Margery, although confused by her employers sudden request, committed herself to the task at hand. The nobles trust in her ability was certainly an unwitting boon to the eventually, timely, completion of the gathering buisness that Walter personally assigned to the maid. Fully devoting herself to aquiring each component on the list, utilising every contact and owed favour the young woman had at her disposal, the somewhat monumental task was completed in a third of the expected time; a single week was all it took.
Even Walter himself was impressed with the girl. In fact, he didn't trust his maid to complete the job at all, that was Margery's own misguided interpretation. No, he had assigned the task to her exactly for the reason he said; Margery was the only one he knew, who was accessible at the time, that can read.
Truthfully, the mage simply wished to keep all possible distractions away from the basement room while he found another more capable of completing the job. And now, unfortuantly for Margery, Walter's opinion of her had changed from "useful when I need waking up" to "can be sent on nigh-impossible or daunting jobs and still produce results". This certainly would not bode well for the maids future.
Back to the subject at hand, Walter was shocked by his maids performance. A large portion of the objects on the list were items that rarely passed through public markets, the rarest of which being aewer ore.
Aewer ore is known by another name in Wesamont - wealthy mans bane, aptly named for its uncannily similar appearance to that of a much more sought after material, zautine, also known as elemental iron. Aewer is much denser than zautine, though it's pliability and softness is of a much higher degree than the aforementioned elemental iron. Another property of aewer that undoubtly contributes to its common name is its tendency to completely vanish from sight.
This property is its ownly marketting value. Certain mages find great interest in the ores ability to dissappear and will often spend hefty sums on aquiring large quantities, although aewer is absolutely not uncommon enough to justify such prices. How Margery managed to get ahold of such an eluvise material is beyond Walter, though he does not doubt for a second that his recent immense luck has something to do with it, hence he didn't bother to inquire to where she found it. What Walter found most important, at this moment in time, was to safely process the aewer into a useable form, lest it dissapear from sight and doom the entire project. Well, doom it until more ore can be aquired, but wasting time was as good as ruining the project in Walters eyes.
With Margery in tow, the mage once again moved towards the black walled room, no longer seeing his maid as just a useful tool. He fully believed allowing the girl to observe his work to be a benefitial investment. The mage didn't intend on having her learn, but instead hoped she would be useful in explaining his constructs to others in the future. It takes a simple woman to convince the simple, he thought. Honestly, he still viewed the girl as a tool, though he now viewed her as a specialised tool worth cherishing.
The maid, on the other hand, saw this seemingly sudden change of attitude from her master as an oppurtunity, and as they walked down the stairs, the girl started her enquiry.
"Sir Walter, would it be rude if I were to ask how exactly these odd lamps work? I've seen magical tools before, but never seen such devices work without a mage constantly attending them or without magical engravings"
Walter, barely pausing as he continued down the stairs, replied in his usual flat tone, "Since when have you bothered about whether I would find something rude?" The young girl guiltily look to one side, trying to avert the invisible gaze from the back of her masters head.
"Anyway, to answer your question, their workings are all down the that liquid, you see", Walter continued in a much more cheerful manner than the maid is used too, "It is the fluid form of what we mages call pure element, though I guess you will know it as mana. Skipping over the unneeded details, pure element has the remarkable ability to take on the form of any other simple element it is exposed to".
Walter paused and pointed towards the hemispherical object radiating the bright yellow aura in his hands, then went on speaking, "By exposing the pure element to the element of light, the outter layer of pure element becomes light element, which in turn converts that below it and so forth, hence emitting light".
Unfortuantly, this explanation completely slipped past Margery. It wasn't that Walter's description of the lamps workings were insufficient if explained to that of another mage, but the young woman was certainly not one well versed in magic.
"Simple element? How is simple element different from pure element? What makes it simple? What IS simple element? Actually, what is element? Whatever it is, it doesn't explain how the lamps seem to refill themselves after a time!"
Believing the nobleman had already gone out of his way to even attempt to explain the operation of the lamps, Margery did not dare to voice her questions this time, though she would soon find these questions inadertently answered anyway.
Soon after Walter finished his rather ineffective lecture, the maid and mage reached the pitch-black wall. As before, Walter opened the wall and signalled for his maid to follow him in.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Once inside, the maids eyes wandered around the small black-walled room. Her attention was at once brought towards the strange objects lighting the room - they differed from the lamps on the stairwell very little shapewise, yet each lit in succession without the need for Walter to use the metalic object, which was still embedded in the doorway. There was little else in the room. The only other notable features were the abnormally straight cut and polished marble tiles on the floor, and the unusual pattern on the white ceiling. Margery also noticed the room splits into two pathways on differing ends of the room.
