CC 11: Thunderplump ~ Nineteen!

“Sorry it took so long to get back to you; we were so close to finishing the project that I had to force these layabouts to push past what they thought were their limits.” Havoc cheerfully called out around a freshly lit cigar as Joe entered the workshop. “But, enough about that! Look at these beauties! The prototype is complete, with room for ten batteries up to the Unique rank.”

Joe wasn't entirely certain what Havoc was apologizing for. “You didn't take very long at all to get back to me. I sent that message when I went into the observatory, and it came back almost right away.”

“Right away? Oooh.” The Dwarf chewed on the end of his cigar for a moment, looking Joe up and down. “Huh. Well, don't suppose you were taking notes on what you were working on, were you?”

The Ritualist cocked an eyebrow, “Of course I was. You want to see them?”

Pulling out his notes on the star patterns that he’d been observing, Joe wiggled it in front of the Dwarf, who snatched it out of his hands and opened it up. He started flipping pages, and Joe's concern started mounting higher and higher as he saw that every page being flipped was filled out with meticulous, tiny handwriting. “Yep, that's what I thought. You went in there just after the end of the Boss Wave, wave ten, right?”

“Ye~es…” The Ritualist already knew where this was going but braced himself for it to be worse than he expected.

“We just finished up wave eighteen. There's already preparations in place for the next boss coming with wave twenty.” Havoc tossed the half-filled notebook back to Joe, who caught it and stored it in his codpiece in the same motion. “You've been stuck in there for just shy of three standard days, I'd say somewhere around sixty-four to sixty-eight hours. High Constitution is one abyss of a focus aid, especially if you have some way to keep yourself clean and hydrated the entire time. As you get higher level and even more powerful, you'll run into the same issue over and over. All of us are running into that problem all the time. So, a note for your future. Going into seclusion is a bad idea, because you come out and realize a city has grown up around you.”

Joe was cursing internally, though he had to admit he’d gained quite a bit from his time locked in study. A cursory glance at his notes revealed what he already knew—he had filled out the Novice section so completely that he could hand this over to a new Ritualist and have them gain the lower skill at the Beginner rank. “With the low lighting, and how it never changes, I must’ve drifted off a few times. No wonder I feel so rested.”

“Enough about you. Come and take a gander at my triple-combined enchantment that hasn't exploded in our faces!” The Dwarf wrapped a meaty hand around Joe's shoulder and pulled him along. “Between my expertise and my ability to tease Experts to get the most out of them, we've put together one station at the Unique rank. The next ones will come together thirty times faster, because now that we’ve made one, all five of us can work on separate versions. Each station rank adds space for up to five additional batteries, starting at the Common tier, and skipping the Special tier. That means you can recharge up to twenty batteries at the same time on this table, if you have enough ambient mana to make it happen.”

The Dwarf's enthusiasm for his craft was starting to get Joe excited as well, so he asked what he thought was a natural follow-up question. “How much mana per minute does this thing output?”

“Yeah, way too much.” Havoc chuckled as he brought his hand close to the artifact and the surface of his skin began to char. There was a manic gleam in his eye as he turned his head to Joe and met his horrified gaze. “I managed to crank those numbers up. A well-enchanted Mana Battery, going off of your design, has a maximum storage of forty thousand. ‘Course, the ones that you make with your little rituals are about half as efficient as if you did it by hand, so they top out at about twenty thousand. All that to say, each battery put on the pad over there can regain approximately seven hundred mana per minute, letting you refill your largest Unique batteries in a little under thirty minutes.”

Joe blinked at that number, trying to decide whether he should say what he was thinking or simply congratulate the Dwarf on the success of his enchantment and move along. Unable to stop himself, he voiced his thoughts. “I don't mean to sound… ungrateful… but that seems a little low?”

Havoc paused and turned fully to look at the Ritualist, puffing smoke gently out of his nostrils. “I'm just going to stand here quietly while you put a little more thought into what's going on here.”

“Um. Oh. Twenty at a time. Got it.” Joe winced as he realized that he’d just insulted the Grandmaster with his casual dismissal of his hard work. “Yeah, so that means… fourteen thousand mana output per minute. All pulled from the ambient environment. Got you. Can we please get back to complimenting how awesome this is?”

“That’d be a great place to stay, conversationally,” Havoc allowed after taking a moment to let Joe tense up. “Let's talk about what sort of protections this bad boy needs. At any given moment, it should have something like, oh, let's throw out an approximate of one hundred thousand mana condensed into the center of it. Someone gets a good attack on the station, it's not just your house that's going to be on fire. It's about half the city. On a positive note, if your ritual that is stabilizing the air in Town fails, it doesn't just cause this to explode anymore.”

