Grey had been working on cars for as long as he could remember. Since the day he could pick up a wrench, he had been sneaking into his grandfather’s garage—or the scrap pile, as he liked to call it.
School was never his thing. But he could tell everything wrong with a car just by driving it around the block once.
On his ninth birthday, he celebrated by rebuilding the engine of his gramp’s prized possession, a ’67 Impala that had been gathering dust and nesting rats for a good two decades before he got his hands on it.
His visual and spatial acuity had always been his strongest strength. He could close his eyes and visualize every part of an engine, dismantling it and building it all in his mind before picking up a single tool.
His grandfather had always told him to go off and become a mechanical engineer, and that had sounded fun until he realized how much school that would have taken.
A single meeting with a guidance counselor had thrown those dreams out the window. Not to mention the fact they couldn’t afford the education to begin with, he had no interest in sitting in boring lectures for that long.
But tinkering, playing with cars, or that time he got obsessed with the idea of building a better security system for the barn so they didn’t have to deal with another cow fucker—literally—had always been something he loved.
Compared to those times, this was several times easier. Grey didn’t even feel the strain.
All he had to do was follow the blueprint given by the Mechanical Jaw Lineage’s tome.
What was hard about that?
’Separate the materials into their raw form... Form them into the proper shape...’
The raw materials separated into ingots that had numbers hovering above them that represented Faces. At the center of the growing pile was a projected image of the Tuned Jaw blueprint.
It was just the lower jaw. It looked simple and was drawn in a single piece. It almost looked like a steel cage a brace face might wear in middle school, except thicker.
Grey wasn’t thinking about how poor of a fashion choice it would be, though. He was already starting to form the raw materials into their proper shape.
The tempered steel gave the jaw structure and form. The Flexweave Mesh was incorporated within it. It wasn’t there to give the object flexibility, but instead gave form and rigidity to the channels opened within the tempered steel.
These channels allowed passage for the necessary electrical conductivity while also acting as ventilation. Its final purpose was for the Aurum Nullite.
The most valuable raw material was the Aurum Nullite. It was to the Tuned Jaw what the Cyber Core was to the Cyber Mat and the blueprints. It allowed the Tuned Jaw to gain the ability to communicate with the neural signals it was receiving from its user.
This Aurum Nullite would fill some of the channels within the tempered steel, acting as the foundation of the circuitry.
It took Grey only a few minutes to replicate this, not even a single bead of sweat forming on his brow.
He moved on to the Load phase next. Here, he was meant to program the circuitry with the appropriate parameters.
Tuned Jaw 0BJ37 had quite a simple function. It wasn’t as advanced as the other Jaw Blueprints Grey didn’t have access to just yet. It could only do two things.
The first was impact resistance, and the other was impact nullification. These sounded similar, but Grey grasped the subtle difference instantly.
Resistance referred to how many pounds of force per square inch an item could withstand, and nullification referred to how much it could nullify this by. Both used different means.
The former used electrical pulses to forcefully strengthen the weak points and nodes of the Tuned Jaw. The latter dispersed and redirected the damage outward to mitigate how much reached the user.
The Loading process was more complex. It didn’t rely on spatial awareness and talent, but instead the same practices software engineers relied on.
Essentially, a good Loading phase was decided by how good the code was and how streamlined a technician could make said code.
Unfortunately, Grey didn’t have the time to learn how to code well in this world. The introduction was too blurry. But, there was something he had understood well.
"If inputs."
Essentially, lines of code that basically said "if" this happened, "then" this would occur. It was some of the simplest forms you could use.
Grey didn’t overcomplicate it. Even if the code was overly verbose and redundant, he didn’t care. He just wanted something that worked properly.
Sigils and glyphs danced in his eyes, an alien coding language he couldn’t understand in sight but grasped well enough in function flashing one after another.
He realized that it was the Cyber Mat that was translating his thoughts into actions.
But soon, he had finished this as well.
’Coding logic is the same no matter what the language. Even if it’s alien. In fact, this is easier than Python.’
Grey’s eyes glowed. There was only one thing remaining.
Intent.
It was the one thing that he didn’t quite understand. It was also the part of the process he felt was the most unhinged.
It was just like he had said...
Some of it was fine...
Some of it was unhinged.
An illusory jaw appeared around Grey’s jaw and over the face of the Skrill Mask.
Grey took a breath.
PUCHI.
He screamed.
It felt like countless blades had punctured his lower jaw, shattering his bone to the point it was left in piles of nothing but ash and dust. His teeth rattled in his mouth, freed and loose from the rest of his skull.
Grey had experienced a lot of pain since coming to this world. But this... this felt like the worst.
And yet, it was just the beginning, because soon after, the pulsing wave of shocks of electricity began.
Then came the feeling of burning in fire.
The Prometheus Flame stirred.
—
Operation: Spark Flame
Quest Rank: Common
Mission Type: Technician
Loops Remaining: 0
Objective: Complete
—