She finds herself standing on a glass platform, floating unsupported in a cloudless blue sky. In front of her, on the center of the platform, is a slab of textured black stone, ringed with a decorative border styled after gigantic eyes.

In her hand is a book.

She's not usually aware of her dreams. It's strange, to be so aware.

She flips open the book in her hands. It is a book about forestry, or perhaps what she imagines a forestry book would be, since she's never exactly read anything on the subject. Her subconscious seems to have decided that the book should mostly consist of details about bees and how to raise them.

She doesn't really want to dream about reading about bees.

If she thinks about it, there's a sort of ... emptiness, to her hands. It feels like she could be holding other things.

She wants to be reading something else, and so now she is. Materials and You, a book about forging weapons out of increasingly improbable substances.

That's not really appealing either. The book blurs again, and she pages through the introduction to On the Dynamics of Integration before giving it up as a bad job.

It's her dream, and she wants to explore, not page through imagined textbooks. She hops up on the black stone plinth, and spins to take in the view.

The island is alone in the bright blue void — or nearly so. To her left and right float some slightly more distant platforms, one made of wood and one of stone. Where she was first standing, there is a chest made of bronze.

Treasure! That's more like it.

Vivian lifts the lid of the chest, thoughts of magical artifacts and gold coming to mind. She should really find a new D&D group, but she just never has the time ...

There's no gold, but there are magical artifacts — three wands, a flat, yellow, technological gadget, sixteen small stone squares, a jumble of little machines, and ...

... a glowing book.

Vivian bites her lip.

She said she was done with books. But this one is glowing. She waffles for a moment, and then pages through it.

You may be surprised to find yourself on a floating platform in the middle of an empty void. I can assure you that it is not the result of one of your many "benders" but in fact a serious matter.

As I have complained to Headmaster R.W. Tema on many occasions, your behaviour at this academy has been distinctly less than impressive. You are constantly late to class, do not take proper notes, and answer back in an undeservedly arrogant tone.

If it were up to me, you would have been expelled from Grimboil's Academy years ago, but for some reason the other masters seem to want to give you endless second chances.

I can assure you, however, that this is your last chance.

You have failed to achieve sufficient academic marks and it is my right as Master of Examinations to demand you take a make-up test or be expelled.

The test I have chosen for you is a very old one, the Ultimate Alchemy Exam.

You have been banished to the void realm and cannot return until the exam is completed.

Nearby, you should find special barrels containing infinite amounts of:
a) Cobblestone
b) Wood Logs (Oak)

Your task is to alchemize these cobblestone and oak logs into the rarest and most difficult substance to create — "Clay"!

I trust after all the lectures you've slept through, that you are aware of the great difficulty of "clay alchemy". The exam is open book, so do make use of Professor Mezz's "JEI Spell" for information.

In addition, your feet have been blessed with a flying spell and your stomach has been blessed with an anti-hunger charm.

I would wish you luck, but surely a wonderchild such as yourself has no need for it. So I will simply say "do not be afraid to give up".

Yours,
Professor Spite
Master of Examinations

She blinks at the book in confusion. What is this, some sort of magically-flavored stress-flashback to highschool? That's not the kind of thing she needed, thanks brain.

There's an addendum, in another hand on the facing page:

Don't let old Spitesy get ya down. The ultimate alchemy exam ain't exactly easy but it's very doable. Just keep your goal in sight and you'd be surprised at what can be accomplished.

btw — it ain't part of the exam, but if you really want to show up old Spitesy, see if you can completely automate the entire clay alchemy process.

It's something he failed when he took the ultimate test, and I know it bugs him. :)

p.s. I snuck an acceleration wand into the exam chest. Don't tell anyone.

Vivian is increasingly dubious of her subconscious's choice of dream material.

But, well — it's not as though dreams usually make sense. And if she understood the book ... she can fly. Or, rather, of course she can fly, it's her dream, but she's now very much aware of the possibility.

She drops the book and takes to the skies, feeling the wind blow past her.

After a few minutes, she gets bored doing tricks, and just hangs in space, staring at the floating platforms.

It's ... surprisingly boring, for a flying dream. No forests or plains to soar over. Just her, and the floating islands.

She wants there to be something more to look at, but no amount of unpracticed lucid visualization makes it appear.

She swoops down to investigate the stone island.

It's made of rings of concentric stone, with various inset decorations. In the center, on top of a stone pillar, sits a barrel.

With an act of will, Vivian pulls a stone out of it, and then turns it over in her hands.

Then she pulls another. And another.

Sure enough, with the classic feeling of dream logic, the barrel gets no less full. She tries putting her stones back, and see that it gets no more full either.

