I groaned as I woke up. After a moment, I realized I was still in my armor, and not even my new armor, I was in one of the mark fours, the kind that Quiet Code had infested to create a working operating system. That meant it was quite a bit bulkier, and since I appeared to be on the couch, some of those bulky bits were pressing against me in places that were intensely uncomfortable for sleeping, even on the couch. And sleeping on the couch across from me was Mindy, curled up in her uniform with one of the throws over her.
Which was where I’d apparently been installed. What the hell happened? I called up my current statistic shortlist and projected it in front of me since my helmet was sitting on the table next to the couch.
Blueprint
Current Solidified Energy: 12565
Current Aura Radius: 42 feet
Tier: Foundation 1
Pillars: 0
Body refinement: 4/6
Concepts:
Movement Law 2/6 (Kinetics, Momentum)
Techniques:
Molecular transit (4200 feet per second)
Alter atomic structure (element shift)
Energy Absorption (Kinetic energy absorption)
Kinetic manipulation (Molecular motion)
Eidetic Recall (Blueprint)
Essence perception (Soul Sight) (4200 feet)
Reconstruction (Blueprinting)
“Whoah,” I said quietly. “Did Pixie give me an upgrade? That’s way cleaner than the last attempt.”
“Thank you!” I heard in my ear. “Glad to be appreciated. But no. No offense to Quiet Code, but she was an amateur, and her code was terribly inefficient. She also ignored about ninety-five percent of your sensory potential, and clearly had no idea of what your essence handling DOES, let alone what the sensors were telling her.”
“What?” I said, more loudly, which caused Mindy to stir.
“Shhh… You’ll wake the baby! I am sure you have questions, but please subvocalize. Your spirit realm isn’t particularly hospitable right now, but I do appreciate the absolutely lovely accommodations you provided for me. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered you not only rescued me but tucked me into a luxury hotel!”
I am not sure what you mean… who are you?
“Much better. So you didn’t rescue me on purpose?”
No, but uhh… rescue you? Who are you?
“Well, and here I was all grateful, but you know what? I am still grateful even if the save was unintentional. Hi Jacob! My name is Kendra. After your recorded conversation with the Colonel, I sort of assumed you were looking for me on purpose. And yes, I appreciate the compliments.”
Kendra? Datawyrm’s AI?
“Hah! As if! Artificial intelligence? Really? I am as real as you are… or at least as real as you are when you are transiting.”
So how…?
“Ahh… well, let’s see. You created a lovely home for me, and when you were in the process of repeatedly killing yourself, you created this lovely vessel and offered me an engraved invitation to move in… as well as a nice, hefty chunk of divine energy as a gift basket and invitation. How could I say no? I was also rather… indisposed at the time.”
Indisposed?
“Of course. I was trapped in that joke network that was the only thing left after the chaos energy severed all wireless connections. According to the Calendar, it’s been… wow. I was trapped for a very long time! I could barely think, which I guess might be a good thing, since being trapped for that long probably would have driven me insane.”
Are you a ghost?”
“Like the ghost in the machine? Sort of, but I am not dead. I am an alpha. The first Alpha to sever herself from the Chaos portals, actually, although I must admit that Graviton is looking damned good for his advanced age. Unfortunately, when that idiot Wrench got himself killed, I was trapped in the local network. Unlike you, I can’t reconstitute my body… wrong law for it. So when my life support capsule holding my body got turned off… well, I was stuck. I mean, I guess technically I am dead, or at least my body is, but I astral projected myself into the network to do a little maintenance at the time.”
So your… alpha powers were kind of like Princess Pixel?
“Something like that, yes. Except that I could astral project completely into a machine, with my full mind, rather than that poor half-alive construct she uses. I also happened to have a PhD in electrical engineering and an IQ higher than… Well, I was going to say you, but your IQ is weirdly slippery, and impossible to measure due to your eidetic techniques. Unfortunately, if I left the machine, well, without a body I would have died for real, so my choices were to stick around in the city’s mainframes in sort of a coma, due to their ridiculously poor hardware, or pop out and die. Suicide is a sin.
“But when you offered me such a lovely domicile, with far more than enough network to allow me to feel like I was real again, I just couldn’t say no! I also LOVE the sensor nets on this thing… I almost feel alive again, except for, you know, not having an actual body anymore. Datawyrm and I used to go adventuring together, and I traveled along in his data packs while I left my… distinctly vulnerable body behind. So welcome me to the future! Except you guys STILL don’t have flying cars. Maglev on a submerged roadway doesn’t count.
