Uhhhhh

Don't blow yourself up?

Record?

Oh right, recording, I should in fact do that.

"This is Alex Marche, and I am about to attempt to play Opus Magnum in real life using my cool new magical powers.  Because it would be cool if I could produce actual stuff with my magic.  Here goes nothing.

"...Really, the most uncertain thing is how big the result is going to be.  For all I know the atoms will be atoms, or they could manifest at actual diagram size.  Neither of those really make sense to me, but I'm sure stranger things have happened.

"...The question will surely be shortly resolved, anyway.

"...Or I could think of exactly the wrong thing to think of and majorly fuck over the idea of immediately transmuting mana into stuff by this paradigm.  Eh.  There's bound to be something I can do.  So let's see what there is.

"...Oh, hey, I know.  I could port Spacechem's syntax and modality over to the oh-emm board.  And maybe see if I can find some duplication hacks.

"...Hm, that might...

"...Okay, attempting to use alchemical symbols and chemical symbols as some sort of absurd duplicative interchange by way of salt is maybe a bit of a huge stretch.  But.  I'm gonna try it anyway."

"...Just need a sheet of hex paper..."

And once she has secured that, she begins a period of grave intellectual suffering.

On the plus side, she's figured out that she can probably make the waldos activate - or await - the grippers, to avoid synchronization issues!

On the minus side, instruction reference hell is upon her.  And she has to do almost all of the designing in her head.  She only has a color pen.

Still, the design is...

If not easy, still trivial.  It intakes NaCl 'atoms' (at factors she has worked out to be about one salt cube), feeds it into the conversion zone, separates the resulting two 'atoms' of alchemical salt, feeds those out of the zone one 'atom' at a time, and outputs NaCl twice by way of a cunning stratagem known as "if you pull a 'salt' in a given direction you clearly ought to end up with the chemical-salt it was made of trailing the path of the waldo" and "whatever picks an object up in the Conversion Zone determines the rules defining those 'atoms'".

Now it just has to actually work when she starts feeding it.  She has the salt packets.

Amazingly enough - it does.  The waldoes wald, the grippers grip, the board works like it should, complete with solution display...

And one salt packet becomes two salt packets.

"...Take that, thermodynamics!"

AAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA I AM A GOD

[solution.mp4]

For my next trick, I will perhaps actually transmute something!  Actually, huh, there's a thought.  I could use something like the same trick, but doing a sort of infinite-loop out of H2O -> Ag.  Or Au, or Cu, or...  A variety of metals.  Possibly more with additional alchemical symbols.  Anyway I should...  Probably ask Wren if she knows anything about conjured matter.

Wren:

So, after much mental gymnastics, I just gave E=mc^2 the finger.  Should I be...  Worried about that.

You probably didn't actually

And not unless there's an unsettling hole in reality, the thing you duplicated is still duplicating, you're hearing odd whispers telling you to kill people, etc etc etc

Actually

Maybe yes

Usually your own magic will refrain from harming you

Unless you're doing something weird and/or stupid and/or daring

But most 'conjured gold' just vanishes after a couple hours, leaving the sorceress in question feeling foolish for thinking it was that easy

Well, what I did was start with real material, then abuse conceptual translation layers to [accurate description of the thing seems like it isn't properly supported in English, but 'cause a dupe "glitch"' isn't far off].

...Oh, I've had a horrible idea.  By which I mean a brilliant idea.  See, lead into gold actually has less mass iirc the chemistry.  So clearly it would concentrate the lead's spiritual weight and make it less vanishable than the lead was.  (Notwithstanding that I fully intend to pun off of pencil lead, instead, because real Pb is, you know, bad for humans.)

...Anyway.  She has this information to test, now.

Which...  Is going to be kind of a pain, actually.  It's not like she has stuff she can use for this just sitting around.  ...Or does she?  If she pops open some of the transparent 'capsules' some of her meds come in...  That might actually fit the salt nicely.  At which point it's a matter of keeping an eye on them every so often, and seeing if there's less at some point.

