Happy Superbowl Sunday! Hope you enjoyed our minuscule TV spot for Endgame.
Chapter Sixteen – Montage, Part One
"Launch!" Tony called.
I released my magic and the titanium ball flew through the air, flying towards a wall of metal.
It ripped straight through, leaving a hole in the middle.
"Jarvis?" Tony called.
"I'm afraid that is still not enough force as estimated," Jarvis said.
I sighed. "And it still ripped a hole straight through."
"Alright, let's upgrade to Titanium then," Tony muttered, grabbing a panel of wall and hauling it over to where we'd secure it into the ground.
The decision to calculate the force needed was probably the most troublesome part. I didn't know just how strong Bucky was, but I did know enough for us to get a rough estimate. After all – Steve could grab a helicopter with one arm and a bar with the other and hold it in place while the copter was actively trying to fly away.
With the help of Jarvis, Tony and I discovered the weight of the helicopter. After showing him the memory (and we both took a few seconds to appreciate Cap's physic) he took the acceleration speed (how fast it took for the copter to get in the air) and the deceleration speed (how quickly Cap pulled it to a stop) along with its weight in order to calculate the amount of force needed to hold the helicopter in place.
The problem is that even with this, and knowing the fact that Bucky is weaker than Steve, Bucky also had a metal arm. And the movies had shown that he didn't care about any damage to his body. Back in my first life, I saw a post on tumblr talk about the difference between the way that Steve and Bucky both land when they fall and how Steve lands lightly on his feet so his body doesn't take damage. Bucky, on the other hand, doesn't care and falls heavily on his feet (which is apparently really bad for the knees) and just focused on fulfilling his mission no matter the pain. So we also had to prepare for Bucky deciding to do something like that, and just plow through walls anyway.
Tony set the new wall in place and I grabbed a ball.
Tony and I had had an argument earlier, when he realized that I could make something out of nothing. I argued that magic was still energy, and I was using the energy to create something. He said that making gold was still cheating.
I pointed out that I don't really make gold, but he pointed out that I could and so it was cheating.
He might have a bit of a point.
Back in Fiore, if something was created with magic, it was priced differently (actually, it was usually more expensive, because items made with magic could usually be imbued with magical properties, so they could be turned into charms and such). As I mentioned to Tony, all living things have energy, and you can generally sense the energy coming from magic, like the humming of electricity.
Upon pointing that out, Tony got a bit happier, especially learning that he might be able to imbue energy (because magic is energy) in the metals.
Because we weren't testing the strength of magic, but just trying to build stable walls for Bucky, he instead forged the balls on his own, with regular metal. This is so we didn't need to worry about the extra factors caused by magic, because I was only using magic so I can mimic the strength caused by a super soldier hitting something with a metal arm. So the magic was used to throw the balls at high speed, rather than actually using the magic to attack the wall.
That testing would come later.
"Ready?" Tony asked.
I nodded, building up the magic, and U beeped, focusing the camera on a wide shot covering me and the metal wall from the side.
"Launch!" Tony yelled.
The ball flew through the air and still left a hole in the metal, but it was oddly misshapen and the ball was almost definitely scratched up.
"Jarvis, was that good enough?" I asked.
"You are at approximately the right speed to equate the force, Mrs. Rigby," he announced.
"Yes!" I cheered.
Tony walked over to the hole. "U, did you get that?"
The little bot beeped, shaking the attached camera.
Dum-E set off the fire extinguisher.
"Dum-E, nothing is on fire-" Tony paused as he looked at me. I tried to hide the remaining traces of Mars, but it didn't work. "Elle, don't encourage him!"
"Aww, but it's cute," I pouted. "And he's like a cat. You know, with a laser pointer? He still hasn't figured out where the fire is coming from. And I'm celebrating finally getting the speed right!"
"He knows the fire is because of you," Tony said, gesturing to the bot. "He's gonna be super attached to you, now."
"That's okay," I said. "You want more fire, Dum-E?"
The bot whistled and spun around.
"How about we practice your aim?" I asked him. The bot stopped and tilted his head, curiously looking at me. I saw his camera focus on my face.
"Here's what we're going to do," I told Dum-E. "I'm going to make a fireball, and throw it. You're going to put it out. The goal is to use as little stuff from the fire extinguisher as possible."
Tony snorted. "'Stuff'. It's sodium bicarbonate."
"We can't all be geniuses," I told him. "I'm lucky that I can probably guess what that looks like in chemical formula. I didn't get to finish middle school, remember?"
