They only managed to do basic experiments on the substance inside the beads, since Lori's tools, equipment and instruments were limited. The substance inside the bead felt disconcertingly like Iridescence to the touch, and Lori had to resist the urge to wash her hands to clean of it every time she made contact. Thankfully, unlike the colors, it didn't seem to be crystallizing, and she felt none of the telltale prickling on her skin of crystal growths embedding into her flesh.
The mostly transparent outer shell of the bead, which was about half a yustri thick and felt like glass but didn't produce the same sharp edges, seemed like a completely different substance from the cloudy white insides, but when Rian had suggested dropping some of the shards into water, the shards had also dissolved, resulting in the same cloudy white water. Subsequent tests of more shards had showed that while the bead's shell didn't react to water when applied to its 'outside', when applied from the 'inside' the whole shell dissolved… which made no sense, since that implied the whole thing was made of the same material, and so should be equally reactive to water. Try as they might, they couldn't recover any sort of remains that could have comprised an outer-most water-protective layer.
"It's too early to try and look for explanations," Rian reminded her as she glared at the cloudy white water at the bottom of the small sample bottle. "Let's just note down cause and effect for now."
Lori grunted in acknowledgement. "But it makes no sense!" she immediately said. "How can it be made of the same substance? How does it not react with water from one side, and dissolve instantly from the other?-!"
"Don't obsess over it," Rian said patiently. "Just list it down as a physical property of the substance and move on."
Lori huffed in frustration, and went back to trying to note down the bead's properties.
Once the outer, glass-like shell was broken through, the material inside was very soft. While it didn't exactly crumble at a touch, since the bead was completely solid and without hollows or bubbles, Lori could scratch it with her fingernail. They used a beast tooth as a cutting and scrapping tool, since metal tools would likely cause seepage, and she didn't want to have to keep actively suppressing the wisps around her keeping her warm.
Trying to measure its density was… interesting. Cutting off a substantial amount of the substance, they dropped it into a glass bowl of water to dissolve it so they could try to weight it using some simple scales—really a plank balanced on a narrow block, so they could approximate how much weight in water the sample they dropped in would amount to by slowly adding more water to an equal-sized bowl on the other end—and correlate the amount of water displaced, but when the sample dissolved and rendered the water cloudy white… the water's volume and weight didn't increase.
At all.
The water rose slightly as the sample was added, but once it had been completely dissolved, the water level was the same as before they had added in the sample from the bead. They both stared. Lori started shaking as Rian duly wrote it down on his plank and suggested they heat the water to test the effects of heating and evaporation.
A small metal tripod was taken from Lori's equipment box and assembled, and the glass bowl was exchanged for a carefully made one of earthwisps with all the bubbles removed to prevent cracking and explosion. The stone bowl of cloudy white water was placed on the tripod while Lori made a binding of firewisps beneath it to heat the water indirectly, and thus slowly. They had to move to another alcove so that the water wouldn't accidentally condense and fall on the bead that had been broken open, which Lori also covered with stone just in case.
Then they sealed off the second alcove and watched from around a corner using a binding of lightwisps to reflect light so they could see what was happening to the bowl. Rian duly noted that it slowly started to boil as opposed to exploding, catching fire, or suddenly dissolving the stone bowl. Only when the water had all boiled away—there was no more bubbling—did they feel safe in returning to the alcove. On the bottom of the stone bowl were clumps of cloudy white residue.
Once gathered, and accounting for the altered shape, there appeared to be less of the sample than had been dissolved.
"But that makes no sense!" Lori cried as Rian noted it down.
"Actually, it's the first of its behaviors that make any kind of sense at all," Rian argued. "It's water soluble, and we were able to extract it again by evaporating the water."
"But it added no mass to the water! There should have been nothing to extract via evaporation! Water used to dissolve Iridescence doesn't leave Iridescence behind when it's been evaporated!"
"I know!" Rian said cheerfully. "I wonder if it's possible to dissolve in a volume of white Iridescence greater than the volume of water? Would you suddenly have a big mass of the stuff once all the water evaporated, or would it be concentrated and condensed?"
Lori blinked. "White Iridescence?"
"Well, it's like Iridescence, but it's white. And as far as I know, 'white' is one of the few colors Iridescence doesn't do. Iridescence isn't silver either, but that's understandable, since that's more of a measure of how reflective a metal is…" Rian tilted his head. "Huh. I wonder how many of these properties other kinds of beads share?"
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"We won't be breaking any open until I learn how to make them myself," Lori said sternly.
"I know, I'm just wondering… do you think it would be safe to try the fire test? See what happens if we heat it directly, with no water?"
"Not in an enclosed space," Lori said sternly. Warm and hot Iridescence crystallized at an accelerated rate, growing fast enough to be visible. Burning Iridescence did so energetically, randomly, violently, and tended to spread hot particulates of the colors in the air that could be inhaled, which burned on the way down and cause it to start crystallizing. Lori wasn't sure if that last was something that actually happened or just a scary story, but it was one of those things no one wanted to actually try to find out.
