Perry dusted his hands off, watching the voodoo doll flail as it sailed into the distance, propelled by suit-assisted strength.

Now that that stuff is taken care of, or at least put on pause, I can spend a day getting ready to go to Washington city.

Perry had a handful of priorities he wanted to get done.

1: Spare suits. Perry hadn’t mass-produced his Mk. 4. He only had one vat to grow them in, and it took quite a few days to finish, so he needed to bring along some Mk.3’s just in case it got smashed.

Additionally, he wanted to get their magical control setup so he could take remote control of them simply by writing the appropriate symbol on himself.

2: Supplies. Perry wanted to bring along supplies to patch and repair his suits. He could pack most of these supplies into the chest cavities of the remote controlled suits.

3: a better weapon system he could deploy against things he needed to be dead. For that, Perry was excited to work with Gor’s Disintegration.

Gor’s Disintigration (Advanced Difficulty)

Ingredients: Glowstone crystal, eye of Greater Corruption Demon, Vivant root, jewelers cutting utensils and a steady hand.

Render the vivant root into a fine power, add water until it is a paste, then form into a stick of incense. Dry.

Empty the eyeball, then cut a series of concentric circles in the pupil at an angle that grows more steep as it goes outward. Example below.

“That’s a Fresnel lens!” Perry shouted at the spellbook, but if it heard him, it didn’t care.

Once the carving is done, and done perfectly, burn the incense and concentrate the smoke as thick as possible before piping it into the eyeball.

When you are ready to disintegrate, break the glowstone crystal behind the pupil. The resulting flash of light will carry the vivant root essence through the corruption demon’s modified pupil and disintegrate the first object it touches.

Once that is done, take a deep breath. If you can do so, you are still alive. Congratulations.

Gor’s Disintegration is slow and cumbersome to cast, but it has been used by a handful of talented wizards in siege warfare to gain the upper hand for their side. The destruction wrought by the spell is complete.

It is said that Gor once annihilated an entire castle and everything inside, save for the mirrors in the duke’s private rooms. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of one, and serves to illustrate the potency of the spell.

Perry pursed his lips.

Save for the mirrors, huh?

An idea was starting to form. Perry could feel the Tinker Twitch making the outside world fade, and he let it go.

Light houses used Fresnel lenses to create a collimated beam (or close to it) in order to allow the signal light to travel further, without diffusing in every direction and losing its effectiveness.

It appeared that the design of the disintegrate was aiming for a similar effect, although they didn’t know exactly why they wanted it that way.

The Fresnel-like design of the cut was a hint that the disintigrate effect piggybacked on the light wave produced by the glowstone flash. The Fresnel effect was to keep the light in a tight beam so it could be aimed at a target.

The Vivant smoke energized the Corruption Demon essence. Brought it back to life for one instant, long enough to partially re-create the creature’s gaze attack.

So if it piggybacks on light…and it doesn’t disintegrate mirrors…

Perry itched the side of his head as he thought. Reflective surfaces actually do absorb photons. They simply made a new photon of the same kind going in the opposite direction. Hence, reflections.

So he couldn’t see why a mirror wouldn’t disintegrate. It did absorb the photons.

Unless the mirror was special, or the piggybacking moves to the new photon. Food for thought on the behavior of Essences.

Perry had an idea brewing, but he was going to have to take extreme precautions.

Spendthrift was going to make an extremely dangerous spell absolutely deadly, and if he made a mistake like with the arm fiasco, he wouldn’t live to regret it.

Let’s see, I’ve got a baker’s dozen Greater Corruption Demon eyes, more than enough glowstone crystals, and a box of vivant root.

Perry’s idea involved the capture of light.

Theoretically if he made a maze-like box of perfectly reflective nanotubes and shot a beam of disintegrate into it, it might just capture the beam long enough to put a lid on it.

Modern research had managed something similar… capturing light for fractions of a second in laboratory conditions.

Perry intended to capture it indefinitely in the real world, dilute it, then dole it out in tiny little blasts that would turn enemies into dust.

Disintegration didn’t need to be insanely stronger to be effective. Perry wanted to leverage the portion of his Spendthrift ability that allowed him to dilute effects and maintain full effectiveness.

Perry’s current ability to dilute substances was about a 1:9 ratio. Meaning he could use one nineth the recommended amount and get the full 100% reaction.

So…Perry could take the deadly light generated by the spell and cut it into nine shots.

Do I even want the full 100%?

Perry didn’t want to dust entire buildings, after all.