"You're still smart," he said, rolling his eyes. "You can't keep using that as an excuse."
I shrugged. "I went to the library a lot. Chemistry and physics interested me a bit, so I know some more of that, but not the really heavy stuff. I never had time for mechanics. I love space, but biology…not so much. Unless it was psychology, which doesn't really count."
"So all over the place," Tony nodded, measuring the hole the ball left.
"Pretty much," I said, shrugging.
Dum-E beeped and tugged on my shirt.
I smiled down at him. "Okay, so I'm going to make one fireball, and throw it. Once it stops moving, it should stay in place, and it won't burn anything, alright? And I'm going to make it purple, so you know you don't need to get rid of it immediately. If it's the normal color of fire, then you should try and blow it out immediately, understand? Even if in the future, it's me that's making it."
"Ca' 'u 'ake i' 'ack?" Tony asked, the ruler in his mouth now.
I rolled my eyes and made the ruler float with Saturn. "Don't eat your tools. Now, what was that?"
"Can you make it black?" he asked, comparing the numbers he was adjusting to the ones from the last test so he could pick the next metal wall. "I don't exactly have potassium chloride lying around, but if it happened to fall into fire, it would turn the fire purple. With the right chemicals, you can make fire turn just about any color, except black."
"'Cause black is the absence of light, right?" I asked him, focusing on the color in my mind.
"Yep. It's common sense, but it still throws people off, and I'm pretty sure they don't teach that in basic school," Tony said. "Don't they do it the other way?"
"That's paint," I said. "Black is all the colors together and white is absence when it comes to paint, because it's on whether or not pigment has been added. Light is opposite. Which is why the primary colors of light are red, green and blue."
"Not red, yellow and blue?" Tony asked.
I snorted. "While they can technically be considered the primary colors of paint, it's really just switched with light's secondary colors, which is fuchsia, cyan, and yellow. Which is why that's what printers use for colored ink. Some artists prefer working with those shades as their primary colors, instead."
"Why do you even know this?" Tony asked.
I shrugged, making the black flame come to life/
"You ready?" I asked the little bot, and he beeped and ran after it as I threw the ball.
"Dum-E, when it's done moving, try and do it from five feet away," I shouted to him, before turning back to Tony. "I didn't really give up hope on my future until the time I ran away. So up until then, I actually had dreams like most people. Thing is, they were never really concrete dreams; they'd shift from day to day. The longer ones would last a while. I was interested in some digital work, with coloring, for a bit. I can't draw for shit, but I liked doing stuff on the computer, so I ended up learning about RGB. When I learned that white was the combination of light, as opposed to the absence of paint pigment, it confused me for awhile, so I spent longer trying to understand what the differences were. That's one reason I still remember it."
Tony nodded, still looking at the hole.
"You already knew all that, didn't you?"
"Yeeeeep."
I laughed, moving closer to him. "Thanks for humoring me. What are you doing?"
"You see how this part of the metal was dented?" Tony asked, running his finger along the inside of the hole. "And it looks sort of stretched out?"
"Yeah," I said.
He nodded. "Even though your speed was faster, this wall is stronger than the last one, strong enough to slow it down. It's a lot more resistant than the last one, and it's stretched out several inches further than the last test…"
He mumbled to himself as I heard Dum-E whistling away from us, where he danced around a white blob on the ground.
"What's that?" Tony asked.
I shrugged. "I lit the fireball around some Earth. I felt like a physical object to hit might make it easier on him."
Tony nodded.
Dum-E whistled and came back to me, tugging my shirt.
"Again?" I asked him.
He beeped.
"Try it from ten feet away this time, okay?" I asked him.
His whistled and waited.
I conjured up the fireball and threw it across the yard.
"Hey, Jarvis?" Tony asked.
"Yes?" asked the computer we brought outside with us.
"Can you hack the satellite and see us from space?" Tony asked.
"You want to see check on how the illusion is holding up?" I asked Tony.
He nodded.
We decided (me, I decided) that we should experiment outside because, well…magic. And also, we'd have more space. So I used one of Cana's cards to create what we call a sustaining illusion. It's especially helpful because I don't need to continually cast Eris to do it; I just cast the spell and link it to the card, which keeps it powered, same as Freed's runes could be.
Since the illusion wasn't really interacting with anything, it was easier done than giving Tony an illusion. This is like taking a picture of a hallway and putting it over a camera so the security watchers can't see.
Since Tony was a living, breathing person, the illusion would need to interact with him. Even if I linked it to a card, it was a much stronger spell to cast in the first place.
