Everyone dreams.

Tonight, she dreams about being given a hammer. It is not a particularly fancy hammer — an ordinary flat face on one side and nail-remover on the other, the head of good tool steel and the shaft of oak wood — but it feels right in her hands. There is someone there, the gifter of the hammer, who shows her how to use it to build simple things. And then more complex things, and even more complex. By the end of the dream, from the hammer in her hand there has somehow emerged a towering city built into the face of a mountain, decorated all over with flowing fountains and hiding deep secrets.

A tap of her hammer gathers materials up to some place inside her where they are refined, shaped, and then released again through the hammer that is the focus of her ability to Build.

When she wakes up, the hammer is resting on her chest.

She blinks away the morning fuzziness and blurriness, solidifying into something vaguely resembling her usual self. 

She lets out a little contented sigh, stretching back into bed. That was a pretty cozy dream... Seeing all those details and all the work and just... having everything bloom up around her was really shiny and...

She blushes, and rubs her hand against her chest. 

Ehh???

There's the hammer from her dream. With a little bit of finangling, she can pop out of bed and heft it in her hand, stepping carefully past her bedside stool to just swing it around a little. It looks basically ordinary, but there's a little... niggling intuition that there's something she can do with it. Most of the details of the tricks slip away like an ordinary dream, but there's a little... tactile sense of a power that she can reach out with and do something with, at least. She pokes at the feeling in her head a little, and hums in thought. 

She examines the hammer with her fingers a little in the light of the bedside table - is there a maker's mark or anything special marking it? Is the head detachable? She also has a bit of a silly desire to just try to whack it at things and see what comes naturally...? Well, there's also the other end of it to think about, and that's... probably safer to fuck around and find out with? 

Yeah, okay. 

She's got a pull up bar secured just by her doorframe, and there's some door hinges... Would screws even count for magic back-of-a-hammer powers? She's got a girlband poster or two she's got laying fallow that she meant to install - never felt like she found the right space for it, but it wouldn't hurt to try to see if anything special happens when she tries to install it again, would it...? 

The makers mark is a simple hammer in a circle. That hammer has a maker's mark on it too — another hammer in a circle, and so on ad infinitum.

The head doesn't seem to want to come off, although it's not particularly clear why not; it looks like a simple press-fit join. Maybe she just needs some more leverage.

Pulling out her poster and gently holding it against the wall ... she starts feeling a craving for iron. Or for glue, maybe? Her pull-up bar honestly looks very tap-able ...

She wonders momentarily if this is when she gets the DLC that actually tells her when she has a dietary problem she needs to fix, then notices that it's asking after glue of all things. And it does feel more like it's more than just the kind of iron you would need in a diet... 

Glue though... She's got a decent amount of that! She's never been the best at keeping on top of these things, so she's got a crusted up bottle of superglue or two that's decently full but a pain in the arse to use that she can try tapping, then...? 

She's got a few random cans and stuff in her recycling? She doesn't mind sacrificing the little container of nails she's got, too, if she can get something interesting out of it... Is there a particular sense of how picky it is, or what if anything it's picky for, besides just 'metal'? 

It doesn't seem to be particularly picky; there are lots of things that she could use. Metal or glue or maybe even string?

If she decides to try something more specific than 'affix the poster to the wall', the feelings will sharpen up.

If she taps the glue or the nails with her hammer, they will dissolve into motes of light that fly into her, and the cravings will go away, since she has the materials she needs.

Aww that is a shiny feeling. Hopefully it's not one of those things that gets too - negative motivationy. 

- The dream said the materials are more than just stored. Is there any particular feeling of - what she can refine them towards? 

She'll go and affix it - she was wanting to do that anyways. Probably just something simple with glue, if it's as... 'abstracted' as she's hoping? 

Now the question is more about... what else can she do? There's a bunch of cardboard and paper and plastics in her recycling, too, so she might as well scoop that up if possible.

