On a Backwater Planet, a Metal Extractor is Built [PA/Multicross SI]
- Status
Arafell
Verified Cephalon
- Location
- Oregon
And yet, while reading it I 'heard' the difference.
I'm liking it so far. We'll see how the battle scene goes.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Blame that on it being eleven at night when I wrote it, and me sucking at character interaction. I'll probably rewrite it after school
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hi, sorry for the lack of a new chapter today, but I rewrote the whole pentecost thing so it was a bit more reasonable and less "Pentecost is paranoid and doesn't ask obvious questions"
Stripes
Genre-Savvy Anti-Nihilist
- Location
- Nizhniy Novgorod
Chapter Seven: Not enough gun
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sorry for the lack of an update yesterday, I had lots of homework. So here is the new chapter, fresh off the presses!
The swarm of jellyfish was beautiful, though they weren't quite the same as they had been earlier. When I reactivated, I thought to myself, "Glitch, why just use mines? Why not use mines that move towards other explosions?"
Well past me, that is a wonderful idea. So, after twenty seconds of subjective time adding a tiny set of motive thrusters, I updated all of my jellyfish so that once the kaiju exits and hits one, they all start drifting towards it. I think it will be amusing. Like the Three Stooges, but with hi-ex and giant monsters.
The Jellyfish swarm wasn't all I had down there though. Hovering just above the trench was a cordon of torpedo launchers and submarines, all of which were aimed to the gash in the fabric of reality, five thousand meters below. I had less than three hours at maximum, and I was ready to destroy this fucker.
I'd also added some torpedo tubes to the leviathan, but that wasn't all that important.
The PPDC had decided to oblige my request, and had actually sent a jaeger. Nova Hyperion, if I was receiving the correct broadcast signal. I was kind of surprised, given how Most of what I had said sounded like utter malarkey.
Since the Jaeger didn't appear in canon, I've decided it would be prudent to note what it looks like.
It was very lithe, which was probably a good thing given that both of its Rangers were olympic fencers. Kind of angular, with sort-of-pauldrons, that looked like they housed a missile launcher or something. I approve.
The melee side of things was a long, thin blade that was probably super heated, judging by the patterns of heat stress, which seemed consistent with testing out the heating coils I had found referenced in some maintenance manuals I had, uh, "borrowed" from a PPDC server. The other hand was a plasma caster, a little more advanced than pre-refit Gypsy's, for ranged combat.
It also seemed pretty damned fast, as it had just dropped about twenty kilometers out fifteen minutes ago, and was now five away from the edge. It made sense. Fencing relied on a lot of quick movement, so a faster Jaeger probably suited them well. And they were now crouching for some reason. Hmmm.
Just to be on the safe side, I'll be sending a little heads up warning, as the crouch they were assuming looked like they were going to try to jump in. Which would set off the Jellyfish, killing them and ruining the surprise for the kaiju.
"<I would recommend not jumping into the trench at this time. I have filled it with mines, so it could cause irreparable damage to both the Jaeger and my plans.>"
They looked startled, as an unfamiliar voice had just announced that should they not do something that made sense, if they were going to witness a Kaiju being destroyed. I'd helpfully translated it into Korean, because I'm a nice guy like that.
A few seconds later, a voice coming from who I assume the local Marshal confirmed my request as an order.
"<If the crazy person says stay out of the trench, stay out of the trench. If something happens with his explosives or whatever, you are safe and get to walk to shallow water to be picked up. If none of the things he said would happen do, you are in an immediate position to stop or slow a kaiju from making it to the shallows, which will give plenty of time to airlift reinforcements from Tokyo or Sydney.>"
He obviously had less faith than Pentecost did. I wasn't going to complain. Now we wait.
[WARNING! MAJOR QUANTUM EVENT DETECTED!]
Showtime. That was convenient.
==================================================================
The first thing I noticed were the erratic readings my sensors were receiving. Distances to the bottom fluctuated from a few hundred to a few million meters almost constantly, temperature readings spiked at random, and gravitational sensor reported something both astronomically dense and as having almost no gravitational pull. It was pretty weird.
Next, I noticed the shape of something pulling out. And boy, was it ugly. A towering cranium rose from a small head, looking like someone knocked a tree over and glued a section of the trunk to a dopey turtle/sloth love child with a superman jaw. The singular claws on its forelimbs were a bit threatening, but whatever the hell the tail was made me more nervous.
I waited a few minutes for it to finish scrabbling its way out of the breach. It had all of the grace of an elephant seal on land. I almost pitied the damned thing, but the fact it started roaring loud enough I was fairly sure my commander heard it from the Atlantic put all of those thoughts to rest.
And then it entered the minefield.
It was instantaneous, it brushed up against a nearly invisible mine, which exploded along its flank. It seemed to howl in pain, which was swiftly cut short as the mines started tracking towards it, engulfing it in a conflagration that my subs could detect from above. As they started to die down, all mines in range having expended themselves, I got a look at the bastard.
He wasn't in fighting shape anymore, to stay the least. One of his arms was sitting on the seabed a few hundred meters away, a blue trail from where it had been flung through the water marking its path. The other arm was dangling uselessly, hanging on to mere sinews and skin. Most of its tree trunk had been shorn off, and its mysterious tail was shattered.
But it was still alive, and we couldn't have that. So I ordered the subs to open fire. Streaks of cavitation bubbles followed their paths, before the torpedoes detonated on the beast, sending great chunks of giblets in every direction, ending it for good. I bet the precursors will enjoy watching this shitstorm.
Now, for a test. I send in a guppy, who begins to cut out a chunk of meat big enough to insert itself into. Then I snickered because my idiot brain had thought up something stupid.
