บท 16: Equipment Upgrade
It was a well-established fact that most powers either came from one of two origins the precursor races aka the galaxy's powers-that-be, and the strange and overbearing extradimensionals.
All those who held powers today either shared a blood-line with these two forces, or those the two sides had conscripted into their unending war. Or they had gained power through research of those possessing the sublime bloodlines, i.e. the serums that were so prevalent within the galaxy.
On that note, here's a question from out of nowhere: What do you do when your cute but sketchy, other-half comes to you with a cylinder full glowing, blue-black, who-knows-what, and asks you if you'd like them to inject it into your bloodstream.
Henrika woke up, in Walder's bed which was something that was happening more often nowadays. It wasn't that they 'sleeping together' more often, though that was true too, it was more that Henri had sort of just adversed possessed Walder's bedroom over time.
A mixture of habit, and the fact he kept his room much tidier, and more organized than she kept hers, kept her coming back, thus leading to his room gradually becoming 'their' room. The ship adjusting the dimensions of the room to mirror this change.
Henri woke up, showered, and had her morning coffee, which was badly misnamed because she was almost never awake to drink it till noon had long come and gone.
She was sitting in the Julianne's canteen watching ten different screen's play news programs from the various nations that made up the Eadberht System's interplanetary government, paying special attention to news from the biggest nations on Olamide III, their current domicile.
Walder walked out from within the kitchen area of the canteen, holding two plates of steak and eggs.
Not being much of a morning person seemed to be something the two of them had in common, but then again, Walder didn't seem to be a day, evening, or night person either. From what Henri had observed the man was either always sleeping, or not sleeping at all, so it was probably best to just put the man in a category of his own and leave it at that.
He put one plate down in front of Henri and then sat down to eat while keeping his eyes training on a tablet he was holding, and occasionally looking up to to frown at the confused noise coming from the screens that had been painted on the wall.
At first Henri thought it was just noisiness that he was frowning at, then she realized that even if he couldn't split his thoughts and focuses like she could, he was still able to roughly follow along with some of the things he was hearing.
They didn't talk much. For the most part the Cerveny-Amihan household was fairly quiet. Henri spent most of her time in her head, Walder was always preoccupied.
Their interactions were made up of brief greetings, considerate concessions for the other party, and frank but brief communications that only happened if non-verbal cues had failed. They'd occasionally have conversations but like neighbors living on closely placed islands they mostly spent their time doing their own thing.
This wasn't the stuff of some epic, world-aweing, romance but for these two eccentrics it somehow worked. They talked exactly as much as they needed to, no more, no less, and the fact that they seemed to agree on the things that counted, and shared a fair amount of interests and hobbies kept things from reaching a realm of estrangement.
Since the news programs generally only lasted for between an hour and an hour and a half, Henri could usually set the playback of the recorded programs to end at around the same time. Sometimes one news program would run longer than the norm but generally things ended on time, with the screens going black and the wall erasing the screens.
Creating a single large window in their place through which one could look out and observe the spaceport and the small portion of Odilia city that one could see from where the ship sat in its dock.
This coincidentally would also be the time where Henri would finish eating the last bite of her breakfast. She wasn't a slow eater, but wasn't a fast eater either, and Walder knew how to cook to match the needs of a superhuman metabolism meaning that portion sizes were generally large.
Normally, the end of the news programs and the end of breakfast, meant it'd be time for the two to separate and go do their own things. They'd leave the plates for the housekeeper flan to collect and clean. Then Henri would head to her room which was basically just a media room, and clothing closet, at this point. Walder would disappear into the depths of the ever expanding ship to do 'mysterious things'...and pop up some time later with food in hand.
Today, though instead of immediately disappearing Walder said,
"So...I've finished you're equipment."
To which Henri replied,
"My equipment? Was that what you've been working on for the last few weeks?"
"Well, yes...We've already said, we're in this for the long run, and I figured just in case that means you'll occasionally be coming out on jobs with me, I might as well make sure we're both...er...fully kitted." said Walder. Scratching his cheek, his nail making scritching noises as it ran over his red-brown, five o'clock shadow.
