The Sister-In-Law of Invention...

[Cassus Akovin]

... would probably be similar to being thrown into an enclosed room for 30 Hours hoping to come up with the best idea of... something useful. Definitely not a motherly environment an inventor would probably like to procure something truly great. Any in-law has been notoriously noted as pretty much awful, so you can probably guess how Triam felt about her current situation.

Luckily she had some advantages on her side, most notably: Cybernetics. She had some very useful devices that would allow her increased proficiency, such as her Cortical Data Splint that granted her a vast repository of information she had collected specifically for the event prior to entering the room, and an Ascension Node with a number of a skills she might be able to use for tasks she wouldn't otherwise know how to complete. Some of those skills included hacking, programming, and proper wiring techniques... basically anything relating to a field of computation she was unfamiliar with.

She didn't know what she would find in the room, but she needed to be prepared to make up for her weaknesses as a gadget-queen.

The door locked behind her, and so it began.

Hour 0

 

[Cassus Akovin]

Uncharacteristically bereft of a lick of armour, the woman in little more than her undies walked towards a big old box of... things. Or rather, many different boxes of things, some of which were already open, or were already kind of boxes on their own... such being the case for the stasis booth. That was the first thing to catch her eye.

Might be fine trying to mess with temporal mechanics in a localized space. Though she had not intention of being a time traveler. Space was actually already big enough for her. There were already so many things she didn't understand, or comprehend how they existed, she didn't need to see things she was never meant to see on top of that.

Near by to the booth, was some sort of generator that she wasn't at all familiar with, yet next to both was an opened box of a seemingly brand new re-create of a deactivated 3PO protocol droid, and a TIE fighter ejection seat. Those were the items that were immediately observable to her, that seemed to have any real possible use to her.

The other obnoxiously observable 'item' in the room was transparisteel-walled cage containing some really quite smelly animal. It was clear that a number of safety precautions were taken to secure that the smell didn't leak... but damn! That thing continued to reek to high heaven nonetheless. Not enough to nauseate her of course, so long as she stayed a good distance away from the cage, but she hoped to finish this competition rather quickly so wouldn't have to stand looking at the stupid dinko.

Another smell caught her attention (which is a surprise seeming as scent has always been a weakness of hers)... that of friend nuna. She found the bucket containing the galactic treat. Looking at it for a moment, she then shrugged her shoulders and moved on. She would come back to that. She felt it. In her stomach.

The other boxes, opened one by one like gifts on some obscure wookie holiday nobody wants to remember, contained materials she was not familiar with and could make no use out of, such as the Svolten Rhyolite, Nihil Smokestone, and all of the animal related goods. There were a few cool gizmos though, the least of which was not the holographic disguise matrix. There was even a Hoth Snow machine that she scored on!

It took her nearly an hour just to familiarize herself with all of the various components and to categorize them by potential use, importance, and integrability. The last part of that hour was spent hurling Hoth snow balls at the Dinko in its cage to blow off some steam, relax, and come up with a battle plan.

Hour 1

 

[Cassus Akovin]

After half an hour of chucking snowballs at the Dinko while she thought of every possibility she could think of hammering together with the materials she had on hand, her mind began to tangent in boredom... and got (in her mind at least) a pretty funny idea. With a mischievous look in her eyes, she eyed the Stasis Booth and casually tossed a snow ball up in the air before it fell back into her hand. Sitting on a desk like surface, she scooted her butt to the side so she was facing the booth, and closed one eye as she lined up a shot for her snowball... then she hesitated, and placed the ball down.

Hopping off the surface she lightly jogged over to the mysterious medical machine, opened the door and tried to activate the machine... unfortunately it had some sort of failsafe for that. Apparently it wasn't a great idea to have an opened door into locally frozen time-segment. It probably would degrade the quality of the device since entropy or whatever would leak into it or something stupid like that. Using her cortical data splint, she did her best in attempting to assess exactly what the device was and how it could be useful or exploited.

It shouldn't be too hard to trick a simple door to be opened instead of closed right? Wrong, it was needlessly more complicated than she expected... luckily she didn't need to use her own skills to trick it anyhow. The miracle of cybernetics gave her the capability to replicate the masterful skills of a hardened hacker... albeit perhaps, not to absolute perfection, but hey... she was hacking a door, not the whole freakin' booth. Eventually she was able to rewire some things and smooth talk over some low-level programs to say 1 instead of 0, and viola! She violated one safety measure.

Surely she did this for some important reason right?

Wrong.

While she was fiddling with the door, she frowned upon returning to her desk surface and finding a puddle of water where a snowball had once been... went directly back to the Hoth machine, and returned to her previous sitting spot on the desk-like feature. What did she do next?

