Chapter 60: Chapter 60 A solid phase

Nathan pursed his lips as he looked across the workbench at Poppy. The short alchemist was looking at Nathan with a kind of desperate hope. Nathan thought about what he could teach Poppy, and what made sense to teach Poppy. They probably weren't the same.

He wants to learn more about alchemy, and has offered a favor to me. I’d certainly be happy to take a favor from an alchemist, especially one involved in ammunition manufacture. But I don’t understand alchemy. I understand chemistry. I understand it quite well. I could teach him chemistry? I could try to come up with something from chemistry he could use in alchemy. I think I need to understand alchemy a bit better, to know where he’s starting from and where he wants to go.

Nathan gestured with his head and they moved a little farther away from where Beatred and Herdin were arguing over the potential placement of the self-destruct enchantment so it would be able to destroy the weapon without interfering with its normal function.

Nathan clasped his hands in front of him, leaning towards Poppy. “I think I need to understand how you do alchemy. I need to understand where you’re coming from first before I figure out what would be useful to you.”

Poppy raised his bushy eyebrows “Alchemy is the creation of magical potions and ingredients, usually by extraction of magical components from natural ingredients. Then those components are purified, processed, stabilized and mixed to produce the desired effect. The most difficult part is coming up with new recipes for new products. I’m hoping you can point me in a direction that will give me things to try. It’ll help me get a unique product and help me level. But more importantly, I just want to know more about my craft.”

And that’s why I want to help him. He just wants to know. Know how the world works, and how he can use the laws of the world to create wondrous effects. Much like me. But it seems like he cares more about learning alchemy than chemistry. Magical vs. mundane. And I don’t know squat about how magic would work in chemistry - which seems to be what alchemy is? I lack a basis for this.

Nathan frowned, thinking. “Can you describe how you make a healing potion? Pretend I’m a complete novice. I don’t need the tiny details, but I’m curious how you think about it.”

Poppy shrugged. “It’s not a secret. Every alchemist makes healing potions, though most throw their own style at it. In the core recipe, a healing potion has three ingredients. The first is essence of life, and is usually filtered from bone marrow or crushed meat. Any marrow or meat will do, but that from a stronger and more vital creature produces a better product. Then you need essence of growth, which can be extracted from a few magical plants with different kinds of alcohols. The final ingredient is just crystallized mana made using a pretty standard basic spellform. Anybody can make it, though skilled mages produce far more crystallized mana of better quality that doesn’t evaporate so quickly.”

Poppy was getting enthused, moving his hands around to describe each process. “Then it’s pretty straightforward. You can just crush the crystallized mana and mix all of them together before it evaporates, but that tends to produce an inferior quality potion that won’t remain stable for long. It’s far more effective to vaporize the growth essence and pass it through the life essence while you heat it and agitate medium-sized chunks of crystallized mana in the mixture along with a stabilizer. You need to pull the crystallized mana out at the right time though, or else it’ll start moving on its own. Fast enough to break the glass.” The orc chuckled, leaning back. “Everybody remembers the first time a basic healing potion blew up in their faces. At least it heals whatever it burns!”

What. Ok. Um.

Nathan smiled back at Poppy for a moment as he tried to reconcile what he’d just heard with the chemistry Nathan knew. The biggest problem was that he didn’t know whatever the hell ‘life essence’ or ‘growth essence’ was. It sounded like a lot of alchemy was extracting, filtering or distilling complex magical mixtures from previously-existing magical sources, then figuring out how to optimally combine them for the desired effect. Unless they were extracting some form of liquid ‘life mana’.

Nathan opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he ventured a thought. “It seems our disciplines approach this problem from opposite ends. With what I know, we try to break things down to the most basic building block possible, then rebuild up and understand every step along the way. That lets us generalize to other processes.”

