In front of me sat the experiment of a madman.

There was, for some reason, the top half of a giant glass orb in the center of the lawn behind Anise's apartment. Felix had covered it with multiple layers of blankets, which he had glued to the glass. Then, Felix had cut small holes in the sides of the blankets, and attached small lamps to those holes.

The top half of the glass orb was held above the ground by a pair of table legs. The top half of the table was made of glass, and in the center of the table was a piece of paper. It was glowing.

I blinked in confusion, and then looked at Felix.

“Felix...” I said, drawing out my words for extra dramatic effect. “I can't heal insanity. I'm sorry.”

Felix rolled his eyes, unamused by my teasing.

“There’s a reason for all of this setup,” he said. “As ridiculous as it looks, it does make sense. I promise. I needed a way to recreate the 'night sky.' The real night sky is too far away from us, so it wasn't working very well. This is somehow the best way to make a copy of the 'night sky' without running into range issues.”

“So you covered half of a glass orb with a blanket and glued a bunch of lamps to it? I don’t think that’s quite what the night sky looks like,” I said.

“I have limited materials,” he said dryly. “Besides, if it’s ridiculous but it works, it’s not ridiculous, right?”

I gave up on teasing Felix, and glanced at the real night sky. The stars were just beginning to appear as the sun set beyond the horizon. I took another look at Felix’s ridiculous setup, and then crawled underneath the glass table.

I could see what Felix was going for. The blanket made it dark underneath the glass orb, and so all of the lamps… kind of resembled stars. I could also see that Felix had added very subtle splotches of paint onto the underside of the glass. He had used some kind of transparent paint. It barely colored the light coming from the lamps, and didn't obstruct the light, either. I had no idea what it was for.

I gave Felix and Anise another dubious look.

“Does it work for your spell creation needs?” I asked Anise.

She grinned and nodded.

“It’s a lot slower than absorbing real starlight, but I should be able to work on creating spells 24/7 now,” she said. She waved her hand, and the top half of a glass orb lifted up. A moment later, the piece of paper flew through the air towards her, as if picked up by an invisible hand.

She closed her eyes, and I saw some of the starlight from the paper disappear, as if Anise had eaten it.

"See? It works!" she said happily. "It's a lot slower, though," she admitted a moment later. I smiled at the sight of Anise using magic so readily.

It had taken Anise quite some time to get her first spell constellation built, but Anise had been hard at work over the past three years. She had constructed two spell constellations. One spell constellation for Mage Hand, one for Force Shield. Her Market items still gave her access to Magic Missile. In total, Anise now had three spells. She didn't have the insane reaction times my spatial sight granted, so she wouldn’t be able to stop a bullet in midair. But if she was paying attention, she could create a force shield before the shooter pulled the trigger. After some crude testing, we were pretty sure that Anise’s force shield would stop a bullet before running out of energy. And she looked so happy when she was casting spells that it almost pushed the absurd setup out of my mind.

Almost.

“So it’s slower than real starlight?” I asked, glancing at the glowing piece of paper. “Also, what’s up with the little splotches of paint in the glass orb? Do they serve a purpose?”

“Ah," said Felix. "I haven't tested this apparatus without them, so they might not be needed. But they're supposed to emulate the various kinds of star in the night sky,” said Felix. “Astronomers have found that there are a lot of different kinds of star. Blue wanderers and green giants are actually the most common. Our sun is an orange stationary star, which is one of the rarer types.” He shrugged. “I figured that it would help with the idea of ‘starlight’ if there was some variance to the ‘stars’ in the night sky I made. I copied the positions and star types of real stars with my glass orb, too. I think it was a little easier to affix the idea of 'starlight' after I added the paint. But it wasn't a big difference.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I glanced at the glass orb again. It still looked absurd... but it was also the fruit of my friend's labor. I grinned, and then gave Felix and Anise both big hugs.

“Congratulations! Even if it’s not perfect yet, I’m still happy that the two of you succeeded!”

Anise grinned.

