Inks
Member
[3,841]
Naevius Squalidus - swaswj
Perseus Artifex - Inks
Naevius Squalidus - swaswj
Perseus Artifex - Inks
The workshop stood dark, lit only by the twin moons and a streetlamp some ways down the street. Naevius stared up at the building with a wry grin. His thoughts churned, churned, churned, as he steadied the rucksack slung over his shoulder.
Naevius looked up and down the narrow, cobblestone street. Quiet. Empty. In his canvas pants, with no shirt under his open lab coat, he should have been freezing. It was that sort of night – brittle and cold, with snow glittering on the rooftops and stamped into a brown slurry down on the street level. The sort of night he wasn’t used to, even now. He came from a place of towering trees and sun-warmed leaves.
He turned to the door. The handle held fast when he made to turn it. Unlocked.
...Unlocked?
Lips curled back to reveal a pointy-toothed smile. The door came open with a click.
Naev stepped inside, pushed the door shut behind him, and leaned against it, fingers tight around the doorknob.
He hummed thoughtfully while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the thick shadows crowding the workshop floor. Then he went around, lighting the oil lanterns hanging over the ground floor workstations. Only once every one was lit did he pause to look at the room in full. He moved over to the cluster of engineering tables opposite the shop's front door. He swept a clutter of nuts, bolts, and wires scattering to the floor and dropped the rucksack in the newly-cleared space.
Then he walked over to the opposite side of the workshop, another table covered in notes, blueprints, and sketches. Naevius pulled a mango from a pocket, biting into it as he considered the young man sitting there, head down on the table fast asleep, oblivious to the enlil standing over him.
Naevius heartily clapped Perseus on the back. "Wake the fuck up, we're doing science!"
Perseus startled awake under the touch. Blinking owlishly, the young Artifex sat up and locked eyes with his unexpected company. His dark hair hung in messy curls over his eyes. A bit of blueprint paper stuck to his cheek for a moment before slipping off and fluttering to the floor.
The young artisan’s clothes were rumpled, as though they’d been worn for a few days. The circles under his eyes remained dark as ever. His fingers were stained a deep blue-violet from some sort of chemical, as was a good portion of his current work bench. A cluster of vials - at least a couple dozen - littered the table, filled with a variety of liquids. Some were colored, some transparent, some thick, some thin. He’d failed to stopper one and it’d spilled over at some point, creating a strange, glossy glaze over a small section of the bench.
“...”
For a longer moment, Perseus said nothing, just stared at Naevius. His right eye flickered before lighting up with a cool, blue glow. “Ah,” he said, eventually. His eyes ticked down, then back up. “Naevius.” He cast about the room, taking in his own lit lamps, the windows standing dark. “You’re...here.”
"I am," Naevius confirmed. The eccentric chemist knocked on Perseus' skull. "You, however, are not. Here, try some of this." From a pocket, Naevius produced a vial filled with fine white crystals. He grabbed the other man's hand and tapped out a small amount of the substance.
Then, to show it was safe, Naevius tapped a small pile into his own palm and licked it before depositing the vial in a completely different pocket. Naevius started to chuckle quietly before a shudder ran through his body. He clapped his hands together sharply and belted out, "Yes! That'll get the neurons sparking!"
Turning around, Naevius sauntered over to the table he had dropped his bag on, biting into an apple pulled from somewhere unknown. "Come on, come on, we made a deal. You wished to learn, I'm here to teach. No time like the present!"
Perseus frowned at the tiny pile of powder in his palm. He imagined he could still feel Naev’s talons curled around his hand, and the man’s words only registered in an abstract, distant way.
‘What is this?’, he opened his mouth to say. “You touch too much,” he said instead. Then, flustered, added, “I don’t like it.”
His brow furrowed for a moment, then he followed Naevius’s lead, pressing his tongue to the powder and licking it off his hand. He recoiled quickly. Whatever it was, it was extremely bitter, sharp and unpleasant on his tongue, drying out his mouth. Pers made a strongly displeased sound and wiped his hand off on his pants. “...A drug?” Pers guessed, then blinked up at Naevius again. “A stimulant?” he hazarded further, considering the enlil’s own response to it. “Does your methodology require stimulants?”
"Can't teach someone who's asleep! It's caffeine, pure and concentrated but entirely legal." Naevius upended his sack, dumping a variety of smaller bags and a pair of jars that clanked loudly on the table. One rolled off but the enlil caught it with his foot just before it shattered on the floor.
"Tell me, my astute friend, what are we doing with these?" He slammed the errant jar to the table and waved a hand over the array of... ingredients. Flour, sugar, yeast, salt, oil, water. Everything had been labeled with bold, block letters.
