It was Thirteenth of Two, High Striving, 236 CR—whatever that meant; I’d written it all down, and I knew some of it due to the translation, but I hadn’t really internalized it yet. Life, somewhat shockingly, was good. For probably the first time in my adult life, I, Sophie Nadash, had just spent an entire week being deeply and contentedly happy, and I was definitely dwelling on it as I reviewed my notes for this particular ongoing experiment.

Liquid continually infused with lunar essence maintains a concentration of that essence, as does solar essence and elemental essences. A chain of elemental essences is elementally stable but sheds mystical energies. Hypothesis: a notional “sphere” of opposed and cyclical essences could create a neutral Elemental Imbuement. This is, as I am told, known art; but I’m giving myself a bit to experiment with it.

I had, by the time a week had gone by, met every resident of Kibosh and all the Delvers who worked out of the village, along with most of the couriers, merchants, haulers, and other itinerants. Some of them were noisome, some delightful; each was so very themselves. And so, I supposed, was I.

Experiment number two: having acquired the tools I need and established a control, I used precise amounts of elemental energy, solar energy, lunar energy, creation energy, and destruction energy in an infusion of a proof-gem designed for the purpose. Spillage rate dropped by an order of magnitude. I need more measuring devices.

Jannea had finished painting our rooms and left; Tayir had finished making the ramp look like a ramp, instead of the break-your-necks design of making it look like stairs. She’d gotten two Feats out of it and delivered me a slender, dense book of non-verbal communication dynamics in Kibosh before leaving, and he’d gotten the chance to step into her shoes and run his own business.

Experiment number five: the apparatus can’t directly accept more kinds of energies. Instead, I’m going to continuously infuse a set of very thin streams of water with what I’m calling “flat” cycles, and have them onto a greedstone. Those are basically batteries, storing magical energy. Spark wants to help, and I’m letting it, but only with the implementation details; the overall research work is all me, though I’d let Kelly help if she wanted to. Diagrams are…

I’d stopped needing to eat five two-person meals a day, and stopped having… gastrointestinal distress, as it were. I was still eating four meals on any day where I gained a level, but I hadn’t gained that many; I’d gone through most of the Basic Set in order to learn the tools and techniques, done one patent validation to learn the basics of the elementalism framework, and then got bitten by the science bug. With inadequate attention to detail, I noted to myself dourly, and added correcting the description for the fifth experiment to my to-do list for the afternoon.

Experiment number seven: infusions aren’t propagating properly in water, but they do in vapors, as Kelly observed (good eye). Since we want to avoid the liquid state, we’ll use dry ice from now on; that’s a thing here, and at these temperatures it’ll be fully gaseous. We need to establish a baseline pressure for the gas that, when we open the central stopcock, propagates the infusion fast enough that the gas is fully infused once it hits the greedstone. To measure that…

All of the Basic Set work that I’d done had netted me only two levels. The potions were all pretty meager in terms of experience rewards, presumably on account of the fact that they were such settled art that literally a kid could make them; still, the point had been to progress in skill, not power, and I picked up Functional Diagramming along the way. I’d never been anything like an artist, but working with other people in chemistry means you should—mind you, most didn’t—learn how to draw out an apparatus or a sketch of a molecule, because yes, the stereoisomers might have different behaviors, Doctor Schludrig.

Experiment nine: by adding angled nozzles to the central chamber intakes in the apparatus, the pressurized streams of gas now momentarily form a set of stable (!!) cyclic discs. It is eerily similar to the Four God Circle, as people are calling it. This was energetically disrupted by the greedstone about three quarters of a second after forming. In our next experiment, we will…

I’d eaten a tremendous variety of delicious stews. That was maybe unfair of me to the refectories, but also it wasn’t even a complaint; they really were amazing. I also ate a pretty wide variety of tiny salatas, as Ketka told me they were called, which we ate by tearing off bits of flatbread and grabbing the contents of the little plates with the bread between our fingers. She’d started teaching me how to negotiate in the Yaro style, all subtle insinuations and insults and wildly exaggerated problems and complaints and imagined insults.

