A.N: sorry for putting an author's note at the beginning but i thought it was important. Since superpierce figured out Everyman's tinker power in the comments, I'll be including a short list at the end of every chapter talking about which universe a piece of tech came from. Feel free to recommend tech from fiction or from the real word, I do a lot of online research for this story but I'm just one man.
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(Chapter start)
I've talked to so many people today that the faces are starting to blend together, I'm starting to remember people by their specializations and by the profiles I have on them. Only the memorable ones are clear in my mind.
My meeting with Sphere begins in two hours and I've seen one hundred and eighty people since this morning. I've had to make speaking in virtual reality mandatory just to have enough time for everyone. It's barely two o'clock and I've already spent thirty four virtual hours talking, helping and making deals with various people. I can count the number of tinkers I remember by name on my two hands.
I've had to set the virtual room to dilate time by six to have enough time and I've started to have intense migraines after the fifteenth hour, repair helps but the migraines keep coming back. It's not all bad at least, my pain has been compensated many times over throughout the day. I've made deals for 3D printers, for personalized virtual rooms, for materials and I've received thirteen conditional offers to join my tinkers association.
Pretty much every conditional offer can be summarized as requiring access to my resources or needing me to heal someone for them to join. There's also a large quantity of tinkers that told me they had to think about it for a bit before joining, around thirty of them.
Besides that, I've also had multiple breakthroughs from interacting with a few different tinkers. Helping a guy with a specialization in energy transferral tech lead my power to give me roided up versions of all variants of my mute field emitters. The new design for the HAF generator can essentially flash freeze everything in its area of effect faster than I can blink at the expense of needing over fifty break and repair cycles to even work after one use without becoming a superheated sludge of metallic plasma. The energy has to go somewhere after all.
The new mute field emitters can absorb shockwaves on the level of nuclear detonations. Normally, that would be a good thing but a mute field that powerful also brings unique problems with it. At that level, the mute field absorbs every bit of kinetic energy from the air making it impossible to breath in or to exhale, the air is completely static. Even moving becomes hard as the air reacts like a solid surface against your body. I probably won't use the strong ones as area of effect but they'll be extremely useful as shaped fields.
I can use a shaped field to make solid surfaces anywhere using static air and that can be used as shielding against kinetic energy or to redirect projectiles. If I make the emitters small enough, I can even give them to civilians in combat situations as protection or I can use them to stop falling rubble from a distance. I can even use them to immobilize low level brutes without having to fight, just hold them in place with a field that covers their whole body and wait for them to fall unconscious from oxygen deprivation.
The most useful in my opinion is the boosted version of the electricity injector, the thing can now dump enough energy inside a machine to fry any electronic parts. In simple therms, I can negate tinkertech even if it has EMP shielding. This is the last thing I needed to have before being ready to participate in Simurgh fights. The amount of tinkers present in fights against her is null so I can just put a electricity injector with wide area of effect in my armor to nullify a whole aspect of her power. She'll be limited to my specialization and nothing I have at lower levels can counter a strategy like that or greatly affect the battlefield, she can't even skip the steps needed to reach higher level tech since the precision engineering needed is way higher than any of her known telekinetic feats.
The last design to receive an upgrade was the heat injection field which is also the thing I was planning to use against Leviathan. Before the upgrade, it could vaporize large quantities of water in under ten seconds. Now though, it can vaporize huge amounts of water instantly which essentially makes me immune to Leviathan's water echo. I just have to worry about staying away from people and visibility since the steam will block my view. Even then, I just have to make scanning equipment to remove one of those problems.
Every other breakthrough can't compare to what I received from the first but each of them is still a massive benefit. By now, my current armor design for the Behemoth fight is one hundred and fifty percent more powerful than the initial one I drew months ago. At this rate, I might even be able to survive Behemoth's kill aura in time for our second encounter. To date, the only tinker to manage that was Dynamo and his armor was a malformed mess after only one blow, one blow able to level buildings and killing high level brutes was survived by a normal human in power armor. That feat is Dynamo's main claim to fame, I plan to be the second to manage the feat.
All in all, despite the migraines, this days has been my most profitable to date. Twenty people made orders for mark two 3D printers at two thousand dollars each and ten people ordered mark 4 3D printers at seven thousand each. Once all of them are sent and I've received all the payments, I'll have made one hundred ten thousand from 3D printers alone.
The other orders will make me less money despite being bought more because I priced them lower. Customizable virtual rooms with the hardware to run them were sold at five hundred each and made me thirty five thousand and I've made another ten thousand from selling raw materials at five cent under market value. If I put all my earnings together, I have enough capital to fund all my large projects.
I can buy a cheap warehouse, demolish it and build my hospital with industrial scale 3D printers on the freed land. I can buy ten boat carcasses with the remaining money and use them to fuel the tinkers association for years and I can use my own land to build the association facilities. My parents old house has ten acres of land, I have no personal use for the space and the property is isolated from Brockton Bay. In other words, the perfect place to accommodate the tinkers association headquarters.
My thoughts are interrupted by a knock on my desk and the facility employee makes sure I'm paying attention before speaking. "Since your meeting is to happen soon, I've been sent to inform you on the rules of the meeting." He explains.
