Weekly Digest 68 - (#209 - #211) (Patreon)

White Iridescence

They only managed to do basic experiments on the substance inside the beads, since Lori's tools, equipment and instruments were limited. The substance inside the bead felt disconcerting like Iridescence to the touch, and Lori had to resist the urge to wash her hands to clean it every time she made contact. Thankfully, unlike the colors, it didn't seem to be crystalizing, and she felt none of the telltale prickling on her skin of crystal growths embedding into her flesh.

The mostly transparent outer shell of the bead, which was about half a yustri thick and felt like glass but didn't produce the same sharp edges, seemed like a completely different substance from the cloudy white insides, but when Rian had suggested dropping some of the shards into water, the shards had also dissolved, resulting in the same cloudy water. Subsequent tests of more shards had showed that while the bead's shell didn't react to water when applied to its 'outside', when applied from the 'inside' the whole shell dissolved… which made no sense, since that implied the whole thing was made of the same material, and so should be equally reactive to water. Try as they might, they couldn't recover any sort of remains that could have comprised an outer-most water-protective layer.

"It's too early to try and look for explanations," Rian reminded her as she glared at the cloudy white water at the bottom of the small sample bottle. "Let's just note down cause and effect for now."

Lori grunted in acknowledgement. "But it makes no sense!" she immediately said. "How can it be made of the same substance? How does it not react with water from one side, and dissolve instantly from the other?-!"

"Don't obsess over it," Rian said patiently. "Just list it down as a physical property of the substance and move on."

Lori huffed in frustration, and went back to trying to note down the bead's properties.

Once the outer, glass-like shell was broken through, the material inside was very soft. While it didn't exactly crumble at a touch, since the bead was completely solid and without hollows or bubbles, Lori could scratch it with her fingernail. They used a beast tooth as a cutting and scrapping tool, since metal tools would likely cause seepage, and she didn't want to have to keep actively suppressing the wisps around her keeping her warm.

Trying to measure its density was… interesting. Cutting off a substantial amount of the substance, they dropped it into a glass bowl of water to dissolve it so they could try to weight it using some simple scales—really a plank balanced on a narrow block, so they could approximate how much weight in water the sample they dropped in would amount to by slowly adding more water to an equal-sized bowl on the other end—and correlate the amount of water displaced, but when the sample dissolved and rendered the water cloudy white… the water's volume and weight didn't increase.

At all.

The water rose slightly as the sample was added, but once it had been completely dissolved, the water level was the same as before they had added in the sample from the bead. They both stared. Lori started shaking as Rian duly wrote it down on his plank and suggested they heat the water to test the effects of heating and evaporation.

A small metal tripod was taken from Lori's equipment box and assembled, and the glass bowl was exchanged for a carefully made one of earthwisps with all the bubbles removed to prevent cracking and explosion. The stone bowl of cloudy white water was placed on the tripod while Lori made a binding of firewisps beneath it to heat the water indirectly, and thus slowly. They had to move to another alcove so that the water wouldn't accidentally condense and fall on the bead that had been broken open, which Lori also covered with stone just in case.

Then they sealed off the second alcove and watched from around a corner using a binding of lightwisps to reflect light so they could see what was happening to the bowl. Rian duly noted that it slowly started to boil as opposed to exploding, catching fire, or suddenly dissolving the stone bowl. Only when the water had all boiled away—there was no more bubbling—did they feel safe in returning to the alcove. On the bottom of the stone bowl were clumps of cloudy white residue.

Once gathered, and accounting for the altered shape, there appeared to be less of the sample than had been dissolved.

"But that makes no sense!" Lori cried as Rian noted it down.

"Actually, it's the first of its behaviors that make any kind of sense at all," Rian argued. "It's water soluble, and we were able to extract it again by evaporating the water."

"But it added no mass to the water! There should have been nothing to extract via evaporation! Water used to dissolve Iridescence doesn't leave Iridescence behind when it's been evaporated!"

"I know!" Rian said cheerfully. "I wonder if it's possible to dissolve in a volume of white Iridescence greater than the volume of water? Would you suddenly have a big mass of the stuff once all the water evaporated, or would it be concentrated and condensed?"

