“Y’Kuingi!” Calvin shouted upon seeing his erstwhile pseudo-fiancee.

Is it just me or has she grown a couple inches? Calvin wondered as he did the traditional crabwalk-arms-raised greeting of The People.

“Welcome to the village, my lord.”

“Your lord, is it?” Calvin asked. “Since when?”

“Since I discovered the human custom of feudalism. If we take you as our lord, you are honor-bound to protect us from all comers.”

Calvin’s brows rose. “There’s the matter of taxes –“

“Already worked out with ‘Kyuriawei’.” She said, carefully enunciated the foreign name with her inhuman mouth-parts.

“Am I just a step behind everything?” Calvin asked.

You were training for the sake of defending yourself, others, and your Status as a Royal. You were doing exactly as you should, Ravager.

Gotta learn how to accept delegation, Calvin thought, shaking his head slightly. It slightly irked him when people did things in his name, but that was just part of the Wizard King package he was working his way up towards.

Besides, Calvin had no problems with defending the Ooze weavers. Abyss, he probably would have done it for free.

Out of all the people he’d come across, they’d been…less reprehensible than others.

Just wait until they get a taste for money and a caste system. Elliot said.

“I want you to keep in mind that not all lords take that responsibility seriously, and you should make provisions to defend yourselves.” Calvin said.

“As you will, my lord,” Ykuingi said.

“So, Y’kuingi, can I take time out of your day for a tour?” Calvin asked. “I want to see everything that’s changed since the last time I was here.”

Her shrimp-like mouth-pieces twitched in the affirmative, and she gratefully took the opportunity to foist her work off on her underlings. She marched away from the leadership hut, showing him around the village.

“You likely saw the holy grill on the way in.”

“Holy?”

“Cook is a holy position of great respect and longstanding tradition,” She said, motioning to the male ooze-weavers frantically flipping fish fillets.

Say that five times fast.

“In three months?” Calvin asked, brows raised.

“Actually we’ve only had the grill for three weeks,” Ykuingi said, her posture suggesting great humor. “But the males love it. They get very protective over the grill and get aggressive when females try to relieve them.”

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my god, that is hilarious! In all worlds, Bar-B-Q shall forever be the domain of the penis!

“I think they just want something they can be better at,” Calvin said, ignoring Elliot’s insane rambling.

“We thought so as well.” Y’kuingi said as they watched a larger female approach for her food at an angle that could be misconstrued as attempting to take over the workspace. The male on that end of the grill faced towards her and lifted up his forelegs like an angry spider ready to throw down.

The female cautiously took a grilled fish, keeping an eye on the male zealously guarding the holy space. She took the fish up to her mouth parts and nibbled a bit before patting the male on the head, skittering away from the violent return flailing of the male’s legs.

The male seemingly huffed as the female left, getting back to work grilling the fish that was streaming into their huge shared workspace.

Now that he was alerted to it, Calvin glanced around the lakeshore and saw several examples of the larger sex physically teasing the smaller males, roughhousing with them a bit before running away and hiding, peeking from around corners to see if they were being chased.

“What’s with the roughhousing?” Calvin asked.

Y’kuingi glanced at him for a bit. “Let me show you something,” She said, motioning for him to follow.

Calvin shrugged and he and his princess train – plus Learner – followed after him. They went a bit deeper into the woods, into a nook that was hidden by thick trees and carefully woven foliage.

What Calvin saw boggled the mind.

Thousands of big old slimy grubs, about the size of Calvin’s torso, were seated in orderly rows at plastic desks. The grubs didn’t have working limbs, only little stubs of thick hair to move on. Instead, they carefully drew messy pictures with their mouthparts on pieces of washable vellum. They were overseen by a dozen female Ooze-weaver nurses, moving quickly between them, cooing at their progress and teaching them bits and pieces of language here and there, though the grubs themselves were mute.

“There’s been something of a population boom. In another two years, our workforce will double, and I fear we may suffer some sort of…

“Rebound?” Calvin asked.

“I do not know this word.” Y’kuingi said.

“It’s when a trend goes one direction, then reverses violently or painfully.” Calvin said.

“Then it is a good word.”

Y’kuingi continued. “You asked what the rough play was. We are well-fed like we haven’t been in years, and certain…instincts are flaring up.”

