Today I spent my time much the same as I did yesterday, only I ended up spending more time with Tiddol. Of course, this was mostly because I had asked her to help me with my current problem, I figure someone that makes tools might be better at figuring out how to keep my puppets from dying than me.

After telling her what I think I have figured out she creates a couple potions and we test them on my puppets one at a time. The first one actually made the problem worse, making the puppet light and agile, at least as agile as my own skill allows, does allow it to do more in a short period of time, but it also caused it to almost immediately burst into flames upon contact with the sands.

The second one did help a bit. Fire resistance slowed down the burning a small bit, but nowhere near enough to be considered viable. Didn’t even reach a second with this one.

The third one, stone skin, was a significant improvement. It allowed the puppet to last nearly one and a half seconds, at the cost of being too slow to actually get anything done. I have no doubt that someone really skilled at piloting puppets would be able to pull it off with that, but I am not a master and I don’t use puppets often enough for it to be worth the effort. So not impossible, but very impractical.

Still, this is the best improvement we have had yet and gave me some ideas about where to go from there.

My next puppet used a lot of Digger Root and Mithrilwood to make it have similar qualities to what is achieved by the stone skin potion. That one lasted only slightly longer than a second but was easier for me to control, not a lot faster though.

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We spent the entire rest of the day experimenting and ultimately came to the conclusion that it has something to do with weight and mana density. Mana density is easy enough, just turn the whole thing into a massive battery, but mana density on its own isn’t going to be enough, at least I don’t think it is. Weight is harder, the heavier it is the harder it is to actually control, which could be disastrous, and different methods of making it heavier have different effects. Like putting a massive weight on its back does absolutely nothing, while making everything bulkier does help quite a bit with survival time but is possibly the worst offender in regards to control.

I would have eventually figured all of this out on my own, but that could have taken days or even weeks. With Tiddol’s help I managed to figure it out in a day.

In the end, I managed to reach four seconds of survival time with the biggest bulkiest puppets, enough time to actually safely collect a tiny sample. Of course, I can’t control a puppet that large for such a delicate task effectively. And I can’t add a smaller, much easier to control, limb onto the puppet because it would just burn away.

I got two and a half seconds on a puppet that I would be comfortable controlling with a delicate task, which is more than enough time if I want to be reckless. But I really don’t want to be reckless. At this point, I think it will just come down to standard brute force refinement, which is easy. I give it two days tops before I get a puppet good enough to get me a small sample of the sand to test.

Actually storing the thing shouldn’t be hard, I’ll just build a room with incredibly thick walls and extremely high mana density. I’ll build it close to the desert too, so I don’t risk it damaging anything.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Tiddol again. We ended up getting ice cream and watching a play, so very similar to what I did with Azrezel the other day just a lot less touchy-feely. Though to be fair I think it would be a lot weirder if Tiddol started grabbing at me than if Azrezel did.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.