“I’ve always believed that the best way to get someone to show up to learn something new, is to get them to want to learn something new. I believe that something of a demonstration is in order. What do you think Hunter? Are you up to showcasing the advantages your synergies provide?” Trey asked.
“What do you have in mind?” Hunter asked.
“How about those batteries you designed? I remember you saying something about tinkering with the design that our company has been using. Did you end up using the criss-cross channels, or whatever you called it?” Trey asked.
Hunter smiled when Trey said ‘core design’. It reminded him of the friends he’d made during the competition — and one terrible pun. He wished he’d connected with them before he’d left. A soft pit formed in his gut — was it regret? Sadness?
Rodney would have loved this conversation.
“Yeah,” Hunter said, scratching his chin and recalling what he could about the plans he’d brainstormed one night after the competition, “I could improve the design. The crosshatch pattern is better than direct channels for this sort of thing, and it didn’t take long to install a switch to vary the output. I imagine with a team behind me and the ship’s fabrication equipment, we can create something impressive. But I don’t think it’ll be enough to eliminate all doubt. We need something else.”
“Is 12 hours enough for you to plan and create that something else, along with the battery?” Trey asked, “I won’t be budging on our timeline. Skyhold needs to be in our control yesterday. If you can find a way of increasing our odds of success and impress our artisans and department heads, I’ll give you priority access to our manufacturing facilities.”
Hunter leaned back and considered. He was far from the weaker, slower version of himself than he was a few years ago. His AR had scaled to be ten times what it had been before. So it wasn’t a matter of ability, it was a matter of practicality. He was certain he could create a something great.
But what would it be? In order to make the best use of time, it was best that it was a design he was already familiar with, something that he’d already refined.
“Yeah, 12 hours should be enough,” he said. Aera snapped her finger as a thought occurred to her.
“That glove thing!”
Hunter squinted at her. Outbursts like that weren’t her style.
“Glove thing?” he asked, then he realized what she was talking about. “Right!”
The glove thing. The F.P.E. he used to help her fight off Jason Chan’s people.
“I’ve improved its design quite a bit as well. I’d intended for the F.P.E. and the armour that Tilda and I had worked on were part of a complete set. With some help, I can whip something up in an hour,” he said, looking at Trey.
“I’ll talk to Joey about sparing you some people. I’ll also tell the fabrication team that you’ve got priority access to materials and help unless there’s another emergency. Alright, it’s a plan,” Trey said, standing and adjusting his tunic. He opened the door and waved for Hunter and Aera to leave before him.
Lost in thought, he walked back to his quarters, forming and exploring plans while rejecting others. It had been a while since he thought about those particular projects. Fortunately, during the first month-or-so of their journey, he’d taken the time to draft a simple design based on what he’d remembered from the last design of the shield system. There were quite a few things that he hadn’t been able to share with Tilda, and he figured when he felt a lot more emotional removed from the circumstances around Tilda’s betrayal back at Barnum, he could revisit the design and improve it.
He was sure his revised plans, while not flawless, would increase efficiency by 15-20%. He spent an hour coming up with a preliminary plan, only using the synergies he was the most confident in working with, as he understood that the demonstration needed to go off without a hitch. He needed to convince everyone that his methods worked.
After he finished his alterations to the design, he brought them to the fabrication room where he met two artisans assigned to his project. Their names were Jesse and Gill. Jesse was a few inches shorter than Hunter, and Gill was the shorter of the pair, coming up to just under Hunter’s chest. They both seemed to know each other pretty well. They treated him with the respect he expected from the crew who knew him, but he saw some skepticism in their eyes when he told them what they were going to do.
“I know that this isn’t a syntax you guys are confident working with,” Hunter said, “So I’ll do all the fancy stuff, and I’ll just have you guys do the more mundane work around the outputs and inputs, as well as carving direct channels where fabrication team isn’t able to,” he explained after going over the basic plan.
“It’s, uh, unorthodox,” Jesse said, looking over the designs spread across the table, “but if you can pull it off, I’d like to see the look on the boss’s face.”
“He’s huge into procedure,” Gill said to Hunter, “he has to triple check everything to make sure it conforms to established standards and specs.”
“Not that we’d have him any other way,” Jesse said.
“Yep, wouldn’t respect him if he were any softer,” Gill nodded, “you can’t afford complacency in this industry.”
Hunter nodded. He could see their point of view. But the idea of an uphill battle here didn’t appeal to him. He hoped Trey would help him with convincing Joey of the stakes, if he wasn’t open minded about Hunter’s synergies or his Gideon’s research.
The fabrication team got the parts for the battery done within 20 minutes, which took Hunter by surprised. They seemed very willing to help and said that over the last couple of days; the work had become pretty monotonous. Hunter’s project was a welcome break from their routine. He inspected the crosshatch pattern carved with precision throughout the thin cylinder that would make up most of the battery’s inner drum.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
With that done, it didn’t take him long to finish the channels. While this was going on, the other two artisans were carving channels on some parts for the aegis and handheld F.P.E. which Gill had recommended they call the Repulsor. Hunter felt it was an improvement over his original name for the device.
Repulsor rolled off the tongue a lot easier than Handheld Force Pulse Emitter.
When the battery was done, and he was working on the synergistic aspects of the constructs, the two artisans would ask him questions. They seemed impressed by Hunter’s knowledge, but still couldn’t drop their doubts.
“I just don’t understand what brought you to use such a strange syntax,” Jesse said. “It’s so far removed from the established way of doing things, you know?”
“You’ve got to see how this looks to us, right? The privileged new heir of the Oberon family, the boss’s son, comes to us and says that he has a new way of doing things that goes against decades, hell, centuries of established standards,” Gill said.
Hunter frowned.
