Chapter 86: Burning Questions (Patreon)

“Xares above, I swear if those two don’t stop scheming soon, I will personally throw them off the branch.”

“I’ll carry Keir if you get Rhita,” Edwin agreed, handing Fissath one of the white logs they used for heating the kiln, “Are we aiming for the river?”

It had been two days since the sabotage/attack from Othniel’s group, and now that they were back in the lab, Keir and Rhita were busy planning their countermove against the rival alchemist. Normally, Edwin may not have minded overmuch, but instead of heads together, quietly plotting in the corner, they were very loud and very much in the center of the room.

“No, if we just retaliate with midnight smoke, it’ll just look derivative! Besides, don’t you think they’ll be expecting that? They probably have some Skill like whatever it was Edwin has that’ll nullify the attack. What we need is something that’ll break their kiln.”

“We don’t wanna escalate, though! If we break theirs, they’ll break ours, and then Fissa will really throw us off the branch. ”

“So they can hear us, then,” Edwin noted, “I just wish they’d listen to what we actually said.”

“You’d think they’d be smarter about it then,” Fissath muttered, “Pipe it down or take it outside!”

“What’s most important,” Rhita carried on, “is that they don’t see it coming, and that it doesn’t give them cause to keep growing in scope. Like… maybe instead of using midnight smoke, we lace their beds with noctan. Then, they sleep at least a full day.”

“Bah! You with your sleeping powder. Can’t you come up with anything original? Besides, we want escalation. If they escalate too much, then we can get the Guild involved!”

“You want to get the Guild involved? That’s just outright telling the boss that we can’t handle it. That he can’t handle it. You really want to tell him that?”

“Hm. True. Well… what about if we fill their canteens with canopia? That’ll work!”

“No, that would be too obvious. The traces would be everywhere.”

“Obvious? When did you care about being obvious? They smoked us out two days ago!”

“Okay, that’s it!” Fissath threw down her tongs, “Edwin, are you ready?”

He set down the log he was getting ready to hand off, “I’m getting Keir?”

When the pair saw Edwin and Fissath actually going after them, they dashed outside, their argument continuing even as they fled.

“But it was specifically tied to the lab! If we…”

Edwin gave his coworker a glance and a shrug, then together they went back to their work.

----

“So what are these things anyway?” Edwin hefted one of the white logs.

“You’ve never seen arycal before?”

Getting- and keeping- the kiln lit was quite the feat. Half of Edwin’s day, or so it felt, was spent keeping it running, and his curiosity about what they were using for fuel had only grown as he kept working with it. The kiln dominated nearly half of the wall it was in, the black, alchemically treated clay reminding Edwin slightly of Blackstone. A hole in the wall opened to a cavernous structure with enough room to hold several crucibles suspended within, as well as a few flat surfaces where other objects could be set. While quenched, the interior was nothing but an inky black void, but when lit, it glowed almost white-hot, eerie shadows spilling from its mouth into the grander laboratory, but that was nothing in comparison to how brightly the furnace itself glowed.

Even Fissath, who claimed she had Skills to prevent being blinded by bright light, used goggles made of almost black glass when looking inside the furnace part of the kiln. Edwin, for his part, managed to get an entire level in Adaptive Defense when he accidentally looked into the lit fire under and surrounding the kiln’s ‘oven.’

Whatever the white logs- arycal- were, they burned obscenely bright. So bright, Edwin couldn’t help but wonder if he would be able to use them for flashbangs. Hence, his curiosity.

“I’m not going to claim that I know the full story, but Wendell loves to boast about how my family’s fortune is thanks to an alchemist, which is not true,” she angrily shoved another log of arycal into the furnace and slammed the door, “We had Skills that were more than adequate for centuries before whatever Alchemist came up-”

“Master Pyroalchemist Sadi!” Keir ‘helpfully’ provided.

“Shove it up your tailfeathers!” Fissath rebutted, “Before whatever alchemist came up with this stuff. It’s a mix of some kind of alchemical metal and kiangah,”

“What?”

“Kiangah. You don’t know what that is?” she tapped her talon on the floor, “It’s… ah… fireclay? Keir, can you pipe up for once when it would be actually useful?”

