Universe's End

Chapter 282: Osborn

Time was quite an interesting element. Sometimes, it felt like a single day took ages, and at other times, years could pass in the blink of an eye.

For Rory, the next several years did exactly that. Without the threat of his Bane showing up anytime soon, and the Founders’ clash settled, Rory had time to actually work on a project he’d been brewing up for quite some time, a project that he wanted to have some actual progress on before the next major event occurred, where he and the other Founders would find themselves off-world.

That’s right, it was finally time for a flying fortress.

Or, that was the intent, but as with all major projects throughout history, one first had to work through the actual specifics of the engineering involved before the final item could be produced.

Before Rory could tackle a true flying fortress, first it was time to revolutionize air travel past the state of the historical gliders of antiquity, something he’d learned from Zoey’s people. It was time for the future, and the first project Rory tackled was to create a platform glider.

The idea was simple: rather than a ‘plane-esque’ glider, he’d instead ride something closer to a platform, allowing him to free up his upper body and potentially even allow for a mobile transport that wasn’t nearly as big and bulky.

The execution was… less than simple. The gliders Zoey’s people used operated on aerodynamic principles and relied on sky-bound materials, allowing for essentially limitless flight, even though they were still vertically limited in how high they could fly.

Rory didn’t want to overleverage the use of sky-bound materials, if only because producing sky-bound materials wasn’t exactly easy, given how much went into convincing even a single material of a low degree of passion. No, the main benefit of sky-bound materials is that it would cut off the ‘edge’ of the calculations, a sort of magical solution to the rocket fuel paradox that the more rocket fuel you needed to lift a rocket, the more it weighed, the more rocket fuel needed.

From there, it was a matter of assembling a research and development team. It wasn’t Rory’s first time doing so or having worked with other crafters in the past. With that said, those prior experiences were decades old in most cases. Those same former assistants had gone on to become the bosses of their own research teams, and so on. While he probably could have brought them back on board, Rory decided against it; at most, he’d send a specific low-priority part request to Gil over at the forge to get whipped up.

The team was a small, but ‘elite’ group. First and foremost was Rory’s right hand, none other than his daughter, Roxy, the Daughter of Design and the second-most renowned Architect in all of Ehkorrus. After that were two former classmates of hers, whom she’d reluctantly suggested, two boys –men at this point— by the names of Rian and Dan. If it weren’t for Roxy, the pair would have likely been duking it out for the title of the most prominent Architect in all of Ehkorrus behind Rory himself.

Between those three, they carried the ‘bulk’ of the team, with two assistants, Roxy’s own apprentices, the two young inventors of Lacquering. Marciello and Janice, the two former students, hadn’t even been properly tiered upon the creation of Lacquering. With several years of experience now under their belt, the two apprentices were solidly tier five, bordering on tier six, and would have been recognized as high-prestige up-and-coming Architects in their own right had they not decided to remain a part of Roxy’s entourage.

There was one other person of note who’d made it very clear they wanted to be part of the team. While they were skilled, extremely skilled in fact, Rory had gently declined, none other than one of the former Original Eight, Mariah. Rory hadn’t been putting out advertisements for putting together a small team when he’d begun work on the sky fortress project. Yet, the woman had still found out, which wasn’t too surprising because she was still the best alchemist in all of Ehkorrus; she’d most likely heard things through the grapevine. She’d shown up, and the two had bantered and made small talk, but in the end, Rory hadn’t wanted her around; something about her just always made him uncomfortable, given the look in her eyes when she spoke to him.

Making excuses about how she should focus on her own endeavors and team, more of a small corporation than a team, Rory had chased her away.

With no other distractions, his research team had spent years hashing out the problems as they arose. The foremost problem was one any engineer from the old universe was familiar with.

Material science.

Over a hundred years since Rory had first arrived on Aelia, the field of material science had advanced leaps and bounds, far beyond the days when he was slapping his blood into concoctions or grinding down boulders for a magical cement paste. Pneuma Enriched Iron had been supplanted by Inversion Steel, which had been supplanted by Night Copper, which had been supplanted by Promethium, which Gravite had supplanted as the main form of metal resource. That wasn’t to say each was ‘stronger’ than the last; in fact, it was the opposite, in the case of night copper and Promethium compared to gravite, but it was about scalability. Night Copper was damn near impossible to mass-produce. Promethium had to be mined in rubedo and nigredo forms before being alloyed, and, as an extremely heavy metal, it wasn’t usable for everything. Plus, the demand was far outstripping the supply at this point.

