"Ah-choo!" (Nina)
I glance over at Nina, who's sitting on our mansion's kitchen counter, fiddling with an Ophelle {AN: Rubik's} Cube that I handed her from Percivil's pre-wedding stockpile.
Still storing away the groceries we just purchased for a special project of mine, I raise my eyebrows at her.
"Dragons can sneeze?" (Mizuki)
Nina smiles mischievously, a dark chuckle escaping her lips.
"Fufufufu...oh yes. Someone must be praying to me for their life." (Nina)
I stare at her for a moment, open my mouth, then close it. That's really not something worth addressing, right?
The sounds of light footsteps and a creaking door pull my attention to the kitchen's entrance, just in time to see Alto appear around the corner. I flash her a knowing grin.
"Hey, Alto. What brings you here?" (Mizuki)
Her sapphire eyes narrow slightly at the question.
"Do not play coy with me, Mizuki, you know very well what I'm doing here." (Alto)
I blink innocently, glancing at Nina briefly as though needing inspiration.
"Ah, I guess this is the kitchen...are you here for a snack? I don't now what kind you're looking for, but I'm sorry, Nina probably ate all of it." (Mizuki)
Nina rolls her eyes at me while continuing to fiddle with the Ophelle Cube. Alto just purses her lips tightly, clearly unamused, and slowly walks towards me, each step clicking dramatically on the floor.
"For three days, you have kept the top floor sealed off with a forcefield, occasionally disappearing for hours, only to return with a huge grin on your face. And for three days, I have been deprived of an explanation at every turn. Ciri refuses to enter without your permission, and Yona just stays invisible and pretends she's not around when I call for her! Ilina offers to sneak me in there, but only if I can put her in touch with someone who specializes in, quote, 'quietly disappearing no good sluts'.
"You just keep claiming it's a surprise, and that you'll show me on the eve of the Royal Announcement. Well, now it's the eve of the Royal Announcement, Mizuki. I know you're doing something science-related in that room, and I demand to be included immediately." (Alto)
My face breaks out into a massive, shameless grin.
Ah, how could I forget? Yes, there is something else I've been sneaking away to tend to in my spare time these past few days. As it happens, Percivil no longer needs the top floor of the mansion for his crafting projects, and I only need to keep a small section of the massive room dedicated to my own smithing endeavors. Which, left me wondering...what, oh what, should I do with all that extra space? Something cool, right?
So, I built a research lab.
Oh, and I'd like to clarify...I don't mean a shitty one. I went all out, pulled out all the stops, wrung my little magic-addled brain for every single iota of creativity I could muster. All to create magical versions of as much semi-modern equipment as possible. And, I've got to say, I totally killed it. No, truly...if there was a piece of equipment that I remembered, seemed useful to basic chemistry or biology research we might do, and didn't require a computer or round-the-clock power supply, I built it. I'm confident that when Alto sees what I've managed to recreate, she will lose her fucking shit.
Also, note to self – I may need to keep a closer eye on Ilina. Those, uhm...working elves, that Jorah solicited to 'court' me a while back? Yeah, there might have been a couple...err, run-ins, with the bolder ones of them in the streets of Eden during recent days. Naturally, I was a little worried about how Ilina would react, but she was surprisingly chill about it. Unnaturally so, in retrospect, and now these comments to Alto have me thinking I should probably make sure there aren't young elven ladies of the night going missing in droves.
Pushing these minor concerns from my mind, I return my attention to Alto's near-murderous glare. I widen my eyes dramatically, as though in realization.
"Ohhh, that's what you're here for! Sorry, must have slipped my mind." (Mizuki)
For a moment, Alto's expression freezes...right before it transitions into a smile so sweet it sends a shiver up my spine. Her tone turns light, unbothered.
"Well, we all make mistakes, I suppose. Who knows, your private bath schedule might slip out next time I'm around Ciri. I can only hope that Ilina doesn't get the wrong idea." (Alto)
My face immediately pales, and I let out a nervous chuckle. Somewhere upstairs, a forcefield I've kept active for a few days evaporates into thin air.
Almost as if she can sense the spell fade, Alto's lips twist into a smirk.
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
I teleport Alto and myself into the middle of the lab, and immediately her eyes widen as we both fall into what I assume is appreciative silence.
On the far end of the room, a wall-to-wall, almost floor-to-ceiling cabinet of metal and glass displays tools and glassware galore – apothecary bottles, decanters, flasks, beakers, graduated cylinders, mortars and pestles, glass syringes – the list goes on. Everything glass I made myself, while granite items like the mortars and pestles I had Ciri make under my supervision with her newly acquired earth affinity, since Nina was busy.
Along the right wall, a massive parchment hangs in a metal frame, displaying a hand drawn periodic table. It's an incomplete one, admittedly, since I can't even remember all of the names of the really heavy elements, much less their atomic weights. However, in a display of memory that surprised even me, I'm pretty sure I have all but a few outliers down to radon filled out and categorized properly, complete with atomic weights accurate to a percent of error.
Looking at it now, I become confused all over again. Didn't I have an exam where we had to do basically what I've done here, and didn't I get a C on it? I can distinctly remember sitting in the exam room, writing answers that I can clearly remember in retrospect are wrong, but...
The train of thought begins to give me a migraine, and without even realizing the transition, I quickly have my attention elsewhere.