"....." Henri didn't know what to say, she'd spent some time mulling over the possibility of asking the guy to make her some gear with his savant skills, but she'd been hesitating because she figured she'd need to be able to compensate the man for the labor and materials. Which she'd estimated would cost funds she didn't have yet.
She hadn't expected him to go and make her the equipment on his own.
After going over their past conversations, and trying to parse why he would do so, one of her lines of thoughts recalled that they 'were' technically in a relationship, and on occasion, people in relationships do nice things for each other just because they care.
Which lead to another line of thought picking up where the two other thoughts left off, and realizing that as odd and somewhat distant, and somewhat intense, the man in front of her could be, he actually was kind of a sweetheart.
A sweetheart who apparently genuinely cared about her well-being. Which made Henri wonder if this was one of those times where the matter was covered with just a thank you, and trying to reciprocate through funds, or goods, or services, was seen as not sincerely accepting the gift. Or whether there were in fact some hidden strings attached to this gift that she wasn't picking up on.
Looking back on what she'd seen of the man, Henri was 85% percent sure, the scenario was more the former than the latter.
This realization lead to another line of thought, drearily trying to recall when the last time she had someone genuinely care for her well-being without having ulterior motives. She was disappointed to find that most of her youth, and young adult life was filled of extended haggling and negotiations where she and her family's face
With an even drearier thought wondering if this had ever been the case, since her dear father had apparently just seen her as asset to trade or abandon as need demanded. Her mother might have loved her, and perhaps her father had loved her as a daughter once, but as soon as her mother was no longer in the picture, he'd clearly cut their emotional ties.
It seemed that along, the rest of the family was not-so-secretly trying to cannibalize each other. She'd apparently just been too busy at school to notice.
"Hey...Henri...is that a no, or a yes, or…" said Walder.
Henri shook her head as Walder's voice crashed through the web of depressing ruminations and brought her mind back to the present.
"Mhm...It's a yes? What were talking about again?"
"The equipment I made for you...Do you want to see it?" said Walder.
"Oh, right. That. Yeah, sure. That'd be great." said Henri.
Five minutes, and one short elevator ride later, they were in one of the Julianne's labs. The first thing Henri noticed was the 9 meter tall machine that floated in a massive containment cylinder.
It looked like a battlemech except somehow 'more'. More alive, more advanced, more present and aware, the eyes in its head seeming to track her as she entered the room.
The machine was humanoid with lupine features. It had a snout, and muzzle like that of a wolf, and two, tall, pointed crests that stood atop its head like ears.
It had six limbs, one set of legs, two sets of arms, with the hands of the lower set of arms, resting on the hilts of the blades that sat in the sheaths at its hips.
It had glowing yellow eyes, and its muzzle was lined with what seemed to be teeth. Its body was covered in long thin plates, and filaments that jutted out like unruly fur. Beneath these plates was a layer of heavy armor like that of a knight's, making the 9 meter machine look like some colossal robot werewolf.
A ridge ran up its spine, lined with glowing spikes, and jutting from both its shoulders like twisted wings was a set of cannons and guns. With a blade sheathed in its right shoulder like a wound from some ancient, long forgotten, war.
Henri looked up at the machine and it immediately knew it to be female, even without the affectations on the machine's armour, and she was immediately aware that she was being assessed. The machine gazing back at her as she gazed up at it.
"Hey, Olamide to Henri...Are you still with me?" said Walder.
"Huh? Oh, yeah." said Henri. Pulling her gaze away from the machine. Feeling like the inside of her head was filled with static as she did so.
"So, after looking at what 'you' have, and looking at what 'I' have and thinking about what we both were lacking I figured I'd start off by going according to your tastes and creating a bunch of modified clothing…" said Walder.
"My tastes?" said Henri.
"Well, Jules and I basically used your shopping habits, and the clothes you have in your closet to try and extrapolate the kind of clothing you tend to wear and then after I created the template for our newly approved basic armor I had Jules make a bunch of armor pieces based on what you'd usually wear."
