I was woken up by a notification from a tab I had forgotten to close last night. While very convenient, having a computer directly hooked up to your brain did have some drawbacks- like the sound of having received an email being directly played into whatever lobe figured out what you were hearing, and how loud it was.
While I groggily set up an automatic do-not-disturb period for the whole computer, I checked what the message was about. To my tired delight, it was a notice that my canisters of chemicals were ready to be picked up.
While altering how fast smoke was created was fun, it was starting to get a little monotonous.Sure, Rebecca and Potato had said that most people would be doing simple exercises for a least a week before they moved on to more fun stuff, it was easy for me to control the reaction as I wished- with the expectation of the terrible ULE efficiency.
After taking a few minutes to shower and get dressed, I trudged over to the desk where I had placed the order, fully expecting to have to wait for it to open. To my surprise, despite being four in the morning, someone equally exhausted was sitting in the chair and perked up when I opened the door to the office. After I mentioned why I was there, the receptionist asked me to wait while they looked for my order. After only a handful minutes, they came back with three of my four canisters- now with chemical safety labels- and a note.
“Here you are. The last portion of your order will take a little longer,” the receptionist said while I reached up under my jacket and clicked the canisters into their clips on my back-harness. “I don’t know the specifics, but they didn’t have the last item on hand- the letter should explain some more.”
Waving my hand in faux-dismissal of their faux-apology, I replied “don’t worry about it. I’m more surprised that they are actually fulfilling it at all to be honest.”
“Well, SEYA- and by extension its contractors- take pleasure in supplying anything necessary to fight the demons. Make good use of those.”
With that, I walked back out the front door and cracked open the envelope. Doing so was unnecessary for me since I could have read what it said through walls, let alone some paper, but it felt right. When I noticed the entire thing was clearly hand written by someone with a lot of training, I was reminded of the leeches that tried to use me to get to my parents before they slipped me away to college.
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“Dear Ms Devil,
We at United Chemical Supply Corporation offer our humblest apologies for the delay on the final part of your request. Despite our best efforts, the equipment needed to synthesize the requested quantity of chlorine trifluoride was not installed by the time the rest of the order was prepared.
Instead of keeping the entire order waiting, we decided to send the filled canisters along with this letter. We hope that you do not mind. The final canister should arrive within the week.
Sincerely,
The United Chemical Supply Corporation Board of Directors”
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While the letter was polite and didn’t strike me as a blatant excuse, I still was a little annoyed. Not really at the fact the most dangerous and likely most fun chemical was left out, but more so at the fact I was now important enough for people to want to be in good graces.
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Everyone on the island either was an MG or worked with them all time, so they were pretty normal to me. Sure there was that meeting with some people to get any potential leverage over me cleared up, but yearly meetings with our family accountant had felt very similar. Even the party hadn’t really given me that feeling since I was one of many speakers and hid from any interviews. In fact, by the second hour most people had probably forgotten that I was the excuse for the whole thing anyway.
But, here was this ostensibly normal letter, reminding me that I needed to be very careful about keeping my identity as an MG separate from my personal identity. Thank goodness that SEYA had the sense to use my cover name for the order or I might have tried wiping a few servers of any of my personal details- and maybe a lot more if I was in a bad mood.
Since that hadn’t happened, that was something to put more thought into later. For now, I had some more toys to play with.
“So, Cleo, how do these things work?” I asked while grabbing the ethyl cyanoacrylate canister. It was probably the one least likely to seriously injure or kill someone.
Appearing on what I now assumed was their favorite spot- my head- in their disturbing 2D form, Cleo said, {first off, I would recommend holding them like you would hold a can of spray paint: near the top, pointer finger comfortably able to access the dial and button. The dial can be rotated to select the nozzle you want to dispense from. Each is designed to give a different spray pattern, with the current position being the safe position.
{The button is pressure sensitive and requires a tiny bit of specifically your ULE to do anything. If you gently press it, the selected nozzle will dispense at low pressure. Press it all the way and you should probably hold on as tight as you can.
{Finally, you should flip the canister over and dump a good bit of ULE into that indent. Doing so will precharge the contents to be ready for you to control them.
{Any questions?}
Following their directions and pushing energy into the bottom of each canister, I asked the obvious: “when will I know when it’s done?”
{When you think it feels right. Remember that this is ULE. You have no control over how much is in there as soon as you stop thinking about it.}
“Right.”
After a few minutes per canister, I was feeling a bit magically worn out but still excited to see what I could do with these things. I had the usual training time scheduled for the evening, so I wasn’t going to do anything large scale or complicated. Plus, I was just in a small passageway behind some of the buildings; out of the way from people’s sight and walking paths, but not a safe location if things went out of control.
Going back to the ethyl cyanoacrylate canister, I flicked through a few settings. My original idea behind asking for this was that it would easily polymerize and stick to things, letting me secure objects like doors or restrain demons. Now that I knew what my magic could do, I had a few new ideas.
Following Cleo’s directions, I switched the canister to the simple stream nozzle and lightly pressed the button while holding it upside down. As I had wanted, a small trickle of liquid oozed out and was immediately under my control to prevent it from bonding or hardening. Despite being preloaded with my magic, it still required a lot of concentration to control how it acted.
As the drop fell with gravity, I allowed the outer layers to solidify into a slowly growing, hollow stalactite. Once it had reached about two inches in length. I let a drop fall off, solidifying the point left over as the droplet fell off before allowing the remaining liquid in the hollow center to polymerize- creating a thin and sharp spike that I broke off the canister.
With a bit more ULE I could sense the overall structure of the spike. For a first try, it was pretty good. Ideally I would be able to control the reaction to create a shape that was a single, extremely long polymer that would be insanely strong. This was far from that, being many smaller segments, mostly in rings where I forced it to solidify before letting a little more to create another layer on the end- a little like the layers of a 3D printer.
Since I had no use for it, I flicked the spike off into a corner before starting off back to my apartment. Even on that small scale, my process was inefficient enough for me to want to call off more experimentation for the evening after I had freshened up and recharged.