"Of course," Rian nodded absently, covering his nose and mouth with the towel around his neck as he lifted up the glass bowl the residue had been transferred to for a closer look. He frowned and moved the bowl away from his face. "Huh… could you shine a light on this, I can't make out details very well."
Lori split an annoyed look between her lord and the glass bowl he was holding, but raised up a finger, binding and anchoring lightwisps to the end of it as she made it glow with visible light, holding it up behind Rian's line of sight.
"Thank you," he said absently, frowning intently at the clumps on the bowl. "Is it just me, or are the ones in the bowl a different shape than the ones we took straight from the bead?"
They left the second alcove, and went back to the alcove with the bead. Lori pulled back the stone cover, then pried up a small chunk of the… white Iridescence… from inside the bead, before placing the new sample into another glass bowl. Even to the naked eye, there was some difference...
"These," Lori mused, pointing towards the samples that had been evaporated from water, "all seemed to be have formed natural right angles." Perfect right angles, at that, or at least as far as she could see. Each clump looked like several cubes fused together by their faces.
"And these seemed to naturally curve," Rian said in the same tone as he regarded the fresher sample. "See the underside, where you pried it up? It's curved there, like it's following the spherical shape of the bead. And look here… doesn't that look like separate layers?" He had to use the tip of the beast tooth to point.
They looked between the two samples, as if doing that would somehow reveal their secrets, even as Rian made another note on his plank. From the intent look he was giving the bowls and the movements of his hand, he seemed to be trying to sketch the two samples. Lori wished him luck.
Lori also replicated her initial accident in deliberately controlled conditions. Mixing a little bit of the white Iridescence into water and then claiming and binding that water led to the binding being imbued and the water becoming clear. However, dissolving white Iridescence into water in a stone bowl, and then claiming and binding the bowl again while it still held the water and white Iridescence solution did not cause the earthwisps to be imbued. Attempts to replicate similar results with other kinds of wisps, except for firewisps, also lead to a lack of reaction with the water.
"So does it react because it's the water you're claiming, then?" Rian mused. "Would the other kinds of wisps react if the white Iriescence were properly dissolved into the corresponding substance?"
"How would one even go about doing that?" Lori asked.
She had meant it to be rhetorical, but Rian had gotten a thoughtful look on his face. "Turn stone molten and then add it in?" he suggested. "Liquefy air and then add the white Iridescence? I'll admit, I can't think of how you'd do it for the others. "
"Just because there wasn't some sort of energetic reaction to being boiled doesn't mean the same will hold true for being exposed to temperature that would lead to molten stone," she pointed out.
"Something to carefully plan for before trying then," Rian said brightly.
Lori glared at her lord, but she couldn't really rebuke him. She'd been thinking the same thing.
However, there was something else all these experiments of trying to draw the… she supposed there was no other word to use but imbuement… from the water showed her.
Her wisps could anchor to white Iridescence. That… was bizarre, but almost, almost understandable. Usually, wisps would anchor to two things: other wisps and the substance they corresponded with. Thus, waterwisps could only anchor to water, firewisps to heat, airwisps to air, and so on, or they could anchor to other wisps, in which case waterwisps could anchor to earthwisps. This was why she needed to use certain substances when intending to anchor bindings. She couldn't anchor waterwisps or earthwisps to wood, for example. At least, not if the wood was dry. While wood could get wet and absorb moisture, the moisture could evaporate or seep out, or the water being anchored to could move unless she made it part of the binding, and then she would have to make it an exception to the binding she was making…
But her wisps could anchor to white Iridescence. Any wisp could do so… despite white Iridescence not being made of water, air, light, darkness, lightning or heat, and it was very doubtful whether it could be considered earth, stone or mineral. Yet they anchored. Almost, she felt she could explain it. After all, beads were formed by using a binding of wisps to claim Iridescence, and having that binding be amalgamated into the colors. So, technically, white Iridescence was also composed of wisps, and wisps could anchor to wisps…
Except for the fact that the white Iridescence was a void in her senses. If her awareness was to be believed, the substance had no wisps of any sort whatsoever… even the ones that had been heated to boiling point to evaporate the water it had been dissolved into, which should have at least made it full of firewisps. But there was nothing, as if the white Iridescence were a living creature, or glass.
And yet, her wisps could anchor to it!
AND IT MADE NO SENSE!
"Do I include that last exclamation in the notes, or was that just for your own benefit?" Rian asked as he duly wrote down her findings.
"Don't include them," Lori said irritably.
"For your own benefit, got it," Rian nodded. "What next?"
Outside what had once been an alcove and was now an isolated room with only one entrance, there came a cough. "Rian? Your Bindership?" Umu's voice called. "It's, um, time for lunch. The food is already waiting at the table."
"Now," Lori said. "We stop and eat lunch. And then I go to my room and expand the demesne."