Alchemical magic turned out to be pretty unimpressive if you didn’t have the ability to see mana. Kelly’s reaction, on the other hand, was going in my file of treasured memories forever.
Still, as her stunned wonder gave way to intense focus, my attention waned. Spark could feed me a vague sense that there was something going on, something rotational and stable, but that… well, it wasn’t anywhere close to gripping. So out came my notebook, and back to sketching and writing I went.
There were a lot of possibilities, once I had a pure mana infusion. Even before that, though, there were improvements to this specific experimental apparatus that I could make. They almost certainly wouldn’t turn out to be relevant moving forwards, since I’d promised Kelly that once we got this working we’d look up the modern methods, methods honed by generations of Scholars and craftspeople, but that didn’t matter.
No matter how much better other peoples’ syntheses were, I had improvements in my head for this synthesis. Writing it down would at least get them out of my head, and serve as a way to improve my own understanding of and approach to the mystical alchemies. After all, if I was missing something that was obvious in hindsight?
If nothing else, it would be an avenue for self-improvement.
We shouldn’t need a first-stage chamber, I wrote, eyes flickering between the apparatus and my paper. Will adding a dye to the dry ice work? Presumably not, because CO2 won’t bind, but something about dyes and CO2 is tickling my memory. I frowned at the paper, trying not to get distracted. Are there other gasses that will work for this, ones that aren’t transparent? Or gasses that react to elemental imbuement by becoming colored, the way water does?
I sketched the way it would look without the first stage. The openings in the stage two valve, what would become the only valve, were already too small for the orb to pass through, and the first chamber was vestigial at this point. It was honestly a little embarrassing that we hadn’t already cut it, but I’d been—we’d all been—more focused on getting the right outcome.
Which… we were getting, probably, given Kelly’s still-focused look, the murmuring noises that were probably her talking with Spark, and the steady motion of her pencil against her notepad. Great.
Will this work with mist? Will this work with vapor? What happens if we have aerosolized non-water things, especially if those materials themselves are magical? Will we be able to pull pure mana out of the storage gem, and if so, can that mana infuse things? Will we be able to pull aspected mana out?
I kept writing until I heard my name, which somehow startled me enough to send the pencil flying and slam my knee into the bottom of the table. It didn’t budge, obviously, which was better than the alternative, but… ow.
“Ow, fuck,” I complained idly, “and oops. Kelly, what’s up?”
“It’s done.” She paused, a little flushed, eyes wide. “It’s done. It worked. I… this is beautiful, Sophie. I wish you could see it.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, about to say it’s fine, and then took a moment to actually assess my emotions. “Maybe Kartom can work up something to turn the mana-side recordings in the crystal into the visual spectrum,” I said. “I’d be surprised if that’s not known art, actually, and if it’s not, then there’s a Feat if he can figure out the mapping, right?”
In time, Spark commented, this might in turn become unnecessary. It should not be beyond the realms of the possible for you to share the vision of another through a bond as strong as the one you possess with Kelly. Even if that remains beyond us, should it not be possible for you to grasp that within you which is divine and see beyond the realm of the mundane?
“My connection to the manasphere,” I responded tartly, “is through you, a person, whom I went to some effort to cultivate as something more than a tool. You’re not just something to be grasped.”
“That’s unfair, Sophie. If Spark—”
“It’s—”
Kelly’s hands came together as if to clap like thunder, but stopped just short, quivering with the sudden reversal. It shut me up anyway.
“No,” she said after a moment, voice soft. “No, you’re being unfair, you need to stop it. I use my hands for you. Right? Even though it costs me time and attention and effort?”
I opened my mouth to argue, knowing exactly where this logic was going, but nothing came out. “Right,” I said finally. “Okay, I—”
“Spark wants to share its vision with you, something that won’t cost it anything. Something that’s intimate, that has the two of you sharing something that’s closer than just me using my hands.”
