Chapter 34: Magic

Chapter 34: Magic

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The next morning was spent on one long shopping trip across multiple cities. I jumped from store to store buying makeup, clay, masks and everything else I needed to make three face changing masks, two for Natasha's and one for Ema. After that I had to travel to Texas to another metal stock shop, one who happened to have a supply of nitinol. I ended up buying all of the nitinol they had, which turned out to be a bunch of spools of wire and a large stack of sheets, as it was too useful to pass up. While I was there I also bought a bunch more titanium, molybdenum aluminum and tungsten. I ended up storing it all, along with all of the metal I had left over, at the quarry, covered with a large tarp, which I also had to buy.

After that I visited a Walmart in Illinois to buy everything I needed to make more transformation cards as well as a bunch of new stuff for the quarry in an attempt to make working there more comfortable. I bought some sturdy tables, a large party tent, a bunch of large storage bins, some comfortable furniture and a ready to build storage shed. I left Ema at the quarry after she volunteered to set it all up while I continued shopping.

I went to a jewelry store in New York next, buying four pieces of jewelry, two size five rings, a locket necklace with a magnetic latch and a bracelet, all simple designs as I'm pretty sure Black Widow was a fan of understated elegance more than extravagance. I ended up getting two simple rings for myself as well, having decided to make two hold out guns for myself in case I was ever disarmed. Finally on a whim I bought a variety of relatively cheap jewelry, all of it simple and as unisex as possible since jewelery that heavily leaned towards women tended to have a for women concept. I ended up spending forty thousand dollars on random jewelry of various types.

After I was done finding what I needed for Black Widows projects I started shopping for my next big one, the danger sense. After some thinking I separated it into a two part project. Step one was figuring out a way to separate the magic from the electricity I got from absorbing my lightning gun. Magic was proving to be a massive game changer, functioning as some sort of bridge between concepts, smoothing out issues in general. I tried to come up with a few ideas to separate them but only came up with one. The upside was that I didn't need to buy anything to test that theory, I already had what I needed.

The second part of my project was where I would actually be making something. I needed to cobble together the concepts to form the framework for danger sense, which the simplified magic could then form into actual danger sense.

Hopefully.

I bounced around New York City and Austin, buying things like motion sensors, glass breaking sensors, heart rate monitors and security cameras. I bought smoke and carbon dioxide sensors, civilian geiger counters and replacement impact sensors for cars. I also spent a few hours trolling through book stores, managing to find three kids books about avoiding dangerous things, a book on cold reading, two books about subconscious instincts and gut feelings and one book about how to identify risks. My final stop was a crystal shop in Illinois, where I bought chunks of labradorite, azurite, fluorite, sodalite and lapis lazuli, all stones supposedly related to intuition and insight. I also grabbed a bag full of leather bands, meant to be worn around your arm or bicep, though that wouldn't stop me from wearing it on my legs.

When I was finally done shopping for the day it was a few hours past noon. I traveled back to the apartment, grabbed all leftovers from previous builds and traveled back to the quarry. Ema had already finished setting up the shed and the tent, so I helped her set up everything else, putting most of the leftovers in storage boxes, putting those, as well as all of the green gun crates into the shed.

As a test I carded the shed, which made me a bit unsteady and bleary eyed for a moment before I recovered. I pushed the shed right back out before going inside and grabbing some of what I needed for Natasha's project, with Ema following to grab the rest.

To make sure I remembered the recipe correctly I quickly whipped up another face changing mask. After checking to make sure it worked as well as it felt it would I handed it to Ema, who instead of using it stored it inside herself, already setting up her default states to store and keep the mask and her ring of archery ready.

With the recipe now fresh in my mind I started over, this time doing my best to make two at once. It was relatively easy and by the end of it I had two masks that were tied even closer together than the landing pads and Bifrost vambrace were. I would have been worried if I ever planned on using the extra for anything other than keeping track of Natasha. The last step was taking one of the extra compasses and combining it with an on off switch before combining it to the spare mask. It did little to change the mask save make it a little bronze in color and add four arrows around the edges. I added a second before it finally shifted shape, becoming a compass like device.

I examined the still normal looking mask and couldn't tell any difference from my usual one, it worked the exact same way as far as I could tell. The only difference was that conceptually it was connected to another object, and even that had weakened slightly. Still, the second you picked up the compass-like object, now only a faint brass color, you could immediately tell where the mask was.

"Alright, only one last hurdle." I said, reaching over and grabbing one set of Natasha samples.

"Are you worried the bonding will sever the grouping?" Ema asked as looked up from the glock magazines she was loading.

I nodded and quickly bonded the mask to her, pushing it back out into my hands. The mask was a perfect replication of Natasha's face in white porcelain, but nothing else about it changed. I had half expected there to be a Black Widow symbol somewhere but other than the shape of the mask there was nothing different. Mentally crossing my fingers I picked up the compass, pumping a fist when I could clearly feel the mask.