Poppy shrugged again. “People have done further purifications on Life Essence, it’s a classic training exercise for a young alchemist. Make them figure out how to distill it down to the Six Primary Fractions of Life. Some are better than others for making healing potions but they’re all helpful and it’s not worth the effort for most potions. There’s a few specialty potions that use just the medium gaseous extract of life though, which is the hardest to properly purify.”

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Ahhh. It feels like we’re talking past each other. I don’t understand what he means by the Six Primary Fractions and he doesn't understand that I mean pure chemical compounds.

Nathan pursed his lips. “I don’t think that’s what I mean. I mean like how charcoal is mostly a single thing, while I think even the simplest of the Six Primary Fractions of Life are composed from many of those different components.”

Poppy cocked his head at Nathan, still confused. “But they’re entirely different categories. The Essences have an inherent magical nature, and while it can be altered, destroyed and subdivided, they are a different kind of thing than a base material like charcoal.”

Nathan shook his head. “My science is dedicated to figuring out how to combine base materials, which we call elements. Things that cannot be further reduced or subdivided into more components. You would use several of them to modify each other to create a more complex and advanced material that has properties that none of the individual components have. It’s not a great example, but the way that gunpowder combines different basic material components, none of which explode, to make something explosive. Extrapolate that forward to more complex mixtures and you have some idea. My discipline doesn’t extract complex pre-existing mixtures, we start from purified single sources and make the desired product in greater purity, predictability and yield.”

Here I am, taking a giant shit all over the field of natural product chemistry. It’s ok, they can’t make their own drugs anyway, gotta rely on the greatest chemists to do it for them. Cells! Well, mostly plants. And Streptomyces. Those metabolic clusters might as well be magic.

The alchemist's eyes went wide, then narrowed. “That - sounds hard. But if you could make a magical reagent from base materials! You would have so much control! How could I get started with that?”

Nathan sighed. He was already teaching Stella electricity and magnetism, and they were making fast progress. But he spent a lot of time with Stella. He wasn’t sure he wanted to spend that much time teaching Poppy basic chemistry. Or that it was possible to make something magical from raw elements. Was there such a thing as 'magic' carbon as opposed to regular carbon? Isotopes? He’d definitely didn't have the tools to start trying to figure that out. Nathan held up a finger. “Hold on a second, I need to think about this.”

What’s the right balance here? I don’t want to leave this guy with nothing. I want to help, and I'm glad I understand a bit more about how alchemy works. But I don’t want to get stuck teaching him atomic theory, the periodic table, electron shells and the rules of covalent bonding, especially when the payoff is so vague. To properly explain it you need the Schrödinger wave equation. Maybe I give him a few teasers and see where he goes with it? I feel like he would be justified in getting frustrated if I leave him with abstract knowledge that doesn’t go anywhere quickly. And I don't have time to explain covalent theory properly.

Is there anything I can give him that would help now? And help prove my point about using a base material in new ways? There’s gotta be something, Nathan, think.

So, Nathan reached back in his mind for something that would help Poppy. He searched for basic chemical reactions that would be helpful to the orcish alchemist. Maybe just classic acid-base chemistry? But to understand what was going on, he needed knowledge of ions and polarity. That was a whole bag of worms that led right back to covalent theory. Not the best starting place. And Nathan would be surprised if Poppy didn’t already know a fair amount about acids.

Maybe - it seemed like alchemy involved a lot of extractions. Extracting magical essences from magical sources. He'd mentioned an alcohol extraction, which was a classicly mundane way to extract natural products. There were some fancy ways to do extractions that Nathan knew about. He thought about good examples and found one after a few minutes.

Caffeine! They make decaf coffee beans by doing a supercritical carbon dioxide extraction to pull all the caffeine out. I did one with lemon peels in my undergrad chemistry lab, we did LCMS on the limonene left over. I think it’s used for a lot of different plant extracts too. You basically need dry ice and a lightly heated pressure-tight vessel, since carbon dioxide goes supercritical above 70 atmospheres and about thirty degrees celsius. 70 atmospheres is a lot, but definitely possible to contain.

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