Turn 86: Post Fight Research And Upgrades

--- Maya Williams ---

With the tournament done and a lot of money burning in her pocket, Maya decided that the best thing she could do right now was- (Ha-ha! Make it rain!)- Throw all of her new found wealth into the air and watch it fall around her, scattering it all over her lab.

(You do know we'll have to clean all of this up right?) Her inner (killjoy) (Hey!) (You're not the only one who can interrupt our inner monologue.) (I am the inner monologue!)

Sighing at the eternal bickering inside of her skull, Maya snapped her fingers to try and get the attention of the LCMs currently working on taking apart her COMP for her. "Niños, you mind picking all of this up for mamá?"

The little mice like minions both looked at the taller LCM-1B who happily climbed down to the ground and began collecting the fallen money.

"Good boy." She smiled, patting 1B's head. (I'm lucky to have my minions.)

(Yes you are. Now with that settled perhaps we can actually get to work now?)

She let out a loud groan (because you're such a killjoy…) (Told you!) Before spinning her chair so that she was once more facing her lab computer.

After working her way through the tournament, she'd gathered a massive amount of data both on her opponents as well as her own equipment. The most pressing of which was as always the fact that her Generator() program just was not producing enough power. At least not if she wanted to have more than one day of serious hero work a week.

Which is why the first thing she did was spend her time upgrading and modifying said program. Using some of the various bits and pieces she'd picked up from the whispers over the last couple of months, because while the base program itself generated energy via a very complicated math formula that she still only barely understood generated electricity for her to use in her COMP.

Though now with some more experience she could tell it wasn't just creating the energy ex nihilo. Instead it was recalibrating the energy in the world around her into a more usable form, be it from mechanical, chemical, or heat.

With her now knowing this she was able to make these various formulas more efficient, enough so that the program would now generate a full twenty-five percent more power than previously possible.

"This still isn't enough…" She grumbled to herself, aware that at most this would shave a day or two off of her 'recharge' time. "But I'm not sure what else I can change right now…"

(How about a change of pace then?) Her inner logic suggested as her eyes were drawn to the partially disassembled COMP her LCMs had been chipping away at.

(Yeah, thinking about it, our initial upgrade could use a bit of a rework given how that +1 to Data Programs was kind of worthless.) Her inner madness agreed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." She admitted to herself as she began messing with some of the inner bits of her upgraded COMP, pulling out older bits and replacing them with parts that didn't look like she'd pulled them out of a trash bin. (Which is exactly what you did!)

"Well I was broke then and now I'm not." She told herself as she slotted in a slightly better processing unit. Something that would hopefully allow her COMP to run programs even faster than it currently did.

(Eh, it'll run the [Data] class of programs better, because this allows for faster data input processing but won't have a very notable effect on anything where we're trying to generate a physical output.) Her inner mad scientist noted more seriously. (And even then it'll still slow down more often than not.)

"What why?" She frowned at her now half-reassembled COMP.

(I believe that has something to do with how despite replacing some of these parts with relatively cheap but still higher quality materials, the remainder is still… How to put this delicately…)

(Something fished out of a bin by a trash panda?)

(Yes that.)

She glared impotently at her COMP before turning to the now seeming kind of small stack of money that 1B was sleeping on. "We're going to run out of that very fast aren't we?"

(Yes. Yes we are.)

Scene Consequences

-Generator upgraded to V1.4

--Now generates 5 units of Power each Turn.

Stolen story; please report.

-Upgrade Data COMP to Mk. 2.1

--Overclock: When using a [Data Program] Maya can now increase the power cost by 1, to immediately cast-erm- use it again on a different target. If she crits a D6 the second cast is free instead.

*Note: I'm removing that +1 to Data Programs and replacing it with the above because I realized given the context of things and some long term changes I've done behind the scenes… that +1 does basically nothing.

-For completing a Programming Project +1XP to Reality Hacking.

--*Skill Rank Up* Reality Hacking Lv. 7 (0/16)

---

Luckily -or unluckily- for Maya, she had other things to deal with before she could spend any more of her winnings upgrading her equipment. Namely school and the usual things with both friends and family, at least until she got the time to go back to her lab where she managed to stall out spending any more money for another day by pulling up some of her scan data.

Ignoring the data on the plant mage due to reasons that still made her blush, and avoiding looking at the elf girl's stuff for completely different reasons that made her blush, she instead pulled up the Scans she'd gotten of the invisible fighter that had beaten said elf girl.

