novelraw Chapter 468 - 468
Chapter 468 - 468
The Power Brigade had a number of devices sitting around not connected to any networks for a reason. Suspicious storage devices from equally suspicious vending machines was one of those reasons… though usually it was more for anything recovered from a villain lair that might be compromised.
We could have had a few people analyze the data, but Calculator would have ultimately looked it through anyway. Given the obvious connection to recent missions, he saved a bit of time by doing it directly. Obviously I was curious about the information as well, but I wasn't as fast at absorbing information. Pretty much nobody was.
I did catch enough glimpses of the information to get an idea, though. It was actually only a handful of pages with a couple floorplans and other images mixed in.
Calculator confirmed what I had been guessing. "Commissary denies any involvement, which makes future actions far simpler. We don't have to worry about damage to the machine."
I nodded. "So do you think he's really not involved? Or just that he doesn't want to be associated with this?"
Calculator flipped back to the floorplans. "Given that we have received information on a villain's lair, it's certainly a strong step towards the former. Or he knows how to cut his losses and run. Either way, I doubt we find any evidence of official Commissary involvement, because even if many people would be reluctant to give up access to the vending machines, any verifiable connection would be sufficient for heroes, half of mercs, and some villains to remove the machines. And Commissary's real power comes from widespread influence."
"That's good," I said. "I'd prefer not to be shot at by random rockets. Or any sort of propelled explosive ordinance. So what's the plan?"
Calculator thought for a moment, which meant he was putting together the whole plan right there and testing it for flaws. "Assuming this information is accurate, we'll want to hit the lair directly. But Commissary's info doesn't claim that this is the only connected location. Based on the locations L'Aspect has been popping up, we can expect at least three lairs throughout the northern section of New Bay. Hit one too early, and the other two won't be as easy to find. If only we had someone with many pairs of eyes…"
"Sorority exists."
"Small eyes that could go unnoticed in many different places…" Calculator continued. He was giving me a look, for some reason. "Someone with a lot of squirrels, maybe."
Ah. "It's not my fault that Zeb wanted to save her homeworld."
Calculator actually chuckled. "I know. And we wouldn't have recruited her without you, but she was growing more useful by the day. It's a shame she's probably never coming back."
I furrowed my brow. "I won't let Zeb die saving Bunvorix. I believe she'll succeed. I'll make it happen."
Calculator raised an eyebrow. "Those are some confident words when talking about a revolution about a high tech planet. You're certainly strong, but there's only so much impact one person can make."
"Well, there's also-" I stopped myself before mentioning Rodentia because even if Calculator probably knew it was better for him to maintain plausible deniability, "Other friends I could potentially call upon. I feel like The King of the Many Colored might resonate with the plight of the Bunvorixians."
Calculator shook his head. He wasn't denying the man's willingness, though. "You don't need to get nukes involved in that situation. You need covert operations, propaganda countering. They're not an enemy you can crush."
"That does make things harder," I said. "I could just Teleport some important ones away, though."
"Surely they have to have teleportation suppression systems," Calculator said. "Or the Celmothians could come in as they pleased."
"But they wouldn't expect people to be magically forced away from their planet," I pointed out. "And I'm better at spatial magic than Spot was ever aware of."
"Speaking of which," Calculator said. "I need you to go look at a vending machine in a training room."
-----
Obviously he didn't mean he wanted me to just look at it. Instead, I was there to figure out what I could do with it. And Midnight too, because he could help with testing even if he wasn't going to visit L'Drugclub. Also, we might make use of whatever we learned here inside whoever was involved's lairs.
I rapped the vending machine with my knuckles. This one wasn't magically anchored or anything, just a regular one. We might have to overcome some sort of defences in real scenarios, but I wasn't sure they'd have anything to deal with what we were trying now. For one thing, Gift had worked fine so they certainly weren't completely teleport proof.
"Yeah, this is way too big for Storage," I commented.
It wasn't just about the volume, but the mass. Even with the vending machine only being full of Power Brigade energy bars and such, the base thing was heavy. Most of it was structural, though some machines were heavier specifically to make them difficult to cart around.
"What if we took all of the stuff out of it?" Midnight asked. "If we're just confiscating the drugs, we can destroy the machine after. Or we could just burn the whole thing."
"Do you know what happens when super serum burns? What sort of toxic vapors it produces?"
Midnight pondered for a moment. "Well, no. But I can presume it's awful."
