"I don't understand you, Justiciar. So there are Venuxians, Titanites, and now Urdmen and Lunarmen? I am confused what to call your military, now." Senator Carter conversed with Adam as they toured the base together.
"Honestly, I've been calling them Wartopians, but I can see how this sends the wrong message with the whole thing going on with the survivors." Adam responded, a bit honestly this time, yet still playing on misunderstandings.
"I am not concerned about a wrong message, to be frank. I think it would make it easier for them to understand since they are familiar, isn't that right?" The Senator shrugged.
"But the grimdark reputation of Wartopia, though." Adam said, shaking his head with a sigh.
"What's grimdark?" The Senator asked, completely unaware of the concept.
"Just what it sounds like: grim and dark. That's what Wartopia is, that's what those military aliens are." Adam explained briefly.
"Mr. Clay, if the apocalypse has taught us one thing, it is that the fate of humanity is far worse than whatever grimdark or imagination we could conceive. Whatever those people are, Wartopians or not, it doesn't make a damn difference against the Gobzkins or the Hive or the goddamn Dragons. The world has gone mad, and if you're still concerned about how people think of you while saving their lives, this vision you have wouldn't last long."
"So you're thinking I shouldn't care what others think as long as I save them?"
"Not quite, no." The Senator shook his head, "When you play the game of power, you see a bigger picture that the little people wouldn't easily see. You'd be forced to make do with bad choices with no right choice in sight. That's day-to-day politics."
"I don't want to be a politician." Adam smiled, looking down and shaking his head.
"O'course you don't. But when you deal with other people, and if it's not personal relationships, it is politics, ain't no way around it, son."
The Senator's advice weighed a bit on Adam's shoulders, but he knew for a fact that it was true.
He kept looking at the cloudy sky while they stood under the sun to get some warmth on this cold winter day, snow beginning to form in some patches of the land.
"Tomorrow, the Alfari will arrive for food and spice trade." Adam said, reminding the Senator.
"It will be Hendrick's people who will conduct that trade." The Senator nodded, waiting to see what's on Adam's mind.
"I feel that since food stocks haven't been produced much lately, we'll need to put extra effort into getting the work going again, so I'm going to help them with the camp's rations to meet the quota, just this once." Adam said in a complaining tone, "God knows how much we need a change of taste before our souls go numb."
"True."
The Senator agreed with Adam, and the conversation started to drift from one topic to another, with Adam listening to Senator Carter attentively, absorbing some experience and advice from the man who had a successful Congress career for twenty long years; however, they would end up disagreeing on important topics like urban planning, work regulation, and certain liberties.
Adam wasn't imposing any of Wartopia's logic on his fellow Earthlings as much as possible, but since the Wartopians had most of the power and technology, and they weren't exactly mindless puppets, some compromises had to be made, and it went both ways so far. Fossil fuel was still a taboo, and so far, all vehicles were used only when necessary, but with the emergence of the Blazer Engines, all fossil vehicles were officially decommissioned and set to be transformed into Blazer Engine vehicles if possible, but it wasn't a priority, and it was one of the things that made the Senator and Adam clash for a while.
At the end of the day, Martial Law was absolute, and living in the shade of a military base meant giving up so much freedom. The question was how much liberty the Senator could retain for his people, and Adam still proved a stubborn opponent.
Then came the matter of faith, the most sensitive topic Adam wanted to badly postpone, but since it was an essential part of the talks, there was no way around it.
To the Wartopians, a temple is both a place of prayer, learning, and information technology. A Script Monastery was essential to many operations, and it was where most technologies were unlocked and upgraded, basically an R&D department. Therefore, it was essential, no matter the feelings it would invoke.
Adam wasn't so religious that he would argue for faith and worship laws, but the Senator was a Catholic, and he was concerned about whether the Wartopians would impose their worship laws.
In the Solarium, piety and patriotism were one and the same. The Solarium was both the state and the faith at the same time. Yet it was neither unified nor organized, and many legalized heresies circulated on different planets. However, the Solar Dogma was clear on some points: no matter what belief the population might adopt, the Solarium should be an essential part of it.
As for Brighthaven City, half of the population was Christian (especially Catholic), and the other half was mostly non-religious, with significant minorities of Jews and Muslims. To make this work, Adam would need a representative from the three religious groups in order to chart a path that would allow everyone to coexist with the Solar Dogma, but he decided to postpone that as long as he could, since he needed to equalize the numbers of survivors and summons first.
And that was as far as his conversation with the Senator led, as he wasn't keen on continuing this topic without an official Solarium religious personnel: Script Monks.
Speaking of which, he had a half-painted Heroic Miniature of a Script Nun at the workbench, and he needed to go finish it, but there was a different matter happening at the moment near the Industrial Depot where Professor Hendrick was assisting Yuki and Megan set up an Optics Lab.
The professor's assistance was vital for the process to work, but since the work required focus, he sent word to Senator Carter to go back without him, as he would be spending the remaining time until tomorrow building the Optics Lab.
They couldn't build something so precise and accurate on their first try; crystals required purity and vacuum treatment, a lot of energy, clean rooms, and a shit ton of trial and error.
The Professor, Yuki, and Megan first started charting the process to anticipate all the steps they needed to take, and to have an end goal defined. For reference, Megan brought an actual Blazer-arm with a perfect crystal, one that Adam had summoned as a unique-quality puppet, and they slowly disassembled it to study its optical focus core.
