Free Hero's Curse by Jack J. Lee Page B

and shield without your permission.”
    If I had a choice, there was no way I was going to look like a Renaissance Fair geek. I couldn’t believe that in this day and age, the best a Holy Warrior could do was a sword and shield. “Look man, I’m really not into suiting up like Prince Valiant. Do I have any other options? You know, something a little more modern?”
    Aidan looked slightly offended. “In the six hundred plus years I have been an armorer for paladins, I have never had one turn down the traditional shield and sword. I have heard of one paladin in the early 1800’s who changed his gifts to a breastplate and spear. It’s more common to make minor changes to the grip, hilt, or length.”
    “But, if I wanted, I could change the sword to a gun?”
    “Yes…as long as you knew exactly what you wanted and could hold a vision of the gun in your head.” I could see him get lost in thought. The worry and the hesitation I had previously seen on his face disappeared.
    “How would the magical sharpness doohickey work on a firearm?”
    Aidan was clearly a gear-head. He loved talking, thinking, and messing about with gear. He became more animated, his brogue more pronounced. “You can change the magic spell on your gear. A few thousand years ago, there was a time when a flaming sword was popular, but over the millennia, it has become obvious which spells work best for sword and shield. Hmmm, I don’t think anyone’s ever thought much about the best spell for a gun. I can tell you what will not work, though—endless ammunition. Conservation of mass and energy applies to magic, too. Maintaining super sharpness does not require much energy, so it’s constant. The flaming sword could light up for less than an hour a day. Converting energy into mass takes a lot of, well…energy. We could probably get you a magic reload of de novo ammo...say once a week, maybe longer.
    “It’d be easier to magically transport ammo from one location to another. We could cache ammo in one location and magically call it to another. The mechanism behind transportation is non-intuitive, but it takes less energy to transfer through the aether than to try to create ammo out of thin air. It works on the basis of quantum entanglement.”
    He peered up at me to see if I knew what he was talking about. When a subatomic particle like a photon is split into two equal photons of opposite polarity, they are ‘entangled’—what happens to one photon is inexplicably replicated by the other. In 1993 Charles Bennet and others proposed the idea of teleporting light using this process. In 1997, a group from Innsbruck proved that this could be done; this experiment had been repeated successfully multiple times. Theoretically any subatomic particle could be teleported. A science fiction author once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [4] It looks like he was right.
    I nodded to show him I understood, and went off topic. “How about the ability to shoot silently?”
    “A magical suppressor?” Aidan got up and paced back and forth behind his desk as he thought. “Yes, that would work, but again conservation of energy applies. Converting sound to heat is easy. Speaking off the cuff without any calculations, firearms get hot anyway after firing multiple rounds. Your weapon could get really hot, maybe to the point of you requiring heatproof gloves. The sound suppression would only work while the projectile was still in the barrel, so it wouldn’t be completely silent. The decibel level would depend on the size and shape of the projectile, and whether or not it was supersonic in flight.”
    “Could we sink the heat into the bullet?”
    Aidan beamed at me. He clearly liked intelligent questions. “Lead has a pretty low melting point. If we did that, there’s a chance that it could soften the lead sufficiently to smear it in the rifling, fouling the barrel and diminishing accuracy.”
    I flashed a quick