“Don’t bother me! I’m busy.”

“The one time I…” she sighed, “Thoril! Explain kiangah to Edwin.”

“Do I have to?”

“Do it! You’re not doing anything important right now.”

“Neither are you!”

“Thoril!”

“Uuuggghhh. Fiiine.”

“Quit whining before your talons turn brown!”

“That expression doesn’t even… Bah. Edwin, get over here! I don’t want to keep yelling. Oh! That was fast.”

Edwin just shrugged. Casual Longstrider use had paid off, and while it was tricky navigating the cluttered lab without running into anything, he could manage it if he really worked at it these days.

“So you wanted to know about kiangah? Do you know it by any other name? Fireclay? Lightstone?”

Edwin shook his head.

“It’s this magic stuff that glows a bit blue or green in air, or you can use to set fires. If you leave it out, it’ll be contaminated and turn kind of yellow or with a bit of treatment, red, but the pure stuff burns really hot.”

Something tickled the back of Edwin’s recollection, and he desperately hoped he was wrong, “Does it… show up really weirdly to any magical tests, like it’s all but nonmagical? And spontaneously catches on fire at times?”

“Yeah! You do know it, then.”

“…Please tell me you don’t use white phosphorus as fuel in your furnace.”

“Wait, you don’t know it as phosphorus but you do know it as phosphorus?” Ah great, Polyglot was acting up again. It always did that when there was a word it wasn’t entirely sure how to translate. He wished he knew what caused it so he could stop it, but he wasn’t having much luck in that regard, “How do you know the technical term for it if you’ve never heard of its more common names?”

Edwin shrugged, but his mind was still racing with the revelation that they used phosphorus for fuel. White phosphorus, no less. Well, at least they had some kind of… they used a metal as well, didn’t they?

Please don’t actually be lithium, please don’t be lithium.

“And the metal you mix with it?” he hazarded.

“That one is this stuff we call elektron, or when purified, sianaaka. Though, you might know it as magnesium. It burns hot and bright, do you know it?”

At least it’s not lithium.

Edwin closed his eyes, held his head in his hands, and quietly screamed. This… this was fine. Totally fine, he was sure. That they decided to use a mixture of magnesium and what looked to be white phosphorus was totally fine. Never mind that magnesium flames reached temperatures above 3,000 degrees celsius, and white phosphorous had a nasty habit of spontaneously igniting at room temperature, or even just when exposed to air.

The only way to ensure that white phosphorus wouldn’t suddenly catch on fire simply from exposure to air was by storing it underwater, but whatever idiot was responsible for this travesty had mixed it with magnesium, which could- in its elemental form at least, such as when it was on fire- react with and burn under water.

“Are you… are you okay?” Thoril asked, and Edwin worked to regain his composure, moving his hands together and pinching his nose.

His eyes closed, he breathed in and exhaled, “I will be.

“I’m just trying to reconcile the fact that someone decided that the perfect fuel to use was a mixture of a metal that burns hot enough to boil iron, even while underwater and an element that spontaneously catches on fire when exposed to air.

“I just… I just need a minute, is all.”

“You know, it’s kept alchemically stable. You specifically need a Skill or a bit of liquid fire to ignite it.”

Edwin inched an eye open to stare skeptically at the blue-skinned man, “And is Master Pyrealchemist Sodi-“

“Master Pyroalchemist Sadi.”

“Same difference. Is he-“

“She.”

The glare redoubled, “Is she still alive?”

“No.”

“How did she die?”

Thoril shrugged, “Lab fire, some… oh, five years ago?”

“Really.”

“Yeah, really. It was a shame, too. Complete loss of her and all of her notes. Burned to the branch.”

“Any idea what started the fire?”

The alchemist scoffed, “No. How would we know that?”

“So let me get this straight. The inventor of this stuff died in a fire five years ago, in a blaze so intense it burned down her entire lab, and presumably was strong enough to overcome whatever fire resistance Skills she may have had, and I’m guessing she likely made a lot of it?”

Nod.