"Oh submarine-kun, please be gentle, I've never had someone do this to me before~"
Man I should become a comedian after this whole conquering the multiverse thing is over.
So, guppy encased, I had a few Sturgeons lift the chunk, and drop it on the breach.
As it falls, I prepare for my first look at the anteverse. Thirty seconds later, I hit the layer of energy-
-and the signal dies as a puff of disintegrated metal and flesh rises from where it had been.
Well that didn't work.
The swarm of jellyfish was beautiful, though they weren't quite the same as they had been earlier. When I reactivated, I thought to myself, "Glitch, why just use mines? Why not use mines that move towards other explosions?"
Well past me, that is a wonderful idea. So, after twenty seconds of subjective time adding a tiny set of motive thrusters, I updated all of my jellyfish so that once the kaiju exits and hits one, they all start drifting towards it. I think it will be amusing. Like the Three Stooges, but with hi-ex and giant monsters.
The Jellyfish swarm wasn't all I had down there though. Hovering just above the trench was a cordon of torpedo launchers and submarines, all of which were aimed to the gash in the fabric of reality, five thousand meters below. I had less than three hours at maximum, and I was ready to destroy this fucker.
I'd also added some torpedo tubes to the leviathan, but that wasn't all that important.
The PPDC had decided to oblige my request, and had actually sent a jaeger. Nova Hyperion, if I was receiving the correct broadcast signal. I was kind of surprised, given how Most of what I had said sounded like utter malarkey.
Since the Jaeger didn't appear in canon, I've decided it would be prudent to note what it looks like.
It was very lithe, which was probably a good thing given that both of its Rangers were olympic fencers. Kind of angular, with sort-of-pauldrons, that looked like they housed a missile launcher or something. I approve.
The melee side of things was a long, thin blade that was probably super heated, judging by the patterns of heat stress, which seemed consistent with testing out the heating coils I had found referenced in some maintenance manuals I had, uh, "borrowed" from a PPDC server. The other hand was a plasma caster, a little more advanced than pre-refit Gypsy's, for ranged combat.
It also seemed pretty damned fast, as it had just dropped about twenty kilometers out fifteen minutes ago, and was now five away from the edge. It made sense. Fencing relied on a lot of quick movement, so a faster Jaeger probably suited them well. And they were now crouching for some reason. Hmmm.
Just to be on the safe side, I'll be sending a little heads up warning, as the crouch they were assuming looked like they were going to try to jump in. Which would set off the Jellyfish, killing them and ruining the surprise for the kaiju.
"<I would recommend not jumping into the trench at this time. I have filled it with mines, so it could cause irreparable damage to both the Jaeger and my plans.>"
They looked startled, as an unfamiliar voice had just announced that should they not do something that made sense, if they were going to witness a Kaiju being destroyed. I'd helpfully translated it into Korean, because I'm a nice guy like that.
A few seconds later, a voice coming from who I assume the local Marshal confirmed my request as an order.
"<If the crazy person says stay out of the trench, stay out of the trench. If something happens with his explosives or whatever, you are safe and get to walk to shallow water to be picked up. If none of the things he said would happen do, you are in an immediate position to stop or slow a kaiju from making it to the shallows, which will give plenty of time to airlift reinforcements from Tokyo or Sydney.>"
He obviously had less faith than Pentecost did. I wasn't going to complain. Now we wait.
[WARNING! MAJOR QUANTUM EVENT DETECTED!]
Showtime. That was convenient.
==================================================================
The first thing I noticed were the erratic readings my sensors were receiving. Distances to the bottom fluctuated from a few hundred to a few million meters almost constantly, temperature readings spiked at random, and gravitational sensor reported something both astronomically dense and as having almost no gravitational pull. It was pretty weird.
Next, I noticed the shape of something pulling out. And boy, was it ugly. A towering cranium rose from a small head, looking like someone knocked a tree over and glued a section of the trunk to a dopey turtle/sloth love child with a superman jaw. The singular claws on its forelimbs were a bit threatening, but whatever the hell the tail was made me more nervous.
I waited a few minutes for it to finish scrabbling its way out of the breach. It had all of the grace of an elephant seal on land. I almost pitied the damned thing, but the fact it started roaring loud enough I was fairly sure my commander heard it from the Atlantic put all of those thoughts to rest.
And then it entered the minefield.
It was instantaneous, it brushed up against a nearly invisible mine, which exploded along its flank. It seemed to howl in pain, which was swiftly cut short as the mines started tracking towards it, engulfing it in a conflagration that my subs could detect from above. As they started to die down, all mines in range having expended themselves, I got a look at the bastard.
He wasn't in fighting shape anymore, to stay the least. One of his arms was sitting on the seabed a few hundred meters away, a blue trail from where it had been flung through the water marking its path. The other arm was dangling uselessly, hanging on to mere sinews and skin. Most of its tree trunk had been shorn off, and its mysterious tail was shattered.
But it was still alive, and we couldn't have that. So I ordered the subs to open fire. Streaks of cavitation bubbles followed their paths, before the torpedoes detonated on the beast, sending great chunks of giblets in every direction, ending it for good. I bet the precursors will enjoy watching this shitstorm.
Now, for a test. I send in a guppy, who begins to cut out a chunk of meat big enough to insert itself into. Then I snickered because my idiot brain had thought up something stupid.
"Oh submarine-kun, please be gentle, I've never had someone do this to me before~"
Man I should become a comedian after this whole conquering the multiverse thing is over.
So, guppy encased, I had a few Sturgeons lift the chunk, and drop it on the breach.
As it falls, I prepare for my first look at the anteverse. Thirty seconds later, I hit the layer of energy-
-and the signal dies as a puff of disintegrated metal and flesh rises from where it had been.
