Chapter 4

I was happy that Gertra found Francesca’s emotional catharsis more amusing than upsetting as well, as while the ideograph for trouble can also have the meaning of two unrelated women in one house, the ideograph of disaster can only be two troubled, angry, emotional women in the same room. I usually have a low threshold of tolerance for drama, but gave Francesca the dignity of dictating the terms of our separation, and sucked it up.

I also started another ‘two weapon’ training, by substituting the casting of magic for thinking of physics problems to disengage my cognitive control from my physical martial effort, which had the added benefit of letting me cast spells as I fought. It was super cool because my body and my spell-casting mind operated in synchronous and synergistic harmony, and I wondered if Curse was expanding it’s horizons.

I started investing some of my money, just to keep my luck sweet. Everyone likes to feel useful, even the Divine. Trying to keep myself interested, (as I seriously suppose that boredom might be the rockiest shoal that lurks in hidden wait for the unwary immortal) I investigated and invested in cutting edge amazing futuristic technology, concentrating mostly on green solution brilliancys.

With Curse’s help, I was able to find poor inspired inventors of startling new devices and procedures, and I helped them with cash influx, advice, and legal stuff, (like patents and intellectual property protections) for a negotiated reciprocity which included access to or use of their discovery. When my toy chest was full, I could play with the pieces to see which ones would fit together in ‘sum greater than the parts’ applications.

One inspired female engineer conceived a novel design for a wind turbine had a very small footprint, being a tube airfoil which was astoundingly efficient. (The vanes were semi-articulated, and the energy from the serially joined flopping flaps was also utilized.) Another had developed the idea for a powerful power pack that had very tiny holes in the exotic membrane between two opposingly charged materials, which harvested the free electrons in the valence and provided a lightweight and relatively small sized power source.

That is, a fuel cell that was inert, lightweight, and provided three times the energy from a power pack the size of a piece of luggage.

Piloting experimental craft is usually for the young and foolish or the old and jaded. I was old enough to know better, and not old enough to no longer value my future as much; but my unique circumstances of not fearing death came from security about staying alive. I had good luck and a powerful blessing, so I risked it.

Do you remember Donald’s inventor cousin, Gyro Gearloose? Auto-gyros always remind me of Gyro Gearloose and his wacky flying egg-beater. Well, didn’t Cousteau’s ship have egg-beaters instead of sails? Inwardly rotating pairs of horizontally aligned tubes of curved airfoil grabbed air from above and forced it downward between them. Not only did it zip, but it had a nice stable very low hover using the ground-effect, and it was crash-proof in the event of power failure above seventy feet if you were quick to throw the auto-gyro switch, as the air moving through the airfoils braked the craft so it landed bump-thump instead of crash-smash. (it soon became the standard way to fully recharge the auxiliary batteries... ) The thump was the shocks bottoming out. You bet I tested it, after watching someone else do it first!

I had sponsored a struggling inventor to develop the technology with infused money and mind and body, as well as tech from my private toy chest, brainstorming roadblocks together and working to help her realize and develop her back-of-envelope idea into a working craft.

Together Sara and I created a vehicle suitable to fill the long anticipated ‘flying car’ niche, as it was fully roadable in hover mode, and a selling point with the licensing bureaus was that it had zero impact on the roadways. A few rules about where it was permissible to go vertical, and personal transportation (for licensed operators) entered a new dimension. The Skybeater™’s striking similarity to a flying saucer was a case of form following function, mostly.

With the upper surface covered in highly efficient solar cells feeding power to the storage batteries, which were also charged by the powerbrick, as we called the power pack super battery, it looked quite environmentally friendly too.