 Can she make... a small cube made out of cardboard, bigger than any of the constituent bits would allow on their own? Different colors of plastic than she's got represented? Origami cranes made out of the paper? She's never really gotten her fingers cooperative enough to make them look good, but she's gone through a college try at them a time or two before.

A tap with her hammer fixes the poster to the wall, perfectly straight, just as she had pictured it.

Absorbing the cardboard and paper is just as smooth and natural as the glue was. If she pays close attention to the feeling, she can feel the absorbed materials slowly converting to ... raw-er form. She only absorbed processed tree fibers, but she could make a very tiny woodchip right now, if she wanted to.

And she can absolutely make a cube out of cardboard and cranes out of the paper. Trying to make different colors of plastic gives her a craving feeling again, this time for ... metal complexes and organic pigments?

Oh tricky tricky tricky... 

Can she make idk, sheets of raw cellulose, or raw carbon, or things like that? She'll nab her garbage while she's at it, too - any luck absorbing the glass she broke a few days ago (...and the mug she broke a few days ago. She's a little clumsy, okay?) and the rest of the sundry things that ended up in there? 

As for what can she do with the metal... The nails were steel. Could she say, do aluminum nails? Nails with a different balance of carbon and iron in them? 

The speed at which her absorbed materials are being "refined" isn't very high. She can make a sheet of cellulose the size of her hand, and a little patch of graphene, but the majority of her paper stock is still paper. If she doesn't seem to be trying to make anything in particular, the refinement is spread out across all the materials she has absorbed. If she focuses on trying to make something specific, the refinement concentrates on whatever is needed to get the pieces for that.

And all of her garbage is easily absorbed.

Aluminum nails just give her aluminum cravings. Nails with more carbon are easy — some of the carbon from her cardboard gets used. Nails with less carbon make her rendering focus on pulling raw iron out of her stored steel, and trying to actually make the nail feels a bit like trying to lift something too heavy, or maybe like reaching the bottom of a drink and having your straw start to pull air instead of tea, at least until enough raw iron is available.

The feeling of what-all she has stored and what is happening to it gets much clearer with practice.

She'll mess around a bit with it, and check if she can reabsorb the things she makes? 

It doesn't seem that conceptual? Or well... there's something going on, there. It's... what, that she can get out the material as is, and that when she's processed it, she can what... get out things you can process out of it, and "What it's made from"? She's pretty sure you can't get wood out of cardboard in any normal way, but it makes a certain... internal sense, maybe? At least if she can say, make clay out of pottery and sand out of glass. 

Or well. Is there a sense of 'labels' of what the contents of her 'inventory' 'are'?

Reabsorbing the things she makes is just as easy as absorbing anything else. And yes, she can get sand out of glass. Trying to get clay out of pottery makes her thirsty.

Her inventory of absorbed items is not labeled. Or, at least, not labeled for her — she can keep track of the materials in there approximately as easily as she can keep track of objects in her surroundings, and a bit of focus on a material reminds her of where she got it from and how refined it is. Although it's hard to say whether that's just her normal ability to remember things, or some component of her new magical senses.

Poking at the feeling of one of the refined materials, such as carbon, gives her the same impression of what it is and how much she has that the materials she absorbed directly have.

- Is there an obvious ceiling to how 'refined' things get? If she picks out something really particular - the small touches of vinyl from one of her art experiments, maybe. If she focuses on refining just that, is there a - saturation point it gets to? 

Does she have any particular sense of what being refined... 'means'? Is it a vague sense of proportion or a percentage or something - more finnicky and abstract than that? 

It's not a proportion or a percentage so much as a continual flow from one resorvoir to another. Her 'cardboard' storage drains into her 'cellulose' storage, which drains into her 'carbon' storage, and so on. She can feel out amounts and put percentages on it herself, but again, that's her own mind putting numbers on a thing that she's just ... feeling.

The tiny bit of vinyl refines itself through several stages. Focusing all of her refinement on that small bit of material makes it go faster. First it becomes white polyvinyl chloride powder and a plasticiser, and then with a bit of focus it turns into chlorine and ethylene. Narrowing her intent even further, these pull apart into carbon and chlorine and hydrogen and a handful of other trace elements. And then the hydrogen starts separating into H⁺ and e⁻, and the protons fracture into two up quarks and a down quark and—

Her focus snaps, and she's left with a bit of a headache, from pushing it.