Lori blinked. "White Iridescence?"

"Well, it's like Iridescence, but it's white. And as far as I know, 'white' is one of the few colors Iridescence doesn’t do. Iridescence isn't silver either, but that's understandable, since that's more of a measure of how reflective a metal is…" Rian tilted his head. "Huh. I wonder how many of these properties other kinds of beads share?"

"We won't be breaking any open until I learn how to make them myself," Lori said sternly.

"I know, I'm just wondering… do you think it would be safe to try the fire test? See what happens if we heat it directly, with no water?"

"Not in an enclosed space," Lori said sternly. Warm and hot Iridescence crystalized at an accelerated rate, growing fast enough to be visible. BurningIridescence did so energetically, randomly, violently, and tended to spread hot particulates of the colors in the air that could be inhaled cause it to start crystalizing.

"Of course," Rian nodded absently, covering his nose and mouth with the towel around his neck as he lifted up the glass bowl the residue had been transferred to for a closer look. He frowned and moved the bowl away from his face. "Huh… could you shine a light on this, I can't make out details very well."

Lori split an annoyed look between her lord and the glass bowl he was holding, but raised up a finger, binding and anchoring lightwisps to the end of it as she made it glow with visible light, holding it up behind Rian's line of sight.

"Thank you," he said absently, frowning intently at the clumps on the bowl. "Is it just me, or are the ones in the bowl a different shape than the ones we took straight from the bead?"

They left the second alcove, and went back to the alcove with the bead. Lori pulled back the stone cover, then pried up a small chunk of the… white Iridescence… from inside the bead, before placing the new sample into another glass bowl. Even to the naked eye, there was some difference...

"These," Lori mused, pointing towards the samples that had been evaporated from water, "all seemed to be have formed natural right angles." Perfect right angles, at that, or at least as far as she could see. Each clump looked like several cubes fused together by their faces.

"And these seemed to naturally curve," Rian said in the same tone as he regarded the fresher sample. "See the underside, where you pried it up? It's curved there, like it's following the spherical shape of the bead. And look here… doesn't that look like separate layers?" He had to use the tip of the beast tooth to point.

They looked between the two samples, as if doing that would somehow reveal their secrets, even as Rian made another note on his plank. From the intent look he was giving the bowls and the movements of his hand, he seemed to be trying to sketch the two samples. Lori wished him luck.

Lori also replicated her initial accident in deliberately controlled conditions. Mixing a little bit of the white Iridescence into water and then claiming and binding that water led to the binding being imbued and the water becoming clear. However, dissolving white Iridescence into water in a stone bowl, and then claiming and binding the bowl again while it still held the water and white Iridescence solution did not cause the earthwisps to be imbued. Attempts to replicate similar results with other kinds of wisps, except for firewisps, also lead to a lack of reaction with the water.

"So does it react because it's the water you're claiming, then?" Rian mused. "Would the other kinds of wisps react if the white Iriescence were properly dissolved into the corresponding substance?"

"How would one even go about doing that?" Lori asked.

She had meant it to be rhetorical, but Rian had gotten a thoughtful look on his face. "Turn stone molten and then add it in?" he suggested. "Liquefy air and then add the white Iridescence. I'll admit, I can't think of how you'd do it for the others. "

"Just because there wasn't some sort of energetic reaction to being boiled doesn't mean the same will hold true for being exposed to temperature that would lead to molten stone," she pointed out.

"Something to carefully plan for before trying then," Rian said brightly.

Lori glared at her lord, but she couldn't really rebuke him. She'd been thinking the same thing.

However, there was something else all these experiments of trying to draw the… she supposed there was no other word to use be imbuement… from the water showed her.

Her wisps could anchor to white Iridescence. That… was bizarre, but almost, almostunderstandable. Usually, wisps would anchor to two things: other wisps and the substance they corresponded with. Thus, waterwisps could only anchor to water, firewisps to heat, airwisps to air, and so on, or they could anchor to other wisps, in which case waterwisps could anchor to earthwisps. This was why she needed to use certain substances when intending to anchor bindings. She couldn't anchor waterwisps or earthwisps to wood, for example. While wood could get wet and absorb moisture, the moisture could evaporate or seep out, or the water being anchored to could move.

