“It’s about the shape of the propeller, Mark,” Eliot said, as he set down the skewer of his suya.

  Eliot’s plate was a massacre of wooden sticks and he almost went for another one, but he stopped and sat back in his chair, almost content. He was full of food, but also full of worry. Everyone was worried. It was the final day of the Attack the Gate scenario, and all the gods and the world were watching, but only a small portion of the people involved tonight, here at the gate district, and out there on the walls and otherwise, were aware of the real story.

  The demons were planning a major attack in the War For Life and Thrashtalon was probably involved, and yet, the show must go on. This whole thing had become a tribulation. Memphi was trying to pry open the Veil, to enable easy transfer between Daihoon and Earth, and the demons who controlled the Veil did not like that.

  Mark wasn’t too sure why the demons didn’t want people crossing the Veil in an organized manner, like they did over in Tokyo, but that’s what a lot of people were saying, including Titanfist. Mark had yet to ask the question of ‘why though?’ because he had his own concerns. The Shaper Decouple Ritual had helped him overcome the physical limitations of his Adamantiumkinesis, at least a little. Now, he could finally work on the next part of the ‘flying with adamantium’ problem.

  With 9323 grams of adamantium to his name, aside from the maybe-3 kilos in his bones, that meant he only had around 410 cubic centimeters of adamantium to his name. That was less than half a liter of metal.

  Sure, that much metal spread out really, really well, when he Decoupled himself and his adamantium melded with the threads of his Union, and he kinda poofed out into a kilometer-wide ball of monowire death. But Mark wasn’t Decoupled right now, and hopefully not ever again, because that would kill everything around him.

  So he needed to be able to make smaller shapes. Actual propeller shapes would be really useful, because then he could fly with those shapes, and flying was the goal for tonight, before this Attack the Gate thing turned into the much more important War for Life.

  And so, as Mark, Eliot, Sally, and Isoko were eating Nigerian and Mexican food in the conference room that Eliot had been using for his talks with Sentinel, Mark had asked about how Eliot made drones, and what he did for propellers. There were gadgets and drones and various mockups of turrets and other weaponry all around the room, but Mark was mostly interested in the drones, and their flight mechanisms.

  Eliot decided to go for another stick of suya as he touched one of the holographic projectors in the middle of the conference table, bringing to light tens of different shapes. Propellers. Most with 2 props, but some with as many as 6.

  Eliot said, “You got the basic propeller, which is what you were doing out there. It’s two balance loads on a pivot point. That kind is actually the least you can do, and it’s good if you don’t have enough material, but it’s not the best shape. I use a 3 prop design the most. Sometimes I put a ring around it to cut down on the vortices and thus the noise. The turbulence. Have you considered much of that? Tried it?”

  “Not really, but I can,” Mark said, as he raised a drop of adamantium into the air, and he turned it into a 2-part prop. It was about 6 centimeters long. He spun the edges into a circle around the piece, to help cut down on turbulence, theoretically. “Let’s see…”

  Everyone kinda watched and ate dinner as Mark spun the small prop over the conference table. It was easy to achieve a rather fast rotation since he Decoupled, and so as he spun it faster and faster, holding the prop mostly at the center, it began to pull on him, ever so slightly. Not much, though. It was like holding a fan in his hands and pointing it down at the table. Napkins floated away and steam billowed outward.

  Eliot aimed some sort of tool at it, like a gun but for speed measuring. Mark didn’t know what it was called, but Eliot kinda hummed as he read some readout.

  Quark must have guessed what Eliot was looking at, because he put some numbers on Mark’s vision.

  2-prop, 6 centimeter, 1800 RPM.

  Was that good? Bad? Mark had no idea.

  It seemed bad, according to the tone of Eliot’s hum and the feeling of his vector.

  But for Mark, the sound the propeller was making was a lot lower than normal. It seemed pretty good for that reason alone. The ring around the wing helped... but it was inefficient, for sure.

  Somehow, Mark was pretty sure this was the wrong direction for him, when it came to prop design. Addashield flew on his adamantium (Mark was pretty sure) and he never made noise. He had that invisibility/silence magic happening too, though, so maybe that was the answer to Mark’s noise problem. Just make the props invisible/inaudible! Easy! Addashield would certainly never waste adamantium forming a ring around his props, either, if this was, in fact, how he did this at all.

