OYHN: Worm Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Whole lotta stuff isn't mine. Worm belongs to Wildbow. Builders are from a challenge on Twisting the Hellmouth. The Crystal Minion Tree was originally from a story by Mist of Rainbows/Shadows. GURPS, and the Technomancer world book, belong to Steve Jackson Games. Pokemon was created by Satoshi Tajiri and owned by Nintendo, Pokegirls by Metroanime. Willow Rosenberg is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, owned by Mutant Enemy. Disgaea was created by Yoshitsuna Kobayashi and owned by Nippon Ichi. Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood are both owned by J.K. Rowling. I think Essence of the Archmage was originally The Dark Wolf Shiro's. I have basically taken a whole bunch of other people's ideas, put them into a blender, and out came this. Hopefully it'll come out like a smoothie instead of one of those home made fresh vegetable health drinks that mainly exist to get people to buy vitamins.

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Starting In Minecraft

Fortunately enough, while it was a Leviathan attack, it wasn't one here. Good news for me, bad for Karachi, Pakistan. Lots of action footage, lots of coverage of the eight dead capes and two dozen injured, barely a mention of sixteen hundred dead civilians. American news reporting at its finest.

What this means for me personally is that I've got three months before another Endbringer attack, and nine months before another Leviathan attack. So, even if it doesn't keep to which one attacks Brockton Bay, as long as they keep to schedule I've got some time. As far as I can tell it's canon, Scion has not left the building, the Slaughterhouse Nine keep spreading the word of nihilistic cruelty, no crossover characters that I can recognize, and the only way I have to track Cauldron's activities are that yes, Case 53s have the stupid tattoo and the tinfoil hat sections of the internet talk about buying powers in a bottle.

Armed with a PHO gang map, some real estate listings, and a bus pass, I managed to find a burned out warehouse on the edge of Merchant and ABB territory to make into my lair. It was in a slightly less decayed area of the Docks, where if I chose to put a front company it wouldn't be too out of place, was owned by the city for back taxes, and finally had an intact basement level. I managed to Claim it without having to buy it first, which was a little surprising.

If I can't build a base in a pocket dimension, underground will just have to do. Note to self: steal Coil's base as soon as possible.

Turning a miserable, filthy, infested basement into a perfectly comfortable three bedroom apartment/ supervillain lair was the work of an hour, with a few added trips to pick up scans of things I'd forgotten about. OK the water was coming from a tank I'd have to refill and there was no electricity yet, as I had no idea how one would go about adding an illegal tap into a power line, so no heat or AC, and magic lights would do for now. Feeling reasonably safe, except from teleporters, phasing powers, earth manipulators, and people who can blow through a few feet of concrete like they were opening a door, I went to bed.

When I get up, I make myself a good breakfast (thin crust Hawaiian with garlic and onions makes a good breakfast, right? Right.) , burn about half my daily charge of Power Manipulation improving my Power Manipulation, and the other half enhancing myself physically. Stronger, faster, tougher, more agility, more stamina.

I shadow box a little, feeling the changes, and then groan. I hadn't gotten a baseline, so I had no idea how effective that was.

'Needed to go out and get more raw materials anyway.' Right, Invisibility, Glass Wall to see through my ceiling, Teleport to the burned out warehouse over my base. Hawk's Flight so I don't leave telltale footprints through the crap. I fly out and head for the Boat Graveyard, local Mecca for all scavengers. Seek Metal gets me to a likely mass of iron and aluminum beneath the water far enough that no one should notice its disappearance.

This was going to be unpleasant. Maintaining three spells was giving me a headache, despite the bonuses from Archmage. Water Breathing, land gently in the water, drop Hawk's Flight, cast Swim and Water Vision. Once I get deep enough, drop Invisibility. Deconstruct the wreck of a small, aluminum hulled fishing boat. Grab a bunch of sand and silt while I'm at it. Then I spend an hour looking for lost jewelry. Seek Earth and Seek Metal make that pretty simple

Exit the water invisibly under the remains of a dock, fly up, dry off, head back to base. Have a brief panic attack because I got a little too high on the return trip. Turns out that flying under your own magical power helps with acrophobia, but doesn't prevent it.

'Now, onto one of the cornerstones of my ascension.' I think pretentiously. One of the four patterns I brought into this hellhole. I create my Crystal Minion Tree.

Pretty much what it says on the tin, it's a tree, made of magic quartz, that grows minions on it like giant fruit. It's so beautiful, and not just because it will allow me to create an endless stream of loyal custom people.

Accessing the interface for it, I curse. There are two minion patterns pre-loaded, two of my other cornerstones of power, and I have nowhere near the mana reserves to create them.