I sat back, massaging my temples. My head didn’t hurt, but it felt like it should, somehow, and the fingers digging into my scalp helped. Fuck, she’s right, I thought. If Spark’s a person, it gets to want things, and wanting to help is a perfectly fine thing. A great thing. And… she might not be wrong about the other thing.
“Sorry, Spark,” I said softly. “That was disrespectful of me, diminishing the exact agency I was claiming to be ascribing to you. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
There will be such a time as to make these matters a question of practicality, rather than hypotheticals, before they are spoken of again.
I blinked a couple of times. “That… that was a garden path sentence. Nice!”
The noetic constructs of language are complex, but they can—empirically, it is clear—be invoked in combination to create deeply-constrained constructions without an understanding of the mechanics themselves.
“Let’s not… anyway, so, the experiment!” Kelly glared at a spot that seemed arbitrary—ah, no, it was the tip of the pyramid whose bottom vertices were the two of us and the experiment. “You’re as bad as Sophie sometimes. It worked, how can you not be excited about this? It worked!”
I was on my feet before I realized I was moving, striding over to Kelly’s side. “Worked? Worked how?”
“Everything, everything, we got everything!”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
A true success, Spark agreed. For both of you. This has been an act of Alchemy and of support.
Kelly moved as if to hand me the notebook, but I was already flipping through it, sparing only one more glancing at the apparatus and its totally mundane—no, there was the barest shimmer that vaguely hinted at light or color in the stone at its center.
“Talk me through it. You got too excited and your handwriting is unreadable.”
“Hmph!”
I flicked a glance over at Kelly; voice aside, her body language was more delighted and wry than anything offended, because of course she wasn’t offended. She stepped up closer to me, right hand on the small of my back and hip pressed into mine as she gestured with her left.
“The cycles formed fast, maybe as soon as the interactions started,” she explained. “Once that happened, the second stage chambers got vacuumed.”
“Explains the valves.”
“Yeah! Anyway, so, there was… it was kind of chaotic, a little, like there was an imbalance that kept changing right before it tipped everything over? Always like it was tilting, teetering, barely balanced enough above and below the plane of the elements—I mean the classics. Kinda like a couple of spinning tops, they weren’t exactly reflected.”
“You have spinning—never mind.” I cut myself off. “Keep going.”
“It started sort of accumulating mana in the crystal, and the cycles started shrinking, like they were, um, they didn’t have anything they were… stuck to anymore? They weren’t an imbuement anymore?”
“No physical substrate,” I murmured. “Pure metaphysical structure, stable only because it was a cycle. And shrinking because the mana was draining into the central gem.”
“Yeah!” Kelly stopped bouncing on her toes, which was the first I noticed she was doing it in the first place. “And then it just… kept going. And it’s sort of still going? I mean, they’re not cycling, they’re just cycles. Here, look at this.”
I looked at the page she’d flipped to, or more accurately, stared at it. It was a blown-up sketch of the central gem—crystal; if I were going to make plans to get on Kelly’s case about naming, I’d better use the right ones myself—with a bunch of stuff on it. Iconography, I realized suddenly, and then it all made sense, inasmuch as any of this did.
“The meta-cycle rooted itself back into the physical substrate? So now it’s… stable again, only now it’s embedded in the crystal?”
“It’s got a name, Sophie. A name! We made something the System recognizes as a real thing, an act of craft in its own right!”
I opened my mouth to ask what the name was, then closed it. “How stable are we talking? Is there anything still moving or—”
Kelly cut me off, bumping me gently with her hip. “Heaters are off. The mist is inert and not moving, pressure is equalized across the whole system, there’s no movement of mana and zero power leak from the crystal.”
“And the orbs?” I glanced over at them, tilting my head consideringly. “They’re not in vacuum, but they’re also not in a high-pressure atmosphere, and they’re shelf-stable. So… probably fine. Cross-check; Spark?”
The experiment has run its course and all has found a new stability. Any activity or interaction from the orbs is undetectable to our senses, and likewise both the crystal and the apparatus and its gasses.