  … Mark kinda frowned, ending the spin, saying, “It pulls well enough, but I’d need hundreds of those to get anywhere, and I can’t do that. I don’t have that much adamantium, and this is still noisy. I still need to have weapons.”

  Eliot hummed, and this time it was a disbelieving sort of hum. He thought Mark could manage well enough with this design. He was still thinking, though.

  Isoko said, “If you have hundreds of them, then you already have hundreds of weapons. Do you need to do more than that?”

  Mark went, “Ah. Point.”

  Sally nodded along, but her focus wasn’t here at all. There was a subtle golden glow to her vector. She shared that same golden glow with a bunch of the other paladins in the building; mostly the other paladins of the god of War and Murder, Drakarok. Sally and them were all poised, waiting for the signal. Sally managed to mechanically chew some agege bread that she had dipped into some sauces, though. She enjoyed the food and the company, but she wasn’t really here right now.

  Mark said to Isoko, “But these are still way too noisy and I would rather be as silent as I can on a battlefield.”

  Isoko hummed, nodding.

  Mark said to Eliot, “But there’re better ways, yeah?”

  Eliot shrugged. “Of course.” The air populated with a bunch more designs, from stuff that looked more like spinning blade weapons, to stuff that looked like a bunch of loops, to big tubes with a hundred propellers all stuffed inside, in a line. Mark had no idea what that last one was at all. Eliot said, “Generally, the more props you have in a propeller, the more lift you can achieve, but past a certain point the power needed to spin those blades becomes too great, and you’re better off adding another prop to the mix. So you gotta mix and match a bunch of stuff based on a bunch of physical requirements, though simplicity is always best…” Eliot was rambling, getting stuff out there, but now he found the thread he was searching for. He began, “How about we start at the very beginning. Do you know about Bernoulli’s principle?”

  Mark shook his head. “Maybe?”

  Eliot perked up. “Ah! Good. So we start there.” Eliot easily pulled up a diagram of a wing shape—

  “Oh yeah! … Uh. Shit.” Now Mark felt kinda stupid. “I should have been making wing shapes? I thought that… uh. Didn’t matter?”

  Of course his wings needed to be wing shaped! Mark needed domes over flat land, and angled to cut the air properly!

  Eliot smirked, and then he said, “These are small, basic improvements that shouldn’t matter if you have enough material, but you only have so much material, and so you need to do everything you can with everything you have. And so, even with the material concerns, I don’t think you should stick with the 2-prop design. 3-prop might be best. 4 might be good, if you can handle the force needed to actually spin that much, for that long. Or maybe one of these toroidal props would be best? We won’t know until we do a lot of experiments, and I can’t run these live action experiments in a simulator like I normally do, since it’s you doing stuff that you still need to actually do all the time. But! I want you to try this one: A 3-prop toroidal propeller.”

  He conjured a hologram.

  It was like 3 rings kinda squished together, with the edges tilted, forming something like… 3 scoops? No, those angles at the edges were kinda funky. Mark didn’t really know what he was seeing, only that he hadn’t ever seen Eliot use one of these before.

  “You don’t use these?” Mark asked, even as he tried reforming his ringed propeller into what he was seeing in the air.

  “I do not,” Eliot said, “They’re great for reduced turbulence but I like the turbulence, because I can usually get rid of it just through Manipulation alone, and so, the usual reason for me hearing turbulence is that I lost control of something, or something or someone took control of my drones and they didn’t think to spend that extra Power to make the drones silent. It’s a good warning system. Doesn’t always work! But it works often enough.”

  Mark paused.

  Isoko went, “Huh!”

  “I didn’t know you did that,” Mark said. “That’s smart!”

  Eliot grinned. And then he shrugged, dismissing the comment, though he was still inwardly proud even as he said, “It’s nothing, you know. Just basic Techie stuff. Counter-Power use, etcetera.”

  Mark recalled going into the forests surrounding Memphi with Eliot, and hearing his drones occasionally make noise now and then, and then Eliot would focus heavily on those drones… And now Mark remembered something else. “You remember that LED wasp infection? We took that orange Slayer quest to eliminate them around that tower far to the southeast. Your drone scouts fell out of your control all the time and it always preceded the wasps attacking.”

