Chapter 41 - Memory, Thou Art a Fickle Beast

It was warm; the warmth of a perfect spring day just before summer hits. Water burbled somewhere just out of sight and a few shifting spots of sunlight managed to struggle through the canopy and triumphantly reach the loamy soil. Birds twittered a cheery chorus all around.

He took a deep breath nearly finding a high in the scent of the woods.

Leaves crackled and light steps scuffed behind him just before a pair of slender arms wrapped around him from behind.

“You went wandering off again.” A voice gently whispered a rebuke. The breath caressing his ear sent a rush of goosebumps down his spine.

“You always find me though.”

“I do. But what makes you think I always want to be chasing after you? Maybe you should chase me for a change.”

“I already did that once, or do you not remember?”

“I remember you stumbling after me until I took pity on you.”

“Oh, is that how it was?” He laughed. “I still managed to catch you.”

“Are you listening to yourself? I let you catch me. More pity upon the poor soul so inept on his soles.”

“I love how humble you are.”

“Humility is for people who don’t know how amazing they are.” She laughed with him this time; chimes in the wind. He pulled her around for a kiss that went on longer than it was meant to; not as long as he wished.

“You could have found a closer spot. You know I don’t like getting dirty trudging through the wilderness.”

“We’re camping, we’re supposed to get dirty.” Her stare was so flat every level in the hardware store would burst its bubble from envy.

“Oh no, a mistake like this so close to the end of the game. This could cost him the championship, Bob.”

“Absolutely Terry and after such a great showing the rest of the game. Just tragic.”

“I’m sorry about that” he amended. A bit of texture returned to her gaze.

“You’ll just have to make it up to me.” This time there was a sparkle.

“I’ll see what I can do about that.”

He kissed a new set of lips and a new song rose to compete with the birds.

Mitch rose slowly back to wakefulness feeling strangely warm and satisfied.

Was I dreaming about… sports?

He clearly recalled the voices of sportscasters, but the rest of the dream was already

blurry beyond recovery. No, there was more to it than that. There had been another voice; a girl?

Gone. Oh well, there are bigger fish to fry.

The comfortable feeling left by the dream faded as he remembered what still lay ahead. He spent a couple more moments steeling himself before he opened his eyes to the daylight’s assault.

Unsurprised, he found himself laying on the same spot in the proving grounds: if the crick in his neck was any indication Kanshou had left him as he had fallen. Every body part protested as he woozily made his way upright, pins and needles dancing around various extremities as blood flow recovered from the awkward position. A couple repetitions of Joel’s form sped the recuperation and cleared his head somewhat.

Looking around he discovered the diamonds a couple of yards away and collected them and the prototypes before heading back to the workshop. Upon arriving he placed the stones on a table and sat heavily in the chair. Staring a emptily at the rocks and notes, the experiments still glowing in their circles. The crystal set up for the stress test had cracked at some point and was sparking inside the still active formation.

He made a list in his head of the things that still needed doing and the weight of it pressed him deeper into his seat.

One moment: I will have one moment of melancholy and then I will let this go and I will not look back on it.

For that moment he allowed all the fear and chaos of the last few months full reign on his emotions. His head fell and his shoulders drooped. He made himself small in that chair as though he could make the universe forget his existence. He imagined going back two years to when his biggest concern was whether to go out or have delivery.

He sat up, shook himself off, and got back to work.

The new blunderbeam prototype had a few significant changes. The formation in the barrel was still a nonuple helix but it was broken into three sections with each section being slightly offset from the one before. At the intersection of each element there was an additional circle for reinforcement which had its own formation to augment the containment. In addition, he had added a formation which kept the entire unit partially charged so that a beam would form as soon as additional energy was added to the system; this way there was no time lost as the mana rod was converted to usable energy.

The crystal weapon was more refined in appearance having been where he spent the majority of his time. It actually looked somewhat like a firearm, if such things were made from wood. It had the outline of a short assault rifle, like something with a bullpup design, complete with pistol grip and a magazine-like area where he loaded the mana rods.

The form factor wasn’t strictly necessary for the weapon’s operation, but he had chosen it for its ergonomics and control. Also, once he painted it black, he would feel slightly less deranged waving the thing about. His original design had looked more like a chunky magic wand with the crystal inset into the end of the functional components which were all worked into a forearm length dowel.

The pre-charging trick had been used here again, which meant the crystal was constantly glowing. There would probably need to be a cap that could be put on the end to keep light from leaking out at inopportune moments. Although, on the plus side, it would save him from needing to carry a flashlight. On this one, however, he had also created a chamber which would hold energy which had already been broken out of its solid state; further cutting down the time between trigger pull and beam formation to almost nil.

Overall, it was quite satisfactory. His only regret was that he had spent as much time as he had on the rifle shape. At the time he had been thinking that this would be the version he would be using for the Tolling, but unless he could figure out a way to adapt it to fit the much larger diamonds the whole thing would need to be done over.

The next thing that drew his attention was his notes on using the ratio between the collectors on the formation and the main circle as a unit of measure. If he was right about things it was similar to calculating density. Actually, it was exactly density: the larger the collectors were in relation to the circle the more energy would get crammed into the area of the circle until it either reached equilibrium or the circle failed and the energy escaped.

It could also, he now thought, be used to classify crystals’ energy capacity. If he used the point at which there was a solid glow as the point of definition he could compare the relative capacity between crystals.

