Solitaire POV: Day 69

Current Wealth: 24 gold 48 silver 14 copper

Once Xangô was finished flaunting his virginity at me, I was free to turn my attention to matters slightly more important than the ethics of thumbing out a cro-magnon creature’s eyes. More specifically, what the fuck could I do with elements, and where were the limiting lines drawn?

There’d not been much point in experimenting before, outside of the very broad tests needed to confirm that I did, in fact, need to boil and heat the ingredients for black powder regardless of how hard I wished them into rearranging on their own. Now though, there’d be a much wider variance in the methods and techniques done to all the metals Beam had brought on his little shopping trip.

Ores and minerals, some in crystal form, others powders or stony blocks. All of them had things I wanted, tucked away inside, keeping the good stuff from me like pearls inside oysters. Well, that was fine, I wasn’t exactly the classiest of fellows, but I knew how to eat an oyster at least.

I picked up a rock, and started smashing the materials apart.

This wasn’t just a discharge of masculine energy, breaking things to bits is a vital first step in a strange amount of chemistry. Square-cube law, and all that. The smaller something is, the higher its surface area- the thing that correlates to reactivity- is in relation to its volume- the thing that correlates to time taken to react. Which is to say, breaking one volume into a thousand smaller ones will make them react a lot quicker and easier. Ten times so, actually. Worth remembering.

We’d started a fire up, because that was all I’d need for the purposes of this little experiment. If it failed then we could always just use a proper smithy, but if it worked then that knowledge alone would be worth more than the actual products of my work today. The molybdenite was first.

Different ores melted at different temperatures, and this was one of the various principles I planned on using to separate the useful agents Beam had gotten from the worthless sludge their atoms were bound in and around. By my estimates we’d be looking at maybe 800 degrees celsius for the fire, well below the point at which stone would liquefy. Which was the first test. Could I make things more vulnerable to heat?

I waited, eagerly watching the churning flames. Twenty minutes passed without so much as stone going runny before I was forced to conclude that, apparently, just sapping the thermal resilience of a material was beyond me. Irritating. I considered the matter further, at that, and turned my attention to the fire itself.

Fire isn’t really anything special, it’s just chemical energy becoming heat. Fuel turning to energy and gas. The temperature was…What? I didn’t know exactly how it was determined, but I didn’t take long to figure it out. Materials didn’t have arbitrarily determined burning heats, it was variable. Variable along with amount and size of the fire, so…The faster fuel burned, the hotter it would become. Made sense, of course, for more heat to be transferred across the same medium, the temperature differential had to grow.

So what would happen if the coal started reacting faster? I decided to try and find out.

I’d had my suspicions, of course, and they proved well founded. More and more coal needed dumping on the flames as heat and entropy ate it, CO2 filling the air with dangerous density. Within minutes, even my superhumanly toughened flesh was starting to throb at the feeling of heat pressing against it. My eyes didn’t hurt, they were too resilient for that, but I knew instinctively that looking at the light of the blaze would’ve been dangerous for a normal person’s. It was almost like burning magnesium, rather than a standard fire.

And it got hot, very quickly. Worked perfectly for separating my ores and causing all those nice, convenient chemical reactions, but unfortunately I had to dial the temperature down a shade. On account of the stone floor starting to melt.

That was inconvenient, but I somehow didn’t mind. I’d confirmed my little theory, knew, now, that I could at least influence reactions on a chemical scale. So I got to work testing it out a bit more.

Now originally I’d only actually planned to find my limits, gauge precisely where the lines were so I could work around them. What I hadn’t intended was to actually stretch those limits, and it came as a brilliant surprise when I started accidentally doing just that. Well, it didn’t stay accidental for long.

I worked, and worked, hours soon flitting by as I concentrated on hastening reactions, then triggering them, then amplifying them. I could hear the laws of chemistry screaming at me while I did it, soyjaking as they watched me violate conservation of matter and energy both, leaving products that out-weighed the reactants and thermal releases that left equations see-sawing rapidly. The more I did, the more I felt spurred on to do.

Stolen novel; please report.

Xangô came in as the sun was setting, the world suddenly darker, and I glanced up at him with a grin. Had all that time really passed? I flitted my focus back, sifting through memories to verify. Yes, sixteen thousand seconds, in fact. And worth every moment.

“Watch this.” I instructed him, holding my hands out, closing my eyes and concentrating for a second. I felt hydrogen in the air, and I took that. Nitrogen and oxygen, too. There wasn’t as much carbon as I’d have liked, but I fixed that by just exhaling. It wasn't hard to separate the oxygen out of my breath and add what was left to the mix, balancing and weighing, calculating it all at once. Becoming the catalyst myself.