“They’re horny.” Calvin said, nodding.

“Precisely.”

Well, I always wanted to know what a horny Ooze weaver looked like. I can cross that off my bucket list I guess.

The princess showed him to the plastic refinery, which was a sight to behold.

It was composed of several large vats connected by tubes, with slowly leaking runoff channels that could be opened at a moment’s notice. Female Oozeweavers tirelessly ran nets through the ooze while others held the Diocese’s emitters, spending Bent to convert the raw sludge into a grey slurry. Still more came by and spat huge gobs of slime into the vats before going about their days.

“Can you tell my about who is required to put their Binding in the vats?” Calivn asked, watching the female leave. “Are there shifts, or is it just kind of…self service?”

“Since we produce Binding in our own bodies, we cannot conjure out of it in thin air, nor can we set an arbitrary quota,” Y’Kuingi said, nodding. “Instead, all people aside from Gravid soon-to-be-mothers are encouraged to spit whatever spare Binding they have before they enter torpor for the day, allowing their reserves to rebuild as they sleep. This takes a toll on our bodies, but between the extra food, and weighing our choices in favor of extra points of Endurance, We have mostly compensated.”

“I see.” Calvin said, nodding. “Kurawe, as soon as my visit is over, arrange for Ooze weavers to be carted to the temple of awakening and given their second and third Break.”

It will impose a time cost on the train system, but I believe raising our Plastic manufacturer’s Breaks will be beneficial in the long run.

I’m going to have to make a passenger train, aren’t I?

Your edicts to move people to and from the Temple of Awakening are beginning to be felt in our profit margin. Although Murak is aware of the benefit of Veteran laborers, he is nevertheless extremely uncomfortable earning less than the maximum amount of money form a given situation.

Calvin fixed his eyes on the ooze-weavers making plastic.

The process went like this: In the primary vat, the Ooze weavers would use the emitters to congeal tiny lumps of half-formed plastic. They fished these nuggets out of the mixure and tossed them in another, smaller vat where the lumps were rinsed with fresh lakewater.

The lakewater was then bled off, leaving the clean pellets all by their lonesome. The emitters were then used to turn them back into a slime, then gently mixed together to achieve fusion between the elements involved.

If the slime was mixed roughly, their end result would contain less plastic than otherwise.

Because the long chain polymers are getting busted up. Ooh, idea.

Once the second vat was thoroughly mixed, it would be hardened via Emitters.

This stuff wasn’t the finished product, it still needed to be sweated, allowing the slime that didn’t shift back to escape through pores in the material.

After a few revolutions of this, they had their plastic.

Calvin watched the entire process in fascination, from the giant vat of slime, they refined the material all the way down to a cube about two feet on a side of pure plastic.

Yeah, we’re definitely not winning any efficiency medals. But I do have some ideas.

“Science?” Calvin asked with a raised brow.

Science, bitches! Elliot bellowed.

“Pardon me, Y’kuingi, I’m going to create metal men.” Calvin said so she wasn’t completely dumbstruck.

Calvinian Summoning

46/54 Bent remaining

Twenty-six hundred normal sized Knick-knacks flooded out of the cloud of thick green smoke that covered the entire operation.

“Start setting up testing facilities. I want every different grade of filter over here. All the different acids over there. There might a catalytic effect, so make a row for testing monster extracts.”

Calvin dove into testing headfirst.

The idea was to find a process that maximized the amount of slime that got converted to plastic nuggets right out of the gate.

Seeing the amount of slime that didn’t make the grade lead Calvin to believe they were vastly underperforming.

I’m not using my Abilities to destabilize an economy…Calvin told himself. I’m using my Abilities to rapidly find a recipe that will allow someone else to destabilize an economy.

Calvin’s knick-knacks tested a thousand carefully measured units of slime, finding that, with the current method, approximately 0.05% of slime became plastic. If they could raise that to just one percent, that would increase their output by twenty times.

The first gains are always the easiest. We’ll most likely make that jump before dinner. It’s the scrabbling for that extra half-percent on the back end of ninety-nine point five that really challenges people like us.

They began a battery of tests. They changed the temperature, they changed the exposure to light, they changed the catalysts, adding things like salt, chalk, and practically anything that could be ground into a fine powder.

