Chapter 110: Short Stack

The thing with Sean was, even when we worked together, you didn’t want to give him too much free time. You had to keep him busy, keep eyes on him. Or he’d do stuff you wouldn’t expect. I remember going into a badly flooded janitor’s closet, with Sean somehow having managed to plug both the work sink and the floor drain with hair.

You take a smart guy and put him in a physical job and that’s how it goes. They get bored. Sean was always smart and that made him dangerous without a babysitter.

I never did ask where he got all that loose hair.

The Glorious Jeff Greco

—

Sean spent the points immediately. He had been keeping his eye on a particular base upgrade for a while, something that he needed now that he was surrounded by the weirder, wider system universe.

Inspection Table

Inspect skills are great and all, but aren’t they too portable and convenient? Sure, it’s nice to be able to know what something is in the heat of the moment when it matters most. But wouldn’t it just be cozier to be able to know the same thing hours later, once you’ve returned home to safety, and it hardly matters anymore?

The Inspection Table gives you all the stuff you could have in a better form in a worse one but it does give you that stuff. If you pop something on it, it will tell you what it is. Generally, at least. Some stuff is just hard to identify. But for the most part, it does what it says on the tin.

The points would have been a waste if Brett was still around, given that the merchant’s identify skill did essentially the same thing. But he wasn’t and Sean was holding what appeared to be an alien harmonica with no idea how to use it, or even if he should be holding it with his bare skin. Once the table materialized, he threw it and a few other things on the loading platform and hit the button. Like magic, he could now bring up a system description of the items just like they were his own creations, or something he had bought at a store.

Tooth Repair Device (Incardian)

Incardian teeth are durable, but only when eating foods with the limited chemical profile of their home world. In the galactic environment, they don’t fair so well, the interactions between their exotic enamels and foods in general being described as “disastrous”.

These fix that damage, provided the Incardians remember to use them every hour on the hour.

Tooth Repair Alarm (Incardian)

Activates 30 times per day, once for each Incardian hour.

The potions ended up being entirely poisons, which he had theoretical uses for at best, but were at least a resource he could screw around with. Out of curiosity, he put his Earth pendant into the machine, getting only an error message explaining it was unassessable back. That was expected, given what it was, but made him feel a little better. If the machine couldn’t scan it, that meant that at least some abilities would fail to as well.

He ended up dumping the corpse, armor, and weird tooth devices into the recycling bin, netting a bunch of potentially interesting metals and woods he might be able to do something with later.

He showered. He slept. And then, just like that, he was out of things to do. Putting on some clean work clothes, he went out and used his suddenly increased spending capacity to buy some bulk alien grains and spices, stowing them in his bag of holding in case his base ended up not following him to Cedarhelm’s planet. But outside of that, he had no responsibilities for the next few days unless he picked up some miserable odd jobs, which didn’t seem like it was worth the risk.

With nothing but time, Sean started fucking around with materials. He had sort of a lot of them now, mostly things left over from Brett’s near-compulsive exploitation of the recycling bin. He spent a whole wasted day trying to make a workable gauntlet, failing again and again before deciding there was little to nothing a metal hand would do for him anyway.

But what do I actually need, at this point?

After some thought, he settled on three distinct modes of thought on the subject. The first was defense. He needed it. Sooner or later, he was going to deal with weirder bullshit than he had so far. Melee enemies were hard, and ranged were harder. But out in the greater universe, people could actually use magic. He had seen ads on the sides of buildings for a show where a guy shot exploding fireballs made of molten metal, and he was entirely unclear both if that was real and what he’d do if that kind of attack was coming at him.

The second was offense. He was set on blunt force, and was really, really unlikely to make anything better than the Mystereamer for piercing attacks at this point. Ranged was still a soft spot, though. He had thrown every dart he had at Eike during their last battle and the system hadn’t seen fit to give those back to him. That was fine, mostly, since whatever armor piercing abilities the Spectral Darts brought to the table had long since been outpaced by other things he could do.

What he needed now was just more darts. He needed enough of them made cheaply enough that he could spam them without worrying about running out.

Last, he needed weird stuff. His stats were high, but he would eventually run into someone better levelled than him who meant him harm. If he was going to have a chance in that situation, he’d need unconventional stuff other people weren’t expecting to give him an edge.

He got to work. The darts were easy enough, once he figured out the right combination of mad-scientist tools to knock down chunks of metal to roughly dart-shaped form in a reasonable amount of time. Eventually, he figured out a simple, unfletched design that he could spike on both sides and get to hit at targets often enough. The system recognized them, even if it didn’t act the most impressed about them.

