...Speaking of training fights, though, she should really make some sort of actual weapon.
And lightsabers are really cool.
So maybe if she just...
Alright, this is going to be by far the most thaumaturgically complex problem she's ever dealt with. First off, she needs to make quintessence. It's the only material in the O-M catalogue that she can convince herself is a good representative of magic-itself. And that's simple enough, really...
But what's complex is when she needs to build her ritual sigils out of it - at the very least, she needs to build a sort of floating I/O anchor, to turn the chains of triplex-bound air around at the tip of the blade.
...She may actually need to build the tip of the blade out of magic; as it is, she's not sure it would thrust properly.
Anyway.
First step: a reservoir, to store the quintessence that she will make the blade out of.
She can, at least, sort of reuse the framework for the silver crystal that she has already worked out...
Silver, gold, or platinum...
...Actually, no, the first question is how she should create the input/output nodes.
She has some ideas, at least - and it oughtn't be extremely difficult to create what she needs, though it will stretch her skills to their limit.
...It's a very artistic design, what she comes up with. It intakes, in a roughly atmospheric ratio, many 'air-2' (Things That Aren't Oxygenated-2), a 'fire-2' (O2), 'water-3' (H2O, represented with a pair of triplex bonds), and fire-earth-fire (CO2), as well as 'lead' (an 'ingot' of pencil lead). It outputs a version of her circle-spiral/hex-triangle sigil, the 'circle' (diagrammatically, a truncated hexagon of r=5), and triangles, made of quintessence and accented at their meeting with gold (to anchor unto other parts), while she renders implicit the hexagon by the triplex bonds that ring the center-point in fire, and crafts the two spirals - one that elevates the raw material into 'alchemical reification-space', and one that draws those raw materials out - of the four elements and 'vitae', and salt and 'mors'; the first plunging to the center's quintessence molecule, the second folding out within the outer rings. (These, too, are bound with triplex bonds, for their 'nature' as energy-conductive.)
The way she fudges the structural bonds shall not be elaborated upon here, being as it is quite messy - but she does, in fact, believe that were she to assemble the bond structure from magnetized rods, orbs upon which to anchor them, and perhaps a bit of liberty taken with certain parts, that she could well draw them into a properly circular shape.
...With that settled, it is now time for her to contemplate how to actually lay out a lightsaber.
This may well end up being hell, if she's honest with herself. She still doesn't have normal ways to etch alchemy-space into metals. Though, now that she's thinking about it...
She could just put the alchemy-space into an alchemy-space. Well, not exactly 'an alchemy-space', so much as 'the space in which alchemy-"space" itself is reified' - but all she needs to do is transfer the diagram's mana-structure into an I/O point, because those already abstract size/structure.
...Yeah. She can work with this. It's basically what she already does, when she flips things across planes or into different tilesets or through chemistry/alchemy transitions.
And producing one sigil is much less difficult than producing many sigils.
She can make this work. This will work.
Now she just has to do some nice holographic rendering. She can do that, right?
...This may take a minute.
Okay, seriously though, how is she going to do this...
Well. Quintessence covereth a multitude of magical use-cases. So if she just... Uses quintessence-formed wireframes! Ha! ...She'll come back to that later. It still has a reservoir problem. And a structural issue, in that she doesn't have a Turing machine lying around to execute arbitrary data files or anything. Yet.
Anyway. She should, perhaps, make an actual magic tool. (She wants her sonic screwdriver.)
Though the question there is 'how', once again.
Vitae, again, would elevate... Connected to quintessence to channel and transmit -
Silver for the body, again. And then what, though, is the question... Or rather, she needs to get the form factor right, is the important thing.
So she has .9mm lead, and she has crystals of salt that are also totally that sort of size, she's not going to observe too closely -
- Actually, hm, she'll reuse the earlier shape she drafted, if she's going to do this in one diagram. The lead's really a bit bigger than anything but those big honking cubes of salt that you get in pretzels, and those are bigger than the lead.
...Though, on the other hand...