He did some math, charting the logarithmic effect of the Spendthrift perk and found that his ideal amount of dilution would be 1:1400

Rather than dust an entire building, it would dust an area about the size of a large beach ball.

On humans, that would be instant death, same if he shot pretty much anything that needed organs to live. A few giant creatures might survive, but hey…shoot ‘em again.

The utility of a huge amount of extra shots outweighed the ability to blast entire buildings to dust.

Perry didn’t see himself needing to do much of that.

Now that he had a strong idea of what he wanted out of it, Perry had to design a light trap.

The scientists from MIT would be so mad, Perry thought to himself as he poured cheap chrome paint in the box, throwing in chemicals that would grow molecular crystals at freezing temperature before evaporating, leaving behind microscopic chromed holes in the walls of the box.

Perry had to bypass the evaporation stage of the crystals by applying pressure and heat, then flushing out the box over and over until all the crystals had disappeared, leaving him with…a matte box.

Hmm…Perry glanced at the box from several angles. The interior didn’t look like much. Vaguely shiny, and vaguely reflective.

Then he noticed the weirdness.

Perry waved his hand over the box.

One, two.

Two seconds later, the box darkened as the shadow of his hand was reflected over the surface.

Holy cow, that’s cool!

Light moved at 186282 miles per second, so for his shadow to not register until two seconds later, light that entered his box had to travel about three hundred and seventy two thousand miles to get back out.

Give or take a few thousand miles.

That’s some impressive surface area. It’s gonna be a bitch to get the gas molecules sticking to it to boil off.

Now I just need a lid, a way to make a perfect seal, depressurize it, and a solid-state way to let the disintegrate effect both in and out, a perfect collimator, and a way to measure the amount remaining inside so I can accurately track my uses. Preferably some kind of sensor that won’t just disintegrate.

Okay, the mass of a photon is zero. BUT no photon is without energy, and with a sensitive enough measuring device I could measure the bleed-through of energy spontaneously becoming mass and momentum without looking inside the box. Normally that would be too precise, but I bet I could manage something that sensitive.

…and then strap that insanely delicate measuring device to my wrist and punch people in the face.

The life of an active Tinker cape was fraught with contradictions.

Perry checked his clock. 3 AM. 31 hours until he had to be at the train station.

…I got time.

***Natalie***

“Where the hell is that nerd?” Heather asked, arms crossed as she scanned the surroundings. We’re leaving in five minutes, and if he misses the bus, he’s basically screwed for life.”

Natalie glanced up at the gorgeous shapeshifter. Maybe she thinks Perry is a nerd compared to her? That was a distinct possibility.

The last couple months, Perry had added maybe twenty pounds of muscle and it looked good on him.

It wasn’t what Natalie thought of as ‘nerdy’. More like ‘jaw-dropping’.

To be fair he has weird taste in T-shirts, but that’s not the worst thing ever.

And hey, if jamming out together on hi-tech is nerdy, then I don’t wanna be not nerdy.

Of course, Natalie said none of this out loud, until she felt the pressure building up inside. She desperately tried to find hand-puppetry or a non-sequitur that would make Heather laugh, but drew a blank.

“He’s not nerdy, he’s magically delicious!” Nat blurted.

Heather blinked, glancing down at her.

Natalie recovered by playing it off as a joke, adopting a humorous pose she’d been studying and grounding herself on Heather.

“It’s okay, babe, everyone’s a nerd compared to you.” Nat broke out into a cold sweat as Heather stared at her.

“Awww,” Heather grabbed Nat and squished her into a side-hug, nearly giving Natalie a heart-attack at the proximity.

I should have been ‘the funny girl’ earlier. It’s got fringe benefits. Natalie thought, her heart hammering in her ears.

“Final boarding call for Washington City.”

The supers milling around them, smoking and joking to ease their nerves began to file towards the heavily armored train the size of a building.

“I swear, if Perry flakes out on this trip, I’m gonna steal–“

“Wait up!” Perry’s voice carried over the surrounding supers.

Natalie couldn’t see anything because everyone was taller than her, but Heather relaxed.

Perry emerged from the surrounding crowd, panting harshly as he doubled over from exertion.

“Hey guys,” he said once he caught his breath. “I was working on something, lost track of time, and then they had the security checks and I had to declare my weapons and stow my armor. Took more time than I thought.”

“Excuses,” Heather said.

“Where did you get that shirt?” Natalie asked with a frown.