It was a big undertaking, but since the recipes were provided by the Sacred Code in the terminal Adam had set up for the Optics Lab, all they needed was to put together not merely a machine, but a set of conditions that would make the transition from fine silicate to optical wonders possible.
"Vacuum capability goes here. Chemical prep here. Heat insulation on the far end." The Professor had a plan in mind, and he kept laying it out for Yuki and Megan as they kept up with him.
Then the dirty work started; even Adam was invited to assist in this process, setting up a Workbench with many of the spare robotic arms he had lying around. Borrowing a Hoverbarrow from the construction team, Adam started piling crates of silicate dust beside the Industrial Depot in large numbers. In fact, he had them by the hundreds, since it was the most widely available resource the Refinery Rig could produce.
Yuki had the silicate dust stripped and washed in scavenged acid tanks meant for battery recycling. Megan calibrated the robotic arm to do nothing but stir, rinse, and repeat. Purity wasn't measured in absolutes anymore; it was measured in how many failures the process could tolerate.
"Too many metallic impurities, the beams will scatter everywhere," Megan muttered after the first batch cooled into cloudy glass.
"Then it will teach us something." The professor replied with the glee of a scientist who was finally getting his hands into the dirty work he loves, "We aren't optics scientists, but we must expand our understanding using the same scientific process we've always relied on. Safety, experimentation…"
"And boring repetition." Megan groaned.
"Keizoku wa chikara nari." Yuki retorted in Japanese before translating, "There is strength in repetition."
"Right you are, Ms. Nakamura." The Professor agreed with Yuki, finally feeling right at home with his students being themselves: Megan with her efficient laziness, and Yuki with her endless patience as if the world owed her some time-out. "Now, let's cut through this mess and see what we have."
They melted the silica in a jury-rigged furnace—ceramic crucibles printed in the Fabricator in layers thick enough to survive a blast. The glass poured slowly and reluctantly, and its smell was that of effort and progress.
Laser cutters scored rough lenses. Robotic arms rotated them against abrasive slurry, grinding down imperfections with mechanical patience humans would never have.
Every lens cracked.
Every. Single. One.
Until one didn't.
Annealing (Heat Treatment) was where they almost gave up.
The base's power grid wasn't built for slow. It surged, dipped, and acted throughout the day since most technicians were busy with the construction work to keep watch and calibrate it. Adam rewired spare fluxgel batteries and sheer stubbornness to get the process going.
"The cooling curve has to be steady." The professor said. "If it drops faster than two degrees per minute, internal stress spikes."
The first annealed lens survived handling, the second survived a low-energy test beam, and the third focused it.
There, the process now seemed possible, and by nightfall, it was time for testing and taking measured risks.
The Professor insisted on doing the testing outside base boundaries, preferably by the trenches outside, providing perfect cover and a controlled environment, just in case anything goes wrong.
As for the lens, it sat warmly in its cradle while Megan aligned the test laser to pass through the makeshift circuit that mimicked the Blazer-arm internal parts, made of carbon tubes, capacitors, and prayer etchings in Solar Script.
"Low power." Yuki warned as she was operating the terminal.
"I know, I'm not suicidal." Megan retorted, being the one handling manual calibration.
Once fired, the beam passed through as the glass cooled. Hendrick instructed Megan to adjust the angle manually with steady hands despite the heat felt through her switches.
"Hold it." he whispered, "Let the lattice speak for itself."
They watched the sensor readouts shift with tiny changes, fractions of a percent. Energy loss dipped, and the Focus Lens finally calibrated to modular measurements.
The lens succeeded—it wasn't a crystal yet, but neither was it just glass anymore.
Adam and Elena were notified through the radio that progress had been made in the lab, and not only did they come running over, but almost the entire base went on alert just hearing that Blazer-arms were now possible to make from scratch.
The introduction of this technology made morale surge in camp, but there was no time to celebrate, as there should be more construction work going on at the military base at night, when the survivors would sleep. With little time on hand for both construction and rest, the troops were sent back to their stations, and Adam remained with Yuki and Megan to calibrate the Sacred Code for the Optics Lab.
Adam invited Professor Hendrick to stay the night and guided him towards the new building where the troops were laying out their sleeping gear. However, Adam merely pointed the way to the place and left the professor to walk there himself.
As soon as the Professor left, Adam and Yuki glanced at each other, while Megan made a complicated expression.
"I still don't think it's right to lie to the Professor like that." Megan spoke first, clearly distressed about a plan Adam and Yuki had in mind.
"What you are feeling should be something related to your respect for the figures of authority in your life." Yuki said analytically, "But you now learned that even such venerated figures are prone to mistakes."
"Can I hit her?" Megan asked Adam.
"What she was trying to say is that we must trust our gut on this one. It's a harmless lie after all, and Captain Creed will make sure that nothing will happen to the Professor." Adam replied with an assuring smile.
"Yeah, Captain Creed, why would I even worry?" Megan groaned and shook her head.
All three of them were watching the surveillance screen that showed the base's central area and the professor walking through the empty way, unbothered by anything, until an intense light shone from a certain direction where the storm shelter of Kave's family was located.
The professor, being a curious character, halted, looked around, and slowly walked towards the 'Cave' where Adam and his friends used to play endless sessions of Wartopia games for a decade. Tonight, they had one more game to play, and the Professor was their guest of honor.
But on a different note, Adam may have forgotten about his loyal Workbench that took his will to the letter inside the unmanned command center, as it was finally left alone to act freely.
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