Chapter 22: Factory Settings (Patreon)

The lens merchants looked at Jeb like he was going to get everything dirty and/or plot some kind of terrorism, but when Zlesk walked in covered in wounds, they bent over backwards to accommodate him as soon as they saw his Citizen club card, selling him whatever he wanted without question.

Forget the fact that Jeb was actually planning on doing violence with the supplies, it still rankled to be viewed with suspicion.

Bah, Jeb thought as he fed another Annihilation lens into the grinder. The grinder was a modified belt sander with a case/funnel around the business end. Just throw a lens in and the machine would make short work of it.

RRRR! The machine sanded the lens down into a murky powder, depositing it into the small bin underneath. Jeb brushed off the belt and made sure the funnel was perfectly free of Annihilation lens particles. That’s the kind of shit you don’t want floating around your shop.

There wasn’t enough spare Annihilation lens to go around, even though Zlesk had bought a handful of cleansing wands. Not for what Jeb wanted to do.

When you go big game hunting, you need the proper equipment, Jeb thought, glancing at the Beautiful Revenge, hung up on the shelf. It was a beautiful piece of gear, but Jeb wanted something with a little more shock and awe.

He carefully dumped the lens dust into the machine that he’d helped Eddie make.

The Squeezer.

At its core, the machine was a hydraulic press that allowed two halves of a die stamp to press against each other at outrageous pressures. Then the magi-tech got involved. You couldn’t just press lens dust together and expect it to come out as a whole functioning lens.

While it would work for a couple uses, the whole thing was incredibly brittle and tended to fall apart from the slightest touch. After quite a bit of experimenting, and, Jeb was ashamed to admit, a couple tiny deer getting squished by a hydraulic press, they were able to figure out how to make The Squeezer reconstitute a solid lens.

Myst had three states of matter: Ray, Thread, and Myst. Ray was anything that came out of a lens or Engine, and acted like you’d expect: like a ray; travelling in a straight line and delivering its effect on whatever the focal point was. It behaved very much like light.

Thread was when the Myst was coming from a person’s Core. It was malleable and generally connected back to the user’s core, forming a thread-like shape.

Then there was Myst, the neutral form that didn’t seem to want to interact with anything except Engines and living creatures. It didn’t even overtly interact with lenses, except possibly to shift their state of matter at a microscopic level.

They knew this, because in order to sinter Myst lenses, a high concentration of neutral Myst of the same type basically filled in the microscopic gaps of the pressed material and allowed it to form a cohesive solid.

The setup had a thick gold box at the top that was designed by Eddie to catch a ray before its focal point and hold it in place, compressing it until it reverted to neutral Myst. It was a similar concept to the Myst capacitor he’d explained to Jeb earlier. From the box, a feed-tube ran down into the lens-shaped die, Which Jeb had made using The Blue Serpent Furnace. Only neutral Myst could make it past the half-dozen switchbacks and down into the dies.

Jeb put the last available Annihilation lens into the converter, making absolutely sure it was close enough to the edge of the box that it wouldn’t carve a chunk out of the gold rather than get stopped and neutralized.

Jeb closed the lid, made sure it was screwed on tight, then fed the business end of the Myst engine through, connecting the nipple of the fiber-optics to the neutralizer.

Once that was done, Jeb checked everything one more time before feeding the black dust from the Annihilation lenses into the dies, making sure it was piled up nicely, allowing the dust to fill every tiny crevice.

The dies themselves had a thin coat of gold which had to be peeled off the finished product each time. Without the coating, the Myst infusion would simply dissipate into the environment. Gold was an excellent Myst insulator, and likely one of the reasons it was so expensive.

“Alright, I think we’re ready to get started,” Jeb said, reaching for the lever on the hydraulic press.

A motion out of the corner of his eye grabbed his attention. He glanced over and spotted Eddie laying down on his belly, a fair distance away and partially behind some rather sturdy furniture.

“What are you doing?” Jeb asked, frowning.

“If the system were to fail and eject Annihilation Myst out at high pressure, it would most likely be lateral. In short, I don’t wanna get cut in half.”

Jeb glanced at the welded together machine, a touch more ominous now.

“Scoot over,” Jeb said, moving over next to Eddie and lying down behind a thick hunk of greasy engine.

Jeb reached out with telekinesis and flipped the switch.

The press kicked on with a loud whine, pressing a huge steel die down into another. Jeb saw a faint plume of shadow as microscopic bits of lens were ejected from the edges by the pressure before the two sides of the die clamped down together.