Walter continued down the right path, urging his maid to continue following. As she slowly began to amble behind the mage, she turned to look down the other path. The pathway seems to lead to a dead end, yet Margery couldn't help but find the black wall at the end of the path to be incredibly unnerving; it looks almost as if it is absorbing the light around it, producing a darker blackness than even the light devoid darkness of night. The maid quickly turned away from the hall lest she lost herself in the wall. The woman had been holding her breath the entire time, and the sudden rush for air hit her all at once. Gasping for breath, Margery continued behind the nobleman.
After walking in an almost trance-like state for what seemed to be an eternity to the young woman, though it was truthfully less than 20 seconds, Margery met with Walter opening a normal seeming wooden door. The mage, as he turned to welcome his maid into the room, noticed her now pale complexion.
"Ah, so you've seen the other hallway then?"
Walters comment was met with nothing but a blank stare, as if the maid had lost a vital part of herself, though he knew that was due to nothing more than fear.
"Calm down, what you saw is simple a slightly complex illusory magic formula, designed to give this place that mage-like mystique guests expect from powerful mages. Pay it no mind"
Colour visibly returned to the girls face upon hearing her masters statement, though she could not fully shake the dreadful feeling that something was wrong. The nobleman never had guests come to this room, so why bother prepare such a formula? The feeling she lost some part of herself never left her mind, either, but there was nothing more she could do. Her employer clearly did not want to give the complete truth and she was careful not to press for it.
Instead, the young maid chose to do as her master intended, and proceeded into the room. Unlike the clean black walls of the hallway, the maids shock at seeing dusty stone brick walls and jagged cut paved floor is certainly not uncalled for. The rooms looks no different than any scholar or mages room. A single wooden bookshelf in the corner is overflowing with thick books, scrolls and loose parchment. Dotted along the walls are single shelves holding all manner of items, from clear glass bottles of differing shapes, to twisted metalic gadgets and amulets. Right at the back of the room stands a simple, orange-red coloured desk, littered with crystal looking quills, stacked books and parchment. Most notably, a large glass container full of fluid stands right in the center of the desk and within the fluid lies the aewer, almost suspended in the liquid. Unlike when the maid purchased the ore, which looked no different than specks of dark red surrounded by chunks of rock, the aewer was now a smooth reddish-brown sphere.
"This liquid is, or was, the regard turpentine. You should be well familiar with it, as you were the one who brought it" the mage began speaking to his maid in the unusual cheery tone from earlier.
"regard turpentine is produced by distilling resin from the kelmentar tree, which is incredibly rich in fire element, using a particular method only a mage is currently able to do. The turpentine not only completely dissolves the sediment around the aewer, it also causes the metal to naturally compact. The process produces large amounts of heat, completely dispelling the remaining fire element, but also melts the compacted metal, leaving behind a sphere of aewer drowned in pure element! How fascinating this is indeed"
Once again, Walters explanation was almost completely lost on the young maid, but she understood the gist of it - the products she bought, when mixed together, somehow refines the aewer ore into metal and the liquid within the glass lamps.
What happened next, though, completely destroyed Margerys hope of understanding.
The nobleman pulled out a green metalic box about the size of a watermelon from a cabinet in the corner of the room. At the front of the box is a single pane of crystal-like glass, allowing one to clearly see the circular slot around the size of Walters fist in the center of the box.
The maid recognised this as one of the items her employer had sent to be crafted by the cities magic smith; she specifically remembered its exorbitant price. Mages may be rare, and mages that taken an interest in smithing rarer still, but a price she could not personally afford even if she worked for a thousand years for a green box? Clearly, her employer was more bizzare than she imagined.
As Margery was internally complaining about his lavish spending, Walter speedily took the orb of aewer out from its glass container with a pair of iron tongs, then placed into the circular slot inside the box. Then, he grabbed a small turqoise bead and broke it over the top of the orb, before swiftly closing the top of the box.
Peering through the small window, Margery instantly stopped concerning herself with the spendings of the wealthy. Instead, she absorbed herself in the strange occurences happening within the box.
Firstly, the previously reddish-brown orb completely changed colour to match the turqoise bead. Next, a thin layer of clear liquid substance formed on the outside of the sphere, before changing into a turqoise aura, the same as the yellow aura Walters sphere radiates to start the lanterns. Finally, the orb began to violently vibrate in its slot before small pellets of turqoise aura began to bombard the orb from every direction.
10 minutes later, the orb lay completely silent. Now, it no longer lay surrounded by a turqoise aura. Instead, the aura had transformed - it became a dark turqoise liquid that completely filled the box.
Walter stared at the green box in front of him, as Margery simply gawked in shock at the substance that materialised from nowhere, and then he smiled.
"Margery, close your mouth and stop drooling everywhere, are you trying to drown the place? Oh, nevermind that, go and find out if everything else I requested has been completed yet. Its about time we begin constructing the accumulator"