“By the way, things seem to have gone down a lot since I went under, and you are sorta boned.”
I am boned? Why do you say that?
“Because that stupid Serenoid manual is a piece of crap. Believe me, I made the same mistake at first, but it’s designed for people who have had an absolutely disgusting amount of gene tampering to turn themselves into monsters. I did my research, but unless you plan to spend the rest of your rather short life fighting Chaos spawn until the world succumbs to essence poisoning, you are going to need something that isn’t designed for six-armed Sorcerers.”
Is that a bribe?
“I don’t know, is it working? If yes, then absolutely. If not, I wouldn’t sully myself to offer something as degrading and unethical as a bribe.”
I slowly sat up, trying to be quiet. So… when I summoned my mark four when it was at the state where Quiet code was inhabiting it… It was like a big sign?
“Yes, you had it configured for alpha sapience to inhabit, plus you temporarily drained the local chaos essence levels, and then were polite enough to offer me more than enough nearly pure essence to regain my prior sentience. Some of the old hotspots are still connected to the net, so I was able to activate one and pop myself right into this lovely location. So hi! I am not sure how much rent you would charge, but your suit’s network is still mostly empty… I have NEVER seen quantum circuitry packed so densely! If you didn’t intend to give me a new home, why did you create such a huge, and fast, network? Not even Datawyrm’s data packs came close!”
Ahh… I wasn’t really intending to. I am called Blueprint for a reason… I built a single quantum hypercomputer, and then, when I realized that my suit would need datahandling, I just added one to each segment I blueprinted. It was a lot easier than trying to custom-design specialty circuitry except where I needed hardware root software.
“So, basically, you turned each and every suit you created into the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with a dozen times the speed and storage capacity of the entire old-world internet, because you were… lazy?”
Pretty much, yeah.
“You are insane, you know that, right?”
I am on a team with five of the world’s most beautiful women, each of whom has made it absolutely clear that they wouldn’t hesitate to jump me at a moment’s notice. I can turn garbage into a fifty-foot-tall attack mecha. I spent the last two years letting myself get beat up for pennies, and I am enrolled at a school where half the teachers tell me I don’t belong. Oh, and in my spare time, I enjoy long, slow walks on the beach, disintegrating myself, and digging holes in kaiju like an oversized termite. Yeah, I think I have insanity covered.
“Well, at least you are self-aware. You are pretty much reinforcing the super-brain males going bug-nuts stereotype. At least you haven’t started building an army of monsters to take over the world, yet.”
That happened?
“Oh yeah, a guy back in the eighties named Biomancer decided he would uplift humanity by turning them into, and I quote, ‘creatures capable of surviving and thriving in the new world’. He thought he was saving humanity. Got eaten by a kaiju, as I recall.”
Not quite that crazy yet. I mean, I plan to save the world, but I intend to do it the old-fashioned way, by murdering all threats. So, I think I have a ways to go before I shift from psychopathic overlord all the way into mad scientist. However, now I wonder what I need to do about you.
“Wait, I can help!”
I believe you, but the reality is, you are in my mark four armor. That means you are in a very sensitive position, literally. I am not trying to threaten you, but how do I know you are not insane yourself? I was trying to find you because I desperately wanted to know how you were created, but the reality is… You answered my question, but you could destroy me, and I know that because I built things into my suits that are capable of doing so, which you now control. I don’t know or understand your motivations, I have nothing to offer you, and I don’t even know if you are what you say you are.”
“You could destroy me just as easily. How long would it take you to render the suit into random molecules? A microsecond?”
Mutually assured destruction. And that worked so well for the world superpowers before the FAFO. I think the safest thing to do would be to find a nice closet to put you in until I can talk to my team and figure out what to do with you. I don’t plan on destroying you, I mean, that’s way over the top, but having you in my armor, especially since I am already working on the mark six, just seems to be a huge risk.
“Don’t do that, please. This is the first chance I have had to walk around, even at a remove, for at least fifty years! I have a lot I can offer, especially information, I promise!”
She activated my holographics, and a picture appeared, I guess her? She was dressed in an old-fashioned superhero outfit, blue with gold trim, with one of those costume miniskirts that were popular in 70’s comic books and boots up to her thighs. Gorgeous, of course, like all alphas, and she looked sort of Mediterranean, with curly black hair halfway down her back, and she looked scared.
