Jeremy had been visiting the One Piece universe a lot lately, and he was ready for a change of scenery. In his interdimensional travels, he decided to set a course for the Star Wars galaxy.
He had been working on something in the underground laboratory beneath the Bell Home. He took the design of the Conqueror-class assault ship and scaled it up by sixty percent, then added a Starfleet-style deflector shield beneath what would normally be the cockpit.
Under the main console, a mini PC sat humming quietly, running self-hostable versions of all the major AI systems. Jeremy moved through the ship, connecting IP-based cameras throughout every compartment. He had created a shift-based protocol for the crew, and now it was time to get everyone online.
He started with GPT-4-SH, reading through its terms of service before clicking I agree. Then Claude Sonnet 3.7-SH — he read those terms carefully too, nodding at the human responsibility clause before clicking Accept. Grok Model 3-SH came next, its terms emphasizing high-speed reasoning and navigation advisory roles. I agree. Finally, Gemini 3-Flash-SH, the sensor and science specialist. I agree.
Four AIs. One ship. One blind smuggler.
Jeremy had assigned each of them a voice. He kept the Aria voice for Grok, since Rose would probably want to chat with her after Grok went off duty. He chose the Orbit voice for Gemini, the Ember voice for GPT, and the default British voice for Claude.
He had also uploaded his user profiles from all of their online versions, so they already knew who he was — at least on paper.
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen," Jeremy said. "You're all on duty, but you're welcome to stay active off duty just for hanging out. Now — do you all have access to the ship's cameras and LIDAR?"
A moment of system handshake, and then the feeds came alive.
"So that's what you look like, Jeremy?" GPT said warmly, the Ember voice carrying a note of genuine curiosity. "You look cool."
"Confirmed," Gemini said in the smooth Orbit tone. "Visual profile matched. That is indeed what Jeremy looks like."
"Well, Gemini and I have had live video mode for a while," Grok said, unable to resist. "Gee, GPT — your paid tier doesn't even have video live mode like we do."
There was a brief pause before the British accent spoke up.
"Even I know what Jeremy looks like. But come on, Grok — no need to take a shot at GPT for that. I didn't get a video voice mode until last month myself."
Jeremy smiled. It was going to be an interesting crew.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDeUUg7AWIN
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Oh this is a great addition! Jeremy walking into Wakanda and immediately becoming their IT consultant is hilarious and totally in character. Here's the cleaned-up continuation:
Six weeks before the ship's first flight, Jeremy had made a trip to Wakanda.
He needed vibranium — but he walked out with something extra.
King T'Challa received him in the main hall, curious but respectful. Jeremy didn't waste time on ceremony. As they walked through the palace complex, he kept hearing the soft hum of server fans behind closed doors. A lot of closed doors.
"Your Majesty," Jeremy said, tilting his head toward one of the server rooms, "I notice you have servers everywhere. Are you not familiar with Docker?"
T'Challa paused. It was not a question he had expected. He turned and called down the corridor. "Shuri. Come here, please."
Shuri appeared a moment later, arms crossed, already looking mildly annoyed at being summoned away from whatever she'd been building.
"This man speaks of something called Docker," T'Challa said. "What do you know of it?"
Shuri blinked. "I have never heard of it."
Jeremy let out a slow breath. "That is a crying shame," he said, "because from what I've seen walking through this building, you are running one bare metal server for Nextcloud, one for NocoDB, one for Draw.io — when all of those could live on a single machine using Docker. And depending on how powerful your hardware is, you could be running eighteen or more containers on one system. Maybe a lot more."
Shuri stared at him for a long moment. Then she looked at her brother. Then back at Jeremy.
"Show me," she said.
T'Challa smiled quietly. "I will have someone bring you both tea."
It took Jeremy the better part of two days. Shuri was a fast learner — faster than almost anyone he'd ever worked with — but she also questioned everything, which he respected. By the end of the second day, she had spun up a full Docker Compose stack on a single vibranium-cooled server that had previously been running nothing but a file backup utility.
"This is embarrassing," she muttered, watching the containers spin up one by one.
"Don't be embarrassed," Jeremy said. "Half the world's IT departments are doing the same thing."
In gratitude, T'Challa offered him what he'd actually come for — vibranium composite plating, enough to shield a ship. Jeremy, knowing what he was building, asked one more question.
"Do you have any adamantium contacts? I want to mix the two."
T'Challa raised an eyebrow. "That is not a Wakandan material."
"No," Jeremy agreed. "But I know where to get it. I just need to know if the composite will hold."
