Pipes Pipes Pipes (Personal Reality) 100:
Purchasing this provides your Warehouse with enough plumbing fixtures to turn the entire volume of your Personal Reality into one massive pool… or anything below that. This provides clean running water with any reasonably common additives you like (chlorine, glacial milk, fluoride), but does not provide a limitless supply, nor does it heat the water. By default, the amount of water this system can produce per day is 1 billion liters or one megaton of water or a block of water 100 meters on a side, and the default temperature of this water is 25 degrees Celsius. It can support any civilian infrastructure on the same scale as Mexico City or Tokyo. Comes only with the basic hookups. You'll need a plumber to do the actual piping. We hear Mario's very good. Bathrooms not included. Purchasing this supplies all facilities inside your Personal Reality with water feeds, and if you've Got the Powa, it will supply hot and cold running water as well.
Waterworld (Personal Reality) 300:
This Pipes Pipes Pipes Upgrade provides you with all the water you'll ever need. Every day this massive Hydrocore Tap can generate enough H2O in any natural form to cover Luna in seas 10 meters deep… let's call it 500,000,000 cubic kilometers of water. Of course, throughput is going to be a bitch, so the Hydrocore comes with a Global targeting computer and up to a million hoses each capable of pumping out 500 cubic kilometers of water a day… or 5.8 million tons of water a second… or 29 times the flow rate of the Amazon River… each. If this isn't enough water for you, you might be obsessed.
Dynamic Waterworks (Personal Reality) 100:
This is a strange one, but say you have an infinite source of some liquid and you want it pumped from wherever you source it through your Personal Reality, this Pipes Pipes Pipes Upgrade is for you. The plumbing hookups for your Reality now support up to six additional inputs from sources you must personally supply, and run those feeds through your Reality. If you have Central Control, they can even be mixed in precise ratios at each distribution point. So, say you had an infinite supply of cocoa and an infinite supply of peppermint schnapps… you could set the system to dispense cocoa from all the brown faucets, peppermint schnapps from all the red & white faucets, and spiked hot chocolate toddies from the brown & red faucets… and could even tell it to make the mix in your office stronger than the mix in the staff break-room. While this can be combined with Water World to a degree, that degree is only to use the hose network to dispense a reasonably vast quantity of 'unlimited liquid x'... say enough chocolate to make a small river… not to flood the planet… unless your source for that unlimited liquid specifies 'absolutely unlimited'... generally speaking, if it's for personal or even industrial use… it's not good enough. Global usage at the very limit required for full Water World Integration. An additional 6 hook-ups costs -50 WP.
Oh neat; terraforming infrastructure.
A mobile workstation imbued with secret of steel, a gamer inventory, simmy protection, instant analysis and bluepringing of tinkertech and power boosting? Damn, not bad for something made in seconds.
Also, what godly use could there be for all of that water? ...transmutation fuel?
He could probably fuel a few Shards with that much energy output? As long as they could work with hydrogen of course.
There's also potentially steam if that could be piped to places.
Besides water, the only liquid that he has any significant supply of is Immulsion - which will remain under indefinite containment.
Also the magma and lava from his volcano, but still, does he have any other liquids to use this with? Or any other liquids in V1 of the celestial forge for him to even gain ever?
He has particle synthesis techniques fueled by the output of a star; he has all of the liquids. Not only that he has the molten contents of the earth as well. And the fluidized contents of the non-molten parts. And Matrix if he wants to take a ride on it.
That being said though he might actually want to use the remote piping system to deploy diluted Emulsion to some remote and/or isolated places for some ecological modification.
Uppercrust was having his world blown away several times over while Apeiron was silently panicking (or being amused over either or) over the entire workshop being reworked for waterslide and pipe travel by his duplicates. The dichotomy is wonderful.
Waterparks, faux-natural hot-springs, waterfalls; I'm sure that they can find some internal use for it all.
Pretty sure that even the volcano won't provide enough liquid to meet that threshold. It is clearly a personal use volcano only.
Well I'm sure that they can tap into other sources of molten rock if that isn't enough. The landmass deployment of it all should be interesting at least.
Fueling an ungodly large and rather inefficient fleet of hydrogen-powered vehicles?
Re-enacting Waterworks?
Pumping it out of a firehouse in an attempt to clean the con-funk off the population of a brony convention?
Diluting a star?
