[Plot] Sea of Monsters

[Will Stanton]

"If I show up as a submarine with arms and legs, I'm pretty sure no one's getting on," Will said, looking down at Miriam. "So there's no real point of trying to make this Attack of the 50-Foot Clay Man."

"Just have to...catch my breath for a moment, one second..."

[Miriam Bell]

"I don't know, the people who signed up for this are of questionable decision making skills to begin with." she jokes. Mostly. "But if this is laying the foundation to what the space you go into will be like then perhaps excess-limbs is not something that should be presented as an option."

[Will Stanton]

Will nodded. "Yeah, this is just a mass test," Will said, missing any implications Miriam might be implying. "Just an example of what I can do without any special circumstances."

[Miriam Bell]

"Well, assuming you're not hollow right now that's a good start, I reckon. Now let's see the same mass as a framework, maybe a metal fish skeleton as a base?"

[Will Stanton]

"A fish skeleton?" Will laughed. "And here I thought I was the creative one."

Nevertheless, Will obliged, first getting down on hands and knees so he was oriented more horizontally than vertically, and then closing his eyes and letting the changes wash over him.

The shifting was slower that Miriam was used to seeing from Will; there was clearly more of a conscious effort to keep everything right (and to prevent his fleshy outsides from disappearing before the metal insides were finished, which was probably a good thing for everyone involved.) But soon, a large, central middle spine stretched from 'head' to 'tail', with steel 'ribs' poking up and down.

Even though he was less solid now, he still shrunk down a bit -- maybe half as long, from tip to tail. Steel, it turns out, is quite heavy compared to bones and the like.

It also doesn't stand up very well, as Will ended up falling to one side with a thundering crash.

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam jumps back a good foot or so even though she's well outside the crash zone.

"Little warning next time, please!" she shouts, more because the loud crash is still ringing in her ears than out of genuine anger.

"And what do your plans say?" she turns to one of the other Wills. "How much do we need to stretch this? Twice this size, three times?"

[Will Stanton]

"Well, eventually we'll need to go with more of a barrel shape, for an inside cabin," the first Will tried to explain.

"Has to be hollow for most of the middle, in order to fit people inside, you see."

"But with plenty of room for whatever equipment the Tech staff comes up with."

"But in terms of dimensions?"

"Four times as long, at a bare minimum."

"And probably closer to ten times as much mass. Lots of pressure to withstand."

"You see the dilemma."

[Miriam Bell]

"I have an idea for the mass, but it's probably better if we get the entire length first..."

"Danger Room, give us two of those junkyard crane magnets on either side of the room. You two." she singles out two of the Will-Crew. "Attach them to the front and back. And if I'm really playing construction supervisor here then somebody get me a bloody hardhat."

[Will Stanton]

"Wait, we're trying to build the actual frame now?" one of the Wills protested. "We haven't gotten nearly enough practice making the mass..."

Despite his protests, the other two Wills went right to work implementing Miriam's orders, attaching the crane-magnets to key structural points on the head and tail of the fish skeleton, a loud metal ringing being heard through the danger room as they made contact. They each gave her a thumbs up when they were locked in place.

[Miriam Bell]

"If it doesn't work we'll call it a test-run and start over. Danger Room, load one of those blowtorch furnace traps I'm sure you have somewhere in a nice line between the Magnets. Crane Wills, get ready to retract the magnet."

[Will Stanton]

The Will Miriam was talking to was left just sputtering -- there were procedures! And structures to follow!

That didn't seem to affect the other two, mind you, who gave another *ready* signal as the Danger Room generated something shooting gouts of flame.

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam waits for the flames to start heating up the metal frame enough for a faint glow to be more or less uniform across Will, then nods and snaps her fingers at the two crane operators.

[Will Stanton]

Will went from a cold grey to a warm red as the flames did their work, heating up the danger room quite significantly; Miriam was basically turning him into a giant metal furnace, after all.

And when he was red enough, the two Wills began to pull their magnets backwards. There was a creaking, groaning sound as the magnets retracted, the steel thinning and weakening as it was stretched. Miriam could hear the metal Will groaning as he was stretched, and the whole thing began to buckle...

[Miriam Bell]

"Ease up!" she shouts. Snapping him in half wasn't going to do anybody any good. "But hold it where it is."

She can't get too close, for obvious reasons, but she reaches out with her mind. Most of Will's mindscape is not hugely suited for this. There's some machinery that might be useful later on but right now she needs something sturdy. Something reinforced. Weathered stones rise from the ground, just enough to hold up a thick metal door, the locked gate to the charnel house in the cellar of her mind. And next to it metal bars, pieces of dungeon and castle architecture meant to safeguard, lock up and protect. All of them begin melting in the heat of the flames and sweat forms on Miriam's brow as she makes the melting pieces of her mindscape tip forward into Will.

"Rotate it! Pull the material in!" she shouts at the cranes without taking her eyes of her mental constructs.