And anyway, it's obvious what refining something means, in the form of a half-remembered echo of her dream. She's turning it into building materials.

Yeah okay, not going that far.

She rubs at her head. 

...Is there anything super actionable she should figure out before - trying anything more? What she has is plenty weaponizeable already, and plenty usable already. Doing too much more would involve buying stuff or selling stuff or doing stuff with other people and... 

...Would you like me to step in? You don't have to, it's not just on you. You know how entwined ours senses can be. 

No, no, it's okay. I... 

I've always wanted to take the first step into the unknown, you know? 

A little jaunty smile graces her lips, followed by a shy little sniffle. 

- Okay. 

She picks up her phone, and dials up emergency services. 

"Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?" the dispatcher asks.

"Um." 

She reflexively looks over her shoulder. 

It's okay. Just take a deep breath. 

"I've got the - subjective experience of gaining superpowers. I woke up this morning with a hammer that lets me de and reconstruct objects and process them for creating things. I just... woke up from a dream and had it there with me. I know this isn't the sort of thing that normally happens, but at least subjectively, I feel lucid and calm and myselves? As far as I know, there's no particular - imminence, but obviously if it's real it's something that should be investigated and explored, so..." 

She swallows, and beats her fingertips against her thigh nervously. 

"Okay, thank you. You did the right thing in calling us. The most likely explanation is that you are hallucinating, so please don't take any actions that would endanger yourself or other people if your powers did not in fact exist. Can you enable your camera and show me an example of something being de- and re-constructed?"

This is already a mildly unusual call, because most people who are having psychiatric problems are, indeed, not that lucid. The dispatcher doesn't even consider that this could be a prank, of course — judging whether everything is a prank would make them worse at their job in the median case, and if it is a prank the justice system can figure out an appropriately punitive fine. That's not their job. Their job is to calmly connect the caller with the appropriate help they need to resolve their emergency.

"Give me a moment..." 

She props up her phone against a wad of tea cozies, then grabs a mug from her cabinet. With a gentle taps of her hammer, it dissolve into light. She taps her hammer against her kitchen table, then it reappears. She repeats the cycle, dissolving it, restructuring it out into a much wider but stouter cup. 

"Um. Hold please."

The dispatcher takes a moment to pull up the full flowchart. Most calls only require the streamlined one that every dispatcher has memorized.

"Okay — first of all, I do observe you to be deconstructing and reconstructing that mug in a way that I previously believed to be impossible. So there is definitely something strange going on. I have no other reason to believe that you are experiencing mental problems. Do you have any reason to believe that this phenomenon represents an urgent danger to life, health, or property?"

She pauses, and taps her tongue. 

"I have no specific reason to believe that there's any such danger? Though I will note that um." 

She's digging herself a bit of a whole here, isn't she. 

"That with minimal extrapolations of I appear to be able to do with the ability, that it probably wouldn't be too hard to violate normal threat modelling assumptions about how difficult it is to create certain risks? I can do some amount of - chemical processing without ordinary logistics, and..." 

She pokes her sense of her power. Can she bin by atomic weight? Like, can she produce something made out of specifically carbon-14, say? 

She doesn't have much carbon-14 in her stores to work with, but yes, she could. Although now she's sort of craving charcoal.

She steps in, voice smoother and softer and a little lower. 

"I think it would probably be pretty easy to use this ability to create a sizeable explosion, amongst other things. We& received a dream featuring a mentor figure teaching us something of how to use our powers, but I don't have any specific intelligence regarding who if anyone else has these abilities and what they, if they exist, are doing with them. I don't have any particular reason to believe that the mere existence of the abilities or their ordinary use is of any particular danger above and beyond the risk of people putting to use the things they manufacture." 