Experiment ten: by removing the greedstone, and replacing it with…

“Kelly, cross-check. Purpose, method, and key observations.”

“We’re testing to validate something we saw last experiment, where we got the cycle-rings made out of steam.” She smirked at my glower, but informal as she was, she’d pointed out to me that her paraphrasing meant she understood, as opposed to just being able to recite it back at me. “We’re going to run the exact same experiment as last time, only with a dead stone.

“Key observations, um. If we don’t get the rings again, that’s one. If we do, and they explode—and okay, I’m never arguing with you about safety again, at least for the next week—then that’s another. If we get stable rings, or the rings last long enough to interfere with each other, that’s the third.”

I folded my hands behind my back, stretching and looking up from the notebook. “Gimme the fourth.”

“The fourth? There were only three obser—oh, fine.” This time, it was her glowering at me and me smirking back. “I was wondering if the pull of the greedstone wasn’t part of why they formed the ring in the first place, pulling them into an… into a circling?”

“An orbit, yeah.” Kelly nodded, and I nodded at her. “That’s good. We might also see the imbuements have some effect on the dead stone, who knows. And when the gasses start interacting, we don’t know if it’ll propagate back, and if it does, what’ll happen when the propagation gets to where we’re bringing in the infusion.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Kelly’s pencil went skritch across the page for a while. I took the opportunity to do some hand exercises and stretch my shoulder; I’d gotten some cypress and laurelwood two days after filing a purchase order, but learning how to cut those down for arrow shafts was an adventure, and the hand cramps were unpleasant.

Learning to properly draw a bow was another whole new world of soreness and practice, for that matter. Ketka had said that it was a slow process and that I was doing fine, but she’d also said that while adjusting… a lot of me. Feet, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, and hands, all with plausible deniability, but she’d also let a hand linger on my waist while she asked me if I was comfortable with her manner of instruction.

It certainly had me paying attention to where and how she arranged my body, along with looking forward to our next lesson in Yarovi social dynamics.

Five-element cycle of the abstract classics first, I thought to myself. I tapped each of the tiny spheres with the measuring stick, and noted that one of them only lit up the little light strip at the bottom of the stick halfway. Quintessence, or æther; I made a note, and separately noted that fire, earth, water, and air were all over half, along with a best guess as to how much they’d each run down. I repeated that for the five pieces of glass that stored the elements of the Beyond—void, star, sun, moon, and planets—and the four elements that formed the cycle of rock—potassium, silicon, oxygen, and aluminum.

I scowled at the last of those. I had absolutely no idea how Hitz was storing aluminum essence or mana in a piece of glass, but aluminum was down to just under half capacity. All of the others I could charge myself, and I had plans to do exactly that, but while I could charge the quintessence orb just by using an enchantment to magically suspend it in as perfect a vacuum as I could manage, I’d have to ask Hitz to recharge the rock cycle.

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t afford it. It just grated.

The last two sets of abstract elements, I didn’t need to measure, but I did anyway. They were a minor miracle, in the most literal of ways; I’d sat in an unadorned circle I’d drawn, connected up with Spark, and let myself become a quiet call into a liminal space I couldn’t come close to seeing. And I’d formed a message, and bound it into that quiet call, and waited patiently.

I’m looking for cycles of elements, I’d asked. If any sets of these glass spheres were to become self-filling vessels of imbuements that formed stable cycles, and they came well-attributed and with adequate descriptions, I would publicly credit anyone who provided such in any publication or patent using them. A quarter-share of any patent revenue I get, once my costs are recouped, will go as designated by anyone who materially assists me in the relevant research, without regard for the extent of the assistance, so long as it’s assistance I ask for in this manner.