A few droplets condensed in the space between my fingers, smaller than raindrops. I jumped back as they fell towards the ground, bracing myself for-

They landed, and exploded apart, sending a crack of noise and a rush of air to run through the room. Xangô practically jumped out of his skin, and I laughed at the sight as he leapt back. The ground was slightly scuffed where they’d fallen. Not a lot, just a few ruffled feathers on the surface of the stone. But not bad for a sub-gram mass.

“What the fuck was that?!” My friend demanded, glaring at me. I grinned back.

“Nitroglycerin.” I told him. “The sports car to our black powder’s spacehopper. Pretty cool, eh?”

His excitement was strongly felt, and long-lived. Xangô quickly called Beam in to witness the effects himself, and they both waxed lyrical about the implications of them. Just seeing them react to it had me bubbling over with anticipation all over again.

“What else can you do?” Beam asked. “Make a nuclear explosion?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but was cut off by Xangô.

“Solitaire do not try to make a fucking nuclear explosion.”

I closed my mouth, then glared at him. Fun-ruining arsehole.

“...Could you, though?” He pressed. I sighed, and shook my head.

“No, probably not. I can de and recombine molecules, but I can’t change the actual elements themselves. New quantities of some seem to appear- otherwise I wouldn’t be able to create a bit more mass than would otherwise be possible with whatever reactants I’m using in their quantity- but that seems to be limited to just a pure chemical reaction, nothing nuclear. Though…” A grin flitted along my mouth. “Level me up a bit more, and I might be nuking people regardless, right?”

For some strange reason that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend, neither of my friends looked particularly pleased with the idea. Still, their dissatisfaction didn’t last long.

“So how much nitro can you make at once?” Beam asked.

I considered that. There was always the option of just checking, of course, but if that amount happened to be much more than a few ounces it’d mean we’d need a new warehouse…And possibly a new genius. I calculated it instead.

Previously, I’d managed to make around 50% more of whatever product I was aiming for than the reactant masses would have otherwise allowed. What would the limiting factor be here, then? My breath, definitely. I could draw in oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen from far around myself- a few metres at least- but if I wanted a decent amount of CO2 I’d need to bring it out of my lungs. I did some quick calculations based on caloric intake and respiratory efficiency, arriving at…0.04 grams, turning to about 0.01 grams of pure carbon. Not a lot, hardly anything in fact.

To calculate how much of one chemical you can make from others, you just need their molar masses. The total atomic mass of what you’re making, compared to the fraction of that mass made up by any particular reactant. Nitro had a molar mass of 227, with 3 carbon atoms being part of that. Carbon’s molar mass was 12, multiplied by 3 that became 36, making it about 16% of the total mass. So I could make just under 10% of a gram of nitroglycerin if I used all the carbon in one breath.

“Uh, Solitaire-” Beam began, I shot a glare at him.

“No talking, brain thinking.” I snapped, and continued to do just that.

Breath wasn’t going to help much. How much CO2 could I get from the surrounding atmosphere?

3 grams, as it happened. Enough for about 30 grams of nitro. That wasn’t very much, not at all, but it was a start. And it’d also shown me there was a limit to how far I could manipulate chemicals from- about 2 metres or so. Would that increase as I became more powerful?

It annoyed me that I couldn’t know, yet, but I moved past it and shared the information.

“So how much is that?” Xangô asked, eagerly. I considered it, then shrugged.

“I have no idea. Wanna go and see?”

He did, and so did Beam. Almost as much as me, in fact. The three of us headed outside, and I worked my magic, congealing atoms together into that special fluid that had made us so good at killing in the 20th century. I was careful to get it moving as I made it, sending my arms out in an arc to ensure that the fingertip-sized blob of nitro was already flying away as it congealed into existence. It struck the stone floor about a dozen metres ahead of me.

The difference in explosive power between it and the black powder is hard to describe.

Our ears didn’t ring, but I saw stone break and dirt jet upwards like a puddle being stamped on. It rained down while we laughed.

“What can you make with this?” Xangô asked, grinning. I sighed.

Nothing, obviously, it was fucking nitroglycerin. But I wouldn’t mind giving a go at stabilising it into something that didn’t explode when you looked at it too hard.

And if nothing else, the ability to make a hand grenade out of literal air was nice to have. I could think of a certain Fucker I’d quite like to test it out on.