Well that didn't work.
Last edited:
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah, complications. Got to love them.
Also this is the second time you've posted a chapter an hour after me.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I also get to spend a fifth of the next chapter on glorious technobabble bullshit. Also everyone at the PPDC picking their jaws of the floor.
Senpai
(Verified Progenitor)
- Location
- Somewhere in the Multiverse
Good chapter @glitchrrr36! I really like how the story is coming along, I also like glorious technobabble! :3
That what? Looks like you forgot the rest of the sentence when you added in the tangential thought.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Last edited:
- Location
- North of England
- Pronouns
- She/They
Why the heck are they mucking around with this "sort-of" nonsense?
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the image in my head had them somewhere between Striker Eureka's shoulder pad things and SPESS MEHREN.
- Location
- North of England
- Pronouns
- She/They
Ah, I see what you mean now.
Chapter Eight: Politics and Breach testing
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As an apology for not updating in the past few days, you get a longer than average chapter, and another one probably later today, since I realized if I had continued writing and gotten everything in this chapter I would be pushing 3-4k words.
Huh. Well at least I know now that there is some list of bullshit requirements I probably have to fulfill to actually get through. I'd better get to it.
Oh, but I also need to talk to the PPDC.
I would have problems with this because I really want to spend time figuring this out, and the PPDC has started pinging the contact I left for them, but you know. Split consciousnesses and all that.
I'll talk to the PPDC first. Testing the breach is going to be "take chunk of kaiju flesh, stick probe that consists of a sensor package, a small generator, and a transmitter into the Breach, drop it in, modify each test slightly until I have a good enough understanding of the mechanism it filters through, figure out how to bypass it, then bring hell down upon them.
====================================================================
"How may I help you, gentlebeings of the PPDC? Care for a plate of kaiju steak?" And they are thrown off guard by a weird statement, just like I intended. Not going to exploit it, because exploiting your own dickishness was rude in some social circles, and I wasn't sure how these guys rolled yet.
"Um, no. No, we would prefer not to. But thank you…Commander, correct?" No idea who that bastard was.
[Ambassador Cole, from polity "United States of America"]
Thank you, helpful head voice.
"I am a Commander, but for the purposes of this meeting, you may call me Glitch."
"Well then, uh, Glitch, the PPDC would like to formally thank you in the quick elimination of the Category III kaiju "Gorgon." Without your intervention, it probably would have caused severe damage to a city or the environment had it made landfall."
"No problem, Ambassador. I had done that so I could show I would deliver on my promise to help wipe the blight of the kaiju from this world. Even now I'm attempting to get through the Breach."
"Well, how is that working for you?" A different ambassador this time. The helpful head voice identifies him as from Peru.
"Not well as of yet, I'm afraid. I'm still collecting data, but I haven't gotten farther than ten meters beyond before I lose signal, and the returns from those are incoherent at best." And they are staring now. Not sure why. It's like they thought that ten meters was a huge distance or something.
"Well, in any case, we had heard you had some requests for your help. What are they? We heard Jaeger technology information was one of these requests, and we would like to know for sure." Cole again this time. Seemed like he was heading this meeting.
"Yes, the various materials, weapons, and other technologies used in the various Jaegers are something I'm curious about. If you accept, I will be sending a fabricator to scan all of the Jaegers with particularly interesting weapons systems, repair any damage for you, and then leave. I will then have what I want, you will have all of your Jaegers operational, and I can begin helping you, as our goals intersect."
"How would your possession of classified information aid us at all?" It's the japanese guy this time. I decided to just ignore names, since they all were thinking the same question, even if he was the one to voice it first.
"Let me answer you question with another question. How long does it take the PPDC to fix a burst capacitor in a plasmacaster? A few days, minimum? You have to remove the armor, pull out the mangled remains of the previous one, clean the whole section of burnt plastic and metal, make a new capacitor, put the new one in, reconnect it, do some testing, and then replace the armor. Speaking of armor, how long does that take to replace? Especially the larger pieces. If a kaiju takes a chunk out of the Jaeger's chest armor, you have to either repair the old one or build another, which given the size of the plates is not an easy process.
"I on the other hand, could fix a plasmacaster in seconds. Point a fabricator at the damaged part, turn it on, wait, turn it off. An armor piece would take minutes, and would be able to use the damaged section as material. A new Jaeger would take, at most, six hours to build, depending on resources. What possible reason would I have to not help? It doesn't benefit me much either way, and my admittedly lax in certain areas morals push me towards this option."
"Well, if that is the case, why not just fill the trench with mines, which you have shown fully capable of doing so? It saves the world trillions of dollars in Jaeger building, and is apparently fairly simple and easy for you to do."
Valid point, Mr. Japanese ambassador dude.
"A number of reasons, really. Firstly, I'm not going to fight your battle for you. The experiences you gain here with dealing with outside-context problems are precious. Many civilizations, to quote a much better speaker than me, encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. If you can, and will, beat the kaiju back, you can probably deal with much of what the universe will send your way.
"Second, I have other things to deal with. Integrating technology, which I will be acquiring by force if needed, isn't the fastest process, and I'd like to apply some things across a pretty wide variety of my arsenal, as well as get some groundwork laid for projects I have on the "hey wouldn't it be cool if I did this" phase.
"Third, the kaiju adapt. If I just keep blowing them to pieces, eventually one that isn't as easy to blow to pieces is going to slip past, get a bit closer to land, then die. The next will be even harder, and go farther. Eventually, one will make it past me and destroy Shanghai or Singapore or Seattle or something. I will not allow that to happen.
