《I Need Time》26

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Currently I am adding the most important part of the car, a quad turret. After building the turret I quickly connect the turret to the car control core and connect the newly installed cameras with three on each corner of the car plus the turret omni camera. A little bit of redundancy is always good. Next, I install a remote control option for the turret from the driver side seat and automatic target tracking. I add the same light armor to the turret and load up 2000 rounds into the turret. Finally, I load the rectangle car with other essentials such as my mobile security system, 2 AMRs, 5 pistols, 10 grenades and 100 kg of carbon. It is very handy having pure carbon laying around, if I am ever in need of something I just take some and fix almost any problem... My brain returns to something I have delayed for some time, Aelynthis armor. I take measurements from an embarrassed elf and go about making an identical set to my own. Before building our home I lived in my armor around the clock as there was no need to change, because with magic problems of sweat and dirt disappear or for that matter any hygiene problems.

Right now I am explaining the combat overlay inbuilt within the goggles to Aelynthi. "These goggles have 2 main modes: black and white combat image mode which is excellent during night time as it functions as night vision and it has no problems working during daytime, the other option is combat overlay mode which shows information in the same way as the first mode but without replacing your view of the surroundings with a black and white image."

"Green represents heat, some surfaces may get a green tinge but mostly you will see other people and animals with a light green color."

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"Red represents an unknown or absent mana level, high ranking mages will have such a color. A red tinge represents lower than ambient mana levels which may occur due to an artifact concealing its mana level or the person themselves concealing their mana level, so these targets are to be counted as dangerous."

"Blue represents mana levels that are higher than ambient, from low mana light blue tinge to high mana solid blue color. Another important function of blue is it allows you to see spells in the making, see where and when an enemy mage is casting a spell and see the power of said spell."

I turn on the combat overley for her and we go outside. She looks around everywhere, at my face, at the ground, at her hand and at the rabbit I caught for this explanation.

"Incredible, is this how you are able to see people in the distance? They are just a bright color for you."

"Yes, I used this to follow you back then."

Aelynthi nods as she continues looking at her hands and proceeds to cast spells. I leave her be and go check on the mana charging progress of the car. All seems good, tomorrow we will set out. Just over 3 weeks of time left, we should make it with days of spare time. Aelynthi is only happy about this fact. I return to find that my dinner has been set free...

The next morning we set out. the truck reaches a good speed after a minute or so and it barely loses any speed on turns. The turn angle is low but 4 wheel steering makes it somewhat bearable. It is very stable with a two meter width, a relatively low silhouette and a low center of mass thanks to the motors and mana battery. I feel excitement from Aelynthi, she seems to be enjoying the ride.

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"Not scared?"

"Why would I be scared? I have ridden in carriages just as fast and horses that are faster but this is much more comfortable and you can see everything outside." Just as fast? What horse can sustain speeds of 40-60 km/h?.. Aah yes, magical horses, of course. Two months of work and it gets compared to horses.

"Do you want to drive?"

"Can I?"

"Of course."

I start teaching her about the controls and explain some quirks of this particular vehicle. Now I am sitting in the passenger position and using the directional camera on the turret to quell my boredom. I can also see that my prototype horizontal and vertical stabilization system is working even if it is far from perfection; when looking on a target I do not have to manually keep the camera pointed on target. As the camera is physically connected to the car and thus viewing screen, I can set the update cycle to a comfortable 200Hz. I also have a 20x20x20 cm diamond cube showing the surrounding area using the cameras LIDAR even if the frequency is lower as LIDAR requires a good amount of energy, I set it to 10Hz. Compared to the energy consumption of the engines it is not worth mentioning but I want to save mana where possible as I still have no idea about the mileage of this thing, though it does seem positive so far. I hope we get most if not all the way there by the time the mana runs out as recharging this thing will take forever. After a few hours of Aelynthi driving I switch back to the driver's seat.

As the sun sets we find a clearing to park, I go about setting up the mobile security system and connect it to the car's security system. It does not really improve the visual radius but it does add new observation angels, so now we have an excellent 3D map with a radius of over 100 meters. It does go on towards +200 meters but the quality drops dramatically. We go to sleep in the truck on the cargo bed behind the two front seats.

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