...Come to think of it, I think 64C -> 1Ag is also, uh, overkill, atomic-numbers-wise.  But I am not going to start messing with mercury.  Mercury is also bad for humans.  And equally incredibly overkill by mass.  It's kind of annoying.

Go ahead and try it, I guess?

You're the one with freeform does-what-you-want magic here, not me. Only thing I can make is ash.

A lot of witches use silver, gold, gemstones, quicksilver, sulfur, whatever, in their rituals. It does seem to help.

Yeah.  Power of everybody thinking.  ...I wonder if you could ...observer-effect, like, a ~spiritually-stretched-out spool of silver wire, into being real without it taking a fuckton of magic?

Say, what even is your ash made of, anyway?  Like, it's magic fire, it just happens, so if there's ash from nothing, what is it?  Or, uh, do you mean just, 'I can burn stuff'.

...Anyway.  I really do need to get me some shiny rocks.  And some sort of...  Something.  Crafty.  Hm.

Actually, maybe I could make...

...Well, the problem with that idea is that I don't really have 3D construction, just 2.5D...  Maybe if...ugh, no, that would be rather a risk of bad associations.  Even if it would make sense.  ...Or maybe I could do some kind of origami with it.  For values of origami that likely involve far more cut-and-paste than is traditionally permissible.  Eh.  Not like I'm Japanese anyway.

...But.  Yeah.  I think I can make this work, actually.  3D Opus Magnum here we fucking go.

Maybe I'll even let myself have arbitrary-length manipulator arms.  As a treat.  ...I suppose I could do waldoes...

...Anyway, details of the tricks I'm trying to play on reality and myself aside, I...should probably actually do that if I'm gonna.  Wish me luck?

[...Alex is typing...]

...Oh no.  The gearing.  Maybe if I just pretend I can actually sightread base 6 everything will be fine and I won't have to worry about it.  ...Hold on, how many ticks can I put on a hexagonal gear of size s...

6*s, duh.  But can I actually...

...well, I can probably create a 1- or 2-tick gear.  And if that -- Oh, yes, it should.  Okay.  Okay, I can create a 2, which means that I can turn a 6 into a 3 - does it? fuck - oh wait, duh, triangles, which means I can probably bodge something together out of that to run a base-ten counter, if nothing else by stepping 60 down by 6:1...

Man.  Mechanics are really hard.  Especially when you're attempting to build them out of shapes you can build out of the centerpoints of hexagons and squares.  ...I do wonder if I could make a triangular grid work, though.  It might be useful...  Though, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure it actually adds any degrees of freedom.

Uh.  Sorry if I'm just rambling on about something you don't want to hear, my brain just tends to take what rubberduck space it can get and this is getting pretty dang complicated on me all of a sudden.  So many bodges...

Anyway I am actually going to go try this now.  Wishing me luck still appreciated.

At least (pencil-)lead into silver is a pretty well-solved problem.  You just run a refining tower.  She could quite probably program one of those in her sleep.  Or blindfolded.  Even with the added step of taking the 'yes it is definitely lead she's feeding this input, she swears,' apart.

I mean I can burn stuff yeah

And I have about 5% of an idea what any of the rest means

Most of it's actually videogame stuff.  This may surprise you, but I'm actually a neeeeerd.  ;P

...One trip to the school supplies store later...

She's just spent like 50 bucks on 0.9mm pencil lead that she really hopes she'll be able to make up for, financially, by selling some fraction of the resulting little silver beads.  ...She could step them up into half again as much gold, but she's not quite sure it would be worth it.  Maybe platinum, though, that has industrial uses and it's incredibly rare and valued.  (Ssh, this is totally what happens when you allow gold to step up in a refining diagram.  There's an alchemical symbol for it and everything, y'know!  ...Actually, though, the exchange rate for platinum is better if she does it as gold plus silver like the alchemists thought, even if it complicates the top of her tower a bit more!  Hah!)

(...Then she actually checks the market rates, and the point of doing that is rendered moot by the price of gold somehow being twice that of platinum in the present market.  Curse that fucking plague and its aftereffects.)

