It was fun watching Eliot’s Power at work.
Every smash of Isoko’s mace caused the ground to break in small sections, and then repair stronger than ever. She broke a wall down and the wall sorted into piles of bricks that Mark started stacking. Once the bricks were stacked well enough, the bricks began to grow into a strong wall of 10 bricks for every 1 that Mark laid down. Eliot recorded everything on his camera drone, as he stood at the center of the destruction, closer to Mark, looking sleepy, his eyes half-lidded. It didn’t look like much, but he was doing the most of anyone right now; all of the heavy lifting. He just needed other people to set up the dominoes so he could make them fall properly.
Within 20 minutes the 2 story apartment, which was already half broken, was fully demolished, and 20% rebuilt.
Pristine, grey stone bricks lay in giant stacks to the sides. Metal reinforcements and nails and wood were all stacked in their own piles, as either ingots or 2x4’s. Glass got its own section. Insulation got disassembled and made into foggy glass. Miscellaneous stuff got placed into a large stone bowl; It looked like plastics and some bits and bobs. A big pile of plaster got dumped out as dry, white-ish powder. A similar pile of brown powder appeared, and it might have been clay; Mark wasn’t sure—
Eliot crashed onto his ass, saying, “Okay! I need a minute! Mark is already stretching me way too far. I need a minute.”
Isoko laughed. “He doesn’t swing that way, Eliot!
Mark’s face turned red.
Eliot stammered, “I didn’t mean— You know what I meant!”
Mark discarded the redness to his face, and focused on Union, trying to get Eliot back up and running by expelling all of his weakness into the world. He deadpanned, “I’ll get you ready for round two, Eliot.”
Eliot’s face went red this time.
Isoko laughed once as she stepped closer, waggling her eyebrows. “Maybe he does swing that way.”
Mark laughed.
Eliot breathed in, and relaxed, saying, “Okay. Ready for round two. Let’s get those bricks stacked!”
Isoko began stacking bricks alongside Mark, and soon the piles of materials began to drain from the piles and reappear as walls. Wherever Mark and Isoko placed bricks seemed to be good enough for Eliot, even though where they built the walls was not where the walls ended up getting built. Once, Mark made a stack of bricks across a way, and the wall ended up getting built two meters away, which was not how the plan looked to Mark, since he thought he was following the plan that Eliot had described earlier. But obviously he was not. Eventually, the same thing happened to Isoko, and Isoko asked about the general layout of the hideout.
“It’s basically what I planned out earlier, but a little bit bigger. Isoko? Can you grab your hammer and smash the street up some, around the wall? Yes. Just like that. Thank you. Anyway. It’s gonna be a square with two rounded towers on the north and south, so that we can watch the goblin territory, in the west, from the towers. We can also watch the waters. I’m just expanding it from the original designs. Three stories, meter-thick walls. Side house to the south, reachable through overhead, covered walkway. I want to build a wall around the whole place, too. We’re gonna need to demolish a few more buildings to get it done.”
David spoke up, “You have 3 hours left with your drone camera.”
Eliot rapidly added, “And I need to make electronics. I should be able to make it with what I have. And then I litter early warning systems everywhere and make a grand scanner at the top of the tower and a secondary one at the top of the second tower.”
Isoko banged up the street, enjoying herself, stomping with her feet and with her mace, saying, “I want a palace room for my princess persona!”
Eliot laughed. “I’ll produce the most professional princess palace you can picture!”
Isoko smashed a ruined scooter that turned into various materials to float into piles at the bottom of the structure, saying, “Perfect!”
Mark stacked bricks and kept everyone in top shape, and also refreshed with water and nutrition, while also making sure no one had to take a break for the bathroom. Occasionally he glanced over at the big monster tree. Once Eliot was done with the base, it would rival the tree for size. Mark wondered how the tree would react. The tree seemed happy right now… though Mark couldn’t tell why he thought that.
It was just a feeling.
Soon, Eliot stood on the second story of the building with all the supplies located under cover, on the sealed first floor, while Isoko smashed into the walls of a nearby structure. Mark stood on the second floor and stacked bricks on the edge of the solid structure, while David hung out, just watching, occasionally flickering as he moved super fast, and then came back.
Mark gestured at the big tree, asking, “Do you think it likes me using it for Union purposes?”
David said, “Yes. I’ve been checking on it, and it’s growing fast. Look up at the top. It’s almost fall, and that is not an evergreen, so it should be cycling down in preparation to conserve resources for the winter. In a month or two, it should change colors. But those leaves up at the top are bright green. New growth.”
“New growth, huh?”
Mark was a little concerned. Plant life didn’t work like human/monster interactions worked when it came to Union work. Not fully. In a general way, and unless Mark was purposefully blighting the area, plants simply liked being connected to a larger system, even if they had to give up stuff to that system. They usually got a lot more back. Fungi liked Union work too, for much the same reasons. For normal magical plants, this was not a problem.