"Same," I said. "And so, because we don't know, we're going to avoid that. Freezing the whole thing might destroy the machine but it would make it annoying to retrieve what was inside and probably break all of the vials. So we should probably stick to spatial stuff."
Technically, if we wanted to bring one away it was possible. I could probably pick the machine up by myself with Enhance Body, but I wouldn't be fast. It would leave plenty of time for people to track us down… or for the vending machine to self-detonate. Could they do that? We had no indication they could, but it was better not to test things.
"Too bad we can't throw it into some sort of temporal stasis," Midnight said. "So it couldn't do anything or be harmed."
"Yeah, we can't really do that," I agreed. Then I threw a big spell at the vending machine, making it disappear.
Midnight tilted his head. "I guess it works on inanimate objects. I hope you can bring it back."
"It should… return at the end of the time limit. Probably."
It did take about twenty minutes of waiting for it to return. If I had been focusing on meditation, with all the upgrades in Spatial Magic and the rate of recovery… I might have been able to keep it up indefinitely. I wasn't sure if that was useful, though.
The vending machine returned from Maze, where it silently informed us that the difficulty was too hard for something without a brain.
"Anyway," I said. "That's not actually useful, is it?"
"It was not," Midnight agreed. "Do you have any better plans?"
"I've got a few," I said.
Between Midnight and I, we had more than a few. Storage wasn't a good one, as it might cost a hefty chunk of mana to try to shove something like that inside. Even if we did manage that, it was debatable whether it would cause other issues long term. And yet, one of our primary tests was also Storage.
Just a different version of it. It would take a bit of setup, but creating a space with dimensions large enough to store the machine was feasible. The limitation of the version we learned on the Aizilish continent wasn't weight but area. Normally, you had to place something inside the space, but forming it around a target should also work.
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It still needed modification to be large enough, but it worked. Midnight and I measured out the sides of the area, using some manual mana control to finish sealing the area around the vending machine. Then it just moved along with me, the one the area was anchored to.
From there, we monitored how the spell lasted. It was… fine. "Clearly unstable," I said. "It seems to be too much. But we should only break one space when it collapses."
"Indeed," Midnight said. "Now lie down before it comes back. The space should rotate, right?"
"Uh… I don't know if we accounted for an absolute reference or not," I admitted. "We'll have to test that and see if it's an issue." For example, if I was running and it popped out beside me at an angle it could be troubling.
Ultimately, because of the bulk and other modifications, it cost around as much mana as a full Teleport spell for fifteen minutes of advanced Storage. We also did need to account for tilt, which might make it last a little less long or cost more mana.
But at that point, we could just Teleport.
"Do you think we can send it alone?" I asked. "Kind of like Gift."
Generally, the user teleported with any targets whether it was Dimension Door or Teleport. However, we might find ourselves with more than one machine to deal with and we might need to bring more.
"There's another issue," Midnight said. "That version of Storage… does it work through other spatial magic?"
Ugh. If Midnight hadn't asked that, I could almost believe it wouldn't be an issue. But now it definitely would be. Of course, I knew that it probably didn't work like that discounting certain luck based superpower interactions, but it felt like it sometimes.
And as it turned out, that version of Storage did get left behind after teleportation. It seemed to lose the connection entirely, though Midnight had also considered the option where its relative spatial coordinates were shifted. The results there would have been carrying it around at a distance. We tried to avoid anything that might end up dropping a vending machine in the next room over.
It took us a half dozen tries to Teleport the vending machine without us. The other three times whoever was manipulating the spell either went with it, the spell only went half the distance but still took them with it, or nothing went anywhere at all.
The first success happened to be on my turn. I reached out and placed a palm on the machine, gathering around 10 mana total. Less than Teleport would cost without upgrades, but significantly more than its cost should have been with upgrades.
More mana was not necessarily better, but it helped cover minor flaws which I was sure we had. I wanted this thing in front of me to teleport over there. Just it, and nothing else.
It wasn't visually impressive when it did. It was simply in a different spot, which slightly confused my eyes.
As the one who was successful, I had to try to share what was different. "I had to enfold it in a spatial pocket of its own," I said. "I think we're doing that to everyone we use Teleport on, but as a group." The full experience couldn't be described in just words, but we knew from experience that either of us successfully pulling off certain magic would make it easier for the other.