“Mm.” Not bothering to tell Naevius that he didn’t strongly care one way or the other about the legality of his drugs, Perseus looked over the labeled bags and jars. He stared at them for a long, long minute, expression completely blank.
He kept his gaze on the jar of plain water as he said, “Cooking and alchemy aren’t similar enough for me to translate one to the other. Combining ingredients and utilizing chemical reactions to achieve something new...isn’t enough.” He frowned slightly and scratched at his chin, where a faint amount of stubble was starting to grow in.
"Is that a fact? By all means, regale me with your depth of knowledge in alchemy," Naevius replied, smirking. He opened the bag of sugar, dipping a talon in and then licking it clean. "Let's be clear from the start that I've promised to teach you in exchange for services rendered. Whether you learn from the lessons depends on you, my friend.
"Now, assuming you have no other inane complaints..." Naevius paused for effect and then hooked his fingers around the jar of yeast, sliding it across the table toward Perseus. "If you understand chemistry at all, you recognize that cooking is a chemical reaction. What is alchemy except another branch of chemistry?"
The enlil dropped down into a chair and swept his arm over the ingredients. "What can you make with these ingredients? How many things can you make using these ingredients and your own two hands?"
“A variety of doughs,” Perseus said without further argument. “Batter. A rudimentary glue.”
"Mmm, that is technically correct," the enlil replied before picking at his teeth with a claw tip. "Now for the practical: make something. I'm sure a bright lad like you has at least one recipe memorized. Can you make a specific dough out of what's on the table?"
Perseus hesitated this time. He felt distantly wary - like a trap had been set for him, waiting for the wrong move to cinch tight. He didn’t like it.
It reminded him of his mother. More recently, it reminded him of his time under interrogation from an otherworldly, threatening woman in a hood. It was a critical stare on the back of his neck as he sat in front of an failed enchanting array. It was a cold grip, painfully tight on his wrist.
“No,” Perseus said, finally. At Naevius’s raised brows, he elaborated. “I mean, I do. I have...at least one recipe memorized. I could probably make dough using these ingredients. But...a specific dough...following a recipe...”
Perseus caught Naev’s eyes and looked away, staring instead at the furnace sitting cold and dark on the opposite side of the room. “Recipes call for specific measurements. I could,” he stopped. Started. “I could guess at the measurements, but to be precise, I would need measuring cups. Which. Are not. On the table.”
That earned an approving nod from the chemist. Naevius pulled his dark shades off and dropped them to the table: his eyes were a bold orange, but also blood-shot and wild. Throwing his arms up in the air, Naevius shouted, "You just have to feel it!" He used a talon to rip open the bag of flour, dusting the surface of the table liberally.
Right on the surface of the table, Naevius began measuring out the ingredients. "Trust your instincts, you'll know the right amounts!" There was a gleeful sarcastic edge in his voice. Flour, water, yeast, sugar, oil, and salt were each dumped or casually measured by palmfuls or pinches. The bony enlil mixed the ingredients together by hand, until, slowly, everything started to come together, sticking into a big wad of off-white. Here, Naevius began kneading the dough, massaging away the wrinkles and homogenizing the mixture. As he worked, he began talking, instructing now rather than exclaiming.
"That's the problem isn't it? You don't find many who approach baking in such a lackadaisical, reckless manner. Old mams and grams might, but only after they've been whipping the same recipes together for years upon years! Yet that is exactly what people expect when you're learning magic.
"You're a man of science! You live in a world of measurement, precision. Even simple black powder requires a precise mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Too much one way and you get a smoke cloud, too much another and you blow up the barrel of your gun. You can't just wing it. And yet..!" Naevius held up the smooth ball of dough before dusting more flour onto the table and slapping the ball onto it. "it's possible."
Perseus looked from the mess Naevius had made of his table, the ball of dough sitting in the center of the chaos, to Naevius. He wasn’t quite sure what point the man was trying to make, yet. That, under circumstances in which measurements and pinpoint precision weren’t possibilities, ‘winging it’ was the only option? That Perseus should just...try? He had.
Pers blinked, owlish, and opened his mouth. “I don’t-”
Naevius threw an arm around Perseus and then rapped his knuckles against the man's skull. "You reject that which is illogical. Prayers and rituals, utter nonsense, yes? And yet, they work. Why is that?" A toothy grin spread and he answered the question, "Simply put, people are reckless! They invoke and conjure and summon with little regard for the potential consequences and no concept for the actual nature of the forces they seek to control. They're dumping handfuls of yeast onto a pile of flour. Then… when they manage to get the right ratios somehow, they always do, they just keep doing it until the method sticks."
