Museum Core Chapter 127: Bidding War, Bidding Won

Apparently, magic that actively altered the variables used in engineering calculations was prone to driving engineers a wee bit batty, to draw upon the delightful pool of British expressions that Thomas was only starting to learn.

Yes, technically, the Belfast’s newest power “just” reduced the effective mass of the ship to whatever could be supported by the ground underfoot, but only when it came to how it influenced gravity, yet simultaneously keeping all that weight there for purposes of balance … the ship’s mass perpetually shifted in one sense while staying the same in the other, and all of it was more “vibes-based” than anything else.

If it was needed to allow the bearer to operate on dry land, the power “Screw the Square-Cube Law” did it in whatever way was needed.

And while Thomas didn’t have to go into the weeds of what that actually entailed, the engineers did.

For a couple of minutes, watching them spiral had been funny, in a weird kind of way. But after that, it had just felt wrong to keep observing them, so Thomas had withdrawn himself from the issue as far as possible while still paying enough attention that he was able to immediately notice and respond to questions when they were asked.

Which happened only occasionally, what he heard was mostly just swearing and objects being thrown after a careful calculation to ensure nothing actually got broken.

The basic design had already been made, but the specifics seemed to be impossible to work out.

In essence, the Belfast’s land form was a cross between a modern, low-slung, destroyer, a transformer, and a centipede-shaped mecha.

Because, at the end of the day, he was still located on an island that was, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small, and therefore the only place he could transform the Belfast into her land-form was one he’d have real trouble moving on from.

Plus, the very specific places he might want to use her were thousands of kilometers of ocean away. Ergo … no matter what he wanted his ship to be able to do, what it needed to do was retain its ability to not just float but swim, and do so at a decent clip.

Which had utterly trashed the initial design, which had basically been a segmented, walking, land vehicle resembling a very short, thick, centipede, covered in turrets.

All things considered, it would have suffered from the same weaknesses that tanks did, namely, that enemy “infantry” could easily exploit weak points and attack from blind spots unless their target was properly escorted, but at the end of the day, it would have been a titan on the battlefield in more than one way.

Thomas’ first thought had been to make this variant waterproof and have it walk along the bottom of the ocean, only to learn that the sheerness of the rise between the true depths of the oceans and the shallow coastal regions prevented it from ever climbing back up, no matter what powers it had. Even with the water supporting some of its mass, that particular setup wouldn’t work.

Which meant he needed a ship that could transform, which had been the next step in the design process, with the end result being able to retract the legs and pull together the various segments into a single, solid, vaguely ship-shaped object.

Yet all those “walking mechanisms” had concentrated a huge amount of mass at the bottom of her hull, creating a bit of an issue that, weirdly enough, Screw the Square-Cube Law did precisely nothing against, bringing the ship to the edge of sinking.

Which meant he had to add a few extra sections that existed for the sole purpose of increasing its volume while minimally increasing the mass, being filled with only air.

And while being metal, they could still be “deflated” by being folded down while the contents were allowed to escape, with the material lying over top of the land-form as an extra layer of armor.

As for the guns, Thomas had gone with four triple-barreled fourteen inch gun turrets, one on each of the segments save the first and last, each of which held three double-barreled four-inch secondaries, and two more turrets like that on either side of each of the primaries.

That part had already been designed and was perfectly implementable, unlike the walking mechanisms.

Thomas was also planning on tacking on a ton of point-defense weapons as well, but those would have to wait until the rest of the design was finished, which was unlikely to happen today, especially as he had something else to deal with.

Frye had been right, Germany had offered them the Deutsches Museum, along with a few others, though noticably none that were in Berlin, not that Thomas would begrudge anyone that level of caution.

The British certainly wouldn’t have chosen to trade their own capital for access to magic if they’d actually been able to make that choice, and, at the end of the day, he was at a level where wrecking a metropolis was in the cards. It wasn’t like anyone out there could read his mind to confirm he’d never actually do something like that.

But not all of the museums had actually been suitable. An old castle turned museum, several variants of natural history museums that were entirely superfluous, and more focused technological musuems had also not been suitable.

Although the other offering in Munich, an outlying one that was all about airplanes, filled with various aircraft, had been tempting. Yet the idea of what a general “tech and civilization museum” could provide had been too tempting.

Now it was time to go …

And then, he realized he had a problem: installing a subcore resulted in it automatically generating a few monster patterns … but those patterns would hold the rank of the core he’d placed. No one would be having much fun trying to explore a B-Rank dungeon at the moment, except maybe Abrams, and even she would have trouble, considering what had happened in the British Museum. Mechanical creatures simply weren’t a good matchup there.

