Stepping on Worm
Chapter Nine

by Skysaber
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Gaining superpowers was almost faster than the telling of it. Just jump in an arcade game.

Jared's duplicates had already secured the needed materials, assembled the device, and even prepared life support capsules.

After being told that the Warcraft game's engineering skill could be the answer to his "never build it more than once" problem, Leet had gone understandably a little crazy. After that revelation he would never have been able to resist adding all sorts of engineering patterns representing things from all sorts of games when they'd been setting up the server.

Unfortunately, their selection was pretty spotty and haphazard, representing enthusiasm more than clear thinking. It included a stupid amount of nonfunctional costumes, ones they'd meant to grant powers but didn't, as well as a selection of impractical geek dreams like plans for a Death Star (required more resources than were probably available in the whole Earth), an embarrassingly underdressed young lady in carbonite they'd no doubt intended to use as a decorative wall hanging (that pattern requiring just some yogurt and coal to make, presumably for a clone base and the carbon), blueprints for star destroyers, a handful of different TIE fighter types, the famous Rebel fighters, a Corellian Corvette just like Princess Leia's famous blockade runner, a frigate from Return of the Jedi and a Marauder Corvette that never made it into any of the films, plus an eclectic mix of stuff from Dune, Mechwarrior and other series, including a VF-series Veritech, the SDF-1, and so on.

All of the big stuff required positively ludicrous amounts of resources to make, so much so that not even any of the major nations on Earth could build them, not even if they teamed up, so did not get considered by Jared for production. And over half the stuff he did not even recognize; not what it was, nor even what series it came from.

A further complication preventing many of these engineering patterns from seeing reality was that many of those construction projects required tools they did not have - like they'd never included plans for any kind of space dock or starship assembly area. Uber and Leet had probably figured they could add additional blueprints for that kind of stuff later.

The most abusive things they'd thrown in were out of various fight games, and Jared only knew of them because they'd sometimes asked him to chime in with his preference. So there were Green, Blue, and Pink Lantern power rings, but no charger for them (Jared hadn't asked for pink, they'd just given him that as another joke), and some intelligent devices out of Magical Soldier Lyrical Nanoha. Uber had chosen Fate's halberd, Leet had gone for a copy of Signum's sword, while Jared had chosen Raising Heart itself.

In those cases, the joke was on them, as Leet had input those patterns without any attached ingredient list - but instead of being free to build, those requirements had filled themselves in, so they all had some pretty specific creation requirements that simply could not be met locally, and Jared personally doubted an experienced multiverse traveler could ever get to all of the things on the ingredient lists. It was a pretty daunting set of requirements.

So there was an amazing selection of engineering patterns available - it's just most of them were useless, as no one could ever be expected to hold enough steel in his bags to be able to make a Death Star, or even a decent cruiser, or achieve any of the weird, esoteric, halfway-philosophical goals needed to build one of those power rings.

And the less said about the requirements for those intelligent devices, the better. They made the Death Star look easy. Both required massive infrastructure that could only be provided by an advanced, galaxy-spanning empire just to produce the parts, but after that the Death Star just required insane volume and mass. The intelligent devices were as much art as science, and required precision craftsmanship by people with advanced degrees in skill sets Jared had never heard of before.

Power rings beat them both. 4th dimensional thinking would only be a start on one of those. In fact, he rather suspected that 4th dimensional thinking would only let you understand how badly outclassed you were at even understanding some of their creation requirements.

So none of those would be appearing anytime soon.

Luckily, not all of those recipes they'd programmed in were useless.

Some were downright practical and useful.

After their own less than ideal experience using modern medical beds, Leet had created an engineering pattern for alien looking, science fiction style life support pods - probably taken from some game that Jared didn't recognize. Still, they worked and were far more dignified than the hospital version. No tubes going into unmentionable places for one. So Jared whipped up enough of those pods for every girl to have one, placing them in what corners of their apartment he could find - which left the already crowded place feeling rather stuffed, but when it got explained this saved them all the indignity of catheters and IV drip bags, everyone was *sooo* glad to have them!

Their redhaired new best friend and romantic interest made certain the girls had those guides for running through both levels and skills quickly, explaining as he did so that the game was designed to be a near-infinite time sink, so it was possible to spend thousands of hours on it, chasing after one extraneous detail or another - and in fact that it was designed to make you do exactly that. So sticking to those guides was crucial if they wanted to achieve the goals they wanted in the amount of time they had available.

