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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Caleb hoisted the tray effortlessly, balancing it on one hand. "Well, Pearson," Caleb replied with a warm, unapologetic grin, "if it's not me who is going to dote on her, who else is? A man has to take care of his own."
With that, he turned and carried the tray back upstairs, his bare feet making no sound on the wooden steps.
He nudged their bedroom door open with his hip. The room was bright now, bathed in the full light of the morning. Mary-Beth was just waking up, stretching her arms above her head with a soft yawn, the blankets pooling around her waist.
Seeing Caleb entering with a tray piled high with steaming, incredibly aromatic food put a brilliant, radiant smile on her face.
"Good morning," she greeted him, her voice still thick with sleep but filled with absolute delight.
"Good morning," Caleb returned, walking over and gently setting the heavy tray down across her lap, making sure it was stable. He sat on the edge of the mattress beside her, handing her a fork.
The two of them ate breakfast together in the comfortable, sunlit quiet of their room. As soon as Mary-Beth took her first bite of the chicken and mashed potatoes, her eyes widened in absolute shock.
"Caleb... oh my goodness," she mumbled around her mouthful, covering her lips with her hand. She swallowed and looked at him in awe. "This is... this is incredible! The chicken is so juicy, and these potatoes... you truly made delicious foods."
Mary-Beth couldn't stop gushing over how delicious the food was. Every few bites, she offered a new compliment, marveling at the seasoning, the texture, the perfect sear on the meat.
Caleb, of course, just smiled modestly, watching her enjoy the meal which he had cooked flawlessly with his max level Cooking skill. To him, providing for her, seeing her happy and safe, was a far greater reward than the thousands of dollars sitting in his dimensional inventory.
After breakfast was done and the empty plates were set aside on the nightstand, the atmosphere in the room shifted from relaxed domesticity to sharp, focused industry. It was time to build an empire.
Caleb walked over to the sturdy oak desk by the window. He cleared a space, laying out a thick stack of blank drafting parchment, a set of fine tipped fountain pens, a steel ruler, and a compass he had procured from his mansion in Saint Denis. He pulled up the wooden chair and sat down, rolling up his sleeves.
Mary-Beth, dressed in a comfortable day dress, pulled up a smaller stool and sat right beside him at the side of the desk. She brought her own notepad and a pen, ready to act as his stenographer and assistant.
"Alright," Caleb said, his eyes taking on that terrifying, brilliant light of absolute focus. "Let's change the world, Miss Gaskill."
Caleb proceeded to do exactly what he had said yesterday. He began to draw and write down designs and schematics for the Marlin-Thorne Firearms Company. He was diving into his max level Firearms Knowledge skill, pulling out the engineering blueprints for upgrades and completely new types of firearms that historically shouldn't have appeared for another 10 to 19 years, right toward the end of World War 1.
But he wasn't just copying history; he was upgrading it. He was making these weapons much more effective, efficient, and infinitely more dangerous.
"First, we deal with the accessories," Caleb muttered, his pen flying across the parchment with mechanical precision. He began sketching the cross-section of a rifle barrel. "Write this down, Mary-Beth. Heading, Polygonal Rifling."
Mary-Beth leaned over her notepad, her pen scratching diligently. "Polygonal rifling. Ready."
"Instead of traditional lands and grooves that cut into the bullet," Caleb explained, drawing a perfect octagon inside the barrel schematic, "we use a polygonal profile. Hills and valleys. It provides a better gas seal behind the projectile. It increases muzzle velocity, reduces barrel wear drastically, and is easier to clean. It's a massive upgrade for longevity in military contracts."
He finished the sketch, adding complex mathematical formulas for the twist rate based on a .30 caliber projectile, and set the page aside.
"Next. The optical sights." Caleb began drawing a sleek, streamlined brass and steel tube. "The current scopes are a joke. They lose zero if you sneeze on them. We are going to design a completely enclosed, nitrogen purged optical tube."
He drew the intricate internal mechanics, the erector lenses and the reticle. "Write down this, internal windage and elevation turrets. We move the reticle inside the scope body, not the mount. It locks the zero in place. And we use a crosshair with mildot demarcations for range estimation."
Mary-Beth wrote furiously, occasionally pausing to ask for the spelling of a technical term, which Caleb provided instantly. She helped him by writing down the complex patent descriptions and the manufacturing step-by-step guides for the machinists back east, allowing Caleb to focus purely on the visual drafting.
"Now," Caleb said, a dark thrill entering his voice. "The real money. The firearms."