That was partly due to population growth combined with Ehkorrus's average tier growth. The other leading factor was due to the introduction of international trade.

Much as Rory had suspected, between the statues left behind by Aelia as a ‘mini-reward’ during the duel between himself and the Spear, and the planetary authority granted to them for his ‘share’ of the reward, Irene had gone on to establish a planetary council of sorts.

Oh, Irene, what will I do with you?

It had been an amusing realization that Rory had stumbled upon during one meeting with Irene when he’d separated from the research team one afternoon. While everyone knew the most powerful figures on Aelia were the Founders, there would be debate as to who was the next most powerful. Was it Apostolos? Eia? Tsarina? The right hands of the other Founders?

Rory would have disagreed with all those assessments, because ever so quietly, a shadow-leader had emerged, none other than Irene herself.

Not that Rory actually cared. To each their own, as long as she did a good job, he was fine with it. The planetary council, at the surface level, was a democratic council of equal city-states. Ehkorrus, the vital bastion of civilization, Sky-Haven, the leader in skybound material, High Crest Sect, practitioners of stillness and frozen arts, Tidal Grove, churning out entire well-organized combat squads, and finally the ‘lost’ city of Varas, named after the original home planet of the Varasians and the territory of the late Voice of the Precursors. Contact had been established thanks to the efforts of a team composed of adventurers from Ehkorrus and Sky-Haven, who’d taken on the task of locating the ‘lost’ city.

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While Sky-Haven was directly aligned with Ehkorrus, the High Crest Sect of the High Crest Mountain and Tidal Grove were allied as well, a two-two deadlock as far as any decisions were concerned. The tiebreaker in such situations was Varas, which, after losing its Founder and then its usurping Founder, had decided to remain a ‘neutral’ city-state regarding the business of Founders.

Except Irene had proven she’d grown quite good at her job over the last century, her vocation quietly growing and evolving as she’d dance between the daylight demands of being the leader of Ehkorrus and the mundane-if-critical demands of a growing city, and the shadow-aspects of worming her influence wherever she could.

“So, what’s your vocation at this point?” Rory had asked during a moment of curiosity as they’d met up for an otherwise ordinary meeting, earning a well-rehearsed look of confusion from Irene.

“The same as always, Illuminated Guide,” Irene had answered, referencing her last official vocation evolution.

“Nah, calling bullshit on that,” Rory had smirked. “I may not involve myself, but I’m no idiot. I can see how much you’ve polished your ability to exert your influence outward. That’s not exactly the trait of a shining paragon of pure-hearted leadership. So, spill.”

Irene had been silent for a moment, sighing with a shrug, the two having long come to an understanding that as long as she did her job well, Rory wouldn’t care exactly what she did or games she played.

“Vizier of Strings,”

“Metal,” Rory had simply said, already moving on.

So, while Varas was ‘neutral,’ they were decidedly in Irene’s pocket, and the ‘planetary council of equals’ that she had helped establish was closer to a front, with Irene herself being the true power player. She was smart enough not to brazenly make it obvious, so that neither the leaders of the High Crest Sect nor Tidal Grove noticed, but the reality remained the same.

But I digress.

While the intrigue of Irene’s shadow-leader and planetary council was surely some people’s cup of tea, it wasn’t Rory’s. What mattered to him was that it had led to the establishment of international trade, which meant Ehkorrus was constantly exporting materials. The demand was at an all-time high, outstripping the availability of essentially everything that wasn’t uncommon grade or lesser.

That itself was important to the question of material science. Specifically, gravite, the artificial ‘recreation’ of Promethium, a watered-down version that subtracted the overall strength, density, and fire-resistant traits, but in turn remained the most mass-producible metal above uncommon grade. The people of Sky-Haven, shortly after gaining access to a consistent supply of gravite, had quickly learned that by mining stone from the floating asteroids and reducing it into a highly concentrated powder, and adding that into the gravite mix, the resulting blend of gravite somehow weighed less by nearly a third, with only a marginal five percent reduction in overall tensile and shear strength.

Taking advantage of the discovery, Rory’s team had worked on refining it further. By taking gravite and submerging it in a vat of Cloud Etch, an alchemical solvent heavy in atmospheric concept, then adding the concentrated asteroid dust before finally drip-alloying a mix of inverted steel with a dusting of activated crystal dust, they could produce a variant of gravite perfect for their needs.