[Will Stanton]

Bits of mindscape clashed with simulated flame, beginning to melt and become more malleable.

The cranes themselves hoisted Will's frame up, attempting to use Miriam's extra support to strengthen the weakening steel beams. It's not a perfect one-for-one match by any stretch of the imagination, but the Wills operating the cranes did their best to try to manipulate the giant fish skeleton, slowly rotating and twisting Will as Miriam drizzled molten metal over his frame. It worked in places, clumping and globbing over his steel bones, but there were enough gaps in the fishbone structure that some of it just pooled onto the floor of the danger room, sizzling.

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam lets the pieces that drop to the floor sink back into nothing in favor of creating new constructs to slowly add to Will's basic structure. It's messing up the overall fishbone structure a bit by adding molten metal all over it, but reforming a proper frame could wait until they had enough workable material.

"How are you holding up?" she asks, unsure if Will is even able to respond, but she is a telepath and all that matters is picking up on a general sense of a response, spoken outloud or not.

[Will Stanton]

Very hot...but not unpleasant. Being stretched is more...straining.

Not sure it's incorporating, though. More like being...wrapped in a blanket.

The thoughts were strained to get out, as the cranes kept pulling Will to a maximum length.

[Miriam Bell]

"That makes sense, but I have a plan for that." Without losing too much focus on the molten metal from her own mindscape she searches through Will's and the various machines that keep his imaginary factories running. And small at first but slowly growing in scope long prongs emerge from the ground. Attached to rotating arms a huge taffy-spinning machine rises underneath Will and catches him on one, then another of the prongs and they slowly begin spinning.

"My raw material, your processing..." she manages under strained breath, sinking to her knees, one arm on the ground to steady herself.

[Will Stanton]

There is a grinding and a squealing of metal as the ends of the molten steel catch onto the nylon rollers of the taffy machine. There's a struggle, as the sheer mass of the molten Will fights against the mechanical gubbins of the machinery; it's working, but slowly and hesitantly.

The one Will not operating a crane or being smushed around hurries over to help Miriam before she falls to the ground. "Deep breaths, in and out."

[Miriam Bell]

"As... externalized as they are... those are still my... thoughts getting tied into knots..." she manages, glancing up at the Will at her side and then at the main bulk of slowly rotating and folding metal.

"We're going to have to speed that up... I can't hold all of this indefinitely..."

[Will Stanton]

"Yes, well, you and I? We think differently. You're not a Will, but your thoughts have a Will of their own," Will said, obviously pleased with his stupid pun.

"Integrating that might take some time; you're not something inert. At this scale? This could take hours. Maybe even longer. Because if it's going to be mass that we can use, it's got to become part of us, and we're going from zero to a zillion here, all at one time."

[Miriam Bell]

"That's why I pulled something from your mind to do the processing, absorb it like you would any new idea or concept or thought... But I can't do this for hours and if I lose focus anything that's not properly assimilated is going to go poof."

[Will Stanton]

"The theory is good, but the scale is wrong," Will frowned. "Maybe we shunt down in mass significantly, work things in bit by bit, and gradually grow it up? Once it's incorporated, we should be able to size it up or down...theoretically."

"The problem isn't the scale, it's the resistance," one of the crane Wills chimed in. "No offense, Miriam, but you're still a gloomy gus, all things considered. We've got to get a closer match between the original bits and the bits we're mixing together. We've got to make this guy more like Miriam, and Miriam more like one of us."

"You're talking bollocks, mate. There's nothing wrong here a little overclocking can't fix. We just have to up the power on these machines, or build a bigger, faster, stronger one. If it won't go in, just use more force."

The three Engineer Wills went back to bickering, like they'd been doing when Miriam first came in.

[Miriam Bell]

"If we lower his scale he'll end up too much like me and I don't know how to be more like him, so it'll have to be number three. I'm sorry."

She slams her hands against the floor and clenches her eyes shut, pulling forth more prongs to rotate through the gaps, getting increasingly more complicated and speeding up when a dozen of them have found their position and latched onto a part of Will to pull and twist.

[Will Stanton]

The whining and grinding noises increased, as the heavy-duty machinery kicked into high gear, more and more prongs jabbing into Will and twisting him one way, then the other. The sheer might of the output was overcoming the difficulties with mixing the Miriam mindscape into Will, as well as the physical challenge of moving literally tons of molten steel, and the entire mixture began to look more...well, mixed. Even if it did mean that Will was being tugged around rather violently and excessively; not that he seemed to be minding it.

"Told you! A little bit of elbow grease goes a long way!"

"Head's up!" a Will called, dodging a little bit of molten steel that flew out of the violently mixing mixture. The heat was increasing, too, as the speed of the molten steel increased.

"I can't tell if it's properly being integrated!" the other Will shouted. "But it's getting in there; just hold steady...."