Actually water, being hydrogen and oxygen by definition, would extend the life of a star; it would be like putting out a fire with thermite.
The hose system can deliver it anywhere, so he can pull this trick on a much larger scale:
...Are you proposing that Joe uses his enormous supply of water as propulsion for the planet? Because I'm game.
Decorative waterfalls. Decorative waterfalls EVERYWHERE in the workshop. Now.
Nah that'd just be gaudy; maybe a few water-features at intersections but you shouldn't over-do something like waterfalls.
I mean, to be fair when the nascent god goes and apologizes that your divine object didn't come with its own array of servants and butlers to serve your every whim, you could only end up dumbfounded as he goes and creates one robot butler to fix that issue for you along with all of your other issues before you could even think of them.
Of course, nowadays with his Better Non-Doormat Personality TM, Apeiron more comes across these days as utterly incapable of understanding the limits of what mere mortals think is possible as opposed to, you know, constantly degrading himself and his divine creations for not being that extra bit of more perfect than they already are.
He almost managed to find someone who would be understanding of people praising and spending a lot of money on less-then-ideal work with a high-level Tinker there but Uppercrust tends to sell to cities so he probably doesn't get that particular personal interaction.
Oh, there are a lot of uses. As you pointed out, Transmutation feed stock is one of them. But he also got the ability to duct other liquids that he has a source of around the place freely as well. Now, admittedly, Joe has a lock on unlimited materials pretty well established for his own personal works. But that's almost entirely for his own works. And while he doesn't have massive supplies of things like molten gold, he can set up arrays that would allow him to transmute water into any other liquid including molten metals and other elements. That means feed stock that can be used in other industrial processes without his personal involvement or the involvement of other members of the forge.
Admittedly, they aren't the kind of organization that would really need that kind of supply unless Joe decided he wanted his own Macross but it's a thing he can do now.
He could probably have Matrix make a bunch of second-rate nanomachines to assemble into something else on-site; I would even say that it would be a good way to deploy things into Shardspace if I thought that the pipes could access it.
Alchemy. Bastard Son is working on alchemy. Interesting.
Well I suppose that if anyone would be able to get some skills in using Transmutation Circles it would be someone who can make arbitrary people arbitrarily skilled at using things; he's just got to make one in the first place first.
terraformation? That's over a third of all the oceans on Earth each day.
If he wanted to really piss off Mannequin in a hurry he could probably terraform the moon in a day; he'd just need to keep the water and atmosphere sealed inside. Maybe contact Blasto about getting some liquid organism-seeds so that he could, you know, seed the water with organisms.
Like I said, go and drop it over Mars Aleph. If their timeline sticks to the same as ours, Opportunity will be happy to find water at last, I'm sure.
Same idea as the moon; you'd need external factors to keep the atmosphere in but it should be easy enough.
Now, this was hardly the most important part of the interlude, but it stood out to me. My bet is one of two possibilities. First, Bastard Son is part of, or connected too, the Thinker think tank that has been investigating the concept of Alchemy, much like Victor is.
Second, Bastard Son got his hands on a significant portion of the Dust recovered from the elemental 'scars' of Apeiron's suit detonation. From there, the materials potential is self-evident, but it may more concerningly be of such high quality that it can generate/propagate more of itself from mundane materials, much like the Divine (and now all recovered) Dust that created the new crystals to begin with. This would justify BS not just rushing it to his Tinkers or putting it up for auction as an ultimately finite material...but bringing together a large team and investment for a potentially continuous money maker.
Of the two, the former is probably the more likely option. We've just had hints more recently, and more solidly confirmed of it being a future plot-line in the form of Victor's interlude, compared to a throw-away line about people collecting the crystals to sell and Blasto musing about mining that happened ages ago IRL.
But personally, I'm hoping for the latter. Especially if it's a case of the generated Dust self-propagating. Because then it's a thing in the universe that can change and grow beyond Apeiron's direct control, and will continue to do so beyond his sight. But also isn't the sort of thing to potentially flip the board and end in a lot of drama and angst, like people experimenting with Alchemy with no idea of it's taboos because Apeiron thinks he has that information locked down.
Edit: Annnd Ninja'd. Though I see Dust has been pretty forgotten about. I guess most of it is still inaccessible, and Blasto is too busy cape-wrangling and now Butcher fighting to mine it up and put on the black market.
Oh yeah that second option is possible as well. That would be interesting. Thanks for bringing the possibility up.
