Demesne 211 - A Gap In Understanding (Patreon)

"Um, I'm not sure I understand the significance," Rian said, looking up from what she'd just told him to write. "I didn't go to wizard school, after all. I can barely read and write. Why is something still being 'anchored' significant?"

Lori glared at him, but he had a point. While her lord seemed able to understand concepts with relative ease, even esoteric ones about Whispering—most people had trouble with firewisps not actually making fire—she supposed he didn't have the foundation to realize the significance of this. "Because only imbued wisps can be anchored," she said, stating it as simply as she could. "These wisps are anchored, but they're not imbued."

Rian blinked. Tilted his head. Wrote something down on his tablet. "So… a very basic, almost foundational aspect of magic isn't being followed. Should I be worried?"

"No, you should prepare for experimenting, because I want to find out why."

Rian took a very big step back. "Uh, by experimenting you don't mean doing experiments on medo you? Because I know this plot, and—"

"Rian, stop thinking about the theater and get over here to take notes!"

Despite how useful he was, Rian was still one of her idiots, and unfortunately acted like it. At least it seldom persisted for very long.

It wasn't just that the wisps were anchored, of course. It was that, as far as she could tell though her awareness, the binding was also still holding in place despite the lack of imbuement or anyone—such as herself, the only one capable of Whispering in the demesne—actively claiming the binding in question. She'd have said that such a thing was impossible, since both her education and experience told her that when a binding ran out of imbuement the binding collapsed and the wisps comprising it dispersed, but it was clearly happening, so it clearly wasn't impossible.

The first part was confirming the wisps were, in fact, anchored. That was simple enough to test, with Lori using a pair of wooden tweezers to pick up the largest intact piece of white Iridescence—a chunk about half the width of her smallest fingernail—and then… moving it back and forth, gingerly shaking it, shining a bright light on it. It was, admittedly, a crude way of trying to dislodge the wisps, but they remained anchored to the piece.

At least, the wisps of the binding that had been directly anchored on the piece in her tweezers. The other wisps of the binding had remained anchored to other fragments, and when she had removed the fragment the binding had warped and distended alarmingly before fragmenting, leaving a hole in the binding in the bowl. The wisps on the piece she had removed managed to largely retain their positions relative to each other, and the wisps still in the bowl all snapped back into place more or less where they had previously been.

It was a strange thing to perceive, a binding being literally torn to pieces… which was just another thing to add to the notes, along with the binding retaining existencedespite having no imbuement.

"Could the binding be siphoning off imbuement from the white Iridescence?" Rian suggested. "I mean, they clearly contain magic that the binding can use, since that's what beads are. Like what happened with the water with white Iridescence dissolved into it, except not all at once."

Lori frowned. "It's a distinct possibility," she admitted, wishing she had thought of it, "but to all my senses the binding doesn't haveany imbuement." She carefully ran her finger over the surface of the piece she'd been manipulating and observing, shaking her head. "Nothing. Imbuement can't be hidden. You can't mistake an imbued wisp for one that isn't imbued." Even if an imbued wisp that wasn't claimed and wasn't part of a binding started leaking imbuement like water out of a cracked jar.

"If we had a more precise way to measure something's weight, we could test that," Rian mused. He pointed down at the glass bowl. "Take a piece, weigh it, anchor a lot of wisps to it and let it sit for a few days and weeks in a sealed container, then weight it again. If it's lost weight, theoretically that should mean that the wisps have been drawing imbuement from it."

"That would actually be a good experiment to perform," Lori agreed, "if we had a scale that precise. We don't even have a scale that's imprecise!"

Throwing one of the fragments with wisps anchored to it into a few drops of water, to see what would happen, had it dissolve and turn the water a cloudy white, but notably did not imbue the wisps that had been anchored to it. The wisps and piecemeal binding in question also didn't immediately disperse, as she had thought would happen when what they had been anchored to physically disappeared. However, as Lori continued to observe the binding fragment with her awareness of wisps—an observation she's have been hard-pressed to replicate with merely her abilities in Whispering, as sticking in her finger or a piece of metal to conduct through would likely have greatly altered conditions in the sample—she saw that the wisps were all slowly drifting apart. It wasn't dispersal as she knew it, but rather like… like…

—Lori glanced towards the glass bowl with the rest of the white Iridescence and anchored wisps—

…like each wisp was slowly being pulled apart while still connected by the same binding.