"Ah, I see. Thank you. In that case, I'm going to share this call with the risk-management team, just in case. In the mean time, since there's no urgent risk — what other support do you need right now? I see that you're calling from Back to the Mountain City; do you want me to put you in touch with the appropriate part of the local government?"

"That would be appreciated, thank you." 

A pause, her focus flowing out a little to feel her body and the little exciteable stressable ball that is Lazuli's presence in the back of her mind. 

"I don't think we need any particular support? It'd probably be a good idea to get a second set of eyes looking over everything and confirming that the objects I make aren't hazardous or defective somehow, and help with acquiring resources to test things with would be nice, if it turns up clear? And then there's administrative things about running a business that I'd probably have to sort out eventually that I don't have the best idea of how to go about. But that's hardly anything urgent, just a reasonably predictable future thing to deal with." 

"Still, it makes sense to worry about. I'm sending a message to our[ex] contact in the Back to the Mountain City Department of Bureaucratic Weirdness, and pushing their contact info to your& phone. You can call them to sort out any legal questions you have, about the status of your powers or about what business resources are available in your area."

"... and the risk-management team just got back to me, and they're also interested in testing to see whether your created items are safe, and some of the limits on what you can do, in particular around the maximum possible size. Are you familiar with the hazardous materials laboratory at the Back to the Mountain City University campus? If you have the time, I can schedule you to meet with local Emergency Services personnel and some of the researchers there to do those tests."

"Haven't had much reasons to be there exactly, but should be able to find my way there well enough. An appointment would be helpful, thank you - don't expect our schedule to be particularly tight, right now, and figuring this out is the most important thing on our plate, as you might imagine."

"Beyond that... Anything you recommend I do with my powers and/or the created objects before then? If we're worried about them being harmful, I can reabsorb everything I've made and just not make more until I'm at the lab? Though might be helpful to have an already made object somewhere, and I could see the argument for just not touching anything more until I've got people looking over my shoulder, as it were." 

"My official recommendation is to stop doing anything more, because the current situation looks safe and we have no idea what you are actually doing. But since you have instruction from a, uh, dream mentor, you may have an advantage as far as determining what is safe here. Do you live with anyone who could potentially be exposed, if you were to leave the items you have already created where they are?"

"And I've made the appointment for an hour from now; I'm pushing the details to your phone. If you have trouble getting there, hit the 'call back' button and your call will be routed to someone with context who can help. Don't worry if you end up running a bit late; as you said, this is currently the most important important thing on a lot of people's plates."

She shakes her head.

"No. Lucky enough to have my own place." 

She checks the details, and plugs them into a mapping app. Shouldn't be too hard to get things working out - she freshen herself up in the shower and throw on a new outfit before setting off for the lab. 

She slips forward, combing her dyed-blue hair back, easing the cyan streams down along her shoulders and making sure that her light up hair ornament is settled in neatly. With a little catch of breath, she slips on fresh underwear, and a blue and silver work dress. She spills a well worn purple scarf around her shoulder. There's something all too easy about slipping into work and clearer purposes, but this, if any time, is the time to be professional, where she can. 

She packs the hammer up in a small black backpack, and sets out on her trip, before fading back into Quicksilver's arms. 

The train system is the same as it ever was.

The hazardous materials lab turns out to be right on the edge of the city's industrial district, for obvious enough reasons. She's greeted by a cheerful emergency services worker in the standard purple-and-black skin-covering pants-having uniform, who shows her into lab one.

The lab is occupied by a wiry, happy person with the shaved head of a researcher who works with exciting chemicals and doesn't want to fuss with hairnets.

"Good morning! I'm Volhmelan. You must be the person with mysterious superpowers that we're here to test?"

"Mhm!" 

She pauses, then musses her hair a bit bashfully.

"Though honestly, I'm a little emotionally if not intellectually surprised everyone has been this credulous. Even if it makes sense, there's a sort of... shift in genre in how the world is treating things around me that's a little disorienting, I guess." 

"I mean, I guess that makes sense."

Volhmelan pauses for a moment to work out what to say. Being a materials science lab technician does not usually require interacting with new people very much.