“Great. So she died in a fire, but you don’t know how it started, and you just blindly figure that this stuff is stable because it probably needs a Skill or alchemical firestarter to get going?”

Nod.

Edwin massaged his temples. He was almost sad that she was dead, because that meant he couldn’t track her down and punch her squarely in the face. Actually, he might still be able to. He just needed to figure out if magic made either resurrection or time travel possible, then use that with the sole purpose of bringing alchemist Sadi face-to-face with him, just so he could give her a solid whack to the face.

She had combined two ingredients commonly used in fireworks into a literal explosion waiting to happen. Why, just why would you do that to yourself?

At least on the bright side, Edwin supposed, she wasn’t around to keep setting things on fire. Her legacy would have to settle for being the creator of an unholy abomination against lab safety.

Edwin’s head fell back into his hands, and this time, he didn’t hold back his scream of frustration.

-----

“No. I’m not touching those things.”

“You had no problem earlier. Come on, nobody else will lend a wing, and it’s so much easier with two.”

“That was before I knew what they were!”

“Where did you learn all that about alchemical ingredients anyway? You don’t have a clue how to make a potion, but you randomly know the proper names for phosphorus and…”

“Magnesium.”

She clicked her talons against the floor in a motion that sounded like a finger snap, “That.”

“I had… let’s say an unusual education in alchemy.”

“What? That’s it? The mysterious Alchemist-Errant, rolling into town with Polyglot on your lips, strange potions nobody has ever seen before, and learning a bit of alchemy, no ties to hold you here?”

Edwin flashed a grin at her, “That’s me. Mysterious. Enigmatic. Fascinating. Other words that vaguely mean unknowable.”

Fissath shot him a glance that… hey, that was probably annoyance! He was slowly picking up on avior body language, “You’re incorrigible.”

“You started it.” He poked back.

“Just hand me the arycal, would you?”

Edwin looked at the dormant firework with skepticism, “Could I borrow a set of tongs?”

She looked to the ceiling, “Here. Use mine.”

While the fact they were iron wasn’t the most reassuring, given the metal usually boiled at something like 2800 centigrade- less than magnesium burned at- they were at least something. It had been an unpleasant revelation that he’d likely been on the knife’s edge of death last week when he had been making his fever elixir. If not for his mastery of Firestarting, to the point where he could completely contain the effect to precisely where he wanted it, the Skill area of effect would have included the arycal logs in Cope Hall, and probably set them on fire. That would not have gone well.

Even contained in a magical kiln that was supposed to be as insulating as alchemy could manage, Edwin could still feel the heat emanating from the fuel, reaching him as he stood near the arycal stock and looking at a very impatient avior.

“Right, right. Sorry, sorry. I’m just contemplating mortality.”

“Yeah, well do it after handing me the arycal. I do not want to have to get the kiln back up to temperature and you don’t want me coming over there.”

Edwin reluctantly agreed and gingerly picked up a cylinder from where it was stacked- though he hadn’t noticed it the first few times he handled the substance, they were slightly hexagonal for easy stacking - with his borrowed prongs. He moved it over to where Fissath waited, handling the block like it was radioactive.

It made it all the more stunning when the glassblower picked it up in her bare wing, opened the upper hatch to the furnace, dropped the log inside, and withdrew another burning block without so much as gloves. She studied the arycal, broke it in half, and tossed it back inside the glowing furnace.

She turned to see Edwin’s dumbstruck expression, and Edwin got a sense of smug satisfaction from her, “What? My family’s kilns burn hotter.”

Edwin quietly resolved to never, ever get on Fissath or her family’s bad side.

-----

With the recent revelation that the kiln burned at- or rather, could burn at; there was some magical or skill nonsense going on that made the arycal burn slower and cooler according to Fissath’s will. That flatly wasn’t how combustion worked, but he wasn’t going to argue with the magical fireproof raptor- with the revelation that the kiln could burn at high enough temperatures to outright boil iron, Edwin realized he might finally have a chance to make more lime.