  Mark always felt those wasp vectors before they attacked them or Eliot’s drones, but Eliot had been scouting out the problem too.

  “Oh yeah!” Isoko said.

  Eliot looked a little embarrassed now, as he said, “Yeah we haven’t… uh… gone on enough hunts, have we.”

  Mark grinned. “Not nearly enough.”

  Eliot rolled his eyes, then he floated a drone to Mark that had four, 3-prop toroidal wings. The wings popped off, onto the table, as Eliot said, “Have an example.”

  Mark happily took a wing and started touching it, feeling it out. It was smooth, but the upper sides of the wing were slightly domed, while the undersides were perfectly flat, except for where the wings curved onto themselves. It looked like Eliot had adapted some basic wing design into the toroidal design—

  “You can also add little loops to the end of a normal 3-prop and reduce the turbulence and increase lift generation that way,” Eliot said, “But that puts weight at the end and that can be a problem. Solving turbulence will be great for your wings, though.”

  “So many small mechanical problems to solve for,” Mark said, as he touched the real prop and manufactured a copy in adamantium in the air above his hands. “My main problem seems to be lack of material and the need to physically control where every prop is around me. I don’t have fixed wings like a drone. It’s like holding on to multiple giant dogs that drag me in directions that aren’t always the same.”

  “Oh shit, yeah,” Eliot said, getting into it. “You have no frame to hold the props for you. You have to control where every prop is all the time! Huh! … I’m not even sure how to solve for that one… but…” Eliot hummed, as a tentacle-armed drone came into being in front of him.

  Eliot’s half of a suya stick and Mark’s single remaining triangle of a quesadilla remained uneaten in front of them as they played with their toys.

  Isoko watched as she ate while Sally barely watched as she ate a lot, gradually working her way to the bottom of every container of food. Soon she was eating the last of the suya, and the food was pretty much gone.

  Eliot and Mark had moved through tens of different scenarios.

  “Props-for-water design is different from props-for-air design,” Eliot said, “Because of the densities of the material.”

  “And then there’s the underground design,” Mark said.

  “How was it going through the ground? I only ever saw you do that just the other day.”

  “I’ve done it a few times. It’s pretty easy to move through the dirt on Earth, with the lower PL of the ground. It’s just big scoops and using a lot of force, which is easy enough to do. Moving in the deeper ground is a lot harder and pretty much impossible. Water is easier than dirt, but I can’t throw the water away like I can with the dirt so I have to actually go through the water and that makes it more difficult.”

  “Yeah it gets inside everywhere.”

  “Exactly! And air is a whole other issue that I couldn’t do a damned thing with until this Decouple thing—”

  Isoko got up and grabbed Sally by the arm, and Sally jerked, coming back to herself as Isoko said, “Sally and I are going to do anything but this right now. Talk to costumes, I think.”

  Sally got up, saying, “Yeah sure.”

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  The girls walked away and Isoko mumbled about aviation geeks and how hovercars and proper Air Shaping just didn’t care about this shit at all.

  Mark and Eliot winced a little...

  But the guys went back to playing with their toys for a while.

  Eventually, Mark was spinning some 3-prop toroids in the air, constantly pausing them and adjusting them, getting a feel for them, as he asked, “Where is Sentinel, anyway? He said he’d be back, right?”

  Eliot’s tentacle-based flying machine was still flopping onto the ground of the conference room as he tried to get the tentacles to be flexible yet firm, like an astral body. He offhandedly answered, “He’s somewhere out there. We talked about holograms and distractions mostly. He doesn’t think I’m doing enough with them, and he’s absolutely right. Invisicloaks, distraction lights, drone holograms. I did a bunch of that stuff back when none of us were good with our Powers to get every edge I could get, but narrowing down to turrets and actual-force-as-crowd-control has given a lot better results.”

  “Ah, yeah. Illusions mess up party members,” Mark said.

  Not their team, because 3 out of the 4 of them could see through Eliot’s illusions just fine, by pinging off of Eliot’s vectors. But other teams would have problems, for sure.