"Oh, I guess that makes sense." said Henri. Trying not to think about the slightly creepy portion of the man and his AI's research on her dressing habits.
Walder pointed to a wall, and the wall became a screen. A motion controlled screen that could have its display scrolled or switched with just a wave of the hand.
Henri looked through a portfolio of made up of tracksuits, sweatpants, yoga pants, jeans, skorts, pant suits, blouses, and t-shirts.
"....And all of this is armor?" said Henri. Her feelings of mild discomfit replaced by a kind of skeptical awe.
Walder nodded.
"Yes. Basic armor is generally all made out of custom elements and molecules that have been created using world-eater technology and quantum harmonics. It's all bullet proof, blade proof, temperature resistant, with a knack of absorbing and diffusing most kinds of energy."
Henri looked at the exact figures for all those resistances and whistled.
"This is better than the standard heavy kit for the heroes leagues' people…" said Henri.
Walder just shrugged, seeming unconcerned by the comparison, as if it were no big deal for him to be able to make pair sweatpants that provided more protection than the heavy-plated body armor worn by an average Heroes League Crisis Response Officer.
"It's just basic armor, what I really wanted to show you was…'this'." said Walder. Guiding Henri's attention over to a hooded coat. Colored red for the most part with its lessor portions and underside being colored white.
"It kind of looks like your coat...Except shorter…" said Henri.
Walder shrugged. Looking sheepish.
"I know...Copying what you'd usually wear was easy, being creative, not so much…" said Walder.
"No...it's...It's okay." said Henri. She was only fashionable in the most perfunctory terms, and generally never worried too much about what she wore, because she just plainly didn't need to. Yet another benefit of being born well-to-do in an age of post-human, serum-enhanced, super genetics.
In a world where people just generally looked good in whatever they wore, being fashionable could be as easy as not looking like a circus clown, or a time traveller.
The coat didn't look completely similar to Walder's it was more like a short cloak with sleeves than a coat.
"So, what does it do?" said Henri.
"The real question is what the coats don't do...Having more access to my powers gave me more access to what I could do through quantum harmonics, like the difference between playing piano while wearing mittens, and playing the piano with your fingers free…"
"Okay then, maybe explain that a bit?"
"The suits are basically stellar vessels in and of themselves, and are equipped with a whole slew of defensive capabilities and life support functions. Imagine the figures for the basic armor times ten. Assuming you could survive the excess kinetic energy, you could probably withstanding a shot from ship mounted rail-guns while wearing one of these, and even if you died, so long as your head was still attached and your central nervous system mostly intact, the suits could probably bring you back from the dead.They naturally have a transformation function inbuilt for dealing with foreign environments and heavier threats, similar to what you saw with my jacket."
"That's...pretty nifty, I guess." said Henri. Too shocked to actually react to the man's.
She stood in front of wall in the lab, scrolling through the figures for the coat's specifications and capabilities, using a screen that was attached to the coat's containment cylinder, and struggled to keep her eyebrows from disappearing behind her bangs forever.
"Um, thanks…" said Walder. Falling into the woman's pacing and treating her like he would one of his contemporaries from his old universe and the age where quantum harmonics and its bastard child the world-eater technologies were better known.
"Anyway, the coat comes with a pair of gloves, while I was doing the redesign, I figured that having a set of separate storage devices was nice and all, but kind of unnecessary, since I could just make a really sturdy pair of gloves with the same function. I mean why carry more s** on you than you have to, right?" said Walder. Using his implant to summon a realistic rotating model of a pair of red and white gloves onto the screen on the wall.
"Wait, so the gloves double as spatial devices?" said Henri. Wondering if the man next to her had any clue how many old physicists would be trying to beat him up if they could hear him glibbly talk about turning into a side-function, a technology they'd spent countless decades, blood, and tears learning how to make.
