Chapter 16-424: Testing, Testing...

While all this excitement was going on, the test-firings of rockets and missiles were going on.

Many of the experiments didn’t need to be guided, and basically we were just looking for when and how they exploded. There was no need for complex systems, as long as they made it above the Haze. Fiery contrails were blazing skywards from all over the edges of Lake Huron, both in Michigan and Canada, looking for more data on conditions of science and magic above the Haze.

The results were not heartening, and I could tell by some of the distant detonations that they were backing up what had been already analyzed to be in effect.

Nay-sayers were going to have to shut up, eat their words, and either knuckle down to the reality of being primitive again, or get magical and do something about it.

Work, as they say, eventually solves everything. We just needed to verify the directions we needed to work in.

I sighed and considered how many smelteries for junk we were going to need to set up. There were millions of tons of metal that would need to be disposed of and melted down for retasking, a much simpler task than mining new ore. A certain someone could make Permanent Walls of Fire hot enough to do just that...

We’d have a better look at the sky and the solar system we were in this time, too. We’d identified several potential orbiting planets, guesstimated distances, and were tracking them. Whether or not these would actually be in those orbits was another matter.

Magical universe, anything could happen. We were pretty sure one of the distant worlds had its own moon-sized sun orbiting it... and the odds were two of the planets were orbiting outside the standard orbital plane.

Or maybe we were. Nothing said all the planets had to be in the same orbital plane in a magical universe...

Another of the things we were looking at was trying to see if the sun was actually spinning, or just sitting there spewing out fire and heat. If it wasn’t spinning, why would there be an orbital plane? The system could be more like an atom or something...

I also had another message to compose.

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Ho, Original Knucklehead! Number Einz Traveler Morningdark calling! Here’s the Algorithm!****************...

New items of interest...

First, The Shroud seems to transport worlds into magical realms once it engulfs them. This alternate Earth I’m on retained most tech capability for now, but we’re doing tests outside the Shroud itself and it seems to be a tech-restricted magical universe similar to Terra-Luna. When I purge the Shroud the Tech Level is going to plummet, with some modifiers to available magic. Still no Soul Magic available in this realm...

Two, it is definitely possible to pull things up to CR 20 into the Shroud, although they can’t leave. Our CR 21 Planetar Cleric/4 is certain that if he leaves, he’d be memory-wiped, so he’s staying here. If the Summoners are dumb enough to bring in something appropriate to the Shroud, the Shroud will instantly deem them fit to be a Shroudlord, and the Summoners get ganked as its first minions!

Three, Location Coordinates: #*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#. I’ll do a fine-tuning when I get a Pyramid set up. I’ve held off making one so as not to alert the enemy.

Four, confirmed Pentara as the nexus world to here, so a quick possible Jump from here to there to get you home, if you can make it here.

Five, confirmed a Pact Mortai and Pact Morituri, and by Shroud harmonics, this should be available across ALL SHROUDWORLDS. Here are the details (*). The Curse of the Dawn might/might not be accessible on other worlds. If we can precipitate it across Shrouded Worlds, it would be of immense help to everyone involved.

Six, here’s the names and faces of some of the people I trust here. (*#*#*). You will find My Warlock Legion especially interesting...

Seven, here’s some information on Worldenders. (*) This is what we think is going to happen here, and I’m planning some Pyramid Power Pugnacity to counter it...

Eight, is the Level I’m frozen at, although I’ve got functioning Theurgy at Fourteen. As I expected, the Shrouded Souls are forcing me to catch up on my Masteries, nothing revolutionary...

Nine, it has been 182 solar days since the last time I Sent to you, for comparison of temporal flows.

Ten, we figured out how to recruit Shoggoths, of all things. Credit a Blooded, of all people! Here’s the details...

That’s pretty much it. We’re slowly dealing with random elements of Cultivators, Shattered, pocket worlds, undersea forces, and there were even Cold Blood dragons here in an inhabited Hollow World. This Earth was crazy under the surface, literally.

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The return Sending came in only an hour later, which was a good sign.

Return Sending with Fistbumps included! (#*#*#*#*##*#*#*#*#*#*#*#)

I decoded it and watched it unfold in front of me, reading with interest.

Point One: None of the others managed to reply to me, although the Sendings found their targets.

That wasn’t ominous at all, no, no.

Point Two: I wasn’t sent here randomly. Korbald is here! I’ve a feeling you aren’t there randomly, nor the others.

My eyes glittered. Mithar could be such a bloody subtle hand when He wanted to be. He might not even be able to see the Shroud, but He’d sensed the hand of the Aberrant get involved, and He’d sent me on that path...

Then where had He sent the others, and why? Inquiring minds wanted to know! Ael had found the missing Ironskull his own bad self on some random world out in the multiverse... no, no, there were no Divine hands at play, nosirree...

