There was a soft click as Lightforge closed the hidden door to his subterranean workshop. Light flickered around him as he summoned tools and reached up to the trapdoor. Slowly and methodically, he welded the hatch to the frame around it. He schooled his features as he did, convinced that this was the right choice.
He’d spent the day making waves. Sheltering villains, getting into brawls, and even a smash and grab job on his own base. Razorhawk and others were already looking for him, and now he was willing to bet that they were frothing at the mouth at the thought that he had slipped away from them yet again. Hopefully no one had noticed him come back to the ruined shop aboveground, but he wasn’t willing to take the risk. So he had made a choice.
Now he was sealed into the underground lab, locked away from the rest of the world. It wouldn’t be overly difficult to break his way back out, but that wasn’t the point. It would help conceal him and give him at least a sliver of peace of mind while he set himself to work.
There was a long list of projects that he could and should work on, but one was the most important by far. He carefully pulled a glowing container from his inventory that was painfully bright to look at despite being mostly empty. It was one of the batteries that would normally power his Revival Pod, and the liquid inside was some type of pure energy rendered into a physical form.
In short, it was immensely powerful. But the point of his next set of experiments wasn’t to prove the power, but to see if he could supplement it in some way. The first step was to learn more about it.
He gently cleared out his multispectral analyzer and placed the container inside. He was hopeful about what it would say, but he had to be careful and sure with each step forward that he took. The machine took a long time processing the data before finally returning with the notification that he’d been hoping for.
System Energy: Restoration
It indeed contained the same type of energy that permeated and repaired the world around him. That was good, and it was what he’d been hoping to find. That meant that, in theory, he would be able to refill the battery just as he had restored the single drop from the consumable medicine that he had. That was good, as it meant that he could move on to the next big problem.
The process was far too slow. The tiny chunk of stone and glass produced a faint wisp of energy that functioned extremely slowly. If he wanted to make something even remotely feasible, then he would need to somehow generate much more of the energy. The problem was how? He hadn’t even made the little item that was producing that tiny little flow of energy; he had come by it completely by accident.
So he set to work finding a way to reproduce a random accident. If he were particularly lucky, it would be a simple process. He summoned his hammer and carefully knocked a few chunks out of the walls. It took a lot longer than it might have, but he didn’t want to swing full force at the walls around him. He was still unfamiliar with the world’s repair process, so his plan was to limit the variables of his experiment as much as possible.
After a little bit of time, he had managed to remove a chunk of the wall that was about the size of both his fists put together. One last swing neatly broke the chunk in half, and his first test piece was ready for work. He took just one of the pieces and put it in the analyzer, intending to study it alone first.
His heart sank as he watched the machine finish its initial scan. There was nothing there but an inert chunk of concrete. Residual heat was the only source of energy on it, and even that was faint. That didn’t make sense; why wasn’t it working?
He smacked himself in the face when the obvious explanation came to mind: time. Structures in this world didn’t repair themselves instantly, far from it. It might take days for a damaged building to fully come back to its previous state, so why would he expect this to start immediately? He would just have to wait and keep an eye on the experiment.
For nearly five minutes he sat perfectly still, staring at the screen and waiting for something to happen. It was a terrible waste of time, but he couldn’t drag himself away at first. But his rapt attention could only last so long, and he eventually drifted away to work on other projects.
The potent restorative energy wasn’t the reason why he’d made this lab, after all. It was simply providing a convenient place for him to work in peace and quiet for a time. The underground workshop was the staging ground for his next round of defensive developments. It was time to get back to work on them.
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Two hours later, Lightforge was leaning down over a table, steadily working away at one of his heavy boots. He had spent some time developing defense systems, but those were actually quite simple. Well, simple in the way that a sword is simple. Powerful and quite effective, but they were only a challenge in regard to scale. This, on the other hand, was challenging his creativity in ways that he never would have suspected.