But her wisps could anchor to white Iridescence. Any wisp could do so… despite white Iridescence not being made of water, air, light, darkness, lightning or heat, and it was very doubtful whether it could be considered earth, stone or mineral. Yet they anchored. Almost, she felt she could explain it. After all, beads were formed by using a binding of wisps to claim Iridescence, and having that binding be amalgamated into the colors. So, technically, white Iridescence was also composed of wisps, and wisps could anchor to wisps…

Except for the fact that the white Iridescence was a void in her senses. If her awareness was to be believed, the substance had no wisps of any sort whatsoever… even the ones that had been heated to boiling point to evaporate the water it had been dissolved into, which should have at least made it full of firewisps. But there was nothing, as if the white Iridescence were a living creature, or glass.

And yet, her wisps could anchor to it!

AND IT MADE NO SENSE!

"Do I include that last exclamation in the notes, or was that just for your own benefit?" Rian asked as he duly wrote down her findings.

"Don't include them," Lori said irritably.

"For your own benefit, for it," Rian nodded. "What next?"

Outside what had once been an alcove and was not an isolated room with only one entrance, there came a cough. "Rian? Your Bindership?" Umu's voice called. "It's, um, time for lunch. The food is already waiting at the table."

"Now," Lori said. "We stop and eat lunch. And then I go to my room and expand the demesne."

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Routine Set In

It was very tempting to stop expanding the demesne.

It was very tempting to stop going out to the edge of the demesne to practice and study forming beads

It was very tempting to just stay in her newly—and probably permanently—claimed alcove in the second level and devote her time to studying the now-opened bead. The substance inside, the white Iridescence as Rian had dubbed it, was fascinating, and defied her expectations of what it should act like, given what she knew had come together in the creation of it. How had it become like this? Was it like this for all kinds of beads, or simply wisp beads? How could she use this?

The questions and frustrations posed by the white Iridescence in the bead was a need she wanted, wanted intensely, to satisfy with answers.

She pushed back the temptation with experience. Admittedly, it was harder than pushing back the temptation to spend her money on honey bread or sweet rolls or new books, but she managed it.

While the bead was interesting, and the material information from it would probably be potentially useful, it was only potentially. Forming beads, and developing a method to mass produce beads, would definitely be useful. Likewise, expanding her demesne was a long-term investment that only she could grow.

So, tempting as it was, studying the material of the bead could not be her priority. Also, when she calmed down and the excitement wore away, Lori was able to realize that none of what she was likely to learn would be new information, frustratingly strange and counter-intuitive as they were. Someone would have decided to break open a bead at some point, and there was no one more likely to do so than the people who could make them: the Dungeon Binders of old.

That still made it information she needed to know, as a Dungeon Binder, but the realities of her situation meant that it was not her primary need. That didn't mean she wouldn't do it, just that she had to do it in moderation. Bead forming and expansion was a greater priority. And now that she had the resources, she also needed to learn how to make bounds tools—at least, Whispering-based bound tools—so that she could take advantage of her ability to make beads…

Besides, it was lunch time. They needed to eat, and afterwards she needed to go to her room and expand the demesne as she was scheduled to, because that was certain and sure and needful. It was the responsible, mature thing to do.

"Yes… yes, that sounds like a sensible set of priorities," Rian said as they finished putting away all of her instruments and glassware into the padded box and covered the large bead full of white Iridescence with a protective stone cover to keep out moisture and prevent accidents

Lori gave him a flat look. "You want to do more experiments on the bead, don't you?"

"…so much… but I understand. You're a Dungeon Binder, I'm a lord, we have responsibilities… even if it would be really nice to just spend time trying to understand more about the white Iridescence inside the bead…" Rian sighed. "So… we're going to prioritize trying to mass produce beads… that means we're going out to the edge every day?"

"Until I know more, yes."

"The edge that will keep moving slightly every day, so we can't even build a little hut to stay warm in." Rian sighed. "Ugh, I'm going to freeze."

Lori rolled her eyes. "You don't have to come, you delicate flower."

"Of course I do. What if you need notes taken? Besides, you'd have to talk to people without me."

