"Brutus. Hurt." As she lets go of one of the leashes. Oh my God, this bitch! Who sics a dog on their prospective teammates like this? I watch as that vicious looking pitbull snout comes flying towards me. I dodge to the side and shove it into the couch. Was that too easy? No matter, the other two dogs are on their way. I shove them apart to get to the lady behind them. She tries to punch me, but I'm able to flow to her side and hug her close to me with my arm around her back.
"Alec, get the fuck off the couch! Me and Bitch here have to have a talk." He valiantly pauses his game and starts stowing the remote out of the splash zone, and generally removing himself from the situation. An ordeal to be sure considering that Brutus and one of the other dogs already recovered and are currently trying to bite into me. I try to rectify that by flowing to the other side of her next to the couch while fending the dogs and not shifting my grip on Bitch. Doesn't work though. All that changes is where the dogs are coming from. Then I flip Bitch over the back of the couch and jump on top of her.
I feel like I personally would have gone for the dogs necks, not to choke them but rather to just hold their heads so that they couldn't bite, and possibly shifted Rachel's legs into their mouths while they were going for mine; sort of try to trick them into biting her instead of myself.
"Are we going to have any more problems?"
"...No." I pat her on the back.
"Good!"
Probably the best way that Rachel could be handled.
"Hmm, then you wouldn't mind trying to retract any anti-thinker effects you have on you, would you?" I roll my eyes and made the barest effort to let her in to my non-existent defenses. She immediately goes crosseyed.
Ah so it
can be deactivated. That or she's just projecting that she doesn't have Thinker-proofing; I
think that that might do the job?
Edit: I honestly thought that Taylor was going to be locked out of crafting until she got [Queen] to do it for her.
So apparently there's a lot more to my acid than meets the eye. What happens when I dissolve something is that I replicate the acidic properties of Hydrochloric acid with the chemical energy required to break up molecules appearing ex nihilo, and without any of that pesky need to wait between chemical reactions for the molecules to align. Most of the mass is released as carbon dioxide and water, with the remainder either being absorbed into my body, or excreted in some fashion. Any metal I gouge out with this technique is just displaced, same with most minerals. Lisa had me try and consciously shape the material I deposited with my chemical processes, and well... I made a few diamonds. Entirely on accident, I swear. Did it with a plank of wood Lisa got for testing purposes.
Apparently making crystal lattices is incredibly easy. We tried making a few other gemstones with a small chemical lab, but introducing impurities to the crystal lattice to make rubies or sapphires required finesse that needs more than a half hour of practice we had to achieve. One of them did come out slightly red though.
I think that she might have just made pink diamond instead of ruby; Aluminium has three free bonds while Oxygen has two, which means that a Aluminium Oxide molecule is two Aluminium atoms with double-bonds to a Oxygen atom each and a single bond to a shared one, but
the crystallography of Aluminium Oxide is kind of a bitch and a half to visualize. Oxide crystals in general, even Quartz, is probably a pain in the ass to assemble atomically.
Crystalizing pure elements like Silicon or Aluminium and Carbon and whatnot should be easy enough though.
Adding inclusions shouldn't be difficult though; they should be able to slot right into the cages of the molecular matrix.
Also I'd have expected her to have gotten some Lonsdaleite out of her experimentation; it's a crystalline Carbon allotrope after all. Lonsdaleite and some Graphine.
All in all diamonds produced this way wouldn't be too valuable anyway; artificial diamonds go for a lot cheaper then natural ones. Should be fun for her to bedazzle things with them though. That and to make some windows and shit out of; may as well if it's so ridiculously easy.
If Taylor
really wanted to make some dosh though there's the road-Platinum from catalytic converters; apparently that stuff comes out to about six or seven grams of Platinum, a few hundred dollars worth of it, per ton; I recon that Taylor could get herself a decently sized ingot of the stuff.
Next up was figuring out my mouths. As incredibly mortifying as it is to be effectively naked in front of another girl and living a twisted mockery of yourself is, she is correct in insisting that I need to be informed about everything my body is capable of. We started out testing with some food. I ate it from one of the mouths in my foot, and it dissolved like a sandwich usually does in my acid. We tried this with a lot of things. Then I tried eating two things at once from different mouths. Strawberries and pancakes so it wouldn't taste all that weird. Unfortunately things got weird regardless. They turned into some strawberries with the shape and consistency of pancakes. Looking at my belly while this happened gave her a headache. Also felt kinda weird while it was happening. Then she had me eat two cell phones. They merged into one. After she had me expell it she called it twice. Apparently it has both numbers now. Her headache grew worse when she looked through the menus.
The last thing she had me do was eat that same cell phone and a whole banana. Peeling and all. The phone worked afterwards. Still had both numbers. Then she peeled it and ate it. She collapsed into a heap a couple minutes after that. I thought she got food poisoning on account of eating an actual phone, but she insisted it was 'just' a crippling thinker headache.
This, on the other hand, means that Taylor could pull some
bullshit now that she's aware of the possibilities. Nanotubes combined with fabrics should be fun.
Fucking ate the composite phone. Weird-ass Thinker. She's going to give herself telephonesis or some shit.
)