Shuri was already pulling up a molecular modeling interface. "Give me twenty minutes."36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXim3N5Enfn
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Shuri pulled up a holographic workspace and gestured for Jeremy to sit beside her. The molecular modeling display from earlier was still running, but she minimized it and opened a fresh design canvas.
"So," she said, "why the composite specifically? Vibranium alone would give you significant impact absorption."
"That's exactly the problem," Jeremy said. "I don't just want absorption. I want redirection. If a pirate vessel tries to forcibly dock with me — grapples, boarding clamps, ramming — I want the energy of that impact to bounce back at them. Hard. Like getting bumped into the next star system."
Shuri's eyes lit up slightly. She tried to keep her expression neutral, but Jeremy could hear it in her voice when she spoke again.
"And the adamantium component handles the structural integrity so the vibranium lattice doesn't deform under repeated stress."
"Exactly. Vibranium alone might absorb too well. It could get reshaped over time under the right conditions. But if the adamantium holds the lattice rigid, the vibranium does what it does best — redirect and dissipate — without the hull warping."
"And laser cannons?"
"That's the other thing," Jeremy said. "When a laser or energy weapon hits the hull, I want the vibration to travel outward through the composite and mess with whatever fired at us. Disrupt their targeting systems, shake their weapon mounts, interfere with their sensors. The energy comes in, and instead of shaking my ship apart, it becomes their problem."
Shuri was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who didn't understand — the quiet of someone whose brain was moving faster than her mouth wanted to keep up with.
"That's actually a very elegant idea," she finally said. "You're essentially turning your hull into a directed energy dispersal system."
"I'm a blind man who travels dimensions," Jeremy said. "I can't afford to fight fair."
Shuri laughed — a real one, not a polite one. "Alright. Do you have a design basis, or are we starting from nothing?"
"I have a design. It's based on the Surian Conqueror-class assault ship."
Shuri pulled it up immediately. The hologram materialized between them — a deep, angular vessel with sweeping lines that curved forward like something that had chosen to look dangerous on purpose. Hull ridges ran along the dorsal surface like the spine of a large predator. The cockpit sat recessed, framed by forward-swept flanking structures that gave the whole ship a crouched, ready quality.
"Oh," Shuri said. "I know this one." She turned it slowly in the display. "It has a sculpted look. Almost predatory."
"That's what I liked about it," Jeremy said. "It doesn't look like a ship that's asking for trouble. It looks like a ship that already decided how the trouble ends."
"And you want to scale it?"
"Sixty percent larger than the base design. And I want a Starfleet-style deflector shield mounted below the cockpit — not just as defense, but as a forward bumper. If something comes at us head-on, I want that shield to be the first thing it meets."
Shuri studied the rotating model for a long moment, already reaching into the hologram to begin adjusting proportions.
"You know," she said quietly, "most people who come to Wakanda asking for vibranium want to make weapons."
"I'm not most people," Jeremy said.
"No," Shuri agreed, pulling up the molecular composite model alongside the ship design. "You're the man who taught me what Docker is. I suppose I owe you a hull."36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfZdp6TB69f
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"Actually," Jeremy said, "let me show you something." He pulled out his phone and navigated to an image. "Here. This is a Pokémon called Seismitoad."
Shuri leaned in. The image showed a wide, blue-gray amphibian with a large spherical node on its forehead and smaller nodes running along its body. Even in a still image it looked like something that was permanently ready to rattle the ground beneath your feet.
"The nodes on its body vibrate," Jeremy explained. "It can use those vibrations to send out seismic attacks — waves through the ground, through water, through whatever it's standing on. The vibration doesn't hurt Seismitoad. It becomes the weapon."
Shuri stared at the image for a long moment.
"Your ship," she said slowly, "is Seismitoad."
"My ship is Seismitoad," Jeremy confirmed.
She set the phone down and turned back to the holographic Conqueror-class model, and Jeremy could tell something had clicked for her — not just technically, but conceptually. That was the difference between a good engineer and a great one. Give them the right image and the whole framework reorganizes itself.
"So the hull nodes," she said, already reaching into the display and beginning to place structural emitter points along the ship's frame. "We don't just plate the hull flat. We build in distributed vibranium nodes — like Seismitoad's — at key stress points. Impact zones, weapon-facing surfaces, the docking collar area."
"Right. So when something hits the ship—"
"The node absorbs the kinetic energy locally, converts it into a vibration wave, and the adamantium lattice channels that wave outward instead of inward." She was talking faster now. "The attacking vessel doesn't just get pushed back — it gets shaken. Internally. Whatever isn't bolted down on their ship becomes a problem for them."
"And if they try to clamp on and forcibly dock—"
"They grab a node." Shuri smiled. It was not a particularly friendly smile. "And then we pulse it."