"Alright.  Test 1: Concentrating pencil lead into silver and gold, by alchemical means.  Firing up the solution..."

Yep.  That works just fine.  The little jars she gathered for this purpose fill up admirably, with little 0.9mm cylinders of silver and gold clinking into place.

"Haha!  Haa.  Yeah.  Okay.  So.  I'm gonna make sure this doesn't disappear overnight.  And then if and when it doesn't, because it shouldn't - I bet there's somebody who needs gold around here.  Ohhhh, we are getting some good shit done.  Haaah.  Whew.  End recording."  She pushes the button to end the video file, a mixture of exhausted and utterly elated.

She's gonna have a good time working in this mode, even if it's a pain in her neck to plan it.

Hey OS, guess who just turned lead into gold?  It me!  I am it!  Ancient alchemists eat your heart out and praise our lord and savior Zachtronics!

I am incredibly hyper right now!  Despite also being fucking exhausted, physiomagically speaking!

*claps*

Vidya is probably really rich with nice concepts to build spells on, whether the 'fully free-form' or 'cultural zeitgeist' theories are correct. Not EVERYONE plays video games but millions and millions do.

Do you have something to fight with yet? Try 'protego'?

Maybe tomorrow. I bet ur tired.

Didn't I already say I was going to do Jedi shit?  But yeah there's definitely something to the idea of reappropriating Rowling's stuff for purposes she'd be horribly offended by, the transphobe.  And yeah.  Tomorrow.

In the morning, Alex's pajamas are noticeably tighter in certain spots, and looser in others. And she's also very hungry.

Well, the dining hall is all-you-can-eat once you're in there.  And she needs to be somewhere there's people anyway, if she wants to find someone who can help with her various projects.

She grabs some protein bars and sets off to set up for that - though she has a bit of a morning struggle with her jeans and eventually decides that to hell with it, she'll wear her fancier pants until she can get new ones.

...That's gonna play merry hell on what she, despite all evidence to the contrary, alleges is a budget.  Maybe she can sell some cantrips?  She does have the option of trying to push her gold and silver production, anyway...

Hm.  Selling cantrips like she's some sort of roadside attraction wouldn't get her what she needs anyway because it's not like she can take credit cards, she's not a business, and she needs liquid funds in her bank account if she's gonna be ordering stuff online.  Which she probably is.  Well, no, which she definitely is, but most of the surefire things are for various purposes that are not clothes shopping.

That said, her gold refining would make a damn good showpiece.

(And it hasn't disappeared at all overnight!  Unlike the salt, which...  She had wondered why it felt like the recipe was trying to pull more mana out than she would actually let it take for that.)

(She'll have to create a better virtual particle management idiom.  Or just settle for having to eat that cost.  Now that she's thinking about it, the gold spell felt a bit like that too.  Which is...  Odd.  What would have happened if she hadn't pressed so firmly?  She doesn't actually know.  ...She could experiment with...  Tin?  Iron?  Copper?  Something that eats less supply if it just suddenly vanishes.  ...She's not sure if there won't be confounders, though, given that she's still dealing with chemistry in her alchemy.)

(...A quick google informs her that while she was close with her guess that iron might well suffice for a cheapish test, she is, despite her misgivings about the 8:1 compression, going to need to refine to copper before the number of protons going in becomes more than the number of protons going out.)

...A pigeon lands right in front of her and holds out one leg, which has a small paper tied to it, cooing.

...And does that detect as a trap or a poison or something?

(...She is one with the Force and the Force is with her, she is one with the Force and the Force is with her...)

Yeah, the pigeon's magic, but it's not a trap as far as she can tell.

What is it with wizards and absolutely disdaining the normal post?  I just got a messenger pigeon.

"...Hi there.  Is this for me, then?"

It pecks the paper loose from its leg, then flutters off.

OS replies:

Idk

Faster, maybe? If one already has messenger pigeons for hobby reasons?

I think that's a hobby anyway.

They used to be common.

What is it with wizards and turning lead into gold?

(Magic is bullshit btw)