by Macronomicon
If anything, they were quartz lenses with gold impurities, but whatever.
Using the engine and regulator, Jeb was able to spit out over a hundred pounds of quartz gravel rich with gold onto the floor of the wagon, which he then scooped up into the Blue Serpent Furnace in ten-pound increments, heated and stirred until the individual materials began to separate based on their density.
Once it cooled, Jeb flipped the whole thing over and peeled off the thin layer of gold on the top, tossing the hunk of slagged quartz out the back of the wagon.
Over the course of an evening, Jeb made his fare back, along with a little extra. Jeb had several of these lenses, and they didn’t look like they would be exhausted any time soon. With a little bit of effort, Jeb could get himself spending money whenever he needed it.
In the immortal words of Forrest Gump: ‘That’s good. One less thing.’
Satisfied that it was possible, Jeb set the lenses aside, and worked on his other ideas.
He identified each of the lenses with the Appraiser, tossing the lens up into the grey cloud of roiling Myst. With something as small as a lens, the Myst actually seized on the item, lifting it into the air and making it part of the display.
Jeb took the lumpy antler lens and tossed it up into the roiling cloud.
Raw Stag Lens (Uncommon)
Often considered pests where they come from, deer are tenacious survivors and delicious prey animals. This particular lens creates a powerful stag of the white-tailed deer species.
Curious, Jeb took the lens outside at night and poured a drop of Myst through it, and was gobsmacked when half a dozen tiny stags bolted in every direction. It was one thing to make worms of varying sizes, but seeing a familiar Earth mammal like a deer in miniature just brought back to mind exactly how strange all of this was.
“It’s a twelve-pointer,” Jeb muttered as they disappeared into the dark of night.
Well, as long as nobody made any tiny does, that should be fine, Jeb thought as the foot-long stags scattered into the wilderness.
Annihilation lens mixed with fly lens makes void butterflies. Jeb eyed the big lump of antler in his hand. What would happen with a buck?
Might be something to see.
Jeb still had a pinky-sized piece of Annihilation lens along with some dust from the creation of the Beautiful Revenge. It wasn’t enough to mix with a stag lens big enough to make a full-sized deer.
I’ll have to buy a couple more cleaning wands, and probably some slaves.
Jeb chuckled at the idea of buying a sexy elf waifu, then kicking her out on her ass because he was more interested in the control lens in her collar.
Come to think of it…
In a flash of inspiration, Jeb had an idea for a gun that used Annihilation lenses. All he had to do was attach a spring to the focal slider.
Cock it back, setting the range to minimum, then pull the trigger, allowing a pulse of Myst to travel through the lenses. The focal point rapidly shifts as the spring pushes the lenses together again, boring a hole in a straight line out from the gun.
Gotta write this down! Jeb scrambled back to his wagon and wrote down the idea before he forgot. Jeb was forced to write the idea down on a piece of leather because he forgot to buy himself a drafting journal.
Okay, when I get to the city, I am definitely setting myself up as a mysterious and wealthy survivor of the ‘hard’ difficulty and buying a place to work on my magic…and possibly kidnap children.
Jeb’s half-formed, pseudo plan involved buying a mansion with a huge basement, then disappearing orphan children, feeding and housing them in secret until the bad guy came sniffing around looking for the other reaper horning in on his territory.
That could work. Killers are notoriously territorial.
It was also kind of a bad idea and a logistical nightmare. Jeb might be able to feed and care for them with magic, but he couldn’t physically keep track of a couple dozen kids and still investigate.
Pros: Bad guy comes to me, doesn’t suspect me of hunting him at all.
Cons: Screaming children pissing and shitting everywhere, getting in my way and stopping me from doing my job.
Wait… Slaves.
Jeb grinned as the plan started to come together. If he wanted to come across as a wealthy serial killer, there was no better way to prove he was psycho than to buy some people. These purchased people could help watch his kidnapped children.
I’m such a nice guy.
