Unsurprisingly, enchanting a large structure of advanced tech was far different from imbuing simple elemental magic into something. We were trying to put something like anti-dispelling into it, which might just be Dispel. Since we wouldn't be able to actively do anything, the defenses did have to be fairly generic. Most likely they wouldn't do much more than slow down any sort of attempts rather than completely stopping them, but that could be good enough.

Assuming we actually got working enchantments.

Midnight shook his head. "This one is no good either. We're going to have to start over."

Maybe it was the lack of mastery with the particular sort of magic we were trying, or relative newness to enchantment, or just the size of the project. Either way, we found the enchantments didn't quite stick the way we wanted them to. But unfortunately they didn't also fade on their own, so we had to actively dismantle things.

Disenchanting was pretty much just flooding things with Dispel until they were permanently disabled. Fortunately, we were able to remove any mana sources so that the enchantments were weak. Just a skeleton, really. Otherwise it would have cost several times as much to undo.

Rather than fusing mana crystals with the device we were working with, the Celmothians had just built in storage locations. Technically the same thing could have been done with other objects, if we were willing to have a fist sized chunk of crystal strapped onto the side of whatever it was.

I carefully purged the mana channels that would carry the power, then began to pull apart what remained of the enchantment. The whole process was quite boring, and I couldn't wait until we finished at least a full attempt of our work so that we could get to testing. Because at least there, I should get experience. Testing would involve directly pitting some of the few Celmothians that had gained class abilities against our enchantments, which was kind of like a fight. I got experience for normal spells contesting powers, so it should work the same with enchantments.

If I got experience for breaking down half-built enchantments, it wasn't enough to show. Then again, I might not get anything for overcoming my own spells. I never really tried, because it was easier to just spar with Midnight or something I knew actually worked.

Trying to figure out precisely which parts Midnight worked on wasn't worth the time. It was better to just do the project properly. Mainly because he cared about it.

"Be careful with the dimensional incapacitator," he commented.

"Of course I'm being careful with that thing you said," I nodded seriously. "I'm not going to break anything, don't worry. Actually, between the two of us I have far more experience not letting unstable mana do very bad things."

Negative mana shenanigans had made me get really good at controlling magic or die. So far, it had been the first one. For this project, I wasn't going to let myself get close to passing the threshold. There was no rush, and it wouldn't really save any time anyway.

-----

It took two weeks to get a first pass finished. The device we were working on didn't even take up that big of a room. I wondered how anyone enchanted big wizard towers or castles. I guess they spent a lot of time, and had more people.

The first tests went fine. Unfortunately, those just tested basic functionality. The subsequent tests where people were trying to bypass our protections also went great. For the people trying to bypass things, not for our enchantments.

"They don't really react," said one of the artificers. "It's not much different than a wall. We can climb over, dig under, or just batter at them until there's a hole."

Harsh words, but accurate. Midnight and I discussed how we might make improvements.

"What about Divination magic?" he suggested. "That is what we required to observe anything with magic, right? Then we trigger that with Contingency?"

"That should work," I said. "But that's going to increase our mana costs, which will require more frequent charging and lower the overall efficiency of the system."

Fortunately, they had enough local Celmothians with the ability to manipulate mana- from routing some rescues through my old world- but that only applied for a certain number of enchantments. Midnight and I wouldn't be able to maintain much more than any of them by ourselves, and I wasn't planning to be a full-time battery if that would even be sufficient.

We spent about a day trying to refactor the enchantment with that sort of flexibility in mind… and realized we had to start again from the ground up. It would have been great if we had experience in large projects like this, but unfortunately we just didn't have it. And we hadn't expected that particular pitfall.

-----

"This time," I said. "It should work."

I couldn't believe we'd only gotten a single natural upgrade for Enchantment so far. How disappointing. Did that mean we weren't really good at it after all? I had no way to tell, because there was no way to spend points on it so what its innate tier might be was a mystery. Even then, upgrades hadn't been that much harder to get at the top end.

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Even with what the 'infiltration team' already knew, they weren't able to bypass the teleportation suppressor for over half an hour. More importantly, they tripped the alarms.

Midnight was quite pleased. "That went great."

"I feel like it should have more active defenses," I said. "Like lasers. Or meteors."

Midnight shook his head. "The second one doesn't really work in the city. As for the other thing, this should be connected to other defensive systems in actual practice. The important thing is that it looks like they would generally have to reach the device here to potentially disable it."

