Combinatorial Explosion (Worm/Original)

"[Data]"

"Yeah yeah, don't get your autoclave packets in a twist, I'm still wrapping up your little care package."

"[Corrupt]"

"See, I've been getting that a lot, but honestly, what's a little corruption between friends if it means getting data faster?"

"[Agreement]"

"So, you really don't care about the awakening data? I don't have all the info on it quite yet, but I'm pretty sure we could get you sorted out with your own soul, instead of having you waste effort using physics-alteration to cheat it in."

"[Redundancy]"

"Ow, rude. Alright, if you say so... So, where do you want to make the trade, my place or yours?"

---

Armsmaster's opaque visor covered his narrowed eyes as he stared down at the microreactor that Kid Win had allowed him to examine.

From an outside perspective, the device was simple. Primative, even. The Ward had taken the time to explain what he could, noting his contribution in the form of high-mass materials for the fuel source, and the rogue's own simplistic explanation of how the device functioned.

As far as Sage was concerned, the device was basically a furnace of sorts. Fuel goes in, and the energy consumes it to create more energy.

Of course, a nuclear reactor is also 'basically' a furnace, and Armsmaster had needed a licence of the highest order to operate and own his own for tinker purposes.

Powder goes in, lightning comes out. As basic as could be, and yet...

"Readings show departiculation in the extreme, consistent with reports of other departiculating effects and dimensional distortions," he notes aloud, a camera mounted on an arm zooming in on the device to get a better look at its molecular structure.

What Sage had done to shrink and warp the structure of the parts she used resembled Chevalier's work more than something like Vista's ability.

"Sage referred to that process as 'Alchemy', since she admitted to only having vague control over it," Kid Win pointed out, sitting on a chair nearby, just out of the way.

Armsmaster's eyes narrowed further at the readout, a gesture he considered sufficient to inform the fellow hero of his acknowledgment, despite them having no way of seeing him make the expression.

"Bring up search results," he mutters, his algorithms digging up historic and pop culture accounts of alchemy and arranging it into a bullet-point list of commonalities.

Glancing at the Greeko-roman mythos and 'Anime/Manga' entries, he dismissed the entire list with a faint nod. "Usable," he muttered, leaning in closer to the reactor and shaving off a tiny bit of its outermost layer with a mechanical limb.

The reactor's parts showed all the telltale signs of departiculation, or at least, a form of it. It was one of 'those things' that Tinkers could babble about to one another without anyone in the room being able to understand what the hell they were talking about, beyond the vaguest notions.

Those vague notions essentially amounted to the following. Some parahuman abilities created 'definitions' that overlayed physical material, reducing or removing the particles present in it, hence the term.

In this case, the reactor had been turned into something that barely held on to the distinction of being made of physical matter, but a thin field of rewritten physics was, for lack of a better word, tethered to the object's components, and in the object itself, the energy in question was currently generating its own, entirely unrelated field of otherworldly physics.

The reactor was a child's diorama, the work of a day or so cutting up pieces of the fabric of reality, painting it their favorite colors, and then gluing them together into something that looked informally like art.

"Right, I believe this has been incredibly informative," he says, standing up from his chair, and handing the reactor back to Kid Win brusquely.

"Wait, what did you learn, sir?" the ward asks, trying to catch his superior as they calmly storm out.

"No clue," he answers in a way that conveyed the greatest breadth of his current thoughts, in the fewest words.

---

The door jingled, and Armsmaster took care to step over the large root that was jutting out of the floor, frowning at the sight of the newly repaired shop.

Sage's previous establishment had been, as far as pictures went, a fairly organized affair, in Armsmaster's opinion. Shelves. Walls. Floor.

This new arrangement, however, seemed to be a work in progress, or so he hoped.

"Oh! Hello! I'll be right with you, I'm just working on filling in some stuff!" Sage said from the bottom of a deep pit lined with living, bio-organic railings that seemed to actively shift and move, wooden branches distorting as he approached, prepared to keep him from making a liability suit of himself by falling down into the pit.

"I called three days ago to commission a 'Mana Engine'," he said, peering down into the hole where the rogue seemed to be using a bright yellow torus of lasers to erode away the soil and foundations of the building.

"Hi Armsmaster! It's in the back! Leave the money on the counter, please!" she said, waving him off before, with her other hand, creating a beam of light that seemed to cause web-like pillars of stone to grow over the cement she had just been digging out.

Tempted to observe for only a moment, Armsmaster decided to just get what he came for. Destructive study of one of these engines would allow him to hopefully gain inspiration for his own work, and unlike most Tinkers, Sage seemed either unknowing or uncaring about this fact, selling him the engine even after he informed her of his express intentions with it.

'Good luck with that,' she said, as if there was nothing to worry about.

Shaking the memory away, he approached the unmanned counter, quickly realizing that it isn't unmanned at all, this time.