Multiple, separate cabinets border the periodic table, some full of various common dry chemicals in labeled apothecary bottles, and some full of common liquids in labeled decanters, separated according to safety standards, all of which I alchemized preemptively. Lots of pure water, acids, bases, alcohols, as well as Tris powder, magnesium and sodium chlorides, ammonium persulfate, acrylamide, and TEMED, deoxynucleotide triphosphates, and more...anything useful with a chemical structure small, simple, and common enough for me to remember and alchemize.
Along the left wall, numerous metal tables sit, supporting different variations of boxy and cylindrical equipment made of metal and glass. Then, standing directly in the center of the room like a kitchen island, a massive aluminum table ties the room together, its surface full to the brim with various square and circular engravings, a number of small, copper insets bordering each apparent set of the strange shapes.
Finally, in a corner to our right, the debatably most complicated, yet the most necessary, piece of equipment sits – a rectangular, glass-encased metal frame housing a pendulum and two slowly spinning metal arrows on a circular, engraved background. In essence...I built a clock, the first genuine one on this planet.
It's very basic, will have to be resupplied with magic every few days to keep 'ticking', and I doubt it's perfectly in sync with this planet's day cycle, but...I feel the most pride when I look at it, more than anything else here. It should track seconds, minutes, and hours pretty close to what I was used to from Earth, and it will at least give Alto and I a standardized way to quantify key experimental parameters.
I glance back over at Alto, a shit-eating grin on my face, just in time to see her finally coming out of her stupor, her expression still frozen in disbelief. She walks quickly ahead to the heavily engraved metal table in the center, pointing at one section as she casts me an excited, inquisitive look.
"What is this?" (Alto)
{AN: From here on, there will be spoken references to many pieces of scientific equipment and materials that, in my opinion, are unlikely to have language counterparts on Azura, and should therefore be instinctively spoken in Mizuki's native tongue, English. However, it would be quite a pain to italicize and note them with brackets. So, just autocorrect it a bit in your head. I'll try to remain cognizant of the more relevant dialogue implications, like what terms Alto would need clarification on.}
I walk over, glancing at the specific design.
"These have two features – mixing and temperature control. You place a beaker here, flow magic into this insert to automatically stir the solution, this insert to heat the beaker and its contents, and this insert to cool the beaker and its contents." (Mizuki)
She gives me a puzzled look.
"Beaker?" (Alto)
I smile, gesturing for her to follow me, and walk towards the periodic table. Just below it, there's a plain table with no magic features whatsoever. On its surface lies a large, leather-bound notebook, and stacked on the floor below the table are several similar but smaller notebooks. I flip open the large one on the table, revealing page after page of – admittedly shitty – illustrations of the various items all throughout the lab, complete with their names, pronunciations, and intended uses. I leave it opened at one of the pages for glassware, where the beaker explanation is included, and hand it to Alto.
She takes it with eager hands, and begins scanning through the book with intense curiosity. I stand there for an unknown number of minutes as she continues to read through page after page of the book while walking around and looking at the corresponding equipment. Occasionally, she'll find something she's heard about from me in theoretical discussions before, or be particularly enamored with the description of a novel tool, and she'll exclaim to herself.
"C-Centrifuges!? The ones that increase gravity without magic!?" (Alto)
I wince a little at that one, both from the grandiose, oversimplified explanation I once gave her, and from being reminded about my struggles with creating these. They felt essential to me, if we ever plan to step into any kind of biology research, but I was stuck on actualizing the mechanics for a bit. Constructing the actual machine was rather simple with alchemy spells, but powering its rotation with magic was surprisingly difficult for me.
Gravity manipulation, wind spells, even half-assed ideas about magnetism – I kept trying to implement these spells to replace an electric motor, but there was always a problem. Too magic intensive, too much friction and heat production, too complicated of additional fabrication requirements. Then, I had an epiphany...or rather, realized I've been a complete moron for far longer than I'd like to admit.
One of the most fundamental applications of magic is manipulating standard particles, yet I somehow failed to grasp how sophisticated that means the manipulation can be! Until now, I've only been attracting and repelling, accelerating and slowing, and increasing or decreasing energy states. The forcefields I love so much are just encoded with a basic property – repel matter – no discrimination, no nuance in the forces applied.
It actually took insight from Alto, unbeknownst to her, to make me realize how shortsighted I've been. During one of our recent 'research' sessions, while wrestling with this problem, I was reminded that she'd already recreated a silent version of her basic wind spell. And when I asked her how it worked? She just gave me a puzzled look...'I just will the air molecules to get pushed in one direction', she said!
It's so simple in retrospect. I mean, for gods' sakes, my alchemy spell fully rearranges subatomic particles into new, ordered structures. I've made forcefields that only allow permeability in one direction. What do all these things imply, if not that you can will particles of magic to influence standard particles' motions in specific directions, as long as you can visualize it in sufficient detail. And, it occurred to me – if you can do that, can't you make complex vector maps with variable, magic-induced forces across their area of effect?
Once I realized that, so many magical devices became so easy to design.
For the centrifuge, all the enchantment required was a ring of magic superimposed around the edge of the rotor where matter is accelerated according to tangential vectors. The pendulum clock I made uses the same kind of enchantment to power the primary gear of the pendulum's escapement mechanism. Also, by pretty similar principles, magic motors are now trivial for me to construct, making cars, boats, and even planes achievable!
It did occur to me that this kind of magic application, which I'm tentatively calling vector spells, could be used to directly facilitate flight with far greater magic efficiency than my spacetime manipulation spells. However, since that would rely on accelerating every particle in one's body uniformly via a precise, complicated distribution of magic, I've been hesitant to attempt it, lest I shear my organs apart by mistake.