peterverse | shaker, meet stranger

mrglam posting in

Sadde is home; it's a Friday evening, his shift is over, and there's no school. He's reading a book, lying on his bed in his small-but-tidy apartment.

He is also quite naked, because it's his place and why not?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

msglam

Higher above the water they are! "These look really complex," she comments of the blueprints. "Are you gonna get super turned on again when they create huge explosions?"

From:

first_and_final

"Probably. I'll try to contain myself."

Testing!

...Some of these pins, particularly the ones including a large number of different metals, produce even bigger explosions than the wand from last time. The ice chunks from the first round of testing are completely obliterated early on.

From:

msglam

She giggles. "Should we go even farther from the shore? Are we gonna be visible as weird lights in the distance?"

From:

first_and_final

"...I think we should go farther out when we test these next few," he says.

From:

msglam

So Sadde takes them farther out, and creates the black wall thing between them and the shore just in case.

From:

first_and_final

And they test several more weapon designs. Enormous explosions ensue. Honestly, someone has probably noticed even with the black wall.

"...The unfortunate thing is, I can't make this one any smaller, the design is too complex," he says of the last one on the list. "Unfortunate because I have no idea what it's going to do. All the designs we've tried so far have been basically energetic or destructive in nature; adding platinum and silver adds components of freeze and stun, and I don't know what the result will be. But I want to find out, in case it's impressive enough to be worth trying on Endbringers. Uh, let's get a little higher, shall we?"

From:

msglam

Higher and farther! They're less than specks in the horizon. "So, how certain are you we won't create a tsunami and erase Brockton Bay from the map?"

From:

first_and_final

"Certain enough to try it. I did the math; a lot of my assumptions would have to be wrong before we'd create anything worse than an embarrassingly noticeable explosion. But, yeah, that's the sort of question it's good to make a habit of asking."

From:

msglam

"It's kinda hot that you have to do math to create your explosions, you know."

From:

first_and_final

"Is it? Good to know. Okay, make me this half-wand."

The half-wand in question is four inches long and contains components of every metal they've used: brass, steel, gold, bronze, copper, platinum, and silver. Ashras aims it at the ocean.

The beam is nearly invisible and nearly instantaneous, with a high-pitched vvwp sound that is immediately drowned out by the sound of what it does to the water. A hemisphere of ocean about twenty feet in diameter flash-freezes and explodes violently, sending ice fragments flying in every direction.

"...If we want to fire one of those at an Endbringer at cannon size, we'll have to evacuate the battlefield first," says Ashras.

From:

msglam

"It is! 'Cause you're smart. Smart is hot," she declares, then provides him with the half-wand.

And then-

"I don't think anyone will agree to that. Evacuating the battlefield."

From:

first_and_final

"...if we demonstrate the effect at half-wand, wand, half-staff, and staff size, they might change their minds," he says. "If not... well. Maybe it'll work all right at the smaller sizes. Or maybe I can work the engravings so the effect is more... contained, less actually explosive. Or design a different weapon with different components that has the more contained effect."

From:

msglam

"Does it have to be phallic objects?" she wonders.

From:

first_and_final

"Yes. It actually does. Flat cylinders work as shields, but getting them to an effect strength that's worth carrying one around is stupidly hard and I never studied it, so I don't plan on trying to reinvent the discipline from scratch."

From:

msglam

"I'm mostly wondering what happens if you try to use it on, like, actual stuff made of those materials. What are the engravings for? How do they work?"

From:

first_and_final

"Anything made of an appropriate metal and more phallic than a sphere has some effect as a magic weapon, but the farther they are from the right shape and especially the less symmetrical they are around the central axis, the weaker their effect. The sort of... neutral or generic version of any magic weapon is a wand-sized cylinder with flat ends and no engravings. From there, most possible changes make it worse at what it does, but some engraving patterns make it better, or change the exact nature of the effect. For example, you've done a light-pin with a very focused beam for me, but there are also versions that throw something more like a spotlight than a laser, except a solid gold half-wand makes for an awfully expensive flashlight so they're not very popular."

From:

msglam

"That's really weird! Why cylinders? Why those engravings? How did anyone even figure out those engravings were good as opposed to other engravings?"

From:

first_and_final

"I don't know why cylinders. You figure out the engravings by testing them, basically, but I have no idea who first started doing that systematically. I mean, when you have engravings that are any good at all, they light up when the weapon fires, so somebody might've decorated their staff and found that some decoration styles were prettier than others and wanted to know why..."

From:

msglam

"And how does the math work, there? What exactly do you calculate?"

From:

first_and_final

"The shape and placement of the engravings has... effects. I'd have a much more sensible explanation prepared if I'd been able to bring any materials with me, but as it is I'm making a lot of it up as I go along. For our next date I plan to draw up a huge variety of test designs for platinum half-wands, because it's really easy to test effect-shaping when you're firing freeze blasts at water, but unfortunately the shaping parameters don't work exactly the same way for any two metals."