Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 82: The Morning After

***Translated From Manitian***

“Look at that sunrise,” John said, glancing over at Perry as they stood shoulder to shoulder on top of the wall, having painstakingly worked together with dozens of other supers to flush the prawns back to the wall, where reconstruction efforts were already underway, with engineers, both Tinker and mundane, working at a feverish pace to fill in the house-sized hole in the staggeringly large wall under constant threat of attack.

They’d fought together the entire night, and a strange form of camaraderie had begun to bloom between the sworn enemies.

Then again…

“I supposed you were as good as your word. Maybe there’s still some honor left in –“

John’s words were cut off by Perry’s composite-sheathed fist shattering his jaw. Immediate threat of prawns destroying the city dealt with, and sun fully risen, Perry didn’t have to restrain himself anymore.

“That’s for calling my mom a whore.” Perry said, pointing at the glassy-eyed nocul prince splayed out on the ground. The dagger hidden behind the nocul’s back skittered along the concrete, flung into the mess that lined the top of the wall.

Perry hadn’t seen it, but it did make him feel better about the sucker-punch.

***Translated from Manitian***

Perry knelt down and pulled a vial out of his chest compartment and snagged a bit of the nocul’s blood from his nose while he was discombobulated.

I’m gonna have to store this somewhere else in case he can teleport to it at will, Perry thought. Maybe he’d stash it on top of a flagpole or something of that nature.

“You guys wanna get some sleep?” Perry asked Hardcase and Wraith.

“Yeah.” Hardcase said, her voice hoarse.

“Absolutely. I’m practically dead on my feet.” Wraith responded.

The three of them rode the elevator down to the bottom of the wall and trudged past the clean-up crews who were using thick chains and specialized forklifts to carry away prawn chunks.

There were billions of dollars in infrastructure damage, committed in a single night. Likely lives had been lost, but Perry hadn’t been around to see any of it first hand. He’d been in the thick of it, and he assumed most of the damage happened around the edges.

They arrived at their hotel, where a fight must’ve broken out shortly after they left, as the lobby was a total mess. Lots of chunks of concrete ripped out of the floor, scratch marks everywhere.

“You gotta be freakin’ kidding me,” Perry muttered, seeing the destruction lead up the stairs, down the hall, and into their room, where their door was smashed in, along with some of the doorway itself.

It looked like a prawn had busted in and wrecked everything, but Perry was inclined to think someone had lured one up to this room for the express purpose of punching their tickets.

It wasn’t John, since the guy had been in eyeshot the entire night, so someone else had something against him. One of his minions? The demon he’d killed, back from its home dimension?

Well, whatever, I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Perry stifled a yawn as he picked up the door and summoned a bit of spray-on glue to reconnect the hinges.

In a matter of seconds, they had a working door again.

It looked terrible, and the bolt had torn a hole through the door frame, but it worked. Perry did a quick foam patch on the deadbolt and then locked the door.

“There’s only one bed.” Heather groaned.

Perry could see the shredded mattresses through the shattered doorways.

One of the beds had only been flipped over during the attack on their hotel room, and Heather had righted it.

“W-we could go down to the lobby and ask for a new room?” Natalie stammered.

“I’m too tired for that crap,” Heather said, throwing Nat over her shoulder and tossing her onto the bed, collapsing beside her, face buried into the Alaska king mattress.

In moments, she was out like a light.

Perry followed suit, putting his armor on sentry mode outside the room before he burrowed into the covers on Nat’s other side and passed out.

******

Perry was roused from a dead sleep by the clattering of spoon on bowl, mixed in with the arguing of talking heads on the local news.

Groaning, he slid out from under the shredded covers, feeling gross and sticky from sleeping in his street clothes. He grabbed some clean clothes from the floor, shook the broken glass off of them and ambled blearily towards the living room, ultimately aiming for the shower.

Heather and Nat were sitting on the couch, which was propped up on a couple pieces of wood to keep it level. They were both dressed in comfy oversized T-shirts that looked like XXLs, especially on Nat, who was practically using the oversized shirt as a tent to camp out on the couch.

Nat had some serious bags under her eyes as she ate a forkful of ramen noodles, staring at the TV. The room’s TV had a huge crunch in the corner that spiderwebbed throughout the entire monitor, but the sound quality was fine and the words were still vaguely legible.

