“Okay, there’s a couple problems with that plan,” Natalie said as they pored over a blueprint of a modified altar of Gintax, sharing a seat in an abandoned restaurant.

“First, if you just sacrifice blood, you’re looking at a tiny amount of power generated. We’re talking a few ounces of areonite or the equivalent amount of Divine Favor per fish.

“If you use a typical shrine, it will mummify the entire fish, giving you a substantial amount more, but eating it afterwards might be impossible or dangerous.”

“Mmm,” Perry nodded, the gears already turning in his head.

“Second, as nice as Gintax is, the things he represents aren’t so nice, and a spell to exchange favors with him will invariably…leak a little bit into the environment. It’ll start small, with people accidentally cutting themselves more often, odd behavior, but if unchecked, will lead to a cloud of darkness that looms over the city and a society that worships and thrives on blood and death, much like the Nocul. Not inherently evil, but best avoided.”

“When did you get to be an expert?” Perry asked, pleasantly surprised.

“I was with Heather when a Nocul referred to me as a Priestess of Requiem,” Natalie explained. “So I decided to do some research on it on my own time, and I was surprised to discover that a Priestess of Requiem and a Spirit Smith are basically different cultural uses for the same talent. A Priestess of Requiem absorbs bits of the dead’s soul and uses them to act on their wishes after they’ve passed on. They do things like read wills, avenge murders, settle the restless dead, preside over burials…that sort of thing.”

“What does that have to do with Gintax?” Perry asked.

“Well, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. I was wondering how the techniques for a Priestess of Requiem could help with the Spirit Smithing, and wound up learning way more than I intended about Nocul culture and their god.” Natalie said, blushing.

“Well, I’m impressed. Anything else you thought of?” Perry asked.

“Well, third, the god of blood and death is not a vending machine, is he? I can’t imagine you’d get the exact same thing every time.” Nat said with a shrug.

“Do I gotta personally negotiate every blood sacrifice?” Perry mused. That would take up a lot of time.

“I don’t know,” Natalie said with a shrug. “I’m running up against the limits of things I studied.”

“What if I made some kind of anchor for the contract?” Perry thought aloud. “Well, I mean, that’s kind of what the original shrine is…I guess if I changed the shrine’s contract and allowed for some way to physically dial in different quantites for whatever we needed…

Except a moving part in the shrine and a way to dial in different things to trade with Gintax would inevitably lead to more leakage of Gintax’s influence. Best make separate shrines, at least for now.

Need to figure out a way to clean that up…actually that brings to mind…if Gintax leakage causes changes to the surroundings and the people, is there a way to use the effect to engineer your society? There might be deities whose influence would be beneficial in the right quantities.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be fun to centralize the control over the leakage of a dozen or more deity exchanges and use that to engineer the ideal metaphysical environment for the city? Like a city-wide 4th dimensional smog created entirely of luck, happiness and good vibes. Is that a thing that can be done? Cuz it sounds awesome.

“And fourth,” Natalie said, ticking off her finger as she continued, heedless of Perry’s racing mind. “I’ve gotten a lot better at Spirit Smithing, which has done nothing but informed me how weak and vulnerable a human soul is compared to that of a deity. Letting Gintax possess me to make a sacrificial blade would be incredibly dangerous.”

“Well, if you-“

“Which is why you’re going to help me make PPE.” Natalie said.

Perry raised a brow.

“There’s a lot of spells in Nocul culture regarding spirits and the dead.” Natalie said. “I mean, a LOT.”

“I get that. What are you thinking then, some kind of possession barrier?”

“Sort of,” Natalie said, pulling out a piece of paper and spreading it out on the table. On the paper was a design for a simple headband. “This is the crown I made for Heather that allows her and Anya to co-exist. There’s magic in the crown that regulates what the spirit living inside her can do and can’t do.”

“Ah,” Perry understood where she was going. A simple barrier preventing possession would simply make it more difficult for the possession to happen in the first place, but the nocul had more advanced techniques to make possessions less dangerous. Establish boundaries.

