Albert Grassman. Before the blast.
Have you ever watched the world go by in bullet time? Albert did, in the car, knowing that by the time he got to Tryte he would be stock-full of mana again. The fact was, he thought, that he could spend 21 minutes every hour in Bullet Time, meaning that – factoring the 5-times dilation – he could have something like a little less than 21 extra minutes to live every hour. There were roughly five hours separating him from a nuclear explosion, and the last hour of the five had to be spent recovering so he could approach the great unknown with a full mana pool. Which meant four hours, stretched into 5 hours 20 minutes tops, to prepare.
He had his scroll, ‘on the condensation of mana into crystalline semistable structures’, and he had his book, ‘Magical items for dummies’. Then he had his grandfather’s wise words: “I know I told you not to get involved the other day, but sometimes you need to stop the series of events leading to the detonation of a nuclear bomb.”
Not very wise words, but much to the point. They did echo what he was thinking. And his grandpa was very pragmatic when it came to these things, displaying an uncanny ability to assess the situation and drop his grandfatherly attitude and assume more of a mentor role, with traits of commandeering leadership hidden within. Subtle enough not to be detected by Albert’s conscious mind and classified as an annoyance to be reacted to (in the manner adolescents do) but present enough to be picked up by his subconscious and relayed to him in the way he perceived the old man to be. Someone to be trusted, and whose word should be followed.
Back to the scroll and the book. In the first two hours of travel, Albert managed to absorb the contents of the scroll and figure out what he was supposed to do. In it were contained simple yet detailed instructions on how to make mana crystals with his own internal supply, so that he could use them during a fight should he ever need them. They were rather easy to make too, after the initial awkward learning phase was over, and before long he was holding several small translucent pointy crystals in his hands. And in his lap.
The small things, like prisms made of glass, or sometimes truncated pyramids, did not last long. That was the main reason they were called semistable and not stable. Each one of them could contain up to one single FU but before he could even blink, they already started to sport various cracks on their surface that betrayed their decaying nature, and within the hour they dissipated into the atmosphere, the mana sealed within them never to be seen again. Such a waste.
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But that’s where the book came in handy. Albert thought, and quite rightfully so, that he could apply what he learned the day prior about magical items to the small crystals. If he could inject mana into regular objects to make them better at their jobs than they were before, in principle he could do the same to the mana crystals to make them more stable. All he needed to do was to keep the two processes (creation and improvement of the crystal) separate and he was golden.
Admittedly, he doubted that having a couple of crystals by the time he reached Tryte would be of any use to him. And the fact that the system promised him a teleportation skill as a way to coerce him into the suicidal option of going towards the site of the nuclear blast rather than fleeing in the opposite direction meant that the mission was of the suicidal kind. At this point, he could either hyper-fixate on the problem and reach Tryte in a state of paralyzing anxiety or do his best not to think about it. This is where making silly little mana crystals came in. A welcome distraction.
[Skill acquired: Mana Crystallization I]
* Albert’s notes: can create mana crystals with max capacity of 1FU. Decaying rate varies, average half-life: 10 hours.
[Skill acquired: Magical Item Creation I]
* Can create magically enhanced items. Slight improvement on their original behavior, with the possibility of unexpected emergent properties.
“Look gramps, I did it!”
Lloyd glanced briefly at the crystal, but his eyes did not leave the road for more than a few moments. “What’s that? The system made you build it to avoid the explosion?”
“No… I just did it to distract myself. It’s a mana crystal.”
Lloyd shook his head. “Nay. It ain’t just a mana crystal kiddo.”
“It is.”
The old man sighed, dropping his fake accent. “I don’t mean it literally, Albert. How did you learn to make it? The scroll?”
“Yep.”
“How did the scroll come to your possession?”
“It was a system reward. Completely unrelated though.”
“Was it?”
Albert fell into deep thought, but opted to go back to crafting the crystals after some minutes. Whether his grandpa was right or not, there was no benefit in overthinking the situation, not when so many of the variables at play were simply unknown to him yet.