At a tiny wooded rest stop somewhere in northern Utah, Joseph picked his way through the underbrush up and away from the lot where he’d left Wilhelm laying atop one of the four picnic tables and smoking one of his cigars. Joseph didn’t try to stay quiet as he shouldered aside the springy scrub and dead branches that blocked his way. In fact, noise was a positive in this case. The more ruckus he made, the less likely he’d have an encounter with the wildlife that loved to haunt popular pitstop areas in the wee hours of the morning. Getting mauled by a bear just before hunting a flying psychopath with mind powers would be less than ideal and best avoided.
They’d been on the road for about seven hours now after their meeting at Wilhelm’s cabin, and though the old man insisted they were wasting time with this stop, Joseph knew Wilhelm needed a chance to get out in the open and see the sky. Pluss, Joseph had the final part of his experiment to run.
Morning dew was on every surface from the ground to the leaves that brushed over his body, making the trip a cold, wet undertaking. After a couple minutes of walking, his leg ached under the strain, made worse after an unfortunate slip on the slick stones that dotted ground at random where the brush was thinnest, and his clothes were starting to soak through. Still, he couldn't stop until he was well away from possible witnesses on the highway or electronic surveillance that covered the rest stop.
Earlier in the night, as they’d loaded the gear they’d need for the Gull hunt, Joseph had explained the new “call” function he’d been working on the night before, and Wilhelm had been intrigued.
“So, you can make these things then call ‘em up when you need ‘em later? Well that's a whole 'nother thing ain’t it?” He’d asked half-rhetorically while scratching his bearded chin.
Joseph shrugged as well as he could, carrying the big ammo cans for the 20mm like he was. “Maybe. Haven’t tested it with anything other than kinetic force just yet, because I don’t know how it works. I got it to go the direction I wanted, but it needs more testing before I know what it’s capable of.”
“Still, we’ve talked about how much of a bitch it is to take down a durable flier, right? You need a hammer and an anvil. Well, it sounds like something like this could be our hammer. Think of ‘em like batteries or ammo or explosives… whatever, but instead of having to load ‘em up into a weapon, their boom boom is there right when you burn your new thing. All at once. If you’ve got something that can hit hard, I think you should bring it, much as it pains me to send you in there with a tool you’ve not trained on,” the former green beret mused as he strapped down the first row of toughboxes behind the pair of seats at the van's front. “Alright, read me the list again.”
Complying, Joseph went and grabbed the clipboard from a hook just inside the double doors in the back of the old gray panel van. At the top were the words "BIRD HUNT" in big red letters.
“Alright, 3x battle rifles and assorted ammo?”
“Check. Bringing the 7.62s this time*hurg* by the way,” Wilhelm said as he fought with a stubborn strap. “Before you ask, no I haven’t touched your optics.”
Joseph nodded. Considering the time crunch, he wouldn't have a chance to re-zero his rifle properly if the optic had been replaced. “Alright. 1x 20mm LEP with terminal and cabling. Wait, didn’t the LEP have a problem with the vertical tracking?” Joseph asked. Considering the size of the rounds fired by the Long Engagement Platform, he would prefer the robotic turret to be in top shape and not jerking around like a tweaker on payday.
“Yeah, but it's only a few teeth on the gear, and I figure we’ll use it for overwatch. Won’t need to track vertically too much before I get the gear remachined. We’re loading that one last. Skip it. Oh and I’ve got the det cord in here already.”
“Okay. 1x Plas-lock pistol?” Joseph raised an eyebrow at that one.
“Check.”
“You wanna get close enough to Gull to use that thing?”
Wilhelm grunted. “Not me. You. Hopefully you won’t have to use it anyway. The barrel’s a bitch to replace. You have no idea. Still, I'd rather you have it and not need it.”
