Week 14, Thursday day: Ace builds something

On Thursday morning Ace started his day the usual way by going for a run. On this particular day, though he didn’t leave the compound, as he often does, after his run and come back in the afternoon. This day he came back from his run with a rather full Mule-tech over his shoulders. His first action was to dump the bag in the workshop and then get a shower. Once washed and dressed he went down to the workshop and unpacked the bag, glancing quizzically at the shrapnel imbedded in the walls. Inside the bag were a bunch of tools, an assortment of weapon parts and two heavy flamethrowers. The final item was a small briefcase sized box with Eroz printed on the top in small letter, which was laid delicately to one side and unopened.

Ace got to work, firstly laying everything out neatly and carefully on the work bench so that everything was easy to find and viable then dismantling the weapons and examining the components, putting each of these out clearly n a location that corresponded to where they were inside the weapons.

Ace was building a weapon, and would take some time.

There was, if anyone had good enough hearing to notice it, a violent hiss from the firing range, followed by the light sigh of someone injecting themselves with a medpack, and the tinkle of molten metal falling from a gun due to a directional error in the plasma discharge. Darya scratched her head as her hands reformed like magic thanks to the medpack, and looked at the plasma rifle. She was down to one fully functional one now, averaging a reverse discharge per day. This one just happened a bit earlier than expected, that's all.

Deciding that fixing it up and continuing sounded like a good idea, she headed up to the mechtronics lab. Noticing Ace already inside, she made herself as quiet as possible before sneaking up on him and whispering in his ear. "What you building?"

Well, she tried to, but she was also carrying a still hot metal case that occasionally made a ping noise as it cooled down, and dropped bits on the floor, so she was fairly easy to hear coming. (Stealth + Agility, critical botch!)

Ace turned to Darya as she entered the room. The fact that he was already facing the door, combined with her pinging case, meant that he saw her as soon as she entered. His head was bent down over the work bench and he was in the middle of dismantling the second flame thrower when she entered and he spoke without looking up.

“Mornin’ Dayra. How are you? You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve kind of taken up the whole room with this. If you give me a few minutes I’ll clear some space for you.”

He held a tube up to the light and looked at it quizzically, then he shook his head slightly and put it neatly down on the bench. He looked up at Darya at this point and smiled.

"It's fine, it's fine." She said, leaning over and putting her gun down on the floor. "I've still got another three downstairs I can use, I'll fix this one up later...are you dismantling Pinkie's flamethrowers?" She asked, frowning, looking at some of the parts. (Int+Assess Tech, pass by 0)

"These? No. I picked these up this morning. I've not really poked around inside a flamethrower before and I wanted to have a good look at the delivery mechanisms, see what I could do with them. I'm trying cobble together something to combat nano-swarms. I've got some chemicals from Mr. Positron that'll freeze very quickly when they combine, so I'm working on a delivery system. I'm not sure I can get flamethrowers to work though, I'm not sure the pressure is right in the system. I'm working on it.

What are you up to?"

Darya frowned, and leaned over, completely oblivious to Ace's question. "Ace...would the pressure problem be helped if we switched this..." She pointed at part of the firing mechanism "With the intake barrel from a plasma rifle? It needs quite a bit more pressure than in a flame thrower, since it has to compress the air from around the gun into the plasma bolt...so if we were to just modify it slightly, we could probably get it to fit..."

She suddenly snapped back, and smiled. "Ah, I've been training with plasma rifles all week. Want to be as good with them as my EMP rifle."

“Plasma. That’s... dangerous. Are you alright?”

Ace looked over at Darya’s hands, looking for the tell-tale signs of plasma discharge. Sure enough the marks were there, faded thanks to the composition H but there nonetheless. Ace spent a little longer than was strictly necessary looking at Darya’s hands before turning back to the guns, his face a little redder than before.

“Anyway, I’m not sure that would work. With the intake barrel. It’s designed to draw in from the surroundings sure, but it’s for gasses and we are not trying to oxygenate these chemicals. It’s the viscosity that’s the issue. These pipes are designed for a liquid of a completely different density and... well. It’s designed to be a flame thrower.”

Darya frowned, and tapped her chin with her finger again, as she does when lost in thought. "How viscous are these liquids then, exactly? I might be able to think of something..." She leaned over, plasma rifle forgotten, looking at the various parts on display.

"Take a look for yourself."

Ace walked around the table to the unopened box and put his right hand over the lock. There was a click as the bolts came free and ace lifted the lid to reveal a large amount of grey packing foam and two small canisters with liquids in them. One was light blue while the other was clear.

"It's defiantly not napalm. I'm half tempted to Tex-tape two industrial chemical throwers together and call it a day, but that's not really very elegant. And I doubt anyone but Ms. Pinkie would be able to use it."

"We could try that, I guess. Know where we can get hold of two industrial-grade paint strippers?" Asked Darya, carefully holding the liquid. "EI probably have some, though they might be the wrong kind of strippers..."

"This may be the first time that Seoul Waste Away being an actual company will come in handy. Have you got a Toxin Licence? I bet we can go and buy a few from Tracer-Li if we do so under the company name."

Darya nodded. "It's one of the things you get given on completion of training in Lanzas, so yeah, I can do it quite easily..." She frowned. "Tracer Li huh? I'm hearing about that a lot recently." She pulled herself up straight, and looked down at Ace. "Shall we go now, or shall we try more on this first?"

"Well, I want to get a working prototype, and ideally I want it to be easily portable like a flamethrower, rather than a hulking industrial tool. Licensing is an issue too, this thing has to be sold once we can turn the proof of concept into a production model.

Let's go get some now; it gives me more parts to work with."