***Natalie****

Grampa Collins wiped some dirt off his hands before he nudged Nat’s shoulder. “Check it out, Perry’s outstanding in his field.” He murmured, pointing at where Perry was standing in the center of the north field, still as a statue, his eyes closed.

It took a moment for the dad joke to register, before it wrenched out a strangled chuckle and snort out of her.

Nat covered her face, embarrassed at the odd sound she’d just made.

“So what are you two doing out here?” Grampa Collins asked, motioning to where Heather had gone nature-feral, turning her arms into scythes which she was using to violently mow the kill zone between the turrets and the forest. She was covered in grass stains, sap, and dirt. Her hair was matted, eyes blazing with manic enjoyment as she unleashed raw violence on unsuspecting plants.

Despite her protests to the contrary, once Heather got started getting messy, she had a tendency to wild.

“Perry said his new spell could be dangerous until he gets the hang of it.” Nat said with a shrug. “So we’re staying out of the danger zone until it’s done.”

“Magic stuff, huh?” Grampa Collins grunted, resting his forearms on the four-wheeler’s handlebars and peering out into the distance.

In between Perry’s outstretched hands, a sphere flickered into life. Inside the sphere was a riot of color and rapid changes. It was too far For Nat to make out any specifics, but she could see the world around Perry begin to shimmer like the heat waves above a hot road.

“You know, when Darryl first told me he was going for Hexen, I said to him, ‘Darryl, I’ve been your father for thirty-some odd years, and if there’s one thing I’ve taught you, it’s that no woman is worth losing your pride. Now you’re gonna have to forget all that shit, because Hexen is absolutely the exception to that rule.’”

“So he took her last name, and now I’m a grampa.” Grampa Collins said, leaning his chin on his palm. “And I’ve got a magic grandson warping reality in my backyard. Life is funny sometimes.”

The flickering of the sphere between Perry’s fingers finally stabilized.

Perry opened his eyes, and the sky went dark.

“Shit!” Grampa Collins leapt off his four-wheeler and grabbed Nat, tucking both of them under the trailer as steel and glass began to rain down from the sky in a deafening cacophony.

Once the sound of falling steel, breaking glass and small explosions died down, Gramp Collins let go of Nat, and the two of them crawled out from under the four-wheeler’s trailer.

The north field was covered in disjointed segments of a massive industrial building that had strange creases in it, as well as parts where the walls were seemingly eroded through, or simply far too narrow to support themselves. Beams of steel had jagged veins of odd materials, and the occasional full-on crack, causing structural failure.

It was a strange mixture of flat architectural design mixed with biologic swooping and frailties.

Perry was somewhere in the center of the massive pile of concrete, steel and glass, buried under the massive mess of heavy steel and sharp glass.

Badump

Nat’s heart thumped hard in her chest as she prayed that Perry was okay. He has to be okay, right?

Grampa Collins bent his knees and took a deep breath, and Nat prepared to climb over the rubble to help the old man dig Perry out.

“PERRY, YOU BETTER CLEAN THIS MESS UP BEFORE LUNCH!” Grampa collins barked at the top of his lungs.

“…okay!” a distant voice rose from the general direction of the collapsed building.

“He’ll be fine.” Grampa Collins said with a shrug. “You wanna help with lunch? It’s gotta be easier than digging that fool out of this mess.”

“What’s for lunch?” Natalie asked.

“Mashed potatoes and gravy with peas and tea.”

“Ooh, gravy!” Natalie had real gravy…maybe once before, and not a lot of it, either.

“Yeah, I traded George from down the road for some turret-kill he’d got his hands on last month. Megafauna are generally rendered into a tattered mess by the machines, but you can still simmer it down into a nice gravy.”

“I’ll help with lunch, lemme just give Perry a head start.” Nat put on her magnetic gloves and reached out, using the invisible magnetic hands to tear the collapsed pile of rubble in half right where Perry had been standing, exposing him to sunlight.

“Thanks!” Perry’s voice echoed from the center of the rubble.

“Okay,” Natalie said, hopping on the trailer. “Let’s go make lunch. Do you have any meat scraps?” Nat hadn’t had real meat before she’d met Perry and quite frankly, she might be addicted.

“You can’t make a good megabadger gravy without meat scraps.” Grampa Collins said, firing up the four-wheeler and turning it back towards the farmhouse.

***Perry****

Well, that could’ve gone better. Perry thought, studying his creation from uncomfortably close.

HP:6

Perry was pinned under several tons of half-formed metal and glass.

No wonder they suggest natural scenery and simple constructs with this spell.

A beach was a simple concept, and malformed sand was still sand, even if it wasn’t precise.

Not to mention, the human brain could hold a mountain vista in their imagination more easily than complex architecture.

Any spot where Perry hadn’t held the exact details clearly in his mind, the walls and metal had…wobbled, causing them to look like they’d been scored by acid or thinned out by some kind of edit brush. Some parts of what he’d built even looked organic, like bone or the curve of a waist.

Well, I wasn’t expecting everything to turn out perfectly on the first try.

The interesting note was that the Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation didn’t alter reality so much as it dialed up a reality where the concept he imagined existed, then superimposed it on the current one.

I wonder if Gramma knows that. It didn’t change the spell’s limits. Unusual or rare materials still made the spell harder to use, but only because there were less examples of the material in the infinite spectrum compared to everything else. But there were still an infinite number of them. If Perry could add some kind of filtering or assisted dialing algorithm to supplement his natural concentration, he might be able to boost the power of the spell by widening his potential acceptable outcomes.

Math is weird sometimes. It was interesting to deal with infinite numbers that were lesser or greater expressed as fractions relative to each other….yet still infinite.

