[AdmiralTigerclaw]

MUAHA!

Finally... I figured out how to hide uranium in plain sight.

Let me throw up the scene snippet...

Spoiler for Mother and Daughter:

“So Shari stayed up all night?” the retired Admiral asked.

Fate nodded, casting a glance at Vivio.
“Yes,” she began. “She pulled an all-nighter. When I checked on her around seven or so this morning, she was still typing away amidst a pile of foam coffee cups. But she had already discovered something interesting about the pod.”

The elder woman leaned in slightly. “Go on…”

Fate glanced at Vivio again, engrossed in her lunch and staring at some commercial, then returned to her adopted mother.
“The casing’s made of Polystannum Chloride.”

“Plasteel?” Lindy frowned. The material could only be replicated by magical engineering techniques. It was the same chemical structure as Polyvinyl Chloride, but carbon atoms were intermittently replaced with tin, producing a stronger, more metallic material that still felt like mere plastic to the touch. It was light, but several times stronger than conventional plastic for its weight, rivaling many pure metal compounds in the strength-for-weight category. As such it was a favorite to many mages for their devices. In fact, it was light enough that a nine-year-old could pick up a device and handle it with minimal effort, but strong enough to handle the punishment of close combat. The only issue was that Plasteel was inflexible and brittle compared to regular plastics, thus, ill suited to large-scale structural engineering.

Still, the use of Plasteel was a disturbing thought. Intelligent devices could restructure themselves and materialize their own alloys. But outside of that, plasteel was not in wide use. It was expensive. Anyone with the resources to spend on magical processes for the creation of plasteel had money, or power to spare. That was not a pleasant thought.

“Plasteel,” Fate nodded. “What’s more, is she found plasteel and graphene in the robot arm we recovered.”

“Definitely the work of someone with resources,” Lindy nodded solemnly. “It makes their attack on Selene all the more suspect. What do you think they were after?”

“I don’t know,” Fate sighed. “Rein had pulled a comprehensive database search. According to survey records she pulled up, the FLMP-8 Facility was built in the former location of a coal fired electrical power plant that was destroyed one hundred and fifty years ago during the war. The cavity I found used to be part of the slurry hopper for the baghouse.”

“That would explain the preliminary results of the forensics team I sent your soil sample to,” the elder Haralowne replied.

“How’s so?” Fate asked.

“Ash,” Lindy stated. “Coal fly ash. The entire room was coated with it.”

Fate screwed her face up trying to wrap her mind around it.

“What would a terrorist group want in a room full of soot?”


“I don’t know,” the retired Admiral admitted. “But I asked the forensics team to analyze it anyway. I reviewed a few other incidents involve Sektor 21 power plant attacks. But this is the only one where they did something like this. Every other facility was a power plant like Selene, a raw mana reactor.”

Fate sighed and looked at Vivio again.
“There has to be something we’re missing,” she continued after a second, her face turning into a glare. “Something stupidly obvious!”

“If it were that easy, we’d have caught the masterminds of Sektor 21 years ago,” Lindy responded. However it was obvious by the matching frown on her face that she was thinking along the same lines.

Spoiler for notes:

It was kind of random, but I stumbled across something I remembered about COAL while I was pondering through what exactly would have been in that 'bunker' below the Selene facility.

COAL, contains a lot of 'crap' so to speak. Including radioative isotopes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_po...trace_elements

I figured suddenly, that the leftover ash from coal burning would be perfect for holding a higher concentration of the nasty shit than the ore it started as. Though I admit, it would take a LOT of ash to come up with it, I could handwave just how much ash it would take to come up with 75 lbs of uranium 235 as stated could result from coal burning over a year.

Still, its perfect. I can dangle the clue in everyone's face, but completely misdirect them that its a dead end. I mean... it's soot. What can you get from crappy soot?

The answer: "More than you think."

Spoiler for Notes 2 PLASTEEL:

I'm no metalurgist, but whatever. I put the plasteel bit up before. And I finally found a good name for it reviewing the etemology of vynil, and then tin. One of the latin names for tin is 'Stannum'. Since I replace the carbon atoms with tin, an element with the same valence as Carbon, I decided that instead of PolyVinyl Chlorid, I could call it Polystannum Chloride. I have no idea how the material would actually perform, but I get the feeling that while physically possible thanks to valence, it would be absurdly difficult to make using current processes. Thus, 'Plasteel' is only reproducable via magic, as only magic and directly perform "selective molecular restructuring." (IE: You can selectively grab an atom and replace it with another.)


And just in case your forgot the significance of PolyVinyl Chloride... or PVC. It's regular everyday PLASTIC. You know, plastic cups, credit cards... etc.