Willow Rosenberg, but from an alternate universe. One where a different choice in Halloween costume gave her the skills and abilities of her half-Vulcan Starfleet engineer character, who had followed that up by learning magic from Ethan Rayne, including the Halloween spell, and the Disgaea item portal spell from one of her fellow former costumed revelers.

Hermione Granger, Master of Warding, including the fidelius charm, Master of Runes and Arithmancy from a reality where those are two of the foundational principles of magic, good enough at potion theory and wand lore that she can, given time, recreate all of Wizarding magic that she doesn't already know, good enough at fanfiction Occlumency to not only shield her mind, but control her emotions, have perfect recall, do true multitasking and speed up her perception of time. Master her version of Occlumency, and combat becomes turn based.

And I can't get either of them, even piling on every disadvantage that won't cripple them, won't get me near a cost I can pay.

Right. Not an entirely unexpected problem, and I am a firm believer in multiple backups. For completeness's sake, I bring up the last of my starter patterns. The Silver Screen, a magical artifact that can show any movie or TV show ever made, in any universe, in any variation. Want to see a how to instructional video on making the pyramids, by one of the guys who did it? Easy. Want to see the movies Ed Wood thought he was making? Done.

And it was also too much mana to make. So, more mana.

Fortunately enough, one of the other reasons for taking Archmage (Technomancer Earth), was the cheap, easy mana battery. Cast the Powerstone spell on any semi-precious gem, opal is commonly used, and you have a battery that can store one mana. Cast it over and over again, up to once per carat, and you can have a battery as big as you want. Of course, if you screw up the spell, the stone breaks or gets quirky, and you have to start over with a new one.

Step one, a few experiments to check assumptions. I can make diamonds, emeralds, rubies, etc. from anything that has the right chemistry, but they don't count magically. I can change one gem to another, or squish several together to make a big, flawless one, and still have it count.

Step two, I use almost all the stones I found littering the bay and make a five thousand carat tourmaline. It's pink and green and looks like it would hold all of Krypton's porn, but I still think it's pretty.

Step three, grind. Cast, scan the stone to make sure it hasn't picked up any flaws, repeat. Deconstruct and recreate using the previous pattern when it does pick up flaws. Rest to recover the energy I spent. Realize at this rate it'll take a year to make. Once I have the stupid thing made I'll be able to recreate it for a tiny fraction of the cost to make it originally, but I need the pattern for that first.

I hate grinding. It's the part of video games that kept me from playing a bunch of them. That's one of the reasons I'm a diehard tabletop player, I can just say "My character spends his downtime making potions." and it takes me five seconds.

One of the other things Technomancer Earth provides is a handy way to convert electrical energy to mana. If I had a three hundred sixty kilowatt powerplant, I could make the thing in thirty and a half hours, say three days effort. If I had a three megawatt powerplant, I could do it in a little over 4 hours.

One day's work without it, however, was enough to make one absolutely vital enchantment: Missile Shield. I decided to put it on my watchband, something nice and inconspicuous so I could wear it in public. Now I don't need to concentrate to keep my bullet deflector shields going. A good enough shot, or someone with power assisted aim could still get me, but I had massively increased my survivability. Four hours well spent.

Day two, grind smarter. Power Manipulate my mana reserves and regen. Thinking about how much crap I'd probably breathed in from the bay, I make an essential piece of cape gear. A mask. I went with kind of a bandito look over the nose and mouth, draping down far enough it could be tucked into a shirt so as to be a genuine, protective filter mask. I enchanted it to purify air and water, add hex to make it impossible to remove, add limit so I can remove it. Five hours, but now I'm ready for the next bit.

Entry level costume is reinforced biker gear with helmet and safety glasses. I wish I could make graphene, but just knowing the molecular formula or building the model with the sticks and balls isn't enough, I'm guessing I'll need a sample. I was stuck using a high density, long chain polyethylene a bit stronger than kevlar. I scanned it off the body armor some rich guy had concealed under his suit. A little of that, some titanium, and I was at least bullet and stab resistant, and thusly felt more comfortable going out into the world. Stuffing my trusty powerstone into a small backpack made of the same stuff, I left.

Going through my now standard rigamarole to leave my base without traces, I head out to do some research. It took a while to find out where the local electric company dispatched its trucks from, instead of where to pay bills, more time to get there, and yet more time to find out which high tension and local lines powered where.