Of course, they also apparently had white phosphorus and magnesium- no, he still wasn’t over that- lying around somewhere, so lime might be somewhat redundant. Other than his slickstone, its nigh-frictionless surface still full of so many possibilities, and his supermortar and its very sticky properties, he could probably rebuild his arsenal but better with the new elements, if he could get his hands on them.  He could make magnesium into a better flashbang grenade than he could when heating lime, he could use white phosphorus for his obligatory chemical burn weapon.

Even mundane versions of the two highly reactive elements were dangerous enough on Earth, and that was before he tried to Infuse either of them. Who knew what sorts of off-the-wall attributes they’d have once magic got involved?

Some very, very careful tests on his days off with arycal showed that Infusing it just made it burn even hotter than before. He hadn’t tested much- barely a gram of the stuff- but he was able to feel the heat radiating from a good three meters away. That was significantly more than the mundane variant, and that was a terrifying thought.

More extensive tests would need to wait until he had better access to their elemental variants… and possibly when he was less sentimental about his limbs. Still, an inexplicably ‘stable’ variant of white phosphorus was incredibly tempting, and he knew that he would test it eventually, once he had figured out some safe testing methodology.

From what his Memory told him about phosphorus, it should be possible to turn it into a smoke bomb, an incendiary grenade, a remote source of ignition, and more! All it would take was a few war crimes, but what else was new?

Magnesium, for its part, was largely used as a structural metal, usually in an alloy. It was also used in… firestarters and fireworks, thanks to its high temperature and bright flames.

Well, they couldn’t all be versatility winners, but he’d take ‘hot, bright flames’ as a tool in his arsenal any day. Maybe firevine oil could be of use there? He wouldn’t be stupid about storing it, if nothing else. He could create an airtight container with Apparatus, and while it wouldn’t stop white phosphorus from changing into a different, more stable allotrope, it should help cut down on sudden fires.

Phosphorus was a really neat element, and in most of its forms was... relatively well-behaved. Edwin could, without even leaning too hard on Memory, recall three forms of the element: black, red, and white. Just like how carbon could form itself into graphite, graphene, diamond, or nanotubes depending on the geometry of the atoms in the crystal, so too could phosphorus.

So could chocolate, for that matter, but he was digressing enough. After all, it wasn’t like he was actually writing a science textbook.

…Wait.

Would it make more sense as just being part of the ‘phosphorus’ page, or should he make a dedicated ‘allotrope’ page?

Screw it, I’m making the page. It’ll be more useful in the long run.

In any case, black phosphorus was the most stable of the bunch. It was, essentially, carbon-free graphite. Scientifically fascinating, relatively useless for Edwin. It didn’t occur naturally anyway, and Edwin couldn’t remember the conditions needed to create it.

Red phosphorus was the more common allotrope, and was mostly ‘stable,’ in that you’d need it crushed and powdered before it would decide to suddenly catch on fire. It still burned pretty well, though a solid block of the stuff needed exposure to a flame before it would catch fire. Edwin was moderately sure it was the kind used in matches- or rather, match boxes. If a match wasn’t strike-anywhere, the phosphorus actually used to ignite the match was kept in the rough texture on the side of the box. Naturally, that was an effort to reduce the frequency at which matches decided to randomly ignite on their own, because even red phosphorus could be a problem child like that.

Now, white phosphorus Edwin had heard described as literal hell in elemental form, just missing the brimstone. It had an ignition temperature of 30 centigrade- room temperature- and even below that it would glow in the dark just from its reaction with oxygen. If that wasn’t enough, it was also toxic, burned ridiculously hot and fast, and was generally a really, really bad time.

What kind of an idiot would include it in their regular fuel supply?

Was there necromancy in this world? He needed to see if he couldn’t summon the alchemist’s ghost just so he could see about punching her in her ethereal face.

“So… what was that whole rant about?” Inion asked, kicking her feet in the air while lying on the bed, looking at Edwin with wide eyes.

He sighed, “Alchemists are reckless idiots.”

“They are.”

“Oi!”

-----

It took a little while to fully settle into a routine. The workshop, while far, far from what one might call a well-oiled machine, did have a certain balance to it, which Edwin, predictably, totally demolished when he came in. Fissath was perhaps the one person who actually enjoyed the change, as she was no longer the primary outsider among the group.

