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Sep. 20th, 2007 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gone_byebyeUniversity of Melcene
College of Applied Alchemy
Year 5149 of the Fourth Age
“Not bad,” said Senji as the smoke cleared. “Not bad at all. Exactly what did you add to the mixture that time? By all rights, that should’ve fizzled out.”
As the students in the room directly above Senji’s lab began to cautiously gather around the newly burned hole in their floor, poking at the heat-fused edges, Ray said, “Iron sulfide, I think. Nicely pyrophoric, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. All right, you’re hired.”
“Thank you.”
Year 5152
Dear Romana,
Senji’s put the lead-to-gold experiments aside. He’s been swearing up and down that he’s never going to touch that line of inquiry again as long as he lives, but I get the feeling he’ll be back to working on it inside of six weeks. For now we’re working on an improved method of reagent purification for general use throughout the labs. Honestly, I don’t know what his suppliers are thinking. This place needs a Pure Food, Drug, and Insecticide Act if ever anywhere did- oh! Speaking of insecticides, I’ve worked out how to synthesize caffeine from tea leaves. On paper, anyway. Getting some of this stuff together’s going to take a while. . .
Year 5155
“Ray, what did we agree about you and ale?”
“That if I intended to drink enough of it at the winter solstice celebrations to get drunk, I should lock up all the writing implements and stay away from anything that could be construed as scaffolding.”
“Thank you. Now what in Torak’s name have you written all over my ceiling?”
Year 5158
“Just for the record,” said Ray as he crouched down to help Senji extract himself from the wreckage, “I did tell you not to expose that stuff to air or water. Next time, keep it submerged in mineral oil.”
“WHAT?”
“. . . never mind.”
Year 5160
Dear Romana,
Once again, despite everything, the road to the West is no more open than it was when I got here. It’s kind of depressing. You’ve got this huge empire full of fascinating people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures, and they just happen to be ethnically and religiously tied to a bunch of morons who would either cut my throat or attempt to co-opt me for a spy if they had even the slightest inkling that I was trying to leave their territory to get to the lands of people who’d be able to help me. I’m still working on figuring out how to get out of here, around the southern side of the continent, across the Sea of the East, through Murgo waters, etc., since the alternative is crossing the continent by horse or on foot, then crossing the sea of the East and going through Nadrak territory. Land passage isn’t just slow, it’s chock full of Grolims, and as far as Grolims are concerned I’m sort of carrying this huge ‘come and get it, big tasty bait’ sign. I’d kind of like to get back to you in, you know, one piece.
In the meantime I’m working through the maths behind the philotic portal that Egon and I built in the animated continuum. Who knows? I might be able to build something to get me home without ever having to bother getting a ship. Here’s what I’ve got so far. . .
Year 5162
Mid-experiment, Senji looked up and sniffed. “I didn’t think they had the new kitchens baking anything yet,” he said. “Was that you?”
“Um. . . yeah. Sorry.”
“You should be. Now I’m all hungry.”
Year 5165
Dear Romana,
Still no luck with the boats, the Grolims, the empire, or the philotic portal. Garion can’t be born soon enough for my liking, frankly. On the other hand, I have got some new equations to show you- here, have a look. They’re an expansion of my work on the magnetically-based distortion of six-dimensional local spacetime to produce the dimensionally displaced space inside my boxes. The implications of some of the later equations are fascinating. . .
Year 5171
“Ray, if you’re going to spend that much time practicing sword work with the instructors from the athletics facility, you’d better learn to bleed with a little more good grace. Now stop squirming. It’s not my fault this stuff stings.”
Year 5178
“Fascinating,” said Viscount Kadian, running the oddly colored cloth through his hands for the fourth or fifth time. “And you said your assistant developed this dye?”
“While he was trying to come up with a preventative for some of the nastier Gandaharian jungle fevers,” Senji answered. “So, do you think there’s a market for it?”
“Possibly. Possibly.”
Year 5180
Dear Romana:
There was a girl at the Center for the Study of Witchcraft today who looked exactly like you from behind. I swear, for a second I couldn’t even move, I was just that stunned to see you again. She turned around a second later and didn’t look like you at all any more, but. . .
Year 5183
“Oh, him,” said Senji, peering at the half-scorched notebook Ray had found buried in the back of one of the closets on the fifth floor. “I remember him. He burned all his notes and went into a monastery.”
“Where I come from, that kind of thing usually means someone’s made a fundamentally disturbing discovery about the nature of reality and man’s place therein.”
“Nothing as fancy as that.” Senji wrinkled his nose. “He just lost it because he turned glass into steel.”
“. . . he what?”
“Oh, don’t you start.”
“Actually, I think I might.”
Year 5185
Dear Romana,
I showed some of the equations from yesterday’s letter to a scholar in the College of Comparative Theology today. He got this incredible twitch under his right eye and had to go lie down for a while. Now if I could just figure out how to force Grolims to read them. . .