She supposed she would. "I'll need a jar."

Rian blinked at the sudden declaration, then followed after her as she left the alcove. "A jar?" he said as he stepped out of the alcove, and Lori sealed it behind him, the stone flowing to seal the opening. It wasn't very thick, and someone stomping on the wall would be able to crack it eventually, but it was a sufficient deterrent for casual investigation of her bead.

"Yes," she said, not elaborating. Having some sort of sealed, relatively watertight container for beads to Iridescence to crystalize and grow in would help her in growing more beads. So far she'd been relying on the little that had been mixed in among the gaps of air in the snow, but that needed careful handling lest the snow melt to water and take the colors with it. The thought of deliberatelytrying to grow Iridescence made her shudder, but it was needed. As she'd slowly been finding out, the substance clearly had more uses and interactions with magic than she'd been led to believe.

It was probably deliberate. The inherent danger of being in Iridescence, the increased difficulty and rate of degradation of any sort of magic performed in it, and the possibility of instantly being executed for treason would have probably been enough to deter people from experimenting with the substance normally. Lori had certainly never considered doing so when she'd been in school. This probably allowed Dungeon Binders to reasonably restrict the information.

She was starting to suspect there were probably more uses than simply creating dungeon cores and beads…

"A jar," Rian said, nodding as she led the way her usual table. "Right. Got it. I'll see what I can find. What do you need it for?"

"Making beads, of course," Lori said.

"Oh, tomorrow you expect to make so many beads you need a better container to bring it back in so it doesn't accidentally fall off the sled?"

Lori paused. "Make it two."

So useful.

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Routine set in, despite the cold. The next morning, Rian took Lori to the edge, where she left one of the jars some distance away from the edge of her demesne, well outside even her most optimistic estimate of her current rate of expansion. Then she made beads.

From the previous several days of doing so, the basic components had become obvious. A bit of Iridescence was claimed by a heavily imbued binding, and the two would amalgamate, forming a bead. The size of the bead was mostly dependent on how heavily imbued the binding was, though the absolute minimum size seemed to be set by the volume of the Iridescence that claimed was. water had to be kept away from the process, but that was just to keep the colors from being washed away. Once the beads were formed, there was no longer any need to worry about them, beyond them getting dropped into the snow.

The one time that had happened it had been a rainbowed pain to find the bead again, since it had been cloudy white on white snow.

Leaving the jar outside of the demesne to allow Iridescence to crystalize inside it overnight allowed her access to more substantial amounts of Iridescence than what was currently available from the environment, especially after she started leaving a binding of firewisps inside it. The Iridescence quickly crystalized from the heat and from trapping the imbued wisps.

She didn't even need to extract the Iridescence from the jar to start binding. All Lori had to do was create bindings of wisps, heavily imbue them, anchor them to the frost on her belt knife, and stick her knife inside the jar so the bindings reached the Iridescence. The metal of the blade acted as a conduit for her, letting her initiate claiming the Iridescence. It soon became a process of finding what level of imbuement created a bead of what size. Even so, the finished products contained small but noticeable variations in size, even when she used bindings that were of equal levels of imbuement. Presumably, the size of the Iridescence 'seed' was what affected the end result.

Lori tried claiming, binding and imbuing the beads after they had been formed to increase their size, but it was a futile endeavor. The beads were devoid of wisps to her, and felt like glass under her fingers touch, even when she finally got back to her demesne where it was warm. She tried it anyway, both inside and outside her demesne, in case that made a different, but other than appearing as a void in her awareness of wisps, it made no difference.

She'd even tried pouring her blood on it and, when that had resulted in no effect, using waterwisps from her blood in the binding to make a bead. Their affinity allowed her to imbue the binding outside the demesne, confirming the connection, and she was still imbuing when she had the binding claim Iridescence, but as soon as the bead fully formed, it was like someone had overridden her claim, the wisps just coming out of her control, and there was only a bead, devoid and glassy.

Despite those failed experiments, she managed to increase her bead production. She was now coming back from the edge of the demesne with a jar that, if not exactly full, usually contained at least five to ten beads of a size close to the largest denomination, give or take a few chiyustri. It was a decent improvement over coming back with three small beads that barely reached minimum standard diameter, or a single large bead just a little bit past maximum standard.