He had decided that his boots needed serious upgrades. So far the only update that they’d received was the ability to produce short cleats that he used to help maneuver and run on walls. That was fine, but it wasn’t enough. When he and his friends had been cornered by bad guys, Cannoneer had sacrificed himself so that he could get away.
But that was only necessary because Lightforge had been unable to get away on his own. Between Circe’s invisibility, Sunbird’s speedy flight, and Cannoneer’s explosive travel, all of them had been able to get away by themselves. He was the one who should have been left behind, but that hadn’t happened. For whatever reason, his friend had sacrificed himself instead.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen again. He needed more options to get himself out of trouble, and that meant upgrades to his boots. He had a lot of ideas, only some of which he knew how to make. The rest were cool but probably wouldn’t work. His goal was to fit as many of them as possible into the boots.
His first thought? Jet boots. He probably couldn’t fit full flight capabilities into them, but improved jumping was certainly a start. Maybe if he incorporated multiple jets all over his body? Would he be able to manage flight that way?
Huh. For the first time, Lightforge found himself asking a very particular question. Why wasn’t he trying to make an Iron Man suit? Rather than a bunch of different gadgets and gizmos, what about a single, powerful suit that would let him do all kinds of things at once?
How had he never thought of that? Instead of working on bits and pieces, build them into one powerful whole! It was perfect! He’d be able to do so much more than he’d ever thought. Flight, weapons, shields, an entire arsenal built into a single platform that would let him zip around town and keep people safe. It was a beautiful thought.
But it wasn’t anything more than that. Quite frankly, he didn’t have the resources to build an entire suit of power armor. If nothing else, he didn’t have a power supply that could run something like that. Maybe if he directly hooked up one of the revival batteries?
…That probably wouldn’t work. While they might be called batteries, the energy stored within them wasn’t common electricity. It was some sort of fundamental power that could change the world around him. He would have to find a way to convert between the energies, and there was no guarantee that it would be a clean process.
A gentle beeping sound roused him from his thoughts and he shuffled back to the analyzer to see what it had for him. His heart skipped a beat as he checked the display and found the chunk of stone emitting a faint glow. It was covered in a thin layer of restorative energy, with thin tendrils extending out in every direction. For the moment those tendrils were shorter than the width of his finger, but they were slowly growing even as he watched them.
He smiled broadly and gently picked up the medical syringe from the tabletop and placed it inside the analyzer, mere inches from the stone. Slowly but surely the feelers of energy reached out further and further, waving in an imperceptible breeze as they searched for a target.
It took several minutes before the energy made contact with the syringe, and his eyes were glued to the screen for each and every moment. He took a sharp breath as one of the tentacles moved slowly back and forth, a hair’s breadth away from the target.
He didn’t know what to expect, as he hadn’t been there for the first time that this had happened. Maybe a flash of light? Would all of the other feelers vanish, or maybe they would be absorbed into the one that was about to make contact? No matter the outcome, the undeniable thing was that this was much more of the energy than had come out of the tiny fragments that he’d been using early, so it should provide a significantly more exciting show.
He was disappointed. When the tendrils of energy touched the syringe, nothing happened. Instead, to his dismay, it simply passed through without stopping, as if the consumable item weren’t even there.
What was wrong? He knew that this could work, as it had already happened. So what was different? Lots of things, really, and any one of them could provide the key to why it was different now.
He put his head down against the machine in front of him. Of course it couldn’t be that easy. Annoying as it was, it wasn’t surprising. If something so groundbreaking were so easy to unravel, then it would already be a widespread technology. Instead, he had his hands on a freak accident that he needed to somehow reverse engineer how to make it happen intentionally.
It was a disappointing outcome, but Lightforge found himself smiling. The initial failure wasn’t the end of the world; it was the beginning of a completely new line of inquiry. After all, he hadn’t been planning to research this kind of thing to begin with; it was all coming from a random accident.
In a very real way, he was on the cutting edge of science and technology for this world. He was in a prime position to change the world, not through blind luck but through his own research and hard work.
That was exciting, and he couldn’t wait to get started.