Perry glanced down at his shirt.

Magically Delicious

↓

“I don’t…know.” Perry said with a frown. “But I’m starting to suspect magical shenanigans or divine intervention. You guys ready to board the train?”

“I was ready half an hour ago!” Heather said, punching him in the shoulder. “You’re lucky we’ve got assigned cabins or else we’d be right next to the engines or the shitter!”

Assigned cabins? Of course they would bunk teams together. They’ll probably bunk teams together in Washington city, too. I’m gonna be living with these two for the next two weeks? I don’t know if my body can take it.

“Well, I’m gonna go take a cold shower!” Natalie said, throwing her bag over her shoulder. She glanced between the brash, buxom fire-hair and the charming, svelte nerd.

I forsee a lot of cold showers. Sophie said it was a blessing but it feels INCREDIBLY inconvenient at times like this.

***Perry***

Natalie froze, staring at them for a moment, her face growing gradually redder as the cogs turned behind her eyes.

“’Kay, bye!” the tiny tinker said, trotting away with her bag over her shoulder.

“I think she’s got a thing for you,” Perry said, glancing at Heather.

“I would’ve said the opposite,” Heather said. She glanced over at him and looked at his T-shirt.

“Your T-shirt is gross, by the way.”

“I didn’t buy this!” Perry protested. “I don’t know where they keep coming from!”

“Sure, dude, let’s get to our cabin.”

Their cabin had two bunk beds on either side of the room. Since there were only three of them, they used one of the bottom bunks as a makeshift desk/table, laying most of their luggage on/under it.

Heather claimed the top bunk and Natalie took the other, reasoning that she would fit better than Perry, despite obviously being afraid of being up that high.

Which left Perry with the bottom bunk opposite the luggage. Not that he minded. Bunk hierarchy was never a problem for him. He simply didn’t care who slept where.

He was having more fun chatting with Nat about the new upgrades.

“So I had to scrap the box entirely.”

“Really? But it was so cool!” Natalie said. “I mean, two second delay of light? That is huge!

“I know, but about three hours into it I wondered what would happen if the box was punctured in a fight.”

“…You’d probably die.”

“I know, right?” Perry said, brows raised.

“Soo…you found a way to store light in an inert form without it disintegrating?” Natalie said.

“Well, at first I tried to adapt the storage mechanism to smaller storage units. Rather than carrying around ALL the light in one container, which, when broken, would destroy myself and everyone around me, I tried to make tiny cartridges of the same material, but…”

“It would still make a beach ball area of destruction centered around you, and the mass of storing it would increase greatly from all that extra material for containing each individual piece.”

“Exactly. So I made these.” Perry pulled out one of his disintegrate crystals.

“Check this out.” Perry held the tiny crystal up to the cabin light above Natalie’s eyes, allowing her to see the afterimage of the demon’s eyeball.

“Whoaaaah, that’s so cool!”

“I can do cool stuff too,” Heather said from her bunk, pouting.

“You said it was nerdy.” Perry said.

“That was before you used it as bait to hog Nat.”

“So basically,” Perry said, ignoring her, “the light is preserved in this crystal as a permanently stored reflection, and the only way to get it out, is to hit the crystal with a very specific key of both frequency and voltage. Otherwise it’s completely inert.”

Perry snapped the tiny hexagonal quartz between his fingers.

“See?”

“Fantastic!” Natalie said, wiggling with excitement on his lap. “That’s way safer! Don’t do that again, though. I thought I was going to die.”

“Uh, sorry,” Perry said. “But here’s the coolest part,” He held the broken halves of the crystal together, and after a moment finding where they set flush, the two sides stuck together.

“They’re reloadable, repairable, and combineable, since they naturally repel gases and corrosion in the atmosphere, which allows them to stick back together. If I want smaller charges I can physically break them apart into the size I want for the job I want to use them for.”

“Okay, I forgive you for being late. That is pretty epic.” Natalie said.

“Gimmie Nat,” Heather said, making grabbing motions. “I wanna talk to her about punching things really hard.”

“That sounds fun too!” Natalie, said, abandoning Perry to chat with Heather about employing her mech-suit for mindless destruction.

“Attention passengers, this is Conductor Walthers. The doors are sealed and we’ll be departing in an hour. All Draftees and Volunteers report to the front audience room to receive your briefing and escort shift assignments.”

“Well, that’s us,” Perry said, standing from his bunk.

“Seriously,” Heather said, looking him up and down. “Change your shirt.”