"Fourth, I have no idea what repeated large scale explosions at fairly short intervals will do to the trench, and by extension, the Breach. If I have a choice between letting a few people who signed up for it die, and accidentally destroying the planet, the Rangers can kiss their asses goodbye.
"Fifth, I'm still supporting you. The minefield will stay, just not as excessive as it was. I'm also going to be providing infinitely cheaper repair on the Jaegers, as well as the capability to have the parts fabricated for a fraction of the cost.
"Finally, and the dumbest reason, is there are a few really cool species of polychaete worm in the trench, and I would prefer not to drive them to extinction. These are my reasons, and I'm sticking to them. Do we have a deal?" I metaphorically leaned back, because I was fairly nervous, and waiting for their delegation to finish.
It was taking a few minutes, so continuing to slog through the titanic amount of stuff recovered from the internet was going to resume. Shit there was a lot of fanfiction left to go through.
=====================================================================
A few hours, one hundred twenty six thousand, nine hundred eighty two and 6/29ths fanfictions, and a very heated debate on my offer later, the had reached a decision.
"We have decided to accept your offer, after you prove good on it. You will be given the operational specifications, designs, and samples of certain technologies after you fix a Jaeger. Diablo Intercept is still fairly damaged, it took a direct hit to the power plant, and has significant damage to its weapons systems. You may start by repairing it."
Well, a little more order-ey than I liked, but it was their toys I wanted to play with, so I'd do what they asked. I queued a few submarine fabricators to start making their way towards Lima, where they would build vehicle fabricators actually repair the Jaeger.
Now, I finally had some data on the Breach, and could start figuring out how to get through.
=====================================================================
First and foremost, it was hot. A probe sent in during an earlier test recorded temperatures in the hundreds of thousands of degrees, at the minimum. Further testing showed the energy was kept out of full heat transfer with the water so that the surrounding hundred meters of water didn't boil, while allowing the tremendous energies poured into keeping it open to disperse their 'static' easily and not overload. I'm honestly kind of surprised the kaiju didn't just evaporate upon going through, but I have some evidence as to why that isn't the case which I'll detail later.
Next, the reason it had been placed in an ocean trench instead of, say, the middle of Mongolia, where it could attack everything like many other alien conquerors did had a myriad of reasons. Protection from just being bombed to the point that it collapsed was a relatively minor one, actually. The main reason is that the subduction zone produced by the Philippine, Marianas, and Pacific plates made a sizable amount of energy by slowly grinding up against each other like amateur porn actors. Or tectonic plates. That analogy works better. Anyway, this energy keeps the rift in spacetime stable enough that it doesn't collapse, and then force the Precursors to create another one, since I'm assuming sudden collapse isn't good on the weird generator thing they have creating it. Another is the heat sink action of the water, which keeps it from doing something unexpected.
I got a bit from what seemed to be the other side, but it was garbled, and even if it made it past the barrier separating worlds, it was destroyed by either the DNA lock, which seemingly has a time limit on when a specific genome works, or the 'closed' nature of the Breach at this point. I managed to get past that part once, which is where I found out about the DNA lock. Simply more things to check when the damn thing started to stabilize, since I couldn't invade until then.
What I actually was able to make out was strange, but roughly what I expected- an almost bacterial looking selection of distorted irises and webby looking things, whose purpose I was unable to determine.
But I did find one, particularly infuriating thing out about this whole destroy the anteverse thing. I was going to be here for quite a while.
Huh. Well at least I know now that there is some list of bullshit requirements I probably have to fulfill to actually get through. I'd better get to it.
Oh, but I also need to talk to the PPDC.
I would have problems with this because I really want to spend time figuring this out, and the PPDC has started pinging the contact I left for them, but you know. Split consciousnesses and all that.
I'll talk to the PPDC first. Testing the breach is going to be "take chunk of kaiju flesh, stick probe that consists of a sensor package, a small generator, and a transmitter into the Breach, drop it in, modify each test slightly until I have a good enough understanding of the mechanism it filters through, figure out how to bypass it, then bring hell down upon them.
====================================================================
"How may I help you, gentlebeings of the PPDC? Care for a plate of kaiju steak?" And they are thrown off guard by a weird statement, just like I intended. Not going to exploit it, because exploiting your own dickishness was rude in some social circles, and I wasn't sure how these guys rolled yet.
"Um, no. No, we would prefer not to. But thank you…Commander, correct?" No idea who that bastard was.
[Ambassador Cole, from polity "United States of America"]
Thank you, helpful head voice.
"I am a Commander, but for the purposes of this meeting, you may call me Glitch."
"Well then, uh, Glitch, the PPDC would like to formally thank you in the quick elimination of the Category III kaiju "Gorgon." Without your intervention, it probably would have caused severe damage to a city or the environment had it made landfall."
"No problem, Ambassador. I had done that so I could show I would deliver on my promise to help wipe the blight of the kaiju from this world. Even now I'm attempting to get through the Breach."
"Well, how is that working for you?" A different ambassador this time. The helpful head voice identifies him as from Peru.
"Not well as of yet, I'm afraid. I'm still collecting data, but I haven't gotten farther than ten meters beyond before I lose signal, and the returns from those are incoherent at best." And they are staring now. Not sure why. It's like they thought that ten meters was a huge distance or something.
"Well, in any case, we had heard you had some requests for your help. What are they? We heard Jaeger technology information was one of these requests, and we would like to know for sure." Cole again this time. Seemed like he was heading this meeting.
"Yes, the various materials, weapons, and other technologies used in the various Jaegers are something I'm curious about. If you accept, I will be sending a fabricator to scan all of the Jaegers with particularly interesting weapons systems, repair any damage for you, and then leave. I will then have what I want, you will have all of your Jaegers operational, and I can begin helping you, as our goals intersect."