He pulled a fresh, oversized sheet of parchment to the center of the desk. His pen moved with lightning speed, sketching the iconic, aggressive profile of a semi-automatic handgun.
"This is Project Alpha," Caleb stated. "The M1911. Or, as we'll call it, the Thorne Model 1. Handgun."
He drew the slide, the frame, and the grip. Then, he began detailing the internal guts, drawing a cutaway view. "It operates on a short recoil principle. Write this, when the weapon fires, the barrel and slide recoil together for a short distance before a swinging link pulls the barrel down, unlocking it from the slide."
"Swinging link... unlocking slide..." Mary-Beth murmured as she wrote, completely fascinated by the mechanical ballet he was describing.
"It chambers the .45 ACP," Caleb continued, drawing the exact dimensions of the heavy, rimless cartridge. "A 230 grain bullet. It will stop a charging horse. And here," he tapped the bottom of the grip, "is the key. A detachable 7 round box magazine. When the gun runs empty, the slide locks back. You press a button, drop the empty magazine, slam a fresh one in, hit the slide release, and you have seven more rounds ready to fire in less than two seconds."
He looked at Mary-Beth. "It makes every single action revolver on the market a museum piece. The US Army will buy hundreds of thousands of them."
He finished the 1911 schematic, labeling every pin, spring, and sear with absolute metallurgical perfection, even specifying the required heat-treating process for the slide to prevent cracking.
Next, he drafted the shotgun. The Thorne Auto 5.
"Long recoil operation," Caleb dictated, his hand sketching the humpbacked receiver of the famous shotgun. "The entire barrel recoils into the receiver. Five shots of 12 gauge buckshot, semi automatic. The hunters will love it, the police will love it, and the trench clearers will worship it."
As the hours ticked by, the stack of completed, revolutionary blueprints grew higher. Caleb was a machine, his mind unfettered by the technological ignorance of 1899.
He moved to the rifles. He drew the ultimate bolt action infantry rifle.
"Project Vanguard," Caleb said. "A hybrid action. We take the massive, controlled feed extractor claw of the German Mauser 98 design, so the gun can cycle flawlessly even if fired upside down, and we combine it with the two-piece firing pin and the superior, adjustable rear aperture sights of the American designs."
He drew the internal box magazine. "It feeds from a 5 round stripper clip. Chambered in a proprietary high velocity, smokeless .30 caliber cartridge. Pointed, spitzer bullets for aerodynamic stability."
Mary-Beth shook out her cramped hand, dipping her pen back into the inkwell. "It's so much, Caleb. The factory... do they even have the machines to build this?"
"Mahlon Marlin just bought the machines with my money," Caleb assured her, looking over her meticulously written notes. "And the schematics I'm giving them include the exact tooling dies and milling specifications they need to calibrate those machines. We aren't just giving them the gun, we are giving them the instruction manual on how to build the factory that builds the gun."
Finally, as the afternoon sun began to wane, casting long shadows across the room, Caleb pulled the last sheet of parchment forward.
"One more," Caleb said, his voice dropping slightly, acknowledging the sheer, horrific lethality of what he was about to put on paper. "Project Sweeper."
He began to draw something that looked utterly alien to the 19th century. It had a wooden stock and foregrip, but the receiver was a block of machined steel, and protruding from the bottom was a massive, circular drum.
"What is that?" Mary-Beth asked, her brow furrowing in confusion. "It looks too small to be a rifle, but too big to be a pistol."
"It's a submachine gun," Caleb explained. "An automatic weapon that fires pistol cartridges. In this case, the same .45 caliber round as the handgun we just designed."
He drew the internal bolt mechanism. "It fires from an open bolt. Straight blowback operation. It's incredibly simple to manufacture. No complex locking lugs. The weight of the bolt and the heavy recoil spring keep the breech closed until the bullet leaves the barrel."
He tapped the circular drum. "This magazine holds fifty rounds. Fifty rounds, Mary-Beth. And the weapon fires automatically for as long as you hold the trigger down. At a cyclic rate of about seven hundred rounds per minute."
Mary-Beth stopped writing. She looked at the drawing, and a faint shudder passed through her. She was a writer of romances and adventure novels, but even she could instantly grasp the apocalyptic devastation a weapon like that would unleash in a close-quarters fight.
"Seven hundred rounds a minute..." she whispered, her voice tinged with a sudden, profound horror. "Caleb... a squad of men with those..."