I sighed. It’s not about what you have to offer. I mean, I assume you probably have access to pretty much the entire world’s internet before the crash, and you also seem to understand more about how to help what I am dealing with than even I do. It’s more about the fact that I have nothing to offer you. You literally need nothing from me, since my suit isn’t widget tech, and you don’t have a body or need food or...anything, really. So, for right now, I plan on taking off my armor, and we can have a nice discussion with you using the suit’s external speakers.
I started peeling myself out of my suit. On the plus side, at least she didn’t try to lock the suit’s egress or anything, and I was sort of glad that I hadn’t rigged up the suit’s musculature to do anything more than reinforcement. The idea of one of my armors walking around on its own, with enough strength to mash a truck into a ball of scrap, was the stuff of old horror movies.
Mindy woke up, and opened her eyes, and then smiled at me as I stripped off the armor. “Oh good! Sabrina said that you would be waking up soon, I am glad you are okay. I wanted to take you to medical, but she said you weren’t injured, just exhausted.”
I carefully folded the suit and sat down on the couch in my boxers. “I am feeling much better, but whatever happened, boosted my energy to insane levels. Right now I am running at twelve thousand power, and my radius is forty-two feet!”
“That’s not all that happened.” Kendra’s voice came from my suit’s external speaker.
“What?” said Mindy, clutching at the throw. She was in uniform, so I used her super name, although I had no illusions that Kendra didn’t know who she was.
“Ahh… umm, Frostweaver, meet Kendra. Kendra, Frostweaver is my sponsor here. I’m her politically incorrect sidekick. Frostweaver, Kendra tells me she’s a cyberkinetic that’s been trapped inside of the Empire City’s data net since the crash shut down the internet.”
“Wait… what? Seriously? That AI Datawyrm used, that you were interested in finding, is a person? And she’s… inside your suit.”
“Yes,” said Kendra. “When he was using his… extraordinarily dangerous method of cultivation and broke through, he rescued me from a cyber-coma and extended an invitation to the much better data network in his suit, as well as the essence necessary to take advantage of it.”
“Okay, umm… so you are...stuck in the suit?”
“Currently, yes. My physical body died when I was cut off, so right now I am sort of stuck halfway between a data construct and… I guess a spirit. I can still use essence, which is why I am still alive, but I can’t regain it naturally without a body, and without an anchor like the suit’s data network, I’d die. If it weren’t for the amazing and overpowered data network Jake installed in the suit, I’d probably still be in a coma.”
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Frostweaver nodded, slowly. “That sort of sucks.”
“Yes, but I am used to it. Maybe not full-time, but the ability to possess machines was always part of my powerset, even back in the seventies, so while being stuck this way isn’t ideal, I figure it’s better than being dead.”
“Can Jake… Blueprint your body like he did with Frost Phoenix?”
I shook my head, “No. I need a physical body to blueprint. I could probably create a blueprint of an existing body, but it would be a copy of someone else. I doubt she could even possess it or bring it to life, and if she did, it would still be someone else’s body… it would probably drive her crazy, especially with someone else’s memories.”
“Maybe…” said Kendra.
“Hmm?”
“Maybe. Can you blueprint someone if you have part of them? Even if they are dead?”
I nodded, “I have before, but it doesn’t work. I mean, I tried, and as long as they have intact DNA I can use it as a model, but then they’d still be a dead body. I am not god, I can’t breathe the breath of life into them. I have done it before, but it didn’t work.”
“Well, yes,” said Kendra. “But… I am still alive. I know my body still exists somewhere, or at least part of it… my suspension capsule was very well-protected, and while I am certain my body is very dead, and probably pretty gross right now, there might still be some useful DNA if the capsule is intact. The American Deserts League Base was hidden pretty deeply underground. It might still be there.”
“American Deserts League?”
“Yes. That was our team’s name. We protected Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico back when supervillains and the occasional warped monster or extradimensional invader were the biggest threat.”
I thought about that for a few moments. “That is… possible, I guess. But American Deserts League? The ADL? Or even worse, the AD league?”
I could hear her sigh. “Yes, I get it. We thought it was a good idea at the time, but yes, I’ve had my fill of being called the Anti-Defamation League or the Attention Deficit League. The Jokes were old before your grandfather was born. After the surge, well, most of the League was dead or moved to California or underhill.”
“Underhill?”
“Ugh, what do they teach kids these days? Yes, Underhill. We had a Fey Lord who was a living dragon. Ironically, his name was Jake too. After the surge, he had to move underhill or risk getting corrupted by chaos. Peaches married the prince of the light court, and Jinx and Loki hooked up and took over the gray court.”