Jeb chuckled to himself, carrying on with his day.
A week into the ride was far too long to go without conversation, and Jeb managed to strike up conversations with the driver on several occasions. This particular day they were off-roading, and Jeb had the worst case of swamp-ass, aggravated by the jostling of the wagon.
“So how do you stand this heat?” Jeb asked, popping his head out of the shade.
“What heat?” the melas driver asked, glancing down at him.
“Oh.” Well, that makes sense.
“Are humans a cold-weather species?” he asked, glancing up at the blazing sun.
“I hadn’t thought so, but apparently. We like places around seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, whatever that translates to in alien temp.”
Apparently The System translated for him, because the driver scoffed. “Seventy-two degrees? That’s nothing.”
“So I noticed,” Jeb said, ducking back into the shade.
“The melas enjoy the oil-rich desert and volcano wilds, averaging a hundred and fifteen degrees, human temp.”
“Damn. This must be balmy then,” Jeb said.
“Indeed.”
“Hey, Brav,” Jeb called.
“Yeah?” the driver responded.
“What do your people know about kidnapping?”
Brav actually turned to stare at him, brow raised.
Jeb couldn’t overlook the possibility that the human children were being taken by an alien. It was about fifty-fifty in Jeb’s head.
“Why?”
“I’m looking into missing kids for someone. Is it a common thing for melas?”
Brav barked a short laugh. “Roil, no, it isn’t common at all.”
“Why?”
“Melas babies light themselves on fire as a defense mechanism until they’re three years old or so; they’re dangerous to all but their mother. Same unique chemical reaction. Catching on fire from a flaming baby you’re not directly related to is mildly poisonous.”
“Poisonous, not…burny? Are you hazing me?” Jeb asked.
…
“You’re serious?”
“Of course. Piss off a melas and you’ll feel the heat.”
“How the… Wow. That explains a lot.”
“Why? What do your human infants do to protect themselves?”
“Scream really loud, I guess? They poop themselves and throw up, too.”
“Acid vomit?” Brav asked, eyeing Jeb cautiously.
“No, just regular vomit.”
“How on Pharos did you survive as a species?” Brav asked.
“I’m asking myself that right now,” Jeb said, shaking his head before he noticed something in the distance. Through the wobbling heat waves, Jeb was able to make out the distinct shape of a car.
“Hold up!” Jeb said, banging on the wagon and crawling out into the open to ride shotgun. “What is that?”
“A human construction of some kind?” Brav asked.
“It’s a car!” Jeb said, jumping off the wagon and running for it. “This way!”
“Is the human serious?” another wagoneer called.
“Come on!” Jeb called, motioning them to follow. “Where there’s cars, there’s road! With any luck, it’ll be the Interstate!”
After a minute of running through the arid desert, the car resolved into a Plymouth Voyager propped up on a large boulder, where it had crashed when the driver vanished. Around the boulder, the road finally came in view. He could see where it had been Stitched together with the Pharos
ian desert: the I-5, in all its eight-lane glory, wide enough for half the wagons to travel along side by side.
There were hundreds upon thousands of cars littering the road, but only a handful likely had their brakes on, so it would just be a matter of pushing them off the road.
Come to think of it, I wonder if I could scavenge up some gas and get one of these babies running? I could get to Solmnath in style.
“What are you on abou—Eck Ban!” Brav came to a skidding stop in the sandy soil, his jaw dropping in disbelief. “What on Pharos is this?”
“It’s a road.”
“It’s the ruins of a caravan the size of a city,” he whispered, scanning the thousands of cars baking on the blacktop asphalt.
“Well, they weren’t all going to the same place,” Jeb said with a shrug. “I figure if we clear the path, we can get a smooth thirty- or forty-mile stretch,” Jeb said, motioning to where the road disappeared into the south. “More if the Stitching is oblong.”
“How did humans do this?”
“This is what you’re impressed by?” Jeb asked, turning back to the road. “It’s just a road connecting one edge of the continent to the other that people could traverse in a matter of hours. Is that such a big deal?”