...Yeah, no, she's going to create the Vitae in a different chamber. The lead stays minimized.
Alright. With that settled, and the salt refinery set up, she can bond the Vitae together to upsize it. Plonk a Van Berlo's Wheel into another chamber to make Quintessence from the salt too - good grief, this is going to be a mess in terms of consumption - and she already has a lead-to-silver tower -
Anyway. Write down a perpetual salt refinery, for fodder for the temporary projections, it'll be useful later -
The pattern for that should probably be bound by reactive air, to transmit the impulse; that means she needs to actually construct the relevant shape out of fire first and transmute it after -
Three hexes, empty centers - they'll get filled later -
Okay, she does actually need to tip the connection from the reservoirs with an emitter, fire that diagram up, hold its output -
- start assembling the casing -
- input on a 'tell the device to do things' level comes from the Vitae-Quintessence -
- oh hmm if she just makes it a r=three series of hexes she should be able to bond the edges together at a semi-arbitrary angle -
- how do you tile 3D space properly, anyway, is it just only cubes or - well, apparently there's quite a few options but truncated octahedra have hexagonal faces -
- actually, no, she'll just do prisms, at least while she's constructing the bits that ought to be of equivalent vertical alignments -
- she might have to plan outside-in on this one, actually -
- anyway, how is she going to do this...
The inner core should be conductive. Which means that the center should definitely be quintessence. But what goes around the core - that is not yet properly defined.
Maybe, actually, if she tiled ports vertically...
...Yeah, that'll make producing a signal that actually carries far enough, easier. And then she can always apply waldoes.
Or... Actually maybe she should do the truncated-octahedron thing. Because if she lines up the core vertically, she could adhere ports edgewise.
Yeah. Yeah, she could do that. And then...
That might mean she needs a layer of wind? Or, no. Quintessence again. Or...
Hm, maybe gold wire, actually. Yeah. Consider these magic-particles she intends to produce to be electricity-'shaped' for carrier purposes, and promote them to a collimated beam at the release point. Quintessence around Vitae, then bind to the wire tips as a face? That seems like it ought to do.
(There's really quite a lot of paper laid out for this by now. She's not sure she has enough.)
Anyway. Cue music, because at this point she may well need to hang in there and pray for the assembly to work right. Wire up the edge bindings for the thingamajig - she's going vertical now. Do... More of that. For other things. ...How is she even going to do that...
Realize that the whole 'central core of quintessence' thing was a stupid decision; promptly swap it for a gold wire and put the quintessence around that central point so it's adjacent to the diagrams that are now on the faces of the central gold wire.
Put in another intermediate step or three, with much frustration, to assemble a net for the 3D shape. It's just squares and hexagons, and it'll make the embiggening easier. But it's still annoying.
...She may need to get some pipe cleaners or something, the proper visualization of the assembly process, or rather, the lack thereof, is getting a bit ridiculous. ...She knows how she intends it to happen, at least, which is what matters. So she can damn well start printing sometime soon. Right, herself?
Right, herself?
...Right. Time to make sure everything is wired up correctly.
...When this is done, she is never using paper for this ever again.
Just. No. Never.
Actually, though, if she has enough understanding of computers that she can kinda run one as a magic emulation...
...Well, she has enough something built up in her head in understanding her gigantic tangle of production machinery, that she thinks that if she just draws the right symbols on herself, she could go all Fullmetal Alchemist freehand alchemy about it.
(Not that she knows all that much about that, or has incorporated it into her belief system - heavens no - but she knows it's a thing, at least. And that it would in fact be cool as fuck.)
...And she does have a blue marker.
So if she pulls the output of the one part of production she's actually run as of yet, the I/O node itself, into herself via her sigil...
Grabs hold of some salt and some graphite...
And hooks power up to the models in her head and the diagrams strewn out in front of her by sheer force of arglebargle-frustration-determination-knowing-needing-want...
Can she maybe make a fancy magical effector stick? Please? She still needs to make her lightsaber!
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