OHHHH MYYY GODDD
AND THE FACT THAT UPPER IS CLEANING VOUSE MEANS THAT he'll eventually come into conflict with BSon's branch... and with a direct line to Apey. Yet another vector to spark off that eventual confrontation.
I would think that the conflict would have been inevitable anyway; Circle Alchemy is just to robust a weapon for Bastard Son to hold back once he's got it.
Relatedly I have to wonder whether Victor will try his hand at stealing the skill at Transmutation Circle use once he's got Transmutation Circle
creation down particularly well.
I think turning a city into a small red stone will be Bastards sons end goal, not raising the dead.
I'm not convinced that he has the knowledge for that; maybe in the aftermath of Victor performing human Alchemy but not quite yet.
Oh, it looks like it will soon be hurricane season after the veritable butterfly garden Joe unleashed. I am so excited.
So, quick recap, of original conflicts.
1. Game grid
2. Victor von Frankenstein
3. Bastard Son's thing
4. Scion and the Minovsky particles
And whatever I can't remember. Little help?
All of the personal interactions potentially feeding into Second Triggers for the high-level Shakers and Annihilator Capes.
Apeiron could use the water for humanitarian stuff. With Uppercrust and various other kinds of shielding he might have such as 40k's voidshield, he can protect the area and buildings that are part of the sites he'd be working at, and with Titans for example and other kinds of security forces he can build he can protect it even further from any attempted takeovers from local capes
He could use some steam deployment for weather manipulation to those ends without getting seen being altruistic.
It's still not going to be enough especially since Apeiron has unleashed Uppercrust on the rest of the Elite with a target over the likes of Bastard Son and his kin. Like, technically yeah, it is a threat and a force multiplier at that. But even Aisha took essentially a year of dedicated training from Joe himself to be able to really apply Alchemy to Tinker principles outside of the base analysis + deconstruction combo, and that's with him outfitting her with the best tools. Bastard Son will take at least a month to reach a fraction of that level, especially without the small boost Viktor got from Aisha to skip the discovery of the basic steps of alchemy. By that point, Uppercrust would probably have dealt with the rest of the Elite with help of more dedicated support from the rest of the Celestial Forge.
An important thought really to keep in mind with Alchemy is that it's a very complicated branch of science, and even geniuses are known to take years to study Alchemy to be able to use it with enough accuracy, much more on the field or with complicated work. Victor could cheat it because he was conveniently the sum of the knowledge of countless experts from multiple fields, and even then he ended up falling into a trap on his own since Apeiron wasn't there to guide him on what not to do. Thus in terms of a time scale, learning Alchemy is not even in the scope of affecting the plot that much.
No that was for the Mechashift techniques which were Fiat-backed to require about a month of study; the transmutation work was way faster and Bastard Son has both his own Trump ability and other Thinkers and Tinkers so I'd say that he should have a decent chance at cracking it.
... How did he get Alchemy info?
Victor was in contact with various other Thinkers.
A thought just occurred to me about Heretical Adaptation. It's likely been incorporated within every tier 1 nanite that he's created. The Matrix probably appreciates that they'll maintain their relative quality to an extent rather than just slipping behind as new nanite generations are devised.
Some knowledge of alchemy has managed to leak to the world at large. Enough that thinkers have managed to pull stuff together.
Perhaps not "keep up" but they'd probably specialize in interesting directions that couldn't be replicated by newer models.
I'm curious how far they're going to go with FMA alchemy. On the one hand, it's not a trivial power and at the extremes can be extremely powerful, but on the other hand the barrier to entry is quite high as well since it's literally an entire new field of science. On the other other hand, FMA's alchemists didn't have access to Thinkers and their hungry, hungry shards...
Uppercrust might have more work in front of him than we thought. Imagine one of Bastard Son's thrall with something along the lines of Lieutenant's Armstrong's gauntlets. Or several of them. Yikes.
It's a new field of study but some of the things that are explored within it are also explored within other fields of study so they've got head-starts.
Terraforming a desert with artificial lakes.
It won't help unless he mixes something else in; deserts stay the way they are because the sands and soils biological inactivity makes it poor for holding water so that shit just drops straight down to the water-table where the sunlight can't put it back into circulation. It's like the water-cycle equivalent of the american economy.
Victor von Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster. Messing around with life and death didn't end well for him.
Actually as Victors son his creation would also be known as Frankenstein.
