SSD 5.15 - Headaches

Love you all, thank you for reading. The last few days have been a challenge, but I wanted to get something up for all of you. So I hope you all enjoy.

And he stepped upon a tiny crack, which swallowed him up. The others simply nodded, for such was the fate of those that tempted the spirits.

-From Ugyath’s Tales for Children

==Caden==

The clouds of dust slowly settled, my phantom steps doing nothing to disturb them further, and the glittering remnants of the lights drifted down to settle like the floor of an industrial pixie harvesting factory. No Tinkerbells were harmed in the making of this product…

Silvery steel dust and glittering motes of light still hung in the air, yet, adding an otherworldly cast to the entire room.

Sufficient force is still dangerous.

The lights in the ceiling above it, where they had been flush with the cube, were shattered and cracked, leaving a few mostly hollow sections of glowing crystal, like geodes grown from the steel ceiling.

That level of destruction would be impressive… if those weren’t the most intact lights in the entire room. All the rest had been scoured down to the steel beneath. The largest intact shards, in the rest of the room, were no more than half an inch across and lay buried beneath mounds of dust.

Still an effective protection.

I nodded absently.

There was still plenty more to learn, just with contracting space, as was obvious as the settling dust allowed the compressed cube to become visible, but I fully expected that layers of spatial barriers were going to be added to my defenses shortly.

Huh…

With the subsiding of the dust, the bottom of the cube was now visible. A part of that simply revealed the scars on the steel beneath it, which was entirely expected, though, again, for all that the cube was at ground zero to the blast waves, the steel beneath it was barely touched. The surrounding floor was visibly distinct, having been heavily scarred, especially on the side where the super sonic projectile had struck, leaving the still shiny sections of floor beneath the cube to stand out even more.

Even more than that, however, the presence of chunks of crystal and steel that looked several feet across inside the cube were very noticeable.

With my senses, I could tell what was actually happening.

The interior of the cube was still the same size as ever, at only a few millimeters across. The giant chucks of debris, when felt from inside it, were actually tiny.

But the light enters the cube, hits them in the much smaller space, then bounces back out…

Which led to this.

It was obvious, now that I thought about it, but with the much smaller interior space, it essentially functioned as a magnifying glass. Seen from outside, the space looked the same when it was empty, since all the spacial distortion was undone at the boundary.

However, a few specs of debris, in a tiny space, looked much larger when they were, at least when they were scaled up to match the total ten foot cube.

From this perspective, the ‘large’ chunks of crystal inside the cube didn’t even appear to be glowing; the light they were putting out was minuscule in comparison to their apparent size, and to the light that was reflecting off of them.

Offers a way to solve the invisible maze problem, too… Just shove some bread or something against the wall…

Actually, worth a test…

Should leave this room intact, though. Should see if having a physical impact drains some fundamental energy it is drawing on to remain stable, or something. Might collapse later, and presumably it would happen faster than my last one, if that is true.

Damn it, should set up a proper stress test first.

I cleared out a long section of stone, sticking with my current ten foot by ten foot approach. At the end of the corridor, I shrunk the space of the last ten foot cube. I replaced all the walls with ridiculously thick walls of steel, turning it less into a hallway, and more into a giant sealed vessel.

Could dive to the bottom of the ocean with this thing. Would probably cause it less issues than what I am about to do to it…

Tapping into the dungeon automation, I set all the walls to automatically repair. Any debris, dust, and so on, would automatically get dissolved, as well. Then I set up a recurring teleport into the room, drawing from my stocks of hyper-velocity weapons. Those weapons were, of course, already set to replenish automatically, because not enabling automatic reloading of weaponry was idiotic when you had the option.

I enabled the changes and the first blast ripped through the corridor as it hit an immovable wall.

Just going to let that run.

Good thing I have so much empty space right now.

Fortunately, hollowing out another entirely new room took very little time.

Phenomenal cosmic powers…

This room was larger, to suit the nature of the test. It was still only ten feet high, but was one hundred feet long on each of the horizontal axes. Everything was stone, with crystal lights flush with the ceiling, since I wasn’t planning on running any more stress tests.