“It did work, but it’s not perfect," she said. "Right now, it’s about 1/6th of the efficiency of absorbing real starlight. It’ll still help me make more spell constellations… but we were hoping for better. That’s why we called you over here.” She gestured, and the piece of glowing paper flew over to me again. “We’ve already noticed that the starlight coming from the paper isn’t quite right. Now that we’ve actually created a working prototype, we're hoping you can perfect it.”

“I would have been happy to help earlier,” I said.

“You already have a lot on your plate, Mir. And honestly, the first year or so of trying to make this was just me trying and failing to make glowing paper. You wouldn’t have had much to do except stand around and watch me fail,” he said. "It took me way longer than it should have to realize that light isn't what Anise needs. Otherwise, she could just turn on a lamp and call it a day," he said, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly. "It seems obvious, but sometimes obvious insights escape the best of us."

“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do you want my help with now? How can I perfect the process?”

“Well, how much of the explanation about affixation did you understand from class?” asked Felix.

I winced.

“Umm… not that much, honestly.” Binding essence and I did not get along well. Some parts of alchemy were just hard to understand without doing them myself. And I was awful at alchemy. The theory behind affixation was a lot more feelings-based than the theory behind transmutation. And since I couldn't transmute anything, I had been lost when the teacher went over affixation.

“That’s all right,” said Felix, smiling. “I’ll use a really simplified analogy so that you can follow along. So, as you already know, binding essence binds stuff together. These bonds can be between two physical objects, or they can bind concepts and physical matter together. Affixation is all about binding objects and ideas together. What we did here was bind the ‘physical’ components of light and the ‘idea’ of starlight together to the paper. I figure that’s what Anise’s magic system is working off of - the physical aspect of light, mixed with the idea of stars. That's probably why Anise can’t use sunlight for spell constellations." Felix paused. "Well, or her magic system just hates red stationary stars. That's also a possibility. But I think the 'idea incompatibility' makes more sense, so we're going with that for now.”

I nodded. So far, I was following along. I had always found it strange that Anise couldn’t use sunlight to make more spell constellations. Felix’s explanation cleared up my doubts nicely.

“So I studied a lot of library books talking about what light was, at a granular level, and then started trying to figure out how to make paper emit light. This was a dead end, as I already mentioned, but it was good practice for what came later. Once it turned out to be useless, I started incorporating the ‘idea’ of stars into the next prototypes. And that’s why we now have this ridiculous getup. I don't mind saying that it took me forever to make glowing paper that was imbued with the idea of starlight. Affixation is hard. But the prototype worked! The issue is... well, as you mentioned, my setup is ridiculous. I can't use the real night sky, because it's too far away. But my knockoff night sky is terrible. That's where you come in,” said Felix.

I was starting to get a better idea of why the too had called me over.

"We have a few ideas how you might help. First of all, you could try altering the idea of starlight imprinted into the paper after I finish. If you can just tweak the 'idea' of starlight contained in the paper, that might solve the speed issue Anise is running into."

I frowned. The idea made sense, but I was worried about destroying the paper by accident. Alteration essence was excellent for brute-forcing changes to a magic system, but trying to gently alter the paper might break it.

“I don’t know if the paper will survive my tampering,” I said.

Felix nodded, as if that was within his expectations.

“That’s kind of what I figured, too. Alteration essence seems to have a harder time with physical objects. That’s why I figure our second testing method actually has the best chance to work. As we set up the giant starlight array, I want you to mess with the ‘idea’ of starlight before it gets absorbed by the paper. My getup is only a flimsy recreation of the night sky. If you tweak it with alteration essence before I bind it to the paper, we might get much better results," he said.

I nodded. That sounded a lot more likely to work. I would be a lot less worried about breaking the paper as well.

“The third idea I had was to get you to recreate the night sky using an illusion,” said Felix. “And then I would try to bind that to the paper. This method would also sidestep this ridiculous night-sky recreation. That might produce the best results, but I'm not sure if it'll work or not.” He paused. “I wanted to try all three methods and see what worked and what didn’t.”

“So… that means a lot of testing?” I asked.

Felix grinned. “A lot of testing,” he agreed.