Spikes

You’ve invented pointy sticks. Congrats.

Effects: +1 to SAV affect when thrown.

Sean didn’t care. He made dozens of them, cranking out spikes made of any metal that looked halfway decent. Better yet, he got pretty good at it. He didn’t have a literally unlimited supply of them, but an hour’s work would make dozens more of them if he needed to restock. For most days he could imagine, he should be fine on low-grade missiles.

The defense part was a bit harder. The Jellyfish shield was useful enough for blocking arrows, but he had found he didn’t really enjoy sword-and-board fighting as a whole. His whole build was built around being quick and evasive, and at this point he found the shield got in the way in melee at least as much as it helped.

What he needed, really, was a way to block things before they got to him at all, or to fuck with people who were trying to close range with him and let him control the terms of engagement. A couple hours of screwing with the materials processor in various configurations eventually gave him a lead, in the form of finding out that the damn thing could actually turn almost anything into some form of ribbon or string.

He opted to do that with all the remaining metal in the shop, before using his limited weaving skills to make big, entry-rug sized mats of flexible steel. He’d never be able to use them as a shield, since they were big, floppy, sharp messes of metal. Luckily, the system got what he was going for anyway.

Punt shields

You know the best place to block an attack? Far, far away from its target. There’s probably better ways to block them than by launching huge metal rugs at them, but you do you. It will probably work. Probably.

Punt shields are big Gordian knots of metal you kick, chuck, or otherwise yeet towards danger. What they lack in elegance, they make up in sheer mass and can be reliably trusted to block launched weapons that weigh less than, just for example, an empty mini-fridge.

Effects: None.

Sean liked these things. They wouldn’t be good for most melee situations, but if something big and explosive-looking was coming at him, they’d do the job. It was another situation where he was finding that the combination of his own enhanced strength, his system-enhanced ability to aim things, and the generally permissive attitude of the system towards any messed-up thing he made were all working in his favor.

And then came weird shit. First, he poured all the poisons he obtained from his former day-boss into a big trash bag, swirled them around and got… nothing. Nothing at all. On a whim, he tossed in some Plug Mud, minced sticky apples, and a bit of diet soda from the soda fountain. It was then, finally, that the system drew a line in the sand.

Failure

You have failed because not only because this idea is stupid (it is) and not just because it was lazy (when it was) but mostly because you yourself thought this was dumb in a non-functional, stupid way.

Listen, man, you have to give old Uncle System something to work with here. You see how I’m still talking to you in the Apocalypse System’s voice? That’s because I know you pretty good and I want you to be comfortable. It’s a relationship. You can brew poison in a god without a clear plan and I’m going to reward that. But you can’t just toss shit in a bag in any combination at all and have it work.

“Well, damn,” Sean said. “I guess I deserve that.”

His next several attempts were much more focused on a particular outcome. After some consideration, Sean figured his best bet was creating a lot of smoke and fire, some sort of loud, flashy, blinding problem he could activate and chuck at people. Finally, with some springs, props, and a whole lot of jerry-rigged lithium batteries, he had something workable.

Short Stack

You know those product lines on online shopping sites with names like “TinyHi”? The ones that are clearly direct-from-China vendors with all fake reviews? Imagine if they made pacemakers. Can you imagine how incredibly dead you’d be once that thing went rogue on you and cooked your heart right out of your chest?

This is the weaponized form of the kind of lax quality control you’d expect from those companies. It’s a big mess of lithium batteries, bad wiring connections, plug mud, and the hopes of an unhappy man. It’s going to do something big when it goes, something involving a lot of fire and a great deal of EPA unfriendly emissions.

It is supposed to not explode until a few seconds after you trigger it, but who knows?

Effects: 20% chance to explode on activation with no delay.

Where metal was no longer a rare resource for him, the kinds of stuff it took to make the battery bombs were much rarer. He got two of them made before he tapped his supply of lithium batteries and had to call it quits.

The whole process, start to finish, took the better part of three days. That left four days, more or less, in which he was supposed to lie low. This was not, he had found, an adventuring planet. There were no big prizes to have here, no weird gear or crazy achievements to get. Any benefit he could get from going out would be far, far outweighed by the potential costs of getting found, killed.

He knew what to do. He poured himself a ridiculously large fountain soda, filling a literal bucket with sugar and caffeine as he settled in for a long, boring wait. He was going to do the right thing, sit still, and get off this planet without any incident at all.

He was absolutely committed to the plan, and managed to last a whole day before he broke.