Have you ever seen that gremlin movie? The one where you aren’t supposed to get them wet or feed them after midnight? Well, take one of those evil little bastards, give him a herculean physique, cover him in coveralls, work boots, heavy leather gloves, and a pair of brass-sided goggles, and stretch him to about three and a half feet tall.


    His teeth were flat like a human’s, with pronounced but rounded tusks, his mouth slightly smaller, his eyes less insane-looking red, and his skin was a lot less… plated-spiky-looking, but the ears looked the same, and the rich forest green of his skin definitely explained the term ‘greenskin’ for his people. He didn''t... quite... look like those little green monsters I fought in the tutorial, though.


    “What?” he yelled politely, glaring at us. His… wife, patted his arm, and he carefully lifted his goggles, “I mean, what do you need, Wandi? And who’s the giant freak standing next to you?”


    Wandi took a step forward, grabbing my forearm and pulling me with her. “Raspail, we have a serious problem that I think only you are talented enough to solve. This is Tony. He’s a human.”


    The green bean looked me up and down, “No he ain’t. He ain’t got an aspect. He looks more like a starved three-week dead ogre. You didn’t drag a necros into my fine lab, did you, girl? I don’t have time for someone’s sick sex toy.”


    I recognized the type instantly. Some guys just needed a different approach to being social. I sort of shook off Wandi’s hand and growled, “Call me a necros again, you bat-headed alligator. I heard you were a troll, not a broken oracle stuffed into the body of a blind toymaker’s idea of what an owl is supposed to look like.”


    Both Wandi and Melita were staring at me in wide-eyed shock, and Raspail glared at me like I’d shot his dog. After a second he chuckled, and then started laughing loudly while the girls both looked confused, “Bat-headed alligator? I didn’t even know you humans had spread down that far. Blind toymaker? That’s a pretty good one. I like you, pretty boy. What the hell are you? I can tell you ain’t aspected even from here, but you don’t look like any greenskin I’ve ever seen… especially without the green skin.”


    Wandi whispered, “He doesn’t hate you? Weird. He hates everybody at first.”


    I shrugged and answered the troll, “Something called a basic human. I don’t have an aspect, but I need to learn how to push essence around. Wandi told me that you might know how to do it without an aspect, but there are more important problems.”


    “What problems would those be?” the little Disney Studios escapee asked me. More like a Gremlin crossed with a dwarf, without the beard.


    I looked at the 30-foot-long pipe. “This… is this supposed to be a gun? I can see from here that it’s got a curve to it.”


    He growled, “Frackin’ serious. The curve ain’t a problem, the length is. The Regent wants a cannon that can take out a drake. That means at least a five-pound projectile traveling at almost a thousand feet per second. This barrel” he patted the slightly-curved pipe, “Has to be this long to accelerate that heavy of a projectile to that speed.”


    “Can you use a smaller bullet that travels at a faster speed?”


    He nodded, “Yeah, but there’s a hard bar on how much acceleration the runes can push individually, although the weight can be increased with a higher kinetic essence flow. At least with a heavier weight, I don''t need a fifty-foot-long barrel. Right now, I can shoot this thing, but maneuverin'' it and targetin'' it is the real problem. I mean, it’s not like a gun you can spin around. I think I might have to tell the regent no-go on this pile of sick. I could mount it in the wall, but aiming means draggin'' the damned monster into the perfect position to get shot.”


    I looked thoughtful. The gremlin seemed to be warming up to me a bit, so I decided to see if it was possible to set the hook. “You said the curve doesn’t matter?”


    He nodded, “Yep. As long as the last bit of the barrel is a straight shot, the projectile will travel more or less straight until gravity drags it down. I mean, I thought about bendin’ the barrel halfway down, so it’s in an L-shape. It’s possible if I add extra kinetic absorption, but then I’d have to use a round shot, and aimin’s even more of a nightmare.”


    “Because a long, sharp bullet would get caught on the turn?”


    He nodded, “Yep. Exactly that. But a round shot would have to be even bigger, with a longer barrel to get it up to speed, because penetratin’ a drake’s armor with a club instead of a knife is harder. It’d take more speed.”


    “Can you run the same round through the same runes multiple times to make it go faster?”


    He laughed, “You mean like a teleport shot? Hah. Sure. But it’s a gimmick. Transport runes are horribly energy-inefficient. Someone once made a pistol that could teleport the round a bunch of times from the end of the barrel back to the start of the rune track, but it took the full power of an iron stage to shoot the damned thing. It was destructive, but an iron-rank could do the same damned thing with a good bow and not use his whole energy pool for one bullet.”