“Now, gods are a completely different order of magnitude compared to a spirit,” Natalie admitted. “But they are similar, and I think with your ability to strengthen rituals, we could make something that could make it safer for me to host Gintax.”

Perry glanced down at Natalie, whose eyes sparkled with the feverish delight of the Tinker Twitch as she began jotting down notes.

“Since you can sort of hem spirits in by using parts of their history, their identity, we can tap into the scriptures passed around by the nocul that venerate Gintax…” She said, her tongue peeking out of her lips as she started to get lost in her own world.

Perry rested his hand on his chin and admired Natalie’s ‘focused’ face reflected in the glass table for a moment before he spoke.

“And you’re sure you can do this?” Perry asked.

Natalie ignored him for a moment, jotting ideas down in a dense script before peering back up at him. “Well, no, I’m absolutely not sure. Being sure about things is a great way to be overconfident and make mistakes. But…I’m approaching the limits of what I can learn about Spirit Smithing through practice and self-study,” She admitted with a frown.

“Seeing something as old and knowledgeable as Gintax create a divine artifact firsthand could provide insight into dozens of techniques and interactions I don’t even know about yet. It could push me forward by decades.”

She paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “I think that eventually, the benefits will outweigh the risks of summoning Gintax, and that’s why I’m doing research and coming up with a plan now. The prep work is going to be exhaustive, and I’d like…to do it with you.” Natalie’s voice softened and she wiggled in his lap.

Perry considered for a moment, addressing all four issues Natalie had brought up.

“Okay, so what I’m thinking is, if we just use a blood-shrine to Gintax, we can get people used to the idea. No need to have a sacrificial blade right off the bat for industrial levels of magical output. We can do small miracles to bring people around and create a proof of concept.” Perry ticked off a finger. “We can set up a single-output shrine for each different effect in order to reduce bleed through of Gintax’s power. I can also do some research into things that can either absorb or nullify Gintax’s influence. I’ve got a pretty solid idea that involves Astra.”

Or maybe…or maybe a lightning rod, Perry thought, realizing he’d only been thinking about adding powers to nullify each other, and not taking them out of circulation. He had an idea for that, too.

“I’ll work on managing the bleed-through with the prototype,” Perry said. “I’ll also look into reinforcing and preserving souls to try and view the PPE issue from another angle. Just let me know when you need my help on the manufacturing process.”

“Will do,” Nat said, nodding.

A week went by in a flash and Perry made minor tweaks to the pike trap, improving the safety precautions, ease of use, inlaying a layer of carved megafauna bone around the entire perimeter.

That sort of thing.

It was only producing one filleted pike per day, but the speed was going up as the workers got experience.

Getting through the scales and bone was still a bitch, but after a few iterations, they came up with oversized power tools ridden by workers on cherry-pickers to deal with the outer layers, while the fillets themselves could be moved with modified fork-lifts.

I guess three a day was optimistic, two might be the hard limit, Perry thought as he watched the hustle. There were people crawling over the dead fish like ants, throwing lines to the people up top to hook under the skin at access points where the cherry-picker power tools had cut guidelines.

It was a pleasure to see people working with that kind of teamwork and focus, but it came from a bit of a dark place. Men and women had lined up to crews when they heard that Perry was paying workers with more than enough meat to feed themselves and their family plus a little extra to trade. A square thirty pounds of meat a night.

Perry had to turn most of them away.

Even now, people were lined up at the bank, watching the process with hunger plainly etched across their sunken faces.

Perry couldn’t feed everyone, but that was okay. He’d overestimated the amount of food they’d need, and underestimated the drive and ingenuity of the people living here.

There were pigeon traps on every roof, rat traps in every alley, vegetables growing in rooftop gardens, zealously guarded by men and women with guns and the will to use them. several dozen men and women had taken the plunge of renting one of Perry’s suits after seeing his men using them, and they were bringing in a nice bit of extra income (I.E. meat)

Things weren’t stable yet, not by a long shot, but Perry could tell they had taken the first step onto that road.

Speaking of stability, Perry thought, looking back to his prototype for balancing the local divine energy.

It was a two-pronged affair. On one side was a little box with a gentle green glow emanating from inside, and on the other was a lightning rod.

