Museum Core Chapter 98: Once More Into the Breach

And there went her vacation. Daedalus the Dungeon Core was going to war, and Director Frye had voluntold her to lead the charge … but it wasn’t like she wouldn’t have volunteered had she been given the choice.

Now, was that a reason to get mad, though? Did he actually know her well enough to have made that choice without consulting her … or had he just gotten lucky?

No, he’d known, he’d definitely known. And to be entirely honest, Jaclyn was more than a little excited at the prospect of battling an anchor beast in a way that wasn’t a desperate scramble against a vastly superior foe. It would be extremely powerful, no doubt about it, but not overwhelmingly so. Certainly not to the point where casualties were inevitable.

Fighting paperwork in between bouts of training had been a nice change of pace, especially after the battle against the Hunger, but it had also been getting old, fast.

“Can you fly me to school this time, mummy?”

And as much as she’d loved having peaceful time with her daughter, Eve had gotten it in her head that she’d get to school via the air one of these days and just. Would. Not. Let. It. Go. Even though it decidedly would not work, Jaclyn controlled her spectral wings by moving her shoulders, and with how often she’d have to flap them to stay aloft, she’d wind up shaking any passenger she might take like a saltshaker.

As a now seven-year-old, her daughter was well outside of the age range where “shaken baby syndrome” was a threat, but it was still unlikely to be overly healthy.  Carrying someone was something to resort to in an emergency, nothing more, nothing less … but try explaining that to a young child.

Much the same went for the whole “I no longer have to put dishes in the sink because I can magic the dirt away” issue. Eve had seen that, said something where a teacher could hear, and the teacher had then given Jaclyn a lecture on hygiene. And when Jaclyn had set the record straight, the lecture had switched to “the importance of making sure your child learns the right lessons.”

Kids were generally incredibly curious, trying to figure out the logic behind how the world worked, but the conclusions they came to weren’t automatically correct, and if they were incorrect enough … fun. Lots and lots of fun.

The lecture hadn’t exactly been wrong, but it had been condescending in the extreme.

So yes, one month in and there was already a teacher she had a burning hatred for, and the feeling was probably mutual. In other words, things were going well, and they were settling into Bristol well.

Although one of these days, she needed to settle some legal things. Because “my daughter’s father gets her whenever I have to go punch a monster in the face” wasn’t exactly a proper custody agreement. In fact, it was about as far from one as you could realistically get.

Anyway, five minutes and fifteen “please, can we fly”s later, Jaclyn and her daughter were in the car and driving towards the school. And after a couple more minutes of Eve trying to wrangle out a promise of “flying next time,” Jaclyn was then driving over towards the new offices of the Bureau for Preternatural Affairs.

A former prison, reinforced to the nines, expanded with vast training fields out back, to be rebuilt almost every day because supernatural physical abilities meant supernatural damage to the ground.

Hardly a pretty building, but it had been available. Also, considering what aesthetics modern buildings were built to, new construction would likely have looked just as bad, or perhaps even worse … though Jaclyn had perhaps been spoiled just a little bit by the older architecture of London.

“Good morning, Deputy Director,” the guard called out as he pressed the button to raise the gate.   

“Morning,” she responded, pulling into her parking spot right next to the main entrance. The car was the same one she’d had in London, but it had been slightly upgraded with bulletproof windows and an emergency button that would alert all law enforcement personnel in the area if someone was stupid enough to try and attack her.

That being said, she had been promised something better … once the guys down at the motor pool had finished finalizing the design. Apparently, they were nearly in the triple digits for number of iterations; they always found and/or figured out something else they wanted to incorporate.

Today would be far more bureaucratic than most, but everything on her calendar fell squarely into her area of responsibility, the strike teams. Specifically, the new uniforms, all varieties of them, for all environments they might wind up being needed in.

Up first was the primary workhorse outfit, to be worn into the jungle, the dungeon, the manatee’s manrove forest … anywhere that didn’t need extraordinary adaptations.

Basic reinforced clothing, utility pockets that wouldn’t wind up getting caught on stuff that were also hard for an enemy to grab onto, while also being easy to access, and so on. Tough by most normal metrics, fragile by all supernatural ones. Admittedly, it was cut well enough that even if she fought at full power, it would stay intact unless damaged by her foe, but it hardly helped keep her safe.

Someone had actually had the temerity to suggest spandex, since it provided no hold to grasp onto, would also be aerodynamic, and defensive properties were moot anyway.

… whoever was responsible for that was damn lucky Jaclyn wasn’t absolutely certain which individual in particular had caused the issue. Because she wouldn’t be caught dead in any outfit like that, not to mention how it would be damn hard to put pouches and holsters onto a spandex suit, especially if you wanted to preserve the very ideas that might have made the material useable in the first place.

