16- The gift of knowledge, and proper gifts too.

5/1/5/4353 M.A.C - Niwut - Morning

Six hours! Six friggin hours!

Doro had just woken up from what had been a shorter night than expected. The previous night's project had taken a lot longer than he'd anticipated. Sure, the binder had been quickly assembled, and some of the simpler glassware had gone according to plan, but the final detail work had proved a lot more finicky than he'd expected.

The tube inside the condenser was delicate work, so I had to take it slowly, but making sure those damn fittings were perfectly circular and fitted each other was mental torture.

Doro had needed to redo the fittings and connectors multiple times before he managed to get an airtight seal. It took him a lot of effort before he finally got perfect circles down, but he eventually came up with a workaround. Doro had found out that while using his [Somatic Support], he could make a near-perfect circle by putting an arm straight ahead before spinning on one foot.

Hopefully, I'll be able to do it without aid soon, because this looks rather silly...

The last obstacle had been unexpected. Doro had assumed that replicating the texture of ground glass joints would be simple, and require little energy. He'd been wrong. Getting the texture right was difficult, and because of the scale, a lot of the energy he used ended up getting wasted. The smallest area he could control using nodes was the size of a large raisin, or a small grape, and he needed to expand the same amount of energy whether he wanted to change it in its entirety, or just the fine layer on the surface. The final nail in the proverbial coffin had been that unlike for circles, he hadn't been able to find a motion to help him get the texture right, and his [Somatic Support] turned out too inaccurate for such small-scale work. He was forced to use his kinesis purely mentally and thus had to use more energy than he'd saved up for those final steps. In the end, he had to take a few breaks, to regenerate energy, and let the headache that built up as he focused on the detailed work subside.

And then after getting washed up and ready for bed, I only had 5 hours left before I needed to wake up. One short night shouldn't be enough to stunt my growth to Dad's level, but damn am I tired. At least, I finished what I set out to do last night, and I've got fun presents to give. That should help my mood. Maybe I'll...no stop it Doro! you just decided to do daily workouts yesterday, you can't give up on day two just because you are a little bit tired. Guess I'll just manage myself a bit more than yesterday.

Doro put his casual clothes on, washed his face, and left his room to join his parents in the kitchen. Upon arriving, he was pleased to note that his father's state appeared to have returned to normal, as both he and his mother were setting up the table while chatting away.

"Hey Dad! Sorry about yesterday, guess I was a bit too intense. I made you a present to apologize. I'll show you after breakfast."

"Don't worry, I lost focus yesterday and your mother finished me off. Not all your fault."

Suyum chuckled and couldn't help herself from going for the low-hanging fruit.

"Well Doro said he wanted a younger sibling, so if I finish you off, It would kind of be his fault."

Khetep's eyes widened as his gaze shifted from Suyum to Doro repeatedly.

"First thing, please don't speak about this in front of me, or at the very least not as we are having breakfast. Second, we only talked about that after you nearly sent Dad off to his final rest."

Suyum seemed to disregard his admonishments entirely, as she just kept chuckling at the effect her joke had on Khetep.

"Also Dad, I just told her that if she wanted to get grandchildren any time soon, it would probably be quicker for her to get started on a second child, considering how little I am interested in romance. Let's just say that the present will also serve as an apology for the unintended consequences of that conversation. Good luck! Don't let her down or she'll try to make sure Sarima and I get married-"

Doro and his parents froze up as the sound of something dropping on their doorstep attracted their attention.

"Damn it, maybe they didn't hear it..."

As Doro walked towards the door leading to the outside, he could hear the muffled voice of a little girl on the other side. He made sure to take the last few steps quietly and opened the door quickly, in a single motion. Sarima nearly fell into the room with her face turned to one side, but managed to regain her balance after stumbling a few ungainly steps.

"Eavesdropping isn't a very polite thing to do, Sarima."

Sarima chased the surprised expression from her face and assumed an innocent look as she responded.

"Eavesdropping? Me? Nah, I just tried to hear if you were inside before knocking on the door, I wasn't snooping or anything. Uhhh....but I couldn't hear really well. What were you saying about making sure you and I got married?"

"Ahah! So you were eavesdropping!."

Doro had his hands on his hips and his head held high as he savored his victory, not noticing the shade of tomato red that Sarima's face had taken. He only realized something was wrong when his mother started cackling loudly behind him. Replaying the conversation in his head, Doro came to the most logical explanation.

Shit, she didn't hear the first half of that sentence, and I just confirmed that she didn't hear the second half wrong. Without the first bit about Mom wanting grandchildren, it would come across as if I planned on marrying her.

"Yes as I was saying to Dad, he needs to get me a younger sibling so that Mom doesn't try to pair the two of us off, in her quest for grandchildren. Because I Don't plan on wasting any time on romance for the foreseeable future."

