Chapter 60 A solid phase (Patreon)

Nathan pursed his lips as he looked across the workbench at Poppy. The short alchemist was looking at Nathan with a look of desperate hope. Nathan thought about what he could teach Poppy, and what made sense to teach Poppy.

He wants to learn more about alchemy, and has offered a favor to me. I’d certainly be happy to take a favor from an alchemist, especially one involved in ammunition manufacture. But I don’t understand alchemy. I understand chemistry. I understand it quite well. I could teach him chemistry? I could try to come up with something from chemistry he could use in alchemy. I think I need to understand alchemy a bit better, to know where he’s starting from and where he wants to go.

Nathan gestured with his head and they moved a little farther away from where Beatred and Herdin were arguing over the potential placement of the self-destruct enchantment so it would be able to destroy the weapon without interfering with its normal function.

Nathan clasped his hands in front of him, leaning towards Poppy. “I think I need to understand how you do alchemy. I need to understand where you’re coming from first before I figure out what would be useful to you.”

Poppy raised his bushy eyebrows. “Alchemy is the creation of magical potions and ingredients, usually by extraction of magical components from natural ingredients. Then those components are purified, processed, stabilized and mixed to produce the desired effect. The most difficult part is coming up with new recipes for new products. I’m hoping you can point me in a direction that will give me things to try. It’ll help me get a unique product and help me level. But more importantly, I just want to know more about my craft.”

And that’s why I want to help him. He just wants to know. Know how the world works, and how he can use the laws of the world to create wondrous effects. Much like me. But, it seems like he cares more about learning alchemy than chemistry. Magical vs. mundane. And I don’t know squat about how that works.

Nathan frowned, thinking. “Can you describe how you make a healing potion? Pretend I’m a complete novice. I don’t need the tiny details, but I’m curious how you think about it.”

Poppy shrugged. “It’s not a secret. Every alchemist makes healing potion, though most throw a twist on it. At its core, a healing potion has three ingredients. The first is essence of life, and must be filtered from bone marrow or crushed meat. Any marrow or meat will do, but that from a stronger and more vital creature produces a better product. Then you need essence of growth, which can be extracted from a few magical plants with different kinds of alcohols. The final ingredient is just crystallized mana made using a pretty standard basic spellform. Anybody can make it, though skilled mages produce far more crystallized mana of better quality that doesn’t evaporate so quickly.”

Poppy was getting enthused, moving his hands around to describe each process. “Then it’s pretty straightforward. You can just crush the crystallized mana and mix all of them together before it evaporates, but that tends to produce inferior quality that won’t remain stable for long. It’s far more effective to vaporize the growth essence and pass it through the life essence while you heat it and agitate medium-sized chunks of crystallized mana in the mixture along with a stabilizer. You need to pull the crystallized mana out at the right time though, or else it’ll start moving on its own. Fast enough to break the glass.” The orc chuckled, leaning back. “Everybody remembers the first time a basic healing potion blew up in their faces. At least it heals whatever it burns!”

What. Ok. Um.

Nathan smiled back at Poppy for a moment as he tried to reconcile what he’d just heard with the chemistry Nathan knew. The biggest problem was that he didn’t know whatever the hell ‘life essence’ or ‘growth essence’ was. It sounded like a lot of alchemy was extracting, filtering or distilling complex magical mixtures from previously-existing magical sources, then figuring out how to optimally combine them for the desired effect. Unless they were extracting some form of liquid ‘life mana’.

Nathan opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he ventured a thought. “It seems our disciplines approach this problem from opposite ends. With what I know, we try to break things down to the most basic building block possible, then rebuild up and understand every step along the way. That lets us generalize to other processes.”

Poppy shrugged again. “People have done further purifications on Life Essence, it’s a classic training exercise for a young alchemist. Make them figure out how to distill it down to the Six Primary Fractions of Life. Some are better than others for making healing potions but they’re all helpful and it’s not worth the effort for most potions. There’s a few specialty potions that use just the light gaseous extract of life though.”

Ahhh. It feels like we’re talking past each other. I don’t understand what he means by the Six Primary Fractions and he doesn't understand that I mean pure chemical compounds.

Nathan pursed his lips. “I don’t think that’s what I mean. I mean like how charcoal is mostly a single thing, while I think even the simplest of the Six Primary Fractions of Life are composed from many of those different components.”

Poppy cocked his head at Nathan, still confused. “But they’re entirely different categories. The Essences have an inherent magical nature, and while it can be altered, destroyed and subdivided, they are a different kind of thing than a base material like charcoal.”

Nathan shook his head. “My science is dedicated to figuring out how to combine base materials, and use several of them to modify each other to create a more complex and advanced material that has properties that none of the individual components have. It’s not a great example, but the way that gunpowder combines different basic material components, none of which explode, to make something explosive. Extrapolate that forward to more complex mixtures and you have some idea. My discipline doesn’t extract complex pre-existing mixtures, we start from purified single sources and make the desired product in greater purity and yield.”

