She grins. "Imbued this lens with the ability to see the essence makeup of things through it. Here, you can see." She offers the lens to the two of them. "I'll need to run around peering at everything and writing down compositions for a little while. I am going to do terrible things to your paper stores, by the way, I'll also figure out a way to easily renew them, but."

Ooh Sendhei wants to look!

It's rather strange - almost everything through the glass looks vaguely blue-grey, except for a wash of bright, nearly psychedelic colors near the middle. Upon inspection, it seems that when the very center of the lens is pointed at an object, the object slowly starts to change from blue-grey to a wash of detailed and shifting colors, some of which thrum with life. Taharqi is mostly a wash of reds and oranges interlaced faint trails of silver, a deep crimson centered around his heart and pulsing in time with his heartbeat. Around his head the silver becomes so bright it's nearly white. It's difficult, but not impossible, to pick out faint orbs of blue that mark where his eyes are, and there's some kind of shell around the silver that's hard to pick out.

Sendhei offers the lens to Taharqi, who uses it to look back at Sendhei.

Sendhei looks about the same! Not that the two can compare directly, or anything, but. What's going on roughly correlates between them, with some allowance for (comparatively) minor differences.

Saevetei, meanwhile, gets to cleaning up the leftover debris. The gold dust gets gently swept into its own little pouch, and then the once red and white dust both get to be dumped in another little pouch. She starts to scoop the items that had their essence sucked out of them into this same pouch (of trash, basically), but pauses.

"Do you want to look at these and compare them to something that hasn't had a lot of its essence transferred out of it? It looks kind of neat."

"Yes!"

Peer.

"I've got a few things in reserve, hold on..."

Out comes some more glass baubles, copper dust, and aloe.

Comparatively speaking, the ones that have had their essence transferred away look... flat. Or maybe sort of empty. There's definitely less going on. The drained aloe in particular looks extremely dead in comparison to its (dying) fellow, and the glass looks all sad and dark and flat in comparison to the swirl of blues in its fellow. Some of the copper dust looks a bit faded, but mostly seems all right.

Huh.

How about Saevetei herself, what does she look like?

Significantly different from Sendhei! She has some blocky gold veins twined near the organic silver ones, and some sort of halo of lavender near her heart, which Sendhei just did not have at all. Additionally, she's much more streamlined, and it's easier to pick out specific sets of colors. There's less going on, and everything that's there looks very purposeful almost minimalistic.

Her clothes are neat, too. The gold trim actually glows and pulses with energy, and her clothes look like they're a kind of blueish green that emulates the verdant green aloe more than anything.

"You look all—fancy," Taharqi observes. Sendhei looks through the lens over his shoulder then up at Saevetei herself again.

“I am, thank you! I did say experimental construct, didn’t I?”

"What's the lavender?" he asks.

“Oh, you can see that. Other side of my soul bond, it’s what puts me back in here.”

"'Other' side?"

"So you're only seeing what's going on with my soul and resurrection thing from one side. It's more accurate to say that this body has an anchor that my soul can pull itself to. And all of the soul stuff is not something that lens will be able to show you, it's very basic and imprecise and you kind of need the soul out of a body in order to really get a good look at what's going on with it."

"Would you be able to make a lens that can see this other soul stuff, too?"

"If it's still in a body, it wouldn't just be one. I'd need a set of lenses stacked on top of each other to hide all of the stuff in front of it. Preferably adjustable ones. Or a specific container that wasn't too... in the way."

"If it's that hard how did anyone find out how to do it in the first place?"

“There were things going on in what they could see that couldn’t be explained by what was there. So people tried to find out, and did, and their first attempts were very messy, but they learned how to do better.”

"Sounds... difficult." He puts the lens down. "So what do you need this for, exactly?"

"It'll give me a general idea of what types of essence make up things that are easily available, which will let me categorize and strategize for how to use it all. This," she motions to the lens, "was done with a mix of some very tedious meditation with the objects in question, and some educated guesswork to aim for the right sorts of things I needed. This is more accurate than meditating at every single unique object you have, less annoying, and easier to put to concrete values of things instead of, mm. Guessing based on the feel of things. Like how you could figure out what makes up the broad strokes of a meal just by eating it, but having access to the list of ingredients for it makes recreating it significantly easier. It's like that."

"So it changes between things? Like, two leaves of a type of tree?"

"It does, but it can often be very subtle. For leaves from the same tree with the same growing conditions, they are usually very nearly identical. For leaves from the same type of tree, but two different trees, it's similar, but less so than with the same tree. And leaves from different types of tree vary in similarity, depending on how alike the trees themselves are."

"And if you need specific quantities then this is very very useful," he concludes, nodding. Sendhei takes the lens from him and starts just looking around at random stuff with it.