At that, Jared cast another Time Stop for the group, this one lasting a full 48 hours, so they could have the time needed to run the full simulation without any worry about cutting it short.

Then the group got going.

Jared set himself up, fully intending to jump in with them, however when he hit the control for them all to enter, the girls entered the game successfully but he stayed behind. Normally this would be quite puzzling, but with this being the second time, and with the obscenely high intelligence score he had, as well as the number of ranks he had in related skills it was pretty easy to get at the heart of the reason why.

What he concluded was Leet's curse with quirky technology that often malfunctioned on him had hit this invention at least twice. Once, the inability to repeat-build it, had been overcome by turning it into a pattern for the Engineering skill from Warcraft.

The other wasn't the 'build it once, all others explode' curse Leet was so famous for, but in its way almost as vexing, as experience showed that you only got to log into each training game once. In his enthusiasm Jared had forgotten Leet's inventions often had other notable quirks like that. And, having played their version of the Warcraft training simulator, he was not going to be allowed in again, even on what was essentially a brand new copy.

That made him *SOOO* glad that he'd picked everything up on the first run. Being a completionist had its advantages, at times.

So the only thing lost, really, was his opportunity to play along with the girls. He'd intended to be a mod for them, just as he'd done for Uber and Leet, summoning bank tellers and mailboxes and other things in order to make the game easier on them. However, none of that turned out to be necessary, as they all emerged unscathed, in proper order, before any of the Time Stop spells ran out.

Although there were one or two little surprises.

"What? Do you mean you ALL trained as Mages?" Jared asked, dumbstruck.

At first he had been filled with pride at seeing the girls almost reflexively casting their buff spells as they emerged from the alien life support cocoons.

Then he'd realized that every last one of them was casting the same spells.

"Well, it seemed the best class," Amy offered primly, brushing out her hair and unsure why he was so against their decision. "After all, the ability to summon food and water means we'll never go hungry. Teleports are almost unique to mages and are by far the best means of transportation, not to mention the wide array of personal force fields, attack spells, ability to summon their own minions, and general utility spells available to them. Why? Do you not like the class for some reason?"

She blinked glowing eyes at him, her tone came across implying that if he'd had such an objection, he should have raised it before they all went playing.

Jared hung his head in defeat. "No, I agree with all you've said. In fact, I prefer the mage class myself. Only I'd just learned after you'd all gone in that we only get one try at this. That is why I was unable to join any of you as mod support as we'd planned. The game wouldn't let me in. And good as the mage class is, the way party structure works grants enormous advantage to having a broad range of classes involved. Standard setup calls for three roles: One that absorbs damage well, one that heals damage effectively, and others to do damage. Of those, damage dealers are the least important, and that is the only role that mages fill well. They can't heal, and are renowned for how poorly they resist harm compared to the other classes."

"Oh," Amy made a soft noise of disappointment, echoed by most of the rest of the crowd of girls who'd been listening in as they'd set their own appearances to rights after days spent in those science fiction cocoons. "I wish we'd known that going in. We would have made more effort to max all of the skills and get all of the recipes."

Nodding, Jared raised his head. "So do I, but there's nothing for it. I did not figure it out until it was already too late, so we'll just have to live with it." He gave them all a supportive grin. "Still, if you had to pick any one class to be stuck with, mages are among the best. The only ones arguably better would be paladins or druids, who can switch hit to fill any role, but they don't have nearly the breadth of utility spells. Actually, as far as 'most comfortable class to live as' mages win first choice by a mile - for all of those reasons you've already said."

"Food and minions and teleports do a lot to liven up life," Rae agreed with a sparkle in her glowing eyes. Then she glanced down at her hands in shock, before darting over to look in a mirror - while incidentally drawing Jared's attention to her discoveries as she made them.

It arguably said something significant about him that he noticed the physical changes, more slender builds, taller, narrower faces, more vibrant hair, and of course the pointed ears and brightly glowing eyes only after his reaction to their class had been resolved.

"Hey! Now we're all Christmas elves!" Rae exclaimed brightly in surprise at her own condition, posing before a mirror so she could examine her reflection - a mirror that was soon crowded with all of the girls.

Yes. They'd all become blood elves.