Year 5188
“Well, he seems very proud of himself,” said Senji as the Darshivan mathematician made his way back towards the rest of the University campus.
“He should be. That proof was a very big accomplishment,” Ray answered.
“You came to the same conclusions on your own in that first notebook of yours, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“And proved the conclusions to be completely fallacious two months later?”
“Yep.”
“Should we tell him?”
“What do you think?”
“He’s a pompous ass,” the alchemist said, after pretending to think for nearly half a minute. “But I think we should tell him.”
“Oh?”
“On an unsigned slip of paper shoved under his door at midnight.”
“They’ll be able to hear the screams clear in the harbor,” Ray said.
Senji grinned. “That’s the general plan.”
Year 5189
Dear Romana-
“Ray,” came Senji’s voice from the next room, “the couch just gave way.”
“Oop.” Ray put down his pen and hurried into the next room. Senji was staring mournfully at the wreckage of said couch, his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Oh. Oh man. I’m sorry.”
“What for? You didn’t do it,” said Senji. “And you’re the one who sleeps on it anyway.”
“I know, but I’ve been putting strain on it more than you have. I’ve been using it all this time for-“ Ray stopped, frowning. “Say, how long have I been using it?”
Senji pulled at what was left of his beard, thinking. “About. . . huh. Let me check my notes.” He stumped into the part of the lab where they kept their books and papers and started rummaging. Ray followed. “Huh. Looks like a good forty years now.”
“Okay, that makes- wait, what?”
“Forty years,” Senji repeated. “That couch had a good long run.” He cocked an eye at Ray as he set the book aside. “You’re looking awfully pale all of a sudden.”
“Forty years?” Ray managed. “I should be dead!”
“So should I,” said Senji. “You only just realized this now?”
“I didn’t- I wasn’t-“ Ray stammered helplessly, looking around for a chair. “You’d think I’d’ve noticed!”
Senji snorted. “Ray, I’ve been working with you all this time. You wouldn’t notice if all seven Gods walked into the lab and started questioning your methodology, except to tell them to keep their hands out of that lodestone collection you’ve got going.”
Ray ran one hand over his face, then peered closely at it. It was stained in places from the stuff he’d been working with in the lab, and there were callouses from the daily sword work he did with the more athletic members of the faculty (no sense getting out of practice, and it wasn’t like he had the training drone with him, after all). . . but it wasn’t spotted, or faded, or wrinkled. It wasn’t the hand of a seventy-four-year-old man.
Except where it TOTALLY WAS, because it was HIS hand and he’d just spent FORTY YEARS here.
“Congratulations,” Senji said. “You found out the easy way. I nearly got defenestrated when people realized I’d forgotten to die.”
“Oy.”
College of Applied Alchemy
Year 5149 of the Fourth Age
“Not bad,” said Senji as the smoke cleared. “Not bad at all. Exactly what did you add to the mixture that time? By all rights, that should’ve fizzled out.”
As the students in the room directly above Senji’s lab began to cautiously gather around the newly burned hole in their floor, poking at the heat-fused edges, Ray said, “Iron sulfide, I think. Nicely pyrophoric, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. All right, you’re hired.”
“Thank you.”
Year 5152
Dear Romana,
Senji’s put the lead-to-gold experiments aside. He’s been swearing up and down that he’s never going to touch that line of inquiry again as long as he lives, but I get the feeling he’ll be back to working on it inside of six weeks. For now we’re working on an improved method of reagent purification for general use throughout the labs. Honestly, I don’t know what his suppliers are thinking. This place needs a Pure Food, Drug, and Insecticide Act if ever anywhere did- oh! Speaking of insecticides, I’ve worked out how to synthesize caffeine from tea leaves. On paper, anyway. Getting some of this stuff together’s going to take a while. . .
Year 5155
“Ray, what did we agree about you and ale?”
“That if I intended to drink enough of it at the winter solstice celebrations to get drunk, I should lock up all the writing implements and stay away from anything that could be construed as scaffolding.”
“Thank you. Now what in Torak’s name have you written all over my ceiling?”
Year 5158
“Just for the record,” said Ray as he crouched down to help Senji extract himself from the wreckage, “I did tell you not to expose that stuff to air or water. Next time, keep it submerged in mineral oil.”
“WHAT?”
“. . . never mind.”
Year 5160
Dear Romana,
Once again, despite everything, the road to the West is no more open than it was when I got here. It’s kind of depressing. You’ve got this huge empire full of fascinating people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures, and they just happen to be ethnically and religiously tied to a bunch of morons who would either cut my throat or attempt to co-opt me for a spy if they had even the slightest inkling that I was trying to leave their territory to get to the lands of people who’d be able to help me. I’m still working on figuring out how to get out of here, around the southern side of the continent, across the Sea of the East, through Murgo waters, etc., since the alternative is crossing the continent by horse or on foot, then crossing the sea of the East and going through Nadrak territory. Land passage isn’t just slow, it’s chock full of Grolims, and as far as Grolims are concerned I’m sort of carrying this huge ‘come and get it, big tasty bait’ sign. I’d kind of like to get back to you in, you know, one piece.
