Chapter 16-412: The Tooling-Down

I looked back at the other logistical situations back home.

The re-tooling in preparation for devolving to steam power and lack of electricity was ramping up faster and faster. Those who didn’t want to shoot and hack things were contributing and Leveling up in their own slower way, grabbing their basic Racial Class Levels and improving quickly enough that way.

The petroleum industry was basically slowly shutting down at this point. Wells were being capped and sealed, magically if at all possible, only needing to be tapped in the future for alchemical purposes, which would be a minute fraction of the current oil demand. Natural gas was a possibility to use, but got extremely volatile with fire Elementals running around gleefully, and so gaslight was never going to be a thing, while gas stoves were also going to be needed to be phased out unless you wanted random fires breaking out everywhere all the time.

So, steam power it would be. The production of Everheating Stones for heat sources was basically the name of the game at this point, and Eternal Flames and the like to heat houses, now readily available as more and more Casters hit Seven, were proliferating every day. Indeed, even the armed forces overseas were Casting them on stones and iron bars, to be shipped or Teleported back home.

Going back to cooking with more traditional ovens and stoves and fires was going to be a big change for people. The food processing plants were going into a tizzy, as suddenly heating a thousand gallons of soup at a time was going to be unfeasible to do...

In many ways, the world was slowing down. While there was still some frantic traffic, especially moving materials around, the main thing was that now people were planning where to live for the rest of their lives, as getting around wouldn’t be near as easy, and the living would be harder. It was going to take more labor to run farms again, too...

As a result, there was a gradual movement of people heading back into the countryside, if for no other reason than to be closer to food sources, and back closer to the family and friends they had grown up with.

That meant that cities were going to be falling in size and population, except for key metropolis who would be at the hub of their own network of smaller cities, towns, and villages feeding things into them and getting them back.

It was indeed going to be an era of city-states, and the City Spirits were already agitated as they felt the changes happening, the shift and ebb and flow of population, materials, and the energy of civilized life as real as breathing to them.

Coal mines that had been falling out of favor got a delighted shot in the arm, but they were also dourly disapproved of by Druids for their environmental abuse, and if and when the Mother Land woke up, they had to be prepared to pay the toll for that. Mowing down forests for bonfires was also a pretty bad idea, hence the need for Eternal Flames. Lots and lots of Eternal Flames...

One of the interesting things being put into place were salvage yards on the East and West Coasts of America. The massive fleets and steel ships of the Navy were going to be nigh useless in the world to come, as such massive vessels couldn’t run on steam power, and alchemical fuel was far too dangerous and expensive, especially on a warship.

That also applied to the tank corps, which meant thousands of beloved death-dealing mobile armored boxes and cannons were going to be scrapped, too.

All that metal and steel was going to be recycled, and a brand-new, lighter fleet of steam-powered vehicles was already being designed and getting its keels and axles laid. New designs of steam cannons and the like also had to be designed and made for all this, as the whole world needed to be re-armed.

More importantly, all the technology that we had discovered and that would no longer work, and the processes to make that technology, had to be archived safely. That in itself required companies to open up about many processes, designs, and the like, which ran into trust issues and similar things. Nobody wanted to believe they were going to be outdated by less advanced tech, after all...

Applying advanced material science and Weird Science to less sophisticated technology was basically what Artificers and Alchemists were born to do. The blizzard of shared ideas and designs going up in the Markroom devoted to such stuff was sizzling with wild ideas being tempered down by speed, pragmatism, and time constraints. Designing the most practical and useful designs and the processes to make them could be every bit as much the challenge as a new Gearbot War-Walker to supplement or replace the tanks that would have to be melted down.

I had given dire, dire warnings about Axiomatic Events if armies decided to go Construct-heavy, and even the slavery-level obedience of Golems was something that could be turned against us by sufficiently powerful forces. Ideas about Gear-Tanks and Clankers rampaging across battlefields shooting down our enemies didn’t look so hot when those things turned around and started shooting our own people after reducing their own crews to bloody smears inside of them...

On the flip side of things, there was also a LOT of ammunition that needed to be used up. Word had already gone out that actual gunpowder was going to explode when the Shroud went down, so use up and get rid of the stuff. Arsenals and armories of the stuff were emptying out... and you know, infusing Vivic Spell into a cannon or a Shell meant any undead killed by it were Truly Dead, too.

If you gotta use the ammo up anyways...

That was going to be important for the final fight, because the enemy had undead mechanized units, too, and Possessed Tanks and Necroic Cannons were definitely not things we wanted to see... but we were definitely going to.

Parts of my head were continually involved in this game, and I finally understood why the Shroud had given me all the Construct-making Feats. It was so I could advise everyone else who was going to use them, not me.

A-duh. Me smart team thinker at times, me is.