“Oh! That's good! I was worried, because if I'm not around to run maintenance or add mana to it, that ritual could fail pretty much anytime.” Joe tore his eyes off the artifact—which looked like a poker table with a miniature nuclear reactor strapped to the bottom of it—and found that the Dwarf was staring at him with extreme exasperation. “What?”

“I said it doesn't just cause this to explode. It’ll still do that, but at least we put in a failsafe that should give us about five minutes to evacuate. Also, we, uh, added a little feature that’s become standard on our war golems.” Havoc chuckled darkly as he watched the realization dawn in Joe's eyes.

The Ritualist backed away from the device that he was almost positive wasn’t healthy to stand near, realizing that what he’d been calling ‘table legs’ in his mind were actually powerful coiled springs hooked up to a small block of ice. “Let me guess… if the machine starts to overload, it melts the ice, setting off the springs and sending the recharge station flying. I'm hoping it’s set to fly out of the city?”

“Nah, just up.” Havoc watched his bald protege for a moment before squinting and leaning forward slightly. “Let me make one thing very clear to you, human. This is not something you can intentionally overload and throw at a big, bad beastie. If this thing goes *boom*, lots and lots of people die. Not only that, they’ll for the most part be vaporized. Your little Resurrection Aura isn't going to do much when all that's left of them is mana-irradiated ash, and my people are scattered over half the continent.”

Joe thought back to when he’d first opened a vault in this world and had sent an overloading Master-rank ritual soaring toward the sky. Shaking his head, he gestured helplessly to the recharge station. “We've sent something into the sky and blown it up before, that led to a bad time. It dropped… I don't know, a couple miles of snow and ice in the area as the clouds collapsed. I think we should go the other way with it. Maybe shunt it into the shaft that the Pyramid of Panacea dug through the crust of the planet? Drop it, in other words, instead of sending it up?”

Havoc chewed on his cigar a little more, before shrugging. “You want to make extra work for yourself, you go right ahead and do so. Anyhoo, how many more of these do ya want? I'm thinking we should have at least ten before we get to the fiftieth wave, so we can have a backup battery charging for every possible tower out there.”

Blanching at the thought of so many doomsday devices casually active at the same time in the small space they currently called home, Joe put off the Grandmaster for the moment, promising that he would think about it and get him an answer. “Before that, where do you think we should store this?”

“For now?” Havoc jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, “Put up a slightly larger bubble ritual thingy in the center of Town. We’ll keep it safe by making it appear to be completely stable. No one would think that we'd leave something so dangerous practically out in the open, and that means they won't snoop.”

Joe gulped at that thought but realized that there was plenty of truth in what the Grandmaster was saying. “Yeah, but they'd never think we’d do that, because it’s pretty dumb to do that.”

“Now you're getting it.” Havoc chuckled while pulling out a few batteries that he’d swiped from the ritual tower staging yard. “Come here, I'll show you how to use this thing. Oh, I also recommend you spend a whole lot more time choosing who gets direct access to these. Uhh… and, probably give them a big fat raise.”

“Because it could explode at any minute, and they need to keep their mouths shut?”

“Yeah… yeah, that's a good reason, too.” Havoc looked to the side and coughed a few words that sounded suspiciously like ‘maybe to also replace their bones after a few months’, which was an oddly specific cadence to the coughing that was hard to miss.

The Ritualist decided to ignore that for the moment and just take the gift horse he’d been given. After spending a few minutes looking over the Unique-rank enchantments, which had been set into Unique-rank materials, Joe glanced around the room and asked, “Any chance I can lift this with less than ten people?”

“Ahh… ‘lifting’ it isn't exactly what I’d recommend. Also, no.” Ignoring Joe's look of pure frustration, the Dwarf simply laughed and started setting enchanted cores on the felt-top ‘poker table’ portion of the design; in the spaces where cups or drinks would go. Immediately, the Mana Batteries began drinking in the condensed mana, and the wavy, crackling radiance around the table noticeably dimmed. “So, if you ever need to do maintenance on one of these while it's active, I highly recommend tossing a few batteries in to pull in the energy. Also, do the maintenance real fast.”

“Yeah, no kidding. I have no idea how I’d go about replacing my bones.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem for you.” Havoc brushed off his concerns. “You've got all those fancy healing abilities, after all. Let's start with the basics. Pretend for a moment that you’re really boring and do want to keep all of your fingers, and you don't want them to have scales or the like. In that case, first you put the battery in like this…”