So, trying to look as “un-guilty” as possible, he walked outside and asked to borrow a cargo plane instead of a regular passenger vehicle, so he could transport some materials to stock this dungeon.

He could teleport small things there via Jan, but attemtping that particular trick with the British Museum had taught him not to even bother trying.

Subcores were meant to be built up separately, with their own theme, so easily allowing him to fill their dungeons with the same old thing just by transplating a few hairs, scales and feathers would have gone against the spirit of the thing … but at the same time, “absorb stuff and turn it into a monster” was a cornerstone of dungeon opperations.

In other words, he could transplant monsters; it was just a little tougher and required proper transport.

But that got arranged for at a decent speed, and after a short truck ride, Thomas’ champion, subcore in hand, was aboard a large cargo plane alongside several massive crates of stuff.

***

Munich

Apparently, the delivery of all his stuff had been planned by the same brain behind the “drop the Guardian of Atlantis’ heart from an airplane” stunt.

The theory of airdropping the stuff, rather than risking driving it through the metropolis that was Munich, was sound. Especially when, from above, it was clearly visible that the roads around the museum weren’t the biggest.

They were certainly not the narrow alleys of the city center that sat just a few hundred meters west of the museum, but hardly the highways that threaded through American cities either. It would have been dangerously simple to try and intercept the shipment.

Granted, despite not having been built for combat, Jan was a B-Rank dungeon champion, capable of handling ninety-nine point nine of the things the world could throw at him, but there was little sense in risking it on the part of his hosts.

As for the museum itself, it was a lot more beautiful than he’d been led to believe. Or rather, than he’d been bothered to find out. Frye had given his advice, Thomas had checked to make sure the museum was available and lived up to the hype, and that had been that.

There it was, sitting atop a long island amidst the river Isar that cut Munich in half, a series of buildings in some kind of “classy” architectural style he couldn’t name but actually liked.

Patinaed copper roofs, large glass windows with white wooden frames, brick and stone walls that actually had character, ornamented but not aggressively so …

Was it the most beautiful building ever? Of course not. But it was pretty.

A central courtyard, surrounded by a large, square main building, with further structures stretching up and down the island, and a large clock tower rising in the southeastern corner of the courtyard.

Also, it was big. Just eyeballing it and doing some quick, back-of-the-napkin, math said it was at least a third again the size of the Natural History Museum, probably more.

Between that and how far he would likely be able to sink his influence into the ground, there was a ton of space to play around with.

“Ready?” a man wearing what was apparently a Luftwaffe dress uniform asked, apparently having learned to address the monkey with the fedora without laughing at some point in the two hours it had taken to fly here.

“Ready,” Thomas replied through Jan, and felt the jolt of the crate he was sitting atop getting kicked out of the airplane, followed by the far stronger jerk of the parachute opening.

Wait, he was just getting thrown out? Over a city? That hardly seemed safe … but the true thought behind it all was revealed a moment later when the soldier jumped after him, almost instantly catching up to the crate by flying for a brief second, easily landing next to Jan atop the hopefully sturdy box.

“What’s your power?” Thomas wondered at that.

“I ate a recon drone,” the man replied immediately, in a tone that indicated he was just dying to share more about his superpowers but was too shy/polite to rattle off everything about them without prompting, something Thomas was only too happy to do. He knew very little about the System of Machine Ascendency since it did not seem to play nice with his monster creation abilities, or, at the very least, the powers he’d gotten from the Guardian didn’t.

“What does that give?” he asked.

“I can see really well, and I can fly, but I don’t have the mana to stay in the air for long.”

“I mean, you’re clearly good enough to be trusted with making sure this multi-ton box doesn’t land on someone’s head,” Thomas pointed out.

The air force officer nodded happily.

In the end, steering the box was easy as pie; Thomas barely even noticed when another burst of movement shifted the trajectory of the fall.

It wasn’t a very difficult process, nor an overly creative application of the man’s abilities, but what was more important was that it worked.

The crate touched down on the flagstones of the courtyard lightly, then the soldier flew up to catch the parachute before it folded over the top of the waiting reporters, or a man who Thomas assumed was likely some kind of Munich city official, who immediately launched into a grand speech of progress and advantages and …

Thankfully, Thomas didn’t have to bear the burden of looking like he was paying attention himself. He was a dungeon core. He could simply instruct Jan to “look appropriate,” then withdraw his attention to the point where he’d still perceive when he had to act, but wouldn’t have to listen to the rest of the speech.