"Alright Ema, I'm putting you in charge of this. You don't need to always have it on but I need you to check it frequently. I don't think they would call our bluff, not after what I've been making, but you never know."

Ema nodded and stretched out her arm to accept the compass, pulling it back and storing it inside her chest, finishing the last few mags before standing and carrying them over to me. I combined seven glock magazines together, resulting in a single mag that carried a hundred and nineteen rounds, seemingly managing to avoid the wall of diminishing returns. Still, having a pistol weigh exactly the same but carrying a hundred rounds was impressive. I repeated the process to get a second mag of the same size.

After I was done making the magazines I examined the guns themselves. They had given me six of them, all modified slightly. The sight was raised so that a silencer wouldn't block them, the mag well had a fluted attachment for easier reloading and the trigger was modified in a way I didn't recognize, which probably meant it wasn't commercially available.

"No change." I explained before Ema could ask. "Still a capacitor for magic and electricity, just empty."

I leaned back in my chair, going over my admittedly limited knowledge of electricity and what I knew about how concepts worked. My theory seemed like a bust, but honestly I knew so little about electricity past the "Zap, ouch!" part I couldn't be sure.

"I need to know more about how batteries and capacitors work." I said before looking at Ema. "Do you want to come back with me or stay here? I won't be long."

"I'll stay and keep an eye on everything, maybe start packing up all the guns." She volunteered. "You are done with the guns for today right?"

I nodded and traveled home, sitting down on the couch and pulling the laptop closer. It took me a few minutes to find a good video, but eventually I sat back and started to watch. I quickly realized that while a lot of this made sense, it was clearly not going to help me. I clicked on another video, not really listening as I thought, until I saw someone driving a spike into the ground. I re-winded the video and watched it from the beginning. He was driving in something called a grounding rod. Something specifically designed to ground out electricity, dissipating it into the ground.

I rushed out the door and into the night, spending an hour rushing through a few hardware stores buying copper grounding rods before finding a quiet corner to travel back to the quarry. I removed the wire clamp from a rod, grabbed eight capacitors and combined them together quickly. With a wide grin I shocked myself a dozen times, immediately combining the resulting card into the octuple capacitor before grabbing a grounding rod, carding it and combining it with the super charged capacitors only to frown when it still held strong electrical and magic concepts.

Frustrated, I uncarded the grounding rod, only to shout out in pain as the now black and copper rod zapped all of the electricity it had been storing into my hand. I screamed, my palm a blackened mess as I seized from the current, only to sag to the ground when it ran out. My breathing was ragged and seemed to stutter for a moment as Ema rushed to me.

"Carson! What happened!?" She shouted, lifting up my hand.

"I didn't think about something before I pushed it out of a card." I replied after a few moments, groaning in pain. "Fuck that hurt."

I could feel my healing amulet struggling to fix my arm and hand as I sat on the ground, slowly recovering. Ema fretted over me for a while as I did, eventually helping me stand and sit back down on a chair. After about thirty minutes my hand stopped hurting, completely healed. I shook out the phantom tingles from it while I stood and walked over to the modified grounding rod. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands before carding it. I couldn't help but laugh.

The card still contained concepts of electrical and magical storage. However, everything electrical was now dwarfed by the concept of magic, which was only slightly weaker than it had been before I had zapped the fuck out of myself. As I kept examining it, I slowly realized what had happened. I had been modifying the capacitors to hold magic as well as an electrical charge, which they would discharge equally when not carded. But, when I added in the grounding rod the electrical dissipation from the rod had shifted the discharge from the modified capacitors from both magic and electricity, to mostly just electricity.

On a whim I pushed the card back into my hand and drove it into the ground before grabbing my lightning. I stood over the rod and leaned down, holding out the lightning gun and pulling the trigger, zapping the hell out of the rod for a full five seconds. I waited a bit before tapping it with my finger gingerly, though I was already pretty sure it wouldn't do anything. Sure enough nothing happened, so I immediately pulled it from the ground and carded it.

The magic concept was even bigger. Not by a massive degree, but certainly noticeable.

The rod still contained extra concepts, but they were dwarfed by the magic. I looked around for a second before walking over to the tarp covered stack of metal. I carded a sheet of aluminum and combined it with the magic rod. The magic concept of course carried over, while everything else faded even further into the background. I added two more sheets of aluminum to solidify it even further. I now had a sheet of metal that was lightweight, strong and had a pretty large magical concept. All of the other concepts faded into the background, far enough that they wouldn't interact with anything as long as I paid attention and did not stack on anything overwhelmingly electrical.

"Hell of a way to get here, but it worked!"

"It defused the electricity?"

"Yeah. It still has some leftover concepts but the magical concept is so strong it doesn't really matter."

"Carson, what would happen if you combined a rod with one of Thor's sparks?"

"I I don't know." I said truthfully. "So far that glowing divine concept has disappeared after working its way into whatever object I put it in. It seems to heavily affect the objects though. Just look at how your bow changed, as well as the lighting gun. It's something to keep in mind for the future."