"This is the view that others are seeing from the satellite," Jarvis said, projecting a picture - one that Tony had already seen.
"Tony, it's not going to change. It will stay up, don't worry."
"It's still so cool," Tony murmured, staring at the screen. "I just can't believe how easily you took care of it. How it still seems like we're not even outside at all."
"You should see the stuff that Macbeth can do. It's really something," I said.
"Doesn't make this less impressive," he said, turning away from the image and ambling up to grab the next sheet of metal, which he started switching out and attaching to the poles in the ground.
I beamed at him. "I'm really looking forward to seeing how you react when we pull out the big guns."
His smile mimicked mine, and both Dum-E and U started beeping and spinning around. Butterfingers just looked at them sadly and let out a series of beeps that sounded like a sigh.
"Butterfingers is the mature one?" I asked, bemused.
Tony smiled, locking the wall into place. "The younger ones are more mature. Even though they are all learning A.I.s. The newer ones just have bigger processing abilities, so they pick things up faster."
I turned and grabbed the next ball and waited for Tony to finish setting it up.
"Ready?" he asked.
I tightened the magic, building it up to the same level as last time. "Got it."
"Launch!" he called.
I let go and the ball slingshot over to the wall.
But it didn't go through it this time, instead it knocked it over.
We ran over for a better look. There was a large dent where the ball had hit it, and it looked like it almost went through. The wall had also ripped out of the supports, which is why it fell over. Something I probably should have realized that we'd have to reinforce as the walls got stronger.
"Awesome!" Tony hissed, jotting things down.
"What now?" I asked him.
"Now…" he said. "I need you to use magic."
I raised an eyebrow. "How?"
He drew up the specks of the walls and other metals he'd need as the bots started cleaning up. "I figure that if you make the metal out of magic it'd be stronger. Can you make this much metal with your magic, and will it last?"
I nodded. "Yeah. It'll be a bit until we rescue Bucky, so for now I'll build a wall a day. I'd rather spread out the production and make them stronger than get it done quickly."
"Okay," Tony said, and the group of us headed inside, while I grabbed the card sustaining the illusion.
"Do you want to keep this?" I asked as the bots zoomed the equipment away. "You can always use it again."
Tony smiled. "Yeah, that'd be great."
Today, April 27th, was a Tuesday. I was hoping Corvus would come around today, and I could make him grab Virgo.
If he doesn't show up within an hour or two…I'll probably send a Thought Projection to Lucy about it.
Thought Magic is something most wizards will pick up very easily. Mostly because the centering wizards need to do to focus their core also focuses thoughts. Projecting your thoughts into another's mind is actually pretty easy, and while I started making sure that most people had some forms of Tertiary Magic that could be helpful (Requip, Teleportation, Location Magic, Transformation Magic, etc) Thought Magic was also included.
I just don't really like doing Thought Projections. I like being in my body. There's a reason I don't wander the Astral Plane, like Lucy so freely does. Or even Jellal, who's also pretty cavalier about it. It's one thing for me to take energy from it, wandering it is another concept. Returning to the water and oil example about magic, using magic from that plane is like opening a hole, or a doorway that lets more magic in. Wandering it is like swimming in it, and it's something that's hard for me to handle.
Zeref (an ex-dark wizard member of Fairy Tail that can't die (it's complicated)) says that it's probably because Lucy and Jellal's magic is a more concentrated and pure form. Mine specializes in elements, and that makes it more difficult for me to wander freely. So I prefer to stay in my body. Lucy can Astral Project and dance around with her spirit in her dreams all she wants, but that is just not for me.
Freed thinks it's because I died before, and that when I project out of my body, the tether between my vessel and soul become thinner.
I overheard Zeref telling Mavis he thought that too; he just didn't want to scare me.
And it is a scary concept.
So I'll only Astral Project if I really have to. Right now, it was close to two o'clock. If Corvus didn't show up at four, I'd contact them then. I wanted Virgo to get started on our clothes soon. I know that she's amazing, but the ball was on Friday, the last day of the month. And the 30th was only three days away.
So she didn't exactly have a lot of time.
Though I suppose she might be able to get help from Capricorn and Loke, when it comes to suits.
"Let's eat," I told Tony. "Sciencing makes me hungry."
Next chapter should be up on Wednesday or something. Next Ripples chapter should be up next weekend. (THESE ARE NOT FIXED DATES). But they should be a-coming soon.
By the weekend (in the story not actual irl) things will start picking up soon! We've got a few more parts of the Montage to go, though.