She hurled that snowball as hard as (cyber-)humanly possible right into the Stasis booth... and watched it freeze in mid air. Smirking, she admired her handiwork.

Hour 3

 

[Cassus Akovin]

The problem with throwing objects into an active stasis field is getting them out. Ordinarily this would be no real problem, just turn off the field and everything resumes its normal entropy. However, as a viewer might have noticed, Triam's vitals indicated that she was hungry... and her bucket of Nuna had miraculously fallen into the Stasis field directly below approximately ten different suspended snow balls. She didn't want the snowballs to ruin her only meal by turning off the field, so obviously she had organically generated a problem for her to solve... a rather complicated one for such a simple desire as well.

Ordinary people would give up there, suck it up and just eat cold and wet Nuna... not an Akovin, and certainly Triam Akovin.

First thing she did, is she went back to the Stasis Booth obviously, and removed every bit of upholstery should could find on the device, so she could see all the guts and fail safes that were in place. It was really too bad that they had supplied a Protocol droid instead of an astromech, a handy little BB unit could wonders in all of this mess... an R2 unit would be just as reliable, if not more so. You can always expect an R2 unit to endure past the competition if you maintain them right. Alas, all she had was her problem solving wit and... yes, a protocol droid.

Oh and Rigsy.

She almost forgot that she lugged the one ton hunk of useful droid parts strung up together into an assembly line. It was almost entirely useful for anything but assembly, but he made an excellent helper when it came to reverse engineering mechanical devices, and provided a word of caution whenever Triam delved too deeply into a field she was out of her league with. He had been inactive for the past several hours until she could find a use for him, uses which were often pretty limited... but he had proven useful before in helping reverse engineer technology she did not understand, like converting a Repulse Hand into the Akovin Hand she now possessed, replete with cybernetic enhancement.

"Eh Rigsy, awake yet?" Triam said as the many armed stationary robot whirred slowly on, its photoreceptors opening to begin receiving the decent visage of its makers derriere as she walked past the stasis booth.

"You are clearly insane." The personable robot droned, "You are currently tampering with some of the highest order medical technological innovations in history... in your underwear." If the droid had a specific head to shake, it would be doing so now. "What else is new?"

"Don't judge junkheap, makes me feel closer to my work..."

"Have you ever considered the possibility that your work doesn't want to be that close to you?" Looks like the sarcasm filters are working in fine order... that was sarcasm.

"I want you to take this apart without breaking it, or turning it off, put it back into place, and replicate it with the materials we have on hand."

"Oh, is that all? Would you like me also to replicate a star destroyer out of the air?" A repulse-sled carried the robot over to the Stasis booth as she lugged it over to the guts of the machine, which was still in operation. The 3PO Unit had recently been activated and was currently babbling its head off... strangely however, its voice settings were welded into the mute position, and it wandered in confusion towards it cruel "master".

"Gotta get new material bud, you said death star last week. Besides, this won't be that difficult, I just want you to bend the time dynamics of this stasis field so that it destabilizes enough for me to get my bucket of Nuna." Once again, if the droid could give a deadpan stare...


... it would probably kill her.

Hour 5

 

[Cassus Akovin]

"Never ask me to do this ever again." Rigsy stated begrudgingly as his arms were well within the Stasis Booth, with various components carefully balanced in various locations, a number of handcrafted mechanisms to keep other critical components in place. The Protocol droid nearest to Rigsy was completely and utterly dismantled for its parts, picked apart like a corpse from a vulture. On the work bench that served as the droids body, were various hand-smithed mechanisms that matched very similarly to the mechanisms sticking out of the still-active Stasis Booth. It was clear from the carbon scoring on the droids arms, it had run into numerous problems with this particular operation.

It could also be seen that the objects within the stasis field had moved ever so slightly downward, as the tinkering had messed with the entropy field and allowed a bit of time to leak into the "closed" system. It all looked very dangerous, and would explode at any moment. Which was a likely possibility, considering what they were doing was messing with stuff neither fully understood. There was a reason all those safety mechanisms were in place... tampering with temporal effects was never a good idea.

"I don't think we'll get another chance to, Rigsy. A shame too, this would be a lot easier if we just had two of them. We got to make the most of it however, and try to turn one into two... well, sorta two." She shrugged as she messed with the components replicated on Rigsy's workbench out of smelted Durasteel, circuitry, servos, and other droid components.... even the snow ball machine was salvaged. Some parts from the maneuvering jets on the ejection seat were also used, though mostly for scrap.

"Just keep working bud."