After finishing his explanation, Doro noticed that Sarima had regained her normal complexion, but did not seem let down by the news.

It's better this way, I need to make sure she doesn't see me as a romantic interest. It would be unethical with my mental age, and me being her teacher. Whatever happens, age-appropriate girls will probably keep giving me that feeling for at least a few years, I reckon. Better if I could get her to think of me as something akin to an older cousin, or something along those lines. Just got to make sure she doesn't start calling me oni-chan, or this world's equivalent, otherwise I'll never hear the end of it if Emi or Meg find out.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"Alright, should we get headed to Dad's workshop so we can get this morning's lesson underway?"

The trio left the room and went into Khetep's workshop.

"Did you complete the questions I assigned yesterday?"

Sarima nodded and Doro turned to pick up the binder from the counter.

"Well, here is a gift to aid with your studies. I made it last night. Give me the notes I made you write yesterday, and the page of questions you answered."

Sarima handed the two pages to Doro and paid close attention to his demonstration.

"This is a ring binder. When you open it, as you can see, the rings attached to the spine split open. Be careful, the ends of the right segments of the rings are sharp. You carefully take a page, press the sharp ends gently until the points barely poke through the paper, and then close the binder. When you open it again, you will see neat holes will have been punched out of the page, allowing you to slide the page down and secure it with the rings."

Doro went through the motions with the page of notes, before urging Sarima to do the same with her homework.

"If it ends up getting too full, we can retrieve notes on subjects related to each other and bind them together into simple books, using string. When moving around, remember to secure the clasp on the right slide of the cover to avoid it opening by mistake, and it should make it more convenient for you to carry your notes around. Feel free to carve anything you want on the wooden covers. When we are not using it for lessons, you can also use it as a surface to write on when you don't have a table."

Sarima looked happy as she accepted her gift and started trying out the clasp.

"Before we move on to your lesson Sarima, I also have a gift for my dad. I kinda owe him one for multiple reasons. Dad, I hope you like your gift, I stayed up late to finish it, and it turned out to be a lot harder to make than I expected."

Doro retrieved the case in which he had stored the glassware, and brought it to the counter. He set up the boiling flask on a small tripod to the left, and a flat bottom flask on the right. He then connected the two with the condenser, but then realized he had forgotten to make a grasping stand to hold it in place. Luckily, after asking his father, it turned out he had something that he used to hold up boiling flasks that could be easily adapted to do the job. After securing the condenser in place, Doro placed half a dozen vials and test tubes alongside a pair of measuring beakers.

"I remember you were complaining about your glassware, so I repurposed some of your broken pieces to make this for you. I took a bit of another material from your reserves and made a type of glass used back on Earth. It is called "Borosilicate Glass" back there, and it is a lot more heat resistant and solid than your previous glassware. These should prove more durable and allow you to work at greater temperatures than before. I'll explain how the weird tube-like piece in the center works after I'm done with Sarima's lesson. I should be done in thirty minutes to an hour."

Khetep looked like a child who had just received a puppy on Christmas morning, and all but jumped for joy.

"Can I play with it while I wait? I love new equipment, but I always end up buying second-hand to save on costs."

"Sure Dad. But be careful with the condenser, the middle piece, until I show you how to use it. It's fragile."

Sarima blinked a couple of times at the exchange between father and son before letting out a tiny giggle.

"It's like Doro is the dad."

The father and son pair bristled a bit at the comment but decided to let it go. Khetep made his way to the kiln in the corner of the room, in order to get some work done, as Sarima got closer to Doro to whisper into his ear.

"With his height, in ten years people might actually mistake him for your son."

As Doro pictured it, he couldn't help but feel bad for his father because he thought her joke might very well end up becoming a reality. If he managed to help his father get past his next threshold, Khetep's lifespan would increase another fifty years or so, and it would be dozens of years before he would start aging past his physical peak.

"Alright, let us speak of something more productive, and less pitiful. First, let me check the answers you gave me, and I'll point out the errors you have made, if any. If you got them all right, we'll move to a different exercise tomorrow. If not, I'll set you another series of questions for tomorrow, and each subsequent day until you get them all right. We will repeat this process anytime I teach you a new mathematical topic."

As he had expected, Sarima didn't quite manage a perfect score. However, she had gotten enough questions right to show that she understood the subject.

"Don't worry about it. Practice makes perfect. If you are unsure of your answer, try and think it through practically, using physical examples. You'll see that it will often let you spot when something doesn't make sense. Percentages are important, the better you understand them, the easier it will be for you to understand the next subject."

Sarima looked a bit miffed at having gotten some of the answers wrong, but the encouragement seemed to help prevent her mood from turning sour.

