couple Body enhancing potions.

Her stats were as such:

Casey Thompson

Body 13

Myst 4

Nerve 8

The girl hadn’t gotten a single level, her inhuman stats were from the bonus fifteen points at the beginning, which probably saved her life.

She’d started putting them in Myst one at a time, then stopped when she started getting horrible headaches and seeing scary things, putting most of the rest into Body and a little into Nerve.

Once Casey figured out her Myst ability, they would be able to guide her toward a class that synergized with it.

In theory.

Jeb spent the morning working on altering Amanda’s armor to fit her better, as well as working on a few of his own devices, watching the Myst boot camp members hard at work.

The armor they got for Amanda was a rare animal: It was a full suit of armor that looked as though it’d been taken straight out of a video game.

This lead to several problems with its functionality,

The shoulderpads were huge, obnoxious things that would never work in reality. They had to remove them just for her to be able to lift her arms above her head. The main reason they’d been sold.

The armor was also heavier than a normal human had any right to be able to move in. That problem was largely solved by Amanda’s superhuman strength, but being heavier than it needed to be served no purpose.

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

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

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

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

Ah well, it’s still awesome.

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

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

Safety first.

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

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

“Flamethrower.” Jeb said simply.

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

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

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

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

BOOM!

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

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

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

“Damnit Ron, how much did you use?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ron scrunched up his face in consideration.

“Rangefinder?” he asked, peering at Jeb.

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

“You got something from that?”

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

Ron squinted.

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

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

“Eh, couldn’t hurt.”

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

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

“Nope.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whichever.

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

Perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

College was a long time ago.

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

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

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

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

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

Once the machine was done…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

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

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

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

That could come in handy.

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

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

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

Ron looked at him, jaw gaping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being able to control distance was more important.

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

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

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

He studied the two metal rods in his hand.

Crude training Wand of Fireball (Geysering) (Uncommon)

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

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

That’s something I should look into.

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

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

Jeb drew an outline around them.

That looks like a gun to me.

Jeb flipped the capacitor so the trigger mechanism was facing –

Pop!

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

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

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

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

No more worms.

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

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

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

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

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

Jeb inspected it.

Crude Guerilla Wand of Fireball (Geysering)(Uncommon)

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

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

“Hmm…”

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

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

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

She gave him a flat stare.

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

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

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

Oh, crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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