Seventy

Because of his affliction, Solomon was not a morning person. When Bird and Fyndraxis came within sight of the lodge, they began to hail him. He was probably awake, but in no shape to have company. He was no doubt dry heaving somewhere or breathing his way through a panic attack while his trembling hands tried to bring whiskey to his lips.
He and Bird were also not on the best of terms at this point, so hearing her shouting his name would have little to no effect at this time of day. Around sunset when he was drunk enough to forget how mad he was at Bird and why, was really the time to catch him. The news they bore was important though, and they couldn’t wait until sunset. They wanted to recruit the G to be their Alpha testers.
Alpha testing has a long and wonderful history. The general idea is this: You have a piece of software that you have created and you think that it works pretty well. You hand select a group of people to test it out and tell you how good it is. You, being the creator of said software, think it works perfectly so you test it minimally. Once this piece of software is handed off to your Alpha testers you get to realize that you have in fact made a buggy pile of trash instead of a well crafted program. Alpha testers, through no fault of their own, find every conceivable way to break your software and find glaring holes in the logic used to create it. The G, with their inherent literacy and knowledge of physics would be perfect for this task.
Fyndraxis had disbanded his sphere and instructed it to act like dust and follow him. He was fastened at Bird’s hip, so when she entered Solomon’s throne room it was filled with a gray fog. They found Solomon on the floor with his back arched and his arms curled fetally in front of his chest. He was taking shallow panicked breaths and his lips were beginning to turn blue.
“Solomon!” Bird said as she rushed to his side. His eyes were two portals to the hell he was experiencing, and the terror that it contained was reflected there. He tried to reach out to her and grab her hand, but his arms wouldn’t come uncurled.
“Bird, listen to me carefully,” Fyndraxis started instructing her, “Solomon is having a panic attack. It’s not as bad as it looks. Look into his eyes and talk him down. Get him to breathe with you. Nice slow deep breaths.”
She did as she was asked.
“Solomon, Listen to me. We can get through this. I’m here for you. Take some nice deep breaths with me OK?” She spoke to him gently, looking directly into his eyes.
Solomon nodded and tried shakily to match her breathing. She slowly breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth for a couple of minutes. Eventually functionality returned to his arms and he was able to sit up. He sat there for a while with his head between his knees, just breathing. A couple of silent sobs racked his body, but that was all that he would permit himself.
“They’re getting worse,” he said finally, regarding Bird with inhumanly bloodshot eyes. She hugged him tenderly and pushed his hair from his face.
“We gotta get you off the sauce, man,” she smoothed back his hair gently.
“I think it’ll kill me. If it doesn’t, the dive will, one of these days. I think my people are losing faith in me. It’s actually not a bad way to go. Painless,” he managed to get himself up to a seated position.
“We may have brought you something that will buy you a little bit of good will,” Fyndraxis informed the King.
“I’ll take any council you are willing to give,” as Solomon said council, a console hissed into existence before him. This word, being phonetically close enough to console to trigger the system. Solomon, having an overabundance of cortisol coursing through his veins was already in a rather raw state and was teetering on the knife’s edge between fight and flight. His sympathetic nervous system chose the option for fight and he hauled off and punched the hovering console. The console issued a sound like a frisbee beaning somebody in the head, and flew across the room.
“What the fuck is that?” Solomon exclaimed, teetering on the precipice of another panic attack.
“Fyn and I made something. Something that will help everyone. This will change the world Solomon,” she explained.
Solomon had brought his breathing back under control and began looking around for his hidden bottle of booze. He located it under his throne and took a mighty pull. He fought through a wave of nausea and gestured for Bird to continue with her explanation.
“I’ll take this one, Bird,” Fyndraxis chimed in, “Liberty and I have invented magic. What you just punched is the interface to the power,” Fyndraxis was trying to stay away from saying the word console, “by using that interface, you can get it to do whatever you want.”
“Like what? Whatever I want is rather broad,” Solomon took another pull from the bottle.
“Bird, show him your armor,” Fyndraxis requested.
Bird toggled the switch that changed her cloak into a set of Daemon armor. Solomon walked up to her and inspected her finery. He paced around her in a circle tapping on various parts of the suit. Everywhere he knocked, it sounded like he was tapping on a slab of granite.
“Astounding, how does it work?” He brought his hand to stroke his beard.