"How would your possession of classified information aid us at all?" It's the japanese guy this time. I decided to just ignore names, since they all were thinking the same question, even if he was the one to voice it first.
"Let me answer you question with another question. How long does it take the PPDC to fix a burst capacitor in a plasmacaster? A few days, minimum? You have to remove the armor, pull out the mangled remains of the previous one, clean the whole section of burnt plastic and metal, make a new capacitor, put the new one in, reconnect it, do some testing, and then replace the armor. Speaking of armor, how long does that take to replace? Especially the larger pieces. If a kaiju takes a chunk out of the Jaeger's chest armor, you have to either repair the old one or build another, which given the size of the plates is not an easy process.
"I on the other hand, could fix a plasmacaster in seconds. Point a fabricator at the damaged part, turn it on, wait, turn it off. An armor piece would take minutes, and would be able to use the damaged section as material. A new Jaeger would take, at most, six hours to build, depending on resources. What possible reason would I have to not help? It doesn't benefit me much either way, and my admittedly lax in certain areas morals push me towards this option."
"Well, if that is the case, why not just fill the trench with mines, which you have shown fully capable of doing so? It saves the world trillions of dollars in Jaeger building, and is apparently fairly simple and easy for you to do."
Valid point, Mr. Japanese ambassador dude.
"A number of reasons, really. Firstly, I'm not going to fight your battle for you. The experiences you gain here with dealing with outside-context problems are precious. Many civilizations, to quote a much better speaker than me, encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. If you can, and will, beat the kaiju back, you can probably deal with much of what the universe will send your way.
"Second, I have other things to deal with. Integrating technology, which I will be acquiring by force if needed, isn't the fastest process, and I'd like to apply some things across a pretty wide variety of my arsenal, as well as get some groundwork laid for projects I have on the "hey wouldn't it be cool if I did this" phase.
"Third, the kaiju adapt. If I just keep blowing them to pieces, eventually one that isn't as easy to blow to pieces is going to slip past, get a bit closer to land, then die. The next will be even harder, and go farther. Eventually, one will make it past me and destroy Shanghai or Singapore or Seattle or something. I will not allow that to happen.
"Fourth, I have no idea what repeated large scale explosions at fairly short intervals will do to the trench, and by extension, the Breach. If I have a choice between letting a few people who signed up for it die, and accidentally destroying the planet, the Rangers can kiss their asses goodbye.
"Fifth, I'm still supporting you. The minefield will stay, just not as excessive as it was. I'm also going to be providing infinitely cheaper repair on the Jaegers, as well as the capability to have the parts fabricated for a fraction of the cost.
"Finally, and the dumbest reason, is there are a few really cool species of polychaete worm in the trench, and I would prefer not to drive them to extinction. These are my reasons, and I'm sticking to them. Do we have a deal?" I metaphorically leaned back, because I was fairly nervous, and waiting for their delegation to finish.
It was taking a few minutes, so continuing to slog through the titanic amount of stuff recovered from the internet was going to resume. Shit there was a lot of fanfiction left to go through.
=====================================================================
A few hours, one hundred twenty six thousand, nine hundred eighty two and 6/29ths fanfictions, and a very heated debate on my offer later, the had reached a decision.
"We have decided to accept your offer, after you prove good on it. You will be given the operational specifications, designs, and samples of certain technologies after you fix a Jaeger. Diablo Intercept is still fairly damaged, it took a direct hit to the power plant, and has significant damage to its weapons systems. You may start by repairing it."
Well, a little more order-ey than I liked, but it was their toys I wanted to play with, so I'd do what they asked. I queued a few submarine fabricators to start making their way towards Lima, where they would build vehicle fabricators actually repair the Jaeger.
Now, I finally had some data on the Breach, and could start figuring out how to get through.
=====================================================================
First and foremost, it was hot. A probe sent in during an earlier test recorded temperatures in the hundreds of thousands of degrees, at the minimum. Further testing showed the energy was kept out of full heat transfer with the water so that the surrounding hundred meters of water didn't boil, while allowing the tremendous energies poured into keeping it open to disperse their 'static' easily and not overload. I'm honestly kind of surprised the kaiju didn't just evaporate upon going through, but I have some evidence as to why that isn't the case which I'll detail later.
Next, the reason it had been placed in an ocean trench instead of, say, the middle of Mongolia, where it could attack everything like many other alien conquerors did had a myriad of reasons. Protection from just being bombed to the point that it collapsed was a relatively minor one, actually. The main reason is that the subduction zone produced by the Philippine, Marianas, and Pacific plates made a sizable amount of energy by slowly grinding up against each other like amateur porn actors. Or tectonic plates. That analogy works better. Anyway, this energy keeps the rift in spacetime stable enough that it doesn't collapse, and then force the Precursors to create another one, since I'm assuming sudden collapse isn't good on the weird generator thing they have creating it. Another is the heat sink action of the water, which keeps it from doing something unexpected.
I got a bit from what seemed to be the other side, but it was garbled, and even if it made it past the barrier separating worlds, it was destroyed by either the DNA lock, which seemingly has a time limit on when a specific genome works, or the 'closed' nature of the Breach at this point. I managed to get past that part once, which is where I found out about the DNA lock. Simply more things to check when the damn thing started to stabilize, since I couldn't invade until then.
What I actually was able to make out was strange, but roughly what I expected- an almost bacterial looking selection of distorted irises and webby looking things, whose purpose I was unable to determine.
But I did find one, particularly infuriating thing out about this whole destroy the anteverse thing. I was going to be here for quite a while.
Emizaquel
What is a self?
This is my favourite reason
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Why are you reading so fast? Can you not slow down your brain?