Windgraf Mochtal wasn’t in to Constructs or Gearsmithing, preferring to focus on magical items rather exclusively. The djinn weren’t a race that liked such things, Constructs and war machines of metal being more tools of the efreet and the shaitan.

That being said, he was totally into airship designs and contributing to that field of endeavor. Dirigibles were horrendously vulnerable in a magical world, so we actually needed airships, and the promise of higher Caster Levels, Spellcraft, and Valences meant we could actually potentially make such things... once we got the basic needs of day to day life taken care of. C’mon with them Eternal Flames, people...

Heck, even I was putting out several hundred a day now. For some reason, the silver-tinted black flames I Cast were in considerable demand...

I was also Casting PermanentWalls of Fire, both big and small, which were hot enough to melt steel and so power entire foundry lines. The scrapping and recycling stations were making use of the Walls between staves, using them like massive cutting torches to slice apart big things of steel into more manageable pieces...

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Philiadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Old U.S Steel docks...

I shimmered into place with a flicker of jet and silver, and the Focus de-Energized underneath me. Systems Engineer Onrus Chekovsky, standing on his Disk, grinned and threw me a salute as I materialized.

Hyn who worked in industry weren’t common, but Onrus had a Talent for engineering that helped him rival even a skilled dwarf, and was a better people person.

He had picked out this location for our scrapyard, and we had duly purchased the entire dockspace from U.S. Steel for almost a fair price, given how redundant they were going to be when electricity went away and howling blast furnaces became magnets for random fire Elementals.

It was, well, magical how fast the construction was going up, especially after how fast it had been demolished. A certain someone in the mirror had helped with that, as concrete yielded to Stone Shape IV with the proper know-how, and so tearing apart the foundation of this place to get at the workings hadn’t taken anywhere near as long as it might have. Just strolling through the place and dividing all the concrete into one-foot blocks while making clear cutaways to loosen it from pipes and conduits meant everything could be disassembled with great speed.

More pointedly, all that concrete was just stacked right over yonder, and then brought back to be recycled and molded back down into place when it was time.

I shook Onrus’ hand, and tapped his Disk so he could glide along with me as I skated in the right direction.

I was going to be molding about a million cubic feet of concrete into place today, a process that would take me under half an hour. Onrus had conveniently picked a Focus point for me that would take us past the Chop Shop, and so he would get to show off his baby.

He was very proud of the design, as was his entire team of Gearsmiths, and if I had helped with the design and could watch it out of the eyes of others, that was no reason not to visit and see it myself so they could preen proudly.

An old cruiser, the USS Tallahassee, had been sailed into the dry dock, and was now clamped in place by massive braces after the water was drained away. The entire ship was now exposed in the dock, rusting and peeling from long years of waiting silently in event of emergency, and now its time was done.

As we entered the shop, he nodded to the foreman, who relayed the command to the cutters. Alarms went out, everyone made sure to have their goggles on, or Force Armor up in the case of me, and heads turned upward.

Two robotic arms rotating on universal gears were gripping a pair of familiar steel rods that served as anchor points for a Permanent Wall of Thunder. Swapping in the sonic damage for fire meant that damage to materials wasn’t cut in half, although it was very susceptible to Silence effects.

2-12 +87ish damage was basically two inches or more of steel a second.

The handlers up in the booth separated the rods, and a melodic ringing sang throughout the building. A Wall of jet light with what looked like a standing wave of silver running through it appeared between the two rods, the wave cycling like an oscilloscope as the pitch and tenor of the Thunder energy running through it shifted randomly.

It was still infused with Good energy, so it sounded Holy however you wanted to hear it, and Evil creatures were going to be very uncomfortable listening to it chiming.

The opposed arms rotated the Wall vertically between them as gears spun and whirred smoothly, moving over to line up across the front of the old ship.

With the slow push of a lever, they began to descend over the front of the bow, at first quickly, then slowing as the edge of the black light touched the metal.

The band of silver oscillations rang suddenly, like a bell hit by a hammer, when it contacted the steel. The cutting speed was dialed down to a constant rate, and now continuous tappings, like small bells ringing, rang out as a sonic knife split the steel as cleanly as a razor.

There was always a chance of random bits of steel flying around here, and so most of those watching had on some form of protection. The pings of steel echoing across the lowered safety glass panels were definitely audible as an unpleasant disruption to the music of the Wall itself, so nobody complained about it.

I noticed that the reinforced walkway around the Chop Shop was full of people, watching in amazement as the Wall came down. It could probably move much faster than it was, as the whole ten-foot cross-section of it was basically a blade, but for now a couple inches a second was slow and visible progress that didn’t involve shrieking screams of severed steel, or unbelievably powerful cutting streams of other substances.

Using Fire would have been literally half as effective. Thunder was definitely the way to go, and if it made the entire place vibrate like a church hymnal, well, that’s why I left it Sacred.