After that, you had a version adapted to the desert transformation zone that had wound up squarely in the middle of the Gulf stream, responsible for the bitterly cold winter they’d just survived.

With how unstable its “beaches” were, the whole thing was an absolute nightmare to land on; it lacked places to resupply, and just in general, the place was a nightmare, but when the BPA finally tackled that mess, both she and Frye had wanted to be prepared.

Although Jaclyn had had a minimal impact on the whole affair, with the end result being a version of modern desert gear, updated with advanced and/or magical materials. And someone had had the idea of adding a catheter and bag because utility magic could turn what was collected back into drinking water in a heartbeat.

Jaclyn had wound up shelving the idea. It wasn’t a bad idea, per se, but it provoked a truly visceral disgust in her. Hopefully, by the time they finally had to go there, they’d have a better way to carry sufficient water.

And then, finally, you had the damn aquatic uniform. Not the amphibious, quick-drying one she’d worn to the Pacific Zone, but something to be actually worn when going on underwater expeditions.

Now, if your stats were high enough, you could easily swim when fully clothed. In fact, even cement shoes wouldn’t prevent her from doing so. And anyone who’d be deployed to such an area would be able to breathe underwater anyway.

But raw weight wasn’t the issue; drag was.

The obvious choice, considering the requirements of having to be sleek and there not being a snowball’s chance in hell of them being able to find a sufficiently durable material, was regular swimwear. Except that would be too exposing, and far too likely to tear completely due to a mere handful of points of failure.

So, bikinis were out.

Wetsuits should have been fine, but there were two issues with those, too.

Firstly, wetsuits were designed for water to get between the suit and the wearer, get trapped, and absorb body heat until it kept the wearer properly warm. If water got into that gap, around the wrist when throwing a punch, for example, the drag would be absurd. Wetsuits were there for regular underwater actions, not superhuman martial arts.

And secondly, she hadn’t thought wearing a wetsuit outside the water would be a problem … and then she’d torn out what felt like all the hairs on her right forearm when she’d thrown an experimental punch using just a portion of her full power.

So they’d moved onto dry suits, which worked well … until the suit got even the tiniest tear, which was likely to happen in combat. And then, water would catch on the tear, get blasted inside the suit, simultaneously tearing it and slowing the movement through massive drag until the whole affair got ripped to shreds so badly that it barely even served as a uniform anymore.

And just, in general, anything that could soak up water would provide drag as a matter of course, and anything impervious would cause massive drag the moment a small tear appeared.

End of the day, they’d most likely have to go supernatural for the underwater uniforms, the same way they’d solved the “humans can’t breathe down there” issue.

The BPA had a handful of people using the Pacific System, which was all about underwater operations but lacked a real punch outside of it. The idea of multiclassing had been floated, but there were a handful of issues with that, mostly centered around the fact that taking the F-Rank power from the System of the Maritime Survivor would leave you locked into that specific power.

It would be easy to actually pull off the multiclass; all you had to do was go down there, get the maritime power from the intelligent manatees that inhabited the area, hit E-Rank, and then return to England and touch the village nexus of the orcish settlement.

But at that point, you’d not have the foundational ability of whatever Class you chose, such as an Anima Monk with the Transformation or Spirit Projection ability … without a bond. And that was a simple example, where you could advance to D-Rank and pick up what would normally have been the second bond.

Granger had also figured out a way to twist utility magic ad absurdum to the point where it could be used to breathe underwater, but that had the small issue of its mana cost scaling with water pressure, since the spell also had to keep the water out of the user’s lungs, so that was only so useful.

The easiest way to breathe underwater was to do the same thing as she had: grab an aquatic bond, of which there were many options.

Up first, you had various sharks, which combined the ability to breathe underwater with electroreception, an extraordinary sense of smell, and whatever made the specific choice extraordinary. Speed for the mako, disease resistance for the tiger, unleashing shockwaves for the thresher, superior electroreception for the hammerhead, and so on.

Though if Jaclyn had had to choose one, she’d have gone for the pajama catshark, even though she hated them with the fury of a thousand suns.

The Dungeon used those little blighters, and they were nasty. Agile, flexible, but most importantly, durable as all get out. Coupled with how much the water they lived in used to rob her blows of force, they had been so damn hard to kill … the only thing that prevented them from being the honey badgers of the ocean was the fact that they, in the wild, lacked the attitude, preferring to rest in reefs and hide. Their ludicrous durability would have easily let them pull the same kind of nonsense that had made her own bond so legendary.

Beyond sharks, however, you also had electric eels, various octopi such as the mimic for camouflage, or the blue ring for venom, jellyfish for contact poison and longevity, etc.

But that still left the issue of how anyone who took a class like that would start from the very bottom, so the two underwater transformation zones would have to wait while they all prayed nothing nasty would come crawling out until then.

For now, she just had to keep preparing while the rest of the preparations for the Russia expedition were made.