Vaudevillain

Chapter 102: Droning On

Up in Skyline, Dylan and Jack had started to work on their different projects. Both of them sat inside the OOC lounge, the various NPCs milling about.

"Boss, you want a drink?" Cass asked.

"Not now," Dylan answered.

Jack looked over from her blueprints, "Do you think I could get something?"

Dylan looked over, "Cass, make her a drink."

"Sure boss," the butler bowed. He paced behind the counter and pulled out a few bottles. "What would you like?"

Jack turned to Dylan, "Can he make anything?"

"That's what I said in the description."

"Then, give me one second." Jack logged out of the game, appearing a few minutes later. "Okay, I want a Commonwealth."

"You got it," Cass said.

Dylan stared as Cass pulled out ingredient after ingredient and set them on the table. He caught a papaya, a dragonfruit, some coffee beans, and many more.

"What the h*ll did you request?"

"I looked up the most complicated drinks to make. The top one was called a Commonwealth. It apparently has seventy-one ingredients."

The two looked back over to Cass, who had finished setting all the ingredients on the table.

"Where does he get it all?" Jack wondered.

"I assume he buys it with a delivery system or something," Dylan said.

"What? You aren't curious? Like, at all?"

Dylan shrugged, "Other things were more important. Like building Skyline."

"Man, I would be all over this if I found out. Could I make drinks with poison, or drinks with odd ingredients? Does he have a limit to the drinks he makes?"

"We could always ask. Hey, Cass?"

"Yes, Boss?"

"Can you make any drink for me?"

"I'll try to, Boss."

"What if I wanted a drink with arsenic in it?"

"To poison someone? You'd have to get me the arsenic, but I could make it so no one tastes the poison."

"That answers that," Dylan said.

"No, hold on. Does he have a limit to the normal drinks he makes?"

Dylan turned back tot he silver butler, "Do you?"

"I don't know. But you've never given me an order I couldn't complete."

Jack turned to look at Dylan, excitement in her eyes, "We have to test this!"

"Shouldn't we do it later? We have to build the drones and the cloud machine, and the teleporter."

Jack frowned, mouth lilting to one side, "Fiiine. But if we get downtime, we have to test this."

"Sounds good."

Jack walked back over and grabbed her stacks of paper. She placed them down next to Dylan, letting the stack fall from a few feet above the table. They smacked onto the table, jolting Dylan. A few Jacques twisted to look a the commotion, turning away when they saw nothing happening.

Jack chuckled, "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you. I just figured it would be better to work together on this."

"Yeah, no problem."

"Great. Here's what I have so far." Jack handed over a sheet of paper to Dylan. On it was a drawing of what looked to be a minimalist helicopter. The blades were there, as well as its general shape, but the body held no doors or windows, and there weren't any landing treads.

"This is the first idea I have for a drone," Jack started. "The thought is to use cheap, light alloys that allow for easy maneuverability. Each would have around two hours of battery life and sit in various housing stations around the city." Jack pointed at some drawings on the side, "They come equipped with two laser rays, which hold separate batteries, so the drone doesn't lose power if it shoots too much."

Dylan looked over at the laser drawings. "I think it's too utilitarian," he said.

"This makes it easier to mass-produce them," Jack argued.

"That's not what I mean. Drones like these don't have a theme," Dylan explained.

"Worrying about a theme now means we lose efficiency," Jack said.

"Right, but what good is it to have these deadly weapons if they don't have style? Of course, we don't exactly have a theme for Menagerie either."

"But you do have one for Skyline," Jack replied. She grabbed the sheet of paper back and crumpled it. Taking another sheet, she started drawing again.

"If we have to include a theme like you say, it should base itself off the idea of Skyline."

"So, duality," Dylan said.

Jack nodded. "Traditionally, that means black and white, or anything opposite to the other."

"For Skyline, it's good and evil. Villains on the bottom with heroes on the top."

"Alright, so how do we represent that?"

"Skulls and capes?" Dylan said.

Jack snorted, "A skull drone with a flowing cape sounds like a mob in a fantasy game."

Dylan chuckled, "You're right."

"What about the yin yang symbol?" Jack asked.

"That's not bad. How would you design that?"

Jack sketched out a disk, "Like this?"

Dylan looked at the sleek disk on the paper, "Hmm. What if we split the drone in two? Make it so one has the black core with white flowing and the other the opposite."

"So, like this." Jack grabbed another piece of paper and sketched out two spheres, one white, one black. Curving out from the spheres were teardrop-shaped wings that housed small holes.

"Yeah, I like this," Jack said. "We could have the white drones hold live ammunition while the black drones have lasers."