But, to his surprise, things ended after “only” three minutes. Huh, maybe someone had slipped along some information about his limited patience with this sort of pagentry, or had he just gotten lucky?

From there, things went quickly and smoothly. He was actually given the key to the main door as a symbolic act of “handover,” then allowed to lead the way into the section of museum right behind the entrance and place the subcore, while two cameramen filmed the whole affair. One had a modern camera, the second had a literal museum piece that would survive even if the transformation flooded the area with mana … as was likely.

And another ten minutes later, Thomas was finally left alone to examine his new patterns.

The first monster was named after the “mythical” critters mechanics claimed were breaking the Royal Air Force’s planes during WW2.

About the size of a four-year-old child, with pointy ears and a shark’s teeth, spawning automatically with a full utility belt stuffed to bursting with tools, overflowing with energy as though they’d been drinking nothing but espresso for ten hours straight, it was the …

Species: Gremlin Chaos Engineer

B-Rank

Powers

Tinker

Blackbox

Transmute

Invent

Replicate

This, well, it was exactly why he’d gone for this museum, even if the power description seemed to have caught the short end of “German efficiency,” to the point where it barely even explained anything.

All in all, though … it was an engineer. It was chaotic. That was it.

Invent was the main, well, invention power, Replicate allowed it to quickly recreate anything it had already built once, assuming it had hte required materials, transmute could create those materials, Tinker let it make stuff work more on “vibes” than actual science and logic via an injection of mana, and Blackbox could make it functionally impossible to reverse-engineer anything it built.

Thomas spawned ten of them in the depths of hte museum, and told them to just … go crazy. He just wanted to know what would happen.

Species: Geisterschiff

B-Rank

Powers

Spectral Physique

Poltergeist

Winds of Niflheim

Ghostly Legions

Hellfire Canons

So basically, a ghost ship, except the name was the German word for the phenomenon.

It was the most expensive creature he had, summoning it would devour mana like nobody’s business, but it was looking to be worth it, a massive spectral sailing ship that could spawn its own minions, use telekinesis, unleash arctic winds and launch fireballs was … well, “minimally useful” in a dungoen, but if the Belfast ever needed fire suport, this was how he’d get it.

Species: Canary Overseer

B-Rank

Powers

Hypersonic Flight

Cleanse

Dust Blast

Magmakinesis

Dimensional Tunnel

This thing, on the other hand … it was just one bad pun. The museum had a mine section, canaries belonged in mines, and this was the most ridiculously powerful canary in the world … and still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, though its feathers looked more like burnished gold than the eponymous canary yellow more commonly associated with the bird.

It was a cute little thing, yet also one of the most powerful creatures he had thus far.

As the first power stated, it was hypersonic, or, in layman’s terms, capable of moving at five times the speed of sound, combined with its second power that was far less descriptive but oh so much nastier than its name ever could have indicated.

Yes, it could actually be used to cleanse the air of things like dust or even crack CO2 to provide oxygen, but its main power was all about “cleaning” every targetable surface about as aggressively as possible. Including things such as eyes, the inside of someone’s nose, even the eardrum if the bird caught sight of it.

Imagine someone scrubbing your eyeball. Dry eyes, but infinitely worse … Thomas shuddered. There were limits even for him.

Meanwhile, the next two powers were pure offense, the ability to create and control large amounts of dust, as well as the power to throw around globs of lava that were perfectly capable of detonating said dust.

And Dimensional Tunnel was nothing short of teleportation … in the form of a short-lived portal.

In other words, it was the perfect power for Dexter, to compensate for the giant sloth’s rather low mobility. Especially when combined with Bloodlust. He could keep stacking the power with every hit that didn’t land clean, then deliver a lethal coup-de-grace through a portal that opened mere centimeters from an enemy.

But on murder-tweety here, the power just made it infinitely more difficult to target.

You know what? Time to have a little fun.

Thomas grinned viciously, and spawned one to send it outside, to act all cute and friendly and everything. Actually, to be as tame as possible. Until someone could recognize its rank and freaked out, which would look funny. And as for the excuse as to why it was up there, it was simple, it would lead the first party of delvers towards the entrance once he was done building it.

If the system could play dumb name games, then he could play on those same puns.

Although … sending out a creature this powerful without explanation might be misinterpreted badly.

He stopped the bird before it could leave, bound a small letter to its leg, and sent out a few more birds of the regular variety, disturbingly well-behaved but utterly adorable.