"But it seems like a lot of work just to get slapped with a fine for lying to Emergency Services if we put you in front of the cameras and stuff here and you fail to produce anything. Speaking of which, I just want to confirm that you're okay being recorded and having the results of any tests shared with the — what was the group?"

"The Emergency Services Unexpected Risk Management Team," the emergency services person supplies.

"Right, them. Is that all fine? I figure that we'll start with the wide-spectrum camera and a geiger counter, and then move onto more specialized tests if they seem indicated."

"Yeah, that's fine." 

She grins and bounces a bit, before pulling out the hammer. 

"Prrrrrrobably best thing to do for now would be to repeat the demo I did on the call, and then take requests after that?"

She obligingly (if wigglesomely) waits for them to have everything set up. 

Volhmelan makes sure everything is recording, and then gives her a thumbs up.

"Go for it!"

She repeats the process! 

She doesn't try for exactly atomically the same, more the same sense of relative warping, the same general expression of the idea of it. Though actually... does it feel like she can make something exactly to a mathematical value, or exactly copy something she's absorbed and/or made before, or is it a loosegoosier thing? 

She can make things as exactly as she can conceptualize them. But that doesn't seem to extend to automatically conceptualizing things she breaks down in any more detail than is provided by just looking at them and knowing what they're made of.

"... aaaaaaaahhhhh! Empathy failure! Now I'm getting the feeling you were talking about earlier. Wow."

They take a moment to shake out their hands in a self-soothing way. Then they check the cameras. That sure is a spontaneously appearing object with no apparent mechanism.

"Uh, let me get the geiger counter ..."

They wave it over the created mug for a minute.

"No higher than background. And none of the chemical leak alerts fired, not that that was very likely. Can you do a bigger object on the workbench there, just to be sure? Two meters cubed, or as big as you can make it."

She laughs warmly, and nods along. 

"Experiences coming from faerie are... kind of the same thing? But that doesn't make it that much less strange, honestly, just something I'm more settled into. " 

Sure! She doesn't have that much stocked up, but she can make a decently big cube wrapped in glass, filled with clumps of ceramics and cardboard and whatever else ended up in there. 

That continues to be a perfectly normal object. Or, well, it's a weird cube of mixed materials, but it's not apparently hazardous.

They share as much, and then run through a series of other tests: seeing whether creating or absorbing objects directly releases anything harmful (it doesn't) and checking whether her weight goes up and down when she absorbs and creates things (it doesn't).

"So ... you mentioned being potentially able to make explosions, I was told? Now that we know your safe stuff is safe, do you want to try making something explosive intentionally?"

She half-flinches back a little, before taking a steadying breath.

"Oh um... I don't think I mentioned how that would work? Pretty much every way that I think I could do it would require more technical expertise or materials than I have, but..." 

She vibrates a little, then plays her hands together fussily. 

"I could create conventional explosives, with the materials or things processable into the materials, and a general sense of what ingredients go into it? I could theoretically put together two different parts of a chemical reaction, which could probably be made to be pretty energetic, especially if the process is instaneousish or suspends physics in some way? I might be able to make something in a compressed state, and there's things you could do with that? I can also bundle materials by atomic mass and element, so theoretically, I could completely skip conventional enrichment processes for making a nuclear weapon, or concievably make some sort of super critical material and blow myself up horribly? Of those... I guess it's probably worth testing relatively small amounts of compression and double checking everything works chemically as expected? The rest... less sure about those." 

"Ah, that all makes sense. Let's test whether you can make things under compression, in tension, or in motion, and then check whether the stuff you make is chemically normal."

Some brief checks reveal that the thing she makes have to be stationary and already at an equilibrium ... but she can make a spring pre-compressed if she also makes a retaining bracket for it, so that it will not move when created, but will move when released. She can also make things that are balanced unstably such that they fall over as soon as the air shifts.

Volhmelan documents all this as thoroughly as they can.