“That’s a really awkward turn of phrase.” I drummed my fingers on the table, staring at that last page of the notebook and the tight curves of cycle lines forming what looked almost like magical glyphs. “Following up the word both with a double-item entry, that is. Alright.”
“Alright?”
I took a deep breath, straightening and grinning ear-to-ear at Kelly. “Come on, check your gains, I—” I don’t want us to both be out of commission at the same time, I was going to say, but her eyes went vacant and unfocused before I could get there.
She makes proper haste.
“Yeah, I know,” I murmured. “Sorry to make you wait. Thanks for being cool about it nowadays.”
I kept an eye on the experiment while paging back through Kelly’s notes to get a sense of just what she was… well, not seeing, but perceiving and trying her best to encode as sight. Her handwriting when she was completely distracted wasn’t actually that bad, and I could puzzle my way through it with a fair bit of effort, but there wasn’t a whole lot there.
Ultimately, the cycles, unstable as they were individually, had just shrunk steadily without losing their collective stability, and if there was anything else going on she hadn’t been able to observe it.
“Well.” Kelly didn’t quite startle me, because her single word had been soft enough that I’d processed it before I noticed it. “That was… Spark wasn’t kidding about true success. I’m standing watch, go ahead.”
“Watch is yours.” I sat down in her chair, still smiling, and reached out to Spark.
It was the most natural thing in the world, to take a metaphysical step back from my sight and let Spark control my vision. It had been ever since Spark had woken up, three days after Singer Tayama’s ritual, gift, stupendous flex of her near-divinity, or maybe all three of those.
I should have been afraid, at least the first time.
Trust was as nice as it was new.
Your Divine Flame grows in power, and gently do you learn such. Spark’s message was tagged as funny, and, well, fair enough, given what Spark was. Full Status, or just the changes?
“Full Status,” I said with a quiet smile. “Feels like it’s been a while. Indulge yourself.”
Spark left a feeling of surprised gratitude and glee, and my sensorium faded and shifted.
Your Divine Flame Thrives!
May You Be Known Thusly: Sophie Nadash | 39 | Kibosh, Shem
Progression, Quantized For Centuries: Alchemist (6/15, 56/528) | Hale II, Meticulous
These Faiths In Your Heart Dwell: Pantheism (Faith), YHVH (Culture)
In These Divinities’ Names Do You Raise Blessings: Artemis (Least), Hephaestus (Minor), Hermes Trismegistus (Minor)
Capabilities May, Systematized, Transcend The Mundane: Endure, Comprehend, Observe, Nothing Left to Chance II, Chemical Calculation II, Mechanisms II, Collaborate, Iterate
Glory Comes To Those Who Astound: World Traveler, Godfriend, To Glimpse the Divine Within, Advanced Creation, Spake Thou Unto Divinity And Wert Heard Without Intercession, For Though Divine They May Be Still Are They Grist, First Principles Recreation
To Invoke Your Glory Is To Make Of Your Legend A Skill: [Touch of Divinity], [Compounding Intuition], [Divine Communion], [Rediscovery’s Shortened Path]
Many Are The Paths Arrayed Before You: Chemist of Divine Mysteries; Requirements Met for 39 Classes
Discoveries Most Basic: Stamina, Mana Elixirs; Clotting, Muscle, Burn Salves; Radiant Ice Potion; Breath of Gentle Repose (Herbal); Treated Blood
Discoveries Of Some Meager Interest: Healing Elixir; Radiant Heat Potion; Smoke Grenade; Breaths of Moon’s Ease, Gentle Repose (Synthetic); Stable Elemental Cyclic Framework; Elemental Weapon Application; Bladejoy Oil
Discoveries Of Moderate Interest: Mana Storage Crystal (Flexible); Toxic Draw, Flametongue Potions; Quicktan
Discoveries Of True Interest: Concussion Grenade, Invocation of Puissance, Metalmelt
Discoveries Perhaps Noteworthy: Heartsblood Stamina Elixir
Alchemist And Friend To Gods, You Grow In Glory.
We Learn. We Fail. We Discover. We Rise.