Seeing my nod, he continues. "Now the way the meeting goes down is quite simple, the only reason employees like me need to explain things to tinkers like you is to save time in the meeting room. Sphere's time is packed enough as it is, he doesn't need interruptions on top of everything else." By the end of it, the employee seems almost angry.
One deep breath later, the employee resumes speaking. "The meeting is thirty five minutes long and you'll have to share your time with twenty two other tinkers, each of you will have a minute and twenty seconds to say whatever you want. That's all the time you have, once it's gone, you'll have to wait until the last five minutes of the meeting to speak." He says. "That's all you need to know, your assigned time to speak should have been sent to you in the same letter that gave you your stall position."
And just like that, the guy leaves my stall. If I didn't have experience in customer service myself, I probably would've called the guy and asshole for his attitude. Despite his lack of tact, the information was delivered efficiently and I'm left to think on it. I won't be able to fit everything in under two minutes so I'll have to speak mainly about one equipment and mention the other two briefly. Speaking about the portals seems like the way to go, I can't show my artificial gravity generator because of Euclid's tech and speaking about food will undersell my ability to contribute.
With my mind set, all that's left to do is wait.
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In the last fifteen minutes, I'm pretty sure I've heard just about every variation possible for solutions that can be summed up as this, an idea hypothesized by scientists years ago made with tinkertech. Zero original answers, five guys gave different thruster designs, a guy proposed lasers as propulsion and some idiot proposed metallic hydrogen as rocket fuel.
Seriously, who would use metallic hydrogen as rocket fuel? That thing's dangerous as fuck. Even my portals can be made safe with the right mesures but metallic hydrogen can be destabilized by many different factors that require high end tinkertech to mitigate. Considering metallic hydrogen explodes with fifty one times more force than TNT, I'd consider it a pretty big problem. You can't risk a colony ship blowing up with the power of a nuclear bomb and equipping each rocket with the tinkertech needed to keep the fuel stable would cost way too much.
From the looks the other tinkers are giving him, I'm not the only one with that opinion. Even Sphere looks like he's tired, poor guy's probably been stuck receiving dumbass answers like that for three day straight. Luckily for him, my turn is coming soon and his suffering will be alleviated.
Just as I finish the thought, the guy before me runs out of time and my turn begins. With under two minutes to spare, I need to make this quick. "My name is Everyman, I'm one of the fifty or so tinkers that had a place on this meeting before Hero announced his participation. I brought three pieces of tinkertech to show off but one of them can't be used without interfering with Euclid's tech and I doubt any of us plan to die today. My second piece of tinkertech is a food item which can be eaten at my stall." I take a small breath before quickly resuming.
"Luckily for me, the most important one can be tested here. My portal drones have no range limits and can project house sized portals when in high numbers. Using them, you can bring people and materials to and from the moon instantly and most importantly, safely. That's all." With my part said, I sit down.
Sphere has a clear look of interest and the tinkers after me look dejected as they propose their solutions which have almost all been invalidated by my portal drones.
Fifteen minutes later, the questioning section begins. The last five minutes of the meeting are used by Sphere as an opportunity to ask more questions about a tinkers offer. For this meeting, his questions are focused on me.
"If your statement on your portal's ranges is true, your participation would be invaluable. I'm also interested in hearing about the two other projects you brought, I haven't received many solutions for most of the problems associated with a moon colony and your mention of food has me interested." His piece said, he gives me a gesture to speak.
"When thinking about the most important necessities of a moon colony, my chooses were food, gravity and transportation. As such, I brought my portal drones, an artificial gravity generator and a modified strain of a tasty and edible mushroom. Unfortunately, the artificial gravity generator can't be used near Euclid's tech. On the other hand, i didn't have enough time to discuss the food." I take a breath and call my drones to me.
Once close enough, I put my hand through a newly opened portal and pull out a slice of mushroom. With the food item in hand, I resume speaking. "What I have in my hand is a modified specimen of chicken of the woods mushroom. With proper care, it grows fast enough to feed seven adults indefinitely and only takes up the same amount of space as a microwave." Sphere seems interested in hearing more but unfortunately, the isn't any time left. Before I leave the room, Sphere tells me a few quick words.
"I'll be contacting you soon."
A.N: this chapter is a bit shorter but I couldn't justify making it longer considering how short the meeting is and I'm sure tinkertech infodumps will get tiring if I make them too long. I'll try to make the next chapter a bit longer and the 'Sphere's meeting arc' should finish on chapter fourteen. Hope you enjoyed, till next time.
Universe of origin for tech
VR chip: ready player one/chappie/future Elon tech crossover universes. (Advanced version of Neuralink, virtual world programming from ready player one and Chappie's brain signal interpreter)
Mute field emitters and variants: multiple alternate universes of Call of Duty: Advanced warfare(mute charge)
Lungbuster armor: the shades of multiple alternate tony starks working together with dozens of engineers from unnamed and named universes(Cyberpunk 77 and Deus ex)
3D printers: result of combined work from shades of scientists from hundreds of different universes.