    I nodded slowly, while Wandi started whispering with Melita, who was nodding rapidly and surprisingly enough smiling.


    “So it is possible, and with the right runes, you could do it on a curved track?”


    “Why?” he asked.


    I looked around. There was an enormous amount of junk, and parts, “Do you mind if I demonstrate something for you?”


    He shrugged and held out his hand. “Just don’t wreck anythin'', sure. These ain’t finished works.”


    I found what looked like a large round tray with a grooved edge, after a moment, I also found a rather large bearing, the size of a golf ball, made out of what looked like tin. “Have you ever used a sling?”


    He nodded, “Yep. And that was one of my first ideas, a trebuchet, but height control is always a bitch. It’s great for knockin’ down walls, but swivellin’ it around to hit a target like a drake, and adding in range and arc, is even harder… right now, we use trebuchets until a high-stage can get into melee with it, but that’s why the Regent wants somethin’ better.”


    I dropped the bearing into the pan and started slowly swirling it around the outside edge. “Are you planning to play roulette?”


    I shook my head and started spinning it faster and faster. "This is what''s called centrifugal, or more accurately, centipedal motion. It''s kinda stupidly simple in concept, but it took a bunch of engineers a long time to realize that sometimes simple is what you need. Obviously, increasing the speed takes longer, but if runes have a maximum acceleration rather than a maximum velocity, it could work."This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    It was difficult to keep it inside the pan as it spun, but when I almost thought I would lose control, I tilted the pan slightly so that the now rapidly moving ball shot across the lab, hit a large upturned gear, shot up to the roof, banged against it, ricocheted down and hit a girder support, and finally shot sideways into a wall of what looked like spare parts or junk, banging a bit before the clink of hitting the stone floor. The shot wasn’t really planned, but it was impressive.


    Raspail was glaring at me, not saying a single word.


    “Umm… sorry? I hope I didn’t break anything.”


    “What, by Tuft’s third titty, was that?”


    I snickered, “Tuft’s third titty?”


    He nodded, “Tuft. The people’s goddess of fertility. She got six tits, like a wolf. What the grack was that?”


    I shrugged, “basically a dummy’s version of an accelerator. I didn’t invent it, some very smart guys did, and it’s usually designed to accelerate something super tiny to incredible speeds. Simple concept, but my dad''s driver... uhh... an engineer friend of mine, said that complicated is easy, and simple is hard. Any engineer can create an overly complex work for doing a simple job, but it takes generations to create something simple that can do a complex job.”


    He nodded and dived over to a work table. In a moment, he was drawing with a fat pencil on what looked like a note tablet, and muttering to himself. After a moment, he dropped the pencil. “Scrog, boy! If I used a rerouter and extra stressors, I could get a half-pound ball to go more''n three thousand feet per second without breakin'' the stressors on a brass casing. Do you got any idea how fast that is?”


    I nodded, “Three times the speed of sound. Big boom.”


    “That’s THREE TIMES the speed of sound!” he yelled, repeating me. “Really big boom! That kind of force, in a much smaller casin''… I mean, you’d still need at least a four-foot barrel to aim it straight, and the accelerator ring would have to be at least ten feet around, but it would weigh a fraction… and even a wood rank could power and aim that barrel!”


    I nodded and realized that despite their tech level, these people weren''t simple... Raspail knew what the speed of sound was, which implied that there might be a reason they didn''t have electricity, not that they hadn''t developed it, yet.


    “Oh man, oh man…” he said, frantically scratching new notes. “That… Hey Wandi, how would you like a rifle that could send a ten-ounce bullet right through our town wall?”


    “I think I’d like that?”


    “Uhh… important tip. Ammunition. At that speed, you will get a lot of spin from a ball… that will tend to make the round fly wild. You might want to figure out a way to either control the spin at the end or use a metal that’s soft enough that the air itself reshapes it into a sharper shape, like lead. Also, lead, when it hits a target at high speed, tends to break apart into chunks and shatter all over the inside of the target.”


    He nodded, “Lead is pretty cheap. Not a good essence conductor, but I can account for that unless we plan on using enchanted rounds. But man… that would give a drake a very bad day. I can do this. Carni!”


    “It’s Melita, dear.”


    He waved his hand, “Right, Melita, let the Regent know that we’re doing a redesign, but we SOLVED the shooter problem, and prolly the aiming problem too. It’s gonna take a few weeks or months, but should use lots less materials, I am gonna need a lot more light traction runes, some class C stressors, and about five hundred pounds of lead with full safety scrot for handling it.”


    “But the deadline?”