"Alright. The chemistry tests are going to have to be a little bit more in depth. I mean, we can check that you can create, say, weak acids and test that with a pH strip, but testing that everything is completely chemically normal will take longer. Mug of weak acid, please?"

She could probably still say, make a pressure cannister, though, right? You could probably design something like that to fail destructively on command, or otherwise do something nasty. 

She doesn't know the chemical composition of most any of such things offhand, but after a quick search, she can make some acetic acid, sure. 

She can definitely make a pressure canister! And she can do, for example, little retaining latches made of ice so that they melt open after a moment. Or just really tall things that fall on people.

Volhmelan pronounces her acetic acid to be acidic, and asks her to make a number of other small samples of organic materials to test in more detail.

"It's possible that you'll create dexter isomers of biological materials," they explain, "which would often be poisonous. I mean, not all of them — some dexter isomers are medically useful, and most are non-bioactive, but still."

The Emergency Services worker has been taking notes.

"So it sounds like she could probably make dangerous things with a bit of thought, but as long as she's careful not to make objects fall on anyone and have any springs be securely restrained, she's unlikely to make anything dangerous by accident — excepting perhaps biologicals, which need to be tested for helicity. Does that sound accurate to both of you?"

"I... think so? Assuming no unknown unknowns." 

"I might as well double check the risk around that? I don't expect there to be much issues there because of where the abstraction is? I think the biggest risks would just me being a bit inattentive if I'm doing finnicky with novel chemistry I don't understand very well, but doing something I have a - conceptual idea of should be fine and that's not the sort of thing that I should be doing without intentionality, anyways." 

"Yeah, in my professional opinion as a lab tech: don't do finnicky novel chemistry inattentively. That's going to end badly regardless of whether you're using magic hammer powers or not."

"Hmm ... I'm not seeing an obvious way to test that, but I also think that we've narrowed down the possible risks here enough to give the risk-management team a reasonable starting point to work from. Unless either of you have more things you want to check in a controlled environment, I think we should send these results over to them. And then I have a non-urgent request from the Public Safety Announcement Creation Committee to discuss whether and how you want to be identified in any publications that result from all this, Lustrous."

"I don't... mind in principle? I like making things and having pride in making things and showing off that? Not particularly worried about the public response, though a bit worried about - practical considerations about security? Not sure it's exactly the safest thing to be a public magic person without like, at least normal celebrity levels of precautions about stalkers or whatever, so might want to hold out on that 'til that's cleared up?" 

"Sensible, but I'm not sure what exactly the options there are, hence the request for a meeting with someone who handles that sort of thing."

People who haven't worked in Emergency Services are often surprised that the job's three most common activities are: coordinating things between people, moving things, and waiting.

A sharp little nod. 

"Things to test... Do I get anything about the information in computers I deconstruct? A lower bound for the volume I can absorb? Might be worth leaving the hammer with you to take a look at in detail, see if there's anything weird about it in particular. Not entirely sure how it works with liquids, too - not sure if I could tap up say, a puddle on the ground...?" 

"You were able to reclaim the acetic acid," Volhmelan points out. "But maybe only because it was in a mug. We can test liquids outside of containers ..."

It turns out that she can absorb liquids, in whatever shape seems appropriate. That gives Volhmelan the video evidence to point out that she's not absorbing things instantaneously, but rather from the outside in, which is why there's no thunderclap. She has no detectable minimum volume, and does not get any information from deconstructed computers — or deconstructed paper books, for that matter. And she can only reconstruct an object with writing on it exactly as it was if she looked at the writing beforehand. A sacrificial test phone produces a phone-shaped metal and glass object that fails to turn on, and which proves to be filled with decorative circuit-board like designs in place of actual circuits when Volhmelan pops the casing open.

"Well, it looks like you'll have to be careful not to absorb any electronics you want to keep working," they note. "Although since you can reproduce writing, I bet you could reproduce a circuit board too, if you memorized the wiring diagram."

"It would depend on the level of abstraction, I think? I doubt I'll be able to print out CPUs any time soon, though the basic physical form of the um. macroscopic traces of a circuit board is probably doable? I don't think precision is the issue. Could still have some use..."