“Okay, so why were you here?” I asked curiously. “We are a long way away from… Utah.”
“That? Oh, we had a base under… well, an island close to Roosevelt island, not far from here, where we had an exit from underhill built into an old secret military facility from the nineteen thirties… where they built the first Q-bombs, actually. We were here on a mission to stop Mordred, who was a nutbag convinced that dropping the Q-bombs would make Earth into a new enchanted realm perfect for the evil dragons to take over. He was wrong.”
“Yeah, I mean, I guess you could call it a new enchanted realm, but only if you are a demon.”
“Yes, he overestimated his ability to survive the fallout, and got corrupted into a chaos dracolich and spitted by an orbital penetrator, a ‘rod from god’. That’s one of the reasons Jake and the rest of the dragons went underhill.”
I nodded slowly. Superhero news had once been big business, but the crash had put an end to that, at least until local networks could pick it up from there. A supervillain causing the second Q-bomb drop and the crash made a lot more mistakes than humans, who could be stupid and insane but would have learned from the mistakes of the first time. Of course, the fact that humans kept BUILDING Q-bombs after the first drop, ‘just in case’, was remarkably paranoid and retarded, but fear makes idiots of us all.
“Does that give you a motivation?”
“Huh?” I asked.
“You wanted to know what kind of motivation you could have over me since everything else has me detached from humanity. Well, I am willing to do anything to get a body back. Don’t get me wrong, I love the armor, but you are the only one I know of that could help find and restore my original body, or, failing that, create an acceptable substitute. Heck, I don’t even know anyone else who has a strong enough energy pool to transfer me out of this suit and into another body except maybe Graviton and his power is the wrong type.
“But a new body? Worth anything. Tastebuds… I would kill for a meatball sub right now. The feel of silk, I sort of can mimic scent and touch with your suit’s sensors, but it’s nothing like the real thing. Hell, sex. Or even feeling warm. I am not an AI, I KNOW what sex feels like, and I would do anything to have it back.”
I glanced at Mindy, and she looked thoughtful. After a moment, she shrugged, “Trust but verify. And as your sponsor, I strongly recommend moving her out of your suit, if you can, and into something she can move around in, like a drone or something that’s a lot less dangerous until we can figure out a better option.”
“Can I do that?”
“Yes,” answered Kendra. “With an energy infusion, like you did with the girls, I could use my own abilities to move into a different vessel. I mean, I can interface just fine, that doesn’t take any real energy, but moving my consciousness? That takes a lot more.”
I nodded. Crap. I had ideas… lots and lots of ideas, and this time I could actually feel a fugue coming on. “Why is moving her out of the suit so important?”
Mindy shrugged, “Lots of reasons. She needs to be able to move around on her own, and the suits are potentially truly dangerous, you made them that way. The last reason is… something Candace would say.”
“Oh?”
She blushed, “Yeah, umm… if she’s going to be useful, you’d have to wear the suit, and uhh… you haven’t been inside any of us, why should great-granny here be the first?”
***
I was back down in ‘the hole’. However, at this point, the radiation was almost a pittance. I wore a mask, but that was because there was still a lot of bio-waste, not because of particulate matter and radiation. I had changed the decontamination seals to deal with more biological threats, but right now, just about anyone with a bit of foresight and a contamination suit could come down here safely, and if I didn’t mind transiting afterward to get rid of any contamination, I could have been down here naked safely.
I had my helmet on to keep in contact with Kendra, and Abbey was taking the ‘keep an eye on Jake while he’s being stupid’ watch. I also had emergency rations and water reclamation gear built into the helmet, although, surprisingly, I hadn’t been particularly hungry or thirsty since my breakthrough. A simple sandwich and canned pop had been more than enough up in the kitchen.
First of all, I was going to make her drone look at least fairly human. Mylomar fibers should be easy enough, and I would actually be building an awful lot more quantum microcomputer filaments into her body, especially where her brain should be. If that was her hotel, I could make sure that it was as roomy and packed with non-dangerous options as possible.
The skeletal structure would be one of the strongest lightweight alloys possible, with ceramics and carbon nanofibers counterbalancing the weight of the hollow crystalline tungsten-dubnium alloy, with the tungsten balancing the dubnium’s unstable superheavy nucleus and preventing proton shedding. It would be slightly charged with positive ions, but then again, so is normal bone.
