Slowly but surely, life in Chancery Hills was calming down. The frequent battles in the streets had died down to the occasional skirmish, though tensions remained high. While many still didn’t believe it, the rumors of high level individuals taking an interest in the neighborhood were getting more pervasive by the day. Why such people would care about the lowest level areas in Paramount City were unclear, but that was the nature of rumor.

Lightforge knew that the rumors were true, but he wasn’t interested in investigating the actions of those who were much more powerful than he was. He had done that once, and he was still dealing with the repercussions in more ways than one. The short-lived blacklist was gone from the front of his store, and he no longer attempted to enforce his own personal rules on the people who came to him.

The only rule was simple: keep the fighting out of the shop. So long as the trouble didn’t find its way inside, he would leave it be. A little over a week had passed since he’d made that change, and there had been no more incidents in that time.

That was all for the better, as his major projects were starting to come together. With them, he was hopeful that he wouldn’t have to worry as much about the blowback that would come the next time he overstepped himself. And that time was coming; he could feel it building up inside himself.

He sent out his drone to do a quick survey of the area. With no one in sight, he pushed a button hidden under his workbench. There was a slight tingle of energy surrounding him, but he didn’t otherwise notice anything amiss. That was good, and exactly what he’d been hoping for.

He stepped away from the workbench and found a duplicate of himself still standing there, fiddling absently with the various tools and parts in front of him. It was how he spent most of his time, so it was the perfect cover story for anyone passing by the shop. It was an illusion created by the startling complex device that he’d been able to build with Circe’s help.

With the help of his illusory double, he slipped into the back room and opened the door to the mechanical room. It looked completely mundane, with just the heater and a few pipes running through it. It continued to look completely normal as he took a couple of steps into the room and tapped a few seemingly innocuous areas of the plain concrete wall. Without a sound, the section of floor that he was standing on started to descend.

It wasn’t a long journey, with the lift taking him into a space just large enough for him to walk through without bumping his head on the ceiling. That was all the space that he needed.

As it turned out, adding sublevels to buildings was a very easy task in this world. The idea of having an underground lair wasn’t new, and so the system took that into account and made it simple. He’d taken advantage of that fact to hide his more delicate projects. It was the middle ground that he’d reached with Circe’s help.

He and his holographic double played the downtrodden shopkeeper, quietly fulfilling orders and selling the basics to the people coming and going from his shop. The real work was being done down here, away from prying eyes.

The basement that he had installed only had a few rooms at the moment, but he had a lot of big plans. All of them centered around the object that took up most of the largest room. It was a reactor that was bigger than most cars. Sam had tracked down all the parts for him and he’d brought them down a little at a time to keep the project hidden. From all the testing that he’d done, the thing could power several city blocks with a little bit left over.

That was a good start, so it was time to begin putting that power to use. He already had a number of experiments plugged into it, and he began to review the results from each. The first, and most important, was a small device that looked like a lens set into a large flat base. He touched a few buttons on the base and it began humming to life. A soft glow came from the lens and a sphere of translucent energy came to life floating a few inches above it.

He set the contraption on the ground and summoned his hammer. He swung it over his head and brought it down with all the force he could muster. It hit the glowing sphere with a mighty crack that made the ball dim, but only for a moment. After that moment, there was no sign whatsoever that he’d struck it, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for.

The device was the first successful force field projector that he’d managed to build. He had expected it to go quickly given the work that he’d already done with his own shield, but that assumption was quickly proven wrong. There was a big leap between reshaping an ability that he already had and reproducing the effect of that ability completely from scratch.

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Unfortunately, both the force field and illusion projectors required the massive energy output of the reactor to be viable. Well, the force field generator didn’t at its current size, but it would for anything big enough to be useful. That ruled out either one as a mobile piece of his arsenal for the time being, but that was alright for the moment.

He wasn’t working on his arsenal for the time being. He would come back to it, but his personal power was enough for the moment. His main focus was reinforcing the innocent people around him. Making sure that civilians didn’t get caught up in whatever mess came his way next.

