Chapter 11-329: What Normal People Can Do

We were rolling out the information harvested from the Winter Solstice display. Those rockets getting fired off were all for very specific purposes, and all of them had been retrieved from the waters of Lake Huron, if at all possible.

Lining up the number of experiments and the devices to send them up past the Shroud, to whatever was Out There.

I was watching out the eyes of Gillespie Grundelbrun, one of the Artificers who’d been earnestly serving with the Shroudzones, and working on all the puzzles and measurements in the downtime offered him by his Item Familiar Puzzles.

“Here is the complete display of height attained, divided by fuel types,” Johnny Cho, the presenter, started out with. I studied the graphs he was showing in the Holo, working out the math by eyeball, painting in the data displayed and listing it out in my own Visual File.

Things were not looking promising.

All of the chemical fuels that worked under the Shroud had exploded within seconds of clearing it. Furthermore, samples of gasoline and aviation fuel, among other things, had also gone spontaneous.

The only fuels which lasted to the end were alchemical in mixture and nature, which had naturally added another layer of cost in the form of Energized components.

It meant that when the Shroud went down, all the gasoline in the world was going to light off, as well as anything else chemically refined, like normal kerosene.

Someone who invented a cheap way to make usable oils and greases alchemically was going to be very rich. Someone who held onto those processes was going to end up dead, so this information was getting published and put Out There.

Far more worrisome was the data on oil.

The various grades in the oil had started reacting VERY unusually when they went through the Shroud, according to the divinations pulled out of the sampling cores. They were starting to Animate and coagulate weirdly, pulling in negative energy of various kinds and degrees.

One had survived re-entry, and proved to be energetically eager to consume organic material, forming a Black Pudding as it grew.

It meant every single oil field in existence could evolve into something, and the ancient dead materials that were part of it were extremely dangerous substances that we really, really did not want to deal with.

I Summoned up Elrii, and asked her about it. She confirmed that the Black Blood of the Land was one of the things most sought after by the Tomblords of the various dead worlds, powering many of their great projects and enhancing their servants.

The Alchemists of Heavenbound Hall were soon redirected into a new avenue of research under the direction of one of my thoughtstreams. It had to be quick, as we were now racing the Shroud.

---

“The pathing of the various substances and the various forms of batteries included in the coring samples are displayed here. Let’s start with the standard copper...” the new presenter went on, her voice professionally calm, but her face was clearly worried.

I looked at the circuit boards and wiring of various kinds, with varying amperage and voltage tolerances.

None of the mundane materials could contain an electrical charge. Standard computer memory and circuitry leaving the Shroud had slagged nearly as fast as the volatile fuels had blown up.

Alchemically-treated materials of various kinds had fared better. I studied the tolerance levels closely. They had managed to cram dozens of different kinds of materials in various sizes into the test kits, but of course that was a mere tithe of what was available. Much, much more testing was going to be necessary before the Shroud came down to get a clearer picture.

From what I was deducing, it would be possible to keep a more primitive computer working in a White Zone of purified mana, and certainly within a Grey Zone of anti-magic. Out in the normal world, no.

No more Vaccines and hand-held electronics like that. I sent off that notification right to Gritworks and other major electronic firms post-haste. Gritworks started cycling down production and re-tooling within an hour, and the other firms reluctantly began to follow.

Data storage and calculating engines were going to have to be entirely reconfigured at a lower tech level, and optimally with Energized materials. The first ones were going to have to get into place quickly in order to start transferring essential data from the existing databases.

Wonderfully, radio waves seemed to work normally for communication, although portable radios were going to be bulky and alchemical to function properly.

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“Stress tolerances for vakker technology was not encouraging,” another engineer, thin-faced and with bags under his eyes, went on to the next stage. The whole tree of vakker-tech still worked, but only at larger sizes... unless you used alchemical materials with supernatural heat tolerances, as lightning got VERY ornery when harnessed.

It just doubled down on the fact that any kind of computer engine was going to be bigger and a lot more expensive than it used to be. The exact tolerances weren’t known; I would need to Open the Sky and more rockets were going to have to go up, the latter of which were already being devised and transported to White Sands in New Mexico, with lots of Artificers from across the planet working on devising tests and measures for the modules inside them.

Entire industries were simply going to vanish overnight in the face of this information. The oil industry had better stop drilling NOW... and it might not be soon enough. Existing oil had to be refined, made non-magical, and then burned as fast and hot as possible.

The amount of push-back on that was not small, as there was a LOT of money involved. However, finding out the ecologically-damaging practices of oil drilling was also threatening the life of everything on the planet, the Landbound were going to be all over this shit, as were the Druids.

