Chương 95: 065 – Opportunity

Once the steel had cooled, they were invited down to examine the transparent steel panes. Not surprisingly, only about half of them did so, and Loren wasn't one of them. Yes, yes, transparent steel, very interesting, but the Kaedekin had robots! Huge, person-pilotable robots! Ones that had the manual dexterity to walk around on two feet and were essentially mobile general purpose heavy equipment! Yes, using even manual pulleys and winches to lift the crucible would probably be more efficient, but robots!

She'd have felt vaguely negligent in her duties about it if Commander Bronze wasn't also examining the robots. Thankfully the Kaedekin indulged their curiosity.

"These are utility-type High Models," Namine exposited patiently.

"The Supply, Logistics and Engineering branches mass produce them and keep them in stock because someone always needs one. They're pretty basic by themselves, but they're covered all over with attachment points, so they're easy to customize. I believe the College added on the hooks for lifting the foundry's crucibles, because if I remember correctly the hands wouldn't have enough grip strength to do so by themselves."

"What do you use them for?" Commander Bronze asked.

"Oh, everything," Namine said.

"If there's some kind of equipment that gets used a lot and needs to be taken from place to place, someone eventually stops carrying it manually and mounts it on one of these. A lot of girls use them when they're going camping out in the woods, especially during laying season. Myrmeer herds can get really violent when they're guarding their egg piles, and they stay violent when they're going out to collect food for their young, or so I've heard. I'm not a Field Ranger, I've never had to deal with it."

"…Why would anyone go camping during laying season if it's so dangerous?" Bronze said. Namine shrugged.

"Well, someone needs to make sure animals don't damage the train tracks, power lines and other infrastructure, and the best way to do that is to keep track of them, especially during laying season. And since they can get aggressive when they smell us, a lot of Field Rangers do it from inside a suit or mecha. They also give towns warning when the herds get too close.

While the walls can hold out against them, no one wants myrmeer settling too near them, since when laying season is over that many herbivores are going to attract hungry cursadons. No one wants one of those settling near their town. It wouldn't be safe for the little children to play outside."

"…. What's a… koorsaydun?" Cooper asked.

"Cursadon," Namine gently corrected.

"They're… well, imagine a shark shaped like a bear the size of a house." There was a brief moment as people considered that. Even the aliens were familiar with the two animals, if only because they were commonly depicted in media, though Loren wasn't sure in the case of the pajhadin.

"And these high models can protect against an attack from one of those… creatures?" Commander Bronze said.

"Oh no, if a cursadon gets their teeth on one, most utility High Models get torn apart limb from limb," Namine said cheerfully.

"But until then, they're great for going camping in!" Loren raised her hand.

"If I pushed it, would it be able to stop itself from falling over?" she asked.

"Uh, of course? Why wouldn't it?" The Kaedekin looked genuinely confused. Loren found herself feeling both offended and inadequate on behalf of all humanity's engineers and programmers who'd ever worked on a walking robot… and she'd never actually worked on a robot herself!

"Can I push it until it falls over and see how it recovers?" she asked.

"Purely in the interest of scientific inquiry." For some reason, Namine looked towards the robot's empty cockpit.

"Will that be all right, Thermocline?" Loren stepped back in surprise as the robot raised one hand and gave a thumbs up. Up close, she could see the whole body moving with the gesture, how it seemed to lean back slightly to put more weight on its heels while also turning its whole torso a few degrees and tilting to counterbalance the raised arm.

"That's all right. Decoupling from leg controls and switching them to preprogrammed responses. Push when ready." The voice was feminine, and while similar to the Kaedekin's, it was deeper, more bass. Namine nodded, turning back to Loren with a smile.

"All right, you can push now." After a glance at Commander Bronze, who nodded with an interested look on his face, Loren carefully put both hands on a spot in the middle of one of the robot's shins and pushed. She was pretty sure she had a good chance to push it over, and she even felt it begin to tilt, but then the robot suddenly countered her push by tiling forward a little on its feet. Loren immediately stepped back, worried it would fall on top of her as she saw its whole body moving…

but then it just seemed to straighten in place.