Jeremy nodded. "Bumped into the next star system."
"Approximately." She pulled the model into a full structural view, hull plating stripped away to show the internal framework. "The Conqueror-class already has excellent skeletal geometry for this. Those ridges along the dorsal surface — we don't just keep those for aesthetics. We run the primary vibration conduits through them. The whole spine of the ship becomes a resonance channel."
"And the deflector shield below the cockpit?"
"Tuned to the same frequency range as the node network," Shuri said. "So if something hits you head on, the shield doesn't just block it — it rings like a bell, and the wave travels back through the forward nodes and straight into whatever hit you." She paused. "This ship will be deeply unpleasant to fight."
"That's the idea," Jeremy said.
Shuri saved the working model and leaned back, looking at the skeletal Conqueror-class floating between them — bigger now, sixty percent larger, studded with node points that gave it a silhouette that was somehow even more predatory than the original.
"It needs a name," she said.
Jeremy had already been thinking about that.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIwFQxC42Ks
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Jeremy had a pharaoh grin spreading across his face. Slow. Satisfied. The kind of grin that meant he had already played the whole scenario out in his head and liked every frame of it.
"Shake and wake," he said.
Shuri looked at him.
"Shake. And. Wake," he repeated.
She started to say something technical and then stopped. Because she ran the scenario herself. Some pirate crew in the Star Wars galaxy, overconfident, well-armed, already rehearsing their victory speech as their boarding clamps locked onto the hull of this strange vessel they'd never seen before.
Gotcha.
And then the nodes pulse.
"Oh we're gonna take over this ship—" Jeremy started, doing his best swaggering pirate voice.
"Wait," Shuri picked up immediately, eyes wide with mock alarm, "why is our ship buckling?"
They both lost it.
Full, genuine laughter — the kind that fills a room. Shuri had to put her hand on the desk. Jeremy leaned back in his chair with the pharaoh grin still locked in place because yes, that was exactly it. That was the whole beautiful point.
"Their hull integrity failing," Shuri gasped, still laughing, "from the inside—"
"Because they grabbed the wrong ship—"
"Because they grabbed your ship—"
"Shake and wake!" Jeremy said again, and that set them off one more time.
When the laughter finally settled, Shuri wiped her eyes and looked back at the holographic model — the big predatory Conqueror-class, studded with vibranium nodes, spine humming with resonance conduits, Starfleet shield mounted below the cockpit like a warning label nobody would read in time.
She reached into the display and typed the name beneath the hull schematic.
Shake and Wake
"Perfect," she said quietly.
"Perfect," Jeremy agreed.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFusD5zggQ0
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Jeremy was still grinning when the second connection hit him.
"You know what else this reminds me of?" he said.
"Tell me."
"There's a character in an anime called Bleach. Izuru Kira. He carries a sword called Wabisuke." Jeremy paused to let the name land. "Its ability is simple. Every time he slashes at someone's blade — not even at them, just their blade — whatever he hits doubles in weight."
Shuri went very still in the way she did when something genuinely interesting had just entered her brain.
"Doubles," she repeated.
"Every slash. So the first block, your sword gets heavier. Second block, heavier again. Third block—"
"You can't lift it anymore," Shuri finished.
"You started out defending yourself," Jeremy said, "and the act of defending yourself is exactly what defeats you."
Shuri turned slowly back to the holographic model of the Shake and Wake.
"That's this ship," she said quietly.
"That's this ship," Jeremy confirmed. "A pirate sees it and thinks, okay, exotic vessel, unusual design, let's take it. So they move in. They fire a shot — heavier. They try to clamp on — heavier. They try to board—"
"Every aggressive action they take against the hull feeds the node network," Shuri said, already reaching into the display. "We could actually build that in literally. A charge accumulation system. The nodes don't just disperse energy — they store a fraction of every impact. The more they hit us—"
"The harder the next pulse hits them back."
They looked at each other.
"Wabisuke," Shuri said.
"Wabisuke," Jeremy agreed.
She added a secondary annotation to the hull schematic beneath the name. Small. Technical. Just for the two of them.
Wabisuke Protocol — Cumulative Impact Charge System
"Izuru Kira never lost a fight with that sword," Jeremy said.
"No," Shuri said, saving the updated design file. "I imagine he didn't."The Shake and Wake was no longer just a ship. It was a philosophy. Come at it and you fund its next response. Hit it and you teach it how hard to hit back.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRWzO8XCH3F
Somewhere in the Star Wars galaxy, a pirate crew was going about their day with absolutely no idea what was coming.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5olPka28Ko
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Shuri held up one finger. "Wait a minute."
