Chapter 186: Guns - Markets and Multiverses

“Guns?” I asked, as Felix led me back towards my room.

Felix nodded, while grinning at me. A few moments later, he rummaged around in the bottom of the closet I had given to him, before he pulled out a large box. His grin grew even wider as he handed the box to me.

“Guns!” he proclaimed proudly. “Well, a gun. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make them, and I haven’t made more than one yet. But I think I managed to create one! Look inside the box.”

I gave Felix a careful, considering look, before I opened the box.

Inside, just as Felix had promised, there was a gun. It looked a little bit longer and thinner than other guns I had seen, but it still looked like a well-made gun.

“Does it work?” I asked curiously.

“It should,” said Felix, wincing. “But I also don’t think the inside of your house is a good place to test whether my homemade gun works properly. So I haven’t actually tested it yet. How about we find another spot to give it a trial run? If it works, we could try selling it through Old Mo.”

I nodded, and the two of us quickly left the house before heading into the streets.

As always, we kept to ourselves as we walked. None of the people in this part of the city were friendly, and an attitude of wariness and gloom hung over most of the people we came across. But that was normal for the slums, so I tried not to pay it too much mind. Instead, the two of us walked a little faster as we moved through the streets.

I did notice that the people around us gave us a wider berth than they might have when we were younger. I had stuffed Felix’s gun into my backpack, so we weren’t obviously armed. However, the people around us still gave us a wide berth.

I absently wondered whether they were afraid of being pickpocketed or whether they were afraid of being stabbed for accidentally nosing into some gang’s business. After a moment of consideration, I decided it didn’t matter. Right now, at least, I was grateful that nobody interrupted us.

The two of us walked past several streets, before we found an alley that was at least somewhat isolated from the rest of the city. I used my enhanced hearing to check our surroundings, making sure that nobody was near enough to get hurt if the gun misfired, and also to ensure that we could hide if someone came to investigate. It would be pretty dumb for someone who lived in the slums to walk towards gunshots, but it didn’t hurt to have alleys we could duck into, just in case. Owning a gun was probably illegal, and I didn’t want a hat patrolling nearby to spot us, even if they seldom patrolled the slums.

Luckily, at least for now the closest people to us were several houses away.

“Make sure to use your dress to shield yourself,” said Felix, starting to look a little nervous. “Make sure gun shrapnel won’t hit your face if the gun explodes. I don’t think it will, but just in case. If it blows off your hand, you can just regrow it, but if it hits your brain you might get sent straight back to the Market.”

“Are you that worried about it?” I asked, giving the gun a curious look. “Are you sure I should be firing this thing?”

“I’m mostly sure that it’s fine,” said Felix. “But the gunpowder of this world looks really different from gunpowder I’ve seen in the past. The gunpowder in this world is blue, and made of some kind of gel stuffed with weird powders and binding essence. To be honest, I haven’t figured out exactly how it’s made yet, even though I have figured out how it works through some trial and error. I also tried making the kind of gunpowder I recognized from home, but…” Felix sighed. “Well, the chemical reaction just didn’t work. I ended up with a handful of completely useless powder. The differences in the laws of reality are very noticeable when looking at this particular chemical reaction. So while I’ve recreated the gun itself using my metal attunement, and modified it a bit, I have no idea how to make gunpowder.” Felix shook his head. “Sorry, I got lost in thought. Anyway, I’m pretty sure my gun works, but I’d prefer you stay as safe as possible just in case something goes wrong. I don’t think it will, but…” Felix shrugged. “I would feel awful if I accidentally sent you back to the Market. So stay safe, okay?”

I nodded, and adjusted my grip on the gun so that if it blew up in my hand, I would only need to regrow an arm and wouldn’t just die on the spot. It required a little bit of awkward reshuffling of my arms and my dress, and by the end, I was practically holding the gun against my stomach instead of in any reasonable grip. Given the defensive properties of my dress, at the angle I was holding the gun it would be impossible for shrapnel to clip my brain if something did go horribly wrong.

After that, I aimed at the ground, prepared my spatial vision just in case it was needed, and fired.

An incredibly loud, ear-destroying banging sound resonated through the area, and I winced. My ears were much more sensitive to sounds than they had been in the past, and this gunpowder was much louder than I remembered. I could adjust to it, and I could even tell that some part of my Perception stat was trying to keep my enhanced senses from hurting me. But the loud crack of gunpowder still caught me off guard.

I glanced down at the spot where I had fired the gun, and noticed that there was now a small chunk of metal lodged in the mortal between two large chunks of cobblestone. I knelt down, and inspected the bullet and the street more carefully.

“YES!” yelled Felix, throwing his fist into the air and nearly jumping with glee. Then he winced, and checked our surroundings, before clearing his throat. “I mean… yes. It worked. I am delighted to see that my attempt at creating a gun has succeeded.”

