[NERF GUN && DESKTOP COMPUTER]
???
20 Build, 10 Silk, 5 ???, 40 ???
Not enough grist!
I grit my teeth.
[NERF GUN && KITCHEN KNIFE]
???
200 Build, 200 ???
Not enough grist!
It wasn't working. Alright, fine, onto the simpler ones then.
[KITCHEN KNIFE && PEN]
???
10 Build, 10 ???
Not enough grist!
Why the fuck does everything need such a variety of ingredients? This one especially stings, as I actually had enough build grist for once…
[STACK MODUS && DESKTOP COMPUTER]
???
500 Silk, 500 ???, 500 ???, 500 ???,
Not enough grist!
My name is Taylor Hebert, and I hate my power.
Oh, don't get me wrong. It's strong. At least, I think it is, but it's impossible to use it, because I don't have the resources.
I take the totem off the alchemiter, and stack it against the wall with all the other duds.
Why couldn't I have gotten a normal power? Even before my never-ending cape research binge that I've been doing since I triggered, I still would have known that this wasn't how it was supposed to be. For most tinkers, the start of their career is the hardest part. Collecting materials draws attention, the power grids are closely monitored for odd behavior, and everyone, heroes and villains alike, are desperate to snatch them up.
I had it easier than most in many ways. I didn't need electricity to power my machines. I didn't need to raid the junkyard for parts. I didn't even need a workshop somewhere, as I had my basement. But what I did need was
grist, and I was swiftly running out.
Build Grist: 10
Silk grist: 0
That was it. That was the tally in my brain of every resource at my disposal. These little... blue and white candy-looking things, that I could only track mentally.
Well, not
every resource. My power did come with a lot of freebies.
Firstly, my sylladex. I'm not quite sure where that name comes from, but it's like… an extra dimensional storage space for sylladex cards. I'm guessing it's extradimensional anyway. I don't really know how it works. But it came with five cards, and I can store items inside them (again, I'm assuming through the method of dimensional shenanigans) and take them back out.
In many ways, this is a great power, even all by itself. But it's limited. Five items isn't that many, and the way it defines an "item" seems pretty arbitrary. It'll take water, but only if it's in a container. Canisters of compressed air work as well, but not just air by itself. A stack of items can go in one card, but they all have to be the same- except minor variations are allowed. Like, I can pick up a bunch of totems in a single card, even if I have them carved differently.
It's also got a really weird gimmick where I can only take out the last thing I put in. Other cards get buried. If I try and pick up more items than I have cards for, whatever is most buried goes flying out at dangerous speeds. As far as I can tell, this is because my sylladex uses the "stack" modus, a little card that looks like a captchalogue card, but has a button on the back I can press to swap it to "queue" mode, allowing me to instead only have access to the card that's
most buried, rather than least. Cumbersome, and so far I've had no luck modifying the modus with alchemy. Speaking of alchemy, allow me to explain what it is I'm doing…
Actually, you know what? My power is really complicated! Let me give you the simple version:
Step one: captchalogue an artifact (put an item in a card).
Step two: flip the card over, and enter the captcha code on the back of the card into a machine dubbed by my power as the "punch designix".
Step three: take a card, put it in the designix. The machine will punch the card with a pattern representative of the entered code. This renders the card useless in terms of captchaloguing things, so make sure the card is empty before punching it. (I had lost my can of pepper spray doing that, luckily punching the card with its own code… not that I had the grist replicate it, ugh.) Thankfully, I realized early on that this would be a problem, and wrote down the code to make more blank captchalogue cards, that being "11111111".
Step four: put the punched card in another machine called the totem lathe, and also put in a totem (a brown crystal cylinder) retrieved from yet ANOTHER machine, the cruxtruder (why yes my basement is feeling a little cramped at this point why do you ask?) into the thing. The totem will then be carved in accordance with the code.
Step five: place the totem on- oh can you guess what you put it on can you I bet you can't oh would you look at that it's the
biggest machine yet- the smaller platform of the alchemiter. The alchemiter will then scan it.
Step six: mentally review the cost of the item, and how many you want to make.
Step seven: mentally send the "okay", and watch as the alchemiter manifests the item represented by the code, and eats up your precious, precious grist in exchange.
Got all that? Basically, so long as I have grist, and I can get whatever it is I want to fit in a card, I can make duplicates of it.
But better still, what happens if you screw with it a little?
Well, my power informs me on an instinctual level, that if you put more than one card in the lathe, the resulting totem will produce an item that combines the properties of the items used.
As such, I've been down here for a while, trying to get cool stuff out of random household items. It hasn't been going well.
The machines themselves were free. I didn't even need to alchemize them; I just sort of mentally visualized where I wanted them and *poof*. There they were. The one exception to this was the punch designix, which inexplicably costed me four units of "silk grist" for some reason.
I started with twenty build grist, and four silk grist. But between the coat hanger I stupidly duplicated at the cost of 2 build grist as I was trying to get a handle on my power, the designix taking all the silk, the "perfectly generic object" (a useless green cube?) being made from another two build grist when I tried to use a blank card in the alchemiter, and then another six spent on making more captchalogue cards, I was down to ten build grist, and five cards left in my sylladex, the six others having been punched.
That was it. At least the alchemiter produced seemingly endless totems. So, grist is the problem. How do I get more?
Murder.
That was the answer my power was giving me. Stab a guy dead, he drops some grist. It made an intuitive sort of sense to me, despite being totally insane. Between this and me not wanting to deal with teen drama, the Wards were out of the question. Surely they wouldn't take a cape whose power relied on murder. Not that I was going to just, go out and kill anybody, right?
Right?
Right.
Right?
I mean, if somebody killed Hookwolf or Lung or someone like that, nobody would complain, right?
No, no, no! I shook my head to clear my thoughts. They didn't have a kill order. And it's not like I had any chance of beating them with a power that basically amounts to extradimensional storage.
Or did I?
Maybe? Somehow?
Ugh, what should I do?
[] Join the wards. Out of the question. Mostly because the author isn't sure he can portray the bureaucracy even close to correctly.
[] Kill somebody. Write in who, why, and how.
[] Ignore the alchemy for now. Focus on using the power you
do have. Train using the sylladex. Write in how.
[] Write-In
AN: Feel free to also suggest item combinations at ANY time during the story. They won't always be used, especially right now when you have so little grist, but they might be later. On a similar note, write-ins are always accepted unless otherwise noted, as are modifications to non-write-in votes. The voting works based on a combination of "what got the most votes", and "what do I feel like writing"? Update schedule is whenever I feel like, don't expect consistency. Also don't expect every system to work exactly as it does in Homestuck. 
