The next two months went by without much to speak of.

Sure, there were tons of newbie heroes causing a mess, and Role got a hold of the deed to the city and declared himself King of Franklin City by making a paper crown out of it, but his rule was just and fair.

Which lasted until Solaris noticed the discrepancy in the discretionary budget and kicked him out on his ass.

The thing that really bothered Perry was how much XP each level was taking now. Each level cost roughly 25% more XP than the one before, which meant, just like his stats, XP cost would eventually spiral way out of control.

And working out was beginning to show diminishing returns. 4XP per limb plus core workout, netting him 20XP per day rather than 25.

Still free XP. I’ll take it.

Perry had hoped he could single-handedly rewire all of Franklin-city’s basic infrastructure, getting him that 1k in the first couple weeks.

But, as it turned out, Perry had failed to consider NIMBY’ers, and the sheer amount of red tape involved in ASKING PERMISSION TO MAKE PEOPLE’S LIVES BETTER!

Hey, can I make your roads, water and power lines more resilient so super damage so you don’t get quite as much traffic congestion brown-outs and brown-water?

Oh sure, just go to town hall, fill out a form 84-C by tomorrow with stated intent, wait for confirmation for a couple years when the civilian council loses it in the mail, then finds it next spring and deliberates for about half an hour before deciding you’re actually a cowl trying to sabotage some cape, and deny your petition.

Have a nice day!

It all came down to reputation. Perry’s wasn’t the worst, but it was fairly divisive. Some people thought he was a cape, others a cowl. Mostly because of Amber Hardy’s mini-vendetta.

Anyway, since he wasn’t squeaky clean, he had a hell of a time getting people to listen to his ideas to make their infrastructure better.

Even if his reputation was squeaky clean, he’d still have to wait for a couple years to get permission, which was…not ideal.

The only other option now was to ask forgiveness rather than permission.

Which could land him in a decent amount of hot water if he got caught.

I can just imagine the headlines now.

-Chemestro cleared of all charges of sexual misconduct because he’s such a nice guy!

-Paradox caught trying to fix roads and bridges! KILL HIM!

Perry knew it wasn’t that extreme, but the thought was amusing.

What he needed now was a method to reinforce the city’s guts without anything being able to pin it on him.

And what fit that perfectly…was Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.

Perry pried the chest open and set out the ingredients.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation (Difficulty: Expert)

Ingredients: Pupil of Kemleth Serpent, Veil-Piercing Mushroom, spines of a Grakul, Vivant root dust.

Sprinkle the vivant root dust evenly over the entire pupil, then construct a cage of grakul spines around the pupil without touching it. Make there are no gapes in the cage larger than a palms’width.

Note from mom: Gretchen was a very petite lady. So a palm’s width for her is maybe 2/3 of a normal person’s.

Once the construction is complete, remove any supports, and the pupil should float in the center on its own. Use the cage to carry the pupil.

Ingest the veil piercing mushroom.

You will then have 2 hours to bend reality to your will. Everything within a hundred paces without a soul to resist the effect will become whatever you wish. Good for building castles and Idyllic beaches. Why, I first met my husband, Kerol, on a lovely beach that I had made. He was wearing nothing but ~~~~

The rest of the page was scribbled out, and Mom’s noted continued in the margins of the page.

Nothing else important in there, trust me. Gretchen neglected to mention that The Veil-piercing mushroom gets you high, and the real reason this spell is considered Expert difficulty is because you have to focus on your perfect building, while also tripping balls. One stray thought can ruin everything.

One positive note is that the spell gets easier over time as the body becomes resistant to the hallucinogens.

If you try this one, Perry, I suggest going out on the beach to practice it where there isn’t much to destroy.

Note From Marigold, 38th ruler of Manita –

The spell does allow the transmutation of stone into gold or other valuable yet mundane alchemical ingredients, but the difficulty of the spell seems to increase exponentially with the scarcity of the material, and it cannot produce magical essences. Creating an entire throne room out of gold was beyond my capabilities, but when I narrowed my focus to a small palm-sized stone, it turned to gold rather easily.