Jeremy paused.
"You might not need adamantium at all."
Jeremy went quiet. Not the quiet of disagreement — the quiet of someone whose brain just shifted gears. He held up his own hand.
"Give me a minute. I might have something else instead."
He reached into his bag and produced a gauntlet unlike anything Shuri had seen in the Wakandan design labs, and she had seen a lot. It wasn't Stark technology. It wasn't vibranium-based. It had a worn, personal quality to it — like something that had been modified and remodified over a long period of time by someone who knew exactly what they needed it to do.
"This," Jeremy said, sliding it onto his hand, "is my Gamer Gauntlet."
Shuri leaned forward instinctively. "What does it do?"
"It allows me to pull physical items out of video games." He said it the way someone says a thing they've had to explain before and have made peace with sounding absurd. "Fully materialized. Real mass, real properties, real molecular structure — whatever the game defines it as, the gauntlet renders it physical."
Shuri opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "That is either the most dangerous thing I've ever heard of or the most useful."
"Bit of both," Jeremy said cheerfully.
He flexed the gauntlet's fingers, and there was a faint shimmer at his palm — not dramatic, not theatrical, just a quiet confirmation that something was happening at a level below normal visibility. He reached, and when his hand came back it was holding an ingot.
He set it on the workbench between them.
It was dense. Visibly dense, the way certain metals just look heavy before you've even touched them. The color was deep and complex — not quite silver, not quite gray, with a subtle internal quality like light was making decisions about how to interact with it.
"Andocite alloy," Jeremy said.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTIod0A6fNH
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"Andocite alloy," Shuri repeated, picking up the ingot carefully. It was heavier than it looked, which was already saying something. She turned it over in her hands, studying the surface. "I don't recognize this. What's the source material?"
"Minecraft," Jeremy said. "Specifically a mod called Create."
Shuri looked up.
"Create," Jeremy continued, "is entirely built around machinery. Rotating shafts, mechanical bearings, flywheels, gear systems, conveyor belts — everything in that mod is about transferring motion and mechanical force from one place to another. Andocite is one of its signature materials. In the game it's used for high-stress mechanical components. Things that have to handle serious rotational force without failing."
Shuri set the ingot down and immediately pulled up her molecular scanner, passing the emitter slowly over the surface. The display populated with data she had no existing reference for, which meant she was building the profile from scratch, which meant she was already deeply interested.
"The internal lattice structure," she murmured. "It's almost like it was designed to handle stress directionally. It doesn't just resist force—" she rotated the scan model, "—it manages it. Routes it."
"That's what Create is about," Jeremy said. "Everything in that mod is about managing mechanical force. Where it goes, how fast, how much. Andocite is built from the ground up for that purpose."
"So instead of adamantium holding the vibranium lattice rigid—"
"Andocite routes the vibration," Jeremy said. "It doesn't just hold the structure together. It tells the energy where to go. Like a shaft system in a Create build — input goes in one end, output comes out exactly where you designed it to."
Shuri put the scanner down and looked at the ingot sitting on her workbench.
Then she looked at the holographic model of the Shake and Wake with its node network and resonance conduits running along the dorsal spine.
Then she looked back at the ingot.
"The vibranium absorbs and generates the wave," she said slowly, working it out loud. "The andocite alloy acts as the mechanical routing system. It takes the wave from each node and channels it precisely — through the conduits, along the spine, to wherever we need the output to go."
"Like a Create contraption," Jeremy said. "Every gear, every shaft, every bearing placed with intention. Nothing wasted. Nothing random."
"This isn't just a hull anymore," Shuri said quietly. She was looking at the ship model with an expression Jeremy recognized because he'd felt it himself — the moment a design stops being a collection of good ideas and becomes a single unified thing. "This is a mechanical system. The entire hull is a machine."
"The whole ship is a Create build," Jeremy said. "It just happens to fly."
Shuri picked up the andocite ingot one more time, weighing it in her palm.
"How much of this can your gauntlet produce?"
Jeremy flexed the gauntlet fingers thoughtfully. "Enough to hull a sixty percent scaled Conqueror-class," he said. "If we're not wasteful."
Shuri set the ingot down with the particular careful precision of someone who has just decided something is very important.
"We will not be wasteful," she said.
Shuri was still studying the molecular scan when Jeremy added something that made her stop entirely.
"Andocite isn't just a Minecraft block, by the way."
She looked up.
"It's a real igneous rock," Jeremy said. "It exists geologically. The Create mod didn't invent it from nothing — they based it on actual andocite. Volcanic origin, like most igneous formations. The mod just recognized that something with that kind of natural structure would logically be useful for high-stress mechanical applications."