The news had a scrolling tagline ‘Tide going out’

The pundits were arguing over reconstructions costs, with some of them arguing that building a more sizeable force of supers was higher priority than infrastructure.

“This is unsustainable, that’s what it is, if we have to continue relying on Franklin for reinforcement, then they’ll be able to set whatever price they want! We need to have-“

Perry glanced at the Tidewatch on the wall, and saw that while it was still high, it had receded a few points overnight.

“Is that it, then?” Perry asked, throwing his shirt over his shoulder as he carefully picked his way through the glass.

“For prawns anyway. Now all we gotta worry about is people,” Heather said, slurping up a forkful of noodles.

That was true. It wasn’t like all their worries were over after the Tide receded. Every High Tide produced a bumper crop of supers, and it also supplied them with an existential threat to keep them all behaving themselves.

Over the last month, innumerable Triggers had happened. Some Perry had heard of, and many more who’d kept themselves under the radar.

They were going to start to come out of the woodwork over the next couple months and reshuffle the power structure of Franklin City.

High tide wasn’t over: It had reached the most dangerous point. Somewhere out there were a handful of really bad people who’d lucked into some really powerful abilities.

Before Perry could deal with all of that, he needed a shower.

“The tub is missing,” Perry said upon reaching the showerhead, glancing down at where the tub had been violently separated from the drain. If he tried to take a shower, he would flood the entire room.

Matter of fact, it seemed like someone, or someones, had already flooded the bathroom, given the quarter inch of water he was treading through.

“You think they’re gonna worry about a bit of water damage at this point?” Heather called over her shoulder.

Perry glanced up and around the room at the shattered tile and broken mirrors. The toilet was missing part of the tank, with a five-gallon bucket sitting right next to it.

“Probably not,” Perry said, using some glass shards to pin his towel to the doorframe to cover for the missing door.

“Let me know if you need any help!” Nat said from the couch.

Perry peered out from behind the towel.

“Help with what?”

“W-well, um, t-the plumbing is a little messed up so there’s a bit of a trick to getting hot water that isn’t scalding, I mean, I wouldn’t mind helping with…”

“Hah, nice,” Heather chuckled.

“I mean, not that, but I helped Heather with her hair and back, and…and I thought…I’ll be quiet now.”

“I can probably figure out the plumbing on my own.” Perry said. “I’ll let you know, though.”

“O-okay.” Natalie withdrew her arms and head into her oversized sleeping shirt like a crimson turtle.

Chuckling, Perry turned back to the shower and studied it.

There was an outline for the cold water lever helpfully drawn in sharpie, at the exact point the cold water would actually go through the pipes rather than spraying everywhere, allowing the hot water to mix and come through at lukewarm, rather than scalding, or freezing, as long as the hot water lever was in the indicated position as well.

It was clear, concise, and in Natalie’s handwriting. There was no possible way Perry could fail to figure out the water situation with such a helpful guide available to him.

Ah, what the hell. Tide’s going out and I’m still alive, Perry thought, reaching out with his thumb and smudging the sharpie cheat sheet on the tile wall until it was illegible.

Sharpie was never meant to get soaked.

“Nat, I can’t seem to get the water to work!” Perry shouted.

“Coming!”

******

“Did you hear?” Mom asked over the phone.

“Tide’s going out, yeah?” Perry asked.

“Yep! Not that I don’t like your grandfather, but I’ll be glad to get him out of here. There’s only so many things for him to fix in the neighborhood, and if he doesn’t have any old ladies to fix things for, he waxes philosophical, and it gets pretty nihilistic.”

Mom paused for a moment. “I actually haven’t seen him in a couple days. Maybe he’s still over at grandma’s?”

“When do the aftershocks usually happen?” Perry asked, referring to the flood of new supers looking to make name for themselves after High Tide was over.

“Usually it picks up about two weeks after High Tide is completely gone, and lasts for about four months. You should be back home right around the time things get really exciting!”

“Looking forward to that.” Perry said sarcastically. “I got four days until the train heads out again. Nothing to do on the wall, so it’s basically a vacation at this point.”

