The Way Ahead

Chapter 86b: Burning Questions

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 Fissaths will. That flatly wasnt how combustion worked, but he wasnt 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 wasnt 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 theyd 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 hadnt 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 couldnt all be versatility winners, but hed take hot, bright flames as a tool in his arsenal any day. Maybe firevine oil could be of use there? He wouldnt be stupid about storing it, if nothing else. He could create an airtight container with Apparatus, and while it wouldnt 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 wasnt 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, Im making the page. Itll 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 didnt occur naturally anyway, and Edwin couldnt remember the conditions needed to create it.

Red phosphorus was the more common allotrope, and was mostly stable, in that youd 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 wasnt 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 wasnt 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 couldnt summon the alchemists 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 didnt know the answer to, or just didnt 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 couldnt help but feel slightly jealous of.

At least both of them knew exactly where the other stood in regards to the other, and didnt have to second-guess. Plus, he saw firsthand how their relationship gave them stability to change. Why couldnt he have someone like that to banter with? Inion didnt count, naturally. She was all but contractually obligated to travel with him and provide constant sass. Fissath almost counted, but Edwin knew she didnt 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. Hed 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 Edwins standards, but that was hardly a surprise), and Wendell well, Edwin honestly wasnt sure what Wendell did on a daily basis.

That left Edwin with a massive suite of additives (everything that wasnt 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 didnt exactly like Cope, and the man was almost certainly going to rip off Edwins creations and claim them as his own anyway, so Edwin had even less incentive to give the man a veritable philosophers 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 wasnt 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 Sappers 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 wouldnt 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 wasnt really needed.

Skills were such an utterly insane cheat by their very nature, so much so that a lot of industries- including glassworking- didnt 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 didnt want to think about how much magnesium had been produced to provide the piles of sand they used for glassmaking At least Cope didnt 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 didnt have centuries of methodical trial and error, seeing what did or what didnt work. That meant Edwins 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 wheres home? Ive 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 didnt care about science talk. Or maybe it wasnt the science talk, but him instead? Honestly, he didnt 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 wasnt his problem. It would probably be Thorils problem, actually. Or maybe Wendells.

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 wasnt totally just more sand, by once more hinting at his man of mystery past (to Fissaths mixed annoyance and amusement).

It turned out that even with the strange origin of the labs 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.

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 werent 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 didnt 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