The perfect shard.

I looked at the chart before me, ran the calculations again.

341 percent negentropy.

More than what I expected or wanted. A welcome surprise.

I smiled.

Now all I needed to do was follow the chart and make the trump tinker shard of my dreams.

Sure, I could just take Eidolon's shard and turn it into a negentropic version of itself.

But I had a better use for his shard outside me.

I planned to use it to create my own alien space whale in Project Dark Knight, to control the leftiver Endbringers.

It's way more valuable that way.

But enough speculation.

Let's begin!

I took an deep breath and downed the entire flask of mega seed juice.

"Computer. Get me Dauntless, Golem and Browbeat." I ordered.

These three would form one part of the base of my shard.

Dauntless had the power to enchant an object he touched with a charge granting it a certain property or effect. Like flying boots or laser spear. But Dauntless wasted his gifts. It's real power lay in the ability to allow me substitute components of my tech builds freely.

That copper alloy not conducting enough?

Enchant it with a conductive property that outshines even some room temperature superconductors I have made.

Steel enchanted to be tougher than adamantium. Paper cuts turning into mountains splitting slashes.

Laser guns enchanted to blot out the Sun.

And that was just scratching the surface. If I could enchant something enough times, concentrating it's power, I could turn a roadside pebble into a divine weapon.

There was just one problem. It was touch based. And the weapon could be knocked out of my hand. The gizmo could be disassembled. Broken. Destroyed.

And poof. Just like that, charge wasted.

That's where Browbeat's telekinetic ability to hold things together came to the rescue.

Now of course the question arises.

What's the use of Golem's shard?

Golem has the power to manipulate any material he touches, like an extension if his arms.

Not a particularly useful power in the long run.

But it doesn't have to be useful in and of itself.

The chink in Browbeat's armor is that his telekinesis is automated, like a forcefield, connected to his biokinetic ability to shapeshift slightly.

Which means it can't control it very well.

Unlike Golem's ability, which has control over material in spades.

That's what I wanted from Golem. By merging it with Dauntless and Browbeat I could remotely assemble, control and enchant my tech.

A definite boost to me technokinesis.

From the storage units lining the walls, three canisters flew out, landing on the table before me.

I pulled out a beaker, and checked the chart again, pouring in the measured quantities advised.

58.3 percent of Golem, 71.9 percent of Browbeat and 97.7 percent of Dauntless.

Mixed gently into a solution.

Pushing my technokinesis into the mixture and connected to the shards within, using the method the A.I. had refined from my experiments to convert the shards to my side, overriding the imprint of Scion and Eden flying across the cosmos with my own, an image of me in a Vitruvian pose, against the backdrop of the sun and stars.

A copyright of sorts. One that tells the shards who their new owner is. Almost brands them with it.

Their absolute loyalty belongs to me and me alone.

Just so they don't try that conflict drive bullshit with me.

Anyone who triggers using my shards now, will see my image instead of the usual worms swimming in space thing.

Less majestic? Maybe.

But if it means I get the loyalty of the shards, why not?

While I was at it, I also broke their limiters, giving me complete access to all possible powers a shard could give and at their maximum potency too.

With that done, I poured it out into a testing device, one with three bulbs projecting rays onto a platform. I like to call it the Scanatron 9000.

"Computer, check the entropy on this one." I ordered.

"Right away, sir." The computer replied, and fed it to a meat puppet, triggering it.

A holoscreen projected before me, showing an image of me against the sun and stars, while I opened another screen and checked the stats on it.

"Entropy at negative 280.5 percent huh? I messed up somewhere. Well it's serviceable. Can't expect theory to ring well in practice, one to one.

I can always make up for it in the second base."

I cracked my knuckles and used my power to connect to the meat puppet with a chip I installed into it's brain.

I raised my hand and it mirrored my action, raising it's vestigial appendage, pointing at the mess of materials alid out outside it's containment jar.

With a thought I activated the shard, as let loose the power.

A multicolour kaliedoscope of energy seeped out of the meat puppet and stretched out into the pile.

Parts and circuitboards, nuts and bolts rose up and out of the pile, floating into the air.

Then with a flash they rushed at each other and began to fit together like a giant puzzle, piece by piece. I raised a string of welding material and enchanted the circuit board with heat to melt it, instantly soldering it with the wiring.

The boards fit snugly into the chassis of a car that was coming together piece by piece, with satisfying click and clacks.