"Huh…" someone said.

"I used to do the exact same thing whenever our dog bumped into my leg."

"Hey, do you guys want to look at this steel??" Homura called.

"Otherwise we're going to start polishing it."

"Our apologies, we'll be right there," Commander Bronze said, the double plural making it clear robot time was over. Several people noticeably slumped in their suits, but turned and headed towards where the transparent steel had been elevated to table height. Loren was about to turn away, then paused.

"Thank you for letting me try that," she said to the robot.

"You're welcome." The transparent steel was… interesting. Loren wasn't a metallurgist beyond a familiarity with the alloys they used for parts in the engine room and why it was a stupidly bad idea to use one kind to replace another, so in this instance all she had to go one was that this was chemically a form of mild steel.

The Kaedekin had provided several hammers and magnets, and people were using both to either strike the pane and see it not crack while ringing like metal, or just confirm it was a material that could be magnetized and the Kaedekin hadn't used some sleight of hand to exchange the metal for a piece of transparent polymer. The surface of the steel itself, while transparent, was distorted with streak-like marks, possibly from the rollers making it thinner. The steel was now about 5mm thick, or about there.

It certainly flexed like metal where someone lifted up a corner by a bunch of magnets and got a hammer under it. One of the Kaedekin demonstrated what they meant by 'surface hardness' by using a bunch of different metals to try and scratch it and not leaving a mark, not even another steel tool. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. If Loren hadn't seen the insane amounts of QEC that had gone into making this steel, she'd have thought it was bullshit.

Knowing how much they put into it… well, she still thought it was bullshit, but that was only because she couldn't think of a way to replicate it! if she understood the explanation correctly, one needed to anchor a spell to the QEC that would become a permanent part of the metal. Simple enough, but she couldn't think of a way to do that without the spell consuming the QEC for magic to sustain itself. Maybe an alchemist could?

It wasn't her field—the thought of chemistry gave her a headache—but she remembered enough to know alchemists anchored spells to alcohol without the alcohol being consumed until it was ingested and the spell was activated.

She was pretty sure no one was going to ask her or any of the other quantum engineers to replicate this any time soon—the amount used for this much steel would have been enough to fuel the Venture for a lot of jumps, with enough left over to heal maybe a dozen people with that new rakido-made cellular stimulator… and she just realized it's probably just Drasner using his magic—but she's pretty sure she's going to be asked about how they could replicate this cheaply, both by the brass and later by the company.

With the brass, she can probably dissuade them by pointing out how much QEC it took, but the company wouldn't be fazed by that. She wouldn't be able to make up bullshit about magic with people who knew magic better than her. … Well, if they knew better than her, then they could figure how to do it. She was an engineer, not a metallurgist! After everyone had gotten a chance to look over the finished transparent steel, there'd been a quick break to replace everyone's air tanks again.

Loren was surprised to realize she'd lost track of the time while watching the Kaedekin making the steel. Her air tank had been close to screaming out an alert to replace it.

"All right, where do you all want to go next?" Princess Megumi asked.

"That big building over there is the Animation Engineering Lab, that's the Spiritual Research Building next to it, that's Frog Research next to Trauma Medicine Research, that's the greenhouse and the whitehouse, that building over there is the Hydrocarbon Pressure Cooker and next to it is Hydrocarbon Research…"

"Excuse me!" Loren said immediately.

"Yes?" Princess Megumi said, seemingly not bothered at the interruption.

"Two questions! What is Frog Research, and why does it look like literally the smallest building in the college that's not a public toilet?" That wasn't an exaggeration. Frog Research looked barely bigger than one of the shared rooms for enlisted on the Venture … even if someone had taken the time to make it look like a big green frog wearing a witch's hat. And the only reason the building in question was bigger than one of the public toilets they'd passed was because of the hat.

It looked like some kind of landscape feature next to the bright white Trauma Medicine Research building. She hadn't been the only one looking at it curiously. Princess Megumi… hesitated.