Based on her original peek while doing the Scanning she was aware that the girl from the Gamer's Guild had created some kind of invisible construct by manipulating electromagnetic fields with her mind. Something that she was pretty sure was an indicator of Psionics but could've been a Madness user as well. (I need to go over more Scans to figure out for sure.)

Still even without being one hundred percent sure about the source of the power she was working with, she was able to figure out that the guild girl had been using whatever power she had to bend multiple fields before weaving them into her construct. A complex process that resulted in temporarily bonded photons being held together in what could best be described as 'hard light'. Allowing said photons to interact with the physical world so long as power was supplied before breaking down into nothingness once it was cut.

All of which while notably beyond what she could do with just her COMP (for now) was something that she felt could be replicated with the proper equipment. Especially given how she could already project light strong enough to trigger chemical reactions and generate enough energy to fuel said projection. (I just need to figure out how to increase photon density and better shape it…)

"The real question is how to do it all at once…"

She tapped her fingers against her desk, trying to think of how best to workshop this point before remembering someone that she'd seen create shields from seemingly nothing. A someone that she just so happened to have a phone number for…

"It's uh, it's not too soon to call, right?" She asked the air around her.

(Eh, it's been two days, if anything you'll probably have to remind her who you are.) The cruel air answered.

(Harsh but probably true.) The other air agreed.

She kept tapping her fingers against the table before saying, "Screw it." and pulling up her call function on her COMP, routing her actual phone to ping over half the state and making it near untraceable.

After a few rings, a familiar voice answered, if sounding a bit strained, "What is it?"

She blinked, her mind blanking on her.

"Kind of busy. Either speak or get hexed." The arcane teen warned.

"Uh, hi… Sorry, this is the, uh, M.A.D. from the tournament?" She tried to explain, unable to help but cringe as she realized the other girl didn't know her name and she couldn't share it thanks to the whole Mask thing.

"Who?"

(Oof.)

"Oh, wait… right! The gravity girl."

(She remembers me!)

"Yeah, that's me." She smiled a little nervously. "Um, you said to call you sometime to talk shop?"

"Right, yeah. I remember, just a bit busy with a project." The girl on the other end admitted.

"Uh, what kind of project?" She found herself asking.

"Shaping an extremely dense magical catalyst into a gauntlet without having it blow up in my face." The elven teen answered.

"Oh… sounds like you could use an Alchemy()." She mumbled, remembering how she shaped -and made- the actual explody bits of her explosives.

"Yeah, alchemy isn't going to help me with… Actually, would that work? I mean theoretically this is just hyper dense anima so if I simply repurpose a basic molecular rearrangement circuit then maybe…" The other teen trailed off for a moment. "Give me just a moment."

She tapped her fingers on the table once more as she sat there kind of awkwardly.

(...)

(...)

(...)

(You know we should get some elevator music in here or something. Just to fill the silence when stuff like this comes up.)

"Alright, I'm back." The elven teen told her. "And your idea sort of works."

"Sort of works?" She frowned, not even really sure what her 'idea' was.

"Yeah, I need to apply a little more power than I thought but that makes sense with the sheer density of this thing. The real trick is going to be figuring out the sweet spot to keep this from blowing up the way it did when Jon tried to cut it." The other teen elaborated.

"Uh, is that a real danger?" She couldn't help but ask with some concern.

"I've a much larger margin of error with this than he did given how I'm not trying to actually break this more than it already is." The elven teen assured her.

"That's… good?" She nodded, not entirely sure if that had reassured her or not.

She felt she unfortunately shared this point as she found herself in another awkward silence.

"Right…" The arcane teen drawled after a moment. "So was there a reason you were calling me… I just remembered we never introduced ourselves."

"Oh right, um, I'm uh, I'm a Mask so…" She floundered.

"Let me guess you don't have a Mask name?" The other teen noted with some amusement.

"Yeah…" She sighed, feeling fairly embarrassed as she began to tap her head against her desk.

"Well, I'm not a Mask, so you can call me Artemis."

Scene Consequences

-Thanks to studying the Phantom Fighter (?) Maya has figured out how to make hard light technology. (She thinks.)

--Create Hard Light Tech has been added to the Build Menu.

-Maya can now get an Artemis Assist to help her with any [Software] project, increasing said project's progress speed.

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