"Don't worry! I can change you back!" Jared waved his hands frantically, before muttering something hard to catch about Leet's programming, and 'at least it wasn't undead', and "And now we come to the *third* drawback of Leet's design - it still changes your race, even when it shouldn't."

Serena was blinking thoughtfully, posed with a finger on her bottom lip. "Aren't you still an elf?" she asked curiously.

The boy began to rub the back of his head sheepishly. "Yeah, but I like being an elf. I'm used to it, and besides I know at least a dozen powerups unique to elves, as well as how to circumvent all of the disadvantages, even look like a human when I want to blend in. So yeah, I'm actually quite comfortable with it. Having ten times the lifespan isn't bad, but it's mostly the little things you cherish, stuff that never gets mentioned in any rulebook. For instance ice cream tastes better this way. Most flavors do, actually, and I don't know why..."

He trailed off absently.

The girls all shared amused smirks over his mention of ice cream tasting even better. Of course, they would all be trying some in the near future. In fact, Michelle and Holly both went to the kitchen to fetch back tubs so they could start serving out bowls.

"So," Serena chirruped delightfully, leaning deeply into his personal space, "Who would you be more comfortable marrying? An elf or a human?"

"Oh, an elf obviously," Jared concluded absently, his mind on other things. "I don't approve of half-elves. They're mostly just there to please fans of tragic romance. And I have no use for tragedy. Frankly, I prefer 'Happily Ever Afters' to the soul-crushing agony you'd face as spouse and then children die before you, leaving you to deal with an eternity of loneliness - and I think anyone who seeks out that kind of misery must be sick in the head. No, I'd never marry a human." His distraction made the boy brutally honest.

The girls all shared some very significant looks.

Then the ice cream started to get passed around and they all got lost in bliss. Toes got curled and squeeing sounds made.

Though the portions were small and the flavors few, great delight was had by all around.

OoOoO

"You know, once you said that Leet designed the first of these, I could understand why they are so wonky. The guy's inventions are infamously unreliable," Christina opined, kicking back on a sofa and fluffing out locks of her more-yellow-than-humanly-possible hair.

She, like many of these girls, had been very blonde before. But that wasn't a patch on what they had now. Frankly, Jared was relieved that she found it so amusing.

The others had calmed down out of their budding freak-out when he'd successfully pointed out that, for a D&D wizard (which he was) changing someone's race was trivially easy. That made the 'new look' temporary, and suddenly they'd become eager to explore it, rather than being upset over it.

The girl had all shared knowing glances. Although none of them had communicated anything overtly, nonetheless they all knew they'd reached an agreement already. And as far as they were concerned it went without saying that, if he was only going to marry an elf, then no way were any of them going to return to being human!

In fact, they all felt deliciously naughty with the knowledge that so far as anyone knew they were the *only* elves around for him to marry! I mean, since he swore he would never marry a human and the rest of the girl in the world were human that sort of gave Serena and her friends an automatic victory, didn't it?

Deliciously naughty giggles and much blushing accompanied those thoughts, along with stolen glances over the male territory they felt a good deal of ownership over already.

Which was good, as while changing someone's race was easy, doing so without consequences like nerfing Amy's brilliant intellect and the unusual beauty shared among them was a little more difficult, as polymorph spells, the usual 'go to' for that sort of thing, liked resetting people to the average of their new species.

But average simply would not do for these girls.

There were other options to be explored. They would fix this. But the true remedies took more time than simple spells he already held memorized, and right now he was working on a different priority.

The girls had all used the "copy powers, kill powers, receive dual powers" system inside of the game, which Jared had not been allowed to enter. So he'd been forced to build actual, physical copies of those devices Leet had designed for copying and killing powers. The only problem there was a mild hold up with Jared as the force field and computer tinkering powers did not want to copy to him on the first try. But a second, more determined, attempt did succeed.

Then it was out to the bay.

OoOoO

"What's he doing?" Holly asked, clinging to the side of the older girl Susan. The collected group of girls had followed Jared outside for a project and were standing on the waters of the Bay, which itself was quite a change, but apparently Jared (or Jay-chan as Mina had started calling him) had a spell for that.

Even more remarkable was the softly falling snow hung frozen and immobile in midair, looking like a picture postcard.

It was gorgeous.

