Chapter 17: Chapter 17 – Inspiration; An Act Of Creation

The usual way of things, when someone started working on a new trade in Shem, was to follow the well-trod path. I was, to my own surprise, rather disinclined to do so.

“We have detailed, easy-to-follow instructions for all the Basic Set’s potions, you know.”

“I know.” I picked out six containers based on their labels, three of them jars and three of them vials, trying to work through the notation system in my head. “Acids and bases, I get. But there’s something else on the labels, too. Weak, strong, and a third category?” I put them carefully, carrying them one at a time in each hand, on the nearby table.

“I have no idea! Sophie, among the things we have instructions for are potions that’ll unlock your Alchemist Class at Journeyman Rank, right?”

“Yeah.” I grinned at the mortar and pestle. They were so quaint, and so charming, and I was absolutely not going to waste my time with them. Instead, I grabbed two of the automated-looking grinders; I’d use one for acids, I expected, and one for bases. One more thing to look up in the books. “Did you figure out how the cyclers work?”

“It’s got two mana inputs. One’s a setter for what the air should be, did that. The other makes one of these dishes suck in air that has anything in it that shouldn’t be. Air like what we want comes out the other dish, everything else goes down the tube.”

“Great. Okay, these posts and tubes are obviously for that. I think. Can you confirm that, and then if it’s the case, set up, let’s see.” I glanced around, trying to intuit the design intent of the space. “The layout of the posts suggests we want two cyclers on the far side of the table from me and one on each side?”

“Yes, but, Sophie.”

I grinned at the jar I found, the one that had exactly what I was looking for. Now, to find the flask again that I’d seen… “Kelly, do you know where we had those flasks with the center reservoir, the one where pulling the pin dumps the contents out into the mix?”

“West wall, third shelf from the left, second row. But Sophie, can you just tell me why?”

“I dunno.” Her memory was exactly right, and I made my way back to the table with a couple of them, humming to myself. “I guess I just want to start out doing something creative instead of following directions. It’s the path I want to follow, right? To be a creator, not a technician.”

“Oh.” Kelly’s frown cleared, and the whining note in her voice vanished. “Oh! Okay. That makes sense, and I’m sorry you had to tell me again. What do you need me to do?”

I nodded at the table and the tools that were on it. “The bits of dandelion seeds need to be as finely ground as possible. So do the lemon seeds, but use the other grinder, absolutely no cross-contamination. They go into the reservoirs for these flasks. Can you deal with that while I handle the rest of the prep for this experiment?”

“On it!” The contented joy in Kelly’s voice went a long way to reassuring me that I could, in fact, use her as an additional pair of hands, which was nice. “Why as finely ground as we can?”

“The finer it’s ground, the more surface area it has per volume.”

It took a moment, but without any further prompting her face lit up with the epiphany. “And more surface area means the powder will touch more of… whatever it’s touching.”

“Yeah. It’ll react faster.”

That was enough for her, so I went on bustling around, resorting to the index and finally finding what I was pretty sure was an atomizer nozzle: a rubber bulb and tube mounted on a ring, where the ring had a wire clamp that would secure it to the top of the flasks I’d picked out.

“This,” I told Kelly absently as I fiddled with the clamp, “creates a low-pressure zone that forces liquid up into the gas stream and disperses it as droplets. At least, if the laws of fluid dynamics are the same here as they were back home. So it’s going to aerosolize whatever liquid is in this flask, and that’ll spray into this, which—and I checked—has an airtight seal with the atomizer tube. A closed system, no backspray.”

“And the powder goes in the liquid, ‘cause you wouldn’t have me grinding these otherwise.”

“Yep! Hmm. I need a… ugh. I can’t believe I’m saying this.” I grinned despite my words. “Where am I going to find some kind of pipette?”

“West wall, leftmost shelf, third row.” She grunted with effort, the grinder bucking against her with a sudden growl as she put her full body weight into it. She turned it off instantly, presumably cutting a mana feed or something, and started clamping it into the table with a sheepish expression. “Um. Yeah. That’s where you’ll find the hand stuff.”

“Thanks!”

There was, wonderfully, a sort of magical whiteboard. I picked up something halfway between a stylus and a very fancy pen and wrote out a few bits of nonsense, enjoying the richness of the color and the total lack of odor or residue.