But for monstrous plants, ones that could decide how they wanted to be and then attack if they didn’t like a thing, this could be a problem. According to Lola, some monster plants attacked if they really liked a thing, too.
Mark asked, “Is it a problem?”
David said, “It’s not a sapient monster tree, just sentient. It knows it’s connected to a larger system right now, but it doesn’t know where that connection is coming from. Not yet. If we’re still here in a week, we’ll reevaluate. The wyvern dogs lived in it, bringing their meals back to it all the time, while not killing the wyverns, so it’s probably not a dangerous monster. It’s the monster trees that have no wildlife in them at all that you really have to watch out for.”
Mark nodded in thought.
He continued to breathe in sustenance and breathe out deprivation, while also beating his heart with resilience and weakness. The tree probably didn’t like the deprivation that Mark was giving it, but it loved the resilience and weakness, and Mark didn’t have to adjust his Union too much to match with the slower-beating ‘heart’ of the tree. It was a monster tree, after all.
An hour later Isoko had barreled her way through every nearby building and Eliot had completed the second story of the building. Eliot stayed down on the second floor while Mark climbed onto the third floor to stack bricks.
Isoko paused her destruction for a moment, calling out upstairs, “I haven’t heard the dogs barking in a while! Got an overview, Eliot?”
Eliot said, “Not yet, but I’m looking now.”
The drone moved up—
“Nope!” David said, and then he had the drone in one hand, saying, “That’s for camera work only.”
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Eliot frantically said, “Okay okay! Don’t break it yet, please!”
David said, “Sure. Scout without it, though.” He held onto the camera.
Eliot shook his head, and then looked down at the floor, at a tiny hole in the stone between the first and second floor. Plastics and metals, Mark assumed, flowed out of that hole, into Eliot’s hands, while the stone in front of Mark extended tall, like a column growing out of the building. Mark looked over the edge of the building and watched as the wall thickened out into a proper column that extended high, high above.
In his hands, Eliot crafted some sort of geodesic ball out of metals, glass, and colorful red plastics. A minute later some wires dropped out of the bottom of the thing, coiling long and thin. With a gesture, Eliot floated it to the top of the column and buried the wires under the stone, where they came out on the second and third floor. With a few more gestures he crafted some basic screens and keyboards. He set up a station right where Mark stood, and Mark moved to the side to let him do that, while he focused on his own Power, keeping Eliot’s astral body and his real body in top shape. Eliot sweated a little bit while he worked, tapping away at a keyboard that wasn’t there, but which sprung into being at his touch.
Mark cycled a purity/impurity breathing Union for a little, Eliot relaxed a bit, and then Mark went back to breathing sustenance/deprivation. Eliot began to work easier as he typed at nonexistent keyboards.
Ten minutes later, Eliot had created three touch screens set up around the skeleton of the second and third floor, and one main scanning station where he stood, at the second story ‘base’ of the scanning column. Overhead, the geodesic scanner seemed to glitter under a dome of solid glass that then turned solidly opaque. Another meter of stone appeared on top of the scanner, giving the whole thing a false top, and then a second ‘scanner globe’ went on top of that secondary top.
Mark smirked. “That’s some smart camo. The second fake scanner.”
Eliot tapped away at the keyboard below his main screen, nonsense scribbles dancing across the screen every button press and becoming something more intelligible, becoming letters and numbers. Eliot said, “There’re lots of tricks to protecting a space, but what I did up there was make a second scanner; it’s not a fake scanner.”
Mark looked up and reevaluated what he was seeing. “Just double scan things? Redundancy?”
“You have to triangulate and each sphere triangulates on its own, but the double system can sort through a lot more than a single system. And yeah; redundancy is good.”
Mark watched as Eliot typed away at the keyboard. The things on the screen started to make sense. Mark managed to make out that Eliot was basically typing ‘work faster please I need to scan this place’ and variations of that, which was kinda neat. Soon, the screen showed a map of the area, zoomed out to maybe a mile around them? Mark wasn’t sure. But it captured the entire area and then some, from beyond that Vatican area to a good hundred meters across the river.
Ten minutes later, and the scanner seemed fully operational. The screens were wide and detailed.
It was like one of those underwater scanners that Mark had seen on the fishing boat—
Mark tried not to think of Dad and Mom and how everything had been destroyed, as he saw a screen that was mostly black with pale green squarish outlines here and there. Some greenish craters were everywhere, too, and the river was a big outline in green. Little red dots were everywhere, and four white dots were at the center; those would be monsters and the four humans here, in the middle.
