"I don't think so."

"Well, keep up the good work." Lancir pats Abras on the shoulder. "I'm proud of how well you're adjusting to all this. Really." 

"Thanks," he says, and heads out. One of these days he should probably learn to believe generally trustworthy people when they say nice things about him.

The following week, Abras and Sandra make some time to talk about alchemy again. Abras explains his units for temperature, which are set up so that boiling water is twenty units hotter than freezing water, and his units of mage-energy, defined in terms of both heating water and lifting a rock of a certain size a certain distance. (He brought the rock in question with him just in case.)

Sandra seems very impressed! "All right, hmm. What should we test this time?" 

"I think we were planning to check whether fire does something to the air that makes it not able to sustain fire anymore? And also you were thinking of making a container with a long skinny neck to measure how much air gets bigger when you heat it."

"Oooh, right, and now that you have measurements we can use that. I'll make the container first, we can use the same one for the fire experiment after I think. Wanna help with the glasswork part? I could teach you the trick for it." 

"That would be great. Think I should put up a barrier around it, or not try to do two things at once?"

"What do you think - can you handle both at once? I don't think I can but you're more powerful than me and you've had more practice too." 

"I think I can do the barrier on automatic unless shaping the glass is unexpectedly complicated somehow."

"Hmm, well, you can always back off and hand it back to me if it gets tricky. Here, you want to sort of lay a mesh of mage-energy over the glass, and then you very gently push a heat spell into it, so it's evenly distributed throughout..." 

He remembers watching her do it with mage-sight the last time, and between that and the description has has a general idea of what to do. Getting the heat even all over takes some work, but he gets the hang of it with a bit of trial and error. The practice from repeatedly heating pots of water probably helps.

"You're a quick learner," Sandra says, sounding a little jealous. "Took me three practice sessions before I had it." 

"Watching you demonstrate helped a lot. So did spending all that time playing with heat spells."

"Ah, so maybe you're not quick, just very diligent." Sandra flashes a smile at him. "All right, let's check the cork fit in the neck." 

The lip of the tube ended up thicker on one side than the other, so the hole is a bit oval-shaped, but if they squash the cork in farther it should have a decent seal, and Abras can tweak the glass some more if they want to be sure.

Sandra can also get her penknife out and slice a bit off the cork to make it fit better. "I think that'll do fine. All right. How much of your mage-energy units of heat should would put in on the first try?" 

"Hm, better too little than too much, and water takes more energy to heat than air." He names a number that will, if he's estimated well, heat the air by about the difference between a summer day and a winter day.

"Sure. Huh, I wonder why water takes more to heat - because it's more substantial, maybe? How much does it take to heat glass or metal compared to water, do you know?" 

"Unfortunately I still don't have a good way of measuring temperature that isn't based on mage-energy or on poking things, but glass is harder to heat than air and water is harder to heat than glass by a surprising amount. I haven't tried metal."

"Water's harder than glass? Huh, weird. Glass sinks in water usually, right, so it's denser?" Sandra frowns at their setup. "Anyway, go ahead, and then we can count seconds of air let out." 

"Yeah, I think there must be something other than density involved, but I have no idea what. Anyway, here goes." He heats up the flask, then counts down from three and Fetches the cork out.

Sandra counts seconds, writes down their result. "Hmm. We should wait and leave it open so it gets back to the same temperature as before, and then we can try it again with twice as much energy going in and compare?" 

"I can just cool it down directly so we don't have to wait, but otherwise that sounds good."

"Oh, perfect. Can you tell when it's at the same temperature as before? I suppose this is preliminary and our measurement isn't that precise anyway, so it won't matter hugely if it's a tiny bit off." 

"I can get it close enough to stick a finger in it and use that to get closer. If we decide we need a round of more precise tries we can do that and then wait a while."