Joseph did have some idea about the scarcity of barrels, considering how he'd acquired the little hand cannon to begin with. He looked farther down the list, past the synthsilk armor carrier system, the ear protection, and the goggled face mask. Those were all things he’d be wearing, so he’d need to take care of those himself.
The last item on the list was a surprise for Joseph. “You want to bring the Vlad?” The Vlad was a nasty piece of hardware originally developed by the Russians during the war meant to bring down flying supers. Essentially a supersonic, rocket-propelled harpoon with nasty barbs on the head, it violated a dozen different international agreements about what kind of munitions were acceptable during conflict, but the fact that it was effective and cheap meant its wide proliferation was pretty much guaranteed. In fact, there were instructions online on how to make your own Vlad if you knew where to look. Still, the component parts were heavy and cumbersome for a two man team to set up, much less use effectively.
“Yep. Not taking any chances with this asshole, ‘least not if he gets close enough to my position.”
“Hope your van's shocks are up to it.” Joseph teased in a singsong voice.
That put Wilhelm on the defensive. He actually dropped what he was doing to give Joseph a narrow, challenging stare. “Kid, I don’t think a single part of this van is standard anymore. You worry about the fighting. I’ll worry about the support and my van,” the old man growled. Then he set to squeezing between the seats to get to the driver’s side door, apparently having given up on trying to climb over all the gear in the back.
“How about the drone?” Joseph asked, not seeing it on the list.
Wilhelm climbed out of his door, slammed it, and gave the front tire a test kick. “Got it in there already. Never took it out. That it?”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Yep.”
“Alright, I wanna see one of your balls.”
Joseph rolled his eyes at that but sat down on the porch with his bag of materials to got to work. He started sketching out a basic force ball followed by a call working while Wilhelm continued with the packing and loading process, and when Joseph finished his work twenty minutes later (a new record on time if he remembered properly) he got up and summoned the little construct next to the wood pile on the side of the house. As before, a floating blue ball hovered above the ground at about head height. He'd built no particularly big flaws into the design of this one, knowing now that he'd be able to Call it to dispel energy whenever he needed. It looked solid. Steady. Unnaturally so.
“Okay. It’s done,” Joseph called over his shoulder.
Wilhelm dropped what he was doing and came over to inspect the construct with Joseph. He pushed on it, sniffed it, rapped on it with his knuckles. He even had to lick it before he was satisfied. “Now you can call this thing from what kind of distance?”
Joseph shrugged. “Don’t know. Only ever tried it in the apartment.”
Nodding, Wilhelm reached behind the stacked wood next to the force ball and pulled out an old tarp, draping it over the ball and evening the edges until it looked like a shrouded ghost from a budget horror movie. “Okay, kid. Make with the magic,” he ordered, pointing down the trail toward the main road. “Over there.”
“You know I just broke my leg the other day.”
Wilhelm scoffed. “‘Fractured’ is the word they used, I think. Ain’t really broken. Plus, did I ever tell you about how I did a whole campaign with a broken pelvis?”
Joseph didn't answer. He just sighed, and decided to humor his uncle, walking very carefully with Wilhelm following close behind out onto the path and down until the house was no longer visible. He nearly tripped once thanks to the dark and his natural instinct to protect his healing leg, but the old man was right there to catch him under the arm with steely fingers and a nearly inaudible grunt. Wilhelm didn't say a word when it happened, but he was there none-the-less. That made Joseph smile a little.
Once they were well down Wilhelm’s driveway, Joseph stopped and gripped his Call. He was pretty sure he would be able to channel the force of the working correctly this time, but he wasn’t entirely confident. The last time he’d done this, it was three in the morning, and he’d taken some blows to the head. Hopefully, he wasn't about to get an unpleasant slap again.
“Here we go,” Joseph said. “I didn’t put much force into the ball, but we should at least hear it go off.”
Wilhelm said nothing, but the super knew he was observing intently.
