Cable was truly skilled. He seemed to possess a MacGyver-like ability; it felt as though he could walk into any supermarket and cobble together a murder weapon from baby supplies, food, and drinks.
Arriving in a world whose Timeline was around 1890, repairing a Spatial-Temporal Teleportation Belt built with 30th Century technology sounded like an exceptionally difficult task, yet he seemed utterly unhurried.
Operating under Origin Falcon's watch was certainly dangerous, but Wade's clumsy disguise somehow worked. Cable relaxed considerably as a result. At the very least, it proved that the owner of those giant green eyes in the sky was not omniscient and omnipotent.
The Belt's main problem was that its capacitors had burned out, so he needed to make replacements. There was no point even thinking about 30th Century materials. Cable needed to use the primitive local conditions and create temporary substitutes with technology that was "retro" to him.
Looking at 20th Century capacitor technology, they could broadly be divided into three major categories: plastic film capacitors, liquid capacitors, and electrode-material capacitors.
He chose the last kind, because they could be made with aluminum foil. Aluminum was still relatively easy to acquire in this era.
The European who probably loved aluminum most was Napoleon. One of his treasured personal sets of tableware was made of aluminum. In his era, due to metallurgical limitations, aluminum was even more expensive than gold, so he cherished his aluminum plates dearly.
However, by the end of the 19th Century, aluminum production had increased dramatically. What had once been reserved for the Emperor of France now saw much wider use. Although it had not yet reached the point it would forty years later, when every household had aluminum pots and kettles, Cable knew where to find large quantities of finished aluminum alloy.
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