Susan smiled softly as she made her response. "Every bay I've ever heard of has islands. They also have almost-but-not-quite islands, mountains on the sea floor that almost break the surface but don't. Navigation hazards is all they are, as ships must avoid them, but they are not useful for anything. Jared is over one of those now, but I don't..."

At that moment the boy they were watching finished his chanting and thrust his arms into the air, causing the waters around and below them to ripple, before parting in a circular, outgoing wave as a smooth platform of rock thrust upwards, displacing the water.

A platform of stone that stood six feet above the water, and was about as big around as the walled compound around the Tower of Isengard from the Lord of the Rings movie. And suddenly those girls were not standing on water anymore, as the platform of stone extended far enough to have risen up beneath them.

In moments Jared walled the entire perimeter of that area with more stone, smooth white marble to a height of thirty feet or so, added six feet of topsoil to the land now contained therein, raising the girls upwards as he did so, and was in the act of raising a tower large enough to compete with a mid-sized skyscraper in the middle of this newly created island, also made out of smooth white marble.

"Wow," Lita brushed hair out of her eyes, blown about by the brief moment of ocean spray he'd created. "When he said we couldn't just base our hero team out of our apartment I was thinking he'd just take over an abandoned warehouse or something, like everyone else."

The first of many hundred foot tall apple trees sprung up moments later. Somehow they understood the stone beneath was changing shape to accommodate the root system.

And then he made the brand new island invisible.

Amy was staring intently as he worked. "Placing our new base over a former seamount is a brilliant tactic! Ships are already used to avoiding the area... if we still had any ship traffic in the Bay, that is. But the navigation charts all say to avoid that location because of the underwater rocks. So if they avoid it, and no one can see it, it's all but undetectable!"

"Yeah," Mina agreed, standing confidently as she stared at their man. "It's so much better than an abandoned factory or warehouse. If you make your hero base in one of them, then gang members or homeless people might wander in and find your stuff by accident."

"Not to mention the plumbing in those old places hardly ever works," Serena added, holding her nose, then noticed the other girls staring at her. "What? Haven't you ever been desperate for a bathroom?"

OoOoO

The new base was needed for new space.

As good as the girls apartment had been for dwelling in a secure place, they'd all been packed in rather tightly by western living standards, which meant there had not been a lot of extra room around for machinery or tools.

In short, no room for workshops. No place to put the anvils or forges necessary for smiths to ply their trade, for engineers to work, and so on. The Warcraft game taught an *obscene* number of skills ideal for outfitting a small group of heroes, but unlike the game those same skills in real life needed some space to spread out their tools and do the work.

To say nothing of the extras.

Jared explained, "I'd asked Leet when he was programming the game to please plug up all of the holes in the supply pipeline, as some parts and ingredients just have to be purchased, and as we were not going to bring the entire warcraft world out with us, we would not have access to the venders who sold those things."

He glanced at the girls and shrugged. "I failed. Ok, he made a bit of an effort, but overall Leet found that boring as he'd rather be programming the ability to make things like Dungeon Hearts so he could play other games inside of that one. So most of the ingredients our crafting skills from that game call for, we don't have available here. That rather sharply limits the amount and variety of items we could make for our hero costumes. Sorry."

There came a complete lack of sorrow over thing from the girls watching him, who were glad for what they did have, as it seemed to them infinitely more than the nothing they'd had before.

"Ironically, one of those skills we ought to be best supplied on is making jewelry, as that skill includes the ability to create most of its raw components out of chunks of ore, and raw ore in chunks that size is insanely cheap on this world..." Jared trailed off. "Well, for any minerals that appear on this planet, anyway. So none of the more exotic stuff like Thorium, which leaves us again on the lower end side of what we can produce."

Their redheaded love interest frowned. "Actually, for this starter set of costumes that's got to be our single most limiting factor: we can't use any materials that aren't native to this planet."

"Only our starter set?" Serena materialized by his shoulder as if by magic, blinking curiously for an explanation.

"Well, yeah," the boy replied, guilelessly. "One of the reasons I became a D&D mage is those are able to teleport to any area they've had *described* to them. And we've all seen plenty of pictures and things describing the world the warcraft game is based on. I don't have any doubts I'll be able to teleport there. But buying stuff requires money, which we don't happen to have right now, so our starter set of costumes will have to be made out of things we've got available right now."

