PWP: 6.8 Build

Build 6.8

Bryce Kiley
2011, January 15: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

The fourth Saturday was always something of a wildcard for me. There was no predicting what my power would give me so waking up in the morning was like opening a massive Christmas gift. Would I get a spaceship? Power armor? Nanobot swarm? Biological horrors?

No, I’d gotten none of those. At least, not chiefly. I stared up at the ceiling without truly seeing anything before me. I was too busy trying to catalog everything I now knew how to do. If nothing else, my power was certainly not boring.

For starters, I spoke Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, with native fluency. That was odd. Never had my power simply dumped an entire language into my head like this.

But then again, never had a setting been so aggressively of a certain ethnicity before, either. Fullmetal Alchemist was vaguely German, but alchemy itself wasn’t, with offshoots in both Amestris and Xing.

Now, Xiaolin Showdown? Well, it was in the name. Sure, the Xiaolin Dragons were from all over the world, but the power system revolved so heavily around kung fu and Chinese artifact creation that my power must have considered the language a prerequisite.

A wide grin split my face. This was… This was perhaps the single most overpowered setting I’d received to date. It had everything, from an “evil genius” main antagonist who specialized in conventional robotics to magic artifacts and martial arts techniques specifically designed to make use of said artifacts.

The show followed the Xiaolin Dragons in their conflict against the Heylin, a group of sometimes wacky, sometimes world-ending villains. They engaged in the eponymous xiaolin showdown to take possession of magic artifacts made by Grandmaster Dashi over a millennium ago. All told, it was a highly flexible setting with both fantasy doodads and sci-fi gadgets.

There was one problem: Qi. Though I now knew how the grandmaster forged every shen gong wu, I wasn’t Grandmaster Dashi. I felt like a home cook who’d been given a master chef’s personal recipe book and kitchen knife. I had the tools, but the skills? That was questionable.

My saving grace was that as far as my power was concerned, all internal energies seemed to be interchangeable. Pokemon-style aura could be used to catalyze the geothermal reactions for alchemy, and now Xiaolin Showdown’s brand of fuckery.

I had the requisite energy, if not nearly the reserves of Dashi. That meant I’d have to be judicious in what I made. As hilarious as it would be to make the Monkey Spear, an artifact that turned the wearer into a monkey and generated an army of monkey spirits, I couldn’t afford to, not if I wanted this month to be productive.

In general, I needed three things to make a shen gong wu: the body of the wu, an infusion of chi, and time.

The body was an object, inscribed with ancient script designed to channel qi in preset patterns. This allowed the object to enact its function without the wielder knowing a damn thing about magic kung fu. For every wu, I needed a corresponding object, sword for sword, lantern for lantern, and so on.

That was the easy part. With my alchemy, I could have whatever I wanted to my exacting specifications. Inscribing the text would be harder, but no more difficult than what I was already doing. After months of designing alchemy circles, I felt that I could take some pride in my penmanship.

Then there were the qi and time components I had to consider. I expected the enchanting process itself to be time consuming. Dashi created the shen gong wu, then took the method with him to the grave. He had enough magical knowhow to instantly materialize some items. He’d been more powerful as a ghost than Omi and his friends put together.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t him. I knew how he’d done it, but much as a child couldn’t be expected to follow a master smith’s process perfectly, my own techniques were lacking. Or really, nonexistent. Each imperfection, and there would undoubtedly be many, would introduce rough edges in the enchanting process that needed to be sanded down.

Martial arts kata. Inscriptions and calligraphy. Rituals and incense. Meditations and breathing exercises. These were all training aids that taught young monks to harness qi. Though I could learn to do some of the things the monks could do, I highly doubted I had the time to learn everything.

More than likely, if I wanted to learn the fine art of shen gong wu creation, I wouldn’t get much time to practice the kung fu aspect of this specialization. Simply put, Dashi was a genius without equal even a thousand years after his passing. I… was not.

I had a feeling I’d be lucky to create a bare handful in the next four weeks. There was no time to waste. I bolted out of bed and opened my laptop. First order of business: Make a record of everything I wanted.

Above all else, I needed the Eye of Dashi. Not want, need. It was an amulet that allowed the wielder to fire lightning bolts. I didn’t want it for its offensive capabilities though; I had more than enough ways to zap people as it was. No, what mattered was its potential as a source of energy.

