By Greg Stolze, © 2013
If you want to get stone-cold Biblical on a community, you could do a lot worse than turning water to blood. The Aquasanguinator does just that. You point it at a quantity of water and it turns it into human blood. It’s blood type B Negative, to be specific. Oh, and if you’re wondering how much water it converts, the answer is 100,000 gallons. More than enough to contaminate even a huge million-gallon water tower, unless people in your community are content to drink something that’s 1/10th gore. Now who’s ignoring your ransom demands?
The effect here is a Major Environment Change, costing 3 Generosity. Why major? Granted, with a garage-sized machine and the right supplies, you could certainly wreck a standpipe full of drinking water, but the facts that it’s (1) human blood and (2) operates as a beam that can penetrate the outer skin of a water tank to a thickness of 24 inches put it beyond human science. (For now, anyhow. Artificial blood could be right around the corner, but matter-transformation-beams are still, I hope, far off.)
The mandatory flaw of this device is a cooldown rate, so you can only fire it every other round. Meaning that if you wanted to completely convert Rondout Reservoir in New York, it would take you almost 1 million rounds instead of a mere 500,000.
By Greg Stolze, © 2013