"Ah, Frog Research is where… theoretical research is done to study how to… theoretically… well, turn people into frogs. And of course, how to theoretically turn them back." Huh. So it actually was physically possible for the Kaedekin to look embarrassed.

"And the reason it's so small?" She didn't even bother asking why it was shaped like a frog, since it made perfect sense for the Kaedekin to do that.

"Well, not a lot of people are doing Frog Research," Princess Megumi said. One hand was rubbing the back of her head for some reason.

"Right now, only Tiana, Ifreeta, Sylvie, and Sunog are doing Frog Research, and only part-time as part of their work in Trauma Medicine. That's also why Frog Research is so small. They don't really need a lot of space, since right now all they're really doing is trying to reconstruct frog anatomy from our records and transmissions from Earth. They're actually looking forward to getting samples of actual frogs to study."

"Ah," Loren said, nodding even as she felt people's gazes at her.

"May I ask why frog research is a thing that's studied here?" Yup, that was definitely embarrassment. Princess Megumi was clearly avoiding her gaze as she twiddled her fingers.

"Well… see, the thing is… Look, have you ever heard of someone getting turned into a frog? Not in real life, I mean in stories."

"We're familiar with the concept," Commander Bronze said, still giving Loren some side-eye.

"Well, theoretically, the purpose of Frog Research is to, theoretically, study how Change and Life Flame can theoretically be used to theoretically turn someone into, theoretically, a frog. It's theoretically something that Flame is theoretically capable of, and we have apocryphal sources that say it's theoretically possible, so Frog Research was established in case it theoretically ever happened to someone so we would theoretically have a means of theoretically reversing the phenomenon. Theoretically."

"… You said 'theoretically' twelve times," Falling Stillness said.

"It was an important clarification, so I repeated it," Princess Megumi said, coughing nervously.

"We could go visit Frog Research if you—oh no, wait, they're closed right now. I can see the 'Frog Closed' sign from here." She actually sounded relieved.

"Excuse me, but… is all of Frog Research theoretical?" someone asked.

"Uh, technically…" Princess Megumi said.

"It's not their fault. Tiana and Sylvie are great doctors, and they've contributed a lot to Trauma Medicine, but… Well, no one would be surprised if they're not able to crack the Frog Research problem. Lots of girls and buddies have tried over the centuries, and they've made really good theories, but… well, let's just say the planet's frog population has yet to rise above zero—" Whatever else she was going to say was cut off at the sound of an explosion.

It was a small, distant explosion, and Loren looked around in confusion. The Kaedekin were doing the same.

"I thought there weren't any explosive experiments going on?" Namine said, looking towards Princess Megumi.

"There aren't," the princess of the college said, frowning.

"Partner, what's happening? Is anyone hurt? What blew up?"

"Over there!" one of the Kaedekin cried, pointing. Everyone followed her finger, and found themselves looking at the tall stone tower in the middle of the college. Loren narrowed her eyes, seeing things sparkling in the air.

"Central Research?" Sera said, sounding concerned. She had her cane-wand out and was holding it in the middle.

"No, it's too high. Those are the residential floors," Princess Megumi said.

"Wait… is that… confetti?"

"Oh, poot," Namine said with a quiet vehemence that made it clear she was swearing. Suddenly, writing appeared on all sides of the tower, white lettering that seemed to just float in the air. We apologize for the lack of advanced warning, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Today, I am stealing the Crown of the Princess from the College of Flames! Stop me if you can! Sincerely, Dark Magical Girl Phantom Thief Night Raider.

Just as Loren finished reading the text, a streak of light flew like a rocket from one of the balconies above the sign.

"My room!" Princess Megumi cried.

"My crown!"

"All First Contact Officers, hold in place!" Namine suddenly cried, and it was only then that Loren noticed nearly all the Kaedekin that had been escorting the excursion party had risen into the air, wrapped in glowing magic, and holding guns.

"We're not going after that Phantom Thief! Our job is to keep our guests safe, so put your feet back on the ground and assume defensive formation!"

"Sorry, but what's everyone yelling about?" one of the pajhadin asked.

"We can't see a thing."