Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

lamp fuel, lubricant, firestarter, what have you. They were also shipped up north to be used to heat homes.

Garland Grenore was an oil baron in every sense of the word, except he lacked a title.

More recently though, the desert town had experienced a boom of prospectors and had begun shipping lenses of everything from lumber to gold and fish.

It was with one of these caravans hauling the bounty of Oregon that Jeb bought himself passage south to Solmnath for a cool five bulbs.

Long-distance travel in the empire wasn’t as easy or as safe as it was on Earth. The caravan wasn’t interested in giving a human passage at first, but when he made the coins dance over his palm, they were willing to compromise. Myst Cores made people dangerous.

Jeb spent a lot of the time riding in the back of a wagon, just watching the dusty desert roll by. It was almost as hot in the shade as it was in the sun. Jeb felt for the melas in the driver’s seat, the hot sun beating down on him as he guided the draft animals.

The draft animals seemed used to it. They were some kind of dark brown, thin-haired ungulates with proto-elephant noses. Like those fat pygmy…things you see on the Discovery Channel every now and then.

The comparison stopped there.

The draft animals’ noses were covered with teeth at the end and they seemed pretty adept at biting holes in cactus before suckling as much moisture out of them as they could. The noses were always looking for something to latch onto, and more than once, he’d witnessed an irritated melas driver boop a snoot for being too inquisitive.

The caravans were still figuring out their trade routes again, what with the Stitching of large swaths of land into the strange quilt that was Pharos. Roads and trails that had existed previously now ended abruptly, forcing them to forge new roads. Sometimes, they ended with a towering slice of mountain, and they had no choice but find another way around.

The most distinct thing was all the withering west Oregon landscape interlaced with the arid desert it’d been stitched with. Already, Jeb could see that most of the vegetation was dying, if not all the way dead, and the desert was slowly encroaching on the formerly human territory.

Owing to the unrelenting heat, Jeb bit the bullet and figured out what a ‘mountain river’ lens could do: ice cold water, with only the occasional grit and algae. A real man doesn’t filter his mountain water. He gets lockjaw and he likes it.

Owing either to pure mountain spring water, or simply Jeb’s improved tolerance to disease, Jeb didn’t feel any effect, and kept drinking/spraying himself with river water whenever the heat became intolerable…which was often.

Much of the rest of his time he spent messing around with his new gold lenses. Jeb had disassembled the fireball Luger for more legal transportation, keeping the Myst engine and the wand itself as far away from each other as was practical.

He popped the Myst regulator out of the Beautiful Revenge and rewired it to one of his gold lenses. The gold lenses were about the size of a dime, and they looked like a chip of white quartz streaked with a bit of gold in the center.

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