That was the first day of the Rift Apocalypse. When the portals opened in every major city in the world and more, pouring hundreds or thousands of monsters each. People died in droves, and some obtained a Prime Vestige. Pappardelle was one of the first hundred Archhumans in the world.
The next day, electronics and most industrialized combustibles stopped working. The internet vanished as computers became just inert piles of metal and silica. Long-distance communications ceased to exist. Gunpowder and gasoline no longer burned. Pistols, rifles, revolvers, airplanes, cars, motorcycles, and so on, became memorabilia of a halcyon era.
Communities of survivors became isolated. Leaders appeared among those who ascended to the status of Archhumans. They ruled by right of their power. And the people followed, because it was, They Who Fought With Monsters. (Not "He", "They". Wink, wink).
Angelo Pappardelle dubbed his talent Lightspeed Comprehension. He was eleven and impressionable. The first part was an exaggeration, the second part was the truth. Anything Angelo devoted some time to study, he would understand in a profound and thorough way.
He was the first person to use runes to shape Ether into useful effects. Five minutes after learning how to meditate to enter his Ethercosm, Angelo learned the runic language in which all Ether shells were written.
Without knowing better, the excitable eleven-year-old showed everyone the fireball wand he created. It was a car antenna with runes inscribed in the thickest part that would take essence through the handle and shoot a small ball of fire. It didn't explode which caused some people to call him a failed wizard.
People tried to take advantage of him. Young Angelo had studied the community and its interactions and quickly understood the power dynamics in their group. His talent allowed him to understand any system whatsoever after a brief period of observation. Angelo ingratiated himself to the leader of the group, a burly man he was sure was a former Italian mafia boss before the cataclysm.
But the boss was fair. So long Angelo remained useful, his mother had medical treatment and he was protected. Angelo also understood that they would be discarded or worse the moment his utility ended.
Years passed. Angelo was happy when he was making something, breaking new ground, getting his tools used by people. The boss grew in strength and influence. The group attracted more people craving safety. They found other communities and established traded.
But Mrs. Pappardelle's health was declining. At the very beginning, nobody knew how to heal, and Holy affinity Archs were rare. Angelo once went to Rome to see if he could find a priest with healing magic there, but there was none. That drove Angelo to research and develop something, an enchantment or potion that could heal her mother. They did develop a few healing potions but discovered something shocking.
Consumables were bad for an Archhuman's long-term. For mortals, who lacked the essence to power the consumables, they were the same as poison. And to make an autonomous healing potion, they needed someone who could heal to infuse the proper essence. And yet, these "charged" potions were even more dangerous because without the power of the stars in one's soul to guide this essence, it often gave the mortals a bad case of essence poisoning.
She died in peace. In her deathbed, Mrs. Pappardelle only wished for her son's happiness.
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Angelo worked hard. When his second-star ascension came, his talent developed the ability to see magic. That catapulted his crafting career to previously unreachable heights.
He developed the method of using pressure and Fire essence to compress Ether-reactive crystals into base crystal for engraving. The first long-range communication crystal pair, made by him, allowed the leaders of Rome and Paris to send messages to one another.
Soon, he had teams of enchanters to train. Archhumans came to donate essence to him in exchange for enchanted items. With access to the most exotic types of essence known at the time, he crated things that only existed in human imagination and fiction. Floating platforms. Storage rings.
A century passed since the rift cataclysm. Angelo managed to stave off old age by reaching the third star but even then, his body was still human. Without an affinity to grant him a passive Supreme-quality healing, all he could do was to stave the inevitable.
No potion crafted by humanity could grant such boon, not for the whole body. The best Pappardelle could come up with was a skin cream that rejuvenated the integument. Only some rare natural treasures or potent catalyst from deep in the interspace could reverse a person's age.
And when such a treasure was found, people fought to the death to obtain it. A hundred and fifty years after the Rift Apocalypse, the mafia boss died in one such battle.
Pappardelle retired the next day, leaving behind all the knowledge and treasures he built. He still had a lot of money, so he bought a farm in Tuscany to live his twilight days.
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That is, until he met Robert, had his age reverted to that of a middle-aged man, and went on to become King of Aquilonia. But that, is another story.
[EPIC BARBARIAN THEME BY Basil Poledouris]
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In the deep void, Robert opened his eyes. It was three years past his due time to re-emerge but differently from the Clockwork Dungeon, time at this depth was more like a gentle nudge than an inexorable force in movement.
At this point, he had no idea how old he was. How would one count it? He spent a century with Titania tempering the Mind Palace and only three seconds went by in the real world. He spent a century already in the liminal void, plus a year in reality since he became an Arch, plus the thirty-one years he lived before ascending, and now these three. Not to mention he lived a hundred and fifty hears in Pappardelle's memories, and several decades in the imprisoned teleportation engineer's shoes.