She sits on the edge of the platform and dangles her legs over the void as she considers what to do next.

Well ... in the car, she voiced her desire to create. It's not quite the same thing, in a dream — nobody else will be able to see it.

But perhaps that's a bonus. Nobody to scorn the things she makes, whatever those will be.

She grabs another stone, and feels its texture. It doesn't feel right for carving, although she could not explain why it doesn't feel right if anyone asked. So instead she wants to build something big. Maybe she can make her own floating island.

She concentrates, and sets the stones in the air. And they float! They hold position as though fixed in place with absolute rigidity.

Quickly, she builds out a platform, occasionally going back to the barrel for more rocks.

It looks terrible.

The unfinished texture of the stone just doesn't look good next to the textured and variegated stone of the existing island.

She floats for a while, pondering what to do about it. She considers whether she can make the stones in her hand into some other kind of stone ...

... and options bloom in her mind.

She can make 65 different things out of this stone, by arranging it on a wooden surface in the right patterns. Or she could bake it, or moisten it, or squeeze it into lava, or chisel it, or any number of other things.

She doesn't know how she knows it, just that she does.

She considers making some stone slabs or stairs, but what she really needs is a chisel — that would let her put some really pretty patterns on it, and at least let her spice up her stone platform a bit.

But she doesn't have a chisel.

A chisel is made from a stick and a piece of iron.

Can she get iron, though ... refined, not ore. Maybe she could put tiny bits of iron together to get one? But she doesn't have any tiny bits.

She could try to melt bits of iron out of the stone, but it feels like that would just get her a different kind of stone. What can she ...

Oh! If she just packs more stone into the fire, she can get iron out.

It makes no sense. It blatantly violates not only physics, but common sense. On the other hand, who cares? It's her dream.

Now she just needs a place to make a fire and keep the heat contained — she could make a stone box ...

She flies to the wood platform, and pulls some logs out of the barrel there. She breaks them in her hands to make boards, and then lays the boards out to make a crafting surface.

The crude table would look just fine on the wood platform, but she has an impulse to leave the original islands alone. She wants to make something that is hers. So she flies to her platform, sets the table down, and starts making a furnace out of stone.

A moment later she plops it down next to her table, and crams a bunch of stone and wood into it.

The wood lights spontaneously, casting light across the darkening platform.

She turns and looks up at the stars. They're different — not constellations she recognizes. And the Milky Way is conspicuously absent. Even the moon is new, barely visible in how it eclipses the stars.

By the time she looks back down, her furnace is cold and empty, except for several lumps of iron.

She takes the iron from the forge, and some glowing orbs of light come with it, flowing toward her chest and filling her with a comforting glow.

Vivian laughs, and she isn't sure whether it's with happiness or exhaustion. It's ridiculous — so many weird little details. But it doesn't matter.

The important thing is that she has iron now. She combines it with some of her wood, and flourishes her new chisel.

Now ... what kinds of patterns should she make?

She makes a few different kinds, and lines them up to compare.

There are ... a lot of options. It feels almost paralyzing, trying to figure out which one would be best.

Only ...

Vivian looks over at the existing stone platform. Part of the reason it looks better, she decides, is the variety of different stones. Any one of these, left to cover a whole expanse, would be lacking.

So maybe if she uses this kind for the border, and that kind for the interior, and then maybe this other kind as an accent ...

She quickly wears out her chisel obtaining piles of different types of stone.

... and then must figure out how to clean up the stones of her existing platform. She can get them to budge again with her hands, but it's exceedingly tedious.

Instead, she uses some of her stock of iron to make another tool — a crude pickax, which helps her clean up the platform in short order.

When she finishes, the platform looks a lot better. Or, it would, except that it's somewhat hard to see in the dark.

She could burn some wood to make coals and then stick them on a stick to make a torch.

Yes, that does look better — four torches lighting an island of banded stone, a more subtle pattern around the inside, and an irregular cobbled pattern on the inside.

Maybe it looks a little similar to the existing platform.

But this is different — she built this, and it looks good! It looks fine.

She sits on her table and thinks about what to do next. She could make another island, but ... her brain already sort of gave her a quest. Maybe she should try to make some clay. It can't be that hard, given how simple everything else has been to piece together.

Well, to make some clay you need to make a box out of diamonds, and then fill it with stone, wood, grass, emerald, quartz, lapis lazuli, podzol, another diamond, an evil skull and a glowing star that can only be harvested from a deadly monster. Then you need to electrocute it.

And to make grass, well, you need some compost and dirt and water. But compost needs dirt and wheat — or dirt and saplings, or just leaves. And saplings can be made out of sticks, but ...

It's too much, too fast, all at once.

