“Another failure, and another lesson.”

“Technically, the stone glass didn’t explode!”

“Technically.” I grinned at the utter ruination that had once been an experiment. “I didn’t know that when it breaks energetically it basically turns into sand.”

“I think it’s ‘cause of the annealing.”

We stood in companionable silence, my right arm draped over her shoulders, her left arm around my waist. We’d doffed the goggles and gloves, but kept the rest on, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

“I think the closer we get,” Kelly said eventually, “the more it’s going to explode if something goes wrong. We didn’t even scratch the enclosure, though.”

I thought about that for a moment, then shook my head. “I think this is about as energetic as it’s likely to get,” I said. “Total mutual annihilation of every last thaum of energy in a split-second once it destabilized; the chain reaction propagated fast.”

“At the speed of spellcraft,” Kelly agreed. “I bet the slowest part was the fact that the magic had to actually touch the mist! But… it felt like something else happened. I just couldn’t tell what. Just something.”

“What is the speed of spellcraft, anyway?”

“Something like thirteen miles in a minute if it’s air, but it depends on a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and don’t you make shifty eyes at me! What did I miss?”

I smiled, but it faded fast. “It's a tangent and not relevant. For what happened... I have a hypothesis, but first, Spark?”

Divine interference. Spark didn’t have so much a voice as a way of just… making you have a thought and then tagging it as having come externally, which Kelly was still very much not used to. Insufficient resolution to identify individuals.

“But what did it do?” Kelly paused, hesitation audible in her voice for a long moment before she sighed and sat down at her desk. “Go ahead and pull what you need to.”

I heard the echo of a set of chimes, Spark reaching through the pact that bound me to Kelly and Kelly to me and making use of something. At the same time, I felt a hit of coldness and exhaustion, one that reminded me of when I used to give blood—unusual for Spark to have to draw from both of us, but these were unusual moments.

The imbued orbs shifted out of reality and into liminality between the onset of the decoherence and when the propagation reached the orbs. This was the order. Insufficient resolution to identify elapsed time. All orbs shifted before any unexpected interactions. All orbs returned to reality simultaneously, immediately after decoherence completed.

“The divine orbs, the fire orb, and the aluminum orb, all at the same time,” I said. “Then each of the other orbs in succession, but one at a time. That’s obvious enough. Kelly, what do you think?”

“Um.” She grabbed a different notebook, flipping through it. “I mean, Spark said it was divine interference, so… the Gods saved our butts?”

“Yeah.” The extent of the energy output was starting to hit me, so I sat down, head in my hands. “Well, no. The pure elemental essences in the orbs isn’t volatile, it needs to imbue a substrate in order to do anything. And the orbs are generous; the gasses were saturated. But it might have broken the orbs, and that would have sucked.”

“So—”

“Hey Kelly,” I said quietly, cutting her off, “this is known art, right? I didn’t just accidentally discover a new way of doing magical explosives?”

“[Local Reference].” Her eyes closed momentarily as she invoked the skill, still sitting. She’d gotten it upgraded somehow during our work, which was convenient, and the answers were usually— “Known art,” Kelly said firmly. “Considered impractical, there’s a whole volume of reasons why it’s impractical, apparently, but we don’t have it here.”

“A whole volume?”

Kelly’s eyes tracked upwards as she blinked a couple of times, the Shemmai version of rolling your eyes. “Small volume,” she said. “Lower end of small, closer to a hundred pages than three hundred. Who knows why; the whole point of the separate volume is to be able to offload the information.”

“Okay. Great.” I straightened, letting my worries drain out of me. “I don’t actually want to innovate in weapons,” I explained, probably unnecessarily. “Whatever someone makes in new weapons is going to wind up being used against people, not just monsters, you know?”

“Unless they’re better against monsters than what came before, and worse against people, sure.” Kelly stood up and slid open the range hood, then paused. “Oh, I guess if it’s new, someone could apply it as a principle.”

“So I’m glad this isn’t new.”

“So, what now?”

I flipped open my notebook, writing down the results of the experiment as best I could while Kelly cleaned up the tiny marble-like pieces of glass. “I’m thinking. We’ve got four problems, right? One, the dead stone exploded. Two, the cycles formed, but the gasses diffused and started interacting with each other. Three, the interference patterns were chaotic. Four, probably because of three, there weren’t coherent constructive and destructive zones.”

“How can you even tell all of that?”

I tilted my head to the side, staring down at the notebook. Why was I so confident about that? Now that I thought about it, the certainty of the observations didn’t feel… ah. “Spark,” I said, “are you feeding me this?”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

In order to draw conclusions from observation, one must be able to observe.

“And I can’t see the mana. Okay, but I feel like I can still—”

You are not a technician. Spark’s mental voice was prim, and a kind of not-annoyed where you had to specify that you weren’t annoyed. Let labor be divided, and trust.

I glanced over at Kelly, only to see her smirking at me as she cleaned up the prior experiment. “Smart-asses the lot of you,” I said, grinning. “Fine, I have a lab assistant and a technical analyst, I guess I can cope with that.”

Kelly’s head tilted, a piece of body language she’d started using to indicate she was talking to Spark, instead of to me. “Why not just say it yourself? Instead of going through Sophie.”

In order to draw conclusions from observation, one must have the expertise to make the deductions.

“Right. So you, what, subconsciously feed me the observations and lean on my Skills to help me make the jumps?” I shook my head. “Fine, okay, this is fine. Great, actually, very convenient, how long have you been doing this? Don’t answer that,” I said hastily.