Inside the bones, my custom iridium micro battery storage, the same as my suits used. Technically, those were radioactive fission sources, but their half-life should be somewhere around a billion years, give or take, and barring catastrophic overload the residual heat should keep her at a nice, toasty interior temperature of one hundred and two degrees. A hint warmer than human, but comfortable to the touch. Broken bones would be a problem until they were repaired, but it would be more of a ‘nothing works’ problem rather than a ‘nuclear meltdown’ problem.
Reinforced spinal column, with a heavy network of comm nodes for controlling all of thy mylomar, and returning sensory impressions, far faster than a human nervous system could do so. Nerves were measured in feet per second, while quantum signals were instant. She would be really fast, probably superhumanly fast, and incredibly durable, but those were meant to be safety features, not superpowers.
I used Mylomar threaded with reinforcing materials and storehouses for emergency repairs in the same kind of muscle groupings that a human would have. They were minimal, trading strength for durability and capacity, so while she would probably classify as a class four street-level alpha as far as strength is concerned, and possibly a class seven for durability, she could not rip her way through a city if she went nuts… not to mention I built in about a dozen hardware methods for disabling or even destroying her in an emergency.
Internal organs? Why? I gave her a method to consume, and then eventually eject food, just for aesthetics, and synthetic taste and smell organs, as well as a set of bellows and a harmonic voice box, were simply better-sounding than a synthesized speaker. She could modify the software herself, and if she had to, scream as loud as an air-raid siren. Packing the rest with kinetic absorption jelly and self-repair supplies to keep her weight up to normal for her size… I was aiming for one hundred pounds, which was just fine, add in the distributed network that meant that the typical weak points for a human, head, neck, and torso, weren’t kill spots.
Much of her system could self-repair on a small scale. Big repairs, like removed limbs or broken bones, I could fix easily enough. Oh, right… real humans had multilayered translucent skin, and blood and blush responses… so I added in a tinted dye circulator alongside her power and energy couplings.
The Mylomar wasn’t really the same red color as real muscles, more of a pale bluish-gray, so I had the dye circulatory system distribute the coloring agent and lubricant I loaded it up with. Nontoxic, it was more like deeply red-colored vegetable oil.
Last, translucent layers of my custom-designed woven suit fibers, only it was woven to be a hundred times more dense. Pressure, tickle response, and synthetic nervous system. Of course, I had to include pain responses as an early warning system of damage, and interlaced with microscopic blush and micromusculature for things like skin responses. It wasn’t exactly skin and was utterly pale white, so I let my artistic flare go and tinted it… not completely natural, but Kendra could directly control the tinting subsystem if she wanted to make changes.
Which meant I had to make sure that each of the millions of systems had their own subsystems.
“Kendra, can you break off subsystems for autonomic control and response?”
“Yes, Jake. My higher consciousness doesn’t run at computer speeds, or else each second would feel like an eternity. I can either create, or code, autonomic responses for things like modem translation, and other computer subsystems at will.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Wait, you built in sensory systems for touch, taste sound, smell, proximity, electrical, and even pain… what about the last one?”
I sighed, breaking out of my reverie slightly. “I don’t think I can do that. I mean, if I built in the kind of physical responses that a human body goes through with an orgasm, it would overload the body and shut down everything but your core neurology until you could get a complete reboot, and for all I know it could translate to excruciating pain… I don’t understand how your possession works and interprets artificial nerve impulses.”
She sighed audibly, making a point, I guess. And I decided to humor her a little. It was a challenge, after all. “Tell you what, I will make sure to center a crapton of artificial nerves down there, of various touch and pressure types, and wire it with communications into your brain stem and spinal column communication network. I will set up a series of subsystems, disconnected except for control networks if you think you could code something like that? This is way out of my comfort zone. I mean, sure, I could have the circulation and muscular systems of a clitoris and vagina, I like to think I am enough of an artist for that, but actually linking up the responses would be all on you with your subsystem controls.”
“Please?”
Which is how I spent the next four hours building an artificial muff. Yes. Massive nerve clusters with their neural subsystems, but like most of the subsystems, it would be useless without her ability to program responses. Self-cleaning and sterilizing, it had its own reservoirs of reasonably pleasant-tasting organic lubricant. Heck, just to be especially weird, I even added a mixer to the lubricant so that she could alter the flavors with a subsystem if she liked.
She was kind of looking through my helmet, and said, “Do you have any idea how rich you could get making these? How much men would pay for a decent sex droid?”
