"Rian, what is this?"

'This' was a plank on her table, held up at an angle by smooth river rocks like some kind of signboard. Numbers were written on it in char.

"This is a little something I had made up to help you keep track of your progress and encourage you," Rian said brightly as he prepared the water clocks.

"My progress?" Lori said warily. There was something very motherly about how he was saying it…

Rian stepped away from the water clocks after stoppering them and went over to the board. "You see, these numbers are, in order," he pointed, "how much the demesne expanded yesterday; the highest amount you've caused the demesne to expand to date; the rate of expansion that's the goal we're striving for; and the dream of how much we wish we could have per expansion that's just big enough to be unreasonable but just close enough to be possibly attainable."

Lori looked at the numbers. Forty-one, forty-seven, one hundred, and one thousand. If they were all in yustri…

She glared at her lord. "What do you mean 'we'? I'm doing all the expanding."

"I like to think everyone helps with that too by making sure you don't have to worry about food," Rian said. "And I measure every day, so I'm a little involved. With yesterday, the growth average has gone up to forty two and three-fourths!"

"Your strange obsession with seeing a number go up is very strange," Lori said.

"Your lack of enthusiasm of seeing the literal growth your demesne is what's strange here!"

Yes, this obsession with rising numbers was doing very strange things with Rian's attitude. Rates of growth went up and went down. One learned to stop being excited about it. What was important was that her demesne was growing. It had already grown by eleven paces since she'd started expanding it. She considered that good, reasonable progress. Really, a hundred yustri of expansion to the demesne's radius every day…

…

All right that would be nice, but she hadn't even managed to consistently go over forty-four yustri of expansion, a hundred was definitely unreasonable right now.

Lori shook her head and ignored her lord's foolishness. "Stop distracting me, I need to devise what changes can be made to the process," she said, sitting at her table and looking down at the list she had written. She ignored the plank with the numbers.

The process was simple enough, and taught to every Whisperer while at the same time informing them that actually going out beyond the demesne to try it out will result in their death for treason. One used wisps and materials extracted from one's body, where applicable, so that they would still have an affinity to it. Using that affinity, because it would be difficult to use conducting wires, imbue the wisps with a large amount of magic. Have the wisps and materials make contact with wisps and materials from the area in question one was trying to form a Dungeon at, and from there, with Iridescence. The Iridescence would begin to encapsulate and trap wisps while feeding on the imbuement, but it wouldn't do so instantly. And in that time was an opening for a Whisperer to claim and bind the Iridescence itself, creating a dungeon's core and founding a demesne.

Lori… wasn't quite sure what she had reached out to claim in the Iridescence when she had made her core and in the recent days that she had used a modification of this procedure to expand her demesne. It wasn't wisps. The Iridescence didn't have wisps, didn't correspond to any wisps. It wasn't the wisps that were being trapped in the Iridescence, those were still under her control, contested and slowly degrading as that was…

She shook he head. Not important right then. What mattered was that it worked, and as long as she kept doing it, if not the same way then the right way, kept working. However, that didn't mean that there wasn't any room for changes.

In her hands were a list of variables that she had identified with the procedure for expanding her demesne… once she actually bothered to try an identify them. Originally, she had viewed the whole thing as one complete, distinct process, with no possible variable she could reasonably change except for how long she kept doing it… but as she had sat down to consider it… that wasn't exactly true, was it?

"Affinity… alignment… distribution… concentration… Iridescence?"

Lori blinked, then looked over her shoulder in annoyance. "Stop that. It's annoying."

Rian shrugged and stepped back. "Is that the list of variables?" he said, sounding excited.

She turned in her seat and kicked him in the shin.

"Ow!" he cried, hopping back and starting to rub his abused leg.

"I mean it," she said. "It's annoying."

"All right, I get it, no more reading over your shoulder," Rian said, wincing and hopping as he tried to rub the pain away. "I'm sorry, it won't happen again."

Lori nodded curtly, satisfied. "Yes, these are the variables I've identified. I'm trying to decide which of them I'd test and how, to see how it affects the expansion rate."

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"Ah," Rian nodded, putting down his foot, even as he still winced, and limped over to grab his tablet, which he'd left next to the water clocks. "Do you currently have a preference? Whichever you decide, I need to write down exactly what—"

"Yes Rian, I am aware of how you're supposed to properly conduct an experiment," Lori snapped, still annoyed, though not enough to kick him again.

"Right, sorry," Rian said. "I'm just excited. It's been a while since we've done experiments together, and I'll admit, it's a nice change of pace from what I usually do."

Lori frowned. "What is it you do?"

"Keep you from having to talk to other people, tell you how cold or hot is it, feed you during meals, measure how much the demesne has grown, talk to people to follow up on the things you asked me to ask them to make, resolve disputes between people, keep morale up, keep parents from killing horny teenagers who've been euphemisming with their horny teenager—"

"Euphemisming?" Was that actually a word? "Is that actually a word?"

"I'm using 'euphemism' as a verb."

"I have no idea what a verb is." Some kind of… grammar thing?