-----

Despite all that work, that wasn't even the real project. That was just the planning and testing phase. They were still going to use that because it worked, but our actual project was back on Earth as part of the Celmothian embassy. The whole point of that had just been to make certain we could enchant tech at all, and the answer was we could. However, even on a smaller scale it had been more difficult. There were a lot more delicate parts than a sword had. Even then, we were only directly supplementing what it could already do.

Then again, what was the point of doing anything like that if we weren't doubling down on a feature? Nobody really cared about a gun that was a little bit better at deflecting swords. They just wanted the gun to be a better gun.

Relatedly, Midnight had worked on enchanting a few Celmothian weapons with varying results. The ultimate result was a similar absolute increase in power to other weapons enchantments- but Celmothian stuff had a better base than the handgun I carried. Thus, the enchantments were less relevant.

I didn't care that much either way. After all, we had been allowed to share enchanting knowledge with the Celmothians, since they had absolutely no intention to make any sort of moves against or even vaguely near Ethus. Quite a number of them had become artificers, like Khithae. Speaking of which, we should probably teach her to enchant things too. The more people there were that could do that, the less the Power Brigade would want me to do it.

-----

While we'd been busy, we had only gotten a small amount of news from Earth. Part of it came through Celmothian sources, which meant it was mainly about progress with the embassy. The rest came through Angela.

Madame Multitude at one point, the kind older lady was able to exist in multiple places at once and had been helping coordinate things with them for quite some time. She was mainly based out of New Bay, so she heard about goings on there. Thus, we weren't entirely surprised when we were actually back on Earth and heard about a problematic new street drug, but the Power Brigade had a lot more information on it than Angela. She was working more as a private citizen that happened to have powers, so she didn't get all of the same reports. Though I bet she could have, if she had a reason. She had quite a few people that admired her from her previous career. A wide variety of contacts to call upon.

The direct report came from Calculator. He was good at putting those together, and even personalized them to individuals to some extent. The summary about the drug was…

"Someone has been replicating the vials stolen from Rodentia… the ones she stole them from Super Labs."

I thought for only half a moment. "The ones that she said caused super cancer?"

"The operative part of that is the super. At least in certain people's opinions."

Midnight tilted his head. "And that means…?"

"The people that don't get horribly ill or die usually end up with superpowers."

"That doesn't sound too bad," I said. Nobody else in the room seemed to agree, based on expressions and emotions. "Why is that extremely bad?"

"Aside from a bunch of desperate often criminally connected people getting superpowers?" Calculator asked. "Let me list a few things. First, the powers are often quite similar to existing individuals. Though it doesn't seem they have been able to isolate any strains and give people a specific power. Second, the percentage of people who get horribly ill or die is over 95%."

"And that's bad because…?" I prompted.

"Because people dying is bad," Calculator said. I just looked at him. "And from the city's perspective, it's bad because not all of those affected by this are known criminals. Including the mayor's niece, Thiziri."

"I don't-"

"Yes, you don't know who the mayor is," Calculator waved. "That doesn't matter. She got lucky. A certain healer happened upon her as she was dying in an alley and managed to stitch her back together."

"So if she's fine…?"

"She got Mystrome's powers," Calculator commented.

I didn't know much except that Mystrome was an illusionist villain. I thought through the implications. "Ah. So people now think they're connected?"

"Some people might," Calculator shrugged. "Which is sufficient for it to be a big deal. And the more people that happen to survive, the more others will try. Which gives the Neon Void more prominence and causes the city more trouble."

"If we knew where the Neon Void lived we would have taken them down a while ago, though," I surmised. "So… is there anything active we need to do?"

"Not at the moment. But if we can get one of those vials, we might have you try to Scry more."

"Bolster can-"

"She's not as good as you yet."

Tch. She clearly needed to train more. What was she doing? Oh right, picking up all the utility stuff I'd dumped on her.

"Well, let us know when that happens," I said. "Until then, I think we're working on the embassy?"

"Don't forget your training," Calculator said.

"I worked out every day on Celmoth," I said. "Though for some reason they don't have humanoid gyms so…"

He grinned. "It's kind of a waste when there are only ever have two at most."

"Angela could make there be a lot more." I wondered if splitters got exercise from their clones? It probably depended on their specific power.

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