Phoenix Co. Recruiting for strange positions
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It's edible. It's even not entirely tasteless.

No manuals are in evidence, though the basins totally do have more magic wiring.

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Not even if she checks her phone and her computer? Dang, sucks to be her. Well, time to get back to work on figuring out tubes, then. With the insight that they work better inside solid objects, can she manage to construct one that holds up? (Will it do its job from inside a solid object or would that require her to put the object somewhere impossible?)

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Working inside solid objects is...... Messy. She can find an appropriate long piece of wood in the storehouse, along with some random other bits of raw material. Clay. Metal. Fabric. But naively applying the same techniques to sculpt mana in the air doesn't really work- Gentle nudges don't do anything, and forcing one small piece causes tons of turbulence all around it.

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Okay, so she has to learn the whole landscape of interactions over again. Bring it, this is what she came here for. Do the different materials have different effects, or is it too hard to tell and she should wait until she has the basics down in one medium before trying the next, or what?

If her failures are generating significant miasma without her getting anywhere, though, she will go back to air-sculpting her tubes.

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The miasma she's generating is honestly nothing compared to the constant background radiation trying and failing to creep through the walls of her new place. Like a shot glass in a swimming pool. It's even being pushed back some by the passive pressure from the Wellspring.

Different materials do have different effects; It's subtle, but of the dozen or so flavors of magic, altax particularly likes to cling to fabric, and bios flows more easily along wood than anything else. Even just sticking one end of a pole into the wellspring would probably do something.

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...huh, so if she just straight-up physically crafts the shape she needs out of the materials corresponding to the right flavours of magic, how far does that get her? Though braiding the three different kinds is probably going to be funky, and she doesn't know yet that there are actually corresponding materials for every flavour, she should do a thorough investigation of that.

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Not all materials have exactly one corresponding flavor of magic that likes them. But if she carefully lays down the magic in each one first, making a little physical braid of this soft thread, copper wire, and some sort of plastic cord(?) does make the resulting magical braid a lot more stable. She can make a little three-way braid of the material fairly laboriously, and have a pretty stable cord of magic out of it, only fraying at the ends very slightly.

She's probably getting very tired now?

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But you see, she can't be tired, because she is doing MAGIC fine, fine, she'll sleep, she'll sleep.

And then wake up and scarf breakfast and immediately go back to investigating the intricacies of the correspondence between magic and material. Too distracted to hunt up actual writing materials, she instead takes notes on her phone regarding which magic flavours interact with which materials in which ways, gradually filling in a complete chart between all the flavours she knows about and all the materials in her workshop. She's going to need to get much better at physical craftwork, that's for sure. Also, while she's at it, she realizes that she doesn't have an explicit chart of the reactions between different flavours of magic, and she probably should. And she should check how those reactions are influenced by material, because she suspects they are influenced by material even if only because the magic will move differently through different materials and that might slow down or speed up reactions. Hmm, and on the flip side, having a chart of how the magic flavours behave by themselves and what shapes they like best to settle into and how easy it is to pull them between those shapes might also be a good idea? She isn't sure that there are any stark differences among them in that regard, but she isn't sure that there aren't.

Editing this spreadsheet on her phone is getting really annoying, but she is determined. For science. MAGIC science.

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There are some pretty stark differences in how the different flavors of magic behave. Individually, the differences are comparatively minor - this one's a bit more sluggish, this one seems to vibrate back and forth more, this one is attracted to itself more strongly. But the emergent effects when they combine into larger structures are very different.

Soma in particular likes forming pointy shapes, and is good at nudging other magic around just by sheer proximity.

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