Soul Bound

1              Soul Bound

1.1            Finding her Feet

1.1.5          An Inscrutable Mastermind

1.1.5.10       Good chemistry

The sight before her was dazzling. Around the edges of the cavern were 8 spots that glowed like suns: Red, Blue, Pink, Green, White, Yellow, Purple, and (surprisingly) Black. Presumably mana stores. She glanced away from them, like a driver at night from oncoming headlights, and let her vision adjust. The mages standing in groups also glowed, some more brightly than others. The glow wasn’t evenly concentrated through their bodies; on looking closer she could see coloured mana flowing from the body’s core and out through the hand holding a wand, or just pointed, depending upon the caster’s style.

The cooling system itself took more puzzling out. The runes Wellington had inscribed were as intricate as printed circuit boards full of capacitors and transistors. The wards holding the fluids in place were simple, but strong. The flows going from the mage groups to each area of operation varied, depending on whether it was being heated, compressed or moved. There seemed to be a bottleneck at the second group, and she sang a quick speed buff targeting just them. Ah, yes, that was flowing more smoothly now. The liquid nitrogen Dewar was almost full now. She lined up some empty ones from those she’d taken from the cold lab, and asked Tomsk to swap them in as needed.

Flavio was directing the mage groups with the verve and artistry of someone conducting an orchestra. Bungo was busy sketching a more complex system and risked distracting Flavio by asking a dozen or more questions every minute. Luckily Flavio’s mind was entirely up to the challenge of doing both things at once, and even seemed to enjoy the exercise.

Time to go renew Alderney’s buffs. She put a full Dewar in her inventory box and jogged over. Wellington joined her, leaving Tomsk and Bungo with Flavio.

“Wellington, just the man!” Alderney cried with glee, putting a piece of paper and a spiky object in front of him. “Sketch out the runes you want on the tetsumari, and I’ll make a stamp from it, and inlay it into the design. Make it home in on a target if you can. Able to penetrate armour, confusion, stun, slow, or anything else like that would be good too. Mind the fish hooks, I’ve filled them with paralysis poison. Once you’ve done that, there’s a vampire stake that I’d love you to clone the runes from your Athame onto. After that, let’s work on the gelato machine.” She said the whole thing without drawing breath once. Her eyes were still electric blue. If anything, the glow had strengthened. Bulgaria looked worried.

Kafana asked gently: “Alderney, I’ve brought you the liquid nitrogen, but before I give it to you, there is something you must do for me.”

Alderney: “More to craft? Yay, what, what?”

Kafana: “No, there’s something I need to cast for you, and you’ll need to sit still on this chair for 2 minutes without moving. Can you do that?”

Alderney sprang to a chair and sat rigid, bolt upright, her feet and fingers tapping with impatience.

Kafana drew out her violin. Think peaceful. Effective, but not stressed, not manic. Harmonious. In perfect attunement with her work. Effortless. She threw her will and the strength of her concern into her music, as she played Watermark, by Enya.

Afterwards, Alderney opened her eyes, and blinked twice.

“Kafana, what are you doing here? That music was lovely.”

Kafana smiled in relief. “Hey, Alderney how are you feeling?”

“Pretty relaxed, actually. Wellington, what have you got there?”

Wellington brought his design over, cautiously. “It’s some runes we could put on the tetsumari. But we don’t have to. There’s no rush. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Alderney looked it over and nodded. “Neat job. Well, I’m not up to anything at the moment, so let’s give it a go. Did you see the thread in The Burrow with Kafana’s requirements? If you’ve worked a plan out for that already, could you put it down on paper for me? And I was thinking, maybe we should make it compatible with working just with salt and ice, in case the mages miss a delivery and the orphans need an alternative?”

Wellington smiled, rather than just giving an impassive nod. Maybe their talks to him about modelling Womble behaviour for the viewers had got through. “Sure, Alderney. Not a problem.”

Kafana cautiously renewed the initial skill level buff, and observed Alderney for a few minutes, before also renewing the speed buff and luck buff. Alderney’s eyes did gain a deep blue glow, but it seemed calmer and positive, rather than threatening to crack. She left them to it and returned to Bungo, after leaving the dewar with Bulgaria and admonishing him to keep her better informed, and tell her the moment he got at all worried.

More meditation for mana as she trotted back again. More skill level gained messages.

{System, please could you use your judgement on how vital it is for me to know about a skill level gain immediately, and when possible save them up for a convenient time?}

[I can try to recognise the pattern in your brain that corresponds to a high probability of your being annoyed by one, but I can’t really say what you would predict is vital, because I have knowledge of what others are doing that you don’t, and you have knowledge of what you’re planning that I don’t.]

{Oh, good point! Never mind, thanks for explaining. It is so much nicer than just receiving blank silence.}

[Kafana, are you trying to teach me social skills, the same way you’re trying to teach Wellington?]

{Perish the thought. Let’s see, how would you put it? I’m providing interactive data to facilitate you in your function of adjusting the user interface to enhance the immersive experience.} She mentally giggled to herself.

[Ah. That sounds so much better.]

This time she giggled aloud. She was really enjoying the company of her friend. She hoped System could pick up the emotion and interpret it correctly. She certainly wasn’t going to say that, though. Far too sappy. She tried imagining getting drunk with System at a party, and failed.