Here I am, taking a giant shit all over the field of natural product chemistry. It’s ok, they can’t make their own drugs anyway, gotta rely on the greatest chemists to do it for them. Cells! Well, mostly plants. And Streptomyces.

The alchemist's eyes went wide, then narrowed. “That - sounds hard. But if you could make a magical reagent from base materials! You would have so much control! How could I get started with that?”

Nathan sighed. He was already teaching Stella electricity and magnetism, and they were making fast progress. But he spent a lot of time with Stella. He wasn’t sure he wanted to spend that much time teaching Poppy basic chemistry. He’d need to figure out what was going on with magical ingredients first. Nathan held up a finger. “Hold on a second, I need to think about this.”

What’s the right balance here? I don’t want to leave this guy with nothing. I want to help. But I don’t want to get stuck teaching him atomic theory and the rules of covalent bonding, especially when the payoff is so vague. Maybe I give him a few teasers and see where he goes with it? But I feel like he might get frustrated if I leave him with just abstract knowledge that doesn’t go anywhere quickly.

Is there anything I can give him that would help now? And help prove my point about using a base material in new ways? There’s gotta be something, Nathan, think.

So, Nathan reached back in his mind for something that would help Poppy. He searched for basic chemical reactions that would be helpful to the orcish alchemist. Maybe just classic acid-base chemistry? But to understand what was going on there needed knowledge of ions and polarity, and that was a whole bag of worms that led right back to covalent theory. Not the best starting place. And Nathan would be surprised  if Poppy didn’t already know a fair amount about acids.

Maybe - it seemed like alchemy involved a lot of extractions. Extracting magical essences from magical sources. There were some fancy ways to do extractions that Nathan knew about. He thought about good examples and found one after a few minutes.

Caffeine! They make decaf coffee beans by doing a supercritical carbon dioxide extraction to pull all the caffeine out. I did one with lemon peels in my undergrad chemistry lab. I think it’s used for a lot of different plant extracts too. You basically need dry ice and a heated pressure-tight vessel, since carbon dioxide goes supercritical above 70 atmospheres and about thirty degrees celsius.

{Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 9 achieved!}

Nathan opened his eyes and looked up to Poppy with a smile. “I have a suggestion of a new extraction method. Or I could give you some general hints as to how this idea of building up from basic materials. Which do you want?”

The orc looked slyly at him. “Extraction method.”

“So, this is a bit tricky, but there’s a component of air that can be made solid. It’s only present at low concentrations in normal air. But it’s present in higher concentrations in the air coming off a fire. It’s heavier than the other components of air, though not by much. If you can pressurize air with a lot of that component and freeze it extremely cold, then it will become solid. I bet you can do it with enchantments - it’s cold enough to burn you, but if they can make cold enchantments strong enough to put on a weapon it would probably work for this. The solid looks like ice, but much colder and it isn’t wet. You need to keep it well-insulated. ”

Poppy looked mystified, but Nathan plowed on.

“Then comes the interesting part. In normal air this special ice will just vaporize - turn to a gas. It’ll look like white trails are coming off of it, but that’s just because of water vapor in the air condensing. But when you put it in a sealed container, the pressure will keep going up as the not-ice vaporizes. Eventually, if the pressure gets high enough and the temperature is about at body temperature then it’ll turn into something that’s like a liquid but also acts like a heavy gas, and is amazing at extracting materials. The pressure is quite high, so do it in a really strong container. Then when you let the pressure off it all turns to gas, leaving behind just the extraction, without any solvents. If you put a grate in your vessel then the extraction will be under it, and all of whatever you're extracting from will be on top. It does happen at high pressure. Just need to be careful that your vessel doesn’t explode.”

Poppy’s mouth opened and closed for a minute like a fish. “I - think I understand? I need to try this. If it works - I could try this new extraction method on every raw material I use to see what I get!”

{Low-tier Lecturing 8 achieved!}

Nathan smiled, seeing Poppy pull out some rough paper and start scribbling very small text down. After a moment, the alchemist looked back up at Nathan. “I appreciate this Insight. I would ask you to wait for any more. I do not want to incur more debt than I can reasonably pay back.” He chuckled heartily. “And I expect I will be too busy trying to use this ‘solid air extraction’ for some time to brook any thought of additional explorations.”

Nathan blinked at Poppy’s last sentence, which had veered off into a florid and emphatic accent he hadn’t heard before. But he just grinned back at the orc and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good! Now let’s see what our betters have come up with while we were busy.”

With that they turned back to Herdin and Beatred. Beatred was holding the revolver prototype and pointing at the underside of it while Herdin was nodding along, considering. Nathan just caught the tail end of the argument about where to put the self destruct mechanism.

Beatred turned towards him and let out a frustrated sigh before she spoke. “Well. It looks like the self destruct mechanism needs to take up most of the space in the grip, and will thread up into the chamber mechanism a bit. We’re currently thinking that it will be heat-based, melting the grip and chamber if activated. Herdin says it’s not too hard to do that with a one-shot enchantment.”