"Probably not considered very important for wizards," Rian said. He held up his plank and the latest charred stick he used to write. Where did he keep finding those? Lori would have thought that every small twig within walking range of the dungeon would have been picked up for firewood by now. "So, what are the differences between the variables? I assume we're going to be using the past week's results as the control group. Though as time goes on, you're probably going to have to do 'control' expansions every so often to recalibrate for your increasing familiarity with the process."

That… hadn't occurred to her, but then, she'd only been doing this for a little over a week. "Of course, of course. But it's still a bit too early to need to do that."

Rian nodded. "Yes, I suppose… but we're getting off topic. What variable will you be experimenting with?" He frowned. "Actually, what variables have you narrowed down, anyway? I didn't really understand what I was reading."

"Of course not. You're not a wizard."

"That, I am not. But I still need you to explain it to me, otherwise I won't be able to record it properly."

"I don't feel like explaining."

"All right then. So, which one are you planning to test?"

Lori sighed. Still, she looked at the list

Affinity. Alignment. Distribution. Concentration. Iridescence. Wisp preparation. For the moment, she'd narrowed down the variables to those six, mostly because they were the most simple to isolate, even if not all of them could reasonably be tested. Testing if affinity had an effect on demesne expansion, for example would necessitate using wisps from her body, which… well, she doubted that she could extract enough for it to make an appreciable difference.

Alignment was normally a factor in binding wisps for Whisperers, since the magic one drew in needed to be aligned to the kind of wisp one was going to claim and bind before it could do so, but while she had done it as a step in expanding her demesne, she wasn't quite sure if it was actually needed, as such. She'd never needed to align her magic when binding wisps inside her demesne… but on the other hand, she also knew firsthand that trying to claim and bind wisps outside your body without first aligning your magic to the wisps just didn't work. Still, if she could eliminate the need for that stage… well, it would at least make things simpler for her.

Distribution and concentration were two inter-related factors she had identified. Distribution was where the aligned wisps she would use to expand the demesne were positioned, while concentration was how heavily the aligned wisps were… concentrated. While the concentration naturally rose the longer she gathered wisps on the borders of her demesne, it occurred to her to wonder if it would make a difference if she, instead of spreading and claiming evenly from all across the borders of her demesne at once, instead claimed outwards from a singular point. While the demesne would always be spherical in shape, perhaps concentrating her wisps—and her attention—at a single point would make things easier for her?

The Iridescence and whether the wisps being claimed had been prepared ahead of time had occurred to her late as she was trying to think of any more variables that could be tested, when she had ruled out other factors as being too circumstantial, like whether the weather had an effect on the expansion rate. But those two…

When she'd been getting her core ready, she had added a container of Iridescence she'd gathered. After all, it was what she had found in her own independent research, as while the official lessons about it in class had been vague, the information she'd been able to pull together from several different biographies, books on historical Whispering, and older textbooks that had been removed from the syllabus but were still in the library specified a seed amount was necessary. But there was Iridescence everywhere, wasn't there? Her sources couldn't have known they'd been washing the cave they'd been expanding so it could be safely excavated. Yet different sources that she'd read had still specified the inclusion of an amount of Iridescence, even if they didn't all agree on the amount. Shouldn't the text have simply assumed that Iridescence would be present?

And of course, there was preparing the wisps.

Lori hadn't founded her demesne right away. They had spent days preparing the cave, using her Whispering to soften the stone so that it could be more easily removed with the tools they had. At the same time, she had spent that time building a waterbreak around their encampment as a deterrent against beasts, which had involved claiming, binding and regularly imbuing the water she had poured into it. She had also performed other bindings in the area, mostly on earthwisps, as well as hunting beasts for food with narrow cutting streams of waterwisps. While that had clearly had some sort of beneficial effect in defining the area that would later become her demesne, would outward expansion also benefit from a similar effect with similar preparation? Or would the time preparing be better spent in actual expansion?

She didn't know. It would need to be tested.

Isolate each variable. Test what happens if you modify each. Record the results. Apply the acquired data—

"Lori? Lori?"

Lori blinked, looking up from her list. "What?" she snapped.

Rian pointed at the waterclocks. "While those aren't actually running yet, you are kind of running out of time if you still want to expand this afternoon."

Oh. Right.

Lori shook her head, then glared down at her list one last time. Then she raised her hand and, in the fine tradition of all students trying to find the right answer among several options when they didn't actually have any idea which one it was and no preference, closed her eyes and poked her finger down at random. She opened her eyes, and, since she'd landed between two options, picked the one her finger was physically closest to. "Rian, take notes," she said. "I will be testing whether concentration is a factor in the demesne's expansion."

Rian nodded, writing it down. "Understood." There was a pause. "Can you define what you mean by 'concentration'? Are you talking about how hard you concentrate on the task or something else? Because we're going to need a clear definition of terms, otherwise this record is going to be extremely vague and unhelpful to future generations otherwise."

Lori sighed. "Just write it down, Rian."

"Fine, fine. But you're going to have to explain this later!"