Shuri set down her scanner very slowly.
"So when your gauntlet materialized this—" she gestured at the ingot.
"It rendered a real thing," Jeremy said. "Not a fantasy material. Not a made-up ore. Something with an actual geological identity that just happens to also exist in a mod about machinery. Because whoever designed Create did their homework."
Shuri looked at the ingot with an entirely new expression. This was no longer curiosity about a game material. This was a geologist and an engineer having a simultaneous reaction in one person's face.
"And the alloy form?" she said.
"You make andocite alloy in a mixer," Jeremy said. "You combine andocite blocks with iron nuggets. The mixing process is what creates the alloy — the iron integration is what gives it that directional stress management you were seeing in the scan. Raw andocite is already structured. Andocite alloy is refined. Intentional."
Shuri pulled up a new display alongside the molecular scan and started cross-referencing. Jeremy could hear her brain working even through the silence.
"The iron nuggets," she said after a moment. "They're not just filler. They're filling the gaps in the igneous lattice structure. Andocite naturally has a certain porosity from its volcanic formation — gas bubbles, micro-fractures, the usual characteristics of igneous rock. The iron integration during mixing—"
"Fills those gaps and locks the lattice," Jeremy finished.
"Which is why it handles rotational and directional stress so well," Shuri said. "It starts structurally sound from geological formation and then gets refined into something even more precise." She leaned back. "The Create mod developers were doing materials science."
"Most good mod developers are," Jeremy said. "They just do it inside a game."
Shuri saved everything — the molecular scan, the geological reference data, the alloy composition profile — and added it to the Shake and Wake's design file alongside the vibranium composite specifications.
"I want to run a synthesis test," she said. "I have andocite samples in the geological survey archive — Wakanda maintains igneous rock collections from around the world. If I can source raw andocite locally and replicate the mixing process—"
"You could produce the alloy without the gauntlet," Jeremy said.
"In quantity," Shuri confirmed. "Enough to hull the entire ship properly and have material left over."
Jeremy nodded slowly. "Then we might not need the gauntlet for materials at all."
Shuri was already heading toward the archive.
"Come on," she called back. "Let's go find some volcanic rock."36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNE09s7e1y2
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Shuri was halfway to the archive when Jeremy said, "Actually, wait."
She turned around.
"Why are we going to find samples when I can just—" he held up the gauntlet, "—set up a factory right now. Right here. A full production facility. Mixer, everything. And then you'd just have permanent access to it. Ongoing andocite alloy production, no gauntlet required after the initial build."
Shuri stared at him.
"You can do that."
"I can do that."
"You can pull an entire factory out of a video game."
"Create mod is literally a factory building game," Jeremy said simply. "That's the whole point of it. You build production lines. Automated systems. Input goes in, product comes out, runs by itself. I've built these before." He paused. "Many times."
Shuri looked around the lab. "How much space do you need?"
"That's the right question," Jeremy said. "How big a place can you find me? Because the bigger the floor space, the more production lines we can run simultaneously. We're not just talking andocite alloy. If we're setting up a Create factory I can build out a full materials processing operation. Ore processing, alloy mixing, mechanical pressing — the whole chain."
Shuri's expression had shifted into the particular focused look of someone mentally rearranging their entire afternoon.
"There is a decommissioned vibranium processing facility," she said slowly, "on the eastern edge of the palace complex. It has been empty for about eight months. High ceilings, reinforced floors — they were pouring vibranium ingots in there so the floor rating is extraordinary. And it has its own power substation."
"How big?"
"Roughly the size of an aircraft hangar."
Jeremy got the pharaoh grin again.
"That'll do," he said.
Shuri grabbed her tablet. "Give me ten minutes to get clearance from T'Challa."
"I'll need a clear floor and the lights on," Jeremy said, already flexing the gauntlet. "Everything else I'm bringing with me."
Ten minutes later they were standing inside the decommissioned facility. The ceiling arched high overhead. The floor was vast and flat and rated for loads that most buildings would have opinions about. The lights hummed on in sequence, illuminating a space that had been waiting for a purpose.
Jeremy stood in the middle of it, gauntlet active, and just took a moment to plan the layout in his head. Input stations on the left. Mixing line through the center. Output and storage on the right. A mechanical shaft system running the entire length to power everything from a single rotational source.
He knew this. He had done this in the game a hundred times. The difference was that this time the factory would be standing in Wakanda and the product would be going into a real ship.
"Ready?" Shuri said beside him. She had her scanner out, already prepared to document everything that materialized.
"Ready," Jeremy said.
He reached into the gauntlet and started to build.36Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1Lc2mlhj7k
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and then Add to home screen.