    He shrugged, “I’m gonna miss the deadline but produce a far superior product. He’s used to that. Please send the message, love.”


    Melita nodded, “Got it.”


    Wandi chuckled, “You should tell him about the steam fan, pump, and bomb bullets, too. I bet you could get rich.”


    Raspail suddenly looked shocked. “Oh right! This is YOUR idea. Would you accept ten percent? I gotta build the damned things and bang out the defects.”


    I shrugged, “I didn’t actually come up with the idea, but uhh…” at Wandi’s rapid nod, and shrugged, “Ten percent net or profit?”


    “Profit boy! I barely make ten percent net after resale and labor on most stuff, and once people see this, I figure at most a few months before it starts gettin’ reverse-engineered and we start seein''… uhh… spin-dizzy rifles. Or maybe barkers. I ain’t decided on a name yet.”


    I nodded, “Ten percent is fine, then.”


    He grinned, “Plus a favor. So what’s a steam fan or a bomb bullet?”


    I sighed, “Steam fans I could explain later. Bomb bullets are something from my homeland… I don’t actually know how to make them, they take something called gunpowder, and all I know about it is that it takes charcoal, sulfur, and uhh… poop to make. I think.”


    He laughed, “Poop bullets. That sounds goblin. One of them chieftains was famed for pissing on his blades before a battle and rubbin'' them in his poop so that anyone he cut would get infected even if he couldn’t finish ''em off.”


    He put down his pad and pencil again. “So you ain’t got an aspect, and want to learn to push essence? It’s not hard… ironically, it works a lot like that spindizzy you just showed me, but inside. It’s kind of the basis for gainin'' tiers among the greenskins. But, if you don’t have a spirit root, it just won’t work at all. Lots of people don’t have enough of a root to learn basic essence-spinnin'', so they are limited and hit their advancement roof at wood.”


    He glanced at Wandi, “Aspected got it easy. If you got an aspect, you got a strong enough spirit root to go at least gold-core. They can’t go past that without abandonin'' their aspect, which they would never do in a million years, but Gold core is pretty chaffin’ powerful.”


    “Are you willing to take the time out to teach me?”


    He chuckled, “Sure. It’s somethin'' Gremlins learn when they are children. Ogres mostly are too stupid, and you look like something birthed out by a sick ogre, but I figure you ain’t stupid after inventin'' the… ring rifle? Oooh, that sounds good!”


    “Thank you so much. I will think about you next time I drink too much since I’ll probably wake up in a pool that reminds me of your skin. Seriously though, if you get that kind of speed, don’t forget hearing protection.”


    He laughed, “Right. Siddown. What do you mean hearing protection?”


    I looked at the greasy flagstones of the floor, “Here?”


    He nodded, “Yup. Right here. Unless you wanna find a better puddle of goop to sit in? I’ve been kinda busy. Cleanin'' takes a back seat to finishin'' a contract.”


    Melita leaned forward and whispered to me, “Raspail doesn’t clean, and we won’t touch the lab. He usually hires a crew to do it, but he’s been too busy. We clean our own workspaces, but he really IS a genius, so Carni and I usually forgive him.”


    I found a place to sit that was vaguely clean, on top of what looked a bit like the fuel tank for a boat. “Okay. And what I mean is, if you shoot a bullet at three times the speed of sound, there will be a sonic boom that might shake the walls apart. Anyone nearby would probably lose their teeth, let alone their hearing. Might want to try a bit bigger and a bit slower, like maybe one and a half times the speed of sound. Safety first.”


    “Safety first? For a weapon?”


    I nodded, “You want to kill the guy on the other end of the stick, not the one holding it. Safety first.”


    He nodded thoughtfully. “That would give any decent goblin or gremlin tech the shits, but I guess I can sort of understand where you are coming from.”


    “First off, despite what Wandi thinks, you ain’t tin-tier. You are only wood, albeit a stupidly overpowered wood. Most gremlins would be at least tin rank before they even started thinking about getting their pecker wet, so you might not have a good enough root. You are probably at most rank… what, three? In whatever your primary path is.”


    “You are very observant, sir. I guess the bloodshot look helps.”


    He nodded, “Yeah, trolls can see essence flows. You have a groll-ton of essence, but it’s raw and uncompressed. Wood-tier, that is. Someday, assumin'' you have a decent root and some angry husband don’t kill you for taking away his wives, you''ll probably piss more essence after your morning coffee than most patternists can summon for a great work. Now close your eyes, pretty boy.”


    "Coffee?" I asked excitedly. Oh, thank you, God. I''d had nightmares about being stuck in a fantasy world without coffee.