"Anyway, there is something else that I want to discuss today. Can you tell me what "profit" means for a merchant?"

Sarima thought the question over for a second before answering with confidence.

"Profit is the difference between how much you bought something for, and how much you manage to sell it for."

"Ah. Not a wrong answer per se, but not quite complete either. The price you pay to acquire an item isn't the only potential cost. We'll assume that you are a self-employed merchant, dealing in non-perishable goods, without any employees. You just bought an expensive item at a store, but it happens to be too heavy for you to carry. Transport becomes an additional expense. Now imagine that the item doesn't sell for a while and deteriorates. Metal products rust or lose their sheen for example. That adds maintenance as another potential cost. Now imagine you have other products that sell faster and more regularly, but your shelf space is limited. The entire time that bulky item goes unsold, it is taking up space that could produce more money if stocked with something else. That's another potential added cost through loss of revenue, even if you own your shop and don't have to pay rent. When choosing what you are stocking up on, and where to acquire the wares that you want to sell, you will need to take all these factors into account."

"Yeah, that makes sense. So transport, maintenance, and uh...shelf space? popularity? Well I get it, kinda."

"Until the end of the decan, I want you to think through these factors and see if you can apply any of them to improve the profits of your father's store. You don't have to put your ideas into effect quite yet, just let me know what potential improvements you spot and we'll talk about them together on First-day morning. Until then, feel free to ask questions, but we will be working on mathematics during our lessons."

Sarima nodded and spent another couple of minutes writing down her notes. Doro spent the remainder of the lesson giving her more concrete examples, before sending her on her way.

"My turn then? Please go easy on me, yesterday was a bit much."

"All good. Yesterday was just to help you get the big picture, from now on, I'll focus on things one at a time."

Khetep let out a relieved sigh at his son's response, waiting for him to continue.

"Today, I'll teach you how to use the condenser and the theory behind it. You already have some knowledge of the principles involved. We will mostly be going into the details you don't know about, and correcting false assumptions you may have. First thing, I'm sure you've noticed how different metals melt at different temperatures, and that if an ore contains two different metals, one may melt before the other. Well, liquids can also react in a similar manner by turning into gas. You probably had already realized that due to your line of work, right? Like ice to water and then steam. Sorry if I explain something you already know, just want to make sure there are no holes in your fundamentals."

Khetep nodded in confirmation and Doro proceeded with the lesson.

"Well, the condenser can be used to collect the gases and cool them down. This will let you gather the separated substance in the adjoining beaker, by controlling the heat. If the original liquid is an emulsion, a mixture of different substances, or even a compound, heat may be all that is required to separate it. Sometimes heat isn't sufficient and you will need to use a reagent, a substance that will react with the substance you are trying to isolate, or with whatever else is present in the compound it had formed. Then, by controlling the amount of heat you apply to the boiling flask, you can separate the components of the mixture one after the other, by incrementally increasing the heat and switching collection beakers."

"Alright, I understand the principles, it isn't that far off from some of the reductions I do to get the materials for my glazes and pigments. But how does the condenser turn the gas back into liquid form?"

"Ah my bad, I kind of skipped that part. Do you see those two little nozzles on the outer casing of the condenser? Well, you pour cold water into one end and let it drain out of the other. The spiral tube on the inside is shaped this way to allow more surface area to come into contact with the cold water, and to increase the distance the gas travels through it. I could have made it straight instead, but then I would have had to make the condenser a lot longer to keep the same efficacity."

Doro coached his father until fifth bell, showing him how to use the new equipment by performing simple experiments. First, they drew water and oil out of some of the liquid pigments his father sold, turning them into pigment powder. Then to show liquid interactions, they separated a mixture of oil and water until it appeared most of the water had travelled to the other side. To show his father the importance of safety, he then asked his father to take a sip from the water, so he could taste that it wasn't quite pure. Although the olive oil required close to double the temperature water needed to evaporate, some of its components were more volatile, letting them make their way through the condenser alongside the water vapor.

"You see, vegetable oils aren't exactly compounds, they are more like fairly homogenous mixtures. Even if the oil itself doesn't appear to boil, some of its components may still undergo a phase change, in this case, it would mean going from liquid to gas."

He finished the lesson by explaining to his father why it was important to do multiple passes, and not to assume everything had worked just because the result had the expected color and viscosity. Khetep then left to get lunch ready and Doro found himself with an hour of free time, his energy levels topped up.

Guess I could go for my daily run now. I still have most of my energy, so I can afford to spend about a fifth of my reserve and still be back to full after lunch. Since I'm still a bit tired, I'll go slow and add some shaping exercises using [Inorganic Kinesis] and [Phase Transition].