Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 274: Designing Astronomical Protection

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

Another enormous segment of the factory went up in the amount of time it took Perry to blink.

Now another.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

While Perry worked, he mulled over his priorities.

So, our primary goal is: Keep family alive.

Secondary goal: Survive.

Tertiary goal: Save the world from Solaris, who seems to have gone off the deep end.

It didn’t take someone with 2000 IQ (that wasn’t a thing) to figure out that once Perry had stamped out the mimic epidemic, his value to Solaris dwindled, and that might put him on the chopping block.

The answer was not to drag his feet on fixing the mimic problem. That was not an option. If portions of the Anchors had been turned, there was no reason his family was off the table. Honestly, he wanted to revisit the idea of sending them on vacation to Manitia for a couple months now that things had gotten…a little out of control.

Except it was too late for that. Solaris was holding them hostage against Perry’s good behavior, and sending them away would trigger an instakill.

He’d tried.

The probability dodge had gotten about halfway through explaining that he wanted to evac them before it’d blinked out.

So how do you defeat someone who moves at the speed of light? Nothing I can make has that kind of speed.

Not to mention, Solaris is effectively a walking nuclear weapon. If he can move from place to place with his clothes on, that implies that he’s able to impart his ability onto a small amount of matter and take that with him when he moves.

So, in theory, Solaris could take a baseball and accelerate it to the speed of light. That would…

Perry did the math in his head while he checked all the factories.

No more city. wow.

I’m not sure my Mark Nine could handle those forces. Perry did the math.

Nope.

Again, Perry was working with multipliers in the thousands, and while that made for some ungodly sturdy materials, the speed of light was a real bitch.

…Can I modify photons? Perry thought, glancing down at the glowing ring on his finger. His wedding ring had been made from a laser he’d struck Gorm with, whose reality-warping effects had congealed the beam into a liquid. He’d then used his Spendthrift perk to make it more structurally stable so it could be formed into rings.

Obviously there’s some wiggle room there.

Perry still had some feathers, but there was no way to guarantee similar results. He’d been shooting straight into Gorm’s chest, which had thousands of overlapping strands of reality-warping feathers, and there was no way to know what had done it except to exhaustively brute-force combinations.

That implied time Perry didn’t have.

What about my crystal?

Paradox had experimented with trapping light before, specifically to contain Gor’s Disintegration in a stable form.

I had…a fractal mirror box, and a crystal. The crystal turned out to be the more viable of the two options, but I’m wondering…

The fractal mirror box was created when I was level 4, with 23 Attunement, and I was able to make a box that could capture light for 2 seconds with chrome paint and evaporating crystals.

…What could I do now?

Perry checked his stats for the first time in quite a while.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 18

HP: 13

Body: 135

Stability: 136

Nerve: 135

Attunement: 135

Free Points: 0

XP to next level: 26210

Oh, look at that, about halfway to the next level. He’d been gradually accruing Xp over the last…Nearly a year.

Finally slowing down on the whole levelling thing. Level 19 is going to be crazy. Level 20 is probably going to break Spacetime.

Okay, let’s see here. 135 Attunement is…725.36X

23 Attunement was 3.07X

725.36/3.07= 236.27

Okay, my Attunement is effectively two hundred and thirty-six times stronger than when I was level 4. If I repeated the process I did last time exactly, I could make a box that traps light for…(236X2)/60= seven minutes and fifty-two seconds.

Perry paused. That…was long enough to do something with.

Now how do we trap Solaris in it without him seeing it?

And keep in mind, it might be able to trap light, but if he throws a penny at me, I’m still going to die. He needs to charge in head-first, rather than cautiously test my defenses.

Stolen story; please report.

Except that’s exactly what he’s going to do. He’s the most powerful man on the planet, and yet he’s cautious as hell. The trap needs to be invisible, and I need to figure out a way to make myself more tolerant of things moving at C. long enough to convince him it’s not a trap anyway.

Such a trap couldn’t be invisible, could it? Because it interacts with light by its very nature. It would make a tearing effect as it freezes a small area’s visible light and then carries it with it. A bit like screen-tear on a computer.

How could I apply it to an area without needing the light-trapping surface to be present?

Perry’s furiously working mind thought back to his earlier days establishing his brand of super-heroism in Franklin City.

Dregor’s Binding.Yes. Shadowcat Umbilical cord and Prox Semen combine to create a voodoo-like effect.

With a certain amount of tweaking, I could create a doll of my armor, which I could then coat with the light-trap. Or build one around it…effectively making an invisible light-trap by using the transitive properties of Dragor’s binding to clamp down on light around the suit at a moment’s notice. I don’t need a voodoo doll of my armor laying around to get used against me, I just have to harness the properties of Dregor’s binding to make invisible (but real) effects.

Yes. That could work. Perry began mentally designing the prototype as he continued surveying the production lines. He was currently producing hundreds of thousands of mimic tests per minute. It might not be enough.

Then I need to make myself resistant to kinetic forces strong enough to spark nuclear fusion. Good luck with that.

Or wait…maybe I don’t have to be strong enough to survive the most Solaris can throw at me. Maybe I only have to be strong enough to outlast Earth itself. He’s probably always holding to not destroy the city/planet he’s living in. That might be within the realm of possibility of what I’m capable of. The Mark 9 is already close.

Except…what if he doesn’t hold back? What if he throws a building at me at the speed of light, and the surface of the Earth gets glassed?

Dregor’s Binding might come in clutch there, too.

What if I could add hundred of tons of protective material without actually adding hundreds of tons? Ablative plating strong enough to absorb things moving at c.

For anyone else, it might’ve been a pipe dream, but Perry had options.

