***Mason Pierce***

Mason’s grip tightened on his prawn gun as the boiling seas crept closer to the wall.

It was almost a relief when the first Prawn began climbing the side of the wall, it’s stubby limbs clinging to the smooth surface of the wall, dragging a bulbous head out of the water that looked something a cross between the now-extinct beluga whale and a praying mantis.

Mason’s breath grew ragged against his will, just waiting here with his gun raised felt like he was running a marathon.

I’m gonna ask Stacy to marry me.

The prawns emerged from the water, bearing the scars of their never-ending oceanic war with professor Replica’s robots. Sadly that meant only the strongest made it to land to breed.

Like a school of salmon, they mindlessly threw themselves against the human’s defences, and while the wall was a well-oiled machine designed to toss as many prawn back into the ocean as possible using simple concrete rollers on steel bearings and flipping platforms that dumped their contents out into open air…

Some still made it to the top.

Watching the monster’s flopping struggle like caterpillars would almost be comical if not for their sheer size and power.

One of the creatures jammed their leg too deep into the concrete of the rolling wheel, cracking the material and stopping the rolling action.

More followed behind.

One got stuck sideways in one of the pit traps.

More crawled over them.

Mason’s knuckles whitened as the first prawn made its way up to the killbox. No longer a distant flopping caterpillar, now it was a titanic engine of destruction.

“Aim!” their sergeant hollered over the din of battle roiling up from the ocean.

They shouldered they guns, aiming for the creature’s eyes, the place a conventional prawn gun stood any chance of destroying.

“Fire!”

A deafening blast erupted from the line of guns, riddling the approaching monster with depleted uranium. It began to thrash inside the killbox, cracking the reinforced concrete even as a massive steel piston shoved the prawn off the wall with a hydraulic hum.

The dying prawn fell down to the ocean, but three more took it’s place, peeking above the edge of the wall in unison.

To make matters worse, one of them managed to get it’s stubby legs behind the piston, preventing the massive slab of steel from resetting.

Sergeant O’leary cussed and changed tactics. It was a bad sign for things to go poorly this early in the High tide, and it didn’t bode well for their survival.

“Steve, break out the new guns. Tommy, reload everyone’s prawn guns in the meantime.”

Corporal Steve whipped the crates at the back of the line open and began tossing the Tinker-made guns out to the soldiers on the wall, some ten, fifteen feet to each individual, who caught the bulky weapons without so much as a word, turning back to the prawns crawling over their last line of defence.

“Start with the closest one, then walk your way back to the furthest one, The goal here is to get the killbox up and running again! If we’re lucky, we’ll get the time we need to unstick it once these things are dead!”

Lord knows we’re not lucky. Mason thought, hefting his own tinker-tech gun.

All systems green, Battery one hundred percent. A woman’s voice said.

He pulled the trigger.

A neon turquoise beam of energy dazzled his eyes and drilled a football-sized hole through the Prawn’s impenetrable hide.

“Oh, hell, yeah!” Mason shouted, aiming at the next creature.

Course language detected. Suspending operation until apology is detected.

Mason blinked as the feminine voice began to emanate from his hi-tech gun again. To scold him.

“Um, I’m sorry? Please let me keep shooting?”

Since you asked so nicely, approaching coming closer becoming attaining perspective closer closer closer closer closer closer closer closer closer closer closer closer…

The gun began to get warm in Mason’s hands as the other guns fired their turquoise beams into the approaching prawns.

“Gun’s FUBAR!” Mason yelled as his weapon became hot to the touch, trapped in some kind of logic loop.

“Throw it over the wall!” Sergeant O’leary shouted, pointing out into the distance.

Without wasting a second, Mason heaved and threw the gun over the wall. A moment later there was an explosion of turquoise energy just beyond, and some kind of glowy cobwebs that hurt to look at.

High Tide, man. Mason thought, shaking his head, heading back to where Tommy was holding out a reloaded conventional prawn gun for Mason to snatch up. Everyone else’s gun lasted a few more shot than his, and they were excellent for clearing the wall, if a bit disposable.

IIII

The sound of hydraulic power reminded them of the piston retracting.

To their horror, a lighter prawn was riding the mechanism forward, charging them faster than a prawn’s usual movement speed.

That was right around when the last of their Tinker-tech decided to give up the ghost.

A snarling curse erupted from the sergeant as he flung the sputtering laser weapon aside and held out his hand for the conventional prawn gun.

Tommy threw one his way, and it landed in the sergeant’s hand, but the rest of their CO was already disappearing down the monster’s gullet.

Mayhem ensued.

The enormous creature thrashed around, scattering some soldiers like leaves while snacking on others.