"Maybe they're still somehow anchored, even if what they're anchored to is dissolved into the water?" Rian said, stating the obvious.

"Obviously," Lori said dryly. It was obvious, after all. "The question is whether the water is having a destructive influence and slowly dissolving the anchors, or if whatever ever the wisps are anchored to is merely spreading because of the water and is physically pulling the binding apart as a result."

"Or both," Rian chirped. "Don't look at me like that, we always have to consider the possibility of more than just one factor being at play here. I really don't understand people who insist the answer to something must be one or the other absolutely. The world is seldom that neat. It's far more likely there are multiple things causing this reaction. Is the dispersal dependent on water temperature, for example?" Rian suddenly frowned. "And if we boil the water to recover the white Iridescence, would the wisps still be anchored to them?"

It was a good question. "A good question," Lori acknowledged as she saw a feminine shadow hovering at the doorway. "Note it down for next time. It appears that it is time to eat."

Rian glanced at the doorway as well. "We'll be right out Umu," he called. "Remember, it's my turn to get the food, so don't start without me." Lori rolled her eyes. Her lord could be so strange. Still, at least he hadn't tried to press his voting fetish in a long time…

They put away the instruments, Lori sealing up the glassware that still had samples contained within under stone, packing the rest in her padded box to return to her room. As they did, Lori mused on the strange properties of the white Iridescence. She could already think of some strange uses for them, like dissolving several beads contents into water to provide an extremely concentrated source of magic—they had found that seepage on contact with metal still occurred with cloudy water—provided there was no point of saturation. If there was… well, as long as they could dissolve a number of beads that into water that was less than the bead's overall volume, it would be a far more concentrated form of storage than beads…

Of course, that begged the question of why such weren't in active use… but perhaps they were, and she had simply never been near them, or realized what they were. After all, she'd never worked anywhere that would need such greatly concentrated amounts of imbuement.

As Lori took one of the bowls of food offered by Rian, her mind turned to her previous experiments. She had hoped to use white Iridescence as a substitute for actual Iridescence for making beads, but while that had failed, there were other avenues to pursue. Perhaps using some of the white in the normal bead-making process outside of the demesne would have some kind of effect. At the worse, the white would simply be consumed by the colors to fuel the latter's crystallization… which wouldn't be all bad, as it would give her more seed material.

Really, the most disappointing result of such an experiment would be no interaction at all, which would be counterintuitive—and make no sense!—and reveal little useful data. Hopefully it wouldn't be like that.

She ate her soup like one of the undead, her hand moving from bowl to mouth with smooth, thoughtless movement as Lori considered her other planned experiments in bead-making. Using the jar and heat to promote more Iridescence growth for use as seed has been successful, increasing her yield, and she'd been by mass producing relatively well the past few week, but now she wanted to see if she could enact standardization and perhaps even imprinting with denomination markings. So far she had been making beads using the methodology she had initially discovered, using imbued bindings, but as she had learned, her first method might not be the best method, only the easiest to discover, which had what had prompted trying to grow beads with white Iridescence.

She had wanted to try standardizing with molds, but Rian had correctly pointed out beads naturally formed spheres anyway, and his other suggestions for trying to control the size of the beads were, in hindsight, easier to do, though a part of her twitched at the wastefulness of intentionally trying to seep beads to get them down to a standard size, even if the imbuement to be seeped was to be used somewhere else. That didn't solve her problem of how to put in denomination markings, though. A part of her was sure the secret to getting denomination marks on beads was to have them form inside a mold stamped with the appropriate markings, but as Rian had pointed out, that could burst the mold, unless there were metal contact points to initiate seepage and therefor curtail growth.