Have plenty of other types of testing to do, and still don’t know what pushing does.

With a quick bit of planning, I made a small maze, pulling inward with Spatial Elasticity to create linked cubes in my now standard size.

When I was done, I put a physical body inside and inhabited it.

The maze was, essentially, invisible, but seeing through multiple walls enhanced the shimmer effect, making the far wall slightly hazy.

Not a terrible effect. Would make a larger maze, even if invisible, more difficult to traverse and see across the distance. A feature, not a bug.

At least for me.

Of course, I’m here to test one of the other potential feature/bug combos.

I stepped forward, feeling along the wall as I moved.

The wall was smooth, impossibly smooth, and very warm. Trying to push in farther was impossible, but lateral movements had as much resistance as air, since that was all I was pushing against.

Weird surface. Possibly dangerous to touch, for a normal person.

The hot plasma inside was only really there as a function of compression, but when someone put their finger against it, any tiny bit of their flesh that slipped inside could be burned.

Would truly be only surface level burns, though.

I shook my head, looking at the impossible wall, then grinned.

I know what is happening, and it still gives me a headache. This is going to be a nightmare for everyone else.

I ran my hand along the boundary where two cubes met. There was no seam, no hitch in movement or change to the smoothness; neither had I expected any. I could feel the perfect transistion in space that had occurred when I made two cubes next to each other.

From the perspective of space, they were not individual cubes anymore, but instead a continuous area of spatial distortion. From an internal perspective, it wasn’t a series of tiny cubes, but more a tiny corridor.

Can easily link them together to form larger structures, which work as though they were made that way from the start.

With a moment of thought, I fabricated a piece of bread. The bread was something that I had been offered. I had actually been offered a decent amount of food by now, and I had needed to adjust my puzzle parameters to properly distinguish between different types, just so that slight alterations did not keep giving lots of points.

Probably still the easiest way to make new things to get new points.

One particularly cheeky cook had tried offering food cut into different shapes, starting with simple things, and then getting to the fancier stuff like cute animals carved from gourds, baked into bread, et cetera.

While I was pleased to get the variety, it had necessitating changing the rules around. I had left his previous store of points alone, but the next time he had tried it, he had gotten nothing but a note, which applauded his ingenuity, and that he would need to offer large amounts of different varieties to get even a single point for any materials, techniques, and processes that I already had. It also noted that while any future exploits in my automatic system were likely to be caught earlier, I would also offer some form of reward for finding them.

An official plaque stating the same rules was also posted. In addition, I had updated the puzzle system to be cumulative, so if someone gave me new animal shapes carved from wood, but also did different animals in food, then they would get credit for both, and the cumulative total between them would be looked at to determine if they earned another token.

He had seemed a bit sad about the whole thing, but the end of my note had made him thoughtful.

Better to reward the people who are clever enough to figure out the flaws. If nothing else, it provides an incentive to find them.

Admittedly, giving the points to cook who gave me a bunch of tasty food doesn’t exactly annoy me. It could have been just basic shapes in stone. Hell, Zidaun could have done that, if he realized.

Some things, like cuts of gems, or crystal, would still require my personal attention. And the puzzle system would flag when one person was only providing a bunch of new shapes, so I could determine if what they were offering was actually valuable, delaying any payment until I gave the okay.

Still give a master artisan plenty of points if someone gives me some incredible artwork. I don’t care if I have already have all the materials it is made of.

I’ll have to figure out how to handle judging things when I have a full city living here. Something to assign to the Adar, maybe?

It still rubbed me wrong, that they were essentially slaves, but I wouldn’t improve things by just ignoring them, either.

Maybe find some people that would actually want that kind of work?

Honestly, that was probably a good strategy overall. Give them the chance to pursue their passions, even if they normally wouldn’t be considered useful.

I refuse to believe that classes cannot make every skill useful in some fashion. I don’t care if it specializes in underwater basket weaving; it will have a use.