The Black Blood of the Land... there hadn’t been the same problem back on Terra-Luna, but the mana that had come in hadn’t had decades to percolate, and our Rapture of Fire had been utterly devastating, likely consuming existing supplies before they could be transformed.

Hells, maybe burning off all that oil over the decades had been helpful in reducing our supply of the stuff, and the eventual problems it could cause? It was a weird thought, but it made an odd sort of sense...

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I was constantly in the middle of the datastream. I had twelve Ranks in Alchemy, Chemistry, and Math, a combination not found among anyone else on the planet. I did not, however, have anything related to electronics or electrical engineering, my Engineering knowledge avoiding higher Tech that wasn’t Alchemy-based or Magitech.

I sold the basic design of the PMD to Gritworks for a cut of the sales price in perpetuity, backed by Forj and Mimir-clad contracts. Gritworks could then license it to others.

A Perpetual Motion Device in a magical world vs a technological one were very different things. In a magical world, it was a device that simply stayed in motion without an appreciable fuel source, i.e., magically. In a technology world, it was simply a 100% efficient closed-loop circuit of energy that didn’t provide any energy, it just stayed in motion.

PMD’s were Disks of various sizes, equipped with gears so they could provide mechanical power to places or devices. The primary use of them on Terra-Luna was to provide power sources for tractors to till fields.

The normal means of powering them was to turn gravity at a right angle to the axis of rotation, effectively providing them with endless power as gravity forced them to rotate and move. Naturally, the bigger and heavier the PMD, the more mechanical power it could provide. Add in some kinetic transfer stuff to control the speed, vibration and friction reduction, and you get wheels on the fly that keep on turning, don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow...

I hummed the song as the retooling of the whole world began. Unlike Terra-Luna, they’d gotten over the worst shock of the initial rise of magic, and now had months, if not years, to ease themselves into the next stage.

But there were still things that had to die, and which I couldn’t take the time to kill myself.

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A short, rather squat African woman came up next, looking very no-nonsense and extremely grim. “I only got one thing to show all of you, and it unfortunately matches what we were told. Actively radioactive material.”

Breaths hissed out all around, and this time it wasn’t a replay of Divination results, but just a magnified hologram as seen through watching telescopes.

The crazy play of lights, the singing carrots, the explosion of worm-jaws, the razor-spirals of gaily polka-dotted ribbons... it all matched up to a wild magic eruption.

“Two ounces of plutonium,” Dr. Elma informed everyone, watching the replay from several angles with everyone in the dark room. “It didn’t even make it to the apex of its flight before it went off.” She circled a few of the explosions with a glowing finger that left a trail in the illusions. “That core explosion is a hundred feet across here, with some of these ribbons and stuff reaching out to two hundred yards.”

Someone spoke up, “So, nuclear power...”

“If we have any brains at all, we’ll send all our nukes and refined nuclear material up above the Shroud and let the wild magic take them... because if they blow off down here after it goes down, things are going to get bad.”

I reflected that it was really good that Russia and China had never entered the Cold War of atomics, and even India and the other major powers didn’t have them here. Atomic energy was very concentrated in the West, and overall had proven pretty useless, since nobody was fighting a World War at the moment.

All those missiles buried in silos going off had not been a small thing. Almost thankfully, that wasn’t a problem here. Nukes were smaller and tended to be shot from planes or mounted on cruise missiles, as they had to stay below the Shroud. The idea of making ICBM’s and stuff never took off, because they could never get past the Shroud without blowing apart.

But, there was another use for the things.

-Gregorigori, I need you to make a couple of phone calls for me.-

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Riding down the Avenue of America on the Old Steed was certain to draw attention, but I didn’t particularly care, and the Steed didn’t mind showing off, either. He was the most powerful Eidolon on the planet, these people weren’t a threat to him, and they weren’t possibly going to get in his way.

The Pentagon had never been built in this world out in Virginia, but something similar had been built here in the District of Washington. Here it was The Pentagram, not the Pentagon, and magically speaking, it was one of the most secure buildings in the world, effectively being inside one huge magical Formation designed to keep snoopers, extraplanars, and magical influences out.

I actually thought I’d be meeting them there, but instead the President had wanted to meet me in the Situation Room of the White House. It was a reasonable move, and the Canadian Prime Minister had already been in town, given the very intense national merger talks that were going on now.

I was aware the upper ranks of the national military forces did not like me, but that was par for the course. They were being thrown into a hugely tumultuous situation, without knowing if their forces would be able to remain intact, or chains of command, the whole lot.

The flip side is that they got the choice to do it, and the warning. Otherwise, their forces might have been obliterated by what was going on.

Gunpowder and munitions fell very clearly into the realm of things that were going to go boom, after all.