The Mood of Mana [Probably Solo/Research]

[Jane]

Alchemy was the art of changing a substance from one form to the other, most commonly known by the search of the secret to turning lead into gold. What it wasn't was this new aged phandangled magitech bull hockey that Elder Tales tried to make it out to seem. Cedric couldn't help but get caught up on that thought every time he tried to get started on the darnable subclass he'd picked on character creation, but not today. You see, something about the whole idea had suddenly clicked in the Welshman turned girl's mind and finally he was able to understand. It was all about turning mana into useable energy. It didn't matter what you were trying to do with it, changing mana from a personal mystical pool, into a personal battery pack was all anyone was trying to do. It was so simple it was almost laughable, yet also brought forth a range of ideas of what could be done with this magical, made up substance.

For some reason this realisation brought him to one idea over all others, mood rings. In the real world mood rings worked off of the body heat of the one who wore them, doing their best to turn hand heat into a semi accurate representation of the wearer's mood. They were easily influenced by the temperature of the day around them and similar such external factors, but it was a best guess practice. If Cedric could somehow use mana in the process, he was sure there would be some way to make a reactive substance that tuned in on the closest mana source and read that to figure out the mood of the one in contact with it, effectively changing the colour depending on that. Heck, it would probably have uses outside of the moods if it was sensitive enough, but that was a thought for later.
 

W: 314

[Jane]

The first part of making an idea work, was getting the idea behind the idea to work. In this case Jane had to dream up some sort of mana sensitive substance that wouldn't evaporate on touch. Mana outside of the body was suck a finicky substance, so finding something to mix it with was going to be a big step. To do this the tiny alchemist had gathered up several mana crystals and shards and was using them to grind down into a fine powder. The powder had been a first attempt, but it was too close to the base substance and went from coating the girl's hands, to disappearing into the air within seconds. She needed to produce some sort of alchemical substance that could stabilize the mana enough that it wouldn't evaporate.

The lazy man's first idea for this would of course be water. Water was a great way to contain something, and maybe if the mana was locked away in the water molecules it wouldn't get into contact with human skin, and thus wouldn't evaporate instantly. It certainly was the logical first step, but that didn't mean it would work. Some of the ground up mana shards survived, some disappeared, and it was only really a matter of time before it all leaked out to the surface and evaporated. Something a little sticky was needed, and that probably meant lemon juice wasn't an option.

There were all sorts of substances he could possibly use for this, but Cedric didn't exactly have the patience to read through what was available to him and sort out what exactly that left him with, so there was only really one choice to work with. And that was all of them. It really didn't matter how much work it took, or what he ended up testing it on, all Cedric was burning was money, and he had enough of that so that he'd be able to at least figure out what the heck it was he wanted to use this for. A lack of patients to read didn't translate into a lack of patience to test everything. It didn't always make sense, but people didn't have to.

W: 365

[Jane]

Nothing seemed to work! All the random gunk and alchemical compounds Jane had access to and still nothing seemed to do the job right. Also she'd splashed acid on herself and taken a bit of damage because of it, so she didn't want to keep messing with it any more than she had already. A break was needed, alongside some tasteless snacks and water, just to keep her going. Sadly, food was not going to be the answer here, but that didn't mean she couldn't use it as a way to think.

If the mana wasn't going to play nice, maybe it would be easier to mix it into a pre existing substance, like ink or dye or something else that was full of colours. Jane logic-ed, that if she had something that somehow contained all the colours, she would be one step closer to using those colours with her mana, but at the same time, had no idea how to mix this with the ground up crystals in an effort to prevent the degradation they suffered when in contact with human skin. It was a sort of ingenious idea, and she realised immediately that white dye would probably be the best option to choose from, but missing mana crystals and dye would probably do a whole lot of nothing, not without some sort of catalyst to mix the two and some way for her to command the mana to listen out for the demands of the person and their mood.

It pretty much gave her three steps to achieve in order to proceed. First, find a way to successfully mix fragments of mana into a dye, two, how to make mana react to human contact in a way that reflected mood/emotion, so that mixing the two would make sense, and three, finding a way to translate this mix of mana and emotions into making the dye change colour depending upon them. If one or more of these tasks was unobtainable, then it was likely the entire idea was beyond her ability at the moment.

W: 345

[Jane]

It had been a good, hard day of work with little success. So maybe 'good' was pushing it. Jane had stored up her equipment in a little pillowcase she was carrying around for storage and was hiking it back to the place she slept at the moment, more than a little miffed at the lack of progress she'd been having. What was worst was that she'd used up the majority of the mana fragments, and by majority this meant all. Even the few she'd had left over had disappeared into the ether when she was packing, so miserable and tired was she that she hadn't noticed what she was doing when she touched the substance to put them away. It had sort of been the final straw that truly made the tiny guardian give up and go home.