In the show, Jack Spicer made a time machine. I was loath to touch time travel for fear that there would be consequences that got glossed over in a children’s cartoon, but a plot point was that Jack’s machine had such a high energy requirement that it could only go back two seconds in the past. This was solved by using the Eye of Dashi as a power source, sending Omi back over a thousand years to meet with Dashi in the flesh.

With it, I could potentially speed up production, or even enhance the empowering process for these magic inscriptions I now knew. In the future, I could even use it as a supplementary power source for my mobile fortress, whenever I got around to building it. As a completely off-grid, theoretically infinite resource, I had to have it.

There were other wu of interest, of course. The Golden Tiger Claw. Emperor Scorpion and Sapphire Dragon. Lunar Locket. Heart of Jong. Even discounting many of the unnecessary wu out there, I could easily name a dozen that might prove useful either now or later.

I had to prioritize. The Eye of Dashi was an amulet. Blackened iron. Golden, diamond-shaped face. A hexagonal ruby used to form the “iris” of the eye. All doable. The ruby was the hard part, but even that was chemically simple; a ruby was just a crystalline form of aluminum oxide with a dash of chromium for the color. The gem had metaphysical importance to Dashi, but as far as its molecular creation went? Easy, I could be done in twenty minutes.

I finished my shortlist of preferred wu and drew the appropriate alchemical circle for gold and rubies on my laptop. SAINT would take it to the Gullrest and have it printed out for me by the time I got there. I then joined my family for breakfast.

“Morning, mom, Sisi,” I greeted as I slid into my seat. There was a warm bowl of oatmeal waiting for me, with condiments set out between us.

“Hey, bro,” my sister mumbled. Her oatmeal was more brown sugar sludge than oats, but the sugar had clearly yet to kick in.

“Hello, Bryce,” mom replied. She liked hers mostly plain, with only a hint of cinnamon and raisins.

I studied my options. I had chocolate, mixed berries, raisins, cinnamon, and brown sugar. It reminded me that xiaolin monks, much like their real-world shaolin counterparts, were largely vegetarians. It had been a point of some contention for Clay, Raimundo, and Kimiko when they first began training.

Omi said that this was because of their deep-seated reverence for all forms of life. This was certainly part of it, but another reason was a matter of spiritual purity. In the Xiaolin Showdown universe, such metaphysical notions were proven facts. With Dashi’s clarity of insight, I now understood that qi flowed better through “pure hearts,” and that such purity could be cultivated through “pure living.”

That was… unfortunate. I loved meat. I wasn’t one of those “primal” manly men who had to have a steak with every meal, but I loved bacon, eggs, and all that good stuff. It would suck, but I had a feeling I’d be making some changes to my lifestyle, at least for the next four weeks.

“Did you put milk in my oatmeal, mom?”

“No, just water. Why? We still have some in the fridge if you’d like.”

“That’s fine, I wanted water. I’m thinking about becoming a vegan for the next four weeks or so.”

Sierra laughed, almost snorting her orange juice through her nose. “Pft, you? Vegan? Bryce, you love meat.”

“I do, but I want to try living a bit healthier,” I replied with a sincerity I didn’t feel.

“Nope.”

“What do you mean, ‘nope?’”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I… Why…? I exercise. I practice the guitar. I synthesize music. Is it so weird that I want to try something else to improve myself?”

“Yes, it is,” she nodded with a self-assured smile. “You only get this defensive when it’s not true. You try to sound all logical and stuff, but that’s almost always a cover for something else.”

“I do not… right, mom…?” I asked hesitantly. Turned out, Sierra had excellent intuition when it came to me.

Mom laughed and continued to eat her oatmeal. “Your sister knows you too well, Bryce.”

“Hah!” Sierra crowed triumphantly. “So? Why the sudden interest in the bunny diet? Depending on your answer, I might have to eat tasty, tasty burgers in front of you every day.”

“It’s nothing,” I groaned. Power. I wanted powerful, magic doodads that could potentially make up my anti-endbringer arsenal. “I just want to get healthier.”

“If that’s all, you need protein to go with your new exercises, you know.”

“I’m trying something new.”

