Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 4: Maths

They had a great time, blowing holes in Perry’s ‘new materials’ Nothing was safe, and once the dummies were thoroughly shredded, Perry broke out the prawn gun.

Brendon, the beefy young man who weighed at least two hundred and twenty pounds, got knocked on his ass, cradling a bruised collarbone after the first shot.

The anti-prawn ordinance exploded the armor, the dummy behind it, and tore a huge chunk out of the self-healing backstop Perry’s dad had installed.

“Wooo!” Brendon cheered weakly, still holding his shoulder.

“You’re not doing it right,” Heather said, holding the guns as tight to her shoulder as possible, aiming and firing.

Heather didn’t fall down, but she did stumble backwards, trying to stop herself until her back slammed into the wall.

Really, she weighs half as much as Brendon, what was she thinking?

“Your turn.” Heather said, offering Perry the enormous rifle.

“I know my limits,” Perry said. “And I’d rather not break my collarbone.”

“Com’on man!” Brendon shouted.

“Yeah, com’on,” Heather said with a mischievous grin. “Do it.”

“Doo It! Doo it! Doo it!” the two cretins chanted.

If it’ll get them off my back, it might be worth the broken collarbone.

Perry sighed. “Let it not be said that I’m immune to peer pressure,” he said, taking the rifle and popping out the spent shells.

“Whoo!” Brendon shouted.

Perry admired the cartridges for a moment. They were thicker than his thumb and as long as his hand. The bullet portion had depleted uranium in a lead jacket to protect the barrel. In short, they were freakin’ huge, and only served to reinforce exactly how dangerous the monsters on the wall really were.

These bullets were not meant to be used for practice. Heather, you minx. He wasn’t really getting viable data from these guns, anyway, since everything they hit either exploded, or didn’t. There was very little in-between.

Perry loaded the next shot and took aim, taking special care to brace the gun tightly. He meant it when he said he didn’t want a broken collarbone.

BOOM!

It was at that moment that an invisible 100th dan ninja jumped down from the ceiling and power-kicked him in the shoulder.

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“ACK!” Perry’s voice was lost in the chaos as he was propelled backwards, flying through the air a handful of feet before he hit the ground, sliding until his crown nudged up against the back wall of the firing range.

“How ya doing?” Heather asked, her hair crating a fiery halo around her head as she bent over him, and it was at that moment that Perry was tempted to drop his remaining free points in Body, if only to show up Heather’s cocky smirk.

But no. Heather’s dad was a gun magnate. It could be assumed that he supplied both sides of the law, and it was no fault of Perry’s that she knew how to handle a prawn gun.

“Fine, Heather wins,” Perry said, holding the rifle up for whoever wanted to take a shot next.

“Let’s see if this thing can break my collarbone,” Brendon said, taking the gun out of his hands.

Heather and Perry shared a look before they glanced up at Brendon, who was holding the gun’s stock a couple inches away from his shoulder, spitting in the face of Perry’s safety briefing.

The two of them rushed over to the jock like alarmed parents, and through much scolding and persuasion, convinced Brendon that he did not want a broken collarbone.

Once the last target was detonated, and all three of them had ugly purple bruises on their shoulders, it was time to clean the guns.

After Heather and Brendon went home, Perry broke out the math, and was very surprised at what he found.

His first hurdle was that none of the materials had their durability multiplied by the same amount: Each and every one of them had a vastly different multiplier.

Plywood performed the best, but that was only because it was already significantly sturdier than most of the other materials. It blocked small-arms fire, but nothing with any heft to it. The 7.62 rounds went right through. The math showed that it absorbed the same amount of punishment as 17.199 layers of plywood.

The next best was plexiglass, which blocked small arms as well, but took more damage in the process. Absorbing 15.876 panel’s worth of force before breaking.

Followed by plastic and aluminum cans, which stopped .22 rounds but not much else, and dirt, which stopped a lot of things, but wasn’t viable as a structural material, as it had a tendency to crumble…like dirt.

But the interesting part was that the multiplier for these cheaper materials was higher.

Plastic 23.814

Aluminum cans 27.783

Dirt 30.429

Perry subtracted the effect of his attunement from the result, which was 10.25%, and with a little finagling, found that the common denominator was 12.

So defensive and structural materials were increased by a flat twelve times, while each material’s base effectiveness was upgraded on a case-by-case depending on some indecipherable combination of the item’s rarity/value/effectiveness.

Then at the end, the material’s effectiveness was multiplied by his Attunement

Basically, the Spendthrift perk pulled double duty on cheap junk when it was used as armor.