Stratovite

Quality: Rare (+)

A high-quality variant of the artificial material Gravite. Nearly thirty percent stronger on average than high-yield gravite, at a third of the weight, with a relatively high atmospheric-burn resistance.

While not mass-producible in the same way regular gravite was, it was far more fitting for their needs than something like Night Copper, which had a bottleneck in producibility from the get-go, or Promethium, which was far too heavy. It lacked anything truly X-factor special about it, except the resistance to atmospheric burn, something Rory had encountered before but never had a proper term for. Miguel had warned him of it years ago, the adverse effect remaining in a high-altitude environment could confer, but it was more than even Miguel had realized. The short of it was that once someone crossed from the surface biosphere into the next layer of the atmosphere, the environment itself became a major hazard. Even in minor cases, the mind would tear itself apart, the whispers of the wind poisoning it and literally carving it into pieces.

Fun discovering all of that.

With stratovite, the most prominent issue of the sky fortress project had been cleared, but it wasn’t the only problem. Next had been the issue of powering the thing. In the past, Rory had theorized upon a mobile, high-power pneuma crusher, but the magical calculations, or magiculations as Rory had patted himself on the back for naming them, were so demanding as not to be feasible, requiring the use of bound space pneuma crushers. Except that bound-space pneuma crushers ran into the issue that bound spaces couldn’t be readily interacted with, otherwise breaking the entire ‘bound’ portion of the equation. Circumventing the problem was theoretically possible, but it would have required entire stores of gems at every opening and closing of the bound space, which would have been prohibitively expensive.

Or so was the case, if not for the unlikely hero.

Talismans.

Talismans were still in their early stages of adoption and development, given their relative newness. While new, the basic gist was understood by everyone almost instantly: they could be used much like gemsas ‘expendable’ items. The main difference was in the definition of ‘expendable.’ Outside of Rory, who liked to use gems in single flashes of explosive power, gems tended to be used almost like batteries, with long, albeit not infinite,lifespans.

That lasting power of gems, while valuable, was also what made them terrible for a mobile-bound space pneuma crusher. In other words, it would be like using an entire tank of gas to light a bonfire, rather than just using matches.

Talismans were essentially the ‘matches.’ They weren’t capable of lasting effects, no, but they were far cheaper. There was still much to discover about talismans; that much was obvious. Rory had simply been pleased that a spur-of-the-moment idea had come back around so positively.

While there were more steps involved in the process, it was the material science and the power question that had been the two primary roadblocks, and with them solved, the day had finally come.

“Goblin Mk. 1, testing in three-”

“I still don’t understand why he named it ‘Goblin,’” Roxy sighed.

“Two, one.”

Pulsing pneuma through his feet, the hang-glider-looking platform beneath him began to rise, a burst of pneuma activating the talismans within, and the inscriptions glowed for a brief moment as well. Rising several feet, Rory smiled.

Rian and Dan, watching him rise higher and higher within their warehouse workshop, grinned before high-fiving one another. Roxy’s two assistants, Marciello and Janice, cheered, hugging each other before separating awkwardly.

Oh, young love.

The brief distraction while he was slowly flying upward was probably not the best thing in the world for his well-being.

One moment, he was slowly flying upward; the next, he was flying sideways very quickly.

Being launched by an exploding hoverboard beneath you tended to do that, after all.

“Dad?” Rory heard Roxy shout as he found himself lying in a pile of rubble after being flung through the reinforced warehouse wall, groaning.

“I’m… I’m s’okay,” Rory grumbled. “Cataclysmic runaway failure,” Rory continued to groan. “Chain reaction.”

“Yeah, I realize that,” Roxy said, hands on her hips as she looked down at her father.

“Good news, failsafe worked,” Rory half-grinned, fairly certain several organs had been reduced to liquid.

“I can also see that,” Roxy sighed. Her father’s expression had eased any concerns.

“Bad news is it worked,” Dan said as he caught up a moment later, followed by Rian and several seconds later, the totally-not-dating assistants. “Failsafe concentrated the runaway energy into a localized explosion of power in the same way that concentrating a magical attack reduces the area of effect while multiplying the attack power. Of course, that would have instantly killed anyone below tier eight.”

The small team looked at each other before looking down at Rory, who sighed, ignoring the pain of liquid organs.

“Back to the drawing board.”