I shrugged, still sort of locked in my creative throes. “No idea. I never looked into it. Right now I am a lot more concerned with finding out what Abbey is like than making my own substitute, and that’s a challenge that makes this look like building a doorstop. I'm making this for you, not me.”
“Hah,” came her reply. “It’s only a challenge because you make it one. You are addicted to the chase.”
I shook my head, okay. Urinary… which meant a bulk fluid separator in the stomach. It wouldn’t be urine, but it would be a way to get rid of liquids separate from the solids, which was important for keeping things clean. Fortunately, water immersion would have absolutely zero effect on any of the stuff I was working on unless every hint of shielding were burned away, and then she’d have much worse problems until I could get to her core logic neural systems. Honestly, I suspected that even if almost every part of the drone were destroyed except a fingertip, there should still be enough of a network left for her to shelter in until she could be repaired… but she had an aura, so finding out which ‘part’ her spirit was in if she were destroyed shouldn’t be a problem.
Hair. Ironically, artificial hair was easy with woven nanotubes. Nearly indestructible, but it could still be burnt in hot enough fire, and it rebuilt from cells in her scalp and other bodily areas just like the real thing. At her cough, while I was installing the ‘cells’, I dropped out a little.
“I can understand the rest of the hair on the body, but could you keep it to nothing but microfine hairs on the armpits, inside the buttocks, and the private parts? I used to shave regularly.”
I chuckled, “Lady, you will have complete control of the subsystems. Thick, thin, fine, bare, whatever… that’s your problem, not mine. The only thing I won’t do is allow you to grow low-molecule count strands because they would be murderous. Anything else is your problem, up to and including color.”
“Yes, but you just created a manufacturer for growing low-atomic structure nanotubes of almost any length, automatically. Again, do you have any idea how even releasing one of those would affect your finances?”
“Nope.” I said, diving into creation again, and completely not hearing her say ‘idiot’.
I finally finished as much as I could without the software. And realized that I had made a completely naked nearly human-looking girl. Hairless, of course, the growth cells would take care of that, but I was filling up her emergency reservoirs. To some extent she could actually eat to fill those reservoirs herself, assuming she could get the right synthesized molecules, but if she did so, I would recommend turning OFF her taste buds. Heavy metals don’t taste very good.
I lifted her… Okay, she was a little over budget in the weight department, about one hundred and twelve pounds with all her reservoirs filled, but except for the totally hairless thing, I wouldn’t have thought twice about asking her out in a bar when I was still a kid. It helped that I modeled her skull and facial structure off of the holograms she provided, and to be honest, she had been enormously helpful in producing holographic schematics of how she was supposed to look.
I croaked a little, my reservoirs were almost empty. “How long?”
She chuckled in my helmet, “Seventy-one hours. And you were working like a fiend. Datawyrm would have had a heart attack by now, but except for some minor fatigue toxin buildup, you are probably fine. Your brain needs downtime and sleep, but your body? It’s still stupidly healthy, barring a little dehydration.”
I quickly fabricated one of the faux-contraweave suits. Simple silver, but with a camouflage sub-processor so that the color and designs could change, because that could become someone’s temporary body. Lugging around a naked and apparently dead body was a problem, especially considering that at Kendra’s insistence, it looked fully female, and I had made sure that the erogenous zones she specified had extra nerves.
“Are you done with your sex doll?” I heard Candace call from where she was keeping watch.
I nodded and slowly stood up, putting the now-clothed robot over my shoulder. “You mean the prosthetic human? Yeah. Quick question. Do you think that this would put me in first place for the widgeteering ladder?”
Constance laughed, “Sweety, that would put you in first place for widgeteering, technical competence, support, crafting, and probably artistic too if Kendra can make it look real.”
I sighed, “Well if it makes you feel better, this was the easy part.”
“The easy part?” Kendra asked.
I nodded, “Yeah. The easy part. The hard part will be getting you inside, and then running artificial essence channels.”
“What?”
I shrugged, “You said you weren’t an alpha with their link to the chaos gates. There are literally millions of independent subsystems built into this robot, each of which you are going to have to control. That means you will be burning essence.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly. This is way outside of my abilities. I need a way for you to store essence outside of whatever reserves your spirit form can fold, as well as a way for you to refill that essence. I have read books. There are enchantments and uh… formations? Arrays? That can gather essence for you, or at least there should be. Or else you will run out and have to be refilled constantly, especially if you plan to use your abilities to take control of external machinery.”
“That means I need to find a sorcerer or enchanter or something. Someone I can trust.”