Apocalypse: Generic System Macronomicon (miss read books TXT) 📖

The final lens had to be so much larger because the extremely concave lens spread out the rays at a terrific rate, and without a larger lens to catch them all, the power would be lost. Or perhaps fire Myst would get caught in the tube and melt the container to slag.

Whichever.

So the closer he got the two lenses together, the further out the focal point was, and the further away they were, the closer the focal point was to the two lenses.

Perfect.

Now Jeb just needed to prove it worked with the worm lens before he tore Ron’s flame lens into several pieces.

Jeb knew the same Myst could travel through multiple lenses, as evidenced by both the firefly lantern and the furnace he’d made.

Now, if it could travel through the same type of lens and alter its focal point, he should easily be able to make a range-setter for the Geysering Flame Lens’s explosion.

On a whim, Jeb switched the positioning of the lenses and found that they behaved exactly the same, if not slightly better.

As soon as this tutorial is over, I’m getting a book on optics and reading it cover to cover.

College was a long time ago.

Once that was taken care of, Jeb made a pair of lenses out of the gargantuan worm lens, and spent the next hour trying out different configurations.

It turned out poorly at first, the distance was somewhat inconsistent until Jeb thought of using a third lens at the beginning that was perfectly flat to be what turned the Myst from a vapor to a perfectly flat ray.

When he added that, the range-finder stabilized, and they were able to get repeatable range adjustments.

That taken care of, all Jeb had to do was design a corkscrew internal mechanism that would shift the middle lens back and forth by twisting it.

Jeb’s inhuman Nerve allowed him to picture every part of the contraption and then make each piece using the castoff shavings from Amanda’s armor, injection-casting it into telekinetic hollows.

Once the machine was done…

“It looks a lot like a spyglass.” Ron said, peering at it.

“Or a wand,” Jeb said, holding it the other way, the way it was supposed to be held.

“Holy shit, you’re right!” Ron said, eyes widening.

“Now, let’s figure out the range on this thing.”

With a twist, the corkscrew inside the narrow tube moved the middle lens back, shortening the focal length until it was presumably right in front of the end of the wand.

“Alright, let’s start with the shortest range,” Jeb said, aiming the worm-wand in front of him, putting a tiny amount of Myst through it.

A foot long worm popped up directly in front of the end of the metal tube.

“Label that zero,” Jeb muttered to himself, using the furnace to heat the metal and stamp a ‘0’ at the collar’s spot.

“Let’s aim for…” he glanced at Ron. “Ten feet?”

“Sure.”

Jeb twisted the collar, moving the two lenses closer together, popping out worm after worm until they were fairly confident it was popping them out ten feet away. He stamped ‘10’ into the metal.

As they got the two lenses closer together, the range of the focal point increased exponentially. The distance between zero and ten was much wider than between ten and twenty, each tiny fraction of an inch moving the focal point further and further out.

After they confirmed a big worm appearing about three hundred and sixty feet out, they simply stopped. Moving the lenses any closer together than that simply didn’t work, likely because the focal point wouldn’t stretch any further than that with their crude contraption.

Still, not bad, Jeb thought, imagining the Geysering Flame lens explosion aimable out to a range of three hundred feet.

That could come in handy.

I think I’m going to set a minimum range of twenty feet on the flame lens, though, Jeb thought, reviewing the design in his head. Firing it off ten feet away had nearly caused them some damage.

“Now we need to do some more tests,” Ron said, petting the worm wand and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “See if we can aim this thing more…precisely.”

“You’re thinking about popping a worm into existence in a girl’s lap, aren’t you?”

Ron looked at him, jaw gaping.

Guess I hit the nail on the head. Kid’s pretty obvious.

Jeb put a hand on Ron’s shoulder and stared into the ginger’s eyes. “Ron, I’m going to give you some free advice. I haven’t tried to prank a girl to get her attention since I was fifteen. I want you to stop and really think about this for a second. Which is gonna go over better: dropping a big, gross, worm in her lap, or seeing if she’s interested in testing the wand with you?”

Ron swallowed. “When you put it like that…”

“Good.” Jeb said, patting him on the shoulder and going back to what he was doing.

Next step is making an explosive version with the Geysering Flame Lens.

Jeb sat back down and pulled out the large lens, picturing how he was going to cut it to maximize the amount of surface area they got out of it.

He marked the circles he was going to cut out of the large lens with light scratches, making sure to mark the flat, concave and convex lenses. Splitting the lenses into three pieces was going to drastically reduce the maximum amount of Myst that could travel through the wand without breaking one of the lenses, but that didn’t matter too much.

The drop of Myst that Ron had funneled into the lens the first time had created a devastating explosion, and Jeb was pretty confident that even though the lenses were smaller now, they could still take a lot more than that little drop.

Being able to control distance was more