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

Myst had three states of matter: Ray, Thread, and Myst. Ray was anything that came out of a lens or engine, and acted like you’d expect: like a ray, travelling in a straight line and delivering its effect on whatever the focal point was. It behaved very much like light.

Thread was when the Myst was coming from a person’s Core. It was malleable and generally connected back to the user’s Core, forming a thread-like shape.

Then there was Myst, the neutral form that didn’t seem to want to interact with anything except engines and living creatures. It didn’t even overtly interact with lenses, except possibly to shift their state of matter at a microscopic level.

They knew this, because in order to sinter Myst lenses, a high concentration of neutral Myst of the same type basically filled in the microscopic gaps of the pressed material and allowed it to form a cohesive solid.

The setup had a thick gold box at the top that was designed by Eddie to catch a ray before its focal point and hold it in place, compressing it until it reverted to neutral Myst. It was a similar concept to the Myst capacitor, he’d explained to Jeb earlier. From the box, a feed-tube ran down into the lens-shaped die, which Jeb had made using the Blue Serpent Furnace. Only neutral Myst could make it past the half-dozen switchbacks and down into the dies.

Jeb put the last available Annihilation lens into the converter, making absolutely sure it was close enough to the edge of the box that it wouldn’t carve a chunk out of the gold rather than get stopped and neutralized.

Jeb closed the lid, made sure it was screwed on tight, then fed the business end of the Myst engine through, connecting the nipple of the optical fibers to the neutralizer.

Once that was done, Jeb checked everything one more time before feeding the black dust from the Annihilation lenses into the dies, making sure it was piled up nicely, allowing the dust to fill every tiny crevice.

The dies themselves had a thin coat of gold which had to be peeled off the finished product each time. Without the coating, the Myst infusion would simply dissipate into the environment. Gold was an excellent Myst insulator, and likely one of the reasons it was so expensive.

“Alright, I think we’re ready to get started,” Jeb said, reaching for the lever on the hydraulic press.

A motion out of the corner of his eye grabbed his attention. He glanced over and spotted Eddie lying down on his belly, a fair distance away and partially behind some rather sturdy furniture.

“What are you doing?” Jeb asked, frowning.

“We’re taking Annihilation Myst, a highly dangerous, refined magical substance that literally erases things from existence, and compressing it at about five hundred megapascals of pressure. If the system were to fail and eject Annihilation Myst out, it would most likely vent laterally, and it would be...energetic. In short, I don’t wanna get cut in half.”

Jeb glanced at the welded-together machine, a touch more ominous now.

“Scoot over,” Jeb said, moving over next to Eddie and lying down behind a thick hunk of greasy engine.

Jeb reached out with telekinesis and flipped the switch.

The press kicked on with a loud whine, pressing a huge steel die down into another. Jeb saw a faint plume of shadow as microscopic bits of lens were ejected from the edges by the pressure before the two sides of the die clamped down together.

The whine of the machine increased in pitch for a moment as it strained against itself, then stopped, locked in place.

“Okay, moment of truth.”

Jeb flicked the switch on the Myst engine.

Nothing happened. There was no telltale hiss of an Annihilation lens ripping the air out of existence, and the press wasn’t showing any signs of being torn apart by the dangerous substance.

“Well, it didn’t blow up immediately. That’s good.”

“Agreed,” Eddie said, peeking out from behind the leg of the table.

“Shall we go see if it worked?” Jeb asked.

Eddie glanced over to the press and met Jeb’s gaze. “Let’s have Buddy do it.”

Poor bomb-defusing robot, always getting the short end of the stick.

“Agreed.”

The two of them shuffled out of the basement and sent the robot in to open the press and turn off the neutral Myst compressor.

Thankfully nothing bad happened, and Jeb wound up holding a gold-plated plano-concave lens about the radius of a golf ball. He carefully peeled the soft gold casing away and tossed the lens into the Appraiser’s roiling cloud.

Processed Synthetic Annihilation Lens (small)

Myst that passes through an Annihilation Lens removes the first thing it touches from existence, making these both useful for industrial and military applications, but also quite dangerous.

These rare lenses are found in the Mines of Seeping Death before being sold to businesses and governments to be broken down into safer sizes. It is illegal for a private entity to own an Annihilation Myst Lens larger than tiny.

“Did that say it’s illegal?” Eddie asked as Jeb took the lens out of the roiling cloud of grey and red.

“Yep,” Jeb said, carefully placing the lens in the protective mold and pouring resin over it. Unlike gold, resin insulated basically none of a Myst ray’s energy. It did, however, have a lot more physical toughness than the soapstone-consistency lens.

Resin also took well to being machined, allowing them to bolt lenses in place without drilling into the actual material.

While that was drying, Jeb started on the Stag lens, switching out the dies for a much larger plano-convex lens.

Jeb hand tooled a small lens off the main antler for the Myst compressor, then ground up the rest of the Stag lens. The lens itself was lumpy and oblong. It could only be fashioned into a much smaller processed lens using traditional means,