“If the mists diffused,” Kelly began slowly, and I looked over at her. “Could we use tubing instead of a central chamber? We had the chamber in the first place because we thought the greedstone would eat the cycles as an abstract and wind up with a… meta-stable cycle?”

“But what actually happened was that the greedstone ate mana independently, and we never got stable cycles. And now we have stable cycles again…” I trailed off, tapping my pencil against the notebook, and then started writing again. “This isn’t science, you know. We’re not falsifying anything, this is engineering.” I glanced up, grinning. “Which was always my jam, to be clear.”

“And?”

“And once we’ve got what we’re making, we should probably go back and document the hypotheses and assumptions we’ve made and try to falsify them! But for now, we’re making the thing.”

I heard Kelly take in a breath, and then nothing. Glancing up, I raised my eyebrows at her and made a head-bobbing get on with it gesture.

“What,” Kelly said, “are we making, exactly?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. What are we making? “Well,” I said slowly, “I guess a stable elemental imbuement that’s more than one element? I started out trying to do that with streams of water, right? I just… felt like we should be able to do that. And that it would be useful. I still feel that way, for the record.”

“Mama used to tell me something, when I got lost in a problem.” Kelly’s voice hitched, and I pretended not to notice. “She’d say, start over with why you’re making something and what you’re trying to make, and why it doesn’t work. And I think we’re lost in the problem. What we’re doing now isn’t anything like what we started with.”

“So take a step back and refocus. Okay.” I put down the pencil, leaning back in my chair. “I wanted to make a liquid that contained a—no, farther back. I wanted…” I closed my eyes, casting back with my memory. What did I want? “I wanted something that stored, and generously dispensed, a neutral elemental imbuement. But then I realized that what I was actually working towards was something that stored a stable meta-cyclic elemental imbuement that at all times averaged out to neutral, which is way more interesting, so I switched gears.

“As for why I’m trying to make it? Well, I mean, it’s interesting, I’m learning things, and I’m having fun. That would be enough reason in its own right. Right?” Kelly nodded, smirking—probably because she knew full well that wasn’t the only reason. “So, there’s this thing I noticed, which is that all of the notionally-stable cycles emit… well, if you have an elliptical cyclic flow of elemental energies, its emissions are perpendicular to its plane and split across the foci. Right?”

“And when we managed to make it a circle, it was all coming from just the one place.”

I nodded at Kelly. “Right,” I said, and my feet hit the floor as I surged upright. “So, a lunar-solar cycle emits a bunch of stuff, but if you make it star-sun-moon-planet-void—which, kinda bullshit, moonlight is just sunlight and the sun is just a star—you get creation energy and destruction energy. And every cycle has this sort of thematically-opposite thing going on.

“But what if you had a bunch of cycles?” I paced slowly across the room, hands tangling themselves in my hair. “Every time we added a cycle, it constrained things. The space cycle plus an elemental cycle emits a way narrower band of energies than either alone. Mostly mystical stuff, so we added the rock cycle, and now it’s all abstracts, so we add the two divine ones, and the math says it should balance.”

“The math.” Kelly dusted her hands off at the greedy trash hose, the one that would suck all the dust and oils off of you. “The math says it should balance.”

“Oh, come off it, it’s not that complicated as math goes. Good call on using that for cleanup, by the way, we don’t want glass dust in the air.” She gave me a flat look, and I snickered. “Look, I’ll teach you calculus, fine. But just take my word for it for now: Spark and I can mathematically model the n-dimensional matrix of influences and their propagation patterns to see where the cycles should go physically and what they need to represent metaphysically.”

“And then what?”

I had paced my way over to the now-cleaned-up safety hood. Reaching out, I grouped the orbs into their cycles, smiling as I did. “And then we have a stable system. What’ll happen to whatever’s storing the mana in the middle? Is it going to be aspectless, because the output magnitude undergoes constructive interference while the elements undergo destructive interference? Or will it have all of the aspects contained?”

“So…”

“Kelly,” I said, setting the orbs carefully to the side, “what’ll happen if you apply an elemental aluminum draw to a mana-store that’s a dynamic, chaotic mess of counter-balancing aspects?”

She looked at me warily, which, okay, fair and probably wise. “I don’t know. I could look it up, but you don’t want me to!”

I frowned, glancing over. Maybe less wary, I thought to myself, and more tired of this, and wanting to go on with something more… concretely productive? “I’m hoping,” I said firmly, “that the answer is you get a cross-conversion of all of the other elements into elemental aluminum, which I’m still not over being a thing. And also! Mana, essence, elemental this or that, we need to figure out the terminology for—”

“Sophie. Focus.”

“Right.” I walked over to my notes and started sketching. “You get a multi-element battery. Actually, you get an omni-element battery across all dimensions that it’s stable in the context of, which… might not be everything? I mean, I haven’t tried elemental song or—”

“Sophie. A multi-element battery. That sounds good! That sounds useful! That’s all you had to say.” She leaned against the other side of my desk—when did she walk over?—and hummed thoughtfully. “You like the tubing idea?”

“I like it a lot. But we’ll need another set of valves, see? These ones will automatically close when the pressure equalizes, so that we don’t get any backblow.”

The propagation does not require a mingling of physical substrate, Spark pointed out. Even if the infused gasses continue to flow only in one direction, the elements will propagate up and interact acyclically with the emitters, in the worst case.

“Then maybe we drop and seal the orbs?”

“Well…”

Grinning, shooting down our own ideas as often as we did each other’s, we threw ourselves into planning experiment eleven.