Mark had seen Eliot drop a computer core system, or something like that, down through a hole in the first floor, too, so he had pretty much… pulled tech from the radio waves in the air, or something like that? And then copied it all down there into a robust, redundant system? Mark wasn’t sure, but it was all very neat—
“Keep stacking bricks, please,” Eliot told him, and then he yelled out to Isoko, “The wyvern dogs cleared out! All clear in every direction, 100 meters! Please keep smashing shit!”
Isoko had taken a break, but now she got back to smashing shit, grinning as she did so.
Mark resumed brick stacking as he told Eliot, “This is so cool, Eliot. Glad to have you here.”
Eliot smiled. “Glad to be here.”
An hour later and the castle, the walls, and the nearest twenty meters of space beyond that, were transformed. Eliot built a 3 story fortress out of the ruins of this small part of Rome, ensured the inside was lit with lights and had beds, and it even had some rudimentary wall turrets on the roof, behind rotating shield walls. And also the cameras. Lots of cameras, everywhere. A whole big bank of video screens sat on the second floor, looking like a security guard station.
Eventually, when Eliot had a bunch of extra drones, he told David that he was done with the initial camera drone.
David took Eliot’s initial drone and zipped it away, to place it right inside the broken eggs of the wyvern dog nest in the monster tree. Covered in drying monster goo, it was completely beyond Eliot’s ability to affect. Eliot had three more drones perched on the walls and floating around the building by the time David came back.
David asked the three of them, “Now what?”
Isoko rested against her big mace, saying, “We’ve got a few hours of daylight left. Want to go make a lure tower?”
Mark said, “I agree to that.”
Eliot looked a lot more secure in his options and power, as he spooled fishing line into one hand, expanded his pockets back into cargo shorts, and asked, “I remade basic brown clothes for us all, but how do you two feel about outfits? Personal branding?”
“No thanks!”
“Not at this point in time.”
Eliot scoffed. He pivoted, “How about names? Platinum Princess, for real?”
Isoko said, “Grandmother already suggested that one, so yeah, that’s probably going to be the name I register under.”
Eliot smiled wide and clapped his hands. Then he pointed at Mark, “Steelstream! How about it? It’s a pun and an allusion to the adamantium thing you can eventually do.”
Mark… discovered he didn’t hate it—
He realized something about the abbreviations. “Nope. Not having ‘SS’ as a branding logo.”
Eliot almost scoffed, but then he paused. “Yeah. Maybe not. Technically, your name should be Addastream or Adamstream, but the first is not great and the second just sounds bad.”
Mark frowned. “Not doing those sorts of names.”
Eliot moved on, “Okay okay! How about—” He spread his arms, flickering lights into the air, writing out and saying, “Vitalis! One word! Big meanings!”
David smirked.
“… While I don’t hate it,” Mark said, “That name is probably in use already.”
“They all are, Mark,” Eliot said. “But you could take that one! Especially if you go Villain. You can ‘assassinate’ the hero that has it and take it.”
Isoko suggested, “Dark Vitalis!”
Mark scoffed. “No way.”
Eliot said, “It’s not a bad one!”
Mark went to the door that led to the stairs down, grabbing his spear from the wall, saying, “Let’s get to luring goblins, please.” And then he stepped out into the afternoon sun, facing one of four solid stone staircases that led to a walled, dry moat, and then out past the wall to the land beyond. He started walking down, toward the west, saying, “Daylight is burning, and we gotta enact some very dumb attempts at peace.”
Eliot grinned wide. “That’s a perfect villain line!”
Isoko laughed as she followed Mark down the path, saying, “He doesn’t need a writer after all.”
Mark frowned, but only to stop himself from chuckling.
David left the building last, and then he vanished off into elsewhere. Wherever he was, he was probably still close.
With a wave of his hand just to show that he was doing something, Eliot sealed up the building, asking, “How about Blackvein?”
Mark scoffed. “What’s your name, then, Eliot? ‘Human Bard’?
“Close! It’s my channel name, ‘Veryhuman’!” Eliot added, “Three wyvern dogs ahead. They’re headed this way.”
Isoko hefted her big mace, saying, “Time to get killing.”
Mark said, “Also a very villainous line.”
Isoko held up a shimmering platinum arm, saying, “Okay! Okay! I can be a hero. Let’s be heeeroooes~” She rushed forward onto the street and then smashed her mace against the ground, cracking the air with the sound of it all, before she projected her voice to the sky, yelling, “DEATH TO ALL MONSTERS!”
Mark smashed the butt of his spear into the stone street and took up the cry, “DEATH TO ALL MONSTERS!”
Wyvern dogs started barking up ahead real loud, and then flapping toward Isoko.
Mark dropped them and Isoko splattered them.
As Eliot walked through the gore, following Mark and Isoko down the street, Eliot commented to his cameras, “So yeah, kids. We have a good team. Much better than going out on my own! Remember kids: venturing alone in the wilds might be great for the thrill of it all, but it greatly increases your risk of death~”