"And the two drones work together to take down threats," Dylan continued. "I like it."

"Awesome. Let's see what our powers have to say about it."

Dylan opened up his power tab and went to work.

Designed to protect Skyline, this spherical drone with teardrop wings splits into two separate flyers, one with live ammunition and the other with lasers. The drones work together to take on threats that would harm the citizens of the flying city.

Philosophy Textbook (1)

Eye Drops (1 bottle)

25 mm Ammunition (1 case)

Batteries (10)

Computer (4)

Lens Focus (2)

Car Battery (1)

Sciencium (5 g)

Once his power finished, Dylan wrote down the requirements on one of Jack's sheets of paper. Jack compared it with her own power.

"Wow, it really pulls all sorts of things to make your tech, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. It's awesome."

"I'll bet." Jack went through the items on the lists, "So. I think your power is better if we aren't looking to modify anything. It doesn't cost a lot to build."

"I bet we could use the factory I made to do it," Dylan said.

Jack nodded, "The big issue is this." She pointed to the Sciencium requirement. "We can't replicate this, which means you get stuck producing until we hit a quota."

Dylan made a face, "That sounds terrible."

Jack shrugged, "It's not bad if you have other things to do. How often do you get Sciencium?"

"Whenever I use a piece, it takes twenty-four hours to refill it."

"That's two drones a day, and I bet you want to make other things too."

"Yeah, I'd rather not use up all of my resources making drones each day."

Jack furrowed her brow, her nose scrunching slightly as she did, "Using my design means buying a lot of alloys. Teardrops aren't meant to fly. They tend to fall with style."

"What if we use a less traditional design?" Dylan asked.

"Like what?"

Dylan grabbed a piece of paper and motioned for the pen, which Jack handed off, "What about this? Instead of two drones, we have one that changes colors periodically. The sphere is either black or white, and it surrounds it with energy of the opposite color."

"That's cool and all, but it sounds like something only your power could make. Mine tends to lean on more traditional designs."

Dylan scratched his head in thought, "Alright. What if they shoot energy of the opposite color?"

Jack thought about it. "Maybe? It depends on the energy being used."

"Try it and see?" Dylan asked.

"What the hey, it can't hurt."

Jack opened her power and went through the steps to create the new drones. In a minute, she was done.

"Looks like it's possible. Expensive, but possible."

"How expensive?"

Jack started writing on the paper while explaining, "Well, I'll need some powerful materials if we want what you suggest. My blueprint suggests a small fusion core for the power source, which means I need materials powerful enough to hold up under the stress of that."

Dylan made a face. "A fusion core alone sounds expensive."

Jack looked at him, "Well, you are a mad scientist. Can you come up with anything?"

"Do you want it to be a fusion core, or could it be any type of energy?"

"I feel like anything you can make that is almost perpetual motion would do it," Jack said.

Nodding, Dylan opened up his power tab, typing in fusion core.

This power source can be inserted into all manner of devices to make them run at maximum power!

Car Battery (1)

Nuclear Warning Symbol (1)

Alienite (1 g) or Sciencium (4 g)

"Well, that's simple," Dylan said.

"Why?"

"All I need for this is a car battery, a nuclear warning symbol, and some Alienite or Sciencium."

Jack stared at him for a second, then started to laugh. "Oh my god, ahaha!"

"What? What's so funny?"

"It's not you," Jack wheezed. "I'm imagining someone taking a car battery, slapping the sticker on it, and calling it a fusion core."

Dylan smiled, then started laughing as well as the image appeared in his head. It really seemed like the type of thing a mad scientist would do.

"Wait a minute," he said after he stopped laughing. "If it needs Alienite, what if you replaced the core with that?"

Jack sucked in a breath to calm down. "That works," She said. "But I was hoping we could find a way to not use those materials. We already need enough of it."

Dylan thought about it, "What happens if you use normal batteries?"

"The whole thing falls apart. If we want it to do what you asked for, we need more power."

"Hmm. What if we only have the drones make an electric field around them at first?"

"You know," Jack said, "that could work."

She activated her power and changed the description to make it release bursts of electricity.

"Right, this is much better. It only needs some lithium batteries to run. Everything else is much cheaper."

"You know," Dylan said. "In the end, we ended up making something similar to Nikola's weather machine idea."

"The first ideas are always the best ideas," Jack replied. "Now, come on, make that cloud machine so we can start testing Cass's abilities."

"Man, I thought you would have forgotten about that already."

"Fat chance," Jack scoffed. "You think I'm going to miss testing out a possibly broken interaction?"

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