Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 271: Venom of Paradox

“So what now?” Heather asked.

“Now…we pray one of the venoms we acquired will do what we need it to do,” Perry muttered. He already knew which one he was banking on, but it was best not to say anything until after they’d performed extensive tests.

“Check up on the twins?” Heather said.

“Mm.” Perry nodded and opened a portal.

“Mommy!” Sera shrieked and barreled through the portal, nearly knocking Heather over.

The brass-haired mother swept her daughter up and staggered back through the portal, aggressively nuzzling her the entire time, eliciting shrieks of delight.

“How’s it going?” Perry asked Gareth, who glanced up from his tablet and shrugged before returning his attention to Minecraft.

“He might need less tablet time,” Perry mused to Heather.

“Daddy!” Gareth said, tossing aside the tablet and giving Perry a big hug.

“Nice save, kid.” Perry said, patting Gareth on the back.

“How’d they do, Annette?” Perry asked, glancing over at the Elysian Attendant, who had dark circles under her eyes.

“They’re…healthy.” She offered, as diplomatic as Perry expected an Elysian Attendant to be.

“How did you guys enjoy Australia?” Perry asked.

Sera’s eyes widened in delight. “There’s a spider arcade! Annette didn’t want to take us in but I –“

“We saw a HUGE lizard, it was like this bi-“

“A cock-o-dile! I tried climbing in it’s –“

“And the police got involved, but Annette used-!

“So we spent most of the day in a cage. It was boring.”

“I met a stranger who stabbed someone! He was about to show me how, but Annette-“

“When she went to talk to the Po-leese, someone gave us a ride to-“

“Turns out they were a supervillain trying to umm…run some…us? They didn’t really try to make us run at a-“

“Annette talked to me in my head, so I used the knife Gary gave me and-“

“We had this awesome fight!”

“It was just like you said, Daddy! The superheroes found us, and there was this trash-talk, then they fought-“

“WE fought!” Sera shouted.

“Nuh uh!”

“I kicked him in the peen!” Sera shouted.

“That was just a henchman!”

“Still counts!”

Gareth’s face wrinkled up like someone who disagreed mightily, but wasn’t interested in dying on that particular hill. Instead, he changed tracks.

“There’s an ice cream shop-“

“We got ice cream after!”

“They make it out of real ice cream! Out of cows!”

“Daddy, what’s a cow? Can we get one?”

Perry processed their rapid changes in direction and overlapping stories of how the last couple days went, and decided that Annette probably deserved a medal of her own.

From the children’s myopic view of how things had gone down, he had to assume that a lot of legwork had gone on in the background to make things safer and less scary for them.

So much so that Annette hadn’t had time to whip them into shape like she’d intended, Perry supposed. Almost getting kidnapped and trying to jump into a crock’s mouth were probably the tip of the iceberg.

“Good job,” Perry murmured, patting Annette on the shoulder.

“You’re out a few million.” she whispered back, seemingly shrinking into her seat.

“Eh.” Perry grunted. It didn’t bother him. His superpower was the closest thing to printing money, and those numbers had become meaningless years ago.

“Can you get them packed up to go?” Perry asked the angelic babysitter. “We’re probably going to be leaving tonight.”

Sera must’ve heard him, because she exploded.

“But I don’t wanna go yet!” Their 4-year-old daughter shrieked.

“Sometimes you gotta go before you’re ready,” Perry said, kneeling down. “That’s life. It’s not bad, it’s just the way it is.”

It took less time than Perry expected to calm the twins down and get them ready to go. Maybe Annette had done a little child-wrangling in her free time because they were just a tiny bit better behaved than the last time he’d seen them, a few days ago.

Perry quickly checked the time stamp on his HUD, which auto updated to the local time and date.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

No, they hadn’t gotten trapped in a time warp like when he’d gone after Professor Replica. So Annette really had gotten through to them a bit in four days.

Not bad.

Also, that’s really good, because I didn’t want to be in Australia longer than a week. Four days is ahead of schedule.

Once the kids were packed, they portaled to the lab, where Gna’kis and Lam were ‘doing science’.

Lam had made herself a tiny light-bending science coat to match Gna’kis’s. The spider princess was perched on the demon lord’s shoulder taking notes on a tiny pad while Gna’kis marched from station to station, dictating experiment results and possible modifications to the variables.

“My lord!” Gna’kis said as soon as Perry arrived. “Can I keep her? The sheer number of frequencies that her webbing can carry would allow me to increase the data carried by optic cables by a factor of-”

“Sure, as long as she’s fine with it,” Perry said.

“I’m fine with it!” Lam squeaked.

“She can talk!” Sera said, her eyes boggling while Lam wiggled her legs to freak out the squares.

“She’s a genetic freak, likely the result of inhumane experiments in horizontal gene transfer.” Perry said.

“I am!”

“Can I have her?” Sera asked.

“No. Gna’kis is much more capable of raising an intelligent spider that may eventually become the size of a blue whale. Also she’s a person.”

“Aww.” Sera pouted.

“Where are we at with the venom, Gna’kis?” Perry asked, moving the discussion forward.

“Ah!” the demon lord wearing an alt-punk girl skin exclaimed, raising her finger. “We’ve made some good progress! Except for when one of the wasps got out and almost killed me.”

“Except for that,” Perry said, nodding.

“Lemme show you,” Gna’kis said, motioning for them to follow.

So, after some experimentation, many failed attempts to ‘milk’ the venom out of the wasp, and one escape attempt, we figured out a method that proved somewhat reliable.” She said, motioning for Perry to view one of the glass cases.

Inside was a Dickbag wasp, the size of a man’s palm and busily building a mud nest on the side of a fake rock.

