Chương 29: 27: Downtime is Magic

As I slowly sank into the pool of glorious, bubbly, pine-scented warmth, I let my stress, worries and conflicted emotions be washed away and relaxed. Julia had been right; this group of survivors so much closer to the town center did not have hot showers. What they did have was Jerry's aunt Sarah and her strange domestic powers that were as vague as they were useful.

The old woman had fixed the hole I'd punched in the wall in only a few seconds then proceeded to provide water and natural herbal shampoo for everyone who wanted to clean up after our "adventures" in the streets above.

The baths were actually a trio of kiddie-sized pools built out of seamlessly joined bricks near the survivors' sleeping quarters, with their pipes tapping directly into the neighborhood's water main for as much water as weary old soldiers or cranky high school students might need - her exact words, those. The one thing Aunt Sarah's powers could not provide was warm water for some reason, which was where Mandy and her fire powers had come in.

I didn't know how long I stayed there, soaking and relaxing and kicking all my problems down future-me's direction, but not doing anything felt awesome. No need to fight because monsters wanted to eat me or worse. No need to run or fly to get somewhere in particular before some nebulous time limit was reached. No need to talk with others to convince them of something of vital importance or argue against dangerous decisions.

No thinking more complex than how boiling water felt nice now, or how splashing around threw the bubbles into weirdly appealing shapes. I lost track of time until the water slowly cooled and the bubbles dwindled and my bath was finally coming to an end... or was it? Lazily raising a palm above the surface and staring at the bit of water caught within, I tried to recall what I'd been taught about heat. Vibrating molecules, right? Water was a liquid so that meant...

its molecules moved freely and randomly within the same volume, colliding with each other and their surroundings? Something like that. No need to get it exactly right, I wasn't building a machine here. So to be hotter they had to move faster? Yeah, no. Grabbing molecules with Proximakinesis and pushing them to move faster wasn't going to work. Visualizing that many moving bits was simply beyond me but... maybe if I did it at one remove... except holding onto the water wasn't easy.

The bit in my palm was technically an object and I was touching it but I had to keep touching it. Trying to make it vibrate to warm up resulted in the effect breaking the moment it separated even a hair's width from my skin then splashing against the ceiling. Getting another palm full of water and trying to rotate it instead went better at first, the bit of liquid forming an orb as it went faster and faster and faster.

It had only started to steam when trying to keep it in a sphere became harder, it started to wobble, widen into a disc and finally exploded like a grenade to the face. Seeing the hairline cracks in the brickwork closest to where the orb had been put a stop to that line of experimentation. Maybe... maybe if I tried to speed the molecules indirectly... Force Adjustment III: adjust forces and force-like effects from and on you and objects you touch by a factor of up to eight, selectively.

Automatic trigger on self vs harm. Forcefield Creation I: apply force effects you can personally exert to a volume up to one cubic yard at a time, at reduced effect. One simple geometric shape at a time. The molecules collided with each other because random motion due to heat... what if the force of those collisions became more than they should have been?

Using Proximakinesis, I formed a bit of bathwater into an inch-wide sphere in the palm of my hand because I wasn't about to experiment with even close to a cubic yard when a palm of it had just made a credible grenade. And just in case, better to start slowly. Say... one percent adjustment to the collisions? The sphere didn't change much. Not at first. Second by second though, it became brighter in my Force Awareness and it required more and more force to hold its spherical shape.

The hold of my Proximakinesis stretched and tiny bubbles formed, then multiplied until it was boiling faster and faster until it all turned into steam. It had not just heated up, it kept heating more and more rapidly despite me not adding any more power effects. A few seconds and it had all boiled away. Giggling, I tried it again with even less Force Adjustment - a barely perceptible addition this time. It took longer and escalated more slowly, but in under a minute the new sphere was boiling merrily.

It didn't take long to puzzle out why. Collisions weren't faster than they should have been; each collision was faster. Each molecule underwent countless collisions very quickly, with each collision being harder than the one before, adding energy in a chain reaction until everything went whoosh! Napkin math time! I formed a napkin out of water with Proximakinesis and wrote on it with an imaginary pencil. Cubic yard of water... heating up till it boiled... heat capacity... enthalpy of vaporization...

carry the zero... by the end I was glad I'd put those points into Reason and Vigilance. I was pretty sure I wouldn't have remembered all that stuff otherwise, despite cramming for the Chemistry exam less than a month before. Also, about two gigajoules? I was fairly sure that was a lot. Like, maybe blow-up-a-tank a lot? I very carefully rewarmed my bath then stopped experimenting before I blew up something important. xxxx xxxx Jerry's lab was way lower tech than I'd imagined. No robotic assembly lines.

No holographic panels to design fancy armors on. No tangled network of power cables crackling with barely contained electrical power or glass vials of mysterious liquids bubbling merrily or hissing ominously. There wasn't even a 3d printer around and the only computer looked like one of those towers complete with CRT screens from the late Pleistocene. Most of the space was taken up by garbage.

