Zanma willed his sealsuit to release, and just like that, the black second skin loosened around him, distending into the form of a thin, sleeveless “robe,” and he let it fall to the ground. The sleeve-gloves followed similarly, though they loosened only enough that he could pull them off easily. The shower’s doors folded open and sealed shut behind him, so not a drop of water would escape the closed system. With the twist of a knob, a wall of cold water poured down Zanma’s body, even if it didn’t have a great deal to wash away. Soon enough it turned warm, then hot, until it reached the point of barely being tolerable. As the water ran down the considerable length of his hair, several strands fell out. Zanma remained like this, steaming in this impromptu sauna for a good twenty minutes before he was satisfied. His fallen hair had disintegrated into glittering dust by the time he was done, and new strands were already growing in their place. A few button presses, and the unit’s interior reconfigured into a toilet, then a grooming station with a sink, mirror, and a selection of any prefabricated implements the designers had managed to cram in, razors and so on. He spent a little over half an hour, and by the end, not a trace remained of his fallen-out hairs. Despite his best efforts he had yet to discover a bath setting, despite the unit being just about large enough for one. Perhaps it needed an add-on for more reserve water, or a premium firmware update — a pirate one, of course, he doubted the original manufacturer still existed.
With the morass of sleep finally sloughed off, Zanma felt well enough to tackle the issue at hand: The Wurger’s maintenance and continued work with the very substance that had caused his poisoning in the first place.
While he put his gloves back on, his gaze moved over his workbench, over the plates of pearlescent armor strewn around, and the canisters containing their liquid precursor. The Spider, folded up into a cube once more, sat at the edge. Slowly, memories of the last two days came together in his head. He'd been working with this vile substance, this evil liquid diamond, for weeks now, meticulously dialing it in. The reason? What other than puppets. Always puppets. The Etsutensoku had come across a half-dead Tridacna Leviathan, and the shipbeast had killed it, without the crew ever being involved. The source of his poisoning was the plunder of that "hunt" — Tridacna Leviathan pearl dissolved in a solvent distilled from the creature's own venom; technical name, 2K-TD-RL; actual name, Tridacna Pearl Resin, or TPR. It also went by Tridacna Pearl, Bane Pearl, Psi-Pearl, and a dozen other colloquial names depending on quality, processing method, the specific island, the day of the month, so on and so forth.
Just the same as it had loosened, the sealsuit tightened around him, venting air from a valve on the back until it returned to its state as a second skin.
Looking back, it was his own damn fault. Old Taisei had warned him of this substance among many others, though the old bastard had woefully understated the danger; "just a bit of a headache if you're not careful," he had said. Zanma had sourced the antidote, Locke's Salt, but that hadn't saved him from his own carelessness.
The Tridacna Leviathan was a superpredator: a giant lamprey eel with tentacles in place of a tail, named for its three nested jaws used to punch through its prey’s multi-layered defenses. They hunted psionic creatures in the Sea of Blood, chiefly Slayer Whales; predators that produced shockwaves to stun prey and rivals, infamous for overturning ships in territorial outbursts. The leviathan would lash out with venom-spraying tendrils, willingly sacrificing them to the whale's psychokinetic shredding, having developed its own limited psionics to amplify its agility and control the tendrils at range. The pearl developed as each leviathan fed; the more successful the hunter, the larger the leviathan, the more pearl it had, and the harder it became to kill. The largest specimens were never hunted, but found long after they failed to molt, mined more than butchered. The Etsutensoku's specimen was already dying and below average in size, but a single leviathan still yielded enormous amounts of pearl and venom. Carter had spent a week barking orders at the crew to get it butchered, even with Zanma’s assistance.
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In liquid form, the resin was an evil thing that actively wanted to kill the shit out of you, either by suppressing your mind to the extent of brain death, or by polymerizing on the insides of your lungs and suffocating you. Once cured, however, it made for an unparallelled psi-resonator; not only was it exceptional as armor, it could even enhance a puppet's speed or amplify the user's psionic techniques, if they were channeled through the puppet. A sword with a grip made from the substance could double its value, and one with a blade laminated in it would be a treasured possession to any man who could use it properly, for even a subpar psion could make such a sword fly and kill with a gesture.
Zanma didn’t use the resin in this manner, only testing a few small solid pieces at first. The key was not the volatility of the resin, but the use of one’s own psionics to stimulate it to begin and guide the curing process. There was no secret technique, you just had to do it by feel. However, casting solid resin was too wasteful. The orthodox method, and the one which he employed, was to use a porous scaffold material, impregnate it with the resin, and then glaze it in a thin layer of the pure resin, around 1/10 the thickness of the underlying composite. One could stretch one’s reserves further with negligible loss to per-piece effectiveness, while achieving even better durability. He had used an alternate version of this method with a thicker glaze layer, a full one-quarter as thick as the underlying ceramic-TPR composite. Though perhaps less efficient than using a 1/10 thickness glaze layer, the result of his adjusted method was nearly indistinguishable from solid TPR.
The Spider had been his first use of TPR; its body layout, which folded up into a cube, was designed to make use of his early attempts at casting the resin directly. This psi-resonant plating was the reason he had been able to move it with such ease compared to the other puppets even in his crippled state. He walked over to the Wurger, forming threads and grabbing tools with them as he went. He reached to his left earring and pulled a replacement metacarbonate rod from the spatial-fold storage device, its great weight immediately pulling his hand down for the moment it took him to lift it into the air with a thread. Once the new rod was in place, he joined a thread to the puppet’s arm to re-lock the rod retainers and shift the counterweights back into place. Replacing the igniter was even simpler. Zanma had intentionally stored a few replacement rods as well as various other materials and tools inside his earring’s limited storage space, in case he was ever separated from the Wyrmkaiser. All in all he had stocked up dozens of spare pilebunker rods and strikers, expecting to go through them and not wanting to need to keep making new ones. He would rather set some time aside to churn out a larger batch all at once.
Checking the Wurger as a whole for damage was only one-third visual; he could look all he wanted, but connecting to the puppet would give him a far more thorough sense of its physical state, as it allowed him to extend his psionic sense of his own body into the puppet. It wasn’t practical to do this in operation, not at his stage at least, but it was extremely useful. It hadn’t suffered any significant damage in the battle with Shellhead, requiring only some minor touchups; Zanma intentionally left the scuffs and minor scrapes, feeling they gave the puppet character, that they amplified its presence and made it feel more lively when he operated it. Taisei had alluded to such metaphysical phenomena only in passing, saying that it would be best if he experienced and comprehended such things himself. It pained him knowing that he couldn’t just replace the Wurger’s armor with TPR composite right then and there; nevermind producing the armor pieces, he would have to completely recalculate the puppet’s weight distribution and account for how the psi-resonance affected it, and the armor shape and layout would lead to an infinitely more complex pattern of resonance than any conventional plating. In short, elevating the Wurger to the “Tridacna Wurger” was far beyond his capabilities right now, and operating such a puppet was well out of the question. Just the Wurger as it was already pushed him. He could only fantasize of its future capabilities.
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