"Correct. They're basically a set of ultra-light gauntlets, really. Made light enough that they shouldn't impair user dexterity, but made tough enough that you could probably wave your hands through a plasma-cutter without losing any fingers...at least for a few seconds anyway..No promises if you're going to be exposing them to a temperature north of 10,000 degrees for a sustained period. In that case they might hold up, or they might not, depending on how much of a beating you've inflicted on them prior, but even if they do break down, you can rest assured all pairs of gloves are linked, and the gloves' inner-space is linked to the Julianne's meaning anything that doesn't fit in the gloves will be placed in the ship's storage. They also handle kinetic force and cutting damage fairly well, so I figure it's just more convenient to use them than the storage devices. Especially since both gloves come equipped with a user friendly OS and solid-light menu system to cut out the necessity of having a management device for those without 'my implant'...which is basically just you." said Walder.
"Cool, and I control them how again?" said Henri.
"You wear them, and then you can open the menu using a gesture and scroll through the menu using your fingers...if you know what you're looking for you can just use a voice command and the gloves will either deposit the item in front of you, if its a large item, or if you can hold it, the item will just pop into your hand. Glove-based items like other gauntlets will be equipped over the gloves. You can also change the color of the gloves but they'll either harmonize with the coats, or default to black." said Walder.
Henri couldn't help giving the man a sidelong look, wondering why he'd bothered to add shifting coloration as part of the gloves' features.
"Well, I've got to say this is all very impressive. So, uh….thanks I really appreci-..." said Henri.
"Wait, I'm not done yet!" said Walder. Having clearly gone full mad scientist and gotten carried away.
"You're not?" said Henri.
"I mean, I've only shown you a few defensive items and the best defense is a good offense...you haven't seen the gun I made for you….or well technically you've clearly seen it, but I haven't really explained it." said Walder.
When she heard Walder's words Henri's gaze naturally drifted back towards the machine.
"That thing...is a gun?" said Henri. Her tone incredulous, despite her expression and body language keeping their composure.
"Yes...Or rather, it might be better to call it a world-eater weaponized lifeform...they're basically what gives the tech its name, and everything else is sort of just a side-thing, created as a consequence of the development of the main technology. Sort of like how the development of military technology will usually have implications on civilian tech shortly after the war, when stuff stops being classified…" said Walder.
"It looks like...it looks like an extradimensional...Did you make an artificial extradimensional being, Walder?" said Henri. All her thoughts careening into each other, as the terrifying implications of someone being able to create their own cosmic entities slowly arose from the diffused sea of knowledge within her mind.
"Erm….Kinda? I call her Bad Wolf. She's a world-eater modelled after your personality. Created using certain metrics that signify marker for the best physiological and psychological fusion of beings." said Walder.
"....." Henri just stood there staring up at the creature in the containment cylinder. Watching the great metal being looked down on her with the same measuring gaze as before. She couldn't help wondering exactly aspect of her personality Walder pulled the metal monster from.
Henrika looked to the side and was once again struck with the same uncanny, and frightening sense of having stepped into some strange reality, as she realized exactly anomalous her 'husband' really was.
She'd already been fairly certain the man was at least part of extradimensional being. Related to the beings of myth and legend that always showed up in the myths and religions of civilized worlds, the devils, the angels, the gods, and saints, the unfathomable monsters of the unfathomable cosmos.
Now she knew he was someone who could make similar beings from materials he had lying round. The alien devils, angels, and gods that roamed the cosmos were already far more than the Msaran Galactic Government could handle.
The powers-that-be, the resident gods, angels and devils of the universe, would generally have to sacrifice an entire star system for every major conflict between themselves and the most powerful amongst the outsiders. What did you call a being who could make other such 'great beings' with his own hands?
"Okay...so that's my 'gun' you said?" said Henri. Recovering slower than she normally would after being forced confront a possibility that would break the minds of weaker men.
"Yes." said Walder.
"...With one caveat." said Walder.
"And that would be…?" said Henri.
"To use the weapon suite, it requires you take in a synchronization solution, its basically a mixture of materialized harmonic energy and specially programmed nanites. It basically keys you in as the world-eater's user, and grants you the attached powers that come in tandem with being a register world-eater user."