The whine of the machine increased in pitch for a moment as it strained against itself, then stopped, locked in place.

“Okay, moment of truth.”

Jeb flicked the switch on the Myst engine.

Nothing happened. There was no telltale hiss of an annihilation lens ripping the air out of existence, and the press wasn’t showing any signs of being torn apart by the dangerous substance.

“Well, it didn’t blow up immediately. That’s good.”

“Agreed,” Eddie said, peeking out from behind the leg of the table.

“Shall we go see if it worked?” Jeb asked.

Eddie glanced over to the press and met Jeb’s gaze.

“Let’s have Buddy do it.”

Poor bomb defusing robot, always getting the short end of the stick.

“Agreed.”

The two of them shuffled out of the basement and sent the robot in to open the press and turn off the neutral Myst compressor.

Thankfully nothing bad happened, and Jeb found wound up holding a gold-plated Plano-concave lens about the radius of a golf ball. He carefully peeled the soft gold casing away and tossed the lens into the Appraiser’s roiling cloud.

Processed Synthetic Annihilation lens (Small)

Myst that passes through an Annihilation lens removes the first thing it touches from existence, making these both useful for industrial and military applications, but also quite dangerous.

These rare lenses are found in the Mines of Seeping Death before being sold to businesses and governments to be broken down into safer sizes. It is illegal for a private entity to own an Annihilation Myst Lens larger than tiny.

“Did that say it’s illegal?” Eddie asked as Jeb took the lens out of the roiling cloud of grey and red.

“Yep,” Jeb said, carefully placing the lens in the protective mold and pouring resin over it. Unlike gold, resin insulated basically none of a Myst ray’s energy. It did however, have a lot more physical toughness than the soapstone-consistency lens.

Resin also took well to being machined, allowing them to bolt lenses in place without drilling into the actual material.

While that was drying, Jeb started on the Stag lens, switching out the dies for a much larger plano convex lens

Jeb hand tooled a small lens off the main antler for the Myst compressor, then ground up the rest of the Stag lens. The lens itself was lumpy and oblong, it could only be fashioned into a much smaller processed lens using traditional means, but by filling a mould with dust, Jeb was able to scrape every millimeter of possible size out of it. This was important, because the angle at which the rays met each other dictated the strength of the creature.

They solved that a couple weeks into experimenting, when they noticed that larger lenses would often create smaller creatures with an identical amount of Myst being fed into them by the same capacitor.

Relative to their size, though, they were much stronger and faster. It was effectively a higher concentration of power in a smaller space. They confirmed this by lowering the Myst output on the smaller lens to make both creatures identical in stature, then testing their strength and speed.

They repeated the lens-stamping process, and Jeb wound up with a large Stag lens, perfectly round and at the exact angle they wanted it, about the width of a baseball, with enough dust left over to make another, easily.

Then came Eddie’s contribution to the weapon. After experimenting for weeks, the old man had found the material with the highest reflective value of anything they’d found yet, which was an amalgam of silver and mercury.

This must have been what was on the inside of Xen’s scrivener, Jeb thought to himself as Eddie coated the inside of a dish with the amalgam.

The frame of the dish was created by the 3-d printer, and it was about the width of a soccer ball, its angle carefully calculated to mesh with the other lenses. Jeb briefly winced at the idea of carrying around something that big on top of his staff. On the other hand…super-summon.

They made a mirror by lining a flat plate with amalgam, fixed it in place above the dish then began assembling the lenses into the shaft.

Right away they noticed it was not going to be a wand. It would look like a spaceman spiff laser and be incredibly unwieldy, given its size. In the end, Jeb opted to fix the contraption to the top of a staff.

Just like the Beautiful revenge, it was a three part sandwich, Control/Animal/Annihilation. The parabolic dish of shiny amalgam on the top would, in theory, increase the effective width of the lenses far beyond what was possible with a single lens.

They attached the contraption to the top of a piece of hardwood that rested in the hand just right, and disguised the satellite dish shape of the head with some of the staff’s gnarled roots.

Then they stood back and took in what they had created.

It looked…kinda goofy. The head was too big, as well as garish where the elegant wood gave way to resin and silver amalgam.

“Not winning any beauty pageants,” Eddie said, chewing his lower lip.

“Not supposed to,” Jeb said, hefting the staff in his hand. Sadly the creation was too delicate to be smacking people over the head with it, but hopefully what it lacked in durability, it made up in power.

“Outside!” Eddie said, pointing to the staircase as soon as Jeb hefted the staff. “I don’t need a frightened death deer tearing up the shop.”

