[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
Well, turns out that trying to schedule my sleep was just as ineffective here as it was back in my original world, because I woke up and it was completely dark outside - not the expected result of a two hour nap. I wriggled in my covers, still feeling the dysphoria that came with a complete erasure of two and a half years of hormone replacement therapy progress, and jerked myself out of bed.
I guess I wasn't going to get information today at all, and my mind immediately began running around about five other ideas for what to do. I still had that burger that I could easily reheat from earlier, which I did. It wasn't quite so delicious this time though, but still worth it. I now had 4 ideas on what to do and essentially spent an hour thinking about how much I needed to do each of them, until I eventually decided on resource extraction from the ground. It would spike the power grid - a risk I was aware of but in this case willing to take as compared to the issue where I could be seen pulling from other buildings or scrapheaps. It may set off some tinker alarms in the Protectorate but I was in an abandoned-enough area that I doubted the more local sensors were that well-maintained.
I shifted my specialty into disassembly and fugued into tearing apart all my tinkertech and all the other machines here except the implant and the foam walls and bed, and I was left with neat chunks of metal, CNC processors, glass, and lenses for reassembly into something I could use to truly bootstrap myself. I pushed my tinker power to maximum in the concept of resource gathering and then pushed for ways to pull arbitrary contents from the ground. While anything related to element transmutation via fusion or fission was still well beyond my capabilities, extracting pure elements like silicon and calcium from the ground (with a fairly large power drain however) was within my means. Conveniently, this provided a good avenue for expanding the area I had to work with by generating a fuck-off massive hole in the ground that could work either as an escape tunnel or as an access point to an underground base (ha! take that Coil, I'mma steal your shtick!).
Using a couple of CNC processors and some of the lasers, I designed a machine to produce drill bits, and converted significant amounts of metal into a thick, coiled wire that I'd need to stab directly into the grid. There was no way plugs could cope with the power drain from the drill and elemental separator, and sadly I really did not have the resources for generators of my own - even with a power generation specialty (in fact for that I really needed elementally pure carbon, that was my main bottleneck at the moment). As such, I went to work in a partial tinker fugue, magnetising metal for the drill and shaping drill bits to extreme precision, enough that they would wear down such that they didn't become non-functional until there was almost nothing left of them.
The elemental separator was a potent piece of tinkertech. While the design was more efficient with carbon, I could pull together something that did the same job for a higher energy cost, using iron and lasers to induce bond-separation in common rocks and ground materials like dirt. Several hours later - as the sun was rising - and I'd successfully assembled the entire digging and extraction system using barely more than used scrap. Now of course I had to use it without wrecking various bits of underground infrastructure like electricity lines or water or gas lines.
Repurposing a few lasers and more processors, as well as a magnet to produce a speaker, I constructed a simple sonar which would detect changes in material underground. I had almost nothing left in my piles, but that was fine, because now I could consume the ground for resources! And so, with care, I jacked my drills and elemental extractor into the powergrid, aimed at a 45 degree angle that would just barely miss various lines (most importantly the bundle of fibre that I was planning to hijack for Internet access), and pulled down the lever with a resounding thunk to turn it on. With a raging hum that was music to my ears, the drills sank their teeth into the ground, ripping a hole in the floor - the silicon pile (and some carbon from the dirt that was apparently under the floor) were climbing rapidly, and I was left to my own devices for a while, though it was already almost midday before significant progress had truly been made.
Once again I was reminded how alone I was in this world and I kind of deflated, but it did get me to thinking about the problem. At the very least, I could probably talk to people on the internet and consider people to approach for friendship. I pretty much curled up on the bed and waited, somewhat sourly, for the drill to reach the fibre.