Thoril was naturally annoyed for the fact Edwin kept getting pawned off on him whenever there was an alchemy question whoever (usually Fissath) he was talking to didn’t know the answer to, or just didn’t feel like explaining. Wendell was mad at Edwin for refusing to answer the questions about why he had Polyglot, or what Skill he had used to avoid the effects of midnight smoke. Rhita and Keir were probably the least affected, largely because they were already in a self-contained struggle and ongoing argument that Edwin couldn’t help but feel slightly jealous of.

At least both of them knew exactly where the other stood in regards to the other, and didn’t have to second-guess. Plus, he saw firsthand how their relationship gave them stability to change. Why couldn’t he have someone like that to banter with? Inion didn’t count, naturally. She was all but contractually obligated to travel with him and provide constant sass. Fissath almost counted, but Edwin knew she didn’t really care about him, just about the role as a lightningrod for annoyance he filled. Besides, their workstations were next to one another. Who else was she going to sass? It would be rude for her to ignore him, anyway.

In any case, it all added up to an emotional balancing act, one not aided by the cannonball that was Cope and his temper. He’d praise the assistants- usually Wendell- for random things, and flip out at others for just as random a cause. While Fissath had managed to fight him back from his attempted position of ‘check the entire furnace every day for sabotage,’ it had been quite the fight, and it was only won in the end by pointing out doing such a check would take up a sizeable fraction of the day to perform.

Ah well, that wasn’t really his problem. His job was to try and make porcelain. Well, that was arguably all of their jobs, but they were all miserable at note-taking. Oh sure, their writing was just fine, they all relied on their Record to, well, record things. And they didn’t like copying it down onto paper, which just made it so much better.

From what he could tell, Fissath was there to function as support and play around with the standard set of glassmaking Skills to see what she could accomplish, Rhita and Keir were neck-deep in bone samples and experimenting with that suite of additives, Thoril was constantly getting stuck measuring the differences between samples (nowhere close to the specificity or consistency of Edwin’s standards, but that was hardly a surprise), and Wendell… well, Edwin honestly wasn’t sure what Wendell did on a daily basis.

That left Edwin with a massive suite of additives (everything that wasn’t bone) to experiment with, a task he took to with gusto. He was, of course, fully aware that attempting to make porcelain through making some sort of crystal and then shaping it via magic was not the route to go. But, he didn’t exactly like Cope, and the man was almost certainly going to rip off Edwin’s creations and claim them as his own anyway, so Edwin had even less incentive to give the man a veritable philosopher’s stone capable of transforming mud into ‘white gold.’

All told, he hardly saw any reason to not experiment with magical glass. It was a really, really cool substance. While contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t a slow-moving liquid once it cooled, it was an amorphous solid- a sort of liquid-solid, where instead of settling into a nice crystal when cooled, all the molecules making up glass just stopped where they were, in a giant mess of spaghetti polymers.

Sure, while Sapper’s Apparatus had made glass less important for him personally, he strongly suspected that Infusing various aspects of the process would result in some very fun results. He wouldn’t have expected to get half of the utility out of limestone that he had when experimenting with concrete, and he was way more experienced as an alchemist now as compared to back then.

The first thing Edwin noticed, once he actually got underway with his work, was that Fissath tended to work with pure silica glass. Back on Earth, he was fairly certain nobody worked with actual pure silicon when glassworking, instead preferring to mix it with various minerals and metals- like lime, for that matter- in order to make the sand easier to melt and work with. However, thanks to the way Skills worked, that wasn’t really needed.

Skills were such an utterly insane cheat by their very nature, so much so that a lot of industries- including glassworking- didn’t bother figuring out how to cheat any further. No, they just used Skills to crank up the temperature and duration of the flame- including making some utterly obscene fuel- until they could just melt quartz glass outright.

It did produce some truly stunning results, though. Fissath functionally made crystal glassware on command, clear or colored and strong. Even without her Skills, Edwin managed to get surprisingly clear glass when first learning how. Apparently, it was thanks to the purity of the ‘sand.’

