"Could you make an opening in the sphere?"

"Definitely, that shouldn't be hard." The sphere disappears and she focuses a bit more, the symbols shift in small ways and then the sphere is back this time a section of the top is missing.

Griffie conjures water into the sphere.

The water stays in the sphere. "Well that seems to work. It's not a trivial expenditure but it's doable, I wonder if I can split your water like I could with our sort of matter. We should probably go to an different lab for that we don't really have the right equipment here."

"Uh. This is pure water, I normally wouldn't think of it as being splittable at all. Trying to split the individual water atoms seems … maybe do it with the tiniest sample you can handle and with a lot of different shields, or something? I'd tell you to contact Axis, the Plane of Law, about it, but we're out of range of them."

"I was just planning to pass electricity through the water do you think that's likely to be dangerous?"

"Oh, that should be fine as long as you don't shock yourself. But it's not going to split the water."

"That makes sense, I'm still interested to see if your water does something like ionizing. Splitting your kind of atoms would also be interesting but I don't know how I would do that. Regardless we should go to a chemistry lab instead of this biology one. It'll have more useful equipment."

"Water can bear electrical charge. And sure, let's go to the alchemy lab."

"This way then." She leads the way to a different lab this one has a number of meticulously labelled vials of liquids and powders and a lot of drawers also with labels. The sphere with water in it follows along.

"If you want I can add a program that will translate the labels for you."

"That sounds nice, but I'm not really sure how much of it will translate. Though transliterations are still good, I haven't learned your script yet."

"From reading your dictionary we have a lot of the same words though I'm not sure how good the matches will be. I'm actually pretty curious what'll happen with Riley's experiment. With our kind of matter pure water is made out of two substances. One of which is the part of air we need to breathe and the other is the lightest of our elements."

Riley in the meantime gets out a strange assortment of items including a couple plates of metal and a spool of wire. Then she pauses "I just realized this actually wouldn't work with pure water even for our kind of matter. If I was working with my kind of matter I'd need an acid or a salt. Do you happen to have either of those handy that you don't mind potentially losing and do you know which fields they'd need to exist?"

"Both of those would require the Earth field, with Acid also requiring the Water field to be in liquid form."

"I suppose I should just get all four. Do you have ways to test whether they're all working without losing anything important if I make a mistake?"

"My bubble generates more Air if some escapes, you could bottle some and then take it out. If the Fire field is working, conjured water won't cool to the point of freezing. I can get you a conjured rock sample. Or take biological samples from me, my spines are pretty earth-rich and they regrow."

"Wait is that also true of non-conjured water... no because you said the fields where everywhere on your world. The fact that you can easily conjure matter at all is very different from what I would expect. Does it differ in other ways?" While she's talking she slots the disk maintaining the water sphere back into her staff and takes out another blank one patterns slowly begin to trace across its surface.

"I mean, it's also true of non-conjured water and other liquids in the total absence of a fire field, I just think conjured water is a cheap test. I think the conjured water's fire is decaying more slowly, because the residual conjuration-spell energy is stabilizing it the way it stabilizes the water. Matter conjuration is often temporary for more complex materials, such that they eventually go away, but for, say, 'Mighty Fist of the Earth', that just creates some simple rock, the rock persists. If a conjuration is temporary the material will have a magic aura. Otherwise it's just like any other material, at least after a little while for things like the spell aura to dissipate."

"So pure water can't ever freeze in your world? Or is the fire field not omnipresent?"

"I think I may have been using the word 'pure' badly? It is normally understood that a pure substance still can be warm, and thus contains fire. Pure water can freeze, though I'm not sure what form water at freezing temperatures would take in the absence of the Earth field, because frozen water is normally solid."

"Ok, now I really want to test phase shifts. Do you think anything would go badly wrong if I try to boil the water you gave me?"

"Go ahead! I've boiled water before."

Riley pauses in her crafting and attempts to heat the water by introducing disordered kinetic energy.

Adding disordered kinetic energy to Elemental Water supported by only the Water field agitates it, but doesn't bring it to a boil. If Riley adds a lot of energy, she can agitate it enough to get a weird sort of mist. During this process, Griffie comments that the residual Fire must have dissipated by now, so apparently in the absence of the Fire and Earth fields, water just stays liquid.