Or at least, something in the shape of a lightning rod.

The box used some of the grains of aeronite produced, converted them into life-energy, and used them to power an Astra’s mending. Perry’s hypothesis was that Astra and Gintax, being essentially opposites, would cancel each other out…hopefully.

At least that was one of the major difficulties he’d been forced to work around when first designing Perry’s Pernicious Prison.

Now, did it use up pretty much all the converted areonite to heal simple workplace injuries? Yes. But that wasn’t the point. It was a proof of concept, and Perry could tweak it until they still turned a profit.

Side note, watching iron corrode into Areonite under Gintax’s influence reminded me of the anode of a battery accumulating corrosion. Although an anode corrodes during discharge, not the charge cycle. Is there a way to discharge areonite (death metal) back to iron and essentially store large amounts of life energy? Is it rechargeable without Gintax? Is there an efficient way to store life-energy using death energy, iron and…hmm… Perry jotted down the idea and moved on, checking his sensor as he waited for someone to inevitably show up with a gash or lost finger.

The ‘sensors’ were materials sacred to Astra and Gintax, cut into tiny monocrystalline slivers and suspended in oil, their casings thick, climate controlled, stabilized and loaded with powerful reading equipment. Ideally, the only thing that could affect them was not on this plane of existence. If they showed any change in state of matter, it would therefore be extradimensional in nature.

They fed into a computer which interpreted any miniscule change in a simple activity chart.

To Perry’s delight, the Gintax needle had been growing in energy for the last couple days, twitching back and forth with greater and greater enthusiasm as eddies of Gintax’s corruption wafted past the sensor like eddies of air.

I think it’d about time we gave this a test.

With the sheer number of people and the frenetic pace they worked at, he didn’t have to wait long.

“Hey boss, we got one,” Tom said, escorting a brown-haired young woman with a deep cut in the meat of her palm.

“I can keep working,” She begged. “Just let me wrap it up and-“

“You’re not getting fired,” Perry said to put her at ease as he motioned her over. “Just stick your hand in that box.” Perry turned to the needles, eagerly waiting. A moment went by as nothing happened.

He glanced back over at her and spotted her staring warily at the otherworldly light emanating from the box.

“Ummm…”

“It’s fine, it’ll fix your hand, and then you can get back to work.”

Perry had made sure it would work on androids in advance.

The woman screwed up her courage and closed her eyes, shoving her hand in the box.

OOOOOH BOY!

Both needles flared to life on Perry’s sensors, while the woman’s hand knitted itself back together.

So, does introducing a bit of Astra’s influence to the local metaphysical environment calm down Gintax’s?

The answer: not really. The two needles were slightly more energetic for a while, before returning to their baseline.

If there was a decrease, it would only be measurable by a machine, but the biggest clue it probably didn’t work was the fact that Astra’s weaker influence wasn’t destroyed. If the two canceled each other out as Perry hypothesized, it should’ve been destroyed instantly like a matter-antimatter reaction.

I wonder why the two canceled each other out in my spell? Their application and not their energy? Could be a different state of magical matter, or perhaps they had an outlet to exhaust their potential while these are just sitting in the atmosphere like charged particles waiting to make some lightning.

Speaking of…

Perry moved over to his ‘lightning rod’ and made sure it was in good condition. It was a tube filled with sacred text to Gintax, written on sacred material, in sacred ink. It was designed to befoul the text with antagonistic ideology sacred to Astra about a thousand times a second, at a rate that could only be sustained for a couple seconds before it would literally catch fire.

Perry’s thought process on this was such:

The age-old question was ‘are gods sapient or just clouds of energy shaped by the beliefs and perception of their followers?’

If the answer is the latter, then the punishment for sacrilege is set in stone and will not be tempered by a conscious, carefully considered response to an obvious provocation.

Sure, Perry had talked to Gintax in person, but that didn’t necessarily rule out the cloud of energy hypothesis.

“Everybody clear out!” Perry shouted, motioning his workers back until they were some fifty feet away from the lightning rod.

Perry got to a safe distance, and flipped the switch.