He decided to use the linear length of a single collector divided by the inner diameter of the central circle. Using that method the largest crystal had a capacitance ratio of 2.33.

He immediately set about testing the diamonds for their ratios. Numerous violent failures had forcefully imparted a lesson of caution, meaning that the first test was fairly conservative: eighty percent of double the geode ratio - 3.73 - which did precisely nothing. After the collectors were scaled up to 4.25 it took about a minute to produce one dull, sullen flicker. Frowning, he increased by another half point which was virtually the same except for the flash being a bit brighter. Not daring to make larger changes, he continued to scale up by about half a point each time until finally, over half an hour and many iterations later, he had a brilliantly glowing diamond. The final ratio ended up at 9.17, almost four times more than the crystals taken from the geode and more than half of the ratio for his mana rod constructs, which he calculated at 17.51. Granted it took almost two days to form a mana rod with the current design and only a minute to make the diamonds glow, but the comparison was still striking. That ratio left him at a loss as to how to pre-charge the crystal.

It also got him thinking about the way he was producing the mana rods. Specifically, the question of whether a formation constructed around the current wooden cylinder design to ‘super-charge’ the energy condensation would speed along the process at all. Whether or not using the diamonds increased the overall power of the beam remained to be seen, but there was little to no chance that there would not be a higher energy drain which made reducing the production time for mana rods a priority.

There was no time to waste, so Mitch immediately set about testing his mana rod theory after which he went about making a frame that could accommodate the larger diamonds.

It took Kanshou several days to parse through and assimilate the memories he had extracted from the mind of the boy. There had been several extra items he had not been expecting when he initially began reading the child’s mind. The ‘mana rod’ construct was of particular interest. Spirit stones were a natural resource in his realm, much like gold in this one, so if that method could be adapted for use with qi over mana it would be a huge boon to the Scarlet Ascension.

At first, the form learned from the Historian’s plaything had excited him as well, but it seemed its only use was destroying blockages in the energy channels, something that was much less of a problem in the next realm with its more pure energy. Even if such things did form, better methods existed for eliminating them.

The prize, however, was still the boy’s novel use of the energy condensing formation that had first attracted the Warden to him. It was like creating a step ladder to the next realm so one could gradually adapt to the greater energy concentration of the next realm. For someone like the Head, who was already at the peak of their current realm but unable to move to the next, this would be invaluable. If one lacked either sufficient purity or capacity entering a higher realm would destroy them, however, one could compensate for a lack of one with a surplus of the other. This meant that someone with extremely high capacity, but low purity, could still enter the next realm so the possibility of being able to, even slightly, increase one’s capacity was something that could spark a war if word were to spread.

After sending his report off to his superiors, the Warden sat and began to plan out how he would begin to spread his kernels of knowledge in order to gain advantage over the ‘Artificers’.

Stupid name.

Perry was bored.

Scratch that. Perry was beyond bored.

Perry was so bored he could almost wish for a new catastrophe just to have something new happen.

PFC. Perry was on guard duty; painfully boring guard duty in the middle of a civilian zone. One of the military priorities for protection were pharmaceutical manufactories and research facilities which was why PFC. Perry found himself patrolling the perimeter of a bog-standard production facility and checking work IDs of the normal people who worked there.

Perry was a good kid and did his best to take his assignment seriously, but he was just not the type that could find fulfillment in a repetitive task like this.

One thing made the job easier.

The best part of his day was when she came by.

He didn’t know her name, which was unfortunate, but if he could arrange to be patrolling the southern fence around what would be considered lunchtime he had good odds of seeing her pass by.

Her skin was cinnamon; and her hair jet. If there was such a thing as a chocolatey brown gemstone that would be her eyes, but he had no inkling if something like that existed. She might not have the classic barbie-doll measurements, but that only added to her attractiveness.

What he found most appealing though was her demeanor. She had an electric tension about her that gave him goosebumps, in a good way. It felt like life had better get the hell out of her way because she was coming for it. It also felt… sparkly. She smiled so bright it made everyone around her shinier; people who passed her on the street stood a bit straighter and smiled a bit more easily. Her laugh put wedding bells to shame.

Which was why he was so displeased to be on gate duty, on the north side of the facility, checking badges as employees went in and out for their lunch break.

Speaking of which, a car was rolling back in.

Perry willingly traded one form of monotony for the other as he approached the driver side window and waited, looking out to the street, for them to roll down their window.

When he turned back to talk to the driver, he nearly froze.

“Ma’am.” It was her.

“Hi!” she said brightly.

He had to clear his throat. “Id? Ma’am?”

“Oh! Right, sorry, I’m new.” God worked overtime on that smile.

She pulled a card out of her purse and showed it to Perry. He almost thought it was a gym membership for a second, but then he blinked and saw that it was a proper access badge.

“Isabella? Great name.”

“Thank you.”

“Go on ahead ma’am, and you have a great rest of the day.” He smiled at her as she went through the gate and was pleased as punch when she returned the gesture.

He watched the car until it turned a corner and then sighed and went back to check the next car.

He sure wished he could have been on the south side today so he could have seen that girl again. Maybe he could talk Costello into switching with him tomorrow.

He noticed an older man moving toward the checkpoint on foot. He didn’t seem to be threatening, but he put his hand on his sidearm just in case.

“Perry? Right?” Said the man.

“Uh, yes sir. Do I know you?”

“Let’s see what she’s done to you shall we?”

“What who-?” Suddenly there was blackness.