  “You guys could handle it well enough, but I tried going with others a few times, you know? Training missions for settlement readiness.” Eliot let go of the tentacle drone with his direct control and the drone went rigid and flopped over, crashing into the ground and splattering again. Eliot looked at the splash pattern, and then he began gathering the pieces again, saying, “It was disastrous.”

  “I remember you talking about that. Union helps a lot with that.”

  Eliot smiled. “Yeah.” He lost his smile, and was a little serious as he said, “I like Castellan. I really do. More than I think I would have liked Union. But I’m running into issues that the Cybersongs don’t deal with. Coordination of forces is just something that… was explained to me, that Union did well and that Castellan did not, but I did not understand that at the time.”

  Eliot’s family was a Union family, Freyalan nobility, with their main house in Citadel Freyala, in the land that had once been known as France. His mother and grandmother both had Man-Made Manipulation, and now Eliot did, too. His father did not. His father was Nigerian, with the last name of… Shit. Mark forgot.

  Mark asked, “What about your father’s line… What was his last name again? Do they know about Castellan better?”

  “Alexander Uche,” Eliot said, “The Uches are a lot more varied in Power. They don’t have any of the true versatility that Man-Made Manipulator can do, so they do what they can... I’ve talked to a few people in the Uches, but…” He shook his head. “They’re not big into godly help, either Freyala or Hearthswell.” Eliot grinned. “Dad was kind of a rebel when he went after mom.”

  Mark snorted. “Cute.”

  “Yeah they are sometimes. It’s sickening, really…” Eliot changed the subject, saying, “So are you gonna summon Addavein if it comes down to it?”

  Mark kinda froze, shuddering, his 3-toroid props stilling in the air.

  Eliot almost broke away from the subject, to talk about something else. Anything else. But he breathed, and maintained.

  Mark cracked a little, saying, “I don’t know, Eliot. I really, really… Don’t want to do that. For so many reasons. Even if Freyala already said she would help, she…” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why Freyala helps me so much. Yeah, she helped… initially, and then afterward and then… I’m not even sure what I’m saying. She’s more to blame for putting me into a coma than Lola, though Lola only blames herself. I don’t know who got the Color Drop for me. No one will tell me and the few times I have asked… I think Freyala is really friendly with Addashield. Or at least she was? I don’t know. This whole thing is a… A lot. And now she’s offering to help summon a dragon? Like holy FUCK, Eliot. What the FUCK does that mean? Politically? Spiritually? All of that is too—” Mark cut himself off.

  He had been staring at one of his toroids the entire time he spilled his guts.

  But now Mark looked at Eliot, and asked, “Should I do it? Would they kill him if he showed? Do I want him dead? All the world says they like him. And yet the empires want him dead. All governments want him dead… And I think I still want him dead, too.”

  Silence.

  Small breathing.

  Eliot easily said, “Love ya dude! Can’t help you. I don’t know what the fuck do to with any of that.”

  Mark laughed once, then sighed, saying, “Yeah. Me neither.”

  “I do know that I trust Freyala with my soul— Well… I pledged to Hearthswell, but I trusted Freyala with my soul first. So I would trust her…” Eliot kinda drifted off, and then he rapidly said, “And I think if you need to summon him then we’re probably super fucked anyway so you should just do it and damn the consequences. Being alive to suffer consequences is better than being dead.”

  Mark kinda paused. “… Yeah. That’s… a really good point.”

  “It’s a terrible fucking point,” Eliot said, “Everything about this is terrible.”

  Mark grinned a little.

  Eliot rumbled a deep sigh, and then he stood up rapidly, waving a hand to clear up all of the dinner debris to transform it into raw paper, a small jar of oil, and some smoke that turned into a black ball of carbon. He announced, “Let’s get you flying!”

  Mark had no problem with that.

  Soon, Mark and Eliot were outside in the freezing cold, with Eliot bundled up very well and Mark hanging out in the open wind, black toroids of many sizes spinning all around.

  Mark lifted up off of the ground and it was easier this time, but just like Eliot’s floppy tentacle drone, Mark kinda flopped, too. The act of holding himself up above the center points of the toroids to spin them while also maintaining distances from each other, was difficult.

  Eliot suggested, “Try the props above you, instead.”

  “… Well shit. Yeah. I could try that. It’s just… not how I usually walk with the caltrops.”

