Apocalypse: Generic System by Macronomicon (shoe dog free ebook TXT) 📕

Once he had all the extraneous decorations off, he started fitting the armor to Amanda’s measurements, heating the metal cherry-red and bending it with telekinesis. He made a mistake here and there and had to patch it, but there was gobs of material to work with sitting right next to him, and the furnace was the most precise heating and welding tool he’d ever had the pleasure of working with.

Jeb had found a little workaround to the problem of being unable to bend an object. As long as he kept the force external, it was a simple matter to bend something.

Jeb wanted to add the Myst Engine to his furnace, but the Myst coming out of it wasn’t telekinetic, so even if he could make a permanent flame, he couldn’t make the telekinetic aspect of the item self-sustaining.

Ah well, it’s still awesome.

Once he was done with Amanda’s armor, Jeb got around to making Ron a better tool for self-defense. He carved the necromancer’s Geysering Flame Lens into the right shape for the fire to manifest all in the same spot, then experimented, using a worm lens to calibrate exactly where the fire would manifest.

Once all that was done, he put it on the end of a ten-foot pole.

Safety first.

“You wanna do the honors?” Jeb asked, handing Ron the pole.

“What are we talking here?” Ron asked, grabbing the pole, grinning like an idiot. “Fireball, flaming arrow, Flame beams?”

“Flamethrower.” Jeb said simply.

“Awww,” Ron pouted at the common nature of his magic item. “We could pull that off with a super soaker and a gallon of gas.”

“Maybe, but we don’t have any more lenses to modify the way this one works. As far as I know, the only thing we can do with it is have it create fire at the focal point. That’s it.”

Ron frowned. “I guess we’ll see what we got.”

He held the ten foot pole way out and Jeb saw him thread a tiny bit of his neon purple Myst into the lens at the end.

BOOM!

Jeb and Ron were catapulted backward, tumbling through the air until they landed on the barren mountainside.

Jeb smelled burned hair as he tried to sit up, trying to blink the huge black spot out of his eyes. Through the ringing in his ears, he could hear Casey III crying.

“It did say,” Ron said, coughing. “That it was energetic.”

“Damnit Ron, how much did you use?”

“You saw me,” Ron shot back. “Barely a drop.”

The necromancer held up the steel pole, and they noticed the front half was faintly glowing with heat. After desperately setting it down to check the lens, they were relieved to find that flame lenses weren’t flammable. Go figure.

“Maybe you two would like to take the explosions further away from the baby?” Casey said in a way that was distinctly not a question.

“Yes ma’am.” Jeb said, nodding before he scooped up the pole and retreated, Ron following close behind.

“Yep. Yep, yep, yep.” Ron hustled after Jeb, glancing over his shoulder nervously.

Once they were far enough away, they got back to trying to figure out simple Myst physics.

“Dayum.” Ron glanced at Jeb. “I’d say that qualifies as a fireball, not a flamethrower.”

“Yeah, but if it always blows up in our face, how do we use it?” Jeb demanded.

Ron scrunched up his face in consideration.

“Rangefinder?” he asked, peering at Jeb.

“Yeah, but how do we…” Jeb stopped as an idea occurred to him. “That might work.”

“You got something from that?”

“Yep,” Jeb said, nodding. “I’m gonna see if it’s possible to make a sliding focus.”

Ron squinted.

“How do you think lens focusing works?” Jeb asked, “It’s just a matter of…getting two or more lenses to play nice with each other. I think.”

“You sure about that?” Ron asked, brow furrowed.

“Eh, couldn’t hurt.”

“Where are you gonna get the lenses? Ron asked.

“Got any glass on you?” Jeb asked. He could use pieces of the worm lens, but that would be wasteful, especially if his idea didn’t pan out.

“Nope.”

And the sand in the ground is way too impure to make any kind of clear glass, even if I could melt it and shape it with the Blue Serpent Furnace.

What has the ability to change the way light behaves? Air does it. Especially if it’s denser. Could I compress air to make temporary lenses? Wait! Water refracts light like nobody’s business. That would at least allow a proof of concept.

“Got it,” Jeb said, digging the water lens out of his pocket.

He made water-based lenses by filling a piece of hardened air with water, big lenses about three feet on a side so that Jeb and Ron could both crowd their heads around them.

“Now, what we wanna do here is make it so the myst goes in the primary lens, is converted to rays,” Jeb tapped one water lens. “Then somehow, the distance between the two lenses sets the focal point.

“Well, obviously they can’t both be regular lenses,” Ron said, putting his hand on the other side of the lens. “Focal point is right here. The damn thing would explode.”

“So we make the first lens concave, so it spreads the focus out, then it hits the back lens which corrects it,” Jeb said. “Would that do anything more than move the focus of the lens by a couple inches?”

“You got me, man, but I think we’re onto something here.”

As it turned out, it was a little more complicated than Jeb thought, but it was still doable. Using the light from the sun as a baseline, they were able to figure out that by making a small, extremely concave lens, and a much larger convex lens, Jeb was able to move the focal point drastically by shifting the small concave lens just a