- If you could do necromancy with thalergy, instead of just thanergy - 

"Doesn't the Second House have a trick where they pull thanergy from dying enemies to move thalergy to their cavalier? Thalergy instinctively maintains life - but if it's possible to manipulate..."

"In theory, it is. But I'm not exactly an animaphiliac."

"Might not need to be particularly fine grained, if we're just maintaining the flame between containers - or transferring the lymph as well."

"The last one wasn't that easy. I doubt this one will be either."

"Last one revealed what it was doing in the middle of things, so..." If Ellyn doesn't object, she'll go hold her hand near the flame - not quite close enough to burn, but she should definitely feel any heat.

It's fire. It's hot. She's going to get a nice crisping if she puts her hand in there.

(She doesn't stick her hand in yet.) Can Ellyn tell if it's automatically pulling on any thalergy in its vicinity?

Gideon does seem any the worse for wear? But she might want to prepare some diagnostics. And get a reference book or two, honestly.

To the library, then? (They can also try to find a container for the lymph, if that turns out to be transportable.)

Library. And maybe bother one of the servitors for a teacup or something.

She can do that while fetching her own reference books from their suite (plus her notebooks, which are pretty much reference tomes in their own right, if reference tomes were written in a fly speck six font cipher). 

Ellyn, meanwhile, scours the First's collection for better and more thorough treatments of thalergy manipulation and other squishy flesh magician practices.

Gideon returns with a sturdy cup and a bag full of books (and extra bags) before Ellyn finishes. 

"Do we want to ask Third for advice?"

"Not before we even try," Ellyn grumbles.

Grin. "Found enough books, then?"

She dumps another pair into Gideon's bag.

"For now."

Then back to Lab 3.

"Any new ideas for poking it?"

"Yes." She grabs one of the books and flips through it until she finds the reference from the table of contents. Then gets two more and opens them on the side. "First, measure the thalergetic output of the reaction and compare to the ambient thanergy decay constant. That will give us a clue what's going on with the lymph and why it hasn't burned up. Hopefully. It would also," she sideeyes Gideon, "give us half an inkling about how dangerous it would be to just stick your hand into the fire."

Innocent smile! "Just a bit of one."

Hmph. And to work.

At least for this initial step, it's mostly a lot of careful math. Ellyn does not quite have the intuitive sense for this that she has for working with bone.

Gideon's at least better at math than she was as a child - and she still doesn't mind doing a lot of the grunt work and data sifting, plus speed reading (something she's very good at, on top of pretty much memorizing books) to identify likely helpful entries. (It's actually refreshing - it's been a while since Ellyn really needed the help.)

After a few hours of design, testing, and observation, Ellyn is fairly sure that the object of the test must be to light the other chalice on fire. Ideally by taking some of this fire and moving it over there, because trying to replicate a theorem this tightly balanced by hand is going to take at least six months.

They weren't exactly given a timeline - but, yeah, Gideon votes they try moving the fire. She's been doing some side reading and math on ways to do that without it burning whoever's carrying it, but she's uncertain about its behavior once out of the chalice...

Well. It's feeding on the thanergy given off by the lymph, converting that into thalergy with the heat as a byproduct and feeding that back into the lymph to keep it from dying completely. And the chalice is doing... something to help with that. Containment and moderation? An unchecked version of this theorem could get nasty. An unmodified container may be a non-starter as far as moving a portion of this goes.

Alternative fuel source, maybe? That they can light, that's more stable than the lymph - if it can feed on arbitrary thanergy, they might be able to carry the raw flame somehow...