Still, not worth my time and effort. If I needed gold, I could simply order my vassals to mine more for me, and they would produce it at a far greater rate and for less expense to my time.

Perry raised a brow.

How much is a palm-sized lump of gold worth? Ten, twenty thousand? Oh my god, it isn’t worth my time.

Perry was still probably going to use it to make a lump of gold, because come on, who didn’t want a lump of gold on their desk?

But yeah, Perry’s time just about broke even with the stated value of what Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation could produce…in pure gold.

On the other hand, what I’m looking to do is fix roads and bridges and toughen them up using common materials enhanced with my own Tinker perk. It should work….Probably.

Not to mention, If we pull the essence out of these mushrooms and leave the psychoactive effects by the wayside, it should make the spell way easier to pull off.

Now Perry just needed to design the Spell-frame that would get jammed into his soul, along with the rest of the spells he planned on getting in there today, namely:

Dragor’s Kinesis (Difficulty: Expert)

Gravity-based Kinesis.

Daxer’s Faux teleportation (Difficulty: Apprentice)

Simple Decoy spell.

Static shock (Difficulty: Neophyte)

Minor lightning attack.

Wayward’s Defensive Disguise (Difficulty: Journeyman)

Disguise and protection spell.

Perry was currently designing a snarl of interconnecting tanks, tubes, and filters he planned on creating inside his soul. Perry had scanned through the entire spellbook and organized each ingredient by the number of times it appeared in one spell or another.

The Essences that were most commonly used, like vivant root, were assigned large tanks connected to large filters, with multiple docking ports for dozens of spells to tap into and further redistribution to take place.

Perry figured that each ingredient could have its own storage tank which then went on to supply individual spells on a case-by-case basis.

I never thought I’d be learning supply chain logistics math for my magic study, Perry thought. Pencil scratching as he whipped out the math for each distributor and the switching station.

The alternative was making a new filter for each ingredient of each new spell, and there was a lot of overlap. If Perry continued that route, his soul would become a tattered mess.

Perry’s primary focus was minimal trauma to his self.

And crazy-awesome magical powers, obviously.

So that’s fourteen ingredients (not including mundane things like diamonds and blood) in order to produce five spells.

Even streamlining it as much as I can, that’s seven times as much space as the Light spell. At least.

Perry felt like roadkill for a couple weeks after he’d implanted the Light spell. he’d been irritable and snippy, gloomy and prone to avoid human contact.

Point being: Even if I take extra care, I don’t think I can fit all these spells in once go.

Perry sighed and scrapped the last three spells on his list. He didn’t erase them from his sprawling plan, just marked them to be added later. This was the sort of thing that had to be planned out from end to end.

Today would just be Dragor’s Kinesis and Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.

Both spells were the kind that Perry needed direct mental control over. The other three he could, and had, made actual, physical spell-frames for already, so adding them to his soul would be redundant and cause damage for only a slight boost in convenience.

Not worth it. We’ll leave them in the suit for now.

…Gor’s disintegration? Perry wondered to himself, tapping his chin with his pen.

On one hand, it would be really cool to have that trump card, able to whip out a disintegrate spell and annihilate problems before they gave him any trouble.

On the other hand, putting a piece of a corruption demon into his soul sounded like…a really, really…stupid idea. Just from a common-sense point of view.

If it didn’t pass the gut check, that meant Perry definitely needed to do it sometime, just with more caution than he might’ve otherwise.

Thank you, Stability. Perry thought as he wrote down the idea and made a note to research it more carefully before considering it.

Perry took his interface that he created for the Light spell and beefed it up for the next two spells. They would have to be more nuanced, because the spells themselves had tons more variables than before. Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation was nearly infinite, causing Perry’s head to start overheating as he designed the system, even with maxed-out Nerve.

