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POV: Arthur Sinclair.
I had finished modifying the existing gravitic pushers and reactors for the voidseekers. It had been pretty easy since all I was doing was refitting the tech from the XJF project to fit into this very similar chassis.
So, I had moved on to testing my newest perk; the Carving kit.
When I had shown the carving tools to the Huragok, the first thing they had done was disassemble them. By the time I even noticed what was going on, they had already been destroyed. All I had been able to do was stare blankly after it had been done.
"Really?" I asked, completely flabbergasted by the pair of them.
Overly Small just did his normal Huragok shrug. "Your perk says they'll be back tomorrow. Besides, we can make more now."
I watched as the two of them immediately pulled out several leather pouches and emptied them. Each of the pouches contained a random assortment of gemstones, but there was also one pouch that contained a collection of round tile-like objects.
Both Slightly Overweight and Overly Small focused on these first, each taking one and disassembling it. A second later, another identical stone was produced.
Slightly Overweight whistled. "These have a unique internal structure. It's easy for us to make them, but I doubt we'll be able to mass-produce them any time soon."
The two of them continued examining the various gemstones, while I pulled out the leather tube sitting at one end of the satchel. Inside was a single sheet of modern paper; if I had to guess, probably about an A5 in size.
My mood lowered slightly when I saw the contents. I had been hoping to get access to all of the basic runes from the start, and unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The sheet included only the first fourteen runes, all of which were labeled as low runes.
Still, what was here was absolutely fascinating. I had hoped to get all of the basic runes, since the only rune I knew from Diablo was the immortal rune, Zod. Being able to apply that to things would have been insane. There were also a few runewords as well, but those could wait; we needed to think about creating individual runes and then placing them into devices before we began considering runewords.
"Do we want to start then?" I asked?
Overly Small took the paper from me and skimmed over it. He then dissolved it before I could even stop him.
I let out a groan as I watched. "Fine. Let's start with the first rune then. Can you make me a set of carving tools, please?"
Overly Small whistles at me before replying in English. "I'll do you one better!" From one of his tendrils, a grey shape began to form. Within a few seconds, Overly Small placed a rune on the table.
I blinked a couple of times and grabbed it, only for my first perk to activate.
First Perk Activated. Complete Knowledge: El (Rune).
I blinked as the knowledge of the material and how to carve the rune was shoved into my brain. "Right. Can you make copies of the other thirteen, please? The forge just activated."
A few minutes later, the two huragok had completed copies of each of the low runes, and I had a new notification.
First Perk Activated. Complete Knowledge: Low Runes.
I nodded once. "Alright, let's get five copies of each rune. We'll have to make some weapons to install them in."
We quickly made our way over to the few extra constructors that I had set aside for my use. While I knew little about Diablo, the setting was standard fantasy, which, naturally, meant swords. We spent an hour designing a sword, with most of that time being spent on figuring out how we would need to design the rune sockets; according to the paper, all that was required was a hole of a certain size and shape.
Then we got to printing. Fourteen steel swords were printed, along with just as many dummy targets for us to test the weapons against.
We had been worried that slotting the runes into the weapon would be difficult, but all it took was simply pressing them into the socket. From there, the rune would simply melt into the hole.
While the effects of the first rune, El, were described in the paper, seeing them in action was something else. The visual effect for the El rune was pretty simple; it made the sword glow.
I tested the weapon on a set of dummy targets, and it was pretty effective, though the blade had the thinnest edge we could manage from the printers, and it was already showing signs of taking damage after just a few test swings.
Next was the test of the primary effect. Our assistants brought in a small pneumatic cannon and several collections of differently sized rubber balls. To get a good baseline, I started with just a normal sword.
I took a minute to get changed into full-body armor. When I returned, the number of observers in the room had grown. I chuckled nervously as I looked over at the collection of almost a hundred researchers, engineers, and soldiers. "Uhhh… is it really necessary for this many people to be here?"
Overly Small was the one to respond. "Yes!"
I raised an eyebrow but shrugged and nodded to the technician, who was loading the cannon. "Alright then. Let's start it up."
With little to no warning, the first ball was fired from the cannon, and I easily cut it in half with the blade. Over the next few minutes, we ramped up the speed of the balls until, finally; I missed one of them. As one ball came dangerously close to hitting me, I called a stop to the first test. "Alright. Write that down. I'm switching to the other sword."
With a sigh, I put down the sword and moved to grab the one with the rune in the hilt. I couldn't feel the difference immediately, but when I once more started swinging to knock out the incoming balls, the difference became as clear as night and day. We started with the balls that I had struggled with; they were frighteningly easy to hit now.
Of course, as the speed of the balls increased, the difficulty ramped up, until finally, one hit me straight in the stomach. I stumbled backwards as a cheer rose around the room. Overly Small floated over, and I looked up at him. "That hurt."
Overly Small whistled something I didn't understand, and I let out a sigh. Carefully getting up, I looked around the room. "Alright! Who's going next?"
A few people raised their hands, all of them marines, who were interested in trying, but I pointed out a few people in the crowd. "All of you get changed. We'll start with the normal swords and work from there."
Over the next couple of hours, we got good test data regarding the rune. The difference was stark; even those with the worst hand-eye coordination became significantly better. A few days later, we had made a couple of Mauser frames with included rune sockets. After a couple of hours of work replacing the internal systems, we let people try the thing. Once more, the effect was noticeable, with significantly increased accuracy.