It was a blur of panic and pain as every muscle in Mason’s body shredded itself to keep Mason alive, scuttling, dodging and diving out of the way of the humungous monster’s mindless flailing, all while ejecting hot casings from the massive gun and replacing them with hand-length brass over and over.

He got a shot off into the creature’s eye, but it wasn’t a lethal wound, and when the thing stopped flailing, it oriented on the one who’d damaged it.

Mason patted his bandolier and found it completely empty as the slavering monster heaved its bulbous head over him.

The rest of his unit was gone or pasted, and Mason had stuck around to fight like an idiot. Now he was gonna die like one.

A man dressed in eye-catching spandex sprinted past Mason with a murmured apology before he threw himself into the prawn’s face, entering the creature’s mouth and bursting out through the top of its skull in a rain of gore.

The monster collapsed to the ground, jaws inches away from Mason’s feet and the pool of blood around it.

When did that happen!? Mason thought, clamping his hands down on the bloody tear in his abdomen.

Mason leaned back the concrete lip of the line and focused on breathing. He could taste blood and his lungs burned violently. Women with big red crosses on their helmets picked him up by the armpits and hauled him away.

The line faded from view as another batch of soldiers took their positions, squaring up like nothing had happened.

“Would one of you ladies marry me?” Mason asked, whatever they were pumping into his system loosening his tongue.

“What about Stacy?” one of the medics asked, raising a brow.

“Life’s too short to wait for Stacy.” Mason murmured, his head lolling from side to side.

“He’s on a lot of morphine,” the other medic said. “Don’t listen to what he’s saying. He won’t even remember it.”

“Screw Stacy.” Mason muttered, his vision fading. “I just want a nice girl to pamper me. I don’t wanna end up like my dad...”

***Perry***

Ants? ANTS!?

Like I would use ants.

Dave is a backwards grass-eating savage from a planet where they were still leeching people when High Tide forced them off-planet. Of course he doesn’t know about robotic arms and CAD.

Perry’s new plan was to use Dregor’s Binding on a miniature of the lot and Paradox it up a bit.

Perry understood why use the ants, because you would have to do all the find detail work on the model in advance before the Binding spell was used. Any mistake or correction you tried to make would permanently scar the end result.

But if Perry had something that didn’t make mistakes and worked faster than ants? That would do what he wanted it to do.

I’m gonna need several robotic arms, a Terry-brain relay microchip, and a tiny processor and printer. Hmm, also 3-d printer using Dregor’s Flacidity to rearrange the model seamlessly.

That would certainly make the amount of materials I need far less.

The first step was creating a model using Miniature Vistas.

Miniature Vista (Advanced Difficulty)

Ingredients: 4 compasses with Tengan bone needles. 3 Eye of Earth-hawk, block of pure clay mixed with Mimic blood.

Place the compasses at the four corners of the area to be modeled. More compasses may be used to define more specific borders.

Suspend the three eyes of the Earth hawk ten drogo above the ground, equidistant from each other by two thirds the width of the area to be modeled. The hawk eyes must be facing inward and slightly downward.

The harnesses for the eyes cannot be blocking the vision of any of the other eyes unless the user wishes to include it in the finished product.

The block of mimic-infused clay is placed at the center of the land to be modeled. Once the block has been set within sight of the eyes, the mimic blood will activate and begin to render the Miniature Vista, until all the compasses present have begun to point directly at the clay, at which point the model is fixed.

Well, that’s a pain in the butt.

But not impossible.

Perry got to work, sinking into the Tinker Twitch like a comfy pair of slippers.

The Spell-frame took some complicated work, but he managed it by including drones., allowing the eyeballs to have unobstructed views of the landscape.

Perry was briefly tempted to make Floating Armament holsters for the eyeballs, but drones were less time consuming to purchase and they didn’t have any magical ingredients that could have strange effects on the finished product, AND drones could be directed by the program, rather than needing Perry’s Input.

The finished product looked like a bomb-defusing robot with a bunch of drones piggybacking.

All Perry had to do was spraypaint the corners of the lot with a specific reflective paint that would signal to the robot where the corners were.

Everything else was automatic.

LairFoundation.EXE

Perry watched with his arms crossed as the spell-frame wheeled over to the corners of the ruined lot, robot arm delicately placing one compass after another. Using the four corners as landmarks, the robot found the exact center of the lot and disgorged the lump of clay while the three drones on its back took off.

The robot backed away and stopped next to Perry outside the lot, when the blinders were removed from the eyeballs, and the drones began slowly rotating on a perfect circle around the clay, the bird eyeballs scanning the entire lot. That was a Paradox addition.