Finally, Naevius released Perseus and reached into an inner pocket of his lab coat. "I've seen the fruits of your labor, mister Artifex, around us and in the hands of your customers and in the device you concocted for me. You have wit, intelligence, and the spark of creativity. The fact that you 'cannot' perform alchemy or create an enchanting matrix is not due to a lack of skill. It's because you lack the specific recipe. More to the point, you lack the means to measure. Spells require latent metaphysical energy, visae, but how do you measure a cup of life force, eh?"
Still a bit flustered, a bit put off - he wished Naevius would stop touching him so abruptly, and so often - Perseus nevertheless stared at the enlil with rapt attention. Now, it seemed, Naevius was getting to his point. A means to measure magic. As far as Perseus was aware, nothing like that existed.
Naevius pulled out a glass implement. It was like a ruler, with numbered notches up the center and a graduated color scale. "There exist materials which can serve as temporary conduits for visae. You may be thinking of terra regia, but I would consider those a more permanent form of storage, at least until they've been sapped by us. This is made of such a material." Holding it up for Perseus to see, Naevius demonstrated its usefulness by beginning to cast a spell. "O wondrous light, give me sight beyond sight, give me eyes on the inside that reveal what ails my addled mind!"
Sarcastic though the prayer was, as he spoke, the segment of his tool began to glow in the yellow area, ticking up a few notches. As he finished the spell, the color snuffed out immediately, but his eyes glowed, hiding the bloodshot nature. It was successful.
"Visae is measurable, with the proper tools. If it is measurable, then it is real. That was a novice spell in the School of Castus. Sincerity and faith are not necessary, but certain words do effect a change in the flow of visae. If you dislike the ones that we know to work, you're free to experiment and find your own. Putting that aside, this spell requires 10 eras of 'yellow' visae. This next one, on the other hand…"
Naevius swished one talon through the air, tracing a simple sigil in the air. As he did so, the visae ruler lit up in the blue section, ticking up to the eighth of one hundred marks. The spell completed, and the tool vanished from his hand, only to reappear seconds later in the other. "Eight eras of 'blue' visae. The energy has no color of its own, mind you, but there are different types coursing through your body, and different schools draw on different kinds. I've calibrated this so that each school is associated with a different color on the scale.
"Each tick is an era, and there are one hundred in each school's color. Unfortunately for you, this is a system of my own devising. I've shared it with a few students but it's up to you to learn how to work with it and determine how to draw out the different types, how much each spell requires. Testing, trial and error, study… all things you're used to, yes?"
“Yes,” Perseus said, or echoed, eyes fixed on the object in Naevius’s hands. All of his previous discomfort and lethargy was gone, replaced by a hungry, wide-eyed stare.
Naevius handed the device over. It was heavier than it looked, smooth on the front but textured on the sides and back. "I call it a kunimeter, but call it what you like. It's a bastardized eloian word."
Perseus took it, and turned it over in his hands. Once, then again. Then again. “A kunimeter,” he repeated. Curiosity burned bright in his two-toned gaze. He was thinking, thoughts racing. A means of identifying and measuring, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the aetherial energy required for alchemical work...
There was only one problem left.
“I’ve...tried...” Perseus said, slowly. He turned the kunimeter in his hands again, eyes still on it. “I’ve tried casting, before. Both verbal and somatic spells.” He shook his head, absently. “This would allow me to measure visae, once extracted from the source. I still require a suitable means of...of extraction.”
He looked up at Naevius, meeting his eyes for a fraction of a second before settling his gaze somewhere over the man’s shoulder instead.
"An appropriate choice of words," Naevius remarked, dropping into a chair and snatching up his shades from the table. He waved the glasses around as he spoke, "I've seen your capability as a machinist, but your workspace leads me to believe you've some understanding of chemistry even if alchemistry evades you. Extraction, perstraction, supercritical solvent separation, all very well-known methods, yes?
"The key question then becomes what is the source? What will you be extracting your aethereal component from? The answer may come as no surprise at all, and yet…" Naevius leaned forward, sliding his shades back on but staring at Perseus over the frames. He rubbed his talons together excitedly. "You're not going to like it one bit."
Naevius grabbed Perseus by the hand and suddenly jabbed a talon into the inventor's fingertip. As Perseus yanked his hand away, the enlil had to suppress a laugh as he held up the talon, edged in a tiny drop of… "Blood. It's not the only option, mind you. Visae is present throughout living bodies, so most fluids and tissues which are not excretory are vessels of some amount. Assuming you aren't presently occupied with a lover, however… blood is the most accessible. And it must be fresh, so don't go thinking you can fill up vials of laniger blood from the butcher." Naevius paused and waggled his hand. "I mean, you could kill a bird or rat or something each time you concocted a potion. It made up the basis for many savage tribes stumbling into magic, after all, and hey, if it's good enough for prehistory, it's good enough for you!"