Jeb obliged, heading up to the surface, using the staff to assist his gait. It was a little strange using a walking stick with such a big top, but Jeb supposed he could get used to it.

Maybe if I shorten the entire thing so the dish isn’t moving around in my periphery.

Jeb made it to the backyard, confirmed no children were standing nearby and aimed the stick in front of him. Behind him, Eddie crossed his arms and waited.

Jeb fed a drop of Myst through the staff.

A majestic black and rust-colored stag with twelve points to its magnificent antlers came into being directly in front of Jeb. The antlers had a strange aura of black and purple that seemed to pulse and quiver with barely restrained energy.

The teacup-sized buck let out a startled bleat as it dropped down into the grass, falling from a height of about four feet.

“Maybe give it a little more juice,” Eddie noted, his voice dry.

“I can see that,” Jeb said, dialing up the output internally severalfold.

The next summon was about two feet tall, and from there, Jeb was able to quickly zero in on the amount of Myst it took to make a stag-sized stag. Jeb pushed it a little further, creating one nearly the size of a horse.

“Try it out on the wall,” Eddie said, nodding toward the brick wall fencing in the back of the manor.

Jeb was tempted to have the big stag ram it, but he decided on the teacup sized one, just to be safe. The tiny stag bounded through the grass while the humans watched, leaping five feet up into the air and goring a brick wall with its antlers, treating the stone like softened butter.

The little stag managed to chew a hole through the wall before Jeb stopped him a moment later.

Jeb glanced over at the oversized stag standing next to him, whose shoulders were on the same level as Jeb’s. Its antlers were longer than Jeb’s arm and practically hummed with Annihilation Myst.

It looked back at him with a curious look, seeming to ask: You want me to go next?

No I do not. We’ve only got so much wall, and Pedro would probably kick my ass if I destroyed the wall…more.

“Hey Pops!” Colt said, rounding the corner.

“What?” Jeb asked, he and Eddie glancing over at the teen.

“Nancy’s awake…” He said, frowning as he thumbed over his shoulder, eyeing the man-sized stag. “What are you guys doing?”

“Science project.” Jeb said, facing him, resisting the impulse to hide the staff behind his back.

“Right…well, Nancy woke up a few hours ago, and Mrs. Everett says you can talk to her now.”

“Not bad for a prototype. Gimmie.” Eddie said, snatching the satellite dish/staff out of his hand. The old man took the staff and retreated back into his cave, muttering something about gravitational lensing as he did.

“Alright, let’s go debrief Nance.” Jeb said, wiping grease off his hands.

“Hold up.” Colt said, grabbing Jeb’s shoulder and glancing around like he was guilty of something. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah?”

“Zlesk says you’re some kind of savant at killing people?”

Jeb rolled his eyes. “You get lucky and kill one pirate crew, and everybody suddenly thinks you’re a murder savant.”

“How do you do it? Kill people?”

Jeb’s eyes narrowed, looking the teen up and down.

“You wanna know because you think killing people is cool or because you don’t wanna choke and get somebody else killed?”

The kid shrugged noncommittally, and Jeb almost throttled him.

“You ever watch those movies where the bad guy kills the hero’s family?”

“Like The Punisher?” Colt asked.

“Yeah, like the Punisher. Don’t be like him. I like to think real hard about how much harm enemies could inflict on my friends and family if I leave them alive to nurse a grudge. It helps.”

“But…”

“Yeah,” Jeb said, nodding. “ I know. We missed our shot and now there’s any number of people out there who are just aching to hit us where it hurts. Consider this a cautionary tale of what not to do.”

Colt absorbed that silently for a moment, staring at his shoes before glancing back up at Jeb. “I hate my Myst power.”

“Why? It’s a great power. You’ll never be out of lube.”

Colt’s cheeks flushed. “No, you and Zlesk and that other guy all got out of it in a couple seconds. It doesn’t work on anyone important.

“Colt, your build sucks and you’re using it wrong.” Jeb broke the harsh news to him. “Your slime is a godsend for crowd-control, but you wanna go after the Big Bad. Mathematically you will always have the most impact on a battle acting as support. If you can’t nut up and accept that, you will always be pushing more burden onto your teammates. You’ve got a ranged bonus, lean into that harder too. Get yourself an actual sling and learn how to use it.”

“But if I wasn’t up on that roof that guy would’ve killed you.”

Jeb frowned. “ If I recall correctly, you got knocked out and I shoved him off the edge. If you’d stayed downstairs and helped Zlesk, odds are you two would’ve subdued the people in the courtyard fast, and Zlesk would’ve been fresh enough to help us take down the guy that’s been killing your friends.”