I chuckled, but decided not to say anything about Felix’s outburst. Instead, I continued inspecting the bullet itself.

“It penetrated further into the street than I thought it would,” I said curiously.

Felix shrugged. “Bullets in this world are a little bit bigger, for reasons I haven’t quite pinned down yet. It makes them a little bit slower when they travel through the air, but they also have a little more oomph to them. With the prevalence of metal prosthetics in this world, I suspect that this is an explicit design choice. If someone replaces their ribs with metal or something, it’s probably best to have some more penetrative ability, even if it slows down the bullet’s speed a little.” Felix chuckled. “It’s not like anybody besides us has the reflexes to handle a bullet speeding towards them either way, after all. So might as well have a bit more penetrative power.” Then, he looked more closely at the barrel of the gun, and the street, before his grin grew wider. “I also added a little rifling to the barrel. In my first world, guns had little grooves on the inside of a gun barrel to make the bullets spin a little bit. It made bullets travel further and penetrate objects more easily. I wasn’t sure if there was some sort of change to the laws of physics that made them ineffective, but I’m now pretty sure that rifling still works here.” Felix’s face grew thoughtful. “I wonder why the military guns we stole don’t have rifling.”

I shrugged. I didn’t even know that guns had metal grooves inside the barrel. It did sound like it would be pretty hard to add to mass-produced guns, but I had no idea whether that was the issue or whether there was some other problem that held up the production process. Felix’s thoughts about the impact of metal body parts interested me more, but I wasn’t going to rain on his parade now that he had finally succeeded.

I inspected the gun again, and used my spatial vision to get a better look at the interior of the rifle. Nothing looked out of place, at least to my uneducated eyes.

“How many shots can it fire before it needs to be reloaded?” I asked.

“Five shots. It’s the same number of shots as the rifles we stole had,” said Felix. “I could probably improve it, but honestly, I don’t think I need to, especially for guns we’re planning to sell. I already added rifling to the gun, and I feel that’s enough optimizing for now. If one of us wants to use guns for fighting, I’ll make a much better custom weapon, but I kind of get the feeling I’m going to be the only one really embracing the new weapons,” he said.

“Probably,” I said. “I don’t think Anise the super witch is going to be too enthusiastic about using any weapons at all, and Sallia has already mentioned she doesn’t really like guns. I could see myself using them if I need a weapon, but at this point, I would be much more inclined to just extinguish something if I need it dead.”

“Fair enough,” said Felix. “In that case, I’m going to try not to improve the design of guns too much just yet. Once we have a little bit more of a reputation as gun sellers, maybe I’ll try pushing out better designs, but let’s start slow.” Then, Felix grinned. “But we have a real source of income now! Not just one-off batches of stolen goods. We can actually start producing wealth!”

I grinned and nodded in agreement.

“How much do you think we can sell it for?” I asked. I started thinking about food and clothes, the two things that we needed the most. While we were getting by right now, it was hard to say when something would go wrong. Tomorrow, the armies that were deadlocked at the front lines might sweep into the city and start killing everyone, or the government might figure out that we were the ones who had broken Felix out of prison and send an army to kill us. Or Old Mo might move or close down his shop, causing me to lose my job at the bakery. Right now we were barely scraping by, but if Felix could start selling weapons, we might really reach some level of financial stability.

“Do you want to try to sell it through Old Mo?” asked Felix, giving the gun another curious look.

I thought about it, before I nodded.

“He has already helped me dispose of other sketchy items, and he doesn’t seem to have an aversion to illegal business. I’ll see if he has any ideas about where I could dispose of some ‘dubiously acquired goods’ and go from there,” I said. “I mean, we made the gun ourselves, but I doubt anyone will seriously think a group of six year olds made working guns without a factory or any other conditions. Without the help of your metal attunement, the only other way to create something like this is to either use expensive equipment or an ability potion - and neither of those are available to random six year olds. So people are going to think we stole them.”

Felix nodded, and then sighed. “If they’re sold as stolen goods, the price will probably be lower.”

I also felt a bit depressed as I thought about that, but that didn’t change what had to be done.

We gave the gun a few more test shots, just to make sure the gun didn’t explode in its user’s hands after the third shot or have some sort of other critical malfunction, and then finished stress-testing the rifle. Luckily, nobody came to investigate what was happening over here. In the slums, gunshots meant people moved away from the sound.

It took a few minutes of walking before I arrived at Old Mo’s bakery, where I worked, and where I had learned to read and write. I took a deep breath, before I walked in. It was time to see how Old Mo felt about dangerous ‘stolen’ goods.

Author’s Note:

Reminder that on December 22nd (in my time zone. Exact date may vary for you) I will post the last chapter of the year for each of my stories. Then I will take a two week vacation.

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