I chose the line that feeds Captain's Hill, because screw those rich assholes. If my brown-out ruins their refrigerated stuff, they can replace it. With Invisibility and Resist Lightning running, I make myself a comfortable perch, and Draw Power from it, so I can work on my powerstone. Maintaining three spells while enchanting is definitely not the best way to do things, but in the hour and a half I had before the truck showed up at my pole to fix the problem, I still managed to make it a quarter of the way to fully enchanted. Break down my perch, make sure I and the mana battery are charged, fly down, land some distance away, wrap myself in an Illusion Disguise, and take the bus to the Boardwalk for a meal.

It was while attempting to get enough scans to get a generic burger pattern at Fugly Bob's that I finally got a hit on my power senses. Clockblocker and Kid Win came in for some before patrol fuel. My detection range is only about thirty feet, and I only get an idea of what powers someone has at around five feet. I desperately need to improve that. But first.

"Kid Win, huh? So, when you graduate from the Wards, are you going to become 'Adult Victory'?"

They both groaned. "That's what, second, third time today?" asked Clockblocker.

They ignored me as I walked out.

Perhaps it was because of how distracted I was over my first cape encounter, maybe it was just the sheer number of spells I was juggling to conceal my approach to my base, but when I teleported into my base I was in agony. I had blown the spell. I had forgotten an important fact.

GURPS combat was deadly. The consequence of missing a teleport roll by one was only one die of damage and physically stunned. No chance of accidentally losing pieces or having parts of you appear inside something, making it one of the safer teleport spells available in fiction. One die of damage doesn't sound like much, right?

One die of damage is getting hit in the gut by a middle weight boxer. One die of damage is an average adult male hitting you in a non-vital spot with a collapsible baton.

After recovering from that reminder of my essential squishiness, with a little help from a Major Healing spell, I decided to reevaluate my security measures. I put the stairs and first floor access back, then make my door something on the lighter end of bank vault. Cover it in a permanent Illusion Shell, so it just looks like part of the wall, then put a permanent Avoid on it, so people won't even think to check that part of the wall. It opens inwards, and there's several inches of stone in the way,that must be broken or manipulated out of the way before it can open. Six hours of work, it's three or four o'clock in the morning and my plans for today are screwed up, but now I've got a door I can almost believe is secure enough.

It'll have to do, as I head to bed.

The grind went by in much the same fashion for the next week. Enchant my stealth gear, recharge, work on my powerstone, enchant more stealth gear, recharge, work on the powerstone, enchant protective gear, recharge, enchant underwater gear, etc. Power manipulate my power manipulation for more resolution and range, hit a limit, power manipulate for more power, repeat. By the end of the week I had a hundred yards range and could analyze powers in action over the entire range.

At least I'd managed to get electricity to the base with some solar panels behind an illusion shell, and a self sustaining water system with an Elemental Plumbing enchant. Checking the patterns for the couple of capes I had scanned in the Crystal Minion Tree menus, I was pretty sure that anyone I made based on local capes wouldn't actually have a passenger, so I didn't have to worry about connecting them to depressed crystal space whales.

I realized I was putting things off, like a boyfriend trying to clean his apartment before inviting his girlfriend over. Draining my tanks dry, I managed to get Willow started. It would take a little over a day for her to finish baking, so I recovered enough to go out, recharged off the line for the Medhall offices, grabbed some more raw materials from the bay, and made a second minion tree. I got Hermione started, she'd hatch around twelve hours after Willow.

I was so nervous I ended up making a couch in the room with the trees and hitting myself with Restful Slumber to get some sleep while I waited. I woke up with barely enough time to get cleaned up before Willow hatched.

'Why am I so nervous? She's my minion, she more or less has to like me and do what I say, it takes years of abuse to get them to betray you.' I think.

When she hatched, I was in for a few surprises. One, she was naked. It wasn't that big a surprise, to make her affordable at all, I'd set the tree to only make necessary accessories, like Hermione's wand. Her breasts were perky and natural D-cups, considerably more than the actress who played her was blessed with. Finally, she had antennae.

"Umm, hello?" I said. This was probably the most eloquent thing possible to say in that moment.

She waved. "Willow." she said, then looked frustrated. "Willow." she repeated emphatically.

"I get it, I know, I made you, you're Willow. I'm ... I just realized I never came up with a name." Have I really been so focused on getting what I need to survive this shithole world that I forgot to make up a name for myself?

She shook her head (try to ignore the jiggle), and pressed a small object she had in her hand into mine. I hadn't even realized she came out of the pod with anything. "Willow." she said, even more emphatically.

I looked down at the approximately tennis ball sized and shaped object she had given me.

It was a pokeball.

Realization crashed over me. "Oh fuck."

She brightened, tapping her nose and pointing at me.