"Fire sounds interesting, assuming you don't want a lot of it. By how it works do you mean things like whether different things burn at different temperatures and why water makes fires go out and things like that?"

"And what happens to the wood, too. It doesn't all go into smoke plus ashes, I made a cheesecloth filter to trap all the smoke and weighed it after and both put together were a lot less than the original piece of wood." 

"Oh, that's a good question. Maybe some of it got through the cheesecloth? But also the the flames and the heat have to come from somewhere . . . I wonder what happens if you suck all the heat out of a fire with a weather-barrier. Could you get a heatless fire?"

"I think it just puts the fire out, no? Savil mentioned once she uses that trick to put out fires without it costing her too much in mage-energy." 

"That's useful. So what were you thinking of trying next?"

"I thought maybe if I put the fire in something airtight, like a big glass tank, then none of the smoke will get out? and that'll let me weigh the entire thing afterward and see if some of it just went away and turned into heat, or if it's all there but some of the smoke can get out through cheesecloth." 

"Good idea." He looks around the room for a big glass tank.

"I don't already have one but I can melt down this glass thingy from my last experiment and make it into a tank - oh, do you know the trick for using mage-energies to do glasswork?" 

"I've heard you can do it but I haven't tried."

"Why don't I do it and you can watch. I do this a lot because it's cheaper than buying more glasswork." 

She gets started on melting down her weird complicated glass apparatus. 

Abras watches intently with both eyes and mage-sight.

Sandra feeds mage-energy, in some carefully controlled way, into the structure of the glass, softening it just enough that she can nudge it using a mage-barrier to shape it over. 

(It looks like it could maybe be done even more neatly with Fetching.) 

"That's very neat," he says, after she's done so he doesn't distract her in the middle. "I wonder if having Fetching will make it easier."

"Maybe! I keep forgetting you have so many Gifts, it's kind of ridiculous." 

"It really is ridiculous. Anything non-obvious I should know if I try glassworking myself? Safety precautions, tips . . . ?"

"It doesn't usually explode. Don't touch it, though, it is hot. And sometimes if you get it really soft and stretch it too far it sort of splashes, if I'm pushing it to make something fiddly I'll put a mage-barrier between it and me." 

Abras nods seriously. "Good things to know. Want to do the fire experiment now?"

"Yes!" She gets some sticks of firewood, which she carefully balances on a scale, then sets up in her tiny iron woodstove. She covers it with the glass, uses a rolled up towel to make sure nothing can leak through where it's against the floor, and then concentrates briefly and uses her mage-gift to light the wood in a single flare. 

Nothing that has happened so far has benefitted from Abras' presence in any way and he doesn't see that changing, but he's glad she invited him anyway because he's very curious what result she's going to get.

The result she gets is FRUSTRATION, because before nearly all the wood is burned, the fire starts dying down and then goes out entirely. 

Sandra mutters at it and tries to start it again, and gets a bit of flame, but it too dies quickly. 

Abras tries too and it does the same thing.

"Huh, that's odd. Want to weigh it now and see if it's changed at all? A lot of it did burn, and once we've weighed it we can work on why it won't start."

Moving and weighing the apparatus with the smoke in it without letting any smoke out of it, subtracting the weight of the glass itself, and separately getting the remaining wood and ash out of the stove are all a very annoying time-consuming process, but eventually they manage it. 

Sandra thinks the total weight is almost exactly the same. 

"Huh. I guess the missing wood weight did all turn into smoke. But the part that didn't burn . . . It could be because keeping the smoke next to it put it out or because it needs air and there wasn't enough in the box or something else."

"Hmm. I was thinking, it kills people if they breathe too much smoke - it'd seem weird if it killed fire too, since fire makes smoke, but...maybe it replaces the air, somehow? Maybe fire actually turns air into smoke, by burning..." She makes a face. "I don't think my scale is precise enough." 

"You might be able to find out if the problem is too much smoke or not enough air by taking some smoke out or putting some air in? If you opened the box it would do both . . . it might be possible to do it with Fetching but I don't have the control for it, I'd need to practice. A more precise scale would be useful . . . maybe we could weigh the whole sealed box before we start the fire and then again after it goes out? Maybe a few times each to see how much the scale changes between tries."