“I know Zlesk isn’t going to give you shit about it, but you’re the reason he’s laid up.” Jeb said, poking Colt in the chest. And I’m the reason Kebos got away, Jeb thought, his mind wandering to his missing foot.

Then Jeb saw tears budding in the teen’s eyes.

Ah crap, I think I might’ve broke him.

Jeb opened his mouth to apologize, but Colt spoke first.

“How do I get better?” He asked, looking up at Jeb.

Jeb chewed his lip. “Talk to Zlesk. Ask him to teach you how to fight when he heals. Talk to Eddie, ask him to make you a magic sling or something. Then experiment with your slime. Can you harden it? Make it come out hot? Cold? Sticky? Can you be Spiderman? Can you change the lubrication?  Change it’s viscosity? Specific gravity? Does it float in water? Any change you can make or unique properties you discover are going to greatly expand your options in a fight.”

Colt was beginning to lean back, like he was being forced away by a deluge of condescending advice. Luckily, Jeb only had one more before he let the kid off the hook.

“And most importantly, never stop thinking.”

“Okay,” Colt nodded, presumably having absorbed almost none of that advice.

“Okay, let’s go talk to Nancy.”

Jeb followed Colt out to the front of the mansion, where one of the mercenaries dropped Mrs. Everett’s sandwich, gaping at the massive stag trotting along beside Jeb.

Can’t get hoofmarks on the rug.

“Buck, your name is Buck now.” Jeb said to the biggest buck. “You stay out here with your friends and don’t let anyone hurt the children, capische?”

Buck nodded.

I wonder if it’s the control lens or inborn intelligence from being a magic construct. Jeb thought.

Together, he and Colt headed in and met with Nancy. With a bit of begging they were allowed to let in Zlesk, although Nancy didn’t seem particularly happy to see a keegan up close and personal again, she held it together admirably.

For his part, the beat-up Keegan sat in the corner of the room, trying to look as non-threatening as possible.

The little girl was recovering from a cut on her shoulder, and a stab to the liver that should’ve been lethal, save for the fact that her Body was obscenely high, and children’s livers hadn’t yet been subjected to the same trauma as an adult’s.

The little girl was inspecting the back of her hand when they entered the room. Jeb didn’t see anything on it, so he declined to comment, simply sitting down.

Over the course of the afternoon, they carefully dissected what she had witnessed that night. She had witnessed the exchange between O’sut and the judge with her own eyes, heard him call the judge by name, even, and witnessed him kill Casey.

The fucker was going down. But the account didn’t give Jeb any clue how he was going to come after the rest of the nobles who’d purchased XP bags from O’sut. Presumably a few of them might have been hosting children at their homes. These children were most likely disposed of as soon as word got out about the raid on O’sut’s puppy mill.

“Rules are in place to protect you,” Zlesk said, rubbing his chin.

“You get something from that? Jeb asked, glancing over his shoulder at the keegan in the corner, far away from the little girl’s bed. Nancy watched him with apprehension.

“Yes, if Nancy’s recollection is correct, O’sut said, ‘you just commited a Reaping, not an Honor Duel.’”

“Does that mean something?” Jeb asked.

“It implies that the rule is that the nobles must trick the children into challenging them to an Honor duel, which they will then win handily.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“You don’t know the half of it. The winner of an honor duel is free from legal repercussions for the murder of the loser. Any of the aristocrats of Solmnath who’ve successfully tricked and murdered a child is legally untouchable for that murder.” Zlesk said, tightening his boney fingers into a fist. “This loophole must be closed.”

That explained why the judge was so desperate to stop Jeb from reaching O’sut. The judge had been so brazenly overconfident that he hadn’t covered his ass, legally speaking.

“What, there’s no age limit on Honor duels?” Jeb asked.

“Not really.” Zlesk said, before his expression brightened. “But there is a book.”

“Go on.”

“Every Honor Duel that takes place in the empire must be recorded as such. Otherwise what proof is there it wasn’t a simple killing?”

Jeb thought about it for a moment. “Are you telling me there’s a big book somewhere that’s got a list of names, and on one side will be people like Baron Von Kraggle, and the other side will have ‘Timmy The Orphan’?”

“Basically. It’s called the Book of Honor, and it’s kept in city hall. In this case, Book of Honor might be a misnomer.”

Jeb leapt to his feet. “If we get that book, we can get them for child trafficking! We get their names, trace the money they spent to buy the children from O’sut, and we’ve got them.”

