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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
"Sugar actually inhibits microbes! Mold likes it but I'm not sure even mold likes honey."
"How odd! It is so delicious for humans. Well, we can figure out some spongy substance that is not sugar-containing. Maybe layers of cheesecloth?"
"Appallingly so! I think we would want tanks with frames of some sort inside, to pin successive layers of cheesecloth and hold them apart, and then maybe pour the slurry through from the top, I do not think anyone wants the job of pinning the cheesecloth in place if it is already, er, meat-juiced."
"Yeah, no, that would not be popular or advisable. We might be getting ahead of ourselves, though, we should try small scale variants of lots of things - outdoors, various places, in case different stuff works in different climates - and see where it grows best. Also we'll want a less fuel-intensive way to kill them by the trillion than boiling."
"It can probably be done directly with magic. There is a spell for making 'lively' water safe to drink - though of course the density would have to be enough that much more power was obtained from it than the energy cost to kill them in the first place."
"Maybe they could be in a weather barrier somewhere cold and it could come down to kill them?"
"Clever! If we wished to do this in Haven it would have to be wintertime, then... What temperature range would kill them?"
"Being inside a block of ice does it but I haven't tested a lot of intermediate temperatures."
"Well, we can test it here with reverse weather-barriers. It would be preferable if they all died quickly, that was the advantage of boiling." He looks thoughtful. "Hmm. I wonder if it is possible for a mage to learn how to directly pull the life-force from them, which would kill them and release much more energy."
"If it becomes possible to generate mage-energy with kitchen scraps it might be a more valuable skill."
"Indeed. I will try it once we have a more high-density setup that allows me to actually get a measurable reading of mage-energy output."
And then Leareth has to kiss Belrun again because she's amazing.
The frequency of occasions when Leareth absolutely has to stop what he's doing and kiss Belrun due to her amazingness is slightly slowing down his work, but he does by midway through the day have a design for the meat-slurried cheesecloth setup, and various weather barriers and reverse weather barriers that they can use to test the ideal temperature for growth.
Also he can send people to obtain different kinds of meat, and maybe branch out to other nutrient-dense foods too, to see which one the microbes find tastiest?
"Especially if they can use waste, like discard cooking grease, that'd be ideal."
Leareth's kitchen staff are somewhat weirded out by being handed the task of collecting a dozen types of kitchen waste, pureeing them into fine slurry, and bringing containers of it to Belrun's lab, but they attack the project with enthusiasm.
"I wonder if you could use the same kind of Healing you did on the monkeys to make them like a particularly convenient food source," Leareth muses. "I suppose it might be harder since they are so tiny...?"
"Ooh. Ooh, I don't know if I can but I can sure try. I'll try getting them to like eggs, first, proof of concept in my standard setup so I'm not changing a lot of things at once, but if I can do that I can probably make them like whatever's convenient."
"Well, just tell us whatever you need to do your tests and we will make sure you are supplied with it."
"I will!"
She writes out a research roadmap with branching paths depending on how promising things are, re-writes it all more neatly once it has clarified her thinking on the matter, gets underway with as many parallelizable early steps as possible. Kisses Leareth a lot.
Leareth helps Belrun with everything he can, acts as a sounding board, tries watching everything they grow with mage-sight until he can pick out the faint life-force of the microbe colonies unaided.
They can have raw chicken!
How about greasy chicken-carcass broth? That can be made from kitchen waste.