Session 45.1 - Arms Race

"You're probably wondering why we've called you all here," Yves said. The viera took his work gloves off, tucked them into the top of a very expensive belt, and pulled a different pair of far more fashionable gloves.
"It's because of the cannon," Isa said. "You're sitting on it."
"Oh. Right." Yves looked down at the barrel, currently serving as a very precarious chair. "That makes sense."
The Starfall's inner workings remained a mystery for most of the crew aboard, with few things more impenetrable than the workshop somewhere above the smaller sphere. Here, Yves and Bast traded off experimenting with detached bits of ancient airships, with a calendar by the door marking out who got which day. Once they discovered that Bast's intricate and cautious approach meshed poorly with Yves's reckless yet inspired methods, they came to the mutual decision to stagger their time in the shop.
("I would just like to point out that I am not the one who got sucked into the engine and yelled at by our power source," Yves stated for the record.)
Today, though, the moogle and viera had both been hard at work, the horrors of the Viesen-Croyle factory sanding down their own rough edges. The cannon at the heart of their investigation -- the one Bast and Isa wanted for self-defense before they saw what else it had been used for, the one that Orrey recommended dumping in the ocean, the one that vexed Yves and terrified Linnet -- sat in the middle of the workshop, hooked up to various wires, pulleys, chains, and towels.
Bast took one of the towels and wiped the fur on his cheeks down. "We've figured a few things out," he says. "Specifically, about the modes. Yves?"
Orrey settled into a chair, a page of graph paper laid over his sketchbook, as he started documenting the dimensions and design of the cannon. "Four of them, right?"
"Right." Yves hopped down and walked around to the back of the cannon. "Now, there's nothing loaded, so it's not going to go off. We made sure of that. We pointed it at the least important wall in here before we started testing. The lever on the back switches the cannon between multiple firing modes. We found it in Mode 1, and so that's what you see it in now too."
"Thirteen feet long and able to fire a 40-pound shot up to a mile and a half away," Bast said with some grim satisfaction. "A tremendous centerpiece of anti-ship artillery, though I think we're looking at two, three minute gap between firing. Rapid fire, this is not."
Isa slightly tipped her head to the side with the hint of a quirked lip, Osler for "that's an impressive weapon that could do good things for us if we so needed."
"Mode 2, Yves?" Bast asked.
Yves pulled the lever to the left, down, and then back to the right.
Linnet took two steps back as the cannon shifted, the barrel unfurling along its length like a row of flower petals opening, the barrel lengthening and narrowing as they watched. The back split apart to allow a cylinder to rise up just to the left of the lever, optical lenses whirring and spinning into place.
"Twenty-six feet long," Yves said as the sounds of transformation died down, "maximum firing weight of seven pounds. If our calculations are correct, and we have no reason to think they're not, this could fire over eight miles and hit a target, assuming you could see that distance."
"And that's probably what this is for," Bast said, patting the scope on the top of the cannon. "Doesn't do us anything in here, but if we move this to the deck, we should run distance tests."
"Huh," Isa said, with no elaboration following.
Bast pulled the lever down again, and the cannon refolded on itself, dragging the long barrel back in and peeling it out to expand it laterally, until the barrel was thicker than the initial configuration, with the mouth opening up into a funnel. "Eight feet long, and if you look inside--"
"Which is not the first thing I did," Yves said. "I used a mirror to look first."
"...you will see that we have at least a dozen little grooves built along the rim," Bast said. "Which wouldn't make any sense in a typical fight, since they're arranged in such a way that will kill any long range accuracy."
"But this isn't trying to hit anything from far away," Yves said. "This is trying to destroy absolutely everything in front of it that's really close. And we learned that by seeing how the loading method changes from mode to mode."
Bast turned a crank on the back and opened the cannon up. "You can see here that we're not using typical cannonballs for Mode 3, and we're not in any of the other ones either," he said to absolute uncomprehending silence. "This Mode takes multiple little shots and just empties them in a cone at anything dumb enough to be in front of it. No accuracy at range, nightmarish power."
"Like what you get when you turn on an industrial fan and then throw Blizzard spells through it," Yves added.
Four sets of eyes turned to the viera.
"...which we've all done," Yves said defiantly.
"if it doesn't use typical cannonballs," Linnet asked, "where do we get the ones it does use? Do we have to contact AZYS for those, if we keep this?"
"It had ten already loaded inside it when we started testing," Bast said. "We have them in a trunk in the corner, because of what I found when I wanted to take measurements of the cargo slot on the cannon, because why do cannons have cargo slots?" He crouched down and hooked his fingertips in a panel on the thick base of the cannon, and then, with some effort, pulled it off.
They all crowded around to peer into a tank that held two copper-colored cannonballs... plus most of a third.
"It's growing more," Yves said quietly at Isa's shoulder. "Five a day, from what we have timed. It holds a maximum of ten."
"...growing?" Linnet asked.
"The cannon regenerates," Bast said. "That we've confirmed. If you damage it, it knits it up. You burn it, the burn heals. Take something out of it, it puts it back. I don't know if that's how it's able to shift between modes, but it makes its own shots, and the shots inside of it will change to the mode you change the cannon to, too. Anything you take out stays that way. You put it back in, it morphs with the cannon." He paused to wipe his face down again. "It's weird, is what it is."
Orrey's margin notes were threatening a second page. "What about Mode 4?"
Bast threw the lever.
The cannon cranked itself through another transformation, but this time the barrel divided itself into seven equal parts, seven barrels around a rotating core. "This one doesn't take cannonballs," Bast said quietly. "Look."
He opened the base again and then pulled out a containment cylinder, the same color and dimensions as the ones they used to power the override switch in the AZYS lab. He spun the cylinder around to show the empty interior, the right size to hold a crystal. "Scrap," he said. "A way to weaponize their scientific leftovers."
"No one uses crystals as ammunition," Isa said. "Even the typical elemental crystals are too valuable for that. A good vein of lightning-aspected crystal can provide power to a town for generations. That is incredibly wasteful."
"Either they are making their own synthetic crystals -- and even then, there have to be smarter applications, I can think of a dozen and I'm not even a mad scientist," Yves muttered, "or this is for fighting something that's a lot more dangerous than airships."
Silence descended on the room.
"So that's the cannon," Yves said into the void. "It's weird and I'm glad they don't have it and I don't know what to do with it now that we have it. But now we know what it is, if not what it's for, and... and... and that's the cannon."
"Let's get some fresh air," Isa said, her eyes fixed on the AZYS cannon. "Tomorrow, officer meeting."