Chapter 274: Designing Astronomical Protection

Chapter 274: Designing Astronomical Protection

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

Another enormous segment of the factory went up in the amount of time it took Perry to blink.

Now another.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe

While Perry worked, he mulled over his priorities.

So, our primary goal is: Keep family alive.

Secondary goal: Survive.

Tertiary goal: Save the world from Solaris, who seems to have gone off the deep end.

It didn’t take someone with 2000 IQ (that wasn’t a thing) to figure out that once Perry had stamped out the mimic epidemic, his value to Solaris dwindled, and that might put him on the chopping block.

The answer was not to drag his feet on fixing the mimic problem. That was not an option. If portions of the Anchors had been turned, there was no reason his family was off the table. Honestly, he wanted to revisit the idea of sending them on vacation to Manitia for a couple months now that things had gotten...a little out of control.

Except it was too late for that. Solaris was holding them hostage against Perry’s good behavior, and sending them away would trigger an instakill.

He’d tried.

The probability dodge had gotten about halfway through explaining that he wanted to evac them before it’d blinked out.

So how do you defeat someone who moves at the speed of light? Nothing I can make has that kind of speed.

Not to mention, Solaris is effectively a walking nuclear weapon. If he can move from place to place with his clothes on, that implies that he’s able to impart his ability onto a small amount of matter and take that with him when he moves.

So, in theory, Solaris could take a baseball and accelerate it to the speed of light. That would...

Perry did the math in his head while he checked all the factories.

No more city. wow.

I’m not sure my Mark Nine could handle those forces. Perry did the math.

Nope.

Again, Perry was working with multipliers in the thousands, and while that made for some ungodly sturdy materials, the speed of light was a real bitch.

...Can I modify photons? Perry thought, glancing down at the glowing ring on his finger. His wedding ring had been made from a laser he’d struck Gorm with, whose reality-warping effects had congealed the beam into a liquid. He’d then used his Spendthrift perk to make it more structurally stable so it could be formed into rings.

Obviously there’s some wiggle room there.

Perry still had some feathers, but there was no way to guarantee similar results. He’d been shooting straight into Gorm’s chest, which had thousands of overlapping strands of reality-warping feathers, and there was no way to know what had done it except to exhaustively brute-force combinations.

That implied time Perry didn’t have.

What about my crystal?

Paradox had experimented with trapping light before, specifically to contain Gor’s Disintegration in a stable form.

I had...a fractal mirror box, and a crystal. The crystal turned out to be the more viable of the two options, but I’m wondering...

The fractal mirror box was created when I was level 4, with 23 Attunement, and I was able to make a box that could capture light for 2 seconds with chrome paint and evaporating crystals.

...What could I do now?

Perry checked his stats for the first time in quite a while.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 18

HP: 13

Body: 135

Stability: 136

Nerve: 135

Attunement: 135

Free Points: 0

XP to next level: 26210

Oh, look at that, about halfway to the next level. He’d been gradually accruing Xp over the last...Nearly a year.

Perry stifled a sigh of relief and added that Probability to the control group, enacting no further changes to preserve it for an hour.

At the end of that hour, heart hammering in his chest, Perry took a risk. This is it. After this, I’m committing myself to opposing Solaris, because if he finds a suit of armor specifically designed to fight him, or if he did catch it, but just decided to wait and see what I do with it...I’m as good as dead.

Perry wanted to take a deep, steadying breath, but Solaris was watching him. Solaris was everywhere.

Perry collapsed the probabilities down to the one that had successfully hidden the prototype.

A fraction of a second passed, and Perry didn’t die.

Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe (32)

Perry branched out again into another 32 possibilities.

One hurdle passed.

Now I need to create a material that can withstand other materials moving at c.

Dregor’s Binding might actually be able to help with that, too.

The voodoo-like magic allowed properties to transition between a simulacrum and the real world, with much stronger expression than something like magnetism.

Perry momentarily though of dad’s armor, which was (possibly) held together by magnetism, which forced every millimeter of the armor to maintain it’s position, affording excellent protection from kinetic force, essentially buttressing the material with magnetic force.

Lenz’s law, perhaps?

If Perry created a phantom area around himself that induced a current based on objects moving through it, then the object’s force would create a magnetic force that would oppose itself, and in effect, slow itself down. The faster it moved, the more it would slow itself down.

He could effectively translate kinetic force into electricity.

There’s just one issue. The induced current will have energy on par with a nuclear bomb. Where will THAT energy go?

Wait...I’m a Battery Tinker, too.

Perry reviewed his relevant perks.

Super-Capacitor: Storage devices you create have increased capacity, efficiency, charge and discharge rates.

Atypical Battery: You may create devices that store and release on command any kind of intangible force without changing its form, such as heat, cold, motivation, light, maternal disapproval, magnetism, chemical potential, kinetic energy and more.

I think it’s time I really lean into the Battery Tinker portion of my Class. Perry thought. Could Perry make a portable battery powerful enough to store a nuclear blast?

Let’s do the math.

Spendthrift multiplier for reactions (in this case, energy storage) = 725 (Base attunement)

In his testing, Perry had found that the base multiplier for the super-capacitor Perk was 100X, multiplying it by his Attunement gave him 72500.

Multiplying those two together gave him...

52,562,500X

So, if I create a single AA battery, it can store...

Perry translated into Joules.

One AA battery has 10 kilojoules, so multiply that by fifty two million...

About half a Terajoule.

1 Megaton nuclear bomb equals approximately four thousand Terajoules.

That’s not an apples to apples, comparison, though. He’ll be throwing things at light speed. Let’s figure out how many joules are in...say, a penny thrown at the speed of light.

Thanks Einstein, Perry thought, plugging the weight of a penny into E=mc^2.

A moment later...

Fuck you, Einstein, you bitch!

224 terajoules in a penny!? Are you kidding me!?

Perry needed to effectively strap five hundred AA batteries to his suit to absorb Solaris lazily flinging a penny at him at the speed of light.

I mean, sure, it’s amazing I even have that option, but it’s not gonna cut it. I need more powerful batteries. By a few orders of magnitude.

All this math was done using a storebought AA battery as the basis. If I design and create a battery that is vastly more powerful before applying my perks...then we might be on to something...

Perry got to work.

Outwardly, he continued supervising the production of mimic testing serum at a relatively sedate pace.

Internally, he was furiously designing a solution to The Solaris Problem.