“Identify the culprits, then take them down for any reason we can. Normally I would have moral objections to this, but this kind of scum needs to be removed.” Zlesk said, nodding.

“Get up!” Jeb said, heading for the door. “Let’s get to this book before they do. If you know about it, they have to know about it too. If they haven’t come after it already, they will soon!”

“Jeb…” Zlesk said.

“What?” Jeb asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“You’ve got a broken arm, your other doesn’t work so good, and your foot is still in the shop.”

Jeb glanced down at the loaner pegleg, just visible past his arm in a sling.

“What’s your point?”

“We’re not in the best shape to go after it.” Zlesk said, motioning to his own bandaged form.

“Hmm…I see your point. Better get help,” Jeb said, chewing his lip as he went through his list of contacts. For an operation like this, he wanted someone smart…someone stable…someone with Myst powers.

***

Someone like you,” Jeb said, clapping Eddie on the back. They were standing on the roof of a building somewhat overlooking the center of the city of Solmnath. The hot sun was just beginning to ease up, but the rooftops themselves were still toasty against bare skin.

“This really doesn’t seem like a good idea.” The wild-haired roboticist said, setting up his satellite dish and aiming it toward City Hall.

“You didn’t think the funding and the powerleveling was going to be free, did you?” Jeb asked. “Besides, we’re hunting child-killers. Be more stoked.”

“Plenty of kids to go around,” Eddie grumbled. He tapped Legolas on the top, and the drone rose up into the air, resting on a silent plume of air. The drone was a modified package carrier from a nearby derelict Amazon warehouse, so carrying a book shouldn’t be too hard.

The stealing part though, that was going to be Eddie. Why? Because Eddie had two working hands and Jeb couldn’t read the alien’s chicken-scratch.

Soon as I get some free time, I need to get right on that…As soon as I finish making all my weapons, search the rest of my body for those weird implants in the fifth dimension, find and kill all the people who profited from murdering children…

I might be illiterate for a while.

Indefinitely if he got murdered.

Eddie stared down at the city hall for a moment, then back to Jeb. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Eddie, you’re gonna have the best backup you could possibly ask for. Legolas here.” Jeb said, pointing with his thumb. “You told me yourself he’s the most advanced drone on the face of the planet. He’s as smart as a golden retriever.”

Legolas’s cameras oriented on Jeb and the whole thing wobbled in place, the only method of emoting the drone had.

“What about you?” Eddie asked, his eyes pleading.

“I will be your lookout,” Jeb said. “If you die, I will make sure to tell everyone back at the orphanage what happened to you.”

Eddie paled.

“And if something goes wrong, I’ll just tell you.” Jeb picked up the old phone connected to the dish and spoke into it, his voice echoed by the speakers on the drone’s body.

“Testing, testing, one, two, three.”

“Do I have to do this?” Eddie whined.

“No.” Jeb grudgingly admitted. “But I can keep you out of the basement for an entire afternoon if you don’t.”

The old man’s face became a mask of stone-like determination.

“Let’s do this.”

***Kol Rejan, level 57 Courier***

Kol glanced up, the tugging sensation in his mind leading him unerringly to his prey. The human was above him, on the roof of the building for some reason.

This fellow might be more trouble than he’s worth. Word was the man had been tapped by an Enforcer to stir up trouble in Solmnath.

Now Kol had to decide whether or not to try and make good on his assassination. As a professional, he had to weigh the risk of crossing an Enforcer against the damage to his reputation.

Silently, Kol climbed up a nearby building, his entire frame hauled up by the tips of his fingers, moving as swiftly as a spider. He came to rest on the top of the building next to his target, who was blissfully ignorant of his presence.

Kol settled into a nook in the rooftop, watching Jebediah Trapper from a sheltered viewpoint. He seemed to be talking with some other human with white hair. The two of them looked at City Hall quite a few times during their talk, indicating the target of their current scheming.

Kol wanted the human all to himself this time, so he waited until the white haired human left, leaving out the bottom of the building.

Here we go, Kol thought as Jebediah Trapper settled into a meditative posture, his defenses lowered. The keegan assassin silently drew his blade, moments from leaping over to the next building.

He stopped when a thought occurred to him.

Actually…why get paid once? Now that the human had revealed himself as an agent of Vresh Tekalis and exposed Judge Elkor’s dirty secrets, there were sure to be dozens of others willing to pay Kol to silence him.

Laziness and greed. Kol admonished himself, shaking his head. No. I’ll do this now, then leave the city. I’ve lingered too long.

Kol jumped across to the next building.