“Hmm… Ooh, is it a girl? It’s a girl. Mom~”

I smacked my head against the table as my sister burst into laughter. How was it that she could be so sharp one second, then so stupid the next? 

X

I eyed the Eye of Dashi with a focused frown. I inspected every nook and cranny to make sure I was satisfied. Alchemically constructing it had been simple. Engraving it with a plasma-tipped pen had been similarly straightforward. Not easy, but I was at least familiar with the idea.

The tricky part was the enchanting process. It would channel a source of energy to empower the shen gong wu. Technically, it was a ritual, a spell practiced over time for either stability or energy conservation. I estimated that this process would take a few days of work on my part.

Fortunately, I did have a theoretical workaround for my pathetically low internal reserves. Amestrian alchemy used geothermal energy. Xing-style alkahestry used the energy within ley lines, or “dragon veins.” I knew how to do both; after all, alchemy was the conversion of one thing to another, even forms of energy.

Essentially, I drew the formation Mei and so many others knew by hard. Except, much like Scar, I stopped halfway. Instead of trying to deconstruct and reconstruct something, I simply had the circle store the energy. The idea was that if I could channel the dragon veins into the Eye of Dashi, and do it in a controlled manner, I could fuel the empowering process without my direct involvement.

One of my many alkahestry knives melted for the sixth time today. I picked it up and placed it in another prepared circle. A moment later, I had the knife again, whole.

I examined the alkahestry circle and found the problem. There was a piece of the script that failed to stabilize the current. I’d tried working with it, but whenever I got this part of the circle to stabilize, another would break on me. What I had was already the configuration that held out the longest.

With no other choice, I grumbled and took a seat within the circle. I cradled the Eye of Dashi in my lap as I began to meditate. Once I had the eye, it could act as the conduit for me, but for now, I had no choice but to manually conduct that energy.

Sitting here like this, I allowed my mind to wander a bit.

I wondered, not for the first time, if the “Tinker of Fiction" was a bit of a misnomer. I knew what a tinker could do under the rules of Shard-based powers. This wasn’t that. If anything, what I was doing now was most similar to Dauntless’ power, which I was pretty sure made me a trump in this case.

Then again, the Tinker of Fiction was supposed to be able to replicate any form of technology from the selected setting. It raised an interesting question about what exactly counted as technology.

Truth was, technology wasn’t supercars and robots like Jack Spicer made. Technology was the application of knowledge for practical purposes. So long as the method could be taught, and subsequent generations could make iterative improvements, it counted. It just so happened that in the world of Xiaolin Showdown, one such practical application included qi.

This incongruity between what I knew about Shards and my own power raised some serious questions about the origin of my power.

It was something I’d wondered about off and on for a long time. The Tinker of Fiction was an out of context ability, but there was always the hypothetical that a Shard had been giving me similar enough specializations on a “tinker roulette.” The fact that I distinctly remembered a trigger event, father’s passing, supported this theory.

Except, that idea had been losing traction lately. My first real piece of evidence had been SAINT. No matter how I sliced it, no amount of conventionally advanced technology should have allowed a porygon to just dive in and out of cyberspace through a normal computer screen.

Then there was the devil fruit. The fact that I could replicate it at all, despite its metaphysical aspects, suggested that something more than a Shard was supporting me. This was further supported by Amy’s inability to remove its weakness to water. Though, to be fair, we’d have to see about that in the future. Trainwreck would contact us when he got settled and we could run more tests then. 

She also had trouble changing the expression of the human-human fruit to something more physically humanoid. She could understand how to impart a “template” to the fruit, but she’d yet to crack why it expressed itself in the way it did.

As the host of Shaper, both situations should have been impossible. Any form of biology should have been an open book to her, which told me that the fruit’s metaphysical aspect wasn’t faked at all. A Shard wasn’t secretly playing games with me.

My third evidence was Sabah. Her trump ability could not copy my alchemy, but she had no trouble copying everything else. That suggested that her Shard was functioning fine. It wanted data, and was doing its best to help her get it. It just couldn’t understand metaphysical concepts. The internal energy I used to catalyze alchemical reactions and draw forth tectonic forces was a complete blind spot.