The lights connected to the discharged battery, the cylinders floating into the engine like a smooth, well oiled machine, and the doors and windows slid into place as if they had always been there.

Just like that, within minutes, a brand new car was made, ready to go. Except, it had no fuel. Or water. And it's battery was discharged.

On purpose of course.

Let's tests out some enchantments.

First things first, I charged the engine with perpetual motion, as it started chugging, even without a spark or fuel.

Next I enchanted the battery with and output of electric power, fine tuning it to the desired level.

The lights in the car came on with flick, lighting up the room.

I touched the doors and windows, enchanted them with adhesion to each other and magnetism to the car.

Just like that, without glue or a single screw, the doors opened and closed, the windows slid up and down.

I finally get why people like magic so much.

Seeing something just raw dog the laws of physics in every position is just so much fun!

By all means, the car should just fall apart, just like that, but it held together, each enchantment adding more power and function to it.

Somehow, by the time I was done with it, there stood a car made of trash, but strong enough to bring down skyscrapers.

I whistled happily.

I don't know why stories almost never show this, but there's a special joy in using your powers to exert your will on the environment. It was something I had felt before using my technokinesis, but not to this level.

No. This was something more. Something corporeal. The ability to affect actual physical change on stuff.

Even just something simple like telekinetically assembling a stupid regular honda civic out of trash felt like moving mountains.

The rush of power, andrenaline coursing through my veins. At all this just from the sub par feedback I got from the chip in the meat puppet.

How good would it feel to actually use this power with my own body?!

I felt like ... like goddamn Hercules.

This is actual power baby!

No wonder heroes are so prone to using their powers, punching their problems away.

It feels fucking good!

Kind of like a runner's high, but a thousand times better.

I could feel my blood pumping with excitement like a 3 year old kid on pizza day.

Now that's a good base for a power. And it's just the first one.

I extracted the first base shard from the creature and tucked it into a corner of the desk, before addressing the computer again.

"Computer, get me String Theory, Leet, Kid Win and Dragon."

The first base on it's own would give me a fantastic power, the envy of many. But I'm not here to make just a pretty decent shard.

No. I will settle for no less than the perfect trump/tinker shard.

The first base handled the trump part.

Now for the tinker part.

And for that I have picked some of the best tinker shards possible.

String Theory's power was obvious. She could build any doomsday device on a time crunch, as long as it has a timed self destruct button on it.

It was a great battle tinker power, specializing in quick thinking and battle readiness.

But I wanted more than just doomsday devices on call.

I wanted versatility. True creativity in my inventions.

That's where Leet came in. His power was practically the same as String Theory's but much, much more creatively free. The only limitations on it were that any item he made was a one time use, self sabotaging mess.

Which is why I needed to combine his creativity with String Theory's practicality to make the perfect self contained tinker shard.

But self contained tech isn't going to cut it in the multiverse. I am sure in other worlds I'll find tech far beyond what I can understand at a glance or maybe I'll need to create something from research. Or learn something entirely new. Like snake math and time travel for example. Rick had to spend days doing that, and he had decades of experience. I don't intend to waste my time on stuff like that.

I needed a fast forward option for my learning capabilities.

And Dragon could do just that.

Dragon's shard, which I had extracted personally from her massive underwater server room, well it was wierd.

Not wierd as in icky, but wierd as in it somehow managed to connect to and trigger am A.I. system.

A computer program, lines of code and data.

When I found it, it was hidden inside mass of wires and RAM, strings of data signals running between it and an old 2000s computer in what felt like a spiderweb.

To any other person it would look a glint of prismatic light floating above an old ratty computer overgrown with moss.

But with my technokinesis, I could see it clearly. All of it.

It gave me the shivers just looking at it. It made me realise how truly scary shards can be.

Shards didn't just use DNA to connect to their hosts. They could use anything, even an electrical or radio signal to do so.

There was no escape from these parasites. From their manipulation.

Even uploading your mind into a computer won't save you from being manipulated by them.

The concept if losing your freedom to an alien creature....Like some B-movie horror flick.

That just didn't sit right with me.

If I didn't have a way to forced them into total submission, I would have never touched these wormy disgusting things with a million foot pole.

No. No. Focus.

I shook my head and took a deep breath and pushed down the existential horror down my gullet, gulping hard.

Another sip of mega seed juice helped too.

Right. Now where was I?

Yeah. The tinker base.

The final part of the tinker base was Kid Win.