There were two black bars, one each running along the top and the left, and I stroked my finger down one of them; as I did so, it erased the content aligned with my finger, confirming my hypothesis. More like a magical etch-a-sketch, I thought to myself, and got back to work. The stoichiometry of the reactions needed figuring out, and that meant the chemical reference books, yet another boon from Kelly’s magical insight as to where things were.

When I stopped to self-check, I found, to my surprise and Kelly’s lack thereof, that my hands were shaking. I took a break to take care of that—finished one side of the basket without even noticing what it was, sent her for a drink refill, attended nature’s call, that sort of thing. That meant losing context—and besides, best practices were universal—so I wrote out a quick checklist on the whiteboard, and had Kelly take a look at it.

That cross-check caught a hilarious oversight: we’d set up the cyclers, but hadn’t done anything with their exhaust pipes. Once we were done laughing about that, I rolled a small drum over to each of them and figured out pretty readily how the gaskets worked and how to check the seal with the hand pump. Mental math and a quick check of the books had the maximum pressure of the drums at about ten thousand times what the reaction could even theoretically produce if it were completely converted to gas, but when Kelly checked with me about it, bless her, I walked her through the math anyway.

Accidentally catching my foot on nothing in particular resulted in a confirmation that slamming my hip into one of the drums didn’t budge it, so I checked off the mental box labeled drums are properly secured and tried to ignore the forming bruise.

I knew the chemistry of it suggested that there shouldn’t be more than trace amounts of excess gas, and all the byproducts should be mundane and largely benign. I didn’t much care; I’ve always felt like the act of skimping on safety procedures is what causes the hazard, and I wasn’t going to start cutting corners now. At least the glassware here was effectively impossible to break by dropping it, or by catching my foot on the floor and accidentally hurling it for that matter, so that wasn’t something I had to worry about.

I still wasn’t sure about the question of byproducts even after reading through what information there was in the books. They didn’t have exact molecular composition, and there was some variance in the reported data that was a bit excessive, so I spent some time being a bit more thorough. I calculated the maximum plausible pressure, cross-checking to make sure the flask—and the atomizer, and the lid with the last-ditch valve—could plausibly handle the reaction, and then just to be sure looked up the pressure capacity of the different components in yet another book.

Eventually, after some time at the whiteboard, I had a decent ballpark of the molecular proportions I wanted, and I wasn’t actually going for perfection. The scale needed adjustment, which was tricky until Kelly found some magical calibration weights for me; and after some back and forth with volume versus mass I confirmed that the density measurements in the book and the purity-and-ratio labels on the bottles were all correct as far as I could measure them.

Of course, we then learned that the flat panels next to the scales were magical scales, but at least now we knew how the mechanical scales were calibrated.

Two kinds of seeds, ground to a fine powder. Two remarkably non-toxic liquids, given how volatile their fumes were, one actually used in a wide variety of cooking. One oil extract, something theoretically usable for cooking but which would be an incredibly bad idea. A dozen pieces of equipment. All of it was carefully positioned and secured; every upcoming step was planned and written down.

Nothing we were using was irreplaceable. Still, I was careful to make sure that nothing was in a position to break; this was someone else’s gear, someone else’s lab, and just because most of the stuff we were using was actually super basic didn’t mean we shouldn’t be respectful.

It was time.

I was very—excessively, by most peoples’ standards—careful about the remaining bits of work, that tiny fraction which was intended to be the so-called actual experiment. Flask secured to the table, protective equipment on, I painstakingly pipetted the suspension of oleoresin in its respective liquids into first one vessel and then the other. The pipettes went into the magical cleaning bucket, and the jars of reagents were wiped down, resealed, and put back on the shelves.

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Kelly had long since gotten the powders into their respective cylinders, and she slid them into place at the top of the flasks with a frown. That frown—and the fact that everything was ready and I’d want to do a last check anyway—was reason enough to pause, and I caught her eye with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t think this is going to work.” Her voice was uncertain, and her frown intensified as she spoke.

“What’s not going to work? The reaction itself? That would be an interesting result in its own right, I wouldn’t exactly complain. Be confused, sure, but not complain.”

“No, not that.” Kelly smiled at me, but the frown came back a moment later. “I think this just isn’t enough.”

“Not enough, like…”

“I’m not sure this’ll do what you need for Alchemist, instead of what you already have. I mean, ‘cause… look at this.” She waved a hand at the experimental apparatus, a pin-pull away from… from whatever was going to happen.

“What about it?”