"Could hold off a battalion," Caleb finished, his eyes hard, acknowledging the grim reality of his creation. "The Spanish-American war is officially over, but the world isn't going to stay quiet forever. When the next great war comes, the men in the trenches are going to need something to sweep the enemy out. The military that holds the patent for this weapon holds the key to the future of warfare."
He finished the drawing, adding the intricate, clockwork-like spiral spring mechanism for the 50 round drum magazine, and signed his name at the bottom corner of the schematic with a flourish.
C. Thorne. Chief Visionary.
He set the pen down. His hand was cramped, his fingers stained with black ink, but his mind felt incredibly clear. He looked at the thick stack of papers on the desk, dozens of pages of blueprints, technical specifications, metallurgical requirements, and patent descriptions.
In a single afternoon, sitting in a wooden farmhouse in the Heartlands of New Hanover, Caleb had completely rewritten the future of human conflict. He had secured a monopoly on violence that would make Leviticus Cornwall's oil and railroad empire look like a child's lemonade stand.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, stretching his stiff shoulders. He looked over at Mary-Beth. She was blowing softly on the ink of the final page of notes to dry it, her expression a mix of exhaustion and absolute awe.
"You did beautifully, Miss Gaskill," Caleb said, reaching out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "I couldn't have drafted the patent language without you."
Mary-Beth offered a small, tired smile. "It was... fascinating, Caleb. Terrifying, but fascinating. Are you really going to send all of this to Mr. Marlin?"
"First thing tomorrow," Caleb confirmed. "I'll ride into Valentine and send it via secured, insured express mail on the train. Within a month, Marlin-Thorne will be prototyping weapons that the rest of the world won't even conceptualize for another decade."
He stood up, pulling her up from her stool and wrapping his arms around her waist, pulling her flush against him.
"But the empire building is done for today," Caleb murmured, kissing her forehead. "Right now, I think the inventor and his brilliant assistant deserve a walk outside before the sun goes down."
Mary-Beth leaned her head against his chest, listening to the steady, reassuring beat of his heart. "I think that's the best idea you've had all day," she agreed softly.
They left the blueprints sitting on the desk,a silent, paper arsenal waiting to be unleashed upon the 20th century, and walked downstairs together, stepping out into the fading, peaceful light of the Heartlands, completely untouchable in the sanctuary they had built.
...
Name: Caleb Thorne
Age: 23
Body Attributes:
- Strength: 8/10
- Agility: 8/10
- Perception: 9/10
- Stamina: 8/10
- Charm: 8/10
- Luck: 9/10
Skills:
- Handgun (Lvl MAX)
- Rifle (Lvl MAX)
- Firearms Knowledge (Lvl MAX)
- Past Life Memory (Lvl MAX)
- Knife (Lvl MAX)
- Blunt Weapon (Lvl 2)
- Sneaking (Lvl MAX)
- Horse Mastery (Lvl MAX)
- Poker (Lvl MAX)
- Hand to Hand Combat (Lvl MAX)
- Eagle Eye (Lvl 2)
- Dead Eye (Lvl 4)
- Bow (Lvl 3)
- Pain Nullifier (Lvl 4)
- Physical Regeneration (Lvl 3)
- Crafting (Lvl MAX)
- Persuasion (Lvl MAX)
- Mental Fortitude (Lvl MAX)
- Cooking (Lvl MAX)
- Teaching (Lvl 3)
- Trilingual Language Proficiency - G, I, & C (Lvl MAX)
- Inventory System (Permanent - 50x50x50)
- Acting (Lvl MAX)
- Alcohol Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Treasure Hunter (Lvl MAX)
- Drugs Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Business (Lvl 2)
- Leadership (Lvl 2)
Money: 3,322 dollars and 60 cents
Inventory: 250,992 dollars and 61 cents, 11 gold nuggets, 70 gold bars, 1 Double Action, 1 Schofield, 2 Colm's Schofields, 1 land deed (Parcel), 1 Mauser, 1 Semi Auto Pistol, 1 Lancaster Repeater, 1 Old Wood Jewelry Box, 1 F.F Mausoleum small brass key, 1 Ruby, 1 Braithwaites Land Deed, 1 Broken Pirate Sword, 1 Milton's Safety Deposit Key, 1 Senator Pendleton Sealed Envelope, Proof Of Marlin-Thorne Firearms Co., 10 Dynamites, 1 LeMat, 1 M1899, 1 Carcano, & 1 Ownership deed of Doyle's Tavern
Bank: -