Also if you leave reviews it takes longer.
I can now imagine them trying to find any traces of you, and then finding all of these fanfiction reviews on literally every fanfiction posted on the internet. And they're all like wtf, he's putting them up seconds after they were posted.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because if I didn't do that, and read at something approaching a normal speed, I'd be doing nothing but that for years. Being an AI and able to read, analyze, and make sense of dozens of streams of consciousness a minute is fun.
Stripes
Genre-Savvy Anti-Nihilist
- Location
- Nizhniy Novgorod
...And quite boring when you run out of things to process
There is a obvious answer to such problem, though
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
true, but there is a ridiculous amount of stuff on the internet. Even at 100,000+ words a minute, I still have to get through what I think is a zetabyte or more information total.
Chapter Nine: I Get the Tech
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
As promised, another chapter!
===============================================================================================================
My fabricators had arrived at the Lima Shatterdome. A few seconds later, the vehicle version was rolling up the beach, pinging the doors. I opened up communication with the on-site marshal
"I am Glitch. You were told I would be arriving soon. Please allow my fabricators in."
"I'm getting pings, but there isn't anything out there. I won't open until I'm sure you aren't just being a nuisance."
Whoops, forgot to turn off stealth. There it is.
"Better?"
"Yes, the door is opening just enough for them to get in."
"Understood."
As the fabbers rolled in through the titanic doors into the shatterdome bay, I panned my camera around, looking for the target of my visit. And that was actually a fair bit of damage. From what I could tell past the horribly scarred armor and detached arms was Diablo followed the Cherno Alpha Jaeger design philosophy, of Being big, tough, and able to hit twice as hard as your opponent, even if you have to be slow to do so. Massive fucking fists, a pair of bigass gatling cannons with a bore similar to an Iowa's main guns, and what looked like extendable spikes so the knuckles were spiky like some Chaos Space Marine armor piece. I liked it.
"So I may be able to fix the armor, but I can't do anything else without the specifications of everything, preferably in an electronic format.
"Oh, of course. Sending that to you now."
"Thank you."
And there was the data. An easy fix. My fabricators went to work, firing globs of nanobots at the points that needed more effort, but were less complex, like armor, and servo damage. The fabbers started spraying out streams of smaller nanobots from their arms onto the fiddly weapons bits, which I found included some shot-to hell tesla coils, so the punches were tasers. I guess they did borrow from Cherno fairly heavily.
It took me about twenty minutes to finish fixing everything, during which I learned some interesting things. Things that I would be able to apply to my stuff.
First, the armor. It was bullshit. It was made out of a composite of alloyed metals, mainly titanium, iron, aluminum, and a few other metals, which was heat resistant, tough, and could take a lot of stress before breaking, as well as graphene layers that supported the whole thing. It didn't appear to be that great against acids and energy based weaponry, but it could take a hell of a beating from cutting and percussive forces before it started to take significant damage.
The fluid synapse system was also pretty unusual. What it seemed to do was conduct impulses to and from the jaeger and the Ranger's nervous system, through a liquid of some kind. I honestly have no idea how to describe it. Somewhat viscous, greenish, and from the chemical structure not the most pleasant smelling thing in the world. That could be useful when trying to find a leak though, since they do the same with natural gas.
The weapons were nothing to special, since I already had tesla coils, battleship-grade cannons, and punching things. I did want to see some other Jaeger weapons, specifically the plasmacasters, incinerator turbines, and Striker's missiles, since one can never have enough missiles.
Then, what may be the motherload: the Drift system. It worked off of a much more refined version of using electrodes to track brain activity, and could somehow sync brain function by...something. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, as the best vocabulary I have is in Progenitor-ese, which sounds a fair bit like someone trying to pronounce the sounds birds make, with some elephant seal thrown into the mix. High bit-rate for a spoken language though, which is probably why they used it.
After the Jaeger was fixed, I told the Marshal as much. He seemed flustered. I'm not sure why that is happening so much recently. It's almost like people weren't used to things being built before their eyes. Oh wait. They weren't used to it. Huh.
Now, to get the rest of it.
================================================================
The PPDC decided to be jerks and send it along a few hours later. For me, that meant lots of waiting, and waiting is, as I've said, boring. Well, actually, the meatsacks were getting stuff done as fast as they could.
Being an AI has its drawbacks, unfortunately.
In anycase, they sent along the files, I created copies of what the files said was, and got to figuring them out. I think I'll start with the simple stuff. Like plasmacasters. Those could be fun.
So the plasmacaster was pretty different from normal plasma tech, which created a magnetic "bottle" for the plasma to go down. Plasmacasters, on the other hand, create a "channel" of magnetism, through which multiple strike are sent down in rapid succession, further cauterizing the area as superheated materials, like flesh, are expelled from the wound and then slammed back into it by the force of the plasma heating the air, creating the distinctive "ptfwing" sound.
The term "emptying the clip" from the movie was less like firing a pistol until it was dry, and more like firing a laser until the casing and lasing medium started to melt. In this case, the plasma was argon based, and compressed from the atmosphere, and sent into the generator, which was located in the palm. The fingers served to create the channel. After a number of successive shots, the capacitors used to excite the plasma started to burst, if they weren't allowed to cool down first. Soon after, if a high RoF was maintained, the actual casings and components would melt, often rendering the cannon inoperable until fairly extensive repairs could be made, as well as occasionally turning a piece of the mechanism that allowed the arm to switch between hand and cannon configurations.
