"You could go grab some essence balls and check, but an awful fuckup might happen."

"Also I might not be able to make essences, in which case exploding them just to see what happens is not necessarily wise."

"Oh, they're renewable. I can grow plants that make - what's number fifteen called? - and make the rest of them out of that, I figured out how."

Number fifteen is Mana.

Cam reports this translation. "How very self-perpetuating this system is."

"I like that about it!"

"I will go away from this brand new mountain range and see if I can make essence and airsteel and such and if I can't I will come back and get some essence and go away again and see if I'm alchemically inert."

"Sounds good."

Cam flies off and tries making essence balls.

Essence balls: no.

(Tiro sits and reads books.)

Other alchemical paraphernalia?

He can make airsteel and airfoam. He can't make alchemist's leather or airwood.

Huh. He swoops back to report these results and collect some essences.

"Wood and leather are made from living things, steel isn't and I have no idea about that foam stuff, maybe that's related?" guesses Tiro. "The kit I brought up here is by the door, but if you're going to risk blowing the essences up anyway you could go back to my hill and get some spares."

"I can usually make living things just fine," Cam says, gesturing at a random plant. "Not smart ones, but I hope the gloves aren't intelligent..."

"I don't think the gloves are intelligent, it just jumped out at me as a category difference."

"I wonder how the gloves are usually made." Look look.

Alchemist's leather is usually manufactured via essence diagram (here's a recipe), but there's a paragraph somewhere about the history of the stuff and people did a lot of alchemical experiments before they figured out a treatment that successfully gave the leather an alchemically nonreactive surface.

"Huh," says Tiro. "I guess they're magic?"

"Guess so. And the steel -" He looks that up.

Airsteel was invented using primarily non-alchemical processes!

"Huh," Tiro repeats.

"This stuff is fascinating. I wonder what happened here."

What are the chronologically last things written?

A whole lot of really foreboding diary entries and only marginally less foreboding research notes. The diary entries are a bit all over the place in the way of diary entries, but the research notes are fairly neatly divided into 'what is happening to the global climate and how can we fix it?' and 'what are we going to do about all these ravening fiends?'.

"I guess they never found a solution to the ravening fiends," says Tiro. "And then I guess the ravening fiends all starved to death."

"Seems likely."

"Did anyone ever find out where the ravening fiends came from? Or the climate problems?"

They did not. It was widely speculated, but never confirmed, that the fiends were someone's failed workaround for the climate problem; the fiends never seemed to get thirsty that anyone could tell, and everyone's normal essence plants were being badly affected by the water shortage, so if someone invented the fiends as a water-free essence reclamation/generation mechanism and got a few too many things wrong in their prototype... well. And the study of the climate problem was severely hampered by everyone's inability to go outside without being eaten by fiends.

"And the current climate problem is that there is no climate," Cam remarks. "Although not all of the water is gone, just most of it..."

"I wonder what actually happened."