She tilts her head and frowns. "It's still so weird to me that material properties start acting up if you make them complex enough and don't have a life force making them behave. Back in the old world, all we had were material properties, and you could trust that they'd just keep working unless something externally acted upon them. The tiny lightning maze is entirely based on the material properties of lightning and certain materials that conduct it better or worse. As long as those material properties stayed the same you could expect the tiny lightning maze to keep working perfectly."

She tugs at her hair a bit and huffs. "Mareth has weird physics, Hazel. We like Mareth and its people a lot, but the physics is really weird."

"Hmm." Hazel considers. "I haven't made a deep study of this particular question, but it doesn't seem to me that there's any sort of contradiction in expecting that things will abide by their material properties and that the complexity of life is only achievable with the framework of life to uphold it. If you wanted a real explanation, however, I think you might have to seek out a scholar of a different stripe."

"But that—!" She sighs, takes a breath. "Then Mareth is moving the definition of what counts as the complexity of life, because in a strictly material world that device didn't need any lifeforce to work, because the material properties just kept working unattended, no matter how complexly you used them."

"'Moving' the definition? Compared to what exists in your world, you mean?"

"Or maybe not moving the definition, but... the only way for the behavior you're describing to work is if after some level of complexity, Mareth just throws its metaphorical hands in the air and gives up on maintaining the material properties unless a lifeforce pitches in to do the work. In a purely material world, it works fine. Mareth is having Opinions."

"Hmm. I can see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's true," Hazel says thoughtfully. "You could equally well say that, oh, it's inconsistent that a house made of logs needs more support than a house made of matchsticks, if each is to avoid falling down. Or, I suppose I shouldn't assume—do materials behave differently at different scales in that way, in your world?"

"No! Or well, not until you get several orders of magnitude smaller than even a single gate in the tiny lightning maze, and even then it's not that they behave differently but just that the behavior at that scale averages out to the big behavior when taken in aggregate! It's entirely consistent all the way down!"

"The behaviour at which scale?" blinks Hazel. "I'm afraid you've lost me. How do you mean, it averages out? Are you referring to the differences in architectural constraints between a mansion and a dollhouse, or to something else?"

"Like okay of course you need different support for the log cabin than you need for the matchstick cabin and you can do math to show exactly how it's different and there's other math you do to describe how electrically conductive materials conduct electricity and the math gives different answers at different sizes and shapes but the same math keeps working all the way down! The only way for what happened to our phone to happen is if that math decided not to work anymore below a certain scale if you don't have a life force enforcing it!"

She draws a right triangle, labels the sides with a/b/c, and then writes the Pythagorean formula down. "Our world has proven that this equation holds for all triangles that have that right-angle there at all sizes as long as you're in a stable geometry that follows the same rules. The behavior your describing is like if that equation stopped working if I made the triangle too small."

"Hmm," says Hazel. "I think I'm familiar with this result, though pure mathematics have never been my specialty. I still maintain my expectation that the difficulty of maintaining dense complexity without lifeforce is more like the difficulty of holding up a log cabin compared to a matchstick cabin than like an arbitrary point at which mathematics stop working. But I wouldn't begin to know how to investigate in order to find out for sure."

"That doesn't make... okay it does make sense, but only if we assume that keeping the math consistent takes work, and the basic effort the world puts out without the support of lifeforce just stops being enough after some density of complexity, but that would imply that there.s a continuous pressure on Mareth to devolve into irrational chaos?"

Ruby looks extremely confused and displeased with these implications.

"I couldn't say," Hazel says apologetically. "I'm an alchemist, not a... I have no idea what you would have to be to know the answers to those questions."

"In our old world we'd call it a theoretical physicist? But it probably needs more things here in Mareth? Whatever we wanna call it, I'm gonna have to become one if I want our projects to make sense here."

"Well, I wish you the best of luck and I will be very interested in both your results and the process by which you learn them."

"Well, when we build a lab, you're invited."

They smile. "I am very pleased to hear it."

She sighs slowly, then nods. "I've probably been fronting long enough, and I feel enough calmer, so we might as well take the sample."

A small nod. "Here is your label, then."

She writes "Ruby" down carefully on it, hands it back, and holds out her wrist.

And Hazel takes the sample, the same as always.

She hisses just a little bit when she's cut, but blushes a bit as well. "Okay. That's four. Hailey's next, and I think we've seen it enough times that she'll be able to do it herself."

Hazel nods, and cleans the knife, and sets it in the basket and nudges the whole thing over to Ruby. There is one unused label and one empty vial remaining.

Ruby blows out a breath and closes her eyes.

And Hailey opens them.

"Okay, you lot. Last girl to give a sample here." She shakes her head and frowns for a moment. "I am somewhat annoyed that the first time something made our Ruby cry in this new world, it's the world rather than something I can stab for the crime of doing so."

A short sigh, then a nod. "I'll cope, though."

"...do you usually stab things that make her cry? I mean, fair."