“Four days! Oh, I can’t wait to see you again, sweetie!” Mom squealed over the phone. “We can do villain roundups as a family, maybe quash a plot to conquer the world! Your father is gearing up like crazy.”

“Are there a lot of plots to conquer the world?”

“It’s pretty common, actually,” Mom said, shuffling something in the background. “The Trigger High makes a lot of people think they stand a better chance than they actually do of conquering the world, so there’s all these would be world conquerors multiplying like rabbits, and you go around bonking them on the head and rounding them up, and it’s hilarious.”

“Ah, gotcha.”

“Every once in a while, though, you get someone who actually has the means to actually conquer the world, and then things get pretty interesting.”

“How does that go?”

“Well, sometimes an anchor-class super Triggers and one of three things happens: They jump into line for leadership of the city, they get killed, or they leave the city and start their own.”

“You can just…start your own city?” Perry asked, brows raised.

“I mean, there’s no law against it.” Mom asked. “It doesn’t happen very often, obviously, but if you’ve got the muscle and can get the word out, then you can attract the brave and the desperate.”

“I guess.” They’d have to be brave or desperate, I suppose. Most new cities got rolled their first High Tide.

“So how did things go with that nocul, John?”

“I haven’t heard from him since I knocked him out for saying something he shouldn’t’ve,” Perry said. “I’m hoping I don’t have to deal with him again before I get the heck out of Washington.”

“Hey,” Perry changed the subject. “Did you know Grandma committed genocide by stranding the nocul on Manita?”

“Yeah, that sounds like mom, alright,” Mom sighed. “Look, she might be abrasive, but she’s not evil. She’s just got this ruler-of-the-world mindset where the ends always justify the means. It’s just how she was raised.”

“Why do we still invite her to Thanksgiving?”

“Because she’s family, and she brings literal magical booze…and she would find a way to punish us for the rest of our lives if we didn’t invite her. You do still want access to those spellbooks, don’t you?”

Perry sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”

He couldn’t wait to get back to his soul-ritual experiments. He’d only barely gotten started before he’d been forced to take the detour to Washington.

The mere thought of getting back to his workshop and making progress on soul magic nearly made him giddy.

“By the way…” mom’s voice turned sly. “You’ve been on your own a while now. Anything interesting happen with that friend of yours we met at Burger Joint?”

Perry hung up and threw the phone across the room.

Crap.

That was practically an admission of guilt. Why couldn’t my stability be low enough to lie convincingly?

Perry could only imagine how loudly his mom was cackling at this very moment. And it was happening. Don’t need to scry to know that.

Perry took a deep breath and focused his mind on what needed to get done.

Four more days.

The next four days passed quickly in a spree of discrete purchases of supplies at the local Manitian slum. Perry didn’t run into any more sworn enemies, or demons looking to cash him in for a buck. Largely, it was uneventful.

This was mostly because Perry made sure not to present himself as himself while he was out there buying supplies. There was no wholesaler like Dave who ran the whole market, so Perry was forced to go door to door, browsing for the spell ingredients Franklin city was missing.

He found a few, but many ingredients were in limited supply unless Perry could find substitutes.

Areonite, used for his magical computer, and his Floating Armaments, was one of them: They weren’t making any more of that.

When it was time to board the train back to Franklin City, Perry had an oversized hiking backpack stuffed to the brim with poorly preserved magical ingredients, picked specifically for their poor quality, separated from interacting with each other by thick plastic Tupperware.

Perry didn’t want to accidentally blow up or transform, after all.

They got assigned a nicer room than last time, with bigger storage and bathroom, which was nice. Perry figured the upgrade was probably out of practicality more than courtesy, but he’d take a better room regardless of the reason.

Perry was getting settled in when he heard a knock on the door.

When he opened it, he was greeted with the sight of a pimply teen, maybe sixteen years old with dirty blond hair and freckles.

“Hi,” he said with Plagius’s voice. “Are you Paradox?”

“That’s me,” Perry said.

“A guy named Larry said you could help me out?” He asked nervously.

“Yeah, he mentioned you.” Perry said. it was best not to make the lie too complicated. “Said you needed a team.”

“Well, umm…my name’s Plagius, I just wanted to introduce myself,” He said, offering a handshake

Perry took it.