As I continued to circulate qi from the earth, through my body, and into the shen gong wu, I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t really a parahuman. The evidence had been there all along, but I’d never really bothered to dwell on it before. It was only now that I forced myself to settle down and appreciate the process that I could spare the mental bandwidth.

It did raise more questions than it answered, but I was satisfied nonetheless. Maybe there was something to this whole meditation thing, after all.

Grandmaster Dashi would say something like, “The person who is meant to know will know it, when he is meant to know it.” That guy was a sarcastic son of a bitch who said something similar about Omi’s puzzle box.

It was only near four in the afternoon that I was disturbed from my meditation. SAINT told me that Sabah had flown in, her invisibility worthless before the myriad sensors of the Mimic Network. She landed with tender steps, as though she wasn’t sure what to expect of our base anymore.

That was another thing I needed to figure out. How much did Sabah recall exactly?

She began working with me back when I had Fullmetal Alchemist and could build automail but not perform alchemy. When the specialization shifted to Despicable Me, she lost the ability to make automail. Well, she could make similar prosthetics, but with Despicable Me’s technology, not FMA’s.

As far as I understood it, her Shard had tossed the archive, or otherwise stored it in a place she could not reach. Presumably, it did this to encourage her to play with the new specialization and gather more data.

But, she hadn’t built any automail in the first place. I wondered if her Shard chucked automail into deep storage because she hadn’t built it. Shards were simple creatures, after all. Essentially, they were idiot-savants. If the host acted as though they didn’t want something, there was a good chance that the Shard would mothball it for a future Cycle.

So the question was, would Sabah be able to maintain her own tech? It could go either way. Logic said yes, but maybe her Shard would prefer to encourage her to tinker with the new specialization. After all, new types of data were the goal.

“Bryce?” she called as she decloaked. She hung her suit jacket on the back of a chair as she looked around the lab unsurely. “Oh, good, you’re here.”

I opened my eyes. I’d been doing this meditation thing since morning now and I was just about reaching my limit anyway. Sitting perfectly still and breathing steadily was actually harder than I’d expected.

“Hey, Sabs, what’s up?”

“You. Well, your power. Your specialization changed. I was hoping I could talk to you about it.”

“Sure, I would’ve thought you’d have been here earlier though.”

“My little brothers had a basketball game I took them to. Then I had to go help pay for pizza for the team because we lost.”

“Wait, shouldn’t pizza be a reward for when you win?”

“Hah, not this time. The coach thought it’d be a good way to raise their spirits,” she laughed as she crashed into the sofa. She dug around in my fridge for a Franky-approved beverage.

“Huh, fair enough. Did you have fun?”

“No, I was the youngest person there besides the actual kids. There was this boy who kept trying to flirt with me.”

“Aren’t your siblings in eighth grade?”

“The twins are in seventh, which is even worse,” she said with a grossed out face. “Look, he has way more confidence than he should, that’s all I’ll say.”

I laughed but decided to stop poking that. “So, can you also speak Chinese now?”

“Yes! Do you have any idea how weird it is to wake up in the morning and suddenly speak fluent Mandarin?”

“Seeing how it happened to me too, yes,” I replied dryly.

“And the kung fu! Why do I know basic kung fu? Why do I feel like shaolin should be spelled with an ‘x’ like it’s one of those X-treme sports marketed towards teenagers? And what the ever-loving fuck is a xiaolin showdown?”

Clearly, this specialization weirded her out a lot more than the super-spies from Despicable Me. I took a seat next to her. “Okay, Sabs, breathe. Are you done venting?”

“I… Sorry, I’ve been holding that in all day.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m okay. Your power is super weird, but I’m okay. I’m starting to think your power is a bit racist though. Kung fu? Chinese? On top of cheap, easily broken robotics?”

“Hey, you’re the one stereotyping, Sabah.” I held up the partially completed wu. “The kung fu and the robots don’t have anything to do with each other. See this? This is the Eye of Dashi, a magic doohickey that lets you shoot lightning at people.”

“Sure. Of course it does. At this point, I’m not even surprised you managed to get ‘Chinese magic artifacts’ as your specialization. So you’ll be focusing on that while I mess around with robots then?”

“That’s the idea. There are a lot of unique artifacts I want to build. I probably won’t get through them all, to be honest. Now, about the previous specialization: What exactly do you remember?”