Also. I need to break into Lightshow’s personal lab to see if she ever considered how she might fight Solaris if it ever came down to it. She was among the few who could pose a credible threat to him.

It just never occurred to her, and Solaris was wise enough to let it lie.

Perry also needed to put out feelers and see who had survived Solaris’s purge. Who had a modicum of power and might be able to support Perry in taking the unbalanced super down?

Gramma’s probably still alive. Solaris never figured out a way to kill her earlier, so why would he now, with his mental faculties diminished? Tyrannus is probably still alive. He’s not an anchor and Solaris is content letting him handle his side of the continent.

Mom and dad…

Perry blinked tears out of his eyes.

According to Solaris they’d managed to get away, but they were Kill-On-Sight for the ruler of Franklin City.

Not to mention, if Perry were Solaris, he wouldn’t tell Perry he’d killed them. He would say they got away. Just to keep Perry calm long enough to get the test out of him.

Perry was now suddenly faced with the harrowing possibility of having to work with his grandmother.

And dead parents.

The primary problem with trying to establish contact with other supers and try to form a team, was that Solaris was constantly watching him. Everyone of note, really. Even now, Solaris was flickering in and out of his secluded lab out in the middle of the ocean, so fast that Perry couldn’t perceive it with his physical senses.

His dimensional senses, however, had picked up on the grating hum of Solaris’s presence whipping through ever since he’d stepped back into the lab. Solaris had found it the instant he’d first opened the portal to go home.

How do you betray someone watching your every move?

Answer: Very carefully.

Perry had been deliberately making the struts of the ocean-bound factories bigger than they had to be. He could’ve made them toothpicks in comparison to the rest of the building and they would’ve been fine against the ocean waves and undersea megafauna, but instead he made them fifteen feet in diameter of solid concrete like an ordinary ocean lair might have.

He was also running a full complement of 32 Probability Dodges, using all but four of them to test the limits of Solaris’s surveillance.

They were dropping like flies.

His first success was when one of his probabilities managed to sneak his light-trapping armor prototype vat into one of the struts.

The strut in question had been blocked from view in the scrying orb by his elbow and thumb, and Solaris (for that fraction of a second, anyway) had taken a liking to observing from a specific corner of the room.

He just barely missed it.

Perry stifled a sigh of relief and added that Probability to the control group, enacting no further changes to preserve it for an hour.

At the end of that hour, heart hammering in his chest, Perry took a risk. This is it. After this, I’m committing myself to opposing Solaris, because if he finds a suit of armor specifically designed to fight him, or if he did catch it, but just decided to wait and see what I do with it…I’m as good as dead.

Perry wanted to take a deep, steadying breath, but Solaris was watching him. Solaris was everywhere.

Perry collapsed the probabilities down to the one that had successfully hidden the prototype.

A fraction of a second passed, and Perry didn’t die.

Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe (32)

Perry branched out again into another 32 possibilities.

One hurdle passed.

Now I need to create a material that can withstand other materials moving at c.

Dregor’s Binding might actually be able to help with that, too.

The voodoo-like magic allowed properties to transition between a simulacrum and the real world, with much stronger expression than something like magnetism.

Perry momentarily though of dad’s armor, which was (possibly) held together by magnetism, which forced every millimeter of the armor to maintain it’s position, affording excellent protection from kinetic force, essentially buttressing the material with magnetic force.

Lenz’s law, perhaps?

If Perry created a phantom area around himself that induced a current based on objects moving through it, then the object’s force would create a magnetic force that would oppose itself, and in effect, slow itself down. The faster it moved, the more it would slow itself down.

He could effectively translate kinetic force into electricity.

There’s just one issue. The induced current will have energy on par with a nuclear bomb. Where will THAT energy go?

Wait…I’m a Battery Tinker, too.

Perry reviewed his relevant perks.

Super-Capacitor: Storage devices you create have increased capacity, efficiency, charge and discharge rates.

Atypical Battery: You may create devices that store and release on command any kind of intangible force without changing its form, such as heat, cold, motivation, light, maternal disapproval, magnetism, chemical potential, kinetic energy and more.

I think it’s time I really lean into the Battery Tinker portion of my Class. Perry thought. Could Perry make a portable battery powerful enough to store a nuclear blast?

Let’s do the math.

Spendthrift multiplier for reactions (in this case, energy storage) = 725 (Base attunement)

In his testing, Perry had found that the base multiplier for the super-capacitor Perk was 100X, multiplying it by his Attunement gave him 72500.

Multiplying those two together gave him…

52,562,500X

So, if I create a single AA battery, it can store…

Perry translated into Joules.

One AA battery has 10 kilojoules, so multiply that by fifty two million…

About half a Terajoule.

1 Megaton nuclear bomb equals approximately four thousand Terajoules.

That’s not an apples to apples, comparison, though. He’ll be throwing things at light speed. Let’s figure out how many joules are in…say, a penny thrown at the speed of light.

Thanks Einstein, Perry thought, plugging the weight of a penny into E=mc^2.

A moment later…

Fuck you, Einstein, you bitch!

224 terajoules in a penny!? Are you kidding me!?

Perry needed to effectively strap five hundred AA batteries to his suit to absorb Solaris lazily flinging a penny at him at the speed of light.

I mean, sure, it’s amazing I even have that option, but it’s not gonna cut it. I need more powerful batteries. By a few orders of magnitude.

All this math was done using a storebought AA battery as the basis. If I design and create a battery that is vastly more powerful before applying my perks…then we might be on to something…

Perry got to work.

Outwardly, he continued supervising the production of mimic testing serum at a relatively sedate pace.

Internally, he was furiously designing a solution to The Solaris Problem.