  Eliot grinned, saying, “Get to it, flyboy!”

  A half an hour later Mark felt both thrilled and comically embarrassed as he hung below three spinning toroids that barely made noise and which he could spin really, really fucking fast. Those three props only used up maybe 1/8th of his total metal reserves, since adamantium was pretty much indestructible under normal action and he could make them hollow and as thin as aluminum foil.

  Eliot had helped Mark to understand ‘bubble metal’, which drastically increased the size and decreased the weight of his props.

  And now Mark was flying.

  It felt fucking amazing to fly.

  To be untethered to the ground, to be among the swirling snow and 30 meters off of the ground. He could go higher. He could fly faster. He could do aluminum-foil thin wings to the sides and a propeller in front. Maybe with a thin length of metal between both wings, so he didn’t have to physically control the wings to a uniform positioning? And one single big tri-prop? Yeah. That was an idea. A good idea.

  It was an idea he didn’t have the time to explore. Not tonight.

  Eliot had been watching the clock and he finally called it quits, just a few minutes before Mark would have. It was maybe 7:50. Episode 3 would be airing at 9. There was still other shit to do.

  Eliot clapped at Mark’s middling success, saying, “Yay!” And then he called out, “Now let’s get the fuck out of this cold and you try not to fly around Isoko too much.”

  Mark landed on the ground, tempering his joy to a more manageable level. Was he too happy about being able to fly? Maybe. “We’re getting her flight magic, soon enough. All of us are getting magics.”

  Eliot went, “… Ehhh.”

  Mark was a little surprised at that. As he started walking to the building, with Eliot beside him, he said, “I thought you wanted something from Sentinel?”

  “I’m looking at holographic setups more because of him but our styles are too different to be compatible in a large way. He regularly works his tech against kaiju and other problems, but my Manipulations breaks down near kaiju and other huge monsters because I do too much constant Manipulation to maintain the power of my things. So my things tends to break when I’m using them to fight monsters.”

  “You’re selling yourself short there, Eliot. All the stuff you built in the settlement does fine when you’re not there.”

  Eliot grinned a little. “Maybe so. You know Sentinel made most of the cannons on the walls? He has a whole company that does that sort of stuff, contracted to the city, and he works with mana crystals and other stuff all the time. I need to go to an arcanaeum and get real mage training to learn how to do stuff like that, but I prefer being agile with my stuff. If I switched to a factor-like setup like Sentinel, with his Weapons Tower in the middle of Memphi, then I’d need to have staff and a whole bunch of other stuff and that is beyond me right now.”

  Mark happily suggested, “I bet a flying castle is more impressive than a single tower!”

  “Sentinel’s tower can fly if he needs it to.”

  Mark scoffed. “I’ve never seen it fly!”

  “ ‘It is ruinously expensive to make it fly for even short amounts of time’, to quote the man himself...”

  Mark and Eliot spoke of wall weaponry and flying castles and techie powers as they headed back inside, out of the snow and the growing dark, back into the throng of showrunners and editors and designers.

  Suddenly the costume designer JJ was there with Isoko and Sally and both of the girls looked happy. But they were not in costume—

  “And now it’s your turns!” JJ said, eagerly. “So come on!”

  Mark found Eliot hurrying on ahead, already talking about costumes with JJ, and so Mark went, too—

  Isoko rapidly asked, “How did your flight go!”

  Mark smiled a little. “I think it’s gonna work.”

  Isoko was as solid as high-PL steel as she nodded, saying, “Good. You’re the anchor for the team, Mark.”

  And that was it.

  JJ was already gone, but not too far. Eliot almost got away, too.

  So Mark kinda… went that way, after he nodded to Isoko.

  Soon the boys were getting new costumes. The real ones. The ones JJ and the other costumers had been working on for the past 3 days, almost nonstop.

  They looked amazing.

  They had to take them back off because Episode 4, the whole finale, wasn’t for at least another… what? 20 hours? Mark wasn’t sure. The timing was kinda in the air right now, with some estimates being that they’d start at noon tomorrow, which was in 15-ish hours. They could start a lot sooner than that, in a mere 3 or 5 hours after the airing of Episode 3, maybe sometime around midnight.

  For now, it was 8:47.

  Time for Episode 3.