- Actually, that's another thing worth testing. She'll try to absorb a space of air, and then either as quickly as possible after or 'simultaneously' make a tiny vacuum chamber with a silicon wafer on it, focusing as much as she can on making it perfectly smooth and singular, just one crystal laid out evenly. 

She'll try to make a simple circuit board from a reference just to check his guess.

"I think it wants me to be able to... picture 'why' it works and how it's made up? Not just that it does work. But I can reproduce a page of writing perfectly that I'm... pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to type out again from memory? There's a bit of leniency, there, I think? But I'm not sure how far it extends, and I bet that it'll go farther when I'm actually trying to build something..." 

Since she absorbs from the outside in, slowly enough to avoid causing a thunderclap, she can't actually leave a pocket of vacuum behind when absorbing air.

... but she can construct a vacuum chamber, if she tries, pushing the existing air out of the way, somehow.

And, like with the writing, if she knows what the circuit is and how it's laid out, she can reproduce it just fine.

Volhmelan rubs their nose thoughtfully.

"Do you want to try building some lab equipment that we can use to check helicity? In case actually intending to build something alters things somehow?"

And also it will get them cool magical lab equipment. Hopefully with non-leaky gaskets.

ummmmm. 

She's pretty sure it won't work, but she might as well make a college try? Making a shell isn't too hard. Making a circuit with an LED is doable with a bit of fiddling. With a bit of tinkering and a good bit of looking things up, she can... probably throw together something that might possibly kind of sort of crudely be in the general vicinity of a spectrometer? She can understand the basics of a prisms and lenses and bits of metal with holes in it designed to selectively block out certain bits of light? But unless something magically comes together it's not going to be actually suitable for purpose. 

Actually the equipment he had in mind is a really precise polarimeter, which is mostly mechanical. It's a bright light source, a finely linearly polarized filter, a large clear tube, and then a rotating polarizer with a stepper motor, a big gear-down ratio, and a photo-resistor.

She can certainly try! 

She'll try to make the pieces one by one, then try to do it all together - she's pretty sure that some of the exact scale details can slip when she's not picturing it all as one device, but she has enough of a mind's eye to - feel a bit of the geometry, the sense of how it all locks together, and hopefully that should help? Motors are pretty simple in their own way too - she's done enough with deconstructed ones in little projects that they don't feel - too too intimidating. 

Volhmelan produces a solution of dilute left-handed sugar water, to test it, and eventually pronounces the polarimeter perfectly serviceable.

"I'll need to calibrate it before use, but it looks good. Did building a thing with some basic circuitry in it feel different than trying to make a circuit in isolation?"

"Nooot much? Basic circuitry is fine - making an example circuit board felt about the same? It's just... an actual computer is really really complicated and busy with all sorts of details. I understand the logic of 1s and 0s, and I've played around with half-adders a little, but I don't actually know how a modern computer works, beyond the vaguest gloss of 'stuff like that, stacked up very cleverly', and I don't think that's enough? Something with a - simpler basis might be better - I think the power might help me sort of... cheat at scale, a little? Letting me hold bigger mental images in my head like I'm linking cad files together, or something like that...?" 

She shakes her head. 

"Not totally sure, though." 

"Well, I can get you a textbook that builds a modern CPU from the NAND-gate up, if you want, but that seems pretty far outside the realm of safety testing. Maybe something to practice on your own time, if you even want to?"

"Yeah... And it's certainly convenient if I can do that, but this should be plenty to start with, I think? I'll see how far I can get, but no promises." 

"Alright! Well, I'll run the tests on the samples you provided, and get back to you with results today or tomorrow. Until then, I recommend not eating anything you make. And I'll text you a link to the raw data from all of this in case you want to do your own analysis. I'll treat all of this as confidential until I hear from ES whether you're going public about having superpowers."

Volhmelan starts wiping down the lab space they've been using. Just because there's no reason to think that there are any contaminants left behind is no reason not to clean in between tasks. This is the exciting hazardous materials laboratory.