It was, in many ways, inferior to the plasma tech in my Uber cannon, except in speed and accuracy. The Uber cannon required transit time, where a quick enough target could move out of the way, allowing the shot to damage a land feature or something instead of its intended target. A plasmacaster, even with its vastly reduced range and damage, was far more accurate, with being able to hit the same square meter of target, while moving and jostling occurred between both target and cannon, and had a speed in transit that was a sizable fraction of C, with the only limit on range being channel cohesion. I could fix both range and accuracy with Progenitor STRONKNESS.
I combined the power induction systems of the Uber cannon, allowing a direct induction from my network of quantum magic, with the systems that created the channel, so that the channel fire mode could expel plasma up to seven times farther, giving me a range of eight kilometers, which was functionally a sniper weapon for a commander. Next I upgraded the plasma generator with Progenitor technology, which could simply fabricate hydrogen plasma, which held cohesion better and was generally a bit hotter. The power wouldn't be quite as high, since it didn't explode violently upon magnetic containment breach, but it would penetrate a little better, which helped get through kaiju flesh.
Finally, I altered the Ubercannon schematics so that the actual uber cannon was a more, well, cannon shape, which I had found allows the bottle to be made faster and move further. Next, I made the barrel retractable, so that a plasmacaster shot was also able to be used. Then I made the barrel a hexagon, because hexagons were awesome. I set a few fabbers to update my chassis' gun as I added the updates across the board.
Next was the melee weapons. The nanotube reinforcement was interesting, but nothing I needed. Since I try to keep units out of melee, it didn't help me any. Moving on.
I'm going to list for a bit, since there was a lot of tech that I gained.
-Incinerator turbines were just giant flamethrowers. Next
-Anti-kaiju missiles were decent armor penetrators, so I added the drilling mechanism and expanded warhead as an option in my various missile units.
-Mortar cannons were vastly inferior to my own ballistics. Next
-The reactors in use right now were nuclear based. Since Progenitor fusion plants could output hundreds of times the amount that a Jaeger plant could, I gave them a pass. The files on Mk.4 and Mk.5 plants were unusual: the "midnight orb" that Crimson Typhoon would use was a highly efficient fusion device with high mass-energy conversion, and the "Supercell" unit from Striker Eureka generated power through what was essentially a miniature thunderstorm. Not powerful enough to be helpful though.
Then I reached the dark matter weapons. Those were cool.
The basic principle behind a dark matter weapon was that it generated and fired pulses of superheated dark matter. "What the hell do you mean by that science fiction buzzword?" you may be asking, staring at me from beyond the fourth wall. Well, dark matter in this case, was mixture of WIMPs contained in a magnetic field, which these humans seemed fond of, that were brought into cohesion with the rest of the universe upon impact.
These WIMPs projected mass, but didn't interact with normal matter until they hit something, where they released all that stored heat as gamma rays, after which they fell out of alignment and dispersed. The gamma rays effectively flash fried the flesh of a kaiju, as well as damaging what they pass through, causing blindness, damage to nerves, and potentially instant death if they could get a good hit in the brain cavity.
Obviously, I plan on munchkining this quite severely. I added it to my commander's ubercannon, as a pair of coaxial mounts, put a pair or seven on all of the titans, and added it to the list of things I will be using on Project:Shitlist.
There wasn't all that much else, since fluid synapse wasn't useful due to hax transmissions technology, and the drift wasn't helpful to an AI at this point.
Back to waiting.
===============================================================================================================
My fabricators had arrived at the Lima Shatterdome. A few seconds later, the vehicle version was rolling up the beach, pinging the doors. I opened up communication with the on-site marshal
"I am Glitch. You were told I would be arriving soon. Please allow my fabricators in."
"I'm getting pings, but there isn't anything out there. I won't open until I'm sure you aren't just being a nuisance."
Whoops, forgot to turn off stealth. There it is.
"Better?"
"Yes, the door is opening just enough for them to get in."
"Understood."
As the fabbers rolled in through the titanic doors into the shatterdome bay, I panned my camera around, looking for the target of my visit. And that was actually a fair bit of damage. From what I could tell past the horribly scarred armor and detached arms was Diablo followed the Cherno Alpha Jaeger design philosophy, of Being big, tough, and able to hit twice as hard as your opponent, even if you have to be slow to do so. Massive fucking fists, a pair of bigass gatling cannons with a bore similar to an Iowa's main guns, and what looked like extendable spikes so the knuckles were spiky like some Chaos Space Marine armor piece. I liked it.
"So I may be able to fix the armor, but I can't do anything else without the specifications of everything, preferably in an electronic format.
"Oh, of course. Sending that to you now."
"Thank you."
And there was the data. An easy fix. My fabricators went to work, firing globs of nanobots at the points that needed more effort, but were less complex, like armor, and servo damage. The fabbers started spraying out streams of smaller nanobots from their arms onto the fiddly weapons bits, which I found included some shot-to hell tesla coils, so the punches were tasers. I guess they did borrow from Cherno fairly heavily.
It took me about twenty minutes to finish fixing everything, during which I learned some interesting things. Things that I would be able to apply to my stuff.
First, the armor. It was bullshit. It was made out of a composite of alloyed metals, mainly titanium, iron, aluminum, and a few other metals, which was heat resistant, tough, and could take a lot of stress before breaking, as well as graphene layers that supported the whole thing. It didn't appear to be that great against acids and energy based weaponry, but it could take a hell of a beating from cutting and percussive forces before it started to take significant damage.
The fluid synapse system was also pretty unusual. What it seemed to do was conduct impulses to and from the jaeger and the Ranger's nervous system, through a liquid of some kind. I honestly have no idea how to describe it. Somewhat viscous, greenish, and from the chemical structure not the most pleasant smelling thing in the world. That could be useful when trying to find a leak though, since they do the same with natural gas.