"Couldn't you teleport us over there and then we all earn money adventuring?" Mina asked.

"Much more dangerous," Jared replied grimly. "We'll want to be as protected as possible first, as stuff that is safe and predictable in the game won't be on the real world of Azeroth. So showing up over there wearing substandard protections is in the 'high risk' category."

Mina nodded, accepting that without complaint.

The much taller Lita popped her head over Mina's shoulder. "But we've played in that game. There are low-level areas where high-level characters like us could run around naked in and be alright, right?"

Jared paused, an odd look to his eye as he reordered his thoughts. "Yeah..." he began tentatively. "I suppose..." Suddenly he looked sheepish. "I'd been too focused on those areas where the best and most important crafting ingredients could be found, and are proportionately dangerous. But you're right. There are any number of towns or other safe areas we could go to."

"And whatever level of gear we'd pick up there would let us go to gradually more dangerous places, and by repeating that a few times we could go get the best stuff, right?" Lita pressed.

The redhaired boy shook his head in woeful admission of error. "You are exactly right." He motioned for the girls to cluster together. "Come on, everyone. Link up for a teleport."

Then it was off to warcraft-land as everyone vanished together in a flash.

OoOoO

While the real him was busy, several clones that Jared had discretely made using his self-duplication power separated themselves from the primary group a fair distance, then teleported.

One of those appeared in a vast desert of sand, clay and rock. Dust blew everywhere.

Heh, apparently the Time Stop spell did not apply across dimensions. Interesting.

Immediately on its arrival the double quickly cast spells on itself, the usual archmage survival kit, plus one for keeping the dust off him and stop it from interfering with his sight. Then he drew in a deep breath and gazed around sorrowfully at cracked clay soil that had once been one of the most lush farmlands on Earth.

California's Central Valley had never looked so dismal. Croplands that had once fed a surprising portion of the Earth now lay desolate and uninhabited.

The double tried to hide his sorrow at the sight of his home state being such a wasteland, but there was nothing for it, the Earth he had teleported to was not a nice place. Shrugging, as he had a different mission, he oriented himself and began to fly towards his destination.

The ability to go anywhere you'd even had a description of was just priceless! Because, when you'd accounted for the countless novels and games that described locations, some in pretty good detail, made for absolutely staggering possibilities!

There was some margin for error, of course, in teleporting via description alone, but that was why Jared was only sending duplicates, not his original self.

Luckily so, as something had felt much like smacking face-first into a wall of tar in the middle of his teleport to this place, and being forced to metaphorically wade through it in order to get anywhere. But at least he'd made it through, and could figure out the error (if that's what it was - sometimes things just went wrong no matter what you do) later.

Perhaps that was what had stripped off the Time Stop effect?

He didn't know, but back to business. One of the many games he had played in his youth was called Car Wars. It was by Steve Jackson, and depicted a planet where some of the scares of the eighties actually came true. Unlike the real Earth, where fresh reserves of oil kept being discovered faster than the most greedy drilling could use them up, here the world oil supply vanished in a single year like someone had flipped a switch.

Then, as if that had not been bad enough, the planet got struck by what they called Grain Blight, a disease that wiped out grasses and anything grass-like more effectively than the Black Death had killed men, leaving basically nothing behind. The guidebook for California said not even palm trees remained alive, having been too closely related to grasses.

The resulting famine had killed off most of the world's population, of course.

It was bad enough that all of the rice, wheat, barley and everything else grass-like in the ground just up and died all of a sudden, but it was not just the plants in the field that rotted, it was every bit of stored grain as well, even stuff that had already been processed into flour or baked into bread!

But naturally, it couldn't end there. You can't just suddenly lose that much biomass without it having a ripple effect. Grass was just too huge a part of the ecosystem not to be missed.

Cattle and other grazing animals died because they lost their primary food source, taking meat and dairy off the table at the same time as the human diet lost bread and rice. Even most wild herbivores like deer and rabbits perished, and the predators of those herbivores died also. So once the ripple had finished spreading there had come a mass die-off of just about anything that lived on land.

This Earth wasn't quite as bad as staring across a moonscape. But it wasn't pretty either.

No, suffering through a nuclear holocaust would have been much kinder. In fact, the planet had even had a nuclear war, but that paled to insignificance behind the other troubles it had been through, so most folks simply forgot that nukes had been tossed around.