“So the easiest way to harvest venom turned out to be completely mundane. In fact, if there are any powers or magic at all, it tends to go haywire. So what we did was make a hollow decoy, and when it stung it…”

She produced a rubber mouse, squeezing it a bit in her hands to demonstrate it’s flexability, then she stuck the mouse inside the case on a long thin stick, wiggling the mouse in front of the wasp to piss it off.

It didn’t take much.

The wasp leapt on the mouse and stung it six times before it stopped moving.

Once the wasp lost interest, Gna’kis withdrew the mouse and opened the plug in the butt, pouring out a few drops of venom from the hydrophobic interior.

“Tah-dah!”

“So how does it work?” Perry asked.

“It oscillates Attunement.” She said.

“Excuse me?” Perry asked.

“The venom has a potent cocktail that raises and lowers Attunement in a repeating pattern that looks like this.”

She wrote out a function that described a violent wavelength that lost a little bit of potency every time it reached a new height, gradually evening out to nothing.

“Most animals with any kind of triggered ability will die, here…” She pointed at the highest Attunement. “Or here,” She pointed at the lowest point of the first wavelength.

“Something with fire powers will explode here,” She pointed again at the top of the wavelength. “Something that uses it’s powers to ignore the square cube law, like spiders, will suffocate, here,” She said, pointing at the bottom. “It’s a surprisingly effective strategy.”

“So that’s why it doesn’t always kill humans.” Perry had suspected it had targeted superpowers somehow, but Gna’kis had done him a favor by discovering exactly how it worked while he was assisting Aussie Man with The Butthole.

“Indeed, although being stung with one of these things actually has a very high rate of Triggering the recipient.”

“Really?”

“Of the people who don’t die, the number of Trigger events is about five percent.” Gna’kis explained. “Which is wildly higher than the statistical average of 0.1%. I went through some of the publicly available data on hospital visits in Australia.”

“Wow. Probably shouldn’t tell the Australians about that.”

“The chances of dying are higher, so most people wouldn’t do it,” Gna’kis said.

Perry met her gaze. “Don’t tell the Australians, okay? I don’t want that many dead people on my conscience.”

“Sure…” she said, sighing before moving on. “Anyway, you were looking for a way to use it to I.D. mimics.”

“Indeed.”

“So, what we’re interested in is this portion of the wavelength,” she said, circling the tight, waves near the end of the function.

“So you diluted it down, figured out a way to increase the frequency and decrease the amplitude, and applied it to a test subject?” Perry asked.

The amplitude was the power of the swings, that would cause things to explode or suffocate from having too much or too little Attunement. Perry was on the ‘exploding’ side of the spectrum. The frequency would dictate how quickly the venom would flip polarity from boosting Attunement to dampening it. At the moment, its frequency was fairly low, with a high amplitude.

To make something that could screen humans from mimics, they needed to decrease the venom’s lethality (Amplitude) and increase its rate of change (Frequency) so that it caused the mimic’s abilities to fire off randomly while not harming a normal human. Or even a superhuman, for that matter.

“You know me so well.”

It was the logical next step.

“Come, come,” Gna’kis said, ushering them to follow her, Lam’s oversized spidersilk coat flowing over her shoulder like a tiny cape.

“It took a while, and a lot of dead mimics, but I found I could raise the concentration, then remove most of the primary chemical responsible for amplitude, and it worked like a charm.”

She motioned to a class cage with a crying human inside.

“So if you-“

“One second,” Perry said, turning to kneel in front of Sera and Gareth. “You guys wanna go say hi to your mom? Me and Gna’kis have some boring grown-up work to do.”

“…Why?” Sera asked, while Gareth glanced past Perry before gazing up at him with suspicion.

“I just don’t want to bore you guys. This could take Alll….daaaay…”

“I’ll take them.” Heather said, glancing past Perry at the mimic in a cage, obviously understanding the nature of the upcoming experiment.

“…okay!” Sera said, while Gareth continued to give Perry suspicious glances.

Portal.exe.

“Nat!” Heather said, stepping through the portal into Natalie’s office, dragging the twins along with her.

Once the portal was closed, Perry heaved a sigh and stood up.

“Alright, do what you’re gonna do.” Perry said, motioning for Gna’kis to continue.

“Please, don’t! I didn’t do anything wrong!” The woman said as a limb detached form the side of the cage, bearing an oversized needle. Her voice grew to an ear-piercing shriek as she desperately tried to escape from the needle, before it lunged forward with the speed of a cobra, injecting her with Gna’kis’s refined venom.

She began convulsing in place, and for a moment Perry suspected they simply had a poor epileptic woman, when her body began melting at random, growing tentacles, wings and teeth, that formed out of her flesh and returned back in a fraction of a second, shuddering at the same pace as her convulsion.

It was messy and horrifying.

Definitely not for four-year-olds.

A minute later, the mimic regained control as the venom ran its course, curling up in the corner of the glass cage and glaring at them hatefully. Perry wasn’t sure which one of them was glaring: The woman, or the mimic pretending to be her.

Both seemed likely.

“Have you tested it on a standard human?” Perry asked.

“Some rats.” Gna’kis said with a shrug. “It causes convulsions, but most of them are alive.”

“Most?”

“I’m working on it. By its very nature, even the refined venom introduces some stress on the body.” Gna’kis mused. “My lord, even if we improve it to the best of our abilities, this is still going to kill some of the humans it’s meant to screen. A small percentage of the very sick, very old, or the very young.”

Perry thought about his children suffering a massive seizure, writhing on the ground in pain. The thought made his eye twitch.

“That’s unacceptable. You’ve done a great job so far, Gna’kis. You got us 99% of the way there. Now let’s Paradox it.”