Joseph picked a little patch of pine needles that the wind currents had gathered into a shin high pile. Then he pointed his fist at it as he clutched the flash paper in his palm. The paper flared in his hand, and he could feel the working pulse as its component parts activated. Then there was a *crack* and the little stack of needles blew apart like dandelion seeds in the wind, and after a few seconds all the needles were settled on the ground again.
When the super looked back at his uncle, the old man was nodding approvingly, turning back toward the house with purpose. Joseph followed him, but Wilhelm's pace was quicker this time. By the time he got there, Wilhelm was staring down at the tarp he’d draped over the construct, now flat on the ground in a damp heap. He was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.
“Make another one,” he’d said, the red lights casting sinister shadows over his craggy face.
So, that’s how Joseph found himself in Utah, crashing through the underbrush and into a little glade where he could complete his next experiment. The ball he’d summoned at Wilhelm’s cabin shouldn’t have had any flaws in it that would leak its power into the environment like his previous constructs. Instead, by all rights, it should still be there, floating under a tarp next to the wood pile. Now, with a few mountains and several hundred miles between them, this was probably the most extreme range test he’d probably get before the fight with Gull. Joseph had his doubts about if this would work, so he’d done his best to make sure this working had the best chance to call its particular target, pouring as much Potential into the working as he could with the time he’d had.
“Here goes nothing,” he muttered to himself as he slipped the Call from the tube in his hand. Holding out his fist toward a fallen branch still laden with leaves and bits of moss, he took a deep breath and summoned his fire. There was the familiar pulse, not really felt in the material world but within the pathways of Joseph’s body and mind, like a singular beat from a titanic concert speaker playing a sound too low for humans to hear. It disturbed the energy in his body, scattering and distorting it. His head swam for half a second, and he almost fell over as the *crack* came. The summoned energy of the force ball he’d made at Wilhelm’s cabin was there, leaving the channel of his Call to strike the dead branch hard enough to snap it and send some of the more tenuously attached leaves floating to the ground.
Joseph stared at his handiwork in disbelief. Four hundred miles away and countless tons of rocks between him and his force ball- force battery perhaps? He should consider renaming them. Anyway, all of these obstacles between them, and the energy still came when he called. No delay. No discernable power loss. With further experimentation this could change everything about how he used his power.
Would this work with other types of energy? He didn’t see why not.
Could he use the stored energy to power other workings in the future? Possibly.
The days of sitting, pouring over a complex array of shapes and interconnected lines with multiple time consuming reservoirs of power to fill just to complete one working could have just become a thing of the past.
The limiting factor of his power had always been his throughput. That is to say, he was only capable of producing a trickle of power at a time, even though he was able to control that power through the use of his workings extremely well. That meant filling the reservoirs in his workings took up the bulk of his time and limited mental energy as he channeled the right stuff for the job into the design. In the end, he was human, and he was able to focus intensely on just one thing only for so long especially if that one thing was syphoning energy from an alien dimension into his own reality. That was taxing as all hell.
Now, though. What if he could create a stockpile of "batteries" like his force balls that he could call on later to fuel his more complex designs?
He picked his way back to the van, where he found Wilhelm leaning up against the driver’s side fender, idly rocking the shocks back and forth with his weight. The old man looked at him questioningly as he came to a stop a few feet away. Wilhelm didn’t say anything, but Joseph could tell he was dying to know the results of the experiment.
“It works,” Joseph said breathily. “This changes things. A lot.”
Wilhelm cocked his head to the side, and his right eye bulged larger than his left as he seemed to mean mug something far away, possibly in the past. “Hell yeah, it does,” he chuckled grimly. “Hell yeah. You know what you’re doing for the rest of the trip then?”
“And here I was hoping for some sleep.”
Wilhelm was already climbing into the driver's seat, ready to get moving again. “You can sleep after you’ve got enough juice stored up in those balls of yours.”
“Oh my God, Wilhelm. Really?”
“Yep. Shut up and get to work.”