Rusty old piping, heavy sheets of metal, car engine parts that had seen better days, Tupperware and aluminum cans, broken beer bottles in all colors, loops of old cables, whole tables full of old tools, screws, nails, nuts and bolts. Only one of the tables was different, its solid steel frame sagging under the weight of hundreds of metal bars.

Not the rebar Liz could make either; these ranged from polished steel, to the dull grey of aluminum rods, the yellow of bronze and dark red of copper, even brown-black or bluish hues of metals I didn't recognize. As I watched, a sweaty, still-pale Jerry was looking down on several brown-black rods that were... slowly melting and reshaping themselves into a curved metal sheet about an inch thick.

As soon as the transformation finished, the still-recovering boy picked up the sheet that must have weighed fifty, sixty pounds and with a grunt of effort carried it over to a ten feet tall, six feet wide depression in the wall where a half-finished robot stood. The brunet shoved the metal plate over a gap in the robot's chest until it fit the surrounding armor plating and hid the more delicate mechanisms and cabling beneath.

Then he grunted again, pressing against the robot for a few seconds with nothing happening. He swore then picked up a two-handed demolition hammer and pounded on the plate until it settled with an audible metallic click. That done, the foolish boy collapsed on a chair set next to the robot, presumably for exactly that purpose.

"Aren't you going to tell him to stop?" I asked the other occupant in the room where she was fiddling with a much thinner rod of cast iron.

"I stopped trying after the seventeenth time he started working the moment my back was turned," Mandy said, not even deigning to look at the idiot who was trying to kill himself.

"He knows he needs to heal, to rest. He's neither an idiot nor a little kid, merely frustrated like the rest of us." The redhead pulled red tresses out of her eyes and shot me a long-suffering look, somehow conveying understanding, patience, exasperation and commiseration at the same time. Then she returned to throwing streams of fire at the finger-thick rod, which flowed into a vortex even as they narrowed down until a needle-thin, painfully bright crimson ray carved symbols into the metal.

"What are you doing?" Whatever it was, it looked way more complex under my Force Awareness than plain sight. Mandy was throwing loads of heat at it, enough to blast holes in the brick walls every second. Instead of melting the foot-long bit of metal into a glowing, boiling puddle, the heat was sucked in... elsewhere. In the rod but not actually in the rod? I tilted my head, tried to look at it from another angle that was neither sideways nor overhead or below but, like, a layer beside the rod itself?

The shape didn't quite want to fit in my sight; it looked like a sphere, if a bazillion transparent spheres were somehow sitting on top of each other yet still were one sphere? Yeah, that made way more sense in my head. In my defense, I hadn't seen anything like it before. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I'm trying to make magic wands," Mandy said with a frustrated huff and the stream of flames suddenly flickered. For an infinitesimal pause between one second and the next the multiple sphere thingy seemed to melt down into an actual sphere and all the heat inside no longer fit and wanted to violently come out. Then I blinked and it was a multiple sphere thingy once more and stable.

"Jerry was nagging me about it.

'You can enchant walls and buildings, Mandy', he said.

'Surely, you could enchant something small enough to carry around,' he said." The sphere thingy flickered just a little but held.

"You don't see him trying to fit something the size of a house inside an oversized pencil, do you?"

"... you seem to be doing well?" I tried and my best friend shot me a well-deserved glare. She had already finished several more wands, though, and the whole base hadn't exploded so everything was perfectly fine.

"How does enchanting work?" Because if it did what I thought it did, it would be very, very useful.

"With a hell of a lot of effort, time and headaches," she shot back before setting the wand she'd been working on aside along with several others that looked ready. Its multi sphere thingy looked kinda full, now. In fact, if I stared at the rest of them from the right angle, they all had near-identical spheres attached to them by a network of glowing red lines that bridged through the different layers and angles and looked a bit like a house's plumbing.

"Don't get me wrong, carrying around workings I prepared ahead of time is dead useful but it feels like trying to squint at several different things at the same time."

"Sure, but how does it actually work?" I asked, picking a rusty old bolt big enough to have belonged in a railway car.

"What is it that you're doing when making a wand?" I squeezed the bolt in my palm and it bent like play-doh... if play-doh squealed worse than nails on a blackboard.

"Can you not?" Mandy demanded, rubbing her temples.

"Sorry." I used Proximakinesis on the bolt to stop vibrations that might produce sound, then tried again. This time it deformed silently, just like play-doh.

"About the wands?"

"Fine, you win." The redhead slumped in her chair, the very image of abused little sister so done with the big sister's shenanigans. The memory brought a small smile to my lips. Fortunately, all of the family worth worrying about was a thousand miles away from this Hell on Earth.

"You know how I can do fire magic, shape and control it however I want, right?"

"Yes, but you can also set traps or something?" I replied and laughed.

"I very distinctly remember one blowing up in my face."

"That's what you get trying to capture incredibly dangerous enemies," she shot back and we both giggled. It was good, having a laugh with my best friend even if we both were in the middle of an apocalyptic magical disaster.

"Anyway, most of what I do is instantaneous, or an effect I am actively maintaining. I stop focusing, it stops working. The traps are different." She hummed a few notes and a symbol of red flame appeared in mid-air.