By himself, Kid Win was a mediocre tinker. He made laser guns and hoverboards.

But what I wanted from his shard was it's speciality.

Modular devices. Tech that can be broken down and rebuilt in a million unique ways and one. Part by part. Easy to maintain and repair. Easy to build on the fly.

Perfect for the battle tinker style I was going for.

An ascended version of Rick in some ways, but with significantly less body modification.

With a thought, the holoscreen shifted to the tinker base chart.

40 percent String Theory.

69.69 percent Leet. Nice. Something he would have appreciated too.

73.5 percent Dragon.

And finally, 38.6 percent Kid Win.

Once more I poured it out into a fresh, clean beaker and forced into merging.

Another imprint and limit break later, the tinker base was ready.

I placed it into the Scanatron 9000 and started the process.

"Negative 301 percent entropy. Good. Good enough." I smiled with satisfaction.

Now for the final part of the perfect shard.

Range.

My technokinesis had grown to be absolutely massive in the four years I had had it now. With a strong enough signal, I could control all technology within the edges of the solar system.

With portals that range went up to practically anywhere in the known universe. Even the multiverse.

But that's not enough for me.

I wanted more.

I wanted to be able to summon my tech across worlds like noble phantasm or a reality marble.

Right now, if I wanted to get me some of my tech, I had to open a portal, have the droids move it into place and then gently pull it out of the portal.

That's not good for when I'm in the middle of battle.

That's where the final base for my perfect shard came to be.

"Computer. Send out the Labyrinth, Cozen, Getaway, Rifle and Trickster."

This next base was purely for range, range and more range.

First a smidge of Labyrinth and her ability to summon landmasses from other realities.

It was a shaker ability, something that can affect a significant portion of the surroundings. Basically an AoE skill rating.

And Labyrinth wasn't just a regular shaker.

No.

A shaker 12+. The strongest Shaker rating in the world.

That's what she was.

I took out a third beaker, and poured out the entirety of Labyrinth's shard.

My power seeped into the shard liquid and I scanned the shard over.

Labyrinth's power was too good to be used up completely.

Her shard combined with Scrub's dimension shunting shard, could give me a way to automate resource gathering across multiple realities at once.

Think Infinite Bread meets Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist.

If I got it set-up right I would never lack for resources ever again.

I didn't want to ruin that.

So I found a solution to the problem.

All shards contained two parts. One was the main shard obviously.

And the other was a bud, a sort of baby shard with similar powers to the mother shard it originated from.

That was what I was looking for.

In parahumans, this would usually bud off and trigger someone close to or related to the parahuman after enough time had passed. This usually resulted in the children of parahumans having a high likelihood hood of gaining the same or similar powers to their parents, making it look like the powers had some genetic component when in reality it was just a numbers game.

Truly, cunning bastards, these entities were.

Back to the shard, I found it, twisted and wrinked in a hidden fold in the mother shard.

Labyrinth's trigger was broken, and had pushed her into madness.

This was likely the cause for the bud being shrunken and deformed.

But if game of thrones had taught me anything, shrunken and deformed creatures are not to be underestimated.

I chuckled at that. Maybe I should rewatch it later. With Paige maybe. They probably don't have Game of thrones here yet.

I wonder how she'll react to the first episode's ending.

I made a mental note and focused back on the task at hand.

With a flick of my wrist, the telekinetic module popped on my bracelet, and I gently separated the bud from the main shard, carefully pulling it out and above the beaker, before setting it out on a petri dish filled with a nutrient mix and healing culture.

While that one regenerates, let's get the rest ready.

I put away the rest of Labyrinth's shard, sending it back into storage and pulled out a fourth beaker.

Popping open the vials I began mixing in the powers.

A little bit of Cozen, and her power to create interconnected pocket dimensions, like a prairie dog burrow or an anthill, but with pocket dimensions.

This was to reinforce the Labyrinth bud and to create a safe tunnel of sorts through which to summon my tech.

Then, a generous dab of Getaway's ability to teleport to places he had attuned with his power.

I was going to flip this the other way around. Teleport tech that was attuned to my power, to wherever I was.

Another bit of Trickster's shard.

Getaway's power teleported him to places he had attuned, whereas Trickster teleported things and people to him.

This served to reinforce the teleportation power and flip the summoner-summoned one relationship.

Finally, Rifle and his ability to increase the range and the perception of the user to match that range.

This would allow me to differentiate between the different tech I was summoning.

