View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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."
They will eat that too. Belrun peers at them all and encourages the other Healers to get their sight honed fine enough to help.
With practice, more and more of them are getting the hang of it.
Some of Leareth's other mages are also figuring out how to find the colonies with mage-sight alone, now that they're growing faster and bigger.
It turns out that if they kill only some of the microbes in a colony, the remaining ones will happily cannibalize their remains, which will cut down a lot on how much they'll have to feed them!
Convenient!
Once Belrun has a particularly dense set of colonies growing eagerly on raw-chicken-saturated cheesecloths in a tank-frame, Leareth can try killing them all at once and actually measure the power generated.
She is ready with an estimate of how many microbes this is and how long it will take them to recolonize the glop up to the same strength again.
Leareth uses a reverse weather-barrier to yank heat from the air and instantly bring everything in it to well below zero. (The air around himself and Belrun is suddenly a lot warmer and steamier.)
He gathers the energy released as the microbes die by the trillions, and feeds it through his channels - and through his measurement apparatus.
"...Maybe five aellae?" he guesses. "But I did not get all of it, I think with more practice I could get ten. Which means...right now it is fifty to a hundred times less 'dense' than blood-magic, for a container of this size. We would need at least five thousand of these for the Heartstone, assuming all of my mages can learn to extract the energy with full efficiency."
None of Leareth's mages are even near where Leareth himself is, it turns out, they can get maaaaybe half an aella to one aella per large frame. (The frames are also a lot bigger and heavier than a person, though of course less than half of it by weight is actually microbes.)
Leareth assigns them to practice concert-Sight with the Healers.
"We can also let them grow longer than this, as we find out better conditions we'll get closer to the ten minute doubling time and then maintaining them more populated will make sense."
"That would be very good. I am not sure if it would take them years of practice to obtain the same efficiency that I can."
"Well, they can work on that and I can work on getting more microbes and we'll meet in the middle."
Vanyel should maybe learn how to do it too? He's really bad at normal blood-magic though, having only ever done it the one time in an emergency and then gotten in tons of trouble about it.
"That's what practicing on definitively morally worthless microbes is for!" she says. "More people knowing how to use 'em seems good to me."
"That's a good point."
Vanyel gives it a try! He's even worse at it than the worst of Leareth's mages! This is incredibly embarrassing, it's mostly because the strength of his Gift means he's relied more on brute force than fine control, so none of his habits are optimized for this.
He practices a lot and improves slowly.
Leareth's kitchen staff keep supplying Belrun with different variants of food-slurry, either purpose made or recycled scraps.
She keeps very meticulous notes on what they do well on, filling in a great big chart of a combinatorial explosion of conditions and strains and foods.
It is a delightful chart and she gets kissed about it when Leareth sees it.
"This research is objectively extremely exciting and valuable. Also it reminds me that you are great and I am so lucky to be working with you."
Kiss.
Leareth keeps practicing, the number of microbes they can cram into one of the giant vats rises, and he can eke out ten aellae from it pretty reliably.
"We should probably officially tell Valdemar that we know how to blow up the moon now and they don't have to experience background dread, if they were."
"- We should! I wished to wait until we had done a little more in-depth research so that I was certain, but I am fairly certain it will be possible, and in years not decades."