The night wasn't exactly a restful one, too much tossing and turning, and she hadn't remembered to remove the stabilized mana fragments from the case before going to sleep. It resulted in a very tired, grumpy little alchemist that dumped out her supplies on the bench the next day before staring blankly at the stuff in front of her, and wondering why the glow in the fragments had changed. Irritation turned to curiosity, so Jane poked and prodded at the material, wondering what she'd done to them, and if they were contaminated in such a way that they were no longer fit for use. As her grumpiness slowly ebbed away and curiosity took over, so did the glow of the shards, though the cause of this was far from obvious.

Sadly the little guardian didn't exactly know how to figure that out, so as she observed the solid mana with curiosity, shifting to anger and irritation yet again. She didn't quite put together the cause of the change until much later. While trying to grind up the fragment she was stressing, causing the shard's glow to change again, which was a new change compared to the emotional states she'd been in earlier. She had to get someone to test this out on, and luckily there were a few Landers around who were happy to assist for a bit of gold.

The experiment wasn't dangerous, but Jane wasn't too sure how 'alive' the Lander's were when it came to emotions, so she probably scared the poor person a couple of times just to get more extreme results. It wasn't the nicest thing to do, but it gave her a good baseline for results and confirmed her suspicions. The only question was how to reproduce this effect later down the track.

W: 437

[Jane]

With the notes she'd gathered from her experiment, Jane had come to the conclusion that Landers seemed to be able to accurately create an emotional response to stimuli. They seemed to count enough for her dream-infused mana shards to react to, but she still didn't know that it was sleep and dreaming that had infused them like that. She also wasn't one hundred percent sure that they were truly reacting to emotion, and not just something else to do with mana. Her tests were at least hinting towards it, which were good enough for Jane. It wasn't like she was some sort of serious scientist or something, she was more than willing to go off hints and whims, it was just likely to take that much longer to get it all done.

With unreasonable amounts of optimistic hope in her heart, the chibi alchemist figured it was time for step two of her harebrained science, and for that she needed dye. And not just any dye for that matter, she needed white dye. White contained all the colours of the rainbow and then some within its bright confines, and it was the best option she had for something that was able to change its colour. With the white there was only the need to calibrate the emotions to a colour, and from there she would be all but done. All she had to do was go out there and find some white dye to work with, something that was easier said than done, and would probably take her a fair chunk of the day to find some that she could afford.

When Jane did finally return to her craft, it was with several vials of white dye in toe. That meant it was just about time to have some fun, and fun she would have. If you called carefully grinding up stable mana fragments into a stable powder without losing any of its innate properties, or it shattering into an unusable substance, fun. The alchemist lost several chunks way too quickly, before slowing down and doing what she'd been doing with the regular shards originally, to much more success. With powdered mana and dye in hand, she soon had her first experimental mix ready for testing, but before that she had to do one last thing.

Pouring the concoction out into a bowl, Jane dipped her finger into the middle of it and swirled it around, trying to get an eye for if any of the mana fragments dissolved under her touch, and sort of getting a feel for the substance she was making. Nothing much happened, which probably meant a success from what Jane could tell. Jane wiped the mana charged dye from her finger and moved the bowl to the centre of her table. Now she had to think of a way to link the mana within the dye, to the colour of the dye itself, and hope that her experiment with the Lander had indeed been showing positive results.

W: 502

[Jane]

There wasn't much she could think of that would allow the tests she wanted, so Jane went for the mad scientist approach this time. Jane decided to dip her own gauntlet into the dye, using tongs to prevent smudging and carefully covering the whole thing, both inside and out, with white mana infused dye. Once she had (what she considered) an even spread across the surface of the metal she had to wait a bit, leaving it in a sunny place to try and dry, not actually knowing how exactly you worked with dye. Dye was like paint, right? So drying made sense.

Once she had the final product Jane put the armour back on and stared intently at the dyed object, waiting for something to change. Slowly but surely the white started to give way to some colour, different shades flowing across the glove as it was trying to read her and getting used to her emotions. There were blues, greens, yellows and even a hint of black coming through, before it finally settled on a rather orange-yellow shade, more orange appearing than anything else. The chibi guardian waited a few more moments after it had settled before exclaiming in excitement and punching her fist into the area. The excitement had an effect, and by the time she looked at the glove again she saw it was now more of a blue colour, her mood rapidly effecting the colour as the mana got more and more attuned to her mood and inner manner system. Whatever that actually was in this game.

It was a bit tricky to figure out how else to test it other than lathering up some more of her own gear and confirming it worked again, or throwing together another batch of the dye to confirm it kept working as intended, but Jane was a bit too excited with her seemingly accurate creation to care about that. She may still have a few more things to hammer out the whole thing, but excitement, very evident through her currently dyed glove, was making her ignore such scientist-ly ideals and just sort of throw an impromptu dance party on her own, with no one invited to look or join in. Once the bad dancing was out of her system Jane gathered up her equipment and started producing more of the dye, figuring that even partially untested, it was still worth getting more of the stuff to try and sell to people, with a money back guarantee of course. Jane was excitable and happy at all this, but she was no crook.

W: 433