Another mix, imprint and limit break later, the mixture was almost ready.

I looked at the oetri dish and saw that the bud had finally bloomed and regenrated.

Good.

Now to trigger it to activation.

I picked up the bud from Labyrinth's shard telekinetically, and put it at the bottom of an empty containment jar.

With a thought, I used my power to open a portal to the serum storage.

Rummaging through it, I pulled out two test tubes, emptying them into the jar.

I placed it under an Incubation beam, as the solutions met, reacting violently as they hissed and smoked, before rapidly transforming into a small, gelatinous creature, shaped like a depressed meatloaf with two beady eyes, no mouth, shriveled vestigial arms and a weak, exposed nervous system.

A meat puppet, as I liked to call them.

This one was freshly made just to trigger the bud.

I snapped my fingers and another portal opened up, and another beam shot out, hitting the meat puppet, turning him inside out.

The Morphizer XE!

Now with his nervous system turned hypersensitive, I took a beaker of alkaline solution and dumped it into the jar, before shutting it off, and vacuum sealing it, suffocating the creature.

It shivered, and tried to thrash about, but it's body was small and unsuited for movement, it's arms were vestigial and useless.

The whole thing was just torturing the poor little thing to a slow, painful death as it burned, drowned and choked simultaneously.

It let out a shrill, weak cry for help from someone, anyone.

Unfortunately for it, I was a cruel god. And torture was it's fate.

I really needed that shard to trigger.

And trigger it did. Moments before the meat puppet died, it triggered, filling the jar with dirt and snow out of instinct.

This did not save it though. Only killed him faster as the extradimensional pour of material crushed him under it's weight.

I shook my head.

What a stupid creature. Though, in it's defense it was only seconds old.

I emptied the jar onto the table and extracted the freshly triggered shard, carefully adding it to the mixture.

Placing it under the Scanatron 9000, I got my result.

"Negative 298 percent entropy."

I leaned back in my chair and stretched.

Four hours had passed now since I began and finally, I was almost done.

With a final fifth beaker, I combined the three base solutions, into one, repeating the whole process again, compounding the shards' powers, picking and choosing their expressed attributes and making byways to connect them and work them as one.

Slowly, shard by shard, I merged the three solutions, into the perfect shard I had dreamed of.

I held up the beaker to the light above and reveled in the kaeidoscopic display of light reflecting off of it.

It looked so... hauntingly beautiful.

Especially for being a gross mixture of slimy, oily liquids.

Carefully, I poured it out into a large vial and sealed the mouth. Putting it down on the table.

I popped a stamina pill, and took a sip of mega seed juice, sitting in silence for a moment.

The power to remotely control, enchant, and assembled my tech.

The ability to instantly identify the properties and potential of a given material on sight and learning stuff at brain melting speeds, bordering on instant comprehension.

The creativity and intelligence to design and create anything tech related that I could ever want, with barely any effort.

Lex Luthor would be jealous!

But then again, Lex is jealous of anything better than him so I guess that's not a high bar to clear.

And finally, the power to summon my tech across the multiverse as and when I please, like room service.

It was a dream come true for any scientist or engineer.

And I was living it. Or at least I would be, soon.

A thought occurs.

I chuckled.

This is going to make me so lazy.

The portals were already turning me into a couch potato. But being able to summon my fridge to me?

That's a whole new level of laziness!

I eyed the vial with the perfect shard, as a satisfied smile settled on my face.

There's just something about a job well done that makes me so happy.

Now then. Onto the final phase of my plans here.

To steal the remaining shards from this world and make my ape escape.

Though, I suppose if I steal all the shards, I won't need to escape because there would be no one even remotely powerful enough to hunt me down.

Hmmmm.....well whatever.

Let's do this. And while I'm at it, I'll make Panacea pay.

If she had at least tried to help me....

But no, she refused to even try!

That bitch!

I could feel my blood boil.

I ground my teeth at the thought, furious.

She will pay.

In blood and in mind.

In power and in kind.

_________________________

Aaaand, I'm sorry.

I was going to write Panacea's public humiliation this chapter but the perfect shard thing got out if hand!

I'll write it out next chapter!

But hey, finally, mc gets the perfect shard!

So silver linings?

Anyways, tell me what you think about the chapter.

And donate your powerstones of you liked the chapter!

Also, if you want to support me, buy me a cup of coffee or read ahead, go here.

www.patr-eon.com/goldenfingers