Regardless of the whole mental tangent, it was easy to make the pattern for bread. I had enough types that I needed to actually pick a type.

Ultimately, I chose the relatively common whole wheat bread that seemed to be a staple in many adventurer’s packs.

Absently, I tore a bit off to chew myself.

Quite good. Definitely much coarser flour than home.

The bread was chewy, sections of larger grain providing additional texture.

No sugar in this, still has a nice sweetness.

Culinary experience aside, I took a bit of the bread and shoved it against one of the invisible walls.

The wall stopped being invisible, instead showing an enormously enlarged ten foot tall section of compressed bread. Since things were no longer stuck as isolated cubes, the bread also pushed slightly into one of the adjoining areas.

One the whole it looked really strange.

Sure, it’s odd, but someone could use something like to delineate where they have been, or just provide outlines in the maze.

Honestly, I’ll probably let them get away with it for now. Perhaps later I could have mazes that dissolve away anything that enters the cubes.

Since I am offering them extra lives, I am half tempted to demand that they let the adventurers experience things blindly. If I didn’t already care about Zidaun and his team, I might do it…

Eh, no need to get everyone too pissed off at me. I’m sure I’ll already have plenty of complaints.

Onto the next test.

The next one was rather simple, and I already knew the answer, theoretically, but I was going to need to verify it before I believed it.

Right in front of me, I excavated a ten foot cube in the stone, then compressed the space. I walked forward, and then put my foot on top of it. Then I took another step.

To all appearances, I was standing on nothing.

Yep, same compression effect.

There was no real reason to believe that it would work differently in another direction, but I needed to verify it.

Not just invisible mazes, invisible three dimensional mazes.

A rather enormous one of these is getting added to my defense tunnels ASAP.

Well, I already have a pit, which would be good for the next test. Might as well use it.

I stepped back, going back to the solid stone.

With a faint push, I reset the space inside the pit to standard. Then I filled it with water.

When I went to compress the space inside, water burst out of the pit in every direction. It created an interesting effect when it hit the invisible walls. Each one suddenly showed water several feet high. Even when the water had spread out, the effect remained.

My senses let me tell what was happening.

Surface tension, the water wants to have a certain minimum grouping.

With the increased exposure to outside air at the boundaries, it pushed the water to remain inside. It was still only at the same level of the rest of the room, but the magnification effect triggers, and effectively the water could have flowed outwards to fall down in the parts where the water was exposed to the surrounding air.

Ugh, again, these effects hurt my head.

For now I looked at the pit in front of me.

It was obvious what happened. Gases were generally easy to compress, and they simply wanted to stay at equal pressure to everything around them.

Arguably, everything wanted to stay at equal pressure, but not everything was so willing to compress. Water, for example, was generally considered an incompressible fluid. This was a lie, of course, as many things in science are, simply because the generalization is more useful than the exacting truth. The truth being, that the water at the bottom of the oceans was denser than the water at the top, and with enough pressure just about anything could be compressed.

However, not everything was happy to be compressed. When you tried to compress water, you didn’t just need to contain the amount of pressure that a volume of water that size would exert on a larger container. That was essentially how air worked. If you compressed air, it just put the same amount of force out, now hitting a smaller area.

Instead, with water, and with plenty of liquids and solids, if you tried to compress them into a smaller space, then they would need drastically more pressure. And, as is relevant in my case, if you spatially compressed an area filled with water, then the pressure inside would drastically exceed the atmospheric pressure being placed on it, even when that pressure was exaggerated a bit.

All of which went to explain why I was standing there with wet clothes and a thin puddle of water covering the maze.

Honestly, should have expected this.

Probably could use this to make some fantastic traps though.

Not that I haven’t already made use of water to cut things in some of them. Could get a lot more force this way though.

Assuming I don’t just crack all the surrounding stone, anyway, but then it is a projectile trap too.

Eh, whatever.

Time to move onto the other side of the equation. Time to push space and see what happens.