In front of his eyes, the clay took on the shape and color of the damaged lot, right down to the bits and pieces of twisted sheet metal strewn across the abandoned storage facility, in perfect detail.

Once the compasses were locked in place, Perry shut off the spell frame, re-captured the ingredients that weren’t consumed, and took the model of his lot back to his house.

The next part…was a little icky.

Dregor’s Binding (Intermediate difficulty)

Ingredients: Shadowcat Umbilical cord, Prox Semen,

Create a likeness of a person, place or thing. Accuracy of reproduction will effect strength of bond.

Create a diluted mixture. 1/500th shadowcat essence, 8/500th Prox Essence, 491/500th water.

Soak the likeness in the diluted mixture of the two ingredients for several months while keeping the mixture completely isolated from sunlight, until it has become completely inundated by the mixture.

Once the result is bathed in sunlight, the shadowcat Umbilical will have a negative reaction that will trigger the essence of the Prox semen, binding the two objects together.

For a stronger result, infuse the primary object with Prox semen as well.

Which was how Perry found himself standing in the middle of his land the next day, hosing everything down with a custom-built hose attachment that added just a little bit of magical creature….issue…to every gallon. He was wearing overalls and a ballcap, not wanting to have to incinerate any of his good clothes.

Nor did he want to be recognized as the indiscriminate jizz-sprayer.

Magic is gross sometimes, Perry thought to himself, scowling and keeping his mouth closed tight behind the mask and eye goggles.

He tried to treat it like any other ingredient or spell he’d ever done…but nobody wanted magical jizz in the eyeballs or mouth.

Probably.

Once that was taken care of, Perry went back to his house and uncorked the depressurizer, allowing air back into the mixture.

What he’d done was taken a page from other high-tech infusions and run the mixture and the model through a depressurizer, allowing all the tiny air-bubbles in the model to be replaced by the binding mixture.

In hours, not months.

When Perry pulled the replica of his land out of the depressurizer in the dark room, it felt like it had gained an extra ten pounds, which was exactly what he wanted.

Perry’s spell-frame quickly put the product in a ‘light oven’ that baked the result in full-spectrum light from every direction, even beneath it, making sure there was a strong, consistent reaction from the shadowcat essence.

Perry watched as the Shadowcat essence fled the model in dark mists that rolled away from the piece. The absence seemed to liven the model and make it more realistic than before as a greyness he previously hadn’t notice faded away.

Then Perry saw something interesting.

A tiny bit of garbage in the model was caught by the nonexistent wind and blew halfway across the miniature storage facility before it caught against a sharp piece of scrap metal, still flapping wildly in the wind.

Wow. That’s cool.

Once the model was done baking in artificial sunlight, Perry carefully lifted the entire thing and placed it in his newly created frame.

It was something out of a tinkerer’s wet-dream, a cube frame of aluminum with dozens of tiny robotic arms bearing dozens of tiny cutters, welders, polishers, melters, scoopers, drip-catchers, q-tips, and tiny little grippy hands.

Cost to repair storage facility: 2.75 million dollars.

Value once repaired: 2.55 million.

Total amount spent on ingredients thus far: 15k.

Let’s make some magic happen.

Perry took the contraption out to his lot and set it up so he could watch the action and turn it off if there was a hitch.

Once he had it set up and had situated himself and the controller in a life-guard-like chair overlooking the whole process, Perry flipped the machine on.

Lair.EXE

The first thing the tiny metal arms hovering over his model did was pick up all the debris

Perry watched with glee as all the damaged bits and bobs began levitating to and fro with machine precision, levitating into giant, sorted, invisible cups, which were then subjected to a gentle Dregor’s flaccidity.

Perry was even more gleeful when the scrap melted together and was set aside for future use with the 3-d printer. The drills began to dig out the base of his lair, moving faster than a conventional construction team could ever hope to, the dirt, asphalt and concrete sorted, melted and set aside to be printed.

Waste not, want not, Perry thought as he settled back into his chair, unable to resist the urge to grin and steeple his fingers together.

“Um, excuse me, sir?”

“Eh?” Perry said, glancing over the edge of his observation chair. A couple stories below him was a police officer, craning his neck and shielding his eyes to look up at him.

“Do you have a permit, um…”

“Paradox,” Perry said. “And I’m not sure there is a permit for what I’m doing.”

“Can I get you to sign this?” The police officer asked, holding out a form of some kind.

Aw man, don’t ruin my buzz with bureaucracy.

Of course the police officer couldn’t make him do anything, but refusing to do so was a Cowl move and would leave a lasting spot on his record.

Perry sighed and began climbing down, the land behind him continuing to be drilled, cut, and reformed by invisible tools.