Brav looked like his eyes were going to fall out of his head, so Jeb decided to stop teasing him.
“The wagons?”
“Right, I’ll go get them,” Brav said, nodding before turning on his heel and running to where the wagons waited for them.
“And I…will start looting,” Jeb said, picking up a rock and smashing the nearest window.
All in all, the wagons actually went only a little faster on the highway due to the constant need to move cars out of the way.
On the other hand, the caravaneers were practically crying with joy as they filled all available empty space with human oddities. Glass was especially sought-after. Human glass was incredibly clear, and a single glass cup went for a couple silver. They made a stack of carefully detached windshields, also grabbing things like knives, guns, and the odd leather bucket seat to bolt onto their caravan seats.
Jeb didn’t bother looking for things to sell. He was looking for some wheels, dumping ice-cold river water on his head every few minutes as his shoe tried to melt to the pavement.
Jeb actually rested on his pegleg every now and then to allow his foot to cool.
The biggest impediment to finding a suitable ride was that many of the cars were empty, weatherworn and damaged. When the world ended a few months ago, people had been teleported right out of their cars and shoved in Tutorials.
That meant the cars were left running, moving at seventy miles an hour with no human oversight. Only a handful of smart cars had been able to avoid collisions of any kind.
Even the ones that didn’t get badly crunched up had been left running until they went empty.
If this were in town, that would have been a problem, but they were on the I-5.
A fair number of people were on long road trips, and some of them had gas cans in the back. Gas degrades pretty hard over the course of three months, but it’s still usable…barely.
After a couple hours of searching, he found an oversized Jeep with its right front tire blown out. Other than that, there was some minor damage to the fender where it had cruised to a stop and hit the meridian, but all that was fixable.
It’s like me! Jeb thought, glancing down at his own missing leg. Whoever had owned the truck had bought it specifically for off-roading, as the body was lifted, the remaining tires nice and big, and not one, but two spares in the back.
Off-roading was going to be the name of the game, so Jeb slapped his hand down on the hood and claimed it for himself, nice and loud so the surrounding aliens didn’t loot the windshield.
After that, he hauled the gas cans over, put a gallon in and tested the engine. The key was still in the ignition, so it was just a matter of crossing his fingers and hoping the battery was still alive. The machine rumbled to life without complaint or stutter despite running out of gas before sitting there for the better part of three months.
“Yesss, power!” Jeb cackled, turning it off before starting on changing the tire.
Half an hour later, he was tapping the steering wheel and bobbing his head to some kid’s EDM, feeling the wind in his hair as he cruised forward at roughly ten miles per hour.
Jeb could just go off-road and ditch his caravan, but that didn’t seem like the best idea ever. Not only did Jeb not know where the city was, he was alone. And there was no easier way to get killed or do something stupid and wind up dying, than to go it alone.
Like Into the Wild.
“Is that some kind of magical pre-recorded music?” Brav asked, driving his wagon alongside Jeb’s Jeep.
“Pre-recorded, yes. Magical, no.” Jeb blanked out. He didn’t actually know how a CD worked. “Probably not magical.”
“What’s playing the music then?”
“Speakers work by passing a current through copper wire at a rate that makes a vibrating electrical field. The vibration is then picked up and amplified by a set of magnets attached to thin fabric or cloth.”
“So, cloth, copper and lodestone does all that?”
Jeb shrugged. “Basically. You’d have to ask an engineer for more specifics. I’m sure there’s some electronics in there.”
Speaking of engineers… I wonder where all the scientists from NASA wound up. Jeb was absolutely sure there were some very smart people out there integrating human tech with Myst.
Myst and Myst engines gave the law of conservation of energy the finger. That kind of power would give those nerds wet dreams. If someone went to an oil refinery and found a Premium Unleaded lens, they could send a ship into space while ignoring fuel weight.