Some of the glowing craters had even become tourist attractions - visited only in heavily shielded buses, of course.

Since the Grain Blight still existed, in dormancy, just waiting to flare up again the moment any grass appeared, that made this planet off-limits to anyone with even half a hint of sanity, as the very idea of carrying some invisible dust infected by that blight off to other worlds was simply too horrific to contemplate. It was a world-killer.

Which, explained exactly why Jared had only dared send a duplicate here. Despite being personally immune to disease, he wasn't going to take any risk of carrying some infected duct off tucked in some crevice of his clothes or whatnot. Theoretically his immunity stretched to cover even that - but he wasn't going to test that and risk destroying a world on a theory.

So the double he'd sent would simply never leave. That wasn't a problem because Jared had convinced Leet to add a mental uplink to his self-duplication power, so alot like Naruto's Shadow Clones, the original learned anything known by his copies when it vanished or got destroyed.

And there was technology here worth learning.

The Car Wars world had a very Mad Max feel to the whole place, hopeless poverty and lawlessness was the theme, with banditry omnipresent - only in this case it was all mingled with some very high technology. One of those was solar power cells that actually worked the way most people thought solar already did - and living up to the fantasies of people who had only ever heard hype was a difficult thing to do.

But no, here what civilization existed used solar almost exclusively as their power source, and were able to power lasers and other high tech gadgets from that no problem. That was a technology worth having.

Another was their plastics.

Here metal was scarce (go figure, they'd never explained that one. Iron was the single most common element on Earth by mass) so they used plastics for everything.

Sounds simple. Most wouldn't even think twice about that. Plastics were already common enough when most people imagined a future they often just pictured more of them in use. But going back a step: in real life plastics were a petrochemical product, meaning they were derived from oil, and this world hadn't got any!

But luckily science did have an alternate source for the chemicals required for plastics. All they needed was... grasses.

So ultimately the only two practical ways known to real world science for producing plastics, were completely unavailable in Car Wars, yet they used plastics for everything. They made their cars out of plastic. Their weapons, computers, even their clothes were plastic.

The modern world could not perform minor repairs on a car without parts shipped in from China, or wherever. Actually building them was out of the question without serious, multi-billion dollar global industries spread across the entire world in a vast interconnected web of parts and shipping.

So how did these guys build cars and stuff without that global transport and industry web?

Well, that was another technology worth discovering. Because this planet had sunk down to a level that was barely above the Old West. Political bodies larger than a small town were mostly theoretical. The countryside had been abandoned to bandit gangs, and the standard form of civilization was walled settlements existing more or less independent of each other, and without any reliable form of shipping in between.

Forget international shipping, these guys could not drive a car between neighboring cities without a near certainty of deadly combat. They plated their vehicles with armor and armed them with everything from machineguns and mine droppers on up to military tank guns and lasers because to do otherwise counted as a form of suicide.

Even serious and well-armed convoys ran a very real risk of death on short, commuter trips.

The key question here was: how did they do it? How did they manufacture cars, as well as the armor and weapons to put on them, targeting computers and other options when most settlements barely had enough residents to qualify as hickvilles?

Modern industry was serious business. To make something as simple as a wooden pencil involved products from like sixty five nations, between all of the various chemicals that went in to making up the yellow varnish, then the metal bit that held on the eraser, the eraser itself, the glue and graphite and everything else.

So simple a product, you'd never imagine how many countries got involved, how many miles those parts traveled over, or the mind-boggling array of everything that went into putting that together - All for a product that was cheap and ultimately disposable.

No, most people saw a consumer product appear on their shelves and never even imagined how complex were the processes that got it there. But people didn't build those huge complexes of soot-belching factories for fun, or because they liked the looks of them.

So the question remained: How did these people get modern cars, helicopters, and computer controlled weapons to put on them, when most of their population lived in villages so small that if you grabbed every man, woman and child from the youngest to the oldest they could not muster enough to fill an average high school?

The modern world got goods to towns of that size by shipping them in. Here that was impossible due to the constant bandit menace. Some shipping happened, but it wasn't near what anyone could call reliable, as you could count on any convoy arriving with a few bullet holes in it, some lives lost, and a few vehicles missing.

If a convoy arrived at all. Many didn't.

Helicopters weren't any safer, since stinger missiles were about as common as rifles, here. And both were in the 'don't leave home without it' category.

