The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (web based ebook reader txt) 📕

might require some training, there might be a steep learning curve depending on complexity, and expensive or exotic fuels necessary to power it, but in theory, anyone could use any piece of technology if they got their hands on it.

That gave me an idea for an experiment.

I walked over to the coiled cyborg spine. Using POSITION vectors, I spread it out flat with the pins facing up. Then I vectored it up into the air until it was clear of the dirt, then rotated it 180 degrees on its long axis until the pins faced down.

“Stand back, everybody,” I said over comms. “I’m going to try something. Move back.” I waved everyone away until we were well clear of the spine. Then I vectored it straight down into the ground.

Gr-gr-gr-GRCH!

The ground exploded into a gigantic red mound similar in size to Titano when he was gigantic, and the cyborg spine expanded with it.

“Look at that!” the guardswomen marveled at it in amazement.

I vectored the spine out of the ground.

Grutch!

The spine and mound shrank back to their original sizes and the red dirt flattened out.

Wondering what the limits of expandability were, I again vectored the spine to rotate over 180 degrees until the pins faced up, then lowered it to the red dirt. I strolled down to the tail end where the pins were the smallest. I knelt down and grabbed them with both hands.

Foop!

My fists exploded to 3 times their size, as did my arms up to my shoulders, and the spinal segment and pins I was grabbing. The rest of me remained normal size, giving me a comical appearance.

“Bwah ha ha ha ha!” several guardswomen laughed over comms, doubling over and pointing in hilarity.

“Oh, look,” I chuckled. “I’ve got Mr. Fantastic hands.”

“Who?” someone asked, amused.

“Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four. Dr. Stretch,” I said, deadpan. “From Marvel Comics?”

Generally disinterested mutters from the guardswomen. Of course they didn’t know anything about American superhero comics.

I released the pins of the spinal segment.

Fwip!

My hands, arms, and the segment shrank back to normal size.

“The question is,” I said rhetorically, “can anyone use the cyborg spine to grow three times their normal size?”

“Let me try,” someone said over loudspeaker. An armored guardswoman walked across the red dirt. Like the others, her helmet and visor covered her face, but the boob swells on her power armor were substantial, and the contour lines on her feminine hips suggested every last detail. In short, gorgeous. Her body, anyway. I couldn’t tell about her face with her visor down. She gestured at the cyborg spine and said, “I’ll do it.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Corporal Syx. Spelled with a Y.”

“But you pronounce it like the number six?”

“Yup.”

I nodded, “Go for it. If anything goes wrong, I’ll fix it with my rings.”

“Where should I grab?”

“Anywhere you want.”

Corporal Syx walked two segments up the tail. “How about here?”

“Sure.”

She squatted down and grabbed the pins.

FWOOP!

Instantly, her hands, arms, shoulders, and breasts ballooned up big, at least three times their original length, width, and depth.

“Look at Syx!” someone guffawed.

“Her boobs are huge!” someone else laughed.

“Triple melons!” another guardswoman chided.

“A hundred handfuls!”

“I want to grab them!”

“Let me play with your Xeno tits, Syx!”

I had no idea what a “Xeno” was specifically, but it didn’t sound like a compliment.

“Skruck those bitches,” Corporal Syx said sourly to herself, but it was audible over her loudspeaker. She released the pins.

Fwip!

Syx shrank back to normal.

I said, “Everything back to normal?”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding disgusted. Her helmet was facing the laughing guardswomen, who were still jeering about Syx’s big boobs. The menacing design of Syx’s visor made it appear she was glaring hatefully at the other women.

I recognized bullying behavior when I saw it. As a kid, I’d been on the receiving end more than my fair share.

With Syx’s helmet and visor on, I had no idea what she looked like. Either she was butt-ugly — a genuine “butter face” if you took her body into account — making her the butt of everyone’s bullying, or she was better looking than everyone else. Either extreme would likely yield the same disdain from her peers.

“Don’t worry about them,” I said.

“I don’t,” Syx snorted defiantly.

“Good.” I said.

My new discovery proved two things, one incredibly good, one incredibly bad.

The Good: there was a way to install the power of my king’s rings into other objects. Any object, in fact. Might I be able to transfer my powers into devices usable by my allies? Could I make duplicate Bombshells Rings, one for each Bombshell? What could Oia, Venus, Cygna, and Sirius do if they had my powers too? We’d make a powerful team to say the least.

The Bad: I wasn’t the only person in the universe who already possessed similar technology to my seemingly magical rings. Here was proof. Worse, they were using it against me and probably wanted me dead. If I had to guess, Baron Crewd and his vile pirates were behind Titano’s super-sizing somehow.

Did that make me nervous?

Put it this way: when you went from being the only kid on the block with a stockpile of thermonuclear ICBM warheads in your back pocket — in my case my rings — to discovering that somewhere out there, some other sneering kid had his own ICBMs — albeit fewer or less powerful or less technologically advanced than yours — then yeah, you better believe it made me nervous.

Up until this moment, my rings had been the decisive advantage I had over Baron Crewd von Bludlust and his space pirates.

Not anymore!

Did someone say arms race?

—: Chapter 25 :—

Now that my false sense of security had been ripped away — the sense that I was the most powerful being in the universe — charging my rings up to full took top priority.

I looked at the cyborg spine and got an idea.

If it worked like my rings, it had a fuel cell of some kind. In the same way I could extract MASS from other objects using my rings, I could also extract ENERGY.