He had considered arming the civilians, but had ruled it out almost immediately. On top of being far too overt, it probably wouldn’t make anyone much safer. He didn’t have the time or the expertise to train them in the use of his weapons, and without that he would just be flooding the battlefield with a bunch of amateurs who would likely have very bad aim. He wanted simple solutions, and civilians armed to the teeth wasn’t it.

Instead he was working on a system of defensive measures that would do the fighting and protecting for the people. Force fields, automated weapons, and traps were all part of his current plans to make the area into an invisible fortress. The next people to attack this particular section of the city were in for a downright deadly surprise.

But that was only the second most important experiment that he had running down here in his little underground lab. He was hopeful that the most important would be his newest experiment, one that he’d put off for far too long.

He had moved his Multispectral Analyzer down into his hidden lab, which would be the platform for this particular round of experiments. The subject of the testing was the odd object that he’d found in his shop days earlier. It was a pair of small concrete chunks stuck on either side of an equally small shard of glass. The fact that they seemed stuck together was odd in and of itself, but the truly captivating part of the item were the random flashes of light inside the glass.

The analyzer had been working on the item for an entire night, running and rerunning it to gain further insight into whatever was happening. It was time for him to look at the results and figure out what was going on. The display was full of information, much of it being things that he’d been expecting. But the true delight came from the item that he’d been hoping for, but not really expecting.

System Overwrite Energy: Restoration

It appeared on his screen as tiny threads of silvery energy that passed back and forth between the pieces of concrete. Another strand was coming from the glass, but that one led out and away from the analyzer. As the strands danced back and forth, they occasionally touched or crossed over one another, leading to the flashes of light that he’d seen. He smiled broadly; it was exactly what he’d been hoping for. He was confident that he knew the purpose of the energy, but there was only one way to know for sure.

He had found a few wooden chairs just for such experiments. He took one and slammed a fist down on top of it, turning it to splinters. Scooping up a few of the splinters, he slid them into the analyzer and took a look. At first there was nothing there, just an inert pile of wood.

After about five minutes, it finally began. A few faint, wispy threads of silvery energy began to crawl out of the wooden shards, slowly spreading out in all directions. It was another few minutes before the threads started to find one another, but this time there was no flash of random color. Instead the threads from the different wooden splinters tied themselves together, connecting the broken pieces.

Slowly but surely, the tiny threads of energy contracted, pulling the shattered pieces of wood towards one another. Lightforge broke out into a wide smile as he watched the pieces inch together. This was it, the energy that allowed the world around him to repair itself after a super powered brawl. Restoration Energy.

More importantly, it was a subtype of the System Overwrite energy that he’d discovered from Gray Guardian’s XP potion. The experiment reinforced the idea that various types of System Overwrite energy were the mechanism that the system used to change things. Changing XP curves, repairing buildings, and probably everything else. If he could create it at will, it would be skin to having full admin access to the world around him.

That was, of course, why the energy seemed to be impossible to harness. The XP potion had given him absolutely nothing in terms of how to produce the energy. And now he had a captive source of the stuff but still no way of manipulating it. At this point he would be happy with any form of interaction that he could control, no matter how small. Focusing it, using it, storing it, anything.

The problem with even exploring those possibilities was that he simply didn’t have the equipment for it. Between his power sets he could create specialized tools for most tasks, no matter how technical. But in this case he had absolutely no idea where to even start. He needed a starting point, something that was already designed to operate with the specialized energy. Something designed to restore things that had been broken or destroyed.

He froze in place as he realized that he had a device that perfectly fit that description. Everyone had one, and he realized that it must contain massive reserves of restorative energy in order to perform its work. What he wasn’t sure of was whether or not he was willing to risk taking it apart. If he tried and wound up breaking it, his life in this world would become infinitely more dangerous.

Unfortunately, the Revival Pod was simply the only machine he could think of with the potential to unlock the answers that he was looking for.