Midnight's magic was still limited to 'normal' bounds, but that just meant not casting spells beyond their natural mana limits. We had some leeway with all these upgrades, so it worked just fine on his second followup attempt.
"One problem," Midnight said. "Is we don't actually know if this will go far enough. Or how accurately."
"Right," I agreed. "And I don't know if it will work on people, either."
"Is that- I guess we do have to try, don't we?"
"Yeah," I confirmed. "Also, I have another thing I want to try but can't try here."
"So do we just cart this off to the pit?" Midnight asked.
"I'm texting Calculator…"
His reply was instant. If I lost one vending machine, it would be covered. But if I made the same 'mistake' multiple times, I would have to pay for replacements. In short, I needed to be confident in my success and not just messing around.
"Okay," I said. "Great Girl will come pick it up. We can't really teleport it direct from here."
The Brigade was already cautious about teleporting within a special training room. Letting things go in and out of the greater area was something we preferred to avoid. Could Midnight and I force our way past the defenses? Yeah, probably, but the alarms wouldn't be worth it. Today wasn't for that sort of test and we'd already done it before. Which was why the answer was now 'probably'. Previous successes didn't mean we could still do it because the defenses should have been improved, though we wouldn't be told precisely how.
-----
Great Girl carried the machine into a van, which then drove out onto the street. From there, using the vehicle as cover so people couldn't see what we were testing, we sent it away.
"It sure does just disappear, huh?" she asked. "Can you do that to people?"
This was why it was good to have her around during tests. We'd already thought of that, but that didn't make it a bad thought. "Want to find out?"
She frowned. "I won't end up underground, right?"
"That's a different test," I said. "We'll just go normally, first."
We told the van guy he could go back and all three of us Teleported to the old quarry outside the city. It was full of battle scars and notably not full of a vending machine.
"Don't worry," I said. "I think I know why. I focused more on accuracy for us, but I didn't have much spare capacity for the object teleport."
"You'd think it would be easier," Great Girl said. "Moving a thing and not people."
"Maybe," I admitted. "But it's probably balanced out by not moving us."
I pulled out my phone, using a custom compass app that was my preferred focus for improvised divination. "Vending machine is this way."
It ended up about half a mile off target, which wasn't bad. Anything less than a percent was more accurate than normal with longer ranged Teleport.
Great Girl laughed. "This is probably the vending machine furthest from civilization."
She might have been wrong about that, because it was actually closer than the quarry to major roads. Still, it was a decent way off into the surrounding woods.
We all stood around for a minute or so. Then she frowned. "Ah, I have to carry it now don't I? I shouldn't have come with you," she hung her head.
She said that, of course, but we knew she liked being strong. And it was well within her capabilities to do it. Even so, I cast Enhance Body to make the trip easier.
"Are you sure you don't want to be a full time support?" Great Girl asked. "I could be so strong?"
"Make Bolster do it," I said. "She gets experience. Also, you'd have to fight Shockwave for exclusive buffing privileges."
"Tsk. They'd just keep challenging me until they won. How's your Haste now anyway?"
"Slowly improving," I said.
Midnight hopped in, "It would be significantly better if we could figure out spacetime."
"That sounds hard," I said. "It could take weeks."
"That's… not very long," Midnight said.
"We also haven't been successful yet. Maybe I can't do it."
"Well now you're just being silly," he said. "You haven't failed to do anything that's actually possible. And we know this is."
"Yeah," I said. "But I don't really know where to start. If it was just about being good at space and time stuff separately, we already have that. Unless we need more time spells? Do you think Contingency counts?"
"Was there nothing in those new books we got?" Midnight asked.
"We'll have to look more closely," I said.
Soon enough, we were back at the quarry. Great Girl put the vending machine down heavily, then shrunk from ten feet tall to six. Then three. "I'm exhausted," she said, laying flat on her back.
Funny. But I knew that it took her effort to be small. Unless there was some sort of fundamental shift in her abilities I hadn't heard about… and the way she slowly drifted back towards her actual normal size indicated that probably wasn't the case.
"So anyway," I said. "We've confirmed the ability to teleport it long distance. So we didn't really need to bring it here."
"You jerks," she quipped. "What about those other tests, though?"
"Oh yeah," I said. I prepared some mana, then made the vending machine disappear. "Hmm."
"What?" she asked.
Midnight tilted his head as well.
"I… didn't expect that to work," I said. I waved my hand through the area in front of me, just to confirm there wasn't anything there. "So, who wants to dig?"