She pushes the flow of information away, and realizes that at some point she screwed her eyes closed against the parading chains of requirements.

That is ... well, it's typical for a dream, actually. She's had dreams about unwinding a spool of yarn, never actually being able to reach the end. This feels similar.

Maybe if she focuses on something smaller ... how can she make podzol?

Podzol comes from soaking dirt in empowered oil, of course.

She follows the chain of requirements back. She needs canola seeds, to make oil, and she can only get those by cutting grass.

Vivian glances around at her plain stone platform.

Okay, so maybe she needs to start with dirt.

Well dirt is easy — pour liquid dirt over gravel. And for liquid dirt, you need a still to distill water of life. But for water of life you need compost, but to make compost without dirt you need leaves. But you can make leaves out of saplings, which ...

Yes, yes, okay. She just needs to figure out where this chain of requirements starts, thank you.

She's going to need a lever.

She puts a stone and a stick on the table, pushing them into place to make a lever. Then she makes a wooden bowl, and grinds the lever up with her pick ax to make a brilliant, shining dust.

It's ... peaceful, just flowing along with the dream logic. Sure, she can grind levers into dust. Why not?

She combines dust, iron, wood, and stone to make a piston, and then makes a wooden box and sets another piston opposite, to squeeze things, and ...

Oh, she needs glass for this, doesn't she?

Actually, glass sounds nice for other reasons. She could make a house, instead of just an island, with big windows looking out into the ... void.

Well, she'll think about it.

She grinds up stones with her pick in a bowl, finer and finer until it becomes sand. Then she puts the sand in the furnace, and waits for it to turn into glass.

It doesn't take nearly as long as it should — a benefit of dream time ­— and a moment later she's holding a squeezing machine.

Vivian is not quite sure where to put it. She's hardly going to use it as much as she'll use her table. But — maybe just there, on the outer ring of stone. That works.

It's sort of boxy. An appliance, like a dishwasher, or an oven.

And if she puts some wood in it, she can squeeze out the water content — and then use that water to make saplings.

She puts wood in it.

... but of course that doesn't do anything. It needs power. How can she get power?

So many ways! But with the materials she has ... maybe she could just build a basic generator.

Yeah, that's simple enough. She makes a stone box, and an induction coil out of iron (somehow) and throws some more wood into it. The wood catches light, and the generator hums, and ...

Water spills into the tank of the squeezer.

Vivian laughs, and dips her fingers in it, feeling the coolness. She's not sure how much water is here. A lot, and simultaneously not that much.

She makes a bucket and scoops the water up, and then pours it over the island. It streams away into the void, making an infinite waterfall.

That has potential — especially once she has some dirt. She could make a garden island, or an island with a lake.

... yes. Yes, that's exactly what she wants to do. She wants to make a garden.

Then she'll need a fermenter, a still, some carpenters, a source of gravel ...

Of course. Dream logic. But step by step — she should start by making some saplings.

She needs more wood. But it's annoying to fly to the other island all the time — can she make another infinite barrel of wood? Yes, of course; just some chests and a bit of wood ...

Okay, now some glass, another table, an axe ...

She holds the carpenter in her hand, feeling the smoothness of the wood. And this is supposed to be able to turn sticks back into saplings? 'Back', as though her sticks came from saplings in the first place.

The real question is where to put it? It needs water ...

She could use those stone slabs in the chest, or make a network of pipes — all different kinds of pipe — or make a tank that transports liquids ...

Hmm. Some of those types of pipe are easier than others. But she already has glass, actually, maybe she can make a nice, clear glass pipe, like an alchemist hooking arcane glassware together.

She giggles.

Sure, that sounds fun. Better than steel-grey pipe, at least. And she just needs a little copper to make it work.

She grinds down more sand, and packs it into the furnace — more than it should be able to hold — and pulls out fresh copper bars.

She spins the copper and glass into a pretty pipe, and runs it from her squeezer over to her carpenter.

She stands back, with her hands on her hips, admiring the steampunk look.

... and the water isn't flowing. She needs a pump. Right.

A little iron and glass later, she has a basic servo. She attaches it to the pump, and watches the water flow.

This is excellent progress. Now she just needs to feed sticks into the carpenter.

And make another generator, right.

When the machine is finished, she picks up the resulting dead bush and turns it over in her hand. Another pass being rehydrated, and she should have a sapling. But it's ... slow. And she needs a lot of saplings, to make dirt. Maybe if she had more generators, to fully power the carpenter, it would go a bit faster.

Well, if she wants to transport power over a distance, instead of just plunking down a generator next to everything, she's going to need some lead, or some gold. Or some stoneburnt, technically. But lead and gold both need to be alloyed and cast, so she'll need a smeltery ...