The weapons were nothing to special, since I already had tesla coils, battleship-grade cannons, and punching things. I did want to see some other Jaeger weapons, specifically the plasmacasters, incinerator turbines, and Striker's missiles, since one can never have enough missiles.
Then, what may be the motherload: the Drift system. It worked off of a much more refined version of using electrodes to track brain activity, and could somehow sync brain function by...something. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, as the best vocabulary I have is in Progenitor-ese, which sounds a fair bit like someone trying to pronounce the sounds birds make, with some elephant seal thrown into the mix. High bit-rate for a spoken language though, which is probably why they used it.
After the Jaeger was fixed, I told the Marshal as much. He seemed flustered. I'm not sure why that is happening so much recently. It's almost like people weren't used to things being built before their eyes. Oh wait. They weren't used to it. Huh.
Now, to get the rest of it.
================================================================
The PPDC decided to be jerks and send it along a few hours later. For me, that meant lots of waiting, and waiting is, as I've said, boring. Well, actually, the meatsacks were getting stuff done as fast as they could.
Being an AI has its drawbacks, unfortunately.
In anycase, they sent along the files, I created copies of what the files said was, and got to figuring them out. I think I'll start with the simple stuff. Like plasmacasters. Those could be fun.
So the plasmacaster was pretty different from normal plasma tech, which created a magnetic "bottle" for the plasma to go down. Plasmacasters, on the other hand, create a "channel" of magnetism, through which multiple strike are sent down in rapid succession, further cauterizing the area as superheated materials, like flesh, are expelled from the wound and then slammed back into it by the force of the plasma heating the air, creating the distinctive "ptfwing" sound.
The term "emptying the clip" from the movie was less like firing a pistol until it was dry, and more like firing a laser until the casing and lasing medium started to melt. In this case, the plasma was argon based, and compressed from the atmosphere, and sent into the generator, which was located in the palm. The fingers served to create the channel. After a number of successive shots, the capacitors used to excite the plasma started to burst, if they weren't allowed to cool down first. Soon after, if a high RoF was maintained, the actual casings and components would melt, often rendering the cannon inoperable until fairly extensive repairs could be made, as well as occasionally turning a piece of the mechanism that allowed the arm to switch between hand and cannon configurations.
It was, in many ways, inferior to the plasma tech in my Uber cannon, except in speed and accuracy. The Uber cannon required transit time, where a quick enough target could move out of the way, allowing the shot to damage a land feature or something instead of its intended target. A plasmacaster, even with its vastly reduced range and damage, was far more accurate, with being able to hit the same square meter of target, while moving and jostling occurred between both target and cannon, and had a speed in transit that was a sizable fraction of C, with the only limit on range being channel cohesion. I could fix both range and accuracy with Progenitor STRONKNESS.
I combined the power induction systems of the Uber cannon, allowing a direct induction from my network of quantum magic, with the systems that created the channel, so that the channel fire mode could expel plasma up to seven times farther, giving me a range of eight kilometers, which was functionally a sniper weapon for a commander. Next I upgraded the plasma generator with Progenitor technology, which could simply fabricate hydrogen plasma, which held cohesion better and was generally a bit hotter. The power wouldn't be quite as high, since it didn't explode violently upon magnetic containment breach, but it would penetrate a little better, which helped get through kaiju flesh.
Finally, I altered the Ubercannon schematics so that the actual uber cannon was a more, well, cannon shape, which I had found allows the bottle to be made faster and move further. Next, I made the barrel retractable, so that a plasmacaster shot was also able to be used. Then I made the barrel a hexagon, because hexagons were awesome. I set a few fabbers to update my chassis' gun as I added the updates across the board.
Next was the melee weapons. The nanotube reinforcement was interesting, but nothing I needed. Since I try to keep units out of melee, it didn't help me any. Moving on.
I'm going to list for a bit, since there was a lot of tech that I gained.
-Incinerator turbines were just giant flamethrowers. Next
-Anti-kaiju missiles were decent armor penetrators, so I added the drilling mechanism and expanded warhead as an option in my various missile units.
-Mortar cannons were vastly inferior to my own ballistics. Next
-The reactors in use right now were nuclear based. Since Progenitor fusion plants could output hundreds of times the amount that a Jaeger plant could, I gave them a pass. The files on Mk.4 and Mk.5 plants were unusual: the "midnight orb" that Crimson Typhoon would use was a highly efficient fusion device with high mass-energy conversion, and the "Supercell" unit from Striker Eureka generated power through what was essentially a miniature thunderstorm. Not powerful enough to be helpful though.
Then I reached the dark matter weapons. Those were cool.
The basic principle behind a dark matter weapon was that it generated and fired pulses of superheated dark matter. "What the hell do you mean by that science fiction buzzword?" you may be asking, staring at me from beyond the fourth wall. Well, dark matter in this case, was mixture of WIMPs contained in a magnetic field, which these humans seemed fond of, that were brought into cohesion with the rest of the universe upon impact.
These WIMPs projected mass, but didn't interact with normal matter until they hit something, where they released all that stored heat as gamma rays, after which they fell out of alignment and dispersed. The gamma rays effectively flash fried the flesh of a kaiju, as well as damaging what they pass through, causing blindness, damage to nerves, and potentially instant death if they could get a good hit in the brain cavity.
Obviously, I plan on munchkining this quite severely. I added it to my commander's ubercannon, as a pair of coaxial mounts, put a pair or seven on all of the titans, and added it to the list of things I will be using on Project:Shitlist.
There wasn't all that much else, since fluid synapse wasn't useful due to hax transmissions technology, and the drift wasn't helpful to an AI at this point.
Back to waiting.
Last edited:
Arafell
Verified Cephalon
- Location
- Oregon
Normally I don't like meta, but that was pretty funny.
- Status