“It’s apprentice level, this. Designing it, sure?” Her voice grew in confidence as she spoke, and she almost started to gesture before remembering where she was. She put her hands on her hips instead, shaking her head. “There’s no magic in it, and no spark, and I know for a fact you’re not making this up as you go along, you’re doing something you already know about. Sophie, honey, this is an Expert Technician at work, not an Alchemist.”

I flinched at her words, hands opening and clenching. I discarded the first three or so things that came across my mind to say, had a moment of thankfulness that I hadn’t had anything in my hands, and closed my eyes for a moment. I let a range of emotions flow through me, mostly the fear of stasis and the paralysis of not believing the status quo can ever change; and then I opened my eyes.

“You’re right.” I smiled at her, which was hard at first and then grew much easier when she smiled back.

“So what are you gonna do about it?”

“Simple.” I did my best to infuse my voice with a cocky certainty to match the question in hers. I was well aware of how short I fell in the attempt, but just trying to do it made me feel better, shifting my mood a little bit towards that feeling. “I’ll improvise an addition. Something with spark. Something magical.”

Her grin gleamed, hard and challenging. “Show me.”

I walked the line of reagents, trying to clear my mind. I knew I didn’t want to mess with my delivery mechanism or the storage; those would work, and I wasn’t coming up with any brilliant insights about that. I needed something that I could add to what I already had, something that would elevate it to an act of creation from, yes, a largely rote recreation of something I knew.

Hephaestus, God of the Forge, I prayed as I walked. Words flowed from my heart, a plea and offering in one, and I felt the pressure of perception and knew that someone—or something—was listening. God of craft and artisanship, of excellence in its own right. You helped me reforge my body; help me now forge a new path and transcend who I was. I dedicate the fires of my eventual workspace to you, should it have such, and ask for your blessing.

Hermes, herald and messenger, guide and trickster. Thrice-Greatest, the mystical chemistry which is alchemy lies within your domain. To you I dedicate vial and flask, pipette and retort. Let my every potion be a prayer to you; bless me, then, and help me find once more that spark which drove me. Help me find within myself the act of creation.

I reached the end of the line and started back again, and about two thirds of the way something twigged in the back of my head, a little nudge from the System bridge, and the feeling of perception faded. I backtracked a few steps, looking for what had triggered the feeling, and my eyes landed on a jar of dust.

Perfect.

“I have no idea how much of this to use,” I murmured to myself. “What a novel experience.”

“Not very much!”

Kelly’s voice sounded from just over my shoulder, and I yelped, the jar slipping from my fingers as I startled. I tried to catch it, which only imparted some spin on it, and reflexively leapt backwards with a flinch as it impacted the floor.

“Good thing those are tough.” With the adrenaline spiking, my hands shook a little as I squatted down to pick up the jar. “Please don’t do that.”

“Got it. Breathe; you’re okay, and it’s okay. The glass is very tough and everything is fine.”

Part of me wanted to get mad at her soothing tone, but most of me was too busy trying to follow her excellent advice. I took the deep breaths I needed, standing up and walking back over to the work bench where we had everything rigged. “Not very much, you said?”

“It’s strong, even if it’s common enough to be in the basics.”

I frowned at that, and went, inevitably, to the books. The description had some measurements in terms of power, but all I remembered is that I vaguely wanted something on the order of 85,000 candela. That conversion wasn’t particularly hard to do, and I wound up with about a milligram of the luminous dust added into the mix on each of the flasks.

“Creation,” I said grandly. “Magic!”

“Yeah. Magic! I mean, literally.” Kelly frowned at the dust mix. “My Skills aren’t giving me any feedback about whether this is going to work.”

“But you don’t have one about whether it won’t, right?” She nodded, and I savored the nervous flutter in my stomach. It was a rather new feeling. The first of many, I told myself. Wondering whether something I created will turn out okay. “Alright.

“Technician shit or not, safety first. Goggles, gloves, and mask?”

“Goggles and gloves and mask. Bucket of sand, at hand!”

“Cyclers prepped? All reactions are in secondary containment?”

“Cyclers prepped. Glass cube is in place.”

I looked over at the checklist on the whiteboard, and then at my lab assistant and friend, her eyes crinkling with an eagerness and anticipation that matched my own.

Reaching over with one hand, my other hand holding the rubber bulb, I firmly yanked the pin out. Dust billowed into the liquid blend at the bottom of the flask, and the world stood still.

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