Four: I completed my Karmic streamlining successfully, and am currently constructing a Pyramid to send myself home, after a bit of an altercation to charge it up. It’s been almost six months exactly for me too, so the timestreams are synchronizing between us.

I raised an eyebrow. Charging up an entire Pyramid? A BIT of an altercation? That would take a bit of a Karmic Buffet... like clearing out a Dead March or something.

Sounded fun! Temporal harmonics working as expected, getting rid of fast/slow chronal advantages...

Five: The Ghost-Stealing Ki trick doesn’t work with Weaponized Spells here, but it does work with normal Weapons. I usually recharge by physically clouting things with Mortus Dius, or using an Autobow, of all things.

Made sense. Find the Flaw allowed the delivery of very strong single strikes. Clear out some chaff in melee or shoot them down to recharge the Ki Pool...

I noted I might have to do the same thing if and when it came time, so I’d better have a recharge system in place. The Cleave Train and Whirlwind combos would do the job the best... wonderful. These muscles were going to come in useful...

Maybe I should make myself up an Autobow, too. It sounded like there had to be actual physical activity, so even if I got a Manticore Tail variant up and working, it would be useless for ranged attacks.

Ugh. Then again, more non-magic alternatives in case of emergency could hardly be a bad thing. More Greyfields were coming, after all...

Six: The Worldender information is depressing, and I’m sure there are more out there. Will make more inquiries and start making more plans...

Well, that was inevitable given our hyperactive brains...

Seven: Sendings couldn’t reach Terra-Luna, it seems I have to get closer. This Pyramid Jump will only get me closer, so we’ll see what happens.

Someone wanted him to go hopping from world to world. Definitely wouldn’t interfere with that process either, uh-uh.

Eight: Shoggoth. Oh, holy Mithar. That guy is nuts.

Best of luck to you! You know I’ll be tracking you down and staying available, so keep me posted!

That I would do. Go world-hopping, learn new stuff, send it off to help the worlds and the people on them, just like Sama, Briggs, and I were doing here.

Places to go, things to do. Sounded like my life.

He’d found Korbald the Ironskull, waaaay out there. That would’ve taken a lot of force and power, and obviously Mithar had to know they were there, or He wouldn’t have sent Ael there, too.

More pointedly, Korbald’s people hadn’t tried to come back, so they hadn’t known the way, and Ael had likely quietly pointed out that they probably couldn’t come back, which would be just as bad.

He hadn’t mentioned how long Korbald’s people had been there, either, but it likely wasn’t a short time, and when you get that many Tens in one place, power gathers to them naturally.

Getting that full story was likely going to have to wait a while.

The rockets’ red and orange and yellow and blue and green glares lit off in the night, and I watched and calculated, not liking what I was seeing, but it was what it was, and there was nothing to do for it but work to get ready for it.

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Everything we were doing here on the Shrouded Earth was actually part of a huge, huge grace period. Magic had come and caught everyone blind-sided in ‘41, especially all the undead getting up. Even with modern tech, the world would have fallen... and the only reason firearms had stayed active and saved us was the Curse of the Dawn.

The Curse of the Dawn would leave with the Shroud, leaving us in a magical world the people had to be ready for.

Grit Firearms was already making alchemical ammunition 24/7. It wasn’t to stockpile them; it was so that everyone who had a gun had at least a handful of shells to use. Now, the wealthy and the powerful would want to stockpile, but what good did that do the average person?

So, they were making offers on a lottery system. If some people chose to resell their alch-amm, and doubtless some would, well, that was that... and it helped redistribute money from the top down, as it were.

There were a lot of complaints from governments and the like who wanted to monopolize the ammunition, and Grit had simply said they’d shut down if they couldn’t sell to the average firearm owner. If the military wanted ammo, there were other sources they could get it from... albeit without the Grit reputation behind it.

Alchemical ammunition suddenly became a VERY hot commodity, prices immediately shooting to three and four and more times what Grit was selling them for. On the flip side, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of rounds of normal ammunition were traded back in, and sent off to Shroudzones to be burned up killing undead.

There was a lot of ammunition out there. One of the interesting side effects was that new Six+’s in China could leave off making ammunition and bullets for themselves, and make alch-amm once they trained up the Skill Ranks to do so. Alchemy was the common man’s magic, after all.

It did put a lot of production lines and people out of work as production of normal ammunition began to taper off. Grit Firearms promised to keep open a production line or three as a stopgap, but basically at this point armories and arsenals around the world were being emptied, because there was no point in keeping them around.

It turned out the brass or steel shells from spent cartridges had the magical resonance that made them ideal for alch-amm, however, so all those were getting recycled. Grit even started setting up a Greyfield site for discharging normal ammunition, just to harvest the shells...

Alchemical munitions would never be as cheap and easy as scientific ones, but they wouldn’t spontaneously combust when magic came down, so nobody regretted it.