Hour 13

 

[Cassus Akovin]

"I'm not sure how much else I can dismantle from this without destroying the entropy field, Miss Akovin. Additionally, if my sensors are correct, the more I tinker with this and destabilize the field, the likelihood of radiation exposure increases. I'm not privy to details of where this radiation originates, but going further seems like a foolhardy task for a reward no more important than a wet bucket of Nuna..." Rigsy complained as his arms stood still against the booth, moving no longer as the droid hit its road block. It was designed to assembled based on direction, not such a complicated task as reverse engineering a complicated machine with unknown variables without breaking it, and replicating it without minimalist materials. Sure she was giving him directions, but she was relying on his sensor input and making educated guesstimates with her advanced cybernetic database at her disposal.

Meanwhile, she took parts and bits of scrap from all across the room, salvaging anything from durasteel, circuitry, to even lightsaber crystals. Anything she could get her hands on to try and replicate the Entropy Field generator. She was very close too, too close at this point to back down. As ever, she was relentless in her pursuit for that damnable bucket of Nuna. She hadn't eaten in hours... how'd that Nuna even get in there in the first place? She couldn't even remember any more, but damn she wanted it, and she wasn't about to let a doubtful droid bring her down in its pursuit.

"Fine. Just hold on while I tinker with this and that." If Rigsy could roll his photoreceptors he would have.

"Master, you're being an idiot again. Just accept it that you're just an amateur and eat your Nuna. You're exhausted and you haven't eaten in at least sixteen hours. It isn't good for thinking, and I'm pretty sure your idea sucks anyway."

"Thanks for the encouraging words there Rigs," She continued working on the orb on his work station.


Hour 16

 

[Cassus Akovin]

In two hours time it would appear the mechanical near-genius had done what the droid thought impossible, she had successfully engineered an Entropy Field Generator out of scrap. It wasn't easy, but after a short activation switch (followed by an immediate off switch), it appear the amalgamation of Protocol Droid, Lightsaber Crystals, Snow Ball Machine, TIE Ejection Seat, and salvaged non-critical Stasis Booth components had produced a quarter meter field that temporarily froze a falling bolt Triam dropped from above it.

"HOLY KARK!" She screamed as she turned it off, allowing the bolt to fall, waking the sleep-moded Rigsy. After a moment of silence, "HOLY KARK! FETH FETH FETH!" Letting out a whooping scream of joy the woman pumped her arms in the air and ran about the room in victory. "DAMN I AM SO FETHING KARKING----- SEXY!!!" Jumping in the air and wiggling, Triam went back to her impromptu device.

There was a pause.

"Now how do I reverse it?" Aye, that, my dear, is the rub.

Hour 18

 

[Cassus Akovin]

She stayed awake for another approximate three hours, mostly thinking, occasionally tinkering, mostly hungry. She kept working though. Like a starving artist, the inventor was practically naked, hungry (although not thirsty thanks to the refresher), and was utterly exhausted. It was fairly clear that she had replicated an imperfect Entropy Field Generator out of scrap, which in of itself was a feat most engineers would not be able to contend with. However, if there is a will, there is a way. Triam would find that way, although she was suffering from a loss of willpower.

Exhausted, she began to realize she had now officially been awake for longer than a full day. Even with cybernetics, she couldn't ward off fatigue forever, especially while hungry. If she couldn't fuel her body, she knew eventually she would have to rest it.

Rigsy was as sarcastic as ever, and as such he had been put into sleep mode for the last hour of frustrating failure. All she seemed to manage was to destabilize her device, with spikes of radiation prompting its rapid deactivation (before it exploded as well, which would end her tenure in the tournament).

This was no simple problem, one couldn't simply flip a switch and suddenly reverse the direction of entropy. However, maybe she was thinking about all of this in the wrong way. In her understanding of entropy, it was the natural inclination of natural objects to move to disorder or randomness. Thus the "Entropy" Field must work against the natural inclination of movement and thermodynamics. It imposed order... possibly by removing the random movements of elementary particles? Perhaps there was some sort of atomic level quantum limiter, which fixed the position of electrons, protons, and neutrons and thus entire atoms, molecules, and any macro-structure created a result of the recombination of molecular relationships. The natural line of thinking of this then, would be that this Stasis Booth machine is pouring in more energy to keep atomic to macro structures from using it. Siphoning it, and thus increasing its own degradation.

However, obviously the closed system isn't at the mercy of a machine that easily breaks down, that energy has to be spent somehow. Maybe it is being harnessed somewhere, which may be the origin of the radiation that leaks out in a failure. She would just make one more tweak...