Interesting. Too bad the Attunement isn’t applied separately to each side of that before they’re multiplied together, but frankly, that’s probably asking a bit too much.

Now that Perry had a good idea of two of the numbers involved, he could start working on the ‘reaction’ portion of the perk, then once that was done, he could start experimenting with actual spells.

The ‘reaction’ verifying was easy enough. All he had to do was look up some well-documented chemical reactions on youtube and copy them identically, then measure the difference.

The ‘reaction’ in this case was a precise amount of vinegar and baking soda.

Using a camera and a simple algorithm, he estimated that by following the instructions exactly, he was able to generate a…10.25% stronger reaction with the same amount of chemicals. Essentially, only his Attunement had any effect at all on the strength of the outcome.

How does that work?

On a hunch, Perry began diluting the concentration of the reaction, and realized that his Perk wasn’t strengthening the primary reaction, it was making the decrease in the strength of the reaction not follow the linear rate of dilution.

Instead, it followed a logarithmic path (Ignoring the 10.25% boost). The reaction maintained most of its effectiveness until there was roughly1/3 the original amount of chemicals, after which it began to drastically diminish.

So…

Perry frowned.

So…basically…homeopathy?

He could use 1/3 of the required amount of any chemical, diluted, in order to generate the same reaction. And that number would continue getting smaller as his Attunement rose.

The fact that it raised the output at full concentration was only due to his Attunement hijacking the function and pushing it above 100%, where it should’ve naturally stopped.

So…if Spendthrift had any effect on magical reactions, then Attunement alone would dictate stronger than natural magical reactions.

Not fifteen or twenty times stronger like the defensive materials, but there would be a boost. If it worked.

I can live with that. 100 Attunement =131X power, after all.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First Perry had to see if there was a noticeable difference between his prior experiment, pre-Class, and a new creation, post-Class.

To test that, he had to make a new spell disc, as well as a new spellframe.

Perry snuck out into the garage in the middle of the night and retrieved one of Terry’s treat herrings, then back into his room, where the octopus immediately pressed itself against the glass, watching the fish with intensity.

“Alright, Terry,” he said, brandishing his sample-needle. “You know the drill.”

The octopus’s eyes narrowed, but it’s gaze kept landing on the herring.

The process was mostly painless, and in a matter of minutes, he had a needle full of nerve cells.

After that, Perry began to sink into what was commonly called the Tinker Twitch. Time began to fly by as he tore the guts out of all the decommissioned computers littering his floor and began creating a house for the new spell disc.

As he worked, the ideas flowed like a river. He was drowning, and couldn’t resurface if he wanted to. By the time he came back to his senses, there was a sleek square on the desk in front of him, about the size and shape of a floppy disc from the late 20th century.

It was, in every way, better than his prototype, capable of keeping the nerve cells alive and fed indefinitely, given a modest supply of heat, electricity, or sun. So as long as he didn’t stick it in the lightless freezer, or boil it, it was shelf stable.

Beside the disc was a much prettier version of his ‘growth’ spellframe from last weekend, with a couple dozen upgrades that had sort of manifested as he was putting the thing together, his mind hopping from idea to idea.

Now the contraption had a smooth steel exterior that almost looked like a metallic ostrich egg, with a tiny hole where the puff of magic dust would be shot from.

Alright, Perry thought, rubbing his eyes and suppressing a yawn as he hooked the two new creations up to his computer, aiming the hole at a new patch of clover he’d stolen from the lawn.

Let’s see whether this Class was a waste of my time.

GrowMkII.EXE

Perry thought he heard a whine immediately before a tiny puff of dust shot out of the egg-shaped spellframe, settling on the clover.

Then the clover tried to grab him.

“AAAH!” Perry screamed and dove out of the way as the clover violently erupted out of the pot and shoved his computer tower off the desk.

The screen went blank as the tower shut down, the cord yanked from the case.

Then the clover conquered it, embedding roots in every inch of the motherboard and generally making a mess of things as it drooped off the edge of the desk, slowing down and stopping just before it hit the ground.

“Well…” Perry said from where he stood on top of his bed. “I think we can safely hypothesize that there is some sort of synergistic effect at play here.”

There was only one way to describe the reaction just now:

Weapons-grade.

Perry rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

Now the fun part: I get to figure out the math.

BRRRR. Perry heard the sound of a big diesel engine.

Wait a minute.

Through his window, he spotted the schoolbus rolling past his street. Left, not right, meaning it was already on the way back to the school.

“Shit.” Perry said, scrambling off his bed. “It’s seven forty-five already!?”