So whatever method they used to supply places, it wasn't the modern system of "build it elsewhere, then ship it in". That simply wouldn't work with shipping so unsafe and unreliable. People have got to be able to depend on their living necessities better than that.

The only answer that remained was those small hick villages made their own necessities.

So if these guys could, on scales from no larger than a couple hundred people at the smallest on up to the rare but present actual large cities, maintain an infrastructure capable of manufacturing enough food and plastics to meet all of their needs locally, to say nothing of a level of industry able to produce all of the modern tools and weapons they used, Jared wanted to know about it. Because that was as huge a shift as computers going from room-sized conglomerations of thousands of pounds of clunky hardware, down to a digital watch.

To put it another way - not since the days of the village blacksmith was a town able to make all of the tools and things it used, and even so the typical medieval peasant didn't own a lot worth having.

These people were able to do the same on a technology base that was able to provide a modern lifestyle and comforts, including cars and guns, body armor, and even practical laser weaponry to anyone that wanted it!

Shrinking the necessary infrastructure of modern living down from "spans the entire globe and requires the efforts of nearly every living person being involved or associated with it" down to "a couple hundred people can do it", was an advance of incalculable worth.

Jared was after it mostly because the world Brockton Bay stood on had a civilization that was getting hammered just about as hard as this place had been by their oil vanishing, and between Endbringers and other problems any technology that required more resources than a couple hundred people could manage, wasn't safe to rely on.

So Jared came here to fetch a technology base robust enough to survive apocalyptic cataclysms and keep on churning out the goods. A tech base where they'd improved on the electric motor and battery until it was not just practical to have electrically powered cars, overcoming the drawbacks those suffered in reality, they had become the standard. And not just cars, they had battery powered electric motors strong enough to be used for the main drive system on helicopters and aircraft, too.

Best of all, Car Wars technology base had only recently departed from the 20th Century norm, so could not be too different from it.

There were some other gems to be found: practical laser weaponry available for affordable prices at the consumer level, gauss guns the same, body armor that could take a burst from a machinegun before depleting, yet cheap enough for everyone to wear a suit. All of those were nice, but better ones could be found elsewhere. What made the ones here attractive was they were all simple enough to be within reach of a 20th century technology base.

However, the main reason why Jared had chosen this planet, besides their solar cells and plastics, was two related technologies. Somehow, and he didn't know how, these guys had perfected practical cloning technology at a level where they had a company, Gold Cross, selling actual life insurance in the most pure and literal sense. Meaning that if you died while you had a policy with them, they would arrange for your corpse to be brought to one of their clinics, where they would transfer your memories out of that body into a new clone so you'd wake up knowing everything you did right up to the moment of your death.

Not bad for a place that had never developed the internet.

And if they couldn't get your body to a clinic in time, or your brain had been splattered or something like that, you'd still wake up in your clone body, just with whatever memories it had up to your last update.

They strongly recommended for people to update their clone's memories once a month, and otherwise held your replacement body in a form of stasis until needed.

As if that wasn't going to be useful enough to know how to do on a world suffering from Endbringer attacks, the Car Wars world had a related technology that made learning everything they had developed a practical concern, and not something he would need to devote a handful of normal lifetimes to.

Because from the ability to store memories in your clone they had also discovered how to program additional skills into people; from scholarly ones like history and math, or the ability to understand how their plastics got manufactured, to active pursuits like how to drive a car in combat or shoot a gun.

Those last two were important because he'd need them just to survive, as magic use was not exactly common here, so he'd have to be discrete with it, which meant learning how to fight like to locals, at minimum.

One had to fit in, after all.

Jared's double landed well outside of the town he wanted and began to walk toward it, already scanning the rather limited skyline for the arena that was the easiest place to find that could direct him to the nearest Gold Cross, and from thence to the people who knew how to program those skills.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Well, back to this.

For those who don't know, winter typically makes a good bid at killing me, and most of spring typically gets spent putting my life back in order. So sorry for the delay, but I would have traded months of illness and weakness and misery for the ability to write more if I could.

Inserted some hints from the challenge I'd accepted into this bit.

Also, since it should now be absolutely clear that I need precisely zero help from the CYOA advantage points to utterly curbstomp this setting despite having taking the majority of disadvantages on the list, I paradoxically feel a great deal better about using them.