And then I pushed my specialisation towards communication infrastructure at tinker 10 level, which apparently let me straight up just make fibre from the glass I had left over from the lasers in about 5 minutes flat, though it was less flexible than proper fibre cable. I had to use the same manufacturing machine I used for drill bits and reprogram it to produce the interface between the existing fibre cable and my own shoddy replication of one. I also needed to obtain a router that could actually tap fibre, which ironically would probably be the hardest bit without some more money, though I could always steal Medhall's, I thought with a shrug. My base was getting pretty comfy, but it was still extremely barebones and didn't really match how I liked my living spaces to be - it was way too wide open rather than my preferred "small and highly connected rooms".
Ultimately, my problem right now was that I needed more money, to pull resources from shops - like a laptop (even if I could steal Medhall's router, which might be more difficult than I initially thought as much as depriving Nazis of internet access amused me, I'd still need a clean computer to put Linux on to or something - I idly wondered if Earth Bet had used laptops on the market, but then I recalled that computing technology here was about several years behind and even older laptops were probably too slow for my purposes) - that I couldn't make myself. My only reliable method of getting money that didn't involve outing myself - because I was too much of dysfunctional mess to get a normal job and I didn't exactly have ID anyway - came from, essentially, beating up Nazis. Or, come to think of it, I now had internet access - I could hack the Gesselschaft or something, but that would require me to have a definitively traceable bank account (or use the Numberman, but that was a way to get straight on Cauldron's radar). And then another thought came to me - why just steal cash when I can probably extract the pins from debit cards of gangsters and take way more money from them?
It was with that thought that I snuck out of my door - carefully watching for any sign of discovery and luckily finding none so far - and headed further in to Empire territory again, with my spiked knuckles and retractable toe spikes equipped. It was approaching evening, but it was still light, which meant I needed to stick to alleys.
Scanning around myself with my eyes, dashing from behind dumpsters when anyone in front of me was turned away, frequently checking behind me, I rapidly approached the richer areas of downtown, closer to the commercial district and Medhall, until I came down a particularly well-maintained side-street and my heart raced as I hid behind a dumpster and saw Kaiser himself in costume patrolling past me down the street. While I'd love to punch his smug Nazi face I was nowhere near in a position to do so and had to endure a tense wait for him to go around the corner at the end of the street. I waited a few more minutes - much of it just trying to calm myself down a little - before moving on to find another singular E88 gangster in an alley with no-one to see. I took him out as easily as the one a couple days ago, grabbed his card and legged it once again, as the sun began to set - allowing me more free movements while remaining stealthy.
Back at my home base, my drill had apparently been hard at work, with an almost 30 metre deep circular tunnel underground and correspondingly massive piles of silicon and calcium (and a little carbon). Behind the warehouse I had co-opted, the plants I grabbed earlier hadn't died, and would provide a good genetic baseline for some of the things I planned on bioengineering in the future. I pulled the CNC chip out of the drill manufacturing machine (I had really got significant usage out of these chips since I got here), pushed my specialties for 3 charges into Hardware Security and 2 into Scrapyard Manufacturing which let me rewrite the CNC chip to exploit identifiable flaws in the card chip hardware when provided an appropriate interface - which was easy to make with jury-rigging effectively as a specialty.
As such, I now had the pin of this card and was thoroughly prepared to go grab cash out of a machine, except for the complete lack of sunlight. I decided to try and sleep, but I rolled and rolled and could not manage, probably because of when I got up beforehand. My mind instead drifted into ideas for new, more powerful technology and things I should deal with. First thing - I needed to figure out the date, because I still didn't know other than being aware that it was at least post-Undersider formation since Bitch had recognised Tattletale's name. Once I had a laptop I was going to be doing significant amounts of research to check information unavailable (or more likely, that I just didn't remember) from Worm canon, and using it to store tinkertech blueprints. I did remember that I should probably warn Mouse Protector about the Slaughterhouse 9, and as I thought about that I realised I should probably tell people about the Siberian's gimmick as well. Time passed fast, thinking about all kinds of other things I wanted to do, and I did eventually fall asleep, dreaming of bioengineering and logistics.
[end of chapter - nya~]