When she reached Bungo, she discovered that Coleus had arrived, leading a procession of apprentices wheeling barrows laden with raw materials. The teams of mages were taking a breather, while Bungo explained to Flavius what he wanted them to try next. There were 9 Dewars of liquid nitrogen, 2 of oxygen and 1 partially filled with dry ice. Kafana took 1 oxygen and 6 nitrogen, leaving the rest for CoThEx to play with. She could see fragments of petal on the floor, where Bungo had frozen a flower and then shattered it.

Flavio: “So Bungo, what do these symbols mean? Why these ones in particular?”

Bungo: “It is to do with a theory about what stuff is made of. Look at these two Dewars. One is filled with a substance that I called ‘oxygen’ and the other is filled with a substance that I call ‘nitrogen’. In the normal course of things, unless magic is used, it is impossible to turn the one into the other, no matter how you bash it, heat it or combine it with other things. According to you, what are they fundamentally made of?”

Flavio: “Pirsig’s Law states that everything is made up of differing proportions of the 8 elements. According to that, both oxygen and nitrogen are made of the same stuff, and it should be possible to transmute oxygen into nitrogen by removing what oxygen has an excess of, and then adding in what’s lacking for it to become nitrogen. Whether those operations can be carried out without magic is a different question.”

Bungo: “According to this other theory, let’s call it Democritus’ Law, everything is made up of very small building blocks. There are a hundred or so different types of building block. Whether those building blocks are, in turn, made up of different amounts of your 8 elements is a question Democritus didn’t look at. But, anyway, some of the objects we see around us, like gold bars, are made up of just one single type of building block. Some are made up out of just two or three types of block, in fixed proportions, such as water, which is one block of oxygen for every two blocks of hydrogen. And some objects are so complex that we can’t really write down a simple fixed ratio for them.”

Bungo: “The advantage of looking at it from Democritus’ perspective is that you can write equations which balance the number of blocks of each type on both sides, that let you predict what you will end up with if you break certain simple objects, or react them with other simple objects. The symbols I used can be thought of as abstract stick diagrams showing the types of block and the ratios making up a simple object.”

Flavio: “I’m not sure anyone in our world has tested what happens entirely in the absence of mages. To a large extent, the outcome of an experiment is what the most powerful mage present wants the outcome to be. Repeat the experiment with different people present, and you get a different result, different proportions of objects produced.”

Flavio paused for a moment. “Which leads me to wonder why the situation without magic is your default assumption. Bungo, does the world you come from not have any magic at all?”

Bungo: “Um...”

Flavio: “You also seem to be assuming that the symbols you drew will resonate with what is going on at this ‘very small’ level of yours, as though the entire world is predictably mechanistic like a clock which could be set running once and then have no need for deities to exist, rather than fundamentally magical and driven by divine will. So I ask myself, what does that tell me about what your world is like?”

Kafana decided to intervene, and let Bungo off the hook: “Flavio, you are a very intelligent person. So intelligent, perhaps, that you have never met anyone else as intelligent as you are and you wonder why that is. Maybe you suspect things about the true nature of the deities, things that frighten or outrage you. I think you should leave poor Bungo alone until after you have had that conversation with Wellington. Fair?”

Flavio looked off-balance for once, and Bungo took that opportunity: “Ok, so enough deep philosophy for now. Let’s return to the practicalities. Chemistry.” he pointed at a sheet of paper:

CaO + 3 C → CaC2 + CO

CaC2 + 2 H2O → Ca(OH)2 + C2H2

2 C2H2 → C4H4

2 NaCl + 2 H2O → Cl2 + H2 + 2 NaOH

C4H4 + HCl → C4H5Cl

2 C4H5Cl → C8H10Cl2

“We want to set up 6 reaction chambers. The first wants fire. The second wants crushing. The third wants rearrangement. The fourth wants lightning. The last two also want rearrangement. The Cl2 is poisonous. The C4H4 explodes under pressure. We should set up storage between each chamber to allow for different reaction speeds, and ideally add in purification and ingredient enhancement stages in case of impurities.”

“I’ve labelled the salt as NaCl, the coke as C and the lime as CaO. If we can set up a viewer that uses resonance to display the proportions in each vessel of the building blocks Ca, C, O, H, Na and Cl that would be useful.”

It looked like they were back on track, and that this would take a while. The mages all gathered around, trying to follow Bungo’s explanations and having Flavio explain things in terms they could relate to.

Perhaps she should try a buff centered on intelligence, or maybe telepathy? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Hmm, by Lobachevsky by Tom Lehrer? No, no, that would give them far too many bad ideas. The Elements? No, no, wrong approach. You can’t learn chemistry that way. She needed music that inspired intelligence, not just music about intelligence.

Ah, what about Biber’s Mysteries of the Rosary? #4, The Presentation was tricky, but worked well as a solo. She tuned her violin for it, and set up some runes and icons to push her mana into. She started to play, loud enough to carry to the mages, but not enough to distract them. She imagined herself behind a screen at an event, background music, unnoticed consciously, almost a ninja musician.

[Skill gained “Learning buff”]

[Skill gained “Stealth performance” - affect people without their noticing.]