"They need two more things than just my intent; a conditional trigger for when they'll activate, and the magic to fuel that activation. That way I can set up things to happen at any later time or to any specific condition."

"Huh..." that was interesting. But what about...

"How do they know the trigger happens? Like how much time has passed, or that an enemy is passing by, or anything else?"

"How does magic know that I want a fireball at that intensity thrown at that direction?" she countered.

"It's fire; it doesn't have ears to hear me or a brain to understand. I certainly don't have time to do math for the fireball's intensity and direction during a fight, let alone to guide spells that home on enemies or have complex trajectories."

"Then..." I thought back to my own powers, how the power list responded to my own abilities. Idly squeezing the silenced bit of metal, I thought of how it could do things I didn't have time to think about, or couldn't perceive let alone calculate. Yet sometimes it did have those limits, seemingly arbitrarily.

"Then how can it do what it does?"

"No idea," Mandy said and cackled, dodging a flake of mashed metal I threw at her head. She was faster than a normal girl now. Then again, if she hadn't grown in other ways than just firepower she probably wouldn't have survived.

"Verity says it is original creation."

"The Midget?" I asked, frowning.

"Do you really trust an outsider you know nothing about? Someone from another world?"

"She's not really a midget and it's either trust people or die," Mandy shrugged way more nonchalantly than I'd expected.

"Shapeshifting, mind control and similar powers exist. Absolutely anyone we meet could be an enemy and there's no way to logically or empirically prove either way. You could be under a full sensory illusion right now, a waking dream with no way to see through it except stronger magic. Which neatly gets us back to the point."

"Which is?"

"Magic creates. When I make a fire, that fire is created, it doesn't come from elsewhere. When you push something really hard or fly, that force is created. When Jerry suddenly knows more about technology, that knowledge is created." She picked up one of the finished wands, twirled it around like a conductor's baton.

"So when a spell, or a power, or supertech needs information? That information is also created. It doesn't need senses to discover the information, or a brain to understand it any more than I need to burn fuel for my flames or you need an airplane to fly. Stealth or mundane forms of concealment won't stop a conditional spell from blasting an intruder in the face and you can't physically disarm it like you can an alarm."

"How come the bad guys haven't found us, then?" I asked.

"If they can create information like that..."

"Because the more powerful a spell or power or skill is the harder it is to learn and do?" Mandy explained.

"A spell to create any information you wanted would be far harder to get than one to turn Florida into a crater. Hell, mundane tech could do the crater, no magic needed. But getting the information so an exploding trap can work? Only a bit more powerful than a landmine so if you got enough magic to slag vehicles you can do it." She frowned.

"Obviously, some of the magic goes towards the trigger so my normal mines are smaller than my normal blasts... unless I spend more time and effort to make them than my blasts."

"Was that what you were doing with the wands?" I immediately caught on.

"You spent ten minutes to make one while in a fight a blast would take a second?"

"Yes and no. The trigger for the wands is a password the user has to say. It can be done with intent, but stuff you can think by accident do not make good triggers." We both laughed at that.

"Plus a weapon that holds just one shot is not very good, so I'm putting enough power for repeat use into them. Fitting that much bang into small objects is the real hard part. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong..."

"You'll get it eventually. Just don't experiment with enough magic to level the building." Only I was allowed to do that and only away from other people. Big sister privilege.

"Too late!" my best friend said with another cackle, then got back to her work. At least she was fireproof... I hoped. The metal play-doh had taken the consistency of soft clay after being squeezed enough times, though from how it glowed a dull red and there were several inches of heat haze around it, it was probably too dangerous to drop and forget about it... so why not make something interesting out of it?

Proximakinesis shaped it into a short sword, compressed it to remove cavities and structural flaws, then Force Adjustment amplified all forces holding it together, turning it decently solid as it slowly cooled. Then I reached for another power. Lasting Force I: make force effects you can personally exert permanent, at reduced effect. Costs time and stamina scaling with effect, inverse scaling with each other.

First, I reached out with Proximakinesis for an effect that would apply a thin slice of force across the sword's edge. Unlike with Mandy's wands, this wouldn't have a trigger or anything else complex; it would remain on all the time. More dangerous, perhaps, but this was a simple proof of concept, not something to get too elaborate with. Lasting Force latched on to the effect and effort, for lack of a better word, poured into it from me. It was like running a set distance, exerting my body for a given work.

I would walk it slowly to avoid getting tired, even take breaks to recover as long as I stayed on the figurative road. Or I could jog to cross that same distance faster, or sprint. If I felt the distance wasn't too much I could even attempt to leap it in a single bound... but neither I nor the blade would like it if I failed. It wasn't a particularly difficult first attempt, and after about an hour it was done.

I wasn't even out of breath, though I had worked up a bit of sweat; if Mandy's efforts to enchant her wands got her headaches from too much thinking, then I got physical exhaustion. It was surprisingly fitting, given the nature of my powers. I drew the blade properly, took a few swings and noticed absolutely no difference in balance. Then I let it fall blade-first onto a steel table; it sliced through a quarter inch of metal with a dull clang, stopping halfway through.

Not bad, for my first ever forging of a magic sword. Let's see what else I could do with this.