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam can spare barely enough of her attention to swipe out with one arm and dismiss the droplets of metal being flung their way. At least enough of them that the remainder isn't immediately dangerous.

"If it's not mixed but folded we can still work with that..." she mutters.

[Will Stanton]

And, indeed, that seems to be more of what has happened -- clear, obvious stripes in the steel; Miriam's color being a darker red/gray highlighting the lighter red/gray of Will, as the machines began to wind down.

It certainly was bigger, at the very least, so that mission was accomplished. Still very hot, mind you; molten steel will do that. But maybe twice as big? A little less, perhaps? A significant improvement, at the very least.

As for how Will himself was doing, he seemed to be a little checked out at the moment -- Miriam would get sort of a fuzz when trying to mentally check in on him. Not a bad fuzz or a sign of distress or pain or something; just a little bit of an overall dead-to-the-world-ness that might feel a little familiar...

[Miriam Bell]

"He actually bloody zoned out... Are you kidding me?" Miriam laughs tiredly. "But mission accomplished. Kind of." she adds as she goes about dismissing the taffy-machinery. The additions to Will, however, stick around, interwoven too much to fade.

[Will Stanton]

Slowly -- but perhaps faster than physics would allow -- the mass of steel cooled, into one large blob of slag, bringing the temperature in the room back down to somewhat reasonable levels for human beings not to be roasted in.

"It's a start, I suppose," Will admitted.

"A start? It's a bold idea, making the ship out of other people's minds, and I want to see where it goes!"

"Joints cause weaknesses, remember? That was the whole point..."

The bickering began anew.

[Miriam Bell]

"They're layers, you dolts. And adding impurities like coal is how you turn iron into steel. Besides, being metaphorically strong is probably going to be just as important and now there's some stark rudeness layered in. The real test is seeing if he can shift the new mass..."

[Will Stanton]

"And the way you stretch taffy is by working air into it gradually, not by striping it with something else. What is this, a candy-cane?" one of the Wills protested.

"It will be fine; you worry too much."

"It will not be fine; it's a potential weak point that can be pried apart! The qualities of the impurities are too different; too alien..."

"Shut up, both of you; he's stirring."


Indeed, the cooled steel slag was beginning to try to pull itself together. It was having some difficulties; some confusion -- the Will-parts were sliding along alright, but the Miriam-bits were kind of dragging along with it. Shifting, yes, but slowly and more painfully?

[Miriam Bell]

"I'll admit this could be going better, but maybe with time it'll absorb more fully. And, really, if the shifting is slowed down that shouldn't matter so much once the overall shape is set, yes? Yes."

[Will Stanton]

"Assuming that we're fine with him just being the vessel and not participating in the exploration, you mean," Will said, his arms crossed. "But with practice, anything can be made to work, I'm sure."

[Miriam Bell]

"Well, how much can he change anyway while ferrying people inside of him? And I don't want him to be locked into this, just that slowing down his shifting might not be as problematic for a boat as it would be for a person-sized Will."

[Will Stanton]

"I think the thought is that there might be somewhere to land, and explore, as well as a possible fight. But we don't know! No one's ever been there before."


The blob of steel was becoming vaguely more humanoid, and bigger, to boot. It was hard to tell, as he was still reforming slowly (and he was still on hands and knees, as he tried to recover from things), but Miriam no longer came up to his knees. He had gained maybe 50% in height? Ish? Something like that?

The ribbons of the remnants of Miriam's height were clear and obvious stripes, wrapping around the more humanoid form of Will as he slowly reconstituted himself. They were moving and being shifted, too, so it wasn't like they were just some foreign object or something, but they weren't moving as freely, and were kind of settling into their own position.

[Miriam Bell]

"Well, it might take him a couple minutes to turn from submarine to person, but he's shifting it. I call that a success, considering I grafted imaginary metal into a real person."

[Will Stanton]

Miriam's pride at her success mayor may not be long lasting, as Will finished shifting back into (massive) human form.

Miriam's metal remained, well, metallic -- straps wrapping around his body in a complex, web-like fashion, forming diamond shapes as they passed around his arms and torso. But, at the very least, he seemed little worse for wear, as he shook the (massive) cobwebs out of his head.

"That's quite the rush," his voice echoed, as he twisted his neck one way and another to try to regain coherent thought.

[Miriam Bell]

Even remaining as metal, it still moved with his shifting and - more importantly - remained without her constant focus.

"Glad you enjoyed that. Because we might have to do it a couple more times to get you enough bulk."

[Will Stanton]

'"QUITE a few more times, I'm afraid," he said, trying to flex around the metal constraining his movements. "It'd be more Miriam than Will when all is said and done. The security's nice, and some more mass is always useful, and doing this another time or three is probably a fairly good idea. But we can't just have other people dumping things into me all day and all night if I'm going to be moving around down there."

[Miriam Bell]

"So what you're saying is we need more of you in the mix. What's to stop us from putting you in a crucible and marching a bunch of metal Wills into it?"