Jeb glanced down at the dash of his Jeep, doomed to run out of fuel sometime in the next couple of weeks when all the refined gas in the world dried up or expired.
Hell, I could find a Premium Unleaded lens. Are there any oil refineries in California? Jeb needed to keep his eyes open for an abandoned gas station.
Jeb tapped the steering wheel some more. Come to think of it, he’d only seen lenses made in nature, hadn’t he?
I wonder if man-made things count as natural. Humans are natural, in the grand scheme of things. What’s the difference between a bird’s nest and a cheap motel in the eyes of the gods? They were both made by animals to breed in.
I wonder if I could visit Silicon Valley and find an AI lens. See if it takes over the world.
Let’s see, there’s all the nature lenses found in Oregon, the beetle lens, the worm lens, the Annihilation lens, the flame lenses.
The control lens was specifically described as arising because of the behavior of people.
Hmm…
Jeb would give even odds that lenses which created advanced sapient-made constructs were either extremely rare or nonexistent.
Still, couldn’t hurt to visit a few tourist traps on the way south. If I can find a candy factory with a candy lens in it, I won’t have to worry about paying Smartass ever again.
Gotta visit that gas station and see if he could grab one of those analog maps.
Jeb spotted a dark lump on the ground moments before he ran over it.
What’s a chunk of pavement doing torn out of the ground? Jeb thought, pulling up short and hopping out.
“What is it?” Brav asked.
“This pavement is outta place,” Jeb called back, flipping it over with his foot. The dark asphalt radiated heat from the sun beating down on it. Jeb glanced around, but couldn’t see any place it might have come from.
“Oh, a sun lens variant,” Brav said. The orange-skinned man knelt down to inspect the chunk of asphalt. “Good eye.”
Jeb hadn’t noticed it radiating sunlight or the smell of asphalt with his Myst senses, because in this weather, everything radiated sunlight and the smell of asphalt.
“You found it, it’s yours.” The wagoneer shru
gged and stood.
“These common?” Jeb asked, picking up the lens and wincing as it scalded his hand. He wrapped his sleeve around it, finally noticing the sunlight rolling off of it.
“Pretty common in deserts. Aristocrats put a higher value on dappled sun lenses or grassy sun lenses, forest sun, or river sun—pretty much anything that smells nice or is refreshing. I haven’t seen that variant before, but I’ll bet you a sun lens that makes the room smell like tar won’t sell for a whole lot. You’ll get maybe a bulb for it? Maybe a handful of silver. Still not a bad find.”
“Fair enough,” Jeb said, loading the lens into the back seat with the rest of his gear before dumping ice-cold river water on himself again.
God, this lens is a lifesaver, Jeb thought, eyeing the damp river rock with a thin film of algae slime on it before putting it back in his pocket.
“Hey, you guys mind some detours?” Jeb asked, turning around and catching Brav’s attention. “There’s some places—”
ZZZ!
A squat, shiny brown ball of armor plating about the size of a basketball slammed into Brav’s side, tossing him into the ground.
The melas wagoneer let out a pained gasp, and Jeb spotted a proboscis about the size of his thumb slipped between the man’s ribs, blood welling around the wound.
ZZZ!
Jeb’s gaze flicked to the side, spotting dozens more chitinous balls flying through the air.
Flying toward him.
Chapter 9: Local Culture, Friendly Wildlife
“Shit!” Jeb stopped, dropped and rolled, lumps of armor plating flying above him. He rolled under the lifted Jeep, heart hammering in his ears.
Jeb whipped his forty-four out of the holster. He was too busy to feel the pain of the asphalt scalding his skin, or where the sudden jerk had banged his elbow against the metal underside of the car.
He was focused on Brav.
From his position under the car, Jeb could hear the creatures rebounding off the metal hood, clattering softly onto the ground on either side. And he could see the wagon driver’s plight, framed by the underside of the Jeep.
The basketball-sized creature attached to his chest was pulsing in a way that couldn’t possibly be good for him as the wagoneer tried to pry it off.