"Powers like?"
"Enhanced strength, agility, regenerative capabilities...plus a few extra things...I'm pretty sure the heroes league has its own ranking systems for the heroes...Being a world-eater user automatically gives you a class five physique. Well, since you've already been enhanced it'd probably make you a class six and six and half maybe but the point is that you'll receive an overall upgrade in your combat effectiveness..on top of having access to the world-eater's own abilities..."
Henri blinked.
The Heroes League's rankings provided estimates for the effective range, and threat of powers. There were ten classes with two extra classes in existence for beings whose abilities ranged beyond normal estimation, i.e. the two classes that existed solely for the powers-that-be and the truly powerful amongst the extradimensionals. Henri's mid-level super intelligence was class-six, and with serum-enhancement her strength was class three.
Speaking in terms of physical strength a normal, person, without serum enhancement beyond the baseline, was class one by default. A man who could crack continental plates would be a class ten. A being who could shatter moons by hand would be a special class eleven. Class twelves generally could pull stars out of the sky and destroy planets like it was nothing.
If that seemed descriptive but kind of vague as far as actual explanations for what the power classes meant, it was made that way on purpose. Each class of power was merely meant to serve as a guideline for heroes guild and heroes league responses.
They were just barely accurate enough for Henri to know that if she accepted the registration procedure she'd be capable of knocking down small cities on our own.
Her already, greatly, slowed, aging process would be slowed even further to a point where if she wasn't killed by violence or accident, she might not die in the next few millennia.
If she was shot with a small caliber firearm, the bullets would bounce right off of her, and regular blades and needles would no longer able to pierce her skin.
While she was mulling things over Walder left the room, and ten minutes later he returned with the registration serum. An ominous thrum issuing from the container.
"I know I probably should have asked before I built her, but is this even something you'd want?...To be linked to a weaponized lifeform...forever? Never again to be left alone to your thoughts?...At the very least I should have explained more about this, instead of just springing it on you like this...This is a serious decision with long term implications. One that could warp you body and soul, and change you irrevocably...My goodness, how could I be so thoughtless?...What was I thinking? Of course you don't want this right now...I-, I apologize...this was...incredibly rash... I have some more conventional weapons in storage...Let me just…"
While Walder was busy thinking through the implications of what he'd built and what he had almost had Henri do, Henrika had already taken the container and syringe.
She emptied the container into the syringe, and then injected the syringe into a vein at her neck, following the instructions that were projected on the screen behind Walder.
"....." said a speechless Walder.
"....." said a moderately abashed Henri.
Walder quickly recovered coughing into his hand. As if embarrassed by his moment of scientific self-doubt.
Henrika was too busy focusing on a buzzing in her ears that had started the moment she'd injected the registration serum into her veins, to be concerned by the man's embarrassment.
"Hm...I'm kind of woozy now, and I'm assuming the tinnitus will fade with time."
"In a few hours or so, you'll probably sleep through the recovery, and the adjustment, and the nanites will make it so that you don't really need to spend much time adjusting to your new physical capabilities…." said Walder. Having mentally decided never to worry about the ramifications of fusing people with artificial eldritch beings, ever again. Henri's actions on this day serving as a very inaccurate yardstick for how the rest of his new universe's people would respond to his world-eater tech and his powers as a cacophonous lord.
A decision that would make most people who became privy to what he was capable of, find his attitude to the existentially horrific things he'd sometimes do and talk of, as strangely blase.
As for explaining Henri's actions. While on the one hand, as a serious minded, level headed, young woman she should have turned the procedure down or at least asked more questions and asked for more time to think about things.
On the other hand, a world-class nerd and neet, she'd be doing her chosen non-profession a great disservice if it was ever found out that a being that she could trust to never knowingly harm her, and she knew had given her honest answers about what was coming, had offered her extra super powers and she'd hesitated for longer than a few minutes. Which was exactly the time it took for her 108 trains of thought to at least 'half-' mull over the consequences of what she was doing.
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