"Um, a lot of it is repetition, so not that much probably. I'll write out the whole procedure in Valdemaran at some point and we can go over it later if you want, and you weren't going to see the whole thing anyway since I can work through the night. Let's say the first twenty minutes at the beginning and then I'll come get you before I start the next stage?"

"Oh, sure, that's fine. I should finish my food – I can catch up?" Vanyel goes back to sit down. 

She gives him a thumbs-up and heads for the alchemy lab. 

Vanyel gets through enough of the food on his plate to satisfy Tylendel, and hugs his lifebonded, and then heads off with Savil to join Lucy. Donni troops along with them; Mardic declines to come and stays to keep Tylendel company. 

Lucy takes out a small bottle of accelerant and pours it out in a sort of celtic-knot pattern on the top of the coffin, grabs flint and steel from the table, and lights it. 

At first the fire burns in the pattern the liquid made, but after a few seconds the entire coffin erupts in an intense blaze that makes a very audible roaring noise as it grows almost to the ceiling, but sheds no heat perceptible to any of the onlookers. 

After about a quarter of a minute, the fire dies away, leaving a pile of ash and some bits of metal slag that presumably represent the nails. She picks up a brush and a tray and starts carefully collecting the powder. 

"Why's the fire like that?" Donni says curiously. 

"The fire is like that because it's magic, and it's better for the fire to be magic because normally fire reduces the soft tissues to gas and leaves the bones relatively intact, which is much, much less efficient for our purposes. You can use normal powderized-bone cremation 'ash,' even if you're not me and can't cheat, but it gives you less of a safe margin for other steps, so this way is better. And since it's magic anyway it's easier to build in the effect so that it doesn't scorch the floor or spread or anything." She finishes collecting the ash, and carefully funnels it into a piece of glassware. 

Vanyel can watch with genuine curiosity as long as he doesn't think about powdered Tylendel being funneled into glassware. 

She pours in purified water and sets it to heat. "This is going to need normal amounts of purification--better than normal, really, 'normal' accounts for the possibility that the body has been buried without a coffin and you have to dig up a lot of dirt with the skeleton. I'm going to have to filter out the ash from the coffin and whatever clothes he was buried in and that's pretty much it. It's generally considered preferable to have to do a little extra filtering than to not have whatever decomposed ex-biomass would stick to anything you removed, and also a lot of people consider it more respectful to just burn the casket than to open it, let alone stripping a corpse naked." 

"Ew, yup, that is an image that actually disturbs me a bit." 

"Sorry. I'm not good at calibrating what's going to upset people. I don't really consider anything that doesn't involve suffering to be inherently disturbing."

"...Honestly that's sort of impressive. But, yes, that would creep out most people."

"...I could have predicted that, I think, but I have a harder time sorting out...what things a 'normal' person would object to because they're objectionable versus because of the way normal people are about things like magic and liking your own gender. I mean nobody gets hurt if people have arbitrary objections to, I dunno, the color purple, that'd be pretty stupid to object to, so it's obviously different in that way, but the purple thing is also different from the dead bodies thing."

"Right, huh, that makes sense. There are things that almost all people don't like, like – oh, I don't know, the smell of rotten food, or stepping in piss, most people would say that's objectionable even if it doesn't hurt you. Oh, and then some people can't handle talking things like gory murder cases they're eating, but that doesn't bother me– Ooh, Van, did I tell you about the murder we helped investigate?" 

"Don't want to know," Vanyel says automatically. 

"When it comes to smells, or tastes or sounds, my perception is actually almost the same as normal, except that I mind things less. Like, I could tell that the basilisk smelled and tasted bad, but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't eat it." She dips her finger in water, draws a sigil on the table, and takes the glassware off the fire and sets it down on the sigil. 

"What does the sigil do?" Vanyel asks her. 

"It prepares the stuff that didn't used to be part of a person to bind to this," she picks up a vial of one of the chemicals, "so that when I pour the whole mixture through a filter the dross is left behind." She pours some in, causing the glassware to turn a dark violet and emit a soft puff of small lavender smoke-ring. 

"Huh, neat!" Donni gets a speculative look. "I wonder what color I'd turn." 

Lucy considers making a deadpan joke to the effect of if she's going to kill herself to find out please let her know first so she can knock Mardic out, decides that this would probably constitute stomping all over Vanyel's triggers, and instead elects to say, "Well, if nothing else gets you first you'll die of old age, you can find out in, what, sixty years or so."

"I'm a Herald. Probably a monster will get me first. But maybe I'll be lucky." Donni keeps watching. 

Vanyel shivers. It's not that he minds going into danger so much – he used to be a coward but things changed. Thinking about Tylendel in combat makes his insides go cold. 

Well, Lucy is very very attached to the two of them, so maybe any combat situations Tylendel could be involved in will happen to have a giant invisible tentacle beast happen to them instead. But that's a consideration for the future; for now, she pours the mixture into another piece of glassware, sets that one to heat, and starts explaining different chemicals. Most of them combine with sigils to coagulate dross, but these ones actually temporarily bind to the ex-biomass and make sure they don't settle out of the solution, and this one serves as an indicator to let her know when the mixture is pure enough to finish the purification step. 

Vanyel nods along, interested. Donni is also interested but her attention span is shorter and every so often she's instead derailed into cracking some joke. 

And then Lucy says, "Van, the rest of the purification is pretty much just more of the same, modulo different sigils and chemicals, I can show you those later."