Instead of using naturally sourced sand from a desert or the beach, they instead got their silica as a byproduct of whatever process they used to get pure magnesium from its ore, used primarily for what else, but arycal. He really, really didn’t want to think about how much magnesium had been produced to provide the piles of sand they used for glassmaking… At least Cope didn’t have too much sand, and the majority of their glass utilized in experiments came from recycled and purified failed results.

Small mercies, he supposed. Small mercies.

In any case, one benefit of Imperial glass being pure silica was there was a ton of room for experimentation. They didn’t have centuries of methodical trial and error, seeing what did or what didn’t work. That meant Edwin’s first task was just recreating what he was used to from Earth; soda-lime glass. It was easy enough once he remembered the soda part of the glass, and got his hands on some sodium carbonate, a task not as hard as he had anticipated.

It still took several days figuring out the right blend of ‘soda,’ ‘lime,’ and ‘silica,’ but he was at least working from known principles. It did result in a few uncomfortable questions from Fissath about how he knew so much about glassmaking, but he was able to subtly deflect it onto his ‘man of mystery’ persona.

----

“I heard someone mention it back home.”

“Who? And where’s home? I’ve never heard of this. You have to tell me.”

“Oh, you know, here and there. Man of mystery, remember?”

“I regret ever saying anything breezing that way.”

----

Once he had his basic glass, it was time to perform measurements. He calculated refractive index in private, tensile and compressive strength in public, and happily explained his methods to those who would listen.

Well, he would have, and when Fissath curiously poked her head in, he happily tried explaining what he was doing. Once she retreated in confusion, Edwin sighed. He should have known better than to talk science with people. Even alchemists apparently didn’t care about science talk. Or maybe it wasn’t the science talk, but him instead? Honestly, he didn’t know which would be worse.

He dutifully recorded all the results of his experiments in Almanac, naturally, and left much more abbreviated notes, more in line with what Cope had provided him, in a notebook. How they were planning to read it once he left- did Polyglot affect his writings yet?- he had no clue, but that also wasn’t his problem. It would probably be Thoril’s problem, actually. Or maybe Wendell’s.

With baseline measurements complete, it was time to get fun. Sparks and mirrors! Something like that.

It was time for magic.

He made sure to sell the lie that he was adding a special ingredient to his glass that wasn’t totally just ‘more sand,’ by once more hinting at his ‘man of mystery’ past (to Fissath’s mixed annoyance and amusement).

It turned out that even with the strange origin of the lab’s sand supply, Mana Infusion resulted in the same strange superfluid-like behavior. Fortunately, it behaved as a normal superfluid, and not the sort of craziness that liquid Helium got up to, and stayed in its crucible even as he melted it, quenched it, and pulled it out to start taking measurements.

Was it clearer?

No. Bad Edwin. Wait for the results of the measurements.

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Almanac Entry: Glass

Glass is primarily composed of silicon dioxide, or quartz, made by melting down some types of sand and then allowed to cool. Unless done by a high-level glassmaker, the melting temperature of glass is too high for practical uses, and it must be mixed with another substance to be workable. See GlassVariants for more information.

For a full technical breakdown on the properties of glass, see GlassStats. For a detailed description of what glass is, see GlassExplained.

When making Infused pure glass, the point at which the mana is Infused during the creation makes no difference (see GlassTestsA). While Infused sand (see Sand) has strange superfluid-like properties, once melted and cooled, there is no measurable difference between it and glass which was Infused while molten.

Glass made while Infused retains all measurable properties of glass (see GlassTestsB), including refractive index, despite becoming noticeably more transparent, to the point of near invisibility in some situations. As of now, the method by which these two facts work together is unknown.

Most interestingly, glass made while Infused is transparent to mana- Basic Thermokinesis will not work on it, but will instead pass straight through as though it weren’t there at all. This is in distinct contrast to normal glass, which will block or intercept magical effects. Flight will similarly refuse to latch on to it, with the tether instead passing straight through as though the glass didn’t exist.

This property remains even if the mana is later somehow removed from the glass.

Glass that is infused post-creation will gain the additional transparency to light, but does not gain the mana invisibility.

See also…

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