Species: Energetic Prism

B-Rank

Powers

Energetic Physique

Photokinesis

Pyroclasm

Silakinesis

Plasmic Shift

And then there was this particular beast, this monster formed from energy, a living natural disaster.

A living, floating, partially-molten lens of glass the size of a tractor tire, capable of firing beams of light, shattering anything that got too close with its third power, controlling glass to create mirrors and prisms and lenses and anything else needed to redirect its energy beams into places out of direct line of sight … and then, finally, it could transform into various forms of high-energy matter, from fire to lightning, just as an extra “fuck you” to anyone who got too close.

Plus, it could leap from place to place while in lightning form the Jack did.

Now, if Thomas had created this thing, he’d have likely given it some defensive abilities, something the System clearly hadn’t felt necessary, but then again, this was a “free” pattern, and one that was utterly overpowered to boot.

And getting another physique power was always worth it; those were hard to generate on his own.

Species: Gear Elemental

B-Rank

Powers

Gear Shift Physique

Transform

Construct

Shred

Industrial Abomination

On the other hand, the Gear Elemental was yet another machine creation power … of a sort.

It was a collection of countless gears that could assemble into just about any shape, while further able to transform individual parts to complete the transition into just about any kind of industrial device, while the Construct power allowed it to imbue anything it built with all sorts of fun reinforcements. That last part was of minimal use in dungeon combat, or in a self-shaping dungeon in general … but there was still a ton of stuff he could use it for.

And it wasn’t like this thing didn’t have combat potential. Shred allowed it to project the edge of its gears up to three meters outwards, easily pulverizing anything trapped between the teeth.

But it was Industrial Abomination that took the cake. It let the elemental sink into its surroundings and transform those, creating a massive death trap straight out of the Saw movies.

Thomas grimaced. Very impressive … but not necessarily something that he could use if he wanted repeat “customers.”

Species: Jet

B-Rank

Powers

Mechanical Physique

Unlimited Propulsion

Full Spectrum Cannons

Regenerating Missiles

Burst of Speed

In contrast, the final monster was exactly what it said on the tin. A living fighter jet with a surprising amount of cargo space, with a power that allowed it to ignore its surroundings, capable of operating even underwater or in outer space, energy weapons that could function as lasers of varying frequency, from as low as infrared to as high as gamma rays, which combined nicely with the ability to generate high-tech weapons, or at least magic weapons that shared the capability of said weapons.

As for the last ability, it allowed it to increase its speed in rapid bursts, allowing for ludicrous acceleration.

And finally, the one thing he hadn’t gotten was any kind of animal, despite all the specimens that had been piled into the museum’s archives just prior to subcore installation, proving once and for all it was about a museum’s purpose and proper exhibits, not how much crap he could convince the owners to pile inside.

Now, it was time to start sticking stuff in the museum.

He started by separating off everything underground, closing all staircases that led down there, while creating a new entrance that he made rise up from the river outside, which he’d connect to the nearby bridge later.

For now, he’d just shape and populate the underground area while moving the core down there.

He’d also turn the rest of the museum into an actual museum, all about transformation zones, what he knew about the various systems, and so on.

As for the “dungeon” dungeon, he started in the mine exhibit, which was primarily a recreation of an actual mine, which was an ambience he’d keep; he’d just add rats, a whole bunch of F-Rank critters with one of stealth, powerful bite, or charge powers.

He’d never used them in the Natural History Museum; he’d established himself with a different set of critters, but they felt appropriate here.

The next area was created based on the “exploring electricity” section of the museum, which was mostly just one big central array of bits and bobs that lit up in various different interesting ways while a scientist explained just what was happening.

You know, the usual, throwing lightning, throwing lightning at a colleague to demonstrate that the farday cage said colleague was located in actually worked … he wished he’d been able to actually see the show, rather than read about it in one of the brochures found up top.

This second area was for E-Ranked creatures, a well-lit factory-like construction that was mostly made from metal, which made it very dangerous when combined with the lightning-throwing wolves and black bears he was populating it with, forcing delvers to pay careful attention to where they were standing, and where he’d placed the rubber flooring.

Therefore, the third area would be D-Ranked, and was stuffed with all manner of mechanical contraptions animated by machine spirits, based on the various machinery found upstairs. Walking vats of molten glass, steampunk steam engines “golems,” and so on.

And as for the C-Rank area, Thomas decided to be lazy. Dinosaurs, nuff said.

There was technically a B-Rank area filled with his new creatures after that, but no one would be able to use that for a good long time, but he wouldn’t properly design it until he got a better idea of what they were capable of.