There’d been laughter, ranging from riotous to infuriated, from a thousand different echoing voices. Some of them had been at an unimaginable distance, and some right at hand; and I’d recognized in them all of the voices I’d been hearing in my dreams. But almost all of them had been silenced within moments, and a sort of secondary chorus of voices had come.

The Tricksters had left me with what I was calling the Pranks Cycle, which was… ludicrous, and somewhat infuriating in the fact that it worked as a stable cycle of abstract pseudo-elements. The second set of voices was a set of Yelemi Risen, mortals who had become Gods of Yelem and joined the Thousand, and they gave me a set of vividly colored marbles. Their hues and patterns represented the Cycle of Nations: Connection, Striving, Rejoicing, Decay, Desolation, New Growth, and then back to Connection.

The speckled glass orbs of the Pranks Cycle, each seeming like they were about to either fly out of your hand or rip your flesh apart but never doing either of them, denoted their phase of the cycle with imagery that remained upright regardless of rotation. Slapstick led to Vicious, and in turn to Subversive, Whimsical, Educational, Artistic, and Technical.

They were marked with emoji, because of course they were.

I’d have been planning deicide if it weren’t so absolutely apropos and well-executed. Besides, Kelly laughed her ass off about it, and that was pretty redeeming.

“Power levels are adequate for this morning,” I said out loud as soon as Kelly’s pencil stopped moving. “We need to make sure we recharge the quintessence sphere. Aluminum is down under half, so that goes on the Hitz list. Everything else is over half.”

“Aluminum and quintessence under half, the rest over,” she repeated dutifully, and then stepped up next to me to look at the apparatus. “We ran the seal check already this morning, water levels are right, and I don’t see any cracks or fractures in the glass. Are we waiting on anything else?”

I translated that in my head as half is this a test and half I’m impatient, get on with it. “Not really, I was just lost in thought. Let’s get the spheres in place.”

“Yes!” Kelly spun her hands in opposite directions from raised to lowered, then flicked them up again—excitement and readiness to get started, if I remembered Jannea’s notes correctly. Grinning, she slid the little marbles into the tubes where the gasses would pass, using a long little brush to put adhesive on them and socketing them into depressions etched into the glass. “Okay. Delicate work done.”

“Checklist says?”

“Checklist says… protective equipment, vacuum, burners, close up the hood.”

“Just the protection and vacuum, then we check again. Always stop to check before you start the fire.” I grinned at her to take the sting out, and she grinned back, effervescently cheerful. “No volatiles, but we’re worried about which three things?”

“Shrapnel if the glass fails and the hood does too. Magical cook-off, boiling mist. So… goggles ‘cause eyes are vulnerable, coats, gloves, and a greedstone on the forehead.”

Gas, not mist, I thought to myself, and made a note to discuss the difference between those two and vapor at some point. I slid my goggles down over my eyes, adjusted the headband, and slid my hands into the gloves. Kelly managed the same, faster than I did; I checked her over, finding—as always—nothing amiss, and she adjusted my headband and coat to fix some flaw or another.

“Burners,” I said, looking at the rig and working the hand pump. “Hood. Wait for the pressure to hit ten on the gauge. Begin recording, burners off, pull the central stopcock, step back, observe. Cross-check?”

“Yep!” I turned to give her a narrowed-eye stare, and she giggled delightfully. “Burners, hood, pressure to ten, record, kill the flames, pull out the stopper, you step back, we watch,” she said after a moment, tapping on the pad of paper with a finger.

The pump handle stopped working, and I took a deep breath, centering myself. Hephaestus, I composed, may your fires here create wonders. Hermes Trismegistus, may the act of creation be as a prayer to you.

I took the breath that past me had—no, I thought to myself, still silly. I breathed out, smirking at nobody in particular. Alright, Spark, your turn. Did we fuck anything up you want to chime in on? I waited a few beats, then nodded to Kelly. “Turn on the heat and let’s see if the stoneglass explodes this time, instead of just cracking.”

She grinned from ear to ear, Spark murmured in my mind about Skill activations, and the excitation part of the experiment began.