She frowned hesitantly at that. “I… I know how to maintain my own tech if that’s what you’re asking. You won’t have to take on my workload. I was fiddling with my jacket earlier and I could still tell everything was in working order.”

“How about if you try to make something new? Not completely new, just try to apply the tech in your jacket to something else.”

“Like, make hover boots instead of jetpacks? That’s… I think I can…?”

“You sound unsure.”

“It’s weird. Have you ever crammed for a test, aced it, then woke up the next day barely remembering a damn thing?”

“I have. That means the knowledge is still there, just buried,” I told her. It had to be. One of the unique aspects of the Tinker of Fiction was that my tech wasn’t strictly tinkertech; humans could theoretically replicate it. It didn’t need a Shard’s physics-bending nonsense to make it work.

Granted, a human would have to have knowledge of esoteric physics, metaphysics, and access to unique forms of energy that didn’t exist on Earth-Bet, but that was neither here nor there.

“It is,” she agreed, “kind of. I can still point to specific parts of the jetpack’s design and say, ‘Yeah, that’s the capacitor that stabilizes the main current into the engine.’ But it’s muted. I’m not sure how to describe it.”

“Do you think your memory will fade?”

“No, it’s not like that. It’s weird. The moment I think about my own jetpack, I know everything I need to. The moment I try to apply that knowledge elsewhere, I’m stuck feeling like a stressed engineering student again. It’s like there’s a mental block that only shows up when I’m trying something new.”

“Or, maybe your Shard isn’t helping you,” I hypothesized. “It could be that when you’re trying to maintain your own gear, your power is helping you recall all that information. Using your analogy, it’d be like having a librarian hand you the relevant textbook. But, when you try to apply that information elsewhere, your power takes the book back, forcing you to rely only on your normal brainpower.”

“Are… Are you saying I’m dumb, Bryce?” she asked with a mock-angry glare.

“I mean, only one of us dropped out of engineeri–Ow!” I yelped as her elbow found my ribs. “That hurts, woman!”

“That had nothing to do with my grades and you know it.”

“Yeah, fair enough. Look, we’ll know if you try to make something new. You should know what a tinker fugue feels like by now, right?”

“Right. And if my power isn’t helping me, then I won’t be able to enter one.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Alright, let’s get started.”

Author’s Note

We’ve long passed the point where I could freewrite this story so the title is a bit misleading, isn’t it?

But more than at any other point, it’s become necessary for me to have a plan. After all, I have roughly a month before the Simurgh descends. I could just do another support mission like in Damascus, but I wanted Bryce to really make his presence felt.

For that reason, so I could give myself a bit of freedom, I randomly rolled five and allowed myself to choose from those. I chose Xiaolin Showdown. At least it’s not another anime, right?

As stated in the chapter, I’m going to ignore Jack’s time machine. It’s just not worth it. Another thing I’m going to ignore is Wuya’s puzzle box. Dashi used it to imprison Wuya 1,500 years ago and it would have theoretically lasted indefinitely if left alone. Seeing how it’d be pretty fucking boring if Bryce just locks Scion away, I’m going to pretend it won’t work on things without Wuya’s heylin qi.

In the end, I decided that Sabah should at least be able to maintain her own tech. Applying the same principles outside of that is up to her own understanding, which is admittedly pretty lackluster.

Animal Fact: The dumbest vertebrate in the world is the bony-eared assfish. It might also take the trophy for the most unfortunate name.

It is a deep sea fish that weighs in at an average of forty grams and gets its name from the bony spines on its gills that form “ears.” Hmm? The “assfish” part?

Well, you’ve heard of the Amazonian penis fish, right? The one that’s attracted to nitrates in your urine and will crawl into your urethra? The assfish is the assfish because it has been found crawling up the anal cavity of baleen whales.

Nah, I’m fucking with you. The penis fish won’t use your dick like a sleeping bag and I don’t really know why the assfish is called that.

I call it the dumbest fish because it is thought to possess the smallest brain-to-body ratio at roughly 1/1,000. Instead of the thinky part that normal vertebrates have, its head is large, bulbous, and fluid-filled. The fluid inside is lighter than the surrounding seawater, giving it the buoyancy needed to balance against its relatively heavy “ears.”