Perseus said nothing, but he watched Naevius with rapt attention, still cradling his injured finger to his chest. He wasn’t sure, yet - couldn’t be sure, not until he had a chance to do some testing - but this felt. Good. It felt like progress. A break-through. A revelation. Whatever it was, it was what he’d been looking for.
The enlil plucked an empty vial from a pocket and held it up. Holding a talon up to a low notch, he explained, "A thimble-full of blood is plenty for most novice-tier abilities. Beyond that, again, experiment! And learn to do it without the blood, you don't look like you have too terribly much to spare." Naevius pressed his thumb into the tip of his middle talon until he pierced through. Holding the tiny wound up to the vial, he let it slowly drip up to the line he had marked.
"Each drop of blood contains all of the different forms of visae, and extracting one form ruins the blood. That means that, at best, you're looking at an eighty-percent loss in potential energy by using blood as your medium. However, pleasantly enough, you don't need to perform complicated filtration via separatory funnels or Soxhlet extractors. Think of it like… a magnet drawing iron out of a solution. Spells and alchemical reactions search for their reagents."
Naevius tipped the vial and let it drop onto the kunimeter. With each drop, all five colors lit up, increasing gradually with every drop. They didn't rise at exactly the same rates, however. "To cast a spell or power a Cantatus array or catalyze a potion, you must have enough. If you use too much the excess is wasted but the reaction will, generally, succeed. In other words, your gun barrel won't explode. Shouldn't explode." The bird leaned back in the chair and shrugged. "I mean, my sample size for testing isn't vast. I picked up on old-fashioned 'magic' pretty easily so this study into alternative perspectives is merely academic for me."
“No,” said Perseus, eyes bright. Gone was the owlish, sleepy-eyed young man who Naevius had startled awake. “This is perfect. Well. No. Perfect is defined as ‘excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement.’ Perfect doesn’t exist. Still, this is...” Pers pressed a thumb to his bottom lip, thinking. “This is what I needed,” he settled on.
Utilizing Naevius’s proposed solution would likely take a lot of trial and error - hours of tedious extraction, measurement, experimentation, testing, evaluation and correcting. It was the sort of work that Perseus didn’t mind, however. Part of him even thrived on it, on the effort it took to develop a satisfactory end product. In fact, compared to some of Perseus’s processes and pursuits, this was almost...simple. No, it was simple.
As simple as blood.
Perseus glanced at Naevius. Once he’d looked away again, he said, “I should have thought of it myself.” There was something almost wistful in the young man’s tone.
"You could not have," Naevius stated bluntly. He had pulled a pear from somewhere else in his lab coat and was chomping into it, speaking with his mouth full. "My observations and the derivation of this method were based on combined knowledge. I could cast magic, I could perform chemistry. They always say that in a land of the blind, a one-eyed hag can be queen. What they don't say is that it takes both a man of keen intellect and a man of dim vision to produce lenses to correct that vision."
How the two things were related, he didn't say, but he did expound, "You cannot know what 'right' looks like if you've never seen it, and you cannot know if your correction works without someone who needs it."
Naevius finished off his pear with one final crunch and then reached into another pocket. The hand came out empty and he seemed mildly surprised before shrugging. "I trust this concludes our arrangement?"
Perseus, already rummaging in one of the drawers attached to the underside of his worktables, made a vague sound in response. He needed paper, and ink. Or graphite. Whichever he found first.
He had calculations to make, and a few hypotheses to test. A ‘thimble-full’ could measure anywhere between two and six millimeters depending on the size and make of the thimble - he’d need to confirm a more exact measurement. If a ‘novice’ tier spell required a ‘thimble-full’ of blood to fulfill the visae requirements in an alchemical reaction, would the next spell tier demand two thimble-fulls? More? Was the demand more likely to be additive, multiplicative? Exponential? Various tiers of spells tended to demand specific quantities of terra regia to initiate added effects; perhaps Perseus could reference those amounts and extrapolate. Or perhaps not.
He’d need a syringe for extracting blood, as well - he had several needles and syringes lying around, but he’d need to check a few books to confirm the best type for performing a venipuncture. Phlebotomy wasn’t particularly one of his strong suits. Yet.
Abruptly, Perseus turned to Naevius, wild-eyed and nearly vibrating with energy. “Your stimulant, the caffeine. It’s. It’s good,” he said. “You probably already know that. Knew that. Anyway, yes. Thank you. I can -” the young man made an absent gesture. “I have a lot of work to do, now.”
He fished a length of graphite and a few pieces of paper, singed on their corners and crumpled slightly, out of a drawer. He smoothed the paper flat on the first clear surface he could find and started scribbling out notes. When Naevius eventually saw himself out, Perseus didn’t even notice.
..