Testing of the other thirteen runes was also very interesting. There were the more boring runes (relatively speaking), which just did "elemental damage;" they included "fire," "cold," "lightning," and "poison" (we hadn't gotten anything to test the poison with yet).
The described effect of the Nef rune was "knockback." In testing, it caused the ball to fly significantly further than for other weapons. When placed on armor, it reduced the damage caused to the target wearing it.
Then there were the really interesting runes. Sol made anything that it was applied to a potentially lethal weapon. Anything even remotely sharp would cut straight through its target; silverware would slice through steel tables; even dull plastic toys would cut wood. The armor enchantment was even better; the described effect was "minor attack nullification." Effectively, it made one immune to stubbed toes and paper cuts.
I discreetly asked Slightly Overweight to make me an amulet to wear, which he kindly provided.
The Shael rune straight up increased the movement speed of objects by a straight 20%. Whether it be myomer, muscle, or rotor, if it had a Shael rune attached, then it moved faster. When we were testing, I did not doubt that requests to mass produce the runes would be on me asap.
That was until we got to testing the Dol rune. When affected by the Dol rune, things like paper cuts would heal in a matter of a couple of hours, where they would normally take days. The medical possibilities were significant. Whether it worked on diseases would be something for the medical staff to test, since this was outside of my normal wheelhouse.
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Testing continued on the second day, but there was some unfortunate news in the morning. The expedition searching for the SLS Tripitz had finally searched all the systems outside the range of New Vandenberg's HPG station. Already, part of the team had split off to go steal a Jumpship. That meant that in just a couple of days or weeks, the Voidhawk would get its first run in zero-G.
The Voidhawks were ready, or at least the prototypes were. A full 40 suits of prototype armor had been produced while the production line was being assembled. The constructors helped automate a lot of the more complex tasks, but specialized parts still needed specialized machines.
In the meantime, the systems that were at the edge of the HPGs range of influence would get trips from XFJ variants.
Then, at the end of the day, the Celestial Forge activated twice.
Special Achievement: Green Thumb [Finish the Baol Precursor chain.]
1st Perk: (Previous Points: 100, Subtracted: 100, Current Points: 0)
- Domain: Knowledge: Future Tech
- Title: Fun in the Sun
- Universe: Warhammer 40k - T'au Empire
- Description:
Plasma, radiation, and antimatter are all similar in that they relate to exotic
and high energy states of matter, whether it is stellar mass or individual
particles of subatomic size. You now are a master of T'au technology as it
relates to manipulating these high-energy states of matter and the physics that
underpin them.
- Points: 100
Special Achievement: It Belongs in a Museum! [Find a Relic.]
Perk 'Clocks with Buttons and Lasers' missed due to insufficient points.
(Available Points: 0, Required Points: 400, Points Doubled, New Point Total: 100)
"High energy" included a lot of technological information. Of course, this time there were no schematics; it was a lot of conceptual information and mathematics.
Most immediately useful were the three travel methods. The first was a method of producing thrust capable of accelerating a ship to 99.9% light speed within a few short months. For pure acceleration, the concept blew everything else we had out of the water. Even the Goa'uld gravitic pushers were nothing. I groaned in annoyance; now I would have to develop another drive that used this tech, and I was pretty sure I could use the Nef rune to increase the acceleration even further.
The other two methods were proper FTL; the second was the Ether Drive. Using it would see a vessel dive into the space between the immaterium and realspace. It was slow and power hungry; a hyperdrive was better in just about every way.
The third was absolutely insane; an object, when wrapped in a field of antimatter, would be capable of travelling at speeds well above the speed of light. It was just as stupid and suicidal as it sounded, but the math was there, and if the forge gave it to me, then it would probably work.
Of course, there was also information on the mass production of anti-hydrogen and other exotic materials, though most interesting was the know-how to collect dark matter, as well as the mathematics behind using it to improve the output of a basic reactor.
Then there was the weaponry. The T'au made heavy use of plasma weaponry and had gotten very good with the tech. Their ion weapons were just PPCs, though significantly downsized to fit in a rifle rather than a mini-gun. Then there are the neutron weapons; similar to the ion weapons, but firing a stream of neutrons rather than ions.
Of course, the neutron weapons required specialized crystals, but they would be relatively easy to produce, even compared to the zat crystals, which were already considered simplistic.
For capital-grade weapons, they had enlarged their ion and pulse weapons, and I was fairly certain I could also produce a capital-sized neutron weapon.
Of these, the single scariest would be the enhanced radiation weapons. These were fusion-based bombs that would kill off all life in an area while leaving buildings intact. Once we started producing nukes, I was already considering changing some of them into this role so that we could capture any ComStar WarShips, but traditional nuclear-based ERWs were still nukes; that meant they still produced heat.
The T'au weapon was not so crude; it released only neutrons and would obliterate nearly all biological matter within its range. It was a brutal but effective weapon and could render unshielded vessels dead in space without even a scratch.
The final tech that the perk offered was information on gravity control. It was similar to colonial gravity plating in concept, but it was significantly more developed. The T'au had applied the tech to producing shields capable of repelling attacks.
It was a lot of new technology, and much of it could be implemented pretty easily. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to apply any of it for a few months, at least not until I had my current tests and projects completed.