“Would it help if I told you that my father was Gideon Koar?”
Gill and Jesse glanced at each other.
“That’s not a secret. Even Gideon Koar, despite his flaws — no offense — didn’t stray too far outside of the norm,” Gill said, holding out his hands to his sides.
Hunter snorted. If he told them what his father had discovered towards the end of his life, their jaws would drop. He’d discovered the holy grail and didn’t just go against convention, it shattered convention. Everything people knew about etherium was just scratching the surface of what was possible. Now that he’d been out in Skyhold, having seen what he’d seen, he believed that now more than ever.
Their notions about what was possible were about to change.
“Then I’ll tell you another secret. My father didn’t just pass down his knowledge to me, he passed down his mutation.”
“Bro,” Gill said, his eyes widening as he looked at Jesse, who seemed amused by his partner’s reaction. Despite what his father had done, there were still some artisans who had a lot of respect for his accomplishments. It left Hunter feeling strange. That old inner conflict emerged, but he felt nothing like the loyalty he had felt in his previous ignorance.
“I had no idea. What kind of mutation?” Jesse asked.
“It gave him a sensitivity to etherium, specifically to charged etherium,” Hunter said.
“Which would make him pretty sensitive to what’s going on inside constructs,” Gill said, and his eyes widened again, “Wait, you’re saying—”
“You can feel your way through constructs in a way that no one else can,” Jesse finished his friend’s sentence, tapping his chin as he considered Hunter.
Hunter shrugged and nodded.
“By what my father described, and from what he observed from me as a child, we both think that my sensitivity to etherium is much stronger than his, and it’s only grown stronger as i’ve gotten older,” Hunter said.
“Huh,” Jesse said, glancing at the Aegis that Hunter was still finishing up.
“So I’ve spent most of my being able to understand etherium and glyphs at a deeper level than most people ever will. I can sense how certain charges of etherium want to react to each other. I discovered that some don’t work well together at all, and will cause the construct to require a much higher affinity rating in order to brute-force a reaction, but there are other combinations of glyphs that seem to flow together effortlessly, increasing a construct’s efficiency by a significant amount.”
“Ah, I get it.” Jesse said, “Synergies.”
“This is insane,” Gill said.
“And this means that we can improve, what, everything?” Jesse asked.
Hunter nodded, turning back to the Aegis. He wondered why he hadn’t opened with this conversation. He made a mental note to do so next time. Maybe he’ll even start the demonstration with something similar.
Gill and Jesse muttered to each other for a minute before they got back to work, but this time, the two other artisans were much more enthusiastic. Hunter told them he’d answer their question once they were done, and that gave them the impetus to speed up their work. He trusted they wouldn’t do a sloppy job. These were crewmen, after all. You don’t get a spot on a ship because you take shortcuts with your work, especially with a man like Joey leading the artisan department.
They finished up the Aegis, and the Repulsor Device was the next to be done. With the three completed, they just needed one more piece to tie it all together.
The modified wireless etheric transmitter was something that Hunter had spent a lot of time thinking about, not just for this project, but over the last year. It tied his father’s wireless etherium networks with another avenue of research he’d been pursuing before he’d died. A way for the network to be mobile.
It required a significant boost in the affinity requirement, but by Hunter’s calculation, that only came into effect when you were considering beaming etherium over a considerable distance. For the sake of personal devices, having the emitter on your body would only add about 10 AR maximum to networks’ affinity requirement, which would have been about 15 before he changed his father’s designs.
It was an incredibly simple addition to the basic design of the wireless construct network, so simple that refining it any further in the future would be very difficult unless he either discovers a new sort of glyph, or his insight into etherium deepens by a significant degree.
After the device was done, and they attempted to connect everything together, Hunter realized that he’d made a big mistake, one that even the other two artisans had neglected to notice.
“It’s not too big of a slip-up. We still have an hour before the demonstration,” Gill said, scratching the side of his head.
Hunter nodded.
The battery worked, and constructs activated upon human skin contact, but the network remained disconnected. Etherium wasn’t flowing into the upgraded wireless network device that Hunter was using to supply power to the Aegis and the Repulsor device. He hadn’t considered that the ship’s fabrication team had been trained to develop output sockets to the navy’s standard—a standard differing from the mainstream products Hunter worked with and designed.
They finished the modifications with 20 minutes left. Hunter had the team rush to the armoury to pick up a few items for the demonstration. Hunter’s team, with less than a minute to spare, raced to the multipurpose room, Hunter’s planned meeting location, only to hear from a junior crewman who’d been waiting for them that the meeting would be held outside the ship.
He sighed. He was going to be late for his own demonstration.
Hunter was tired, and he could see that Jesse and Gill were also feeling the strain of a long shift, one of many they’d had to endure over the last little while. Apparently, they’d already been halfway through a 10-hour shift before they’d been ordered to help Hunter, and that was 12 hours ago. Over half a day of mental labour had a way of exhausting someone, and Hunter hoped that they’d all be able to enjoy a solid 6 or 7 hours of rest.
There were three ways to disembark from the ship. The cargo bay, the hangar bay, and the gangway. Taking a risk, they chose the gangway—the nearest but most dangerous exit—unaware of whether stairs or a ramp had been set up outside.
The gangway portal opened, and the exhausted team was relieved to see that they’d made the right choice. He could see Trey and Captain Gregor standing about 5 meters away from the bottom of the stairs leading down from the gangway, along with the Guard Captains, some Guard lieutenants including one Richard Pellar, whom Hunter was pleased to see, and at least a dozen artisans, among whom was Joey Geraldin — the man in charge of the Merciful Cloud’s artisans. Something about his posture and his expression told Hunter that he wasn’t too impressed with the idea of this demonstration.