"Master.... MASTER!" He got her attention after a moment of foggy thought. "You're going to hurt yourself. You need rest, sleep on this. I assure you that your weak and feeble biological processes will thank you for it."

"I can't stop... I only have nine hours left..." Her eyes drooped.

"I think you can reasonable spend three hours resting. I hear sleep for organics allows them to make better decisions... maybe after you wake up you'll realize your idiocy, and stop this charade you're actually doing something important." She hesitated, more so, so she could process what he was saying.

Her head lolled to the side next to her dangerous and probably radioactive device.

Hour 21

 

[Cassus Akovin]

Triam fell asleep uneasily, despite her exhaustion. Or rather, she was asleep, but the thought she went to sleep with never went away. There was something left incomplete, and it was left in her head, bothering her. Like a nightmare. It was something she had to complete now that she had started. The project now moved beyond simply acquiring a bucket of Nuna without getting it wet. She could care less at this point... It was just one in several things in this universe she had encountered where things... just didn't make the sense they were supposed to. There were supposed to be rules that the universe followed, yet somehow it could just as easily break them on a whim.

She pushed those thoughts aside however, for another time. There was something else, far more immediately important to her than her own existential crisis. And that was the mathematical abstraction known as "infinity". Now, she was no nuclear physicist, but there were a few things she knew about (in part, probably because of her cybernetic databank she was drawing from even in sleeping). She knew that atomic structures were a nuclear cores of protons and neutrons surrounded by a negative "cloud" of electrons, where no electron in any given moment was in exactly one position... that is until measured through observation. It is at that moment of observation that one virtual particle for the electron attracted to the positively charged core remains while a literal infinite amount of other virtual particles destroy themselves in an instant.

Somehow the Stasis Booth must have some means to limit the quantum probability of electron locations within an atom, somehow sapping out the natural entropic acceleration of atomic particles, and circumventing the general principles of thermodynamics... at least within a tiny sphere of influence. In fact, she had just recently recreated such a device through quasi-reverse engineering (and likely a hefty sum of dumb luck [if you believe in that mumbo-jumbo]). It possessed a similar ability of controlling the quantum locations of electrons in atomic to macroscopic structures.

• First of all, she wondered, how is it possible to condense an infinite number of quantum locations into a single defined unchanging point in space (unchanging relative to the observer's perspective, not in the perspective of the ever moving universe)?
• Secondly... if that can be done (and the Stasis Booth proved this miraculous)... is it possible to expand upon infinity?

Technically speaking no. There was a way however, in which infinity can be "reached" faster in comparison to other abstractions which include the value: infinity. It was then that she knew what to do, and three hours later down to the minute, she startled herself awake in a cold sweat... Rigsy was making an awfully annoying noise.

"I would have rather watched you sleep so more, but I know I would never hear the end of it if you lost for any other reason than your own incompetence. Have you given up yet?"

She didn't even speak as she tore apart the Stasis Sphere into little bits again.

"I worked hard on that for hours and you're going to destroy it in several minutes all because I made a joke Ms.?"

"Not breaking it - fixing it."

Rigsy thought differently, as he registered several spikes in radiation. There was going to be a lot of that as she modified whatever consisted of her self-dubbed "quantum limiter", so that it became a "quantum facilitator".

"I have a concern regarding that statement..."

Hour 26

 

[Cassus Akovin]

It was done. Finally done.

She was eating her Bucket of Nuna, sans snowballs. Possibly irradiated, but not to endangering levels. After four hours of testing procedures, and keeping track of radiation levels over periods of time, and failing against power surges that would have lead to electrical malfunctions if not for her deft mechanical skill, the device... worked.

It almost exploded at least twelve times before she had it stable enough to work up to 40ish seconds before she had to worry about a serious failure. She didn't even want to know what would happen beyond 45.... probably explode at some point! Speaking of which, her body had been exposed to some serious radiation spikes in the last twenty four hours.

She didn't care to think what that meant medically speaking, and so she suppressed any medical knowledge that might be locked away in her cybernetic datasplint. Obviously a device of this magnitude put an extreme tole on her body, that would undoubtedly have lasting consequences, even Triam Akovin would not be prepared for.

"Well... I'm glad you got your bucket Ms.."

"So you're speaking now, huh? Are you going to admit that your feeble droid intelligence was wrong again?"

"... I did not indicate any such course of action."

"You might as well, because the device works, and I'm sitting pretty filling my guts up on biofuel. Meanwhile you're over their whining about how you have to hold the Stasis Booth in place until I tell you not to."

"..."

"You'll come around eventually."

She ate her last leg of nuna, and the doorway opened on the Thirtieth Hour.

Hour 30