Perry could feel that was how it worked when the sphere between his hands was flickering through vistas at an unimaginable speed. It was like using a spherical mouse-wheel to scroll through trillions of addresses with the sensitivity maxed out.

In short, tricky. Perry’s focus had been…well, as solid as he could’ve pictured it, and he had still gotten a malformed half-organic nightmare fuel of a building.

Not quite Giger, but subtly unnerving.

Now, Perry thought, turning his head as far to the left as he could to glance up. How do I get out of here?

Several steel beams were currently squishing him into the dirt floor, a massive pane of broken glass was hanging above his groin like a guillotine, and he was pretty sure a flammable liquid was dripping onto his scalp.

“Perry, you better clean this up before lunch!” Perry heard Grampa’s voice faintly through the massive pile of collapsed steel.

Perry gave a thumb’s-up into the dirt he was embedded in.

“Okay!”

A moment later, the rubble separated directly above him with a cacophonous riot of sound, causing the beam resting on his shoulder to warp as it dragged across him, failing to bisect Perry, though not for lack of trying.

HP: 5

The guillotine glass fell on his upper thigh and sheared his pants right above his femoral artery.

HP: 4

A several ton steel beam fell directly on his head as the one on his shoulder slid past.

HP: 3

A moment later, everything stopped moving, and Perry was pleased to see that, through the crack between the I-beam and the dirt, he could actually see sunlight.

Nat must’ve cleared away the majority of the rubble above him.

“THANKS!” Perry shouted into the dirt.

OOH, what if I used my Blueprint perk to help stabilize the spell? Perry thought, summoning an angle grinder into his left hand, which had a couple inches of movement range.

It was an interesting thought. The Perk was meant to allow him to transfer his perks to a predetermined object, that anyone could make if they had the blueprint.

It didn’t explicitly state that it helped stabilize scrying spells, but Perry thought it might help if he made a blueprint and used it as a visual aid while casting the spell.

The metal around his left hand sloughed away, and Perry turned his attention to the steel beam pressing down on the back of his head, prying himself out from under the rubble in a matter of minutes.

Alright, now…how the hell am I supposed to clean this up before lunch?

The answer? Perry’s excess of stored Mk 3’s. They weren’t amazing at crime fighting, being rudimentary and in every way less effective than the Mk 5, but when connected to his brain via the magical computer back in his base, they served rather well as bulk transport.

***Lunch***

“So what exactly were you trying to do that involved burying yourself under a building?” Grampa said, chewing his bread slowly between dips in the gravy.

“I was trying to make a facility that can grow multiple acres of crops on a single acre. Five, maybe ten stories to start.”

“Huh. How you plan on getting them to grow faster than they rightly should?” He asked.

“Unicorn shit,” Perry said. “Typically the cost of unicorn crap is vastly higher than the expected profit, but I can drastically dilute the reaction, which should help control the expense.”

“You’re using unicorn shit as fertilizer?” Grampa asked his eyebrows rising. A wry smile took over his face.

“Yep.”

“That bag you brought is actual unicorn shit?” Grampa asked, chuckling.

“Yep.”

“Well, where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all of it.” Perry said with a shrug

“I guess when you’ve established a proof of concept, you can start producing unicorn-shit potatoes on a large scale. I might be interested myself. How much does a bag run ya?” Grampa asked, taking a drink.

“A hundred grand.”

Grampa spent the next couple minutes coughing the inhaled water out of his lungs while Perry explained his expected profit margin.

50 lbs of unicorn dung, = 100 thousand dollars.

50 lbs = 800 ounces

1 ounce = 20 potato plants grown to maturity.

Average of 8 pounds per plant.

So, 8 X 20 X 800 = an expected yield of 128,000 pounds of potatoes per bag.

In order to help ease wild price fluctuation, Perry was going to provide them at typical wholesale price to stores, which would be thirty about cents per pound, netting Perry a profit margin of…

(128,000 X.3) -100,000

Net loss of $61,600 per bag of unicorn shit…

That was all assuming normal use of the growth spell.

Thankfully, the Spendthrift perk allowed Perry to dilute the unicorn dung down to… 1/(3X1.05^42)

Approximately one twenty-third of its original concentration, while still achieving full effect.

So the new outcome is…

((128,000 X .3) X 23) -100,000

Or $783,200 profit.

Approximately. The math wasn’t going to be perfect because Perry didn’t know for sure exactly how many pounds of potatoes he’d be getting, but the margin of safety provided by Spendthrift was huge, so Perry was willing to risk it.

“You can’t just…What about the costs for the building, the energy to provide light to that many plants, the temperature control system for the building? The transport costs? The seed potatoes?” Grampa asked.

“In theory, the building should be free, along with energy and transportation. I own my own fleet of dump trucks, and I just made a spell that should allow me to create the building and all its accessories from nothing, as soon as I get the hang of it.” Perry said. “And yeah, I guess I should keep about an eighth of the potential profit as retained seed potatoes. Nice catch.”

Grampa itched his head, staring down at the sheet of paper he’d been doodling figures on. A sheen of sweat rose on his forehead.

“You’ve rendered my life’s work meaningless.” He muttered.

“…Sorry? It’s only for the next three months or so.” Perry said.

Grampa gave a strained giggle. “Only for the next three months, he says. Hey Perry, you wanna inherit the farm?”

It didn’t sound too bad. Perry could picture himself making a modest living, raising a couple brats outside the concrete jungle of Franklin City, distancing himself from conflict in order to slow his stat growth enough to enjoy a natural death.

“…Maybe?” Perry said. “I gotta conquer a planet and establish a dynasty before I can settle down on the farm, though.”

“That’s a metaphor right?” Grampa asked.

Perry tapped his fingers together. “Sure.”

“What damn fool ideas did your grandmother put in your head?” Grampa demanded.