Lori supposed she would likely have to go to some effort to make them closer to the standard diameters, if only so that they'd fit into the bead receptacles of bound tools without modification. Beads came in four standard sizes, starting at ten chiyustri in diameter at its thickest points—denomination marks would be a fraction of a chiyustri less—and increasing in increments of five. While modifying the bead receptacle would be easy—she'd seen it done once, with a metal lockbox wired to a bound tool—most owners of bound tools would probably be wary of such modifications. She'd never worked for a bound tool maker, but she'd heard enough stories to know they did not look well on those tool owners who made such modifications. Few actually refused to repair the bound tool in question, but steep surcharges were not unheard of.

Several new containers in her room slowly but steadily began to fill with cloudy white beads, each container filling with beads more or less the same size, or at least within two chiyustri of a standard diameter. It was another number for Rian to track, but Lori wasn't exasperated by this. These were potential saleable goods after all, and keeping track of inventory for sale was important!

Eventually, she started experimenting with trying to use molds and forms to try to get beads of the same size. Rian suggested to make them bigger than they needed to be and then just use seepage to reduce their size. The wastefulness of the idea made Lori shudder, but unfortunately it was the most efficient and effective idea she had to work with.

The distaste made her put the idea aside for a while, as she decided to focus on ways to increase her rate of production. There had to be a more efficient way to mass produce beads. At the rate she was making them, she would never be able to produce enough to make up for the amount of beads a demesne managed to consume with its bound tools in a day, which older demesne clearly had to be able to do to keep their economies running while still using bound tools! Lori reminded herself to not make the same mistake twice, to find a way to produce beads smarter, not harder…

This became part of her morning routine after breakfast. Fortunately for her delicate flower of a lord, this didn't take very long. Simply going out to the constantly moving edge of the demesne, retrieving the jar that had been filled with Iridescence overnight, making beads, and anchoring a binding of firewisps inside the jar, before securing it somewhere she'd be able to find it later. A pair of branches crossed together over the jar helped when there'd been a night's snowfall.

The rest of the mornings, she was able to maintain her demesne. The waste desiccator had slowly grown full, and the noxious air within it had to be vented, but the remaining powdery substance thankfully looked and smelled nothing like what had original gone in. Not exactly pleasant, but given what it had stared as… Well, definitely an improvement.

The desiccated waste was temporarily stored in one of the curing sheds where the planks that had been moved into the dungeon had been stored, where it would be kept until spring to be used for fertilizer, or turned into fuel far earlier. As long as it wasn’t spreading noxiousness and disease in her demesne, Lori didn't really care what happened to it. This also allowed more waste to be put in the desiccator, meaning their latrines could still be used.

She also performed maintenance on the other bindings maintaining the demesne. Not imbuing their bindings, but making sure they functioned as intended. In the case of bindings with firewisps, she had to make sure the temperatures were stable, and to destroy any excess heat, especially when it was heat that had been generated by firewisps. All she had to do was invert the firewisps. When she could, she simply moved the heat elsewhere, since it was winter.

In the afternoons after lunch, Lori expanded her demesne at least three times. Sometimes, when she felt capable of it, she did so four, or rarely five times. Once, when she managed to reach a particularly comfortable rhythm, she managed to do seven, but that led to her being sleepy and distracted at dinner, and passing out immediately when she got to bed. She didn't manage to find time to perform any experiments on the broken bead and its white Iridescence then.

Most days, she managed to at least find some time to open the alcove and pull back the protective stone cover over the broken bead. Rian was always there, taking notes, which she'd later transcribe into stone tablets that joined the rest of the other notes she'd transcribed over the months. It also took her an embarrassingly long time to try and claim the white Iridescence in an attempt to use to make beads, but the attempt resulted in failure. While her wisps could anchor to it, she couldn't claim and bind them like she could the colors.

It took her an even more embarrassingly long time to notice that, half a week later, the binding of wisps was still anchored to the white Iridescence she had tried to claim even after the imbuement had long run out.

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A Gap In Understanding

"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 too 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 they 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!