Perry’s experience with the magical computer he’d created out of Areonite offered valuable insights that allowed him to bridge the gap…probably.

Perry sent the plans to his gramma for approval.

“Paradox, I have no idea what I’m looking at.” Gramma said over the phone. “I understand ‘magical’ theory. Not whatever…this is. If you think it won’t turn you into a soulless monster, you’ve got my approval.”

Hmm….

All it would take was one, single error and Perry would be dead or disabled, probably for life. Perry was playing with his whole future here. He shouldn’t pull the trigger on it with anything short of a guarantee it would work out the way he wanted it to.

Perry took a picture of the blueprints, then wheeled himself over to his desk.

He glanced around, making sure none of his friends were in his workshop at the moment. Didn’t want Heather or Nat catching his Crazy.

Sliding Stats

Attunement 42->38

Stability 27 -> 31

Perry took a deep breath and reached into his desk drawer, retrieving the pale blue crystal sphere that Mars had handed him after the Gerome Incident.

It was slightly opaque, marbled blue and white, throbbing with potential. The world around him began to fade away, leaving him clutching the pulsing crystal in the middle of empty space.

The only other things Perry could perceive was the chair he was sitting in, and the table bearing the complex blueprints for his new spells.

Perry wheeled himself back across the void, over to the blueprints, and tapped the crystal on the side of the table.

Crack.

Perry held the crystal sphere over the plans and pried it apart like an egg, spilling raw Ĕ̶̢͉̌͜͝p̶̯̩̉̒̽ȋ̶͕͇p̵̡̘̎h̵͖̽̂͜a̵̖͊ń̴̠͌͝ỹ̷̭͙͙̚ onto the blueprints.

A strange, clear goop flooded out of the sphere, more than could have reasonably been contained inside. It spread across the plans, sizzling and spitting as it engulfed Perry’s blueprints, covering them in a clear layer of slime.

Underneath the twitching slime, Perry could see the lines of his blueprints shudder and twist, moving like a living thing under attack.

Gradually the lines of his blueprints began to rearrange themselves, grudgingly prodded into a new form by a higher power than Perry’s meager intellect.

Once the process slowed to a halt, Perry held the cracked crystal to the table, where the transcendent thoughts given physical form politely crawled back into their home and sealed the crack behind themselves.

The physical world around Perry blinked back into place, and he was none the worse for wear.

Perry let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

I’ll give Solaris one thing: he was right about frontloading Stability. Perry felt like his sanity was being assaulted just from being in the same room as that goop.

It does nice work though… Perry thought, reviewing the blueprint. The raw epiphany had streamlined his blueprint to an absurd degree, decreasing the total volume of displaced soul by 45%, while increasing storage capacity, AND the interface.

Oh, damn, I didn’t even think of that, Perry thought as he studied the new blueprint. Of course he didn’t trust the new blueprint enough to use it blindly, but it was a GREAT way to identify flaws and adapt new ideas.

“Whoah,” Brendon’s voice nearly caused him to jump out of his skin.

Perry jumped in place and turned around, hiding the blueprint behind him as he stared wide-eyed at the massive kid leaning on a mop.

Did he get hit with the full force of the crazy? Perry wondered, his heart clenching as an instant passed between them. the last thing he wanted was for one of his friends to start chiseling their teeth because it made the voices go away.

“That was really cool, dude,” Brendon said, nodding at him before pushing the mop down the hall, whistling to himself.

Okay, that warrants investigation, Perry thought, leaning out the door of his workshop and watching as his friend continued his janitor duties down the hall, seemingly unphased by incidental exposure to forbidden knowledge.

New Quest!

WTF is Brendon’s deal?

Reward: ???

Penalty for failure: ???

Due to insufficient Data, this is a Mystery Quest. Mystery Quests are Quests that the System lacks the information to quantify prior to mission completion. As such the reward, penalty, and difficulty of the Quest are all unknown.