In addition, there was a possibility there were other methods to create beads. Or at least, possible permutations to the basic procedure she had already discovered. In fact, she had planned one such experiment tomorrow, involving Iridescence placed on metal to act as a conduit, and imbuing the binding that would claim the colors while the two were in the process of amalgamating. Theoretically, it would mean that she could control the size the bead grew to by supplying the forming amalgamation with imbuement until it reached the size she wanted. It would all depend on whether she could imbue the binding fast enough to match the process of amalgamation…

Lori sighed. She wondered how many days of winter were still left? Once spring arrived, with its inevitable and intense rains, she'd probably be busy with the demesne again. Constructing more buildings, probably making a more permanent waste repository to both keep it away from their water supply and be more accessible in winter, probably building new houses, new storage buildings…

She wouldn't have as much time for this study and research, such as it was. This winter was her best opportunity to find efficient solutions to these problems, because when the rains came she'd have to use her mind to solve more practical problems. She'd probably find out the hard way if this area was prone to floods. The banks of the river hadn't been flooded when they'd arrived, but that hadn't been directly after the winter thaw…

Her spoon came up empty when she put in in her mouth, and Lori blink as she realized she'd finished eating all her food. Sheking her head at her distraction, she turned to her lord opposite her. "Rian, the notes?" she asked.

"Here, your Bindership," Rian said cheerfully, handing her the plank. Lori skimmed through it, making sure the words were all legible so that she wouldn't have to find him and get clarification. It was a sad fact that Rian wouldn't write very finely with the instruments he had on hand, so the notes tended to be oversized. Part of why she had to transcribe them into stone tablets, where she could use her sharp-tipped stylus to write much finer lines—

Lori paused as she read some of the random words Rian had scribbled in. Not all of the things written on the plank were what she had dictated. Rian sometimes wrote down questions he had. Usually it was from his relative ignorance of matters pertaining to magic, but in this instance…

"What do you mean, 'bound tools'?" Lori demanded.

"Oh, just wondering if the white Iridescence has any use in making bound tools," Rian said. "I was thinking that instead of using beads, we could use tubes of some sort full of the compressed powder, since spheres are a very inefficient shape when you're trying to store things. You end up with lots of gaps of air. This would result in a higher density of material that more efficiently distributes to take up space. Sorry I didn't bring it up sooner, but it seemed a bit too soon to be worrying about efficiency in that area."

"Ah…" Lori said, nodding. "Yes, it is a bit too soon. But thank you for the reminder. I should start thinking of if there are any applications of the material in making bound tools."

"The bound tools you still haven't started working on?" Rian said dryly.

"As you are well aware, I haven't exactly had time to start working on learning how to handle molten glass," Lori said flatly.

Her lord twitched. "All right, fair enough. We wouldn't want you to burn yourself or something," he said. "Tell me ahead of time, all right? This is probably the sort of thing that will need specialized tools to handle safely, which I'll need to ask the smiths to make."

Lori hesitated. She'd been thinking she'd just use earthwisps to shape the glass, since glass, like metal, was malleable and claimable by earthwisps in its molten state… but on consideration, it was likely the glass would reach a state it was no longer molten—and thus claimable by earthwisps—while still being extremely hot. "Yes, you had best inquire with the smiths if they are familiar with the making of glass-handling tools," Lori said. "And what materials they will need."

"Off the top of my head, probably iron," Rian said dryly.

"Probably," Lori agreed, glancing at the plank again.

In all honesty, she still had no idea how to make bound tools. But then, she'd also had no idea how to make beads, and she'd managed it just fine. At least she had the components now. Beads, as sources of magic to fuel the bound tools. Metal wire, for conduits along which the magic will travel. Glass, for… uh… for… uh, something about binding wisps to the tool?

…

It was at that moment that Lori realized there was perhaps a crucial gap in her understanding of how bound tools worked, because what had seemed like a reasonable explanation she remembered from her early years in school in hindsight made absolutely no sense!