“It uses a lot of tiny little machines that work together,” Fyndraxis explained, “When it comes across a Wendigo, it consumes it and makes a copy of itself. These copies can be commanded to do what you wish.” Solomon raised an eyebrow and nodded his approval.
“How strong is this armor?” He asked.
“Extremely strong. You could drop a house on her and she wouldn’t even feel it,” Fyndraxis said.
“And who can use this?” Solomon asked skeptically.
“Anyone,” Fyndraxis informed him.
“Anyone? Including cannibals?” He gazed around, presumably looking for a glass.
“Technically yes, but they don’t know that. Using this will require literacy and quite a bit of study. The cannibals don’t seem like they hold education as a virtue, so they will probably be out of luck. Plus, Bird and I just killed a bunch of them and I’m sure their numbers are getting pretty thin,” Fyndraxis reassured the King.
“They aren’t an enemy that should be underestimated. While I haven’t conducted a census of their territory, I wouldn’t be surprised if they hold great numbers to the southeast,” he had found his glass and poured himself an unhealthy measure.
“All the magic in the world is in this room with us right now,” Fyndraxis stated.
“I don’t follow,” the king took a sip of his whiskey and gagged.
“This is a very new technology. In fact I only have about 850 kilograms of the stuff. You have the opportunity to learn how to use it before it starts spreading around the world,” the Daemon Sword informed him.
“How is it going to spread around the world?” The King asked as a shakily poured another measure.
“People,” Fyndraxis continued, he was getting pretty good at pitches, “the G are going to start using it and quickly see that they want more. There is more to be had in the Waste. Moving westward into the Waste and clearing out the Wendigo, you will see that there is fertile farmland to be had and great mountains in the distance,” Fyndraxis was trying to take an inspiring tone.
“I have seen these mountains, there are bald peaks and rockslides,” Solomon brought the whiskey close to his lips, but gave a stifled gag and thought better of it.
“Yes, they are called the Adirondacks. Beyond those, thousands of miles west lay some of the tallest mountains on the continent. The Rockies,” Fyndraxis was becoming truly inspiring, a leader of men.
“Are you suggesting the G pick up stakes and leave this valley? We’ve put our blood sweat and tears into making this valley a decent place to live,” his whiskey forgotten for a second, Solomon shot Fyndraxis a glare.
“I’m saying there is a vast world out there that the Wendigo have stolen from you and maybe you should go check it out now that you have the opportunity,” the Daemon Sword reassured him.
“Solomon, this is important,” Bird jumped in for a second to back up her partner, “this is the dawn of a new age. This will happen with or without you, we are coming to you first because you are the perfect people to pull it off.”
Solomon sighed. He then poured himself another drink, and took a minute to think.
“So I could have armor like Liberty’s?” The King’s nausea was beginning to pass, and his efforts to drink were becoming less shaky.
“Yeah, that’s no problem,” Fyndraxis said.
“And we can make skis out of this stuff?” Solomon was starting to catch on, but needed a practical demonstration to seal the deal..
“Solomon, you can make anything out of this stuff. You can make it do stuff. Here, let me show you.”
Fyndraxis retreated to his workshop and fired up Nanomancer. He and Bird hadn’t gotten around to making a demo for the magic system yet, so he decided to whip up something impressive. While he could have gone with something flashy like a lightshow, he knew Solomon and that wouldn’t impress him very much. He had to do something miraculous. He decided that we would make a little camp stove.
A camp stove in itself is not all that impressive. A typical model will use a hydrocarbon compound called white gas under pressure as fuel to generate a delightful blue flame. The camp stove that Fyndraxis was envisioning was a different beast altogether. This stove would be powered by water. Water is made up of two Hydrogen atoms and an Oxygen atom. Both of these elements are highly reactive. Oxygen is extremely flammable. Our atmosphere is only 21 percent oxygen and things light on fire so frequently that every town has to have a fire station and every building has to have at least a couple fire extinguishers. It’s a huge problem. As for evidence of the reactivity of Hydrogen, one only needs to go outside and look at the sun.
Both elements are just begging for the opportunity to be an explosion. But, in water they have reached an electrostatic equilibrium. Water is so reluctant to combust that we use it to put out fires. Except for grease fires, using water to put out a grease fire just results in a larger angrier fire.