The old lady sat back down in a chair, a self-satisfied smile on her face as she grabbed the metal panels that would cover the exposed innards of the prototype that Beatred was holding. She pulled out a pair of knitting needles from a pouch and started scratching on the metal inside of them. The action was pretty similar to knitting.

She spoke, not looking away from her work. “The trigger mechanism for self-destruct is trickier. We’re making a cursed weapon here. I’ve disabled enough of them to know the best ways to do it. The cleanest way is to imprint the weapon at the time of purchase, and then trigger the self-destruct the moment anybody else touches it.” Then she shrugged, never moving her hands away from her work.

“At the same time, that can lead to all sorts of accidents. I’ll slice it back to only trigger if somebody not the bearer holds the weapon for longer than five seconds, or they fire it, or they try to disassemble it. With the runes contained on the inside of the grip, it’ll be quite difficult for them to disable the enchantment.” She cackled. “It’s enjoyable to be the one making the curse, for once.”

She gave another few scratches, then looked up and pinned Nathan with her gaze. “Ah, boy. I meant to ask you. The better classes of enchanted arrows are made by adding layers of metal and enchanting each one separately. Is there a reason it wouldn’t work with bullets? I was thinking of stacking up little disks of enchanted steel, then melting lead around the outside to stick them together and make the outside softer than the barrel. Any reason that wouldn’t work?”

Nathan blinked. He hadn’t thought of that. It sounded like a great way to increase the enchantment area of a bullet. He nodded. “I think that would work. I’ve only heard of people putting steel in the bullet to increase how much it penetrated, but that sounds like it would work.”

Herdin hmmed, looking back down to her freehand engraving.

Nathan peeked at what she was doing. “Herdin, you mentioned owing me a favor. Do you think you could explain cursed items to me?”

She didn’t look up, but her voice was acerbic. “Oh, you want to be an enchanter now?”

Nathan shook his head, even though she couldn't see it. “No. I want to learn to break curses. I’m resistant to magic and figure it’s a good skill to have.”

The old enchanter did look up at that, her eyebrows raised and her gaze intent. “True indeed? Well, come closer and I’ll explain how you make a curse. To break a curse you need to understand that they’re made of triggers and mechanisms…”

After an introduction to curses, Nathan asked everybody to agree that he could share the existence of guns with the Heirs and the Guardians. He wasn’t planning on describing any of the Insights of how they were made, just the overall functionality in broad strokes.

Herdin chuckled. “The team of any adventurer who has a gun is going to find out the weapon exists. It isn’t blood from our wounds to have some of the best adventurers in the city want one. I bet you Stanel wants six. I agree, and I vote that we should also sell Stanel whatever he wants, so long as he promises not to give them to anybody else. I’ll handle the imprinting process.” She pointed at Nathan again. “That means you need to invite me along when you give the weapons to Stanel’s girl.”

Everybody else agreed to that, and Nathan got the distinct impression that Herdin had kind of taken over the gun project. He was fine with that. She had sworn the Oath, and knew how to coordinate something like this. If anybody could figure out how to use the potentials of the guns while keeping them relatively secret, it was the Bhos. Nathan would not be surprised if he got asked to bring in other Bho craftsmen in on the secret in the upcoming months, and asked if they could issue some to their younger generation.

Nathan would need to think how he felt about that. He didn’t want somebody like Simla to end up with a gun. Though Simla wasn’t a Bho. Apparently his family was a branch family that had made a hard split with the main family some ninety years ago.

Then Nathan discussed logistics with Beatred. He wanted to deliver the first set of guns to Sarah before graduation, and it looked like that was going to be possible in only a week or two, depending on how many hiccups there were with the final enchantments. At the end of it, he handed over the remaining balance of money, feeling more comfortable not running around with the equivalent of several thousand dollars in cash.

Nathan also asked Beatred for an additional custom item, drawing out a few diagrams. It wouldn't be particularly simple but should be easy to make with her resources. She shrugged and quoted him a price, making it clear that was the friends and family discount. He agreed and left the workshop, almost skipping on his way back to the Adventurer’s Guild.

Oh yeah. Everything’s coming together. Between the guns and teaching Stella electricity and magnetism I think I’ll both power up the Heirs and get enough favors to trade for Kia’s airwalking Insight.

Overall Status:

{Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 6

Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 6

Talent 3: None

Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 52

Class skills:

Stamina: 620/620

Juggernaut's Wrath

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Juggernaut's Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Utility skills:

High-tier Focused Mind 4

Mid-tier Earnestness 8

Mid-tier Sprinting 4

Mid-tier Spellsense 5

Mid-tier Notice 5

Mid-tier Identify 1

Mid-tier Dodging Footwork 3

Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 9

Low-tier Lecturing 8

Low-tier Tumbling 8}