Oh. How could he forget? He also spent several decades learning the bow as the Old London assassin. Then there's the ninja imprints, and the month he spent with Amanda in the clockwork Dungeon, which netted him another eight.
He lost count. The mental dissociation from living Angelo Pappardelle's life was so much that Jade Mind reached the end of stage 1. It was ready to receive another concept.
It would still take a while to acclimatize his body to the new memories. While he had absorbed the knowledge and craft Pappardelle developed, he still needed to match that with his muscle memory, the same as before.
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The goal of the Academy was to create elites who would spearhead the growth of the American Empire. While the death of many two-star students in the tournament might be a shock, it barely registered in the grand scheme of things. Potential was worthless without realization. Power, concrete measurable power, was all that mattered. In this cruel and brutal universe, which was a maxim. Now that he was running his own company, Robert was expected to deliver results or abandon the project and go back to class. So long he kept his grades and earned his credits (not to mention a good profit for the Academy), he could do as he pleased.
That's why Robert went to the Puffbloom Islands instead of the Imperial Academy campus. There, he pulled a list. Artifact requests for his junior enterprise.
As he looked at each item, memories came to the fore of his mind. Pappardelle had crafted all of them, some thousands of times, others just as curiosity. Robert started with the ones with the strongest memories.
Control panel crystals. Pappardelle had firsthand experience with smartphones and computers back in the pre-rift world. His brand of control panels resembled the data slates people of yore used, tablets but without the touch screens. An ingenious array or runes coded image patterns, or, as Pappardelle called them, sprites on the slab of crystal. Depending on the feedback from the remainder of the Ethertech item, one or many such sprites would appear on the screen. It was similar to what he did with the teleportation platforms but Pappardelle's version was more versatile.
Robert ducked into the liminal void and brought forth a crate of blank crystal panels. Using his fairy form, he walked over the back, engraving the runes. He saw in his mind's eye Pappardelle writing the same set of runes, albeit at a different scale. Robert cycled the Jade Mind, to combat the dissociation that formed.
Panel after panel was completed and set aside. The area for the sprites was left blank. Whoever received the task of preparing the panel for a specific purpose would be the one to finish that part.
He engraved the panels in both dimensions. The liminal void didn't mess with these enchantments as it used no essence. That way, he finished the order in a single percent of the time it would take otherwise.
Next, the storage rings. The world was always hungry for those, and most of the cost was Space essence. Hiring Space Archs to become living essence generators was expensive. Or unethical, if you went down the slave route. To someone like Robert and his absurd essence generation, it was pure profit.
Enchanting the rings proved to be an excellent way to adapt to the memories. It was something he did plenty of times before he absorbed Pappardelle's imprint. He inscribed each metal band, added the tiny space-infused crystal that would create and store the degenerated space of the ring, then encased everything with another layer of metal, to hide the inscriptions. These rings had fewer security features than the premium ones sold by Samson. He had yet to pry those secrets away from the megacorporation.
He finished five hundred storage rings in the time to craft five hundred. This couldn't be helped. The void had little concept of space and would distort the degenerated pocket dimension inside the crystals.
The third biggest item in the list were Ether scrolls. The reason these scrolls were expensive was that they couldn't be engraved unless one had a talent to see magic. While this kind of talent was rather common, it compounded with the second problem. The creator needed to have the stage zero version of the spell in his soul. Which also meant they needed the matching affinity.
With Robert's affinities fully exposed by the tournament, they rained requests for ether scrolls from him. All of those asking for Void spells were declined, as well as those that asked for one of his modified or private spells. Most of Robert's repertoire had been adapted or outright created from scratch.
Writing an Ether scroll was a puzzle in non-Euclidean geometry. Ether shells were a spherical construct but scrolls were two-dimensional. A problem as old as mathematics presented itself. How to flatten a sphere onto a sheet of paper without distorting it? The answer was to add depth to the paper. The runic inscriptions overlapped one another without one band interfering with another. That's why it required magical sight. The magical sight was also needed to power the scroll with essence. This essence remained dormant until a suitable Arch read the scroll, at which time the essence would fill the runic bands out of the paper and reform the spherical shell, adding it to the reader's soul. This was why people couldn't just make a copy of the scroll.
Scrolls unrelated to time and space could be written in the liminal void. Robert took advantage of that.
With that, he finished eighty percent of the order. He engraved vials with preservation and stasis enchantments, for volatile items, glass boxes to keep Prime Vestiges contained, and crystal plates for specific purposes, like controllable heating plates for ovens or light fixtures.
Then, he went to the last item in the list. Someone had provided him with several Tzekenite shards, pure crystallized Ether. They wanted him to make at least two artificial satellite cores out of these shards.