At their current stage of development, they didn’t need to know why a certain process made the plastic manufacture more efficient, only that it did.

They got results quickly.

If the temperature of the slime was raised, but kept below one hundred and eighty degrees, the percentage raised drastically.

Salt did nothing. Neither did chalk. The acid seemed to have a positive effect as long as it was diluted.

At Elliot’s suggestion, they tried different stirring mechanisms, designing something in Visualize that he called a ‘taffy puller’

They threw some of the thicker examples of ooze weaver slime on the machine – simulated by knick-knacks – and let them pull and fold the slime thousands of times.

Over time, the slime began to turn white.

Is it changing to plastic? Calvin wondered.

Oh no, that’s the air bubbles refracting the light so evenly that it looks white to the naked eye. What we’re really after is the gentle stretching and folding to make long chains. Like noodles.

Elliot’s suggestion raised the efficiency to a drastic 3.8%.

Removing light from the equation raised efficiency to 2.4%.

The weak acid set the rate to 2.1%.

Temperature control had a 1.3% effect.

All together, they achieved a multiplicative ten percent success rate.

10.00 Vs. 0.05

Calvin did some quick math.

Two hundred times the efficiency!

They didn’t find any catalysts that helped the solution, as a matter of fact, most of them did the opposite. Whatever the slime was made of, it was already in such a delicate balance that it didn’t take kindly to foreign medium.

There’s definitely something missing, though, Elliot brooded. We got such small increases in efficiency, which implies to me that there’s a component that there simply isn’t enough of.

“Hand me the notes for the P-series experiments,” Calvin said holding out his hand.

“Here ya go, boss,” Goob said, putting the notes in his hand.

Calvin glanced down at the notes in his hand, then up at Goob. Then down at the notes. Then at Goob.

Ella broke into a Guffaw. “Took you long enough!”

Kala, sitting on her lap, twittered in a very refined and princess-y way.

Learner was off trying to negotiate for an Ooze weaver corpse, so she didn’t get to see Calvin’s consternation.

“When did you get here?” Calvin demanded.

“I’ve been helping you with notetaking for oh…half an hour now.” The teen said. Goob was going on fourteen and just starting to sprout. The mop-headed boy had that young gawkiness to it that Calvin was just starting to grow out of.

“No, I mean how long have you been in the Ooze-weaver village.”

“I’ve been here for a few weeks, trying to improve plastic production, and…” he lowered his voice. “hide from girls.”

“Hide? Why would you need to hide from girls?” Calvin asked. Maybe it was a difference in life experience, but Calvin liked girls. Like, a lot. And they generally tended to be beneficial.

“Turns out the Ooze-weavers don’t have a concept of Yandere and none find me attractive in the least, so I’m safe here. I pray to all the gods that whatever evil spirit of ill fortune gave me the Yandere Magnet Skill be struck down by divine wrath.”

Yandere magnet…? I knew a guy who… I mean, if you gave the kid like a hundred pounds of fat and thirty years... the similarities are…

HOLY CRAP! Elliot shouted in the back of his head, making his ears ring sympathetically.

What is it!? Calvin thought, his body freezing.

That’s Doug! You sneaky son of a bitch, you’re back to finish the job, huh? You always said if you came back you’d give yourself the Yandere Magnet Skill, didn’t you, you traitor? Well your creepy preference for two-D anime girls has finally come full circle and given you away. Now is the time for you to finally taste my wrath!

Let’s do it! Elliot shouted. Let’s strike down the one who gave him that Skill with divine wrath! Little does he know, it was HIM! C’mon, let’s do it! He gets what he wants, and we get what we want. Everybody wins!

“No.”

“No?” Goob asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Calvin said waving his hand. “The dead guy who lives in my head says he recognizes you and wants to kill you. It’s no big deal.”

Calvin zoned out as Elliot’s cursing grew more heated.

“Kinda seems like a big deal.” Goob said, paling.

“Anyway,” Calvin said, stuffing his pinky in his ear as if trying to dig out the tiny voice shouting at him. “When you were doing your own experiments, did you have any –“

Wait, where’s everybody going? Elliot stopped shouting and asked a rational question.

Around them, the Ooze weavers were setting aside their nets and emitters, turning as one to file out towards the lake, creating an eerily coordinated procession.