When an electric charge is applied to water in the right conditions, it breaks this electrostatic equilibrium and splits water into its two base elements. This process is called electrolysis, and it yields us H2 and O2 in a gaseous state. This gas is called Oxyhydrogen. Oxyhydrogen desperately wants to be a supersonic blastwave hightailing it away from a mushroom cloud. After the explosion, the hydrogen and oxygen combine again to be regular old water that you can drown in.
What Fyndraxis wanted to make was a small squat cylinder that you could fill up with water and have a nice cooking flame come out the top. With the new Hunters this was easily done. He had been getting very good at using the CAD functions in Nanomancer and had a workable design in about half an hour, his time.
Inside this squat cylinder he made a volume of extremely fine mesh. Containing this volume of mesh, he made a little diving bell to catch the Oxyhydrogen that would be produced when the mesh was given a negative charge. From this little diving bell the gas would bubble out into the larger part of the cylinder through siphons. From there, it could build up pressure and head up to the burner to become the flame it so desperately wanted to be.
Essentially, this was a bomb. Oxyhydrogen is also referred to as Knallgas. This is a German word that means bang gas. It goes bang in a huge way. If you treat it right it can bang you all the way up to the moon, as demonstrated by the Saturn V rocket. The main design consideration for this camp stove was something called blowback.
This is when the fire that you want to use figures out where you are keeping the fuel and goes and finds it. Fyndraxis wants to keep the burning Oxyhydrogen out of his camp stove. He could spend hours and hours trying to design blowback arrestors, but he is kind of in a hurry and his new Hunters have little rockets of their own that he can use. So he lines the insides of the little holes where the gas comes out with Hunters that will fire their rockets while the stove is on. This does two things. Number one, it ignites the Oxyhydrogen, and number two it blows the combusting gas away from the inside of the cylinder.
As long as the exhaust from the little rockets is faster than the combustion of the bang gas, the flame should stay safely away from the fuel source. He also added a couple of features like an on and off button and made sure that it would turn off when it tipped over. Other than that, it was ready for testing.
Fyndraxis joined Bird and Solomon in the throne room.
“Check it out,” he said while the Hunters self assembled into the camp stove that he designed.
“What is it?” Solomon asked as he bent down to look at it.
“It’s a stove,” the Daemon informed him.
“A stove?” Solomon asked.
“Yeah, but not just any stove. Do you have any water?” Fyndraxis queried.
“Just booze,” the King said. Bird shook her head and ran downstairs for a bucket of water. There were screams of alarm from downstairs and when she returned she had turned her armor back into a cloak.
“What should I do?” Solomon asked, a little puzzled by the new device.
“Dunk the bottom of the stove into the bucket,” Fyndraxis instructed.
He did as he was told and the stove sucked up water and filled itself with a bubbling sound. The Hunters on the bottom of the stove looked for water, and when they found it they worked together to pump it into the reservoir. Solomon looked at it in shock.
“It drank the water?” The King said as he pulled it out and inspected the bottom for leaks.
“There is a button and a dial on the side,” Fyndraxis began to describe the operation of the artifact, “set it on the floor and, well, you know what, maybe we’ll have Liberty turn it on and take a couple of steps back.”
Bird put her armor back on and went over to the stove. It clicked on and produced a flame that was barely visible. This was a much better result than the detonation that could have resulted from a poor design.
“Wait, from water? How?” Solomon asked as he started doing some mental calculations.
“Hydrogen and Oxygen, it separates them from the water with electricity and then burns it,” Fyndraxis said.
“How long will this run for?” Solomon asked, inspecting the stove more closely.
“As long as it has water. You need to charge it every once in a while by putting it in the sun, but other than that it will run forever. You could conceivably make one that uses heat to charge it, but it would eventually yield diminishing returns,” Fyndraxis went on.
“And we could make a big one that could run the still?” Asked the King, taking another drink and finally getting excited about the prospect of this new technology.
“Sure, you could make it any size you want, given enough material,” Fyndraxis stated plainly.
“This is huge. Do you have any idea how much time we spend harvesting and processing wood?” The King stood up from his throne.
“From what I can tell, it’s most of what you guys do up here,” Fyndraxis observed.
“Roxy and Grandad need to know about this immediately. Is there any way I can see the design?” The King was getting his boots on and preparing to seek out the pair.
“Sure, all you need to do is say the word console,” A console hissed into existence in front of the Daemon sword, “or you can use this one. I think we need a more specific keyword.”
“How about, summon console?” Bird said as another console appeared in front of her. She dismissed it.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Fyndraxis agreed.