Ugh. No, no, that's all too complicated. She'll just finish making grass, and then come back to the power question.

She makes another carpenter, and then goes to put it down and realizes that she has no way to feed results from one machine to the next. She could just move the bushes by hand, but ... they're kind of scratchy.

Oh, except that she has those stone slabs from the chest — they move items.

She does that, feeding dead bushes from one carpenter to the next.

The machines whir, and then she is holding a sapling.

Now she just needs ... let's see ... eighty more. For the first dirt. And then one hundred and sixty two, to turn dirt into grass.

She looks at her machines.

There's no way she's feeding in the materials for all that by hand.

Well, she could use some of the little automatic crafters to make sticks to feed in. And the generators and the squeezer just need wood ...

She considers the layout of the machines. Hmm. She could rip up everything to make it work, but she doesn't really want to. There must be some way to just squeeze some more stuff in there.

She could put a transport machine under a falling anvil, to squish it very flat so that it fits between the machines.

Only, it's sort of hard to drop anvils, so she can just put it metaphorically under an anvil, and that would work fine too.

Heh. Alright. She might as well lean into it. Let's see ... she needs some stone slabs, and some glass ...

Oh, but the slabs need to be made from smooth stone, not rough stone. But she could make an infinite barrel of that too.

She starts with an infinite barrel of stone, and then makes some pipe — ugly, steel-grey pipe, but it's fine, it's just an intermediate component — and then a transfer node.

She looks at it skeptically. It might fit in between two machines as it is; it's pretty compact.

Nope. The anvil is definitely required.

Well, it needs a bunch of iron. More than she has, so she starts some more cooking in the furnace.

And then sits there impatiently waiting for it to smelt.

Waiting sucks. It's her dream, she should not need to wait.

Well, she's going to need a still eventually, so perhaps she can get started on that ...

More red dust, a sturdy casing ...

A still is pretty simple as machines go. Maybe they're more complicated in the real world, but here they're simple. She whistles as she slots things together.

Now she also needs a fermenter, to create the liquid that the still will refine. And that needs glass, but she's actually out of glass after making the pipes, and her furnace is full.

Well, it's not like there's a rule that she can only have one furnace. She plops down another, and fills it full of sand and wood.

Oh! Her iron is done!

She makes an anvil, and drops it on the delicate mechanical item-mover, squashing it flat. It's a bit looneytoones, but it works.

Then she sets up an infinite wood barrel to feed into the appropriate machines.

There! And now her machine will make her infinite saplings.

Slowly.

She sighs, and sits on the platform, leaning against the rumbling machine. Night has fallen again, while she works.

She thinks about going to bed at night, in her dream, and giggles. She doesn't feel tired.

Actually, that's maybe the best part about this dream. She doesn't feel tired.

Or sore, or hungry, or thirsty, or stressed.

She just is.

She watches the stars wheel overhead, tracing slow lines through the night.

She's going to make a garden, and she's going to fill it with flowers, and a waterfall, and then she can lay there and watch the stars until she wakes up.

She doesn't want to wake up.

It's just been so long since she has had ... time to just do her own thing. And she can never tell how much time is passing in dreams — what if her alarm clock goes off, and she never gets to actually make the garden? How wonderful would it be to just stay here forev—

No, that's not fair. She would miss her friends, for one thing.

The friends that she's always too busy to see. The friends who swear they'll make plans soon, and then it's been a year and she hasn't seen them and the only people she ever sees are her coworkers and her stupid ex-boyfriend and gods! When did she get so lonely?

So ... she can't stay here. Not forever.

But maybe for a little while more.

The dream-sun rises, and she rises with it. Just a few more machines to add to her little contraption, and she'll have dirt.

All this, for a bit of dirt.

She shakes her head and turns back to her crafting table.

She places another automatic crafter next to the carpenter that is producing saplings, and has it make them into leaves.

... and ends up with a bunch of dead bushes as a byproduct.

What? So she didn't need to automate the dead-bush machine at all, she could just cycle them endlessly back and forth between the carpenter and the crafter?

Why was this not part of the knowledge she's gotten about how to make things?

Well, obviously anyone can instantly know how to put together any machine or item, and how much fluid or energy they take to operate, and everything that can be done with them.

But knowing what materials are left-over after crafting an item? Don't be absurd.

Whatever. It's fine. She can just... dismantle her machine a little after all, and rearrange it to be a good deal tidier.

After rearranging things, she has a bit of an awkward setup where the leaves also end up back in the carpenter. But it's whatever — she can just have the next step pull from the carpenter as well. And just like that, she has something that will make her the compost she needs. Slowly.