The girl at the counter idly popped her bubblegum, looking for all the world to be some sort of costumed clerk, an ordinary cashier's outfit contrasting with the glowing blue domino mask they wore.

Stiffly, he approached, hoping he wouldn't have to repeat himself to the girl, a hope that was answered as she pulled out a heavy, simplistic machine onto the table. His requests to minimize the amount of 'alchemy' used on it was met with intrigue by Sage, followed by consternation when 'biomancy' and 'synthesis' were also rejected, in the hopes of minimizing interfering influences during his research.

This didn't seem to be a dealbreaker however, judging from the crudely bolted together mechanism, made entirely out of copper with a motor welded onto the side mandating that it be plugged into the wall, due to a lack of the platinum coating she used on Kid Win's own reactor.

As he wasn't planning on using it for electricity, he deemed it an acceptable loss for his own reactor to generate what she called 'generic time' instead of electrical energy.

"Thank you for shopping at Sage's Produce. That'll be $1,239.96," the girl at the counter said, chin on her fist as she looked to be strongly disdainful of the job she clearly minded doing.

Armsmaster paid with his card, of course, carrying cash being something that viscerally annoyed him after gaining his powers.

As he left the store, he was already flooded with new ideas, the device seeming to come apart in his mind as his power helpfully began feeding him inspiration after the brief contact he had with the rogue.

He, of course, had no reason to suspect that the inspirations came from him entering Sage's immediate proximity, and attributed it to the mana engine he was packing away in his bike, magic inside whirling inside, filled with potential.

---

Arcane Secrets, Flames that burned at one's foes, demons that served their clever masters. There were many things that the average person be might be tempted to pursue, once they had discovered for themselves the ability to use magic.

"Test number 625, one megabyte of data, three kilobytes upload-download, 1 Gigahertz processor speed, current stable size, 97 microns."

Armsmaster was not the average person.

The first thing he had learned upon reaching his workshop and examining the engine had also been among the only things he had learned, namely, that mana possessed no inherent 'fundamental particle' that he could see. It was self-similar, and behaved similarly at one kilometer as it did at one micrometer.

It could also be treated to act like light, and could be used to grow silicon.

His manipulators slowly, carefully, and above all else, delicately moved closer to the microchip he made via 'magical' photolithography.

While Armsmaster didn't believe in magic on principle, he also respected talented tinkerers, and Sage's work was worthy of that respect. He would call it what Sage called it, if only out of that respect and for clarity of discussion with the rogue in the future.

Beliefs thus established, the nanoscopic switch on the microchip flipped on, and the semiconductive materials began doing what they do best, semiconducting the electricity running through them as he wished.

His mouth quirked up at the readouts. He hadn't worked with silicon-based-architecture for a long time, for reasons that seemed obvious to him, and yet, he might be tempted to take a glance at some of his older projects relating to silica, now that he had this new energy at his disposal.

The tinkertech mana-emitter he had produced proved to be a tempting device indeed, with what it could do to silicon at arbitrary scales.

Of course, the mana-constructs that formed around the 'magical' materials he synthesized proved to be a problem, as both synthesis and transmutation caused a very slight increase in the volume of molecules, which had to be accounted for until they were starved long enough to revert to more traditional materials.

That said, of course, it wasn't without uses. Using his mana-emitter, he found that by using a silicon lens, he could 'walk' molecules around, using repeated transmutation to enlarge a molecule using the enchantments that were wrapped around it, then starve the molecule of energy until it reverted, pushing surrounding matter around with precision he simply couldn't attain without using much more energy-intensive means.

He hadn't yet tested how large an atom could become with repeat transmutation, due to the increased potency of its 'magical' effects as more layers of enchantment were added, but he suspected quite a few layers could be applied, if he had the time to really push it.

But even ignoring the downsides and difficulties inherent to the submolecular printing and manipulation, his new blueprints for mana-generating devices proved to be phenomenally handy, and unlike Sage's own work, he had managed to find methods using his power to create the energy without an initial spark, pulling the energy from a subspace manifold using a frequency modulator of his own design. Unfortunately, Dragon had examined the design and said, quite worryingly, that his machine wasn't replicable. The mana generation proved to be one of the irreplicable parts of his tinkertech.

"Dragon, pardon me if I'm misunderstanding, but you claimed that my version couldn't be replicated. Is that meant to be implicative of something?" he asked politely, waiting for Dragon to bring up blueprints that had him swallowing unconsciously, his mouth a bit dry as he glanced over the blueprints.

"Here," she said, bringing up her own designs, refined and calculated based on Sage's handmade versions.

It wasn't the requirement of reality-warping aspects of Sage's power that made her mana engines unable to be duplicated, and it wasn't classical tinkertech blackboxing that made her mana engines unable to be duplicated.

It was... Nothing.

Nothing was keeping her mana engines from being duplicated by mundane means, provided that one had mana to act as the spark.

[] Interlude: Lisa
[] Interlude: Amy
[] Conclude Interludes