In the meantime I’m working through the maths behind the philotic portal that Egon and I built in the animated continuum. Who knows? I might be able to build something to get me home without ever having to bother getting a ship. Here’s what I’ve got so far. . .
Year 5162
Mid-experiment, Senji looked up and sniffed. “I didn’t think they had the new kitchens baking anything yet,” he said. “Was that you?”
“Um. . . yeah. Sorry.”
“You should be. Now I’m all hungry.”
Year 5165
Dear Romana,
Still no luck with the boats, the Grolims, the empire, or the philotic portal. Garion can’t be born soon enough for my liking, frankly. On the other hand, I have got some new equations to show you- here, have a look. They’re an expansion of my work on the magnetically-based distortion of six-dimensional local spacetime to produce the dimensionally displaced space inside my boxes. The implications of some of the later equations are fascinating. . .
Year 5171
“Ray, if you’re going to spend that much time practicing sword work with the instructors from the athletics facility, you’d better learn to bleed with a little more good grace. Now stop squirming. It’s not my fault this stuff stings.”
Year 5178
“Fascinating,” said Viscount Kadian, running the oddly colored cloth through his hands for the fourth or fifth time. “And you said your assistant developed this dye?”
“While he was trying to come up with a preventative for some of the nastier Gandaharian jungle fevers,” Senji answered. “So, do you think there’s a market for it?”
“Possibly. Possibly.”
Year 5180
Dear Romana:
There was a girl at the Center for the Study of Witchcraft today who looked exactly like you from behind. I swear, for a second I couldn’t even move, I was just that stunned to see you again. She turned around a second later and didn’t look like you at all any more, but. . .
Year 5183
“Oh, him,” said Senji, peering at the half-scorched notebook Ray had found buried in the back of one of the closets on the fifth floor. “I remember him. He burned all his notes and went into a monastery.”
“Where I come from, that kind of thing usually means someone’s made a fundamentally disturbing discovery about the nature of reality and man’s place therein.”
“Nothing as fancy as that.” Senji wrinkled his nose. “He just lost it because he turned glass into steel.”
“. . . he what?”
“Oh, don’t you start.”
“Actually, I think I might.”
Year 5185
Dear Romana,
I showed some of the equations from yesterday’s letter to a scholar in the College of Comparative Theology today. He got this incredible twitch under his right eye and had to go lie down for a while. Now if I could just figure out how to force Grolims to read them. . .
Year 5188
“Well, he seems very proud of himself,” said Senji as the Darshivan mathematician made his way back towards the rest of the University campus.
“He should be. That proof was a very big accomplishment,” Ray answered.
“You came to the same conclusions on your own in that first notebook of yours, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“And proved the conclusions to be completely fallacious two months later?”
“Yep.”
“Should we tell him?”
“What do you think?”
“He’s a pompous ass,” the alchemist said, after pretending to think for nearly half a minute. “But I think we should tell him.”
“Oh?”
“On an unsigned slip of paper shoved under his door at midnight.”
“They’ll be able to hear the screams clear in the harbor,” Ray said.
Senji grinned. “That’s the general plan.”
Year 5189
Dear Romana-
“Ray,” came Senji’s voice from the next room, “the couch just gave way.”
“Oop.” Ray put down his pen and hurried into the next room. Senji was staring mournfully at the wreckage of said couch, his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Oh. Oh man. I’m sorry.”
“What for? You didn’t do it,” said Senji. “And you’re the one who sleeps on it anyway.”
“I know, but I’ve been putting strain on it more than you have. I’ve been using it all this time for-“ Ray stopped, frowning. “Say, how long have I been using it?”
Senji pulled at what was left of his beard, thinking. “About. . . huh. Let me check my notes.” He stumped into the part of the lab where they kept their books and papers and started rummaging. Ray followed. “Huh. Looks like a good forty years now.”
“Okay, that makes- wait, what?”
“Forty years,” Senji repeated. “That couch had a good long run.” He cocked an eye at Ray as he set the book aside. “You’re looking awfully pale all of a sudden.”
“Forty years?” Ray managed. “I should be dead!”
“So should I,” said Senji. “You only just realized this now?”
“I didn’t- I wasn’t-“ Ray stammered helplessly, looking around for a chair. “You’d think I’d’ve noticed!”
Senji snorted. “Ray, I’ve been working with you all this time. You wouldn’t notice if all seven Gods walked into the lab and started questioning your methodology, except to tell them to keep their hands out of that lodestone collection you’ve got going.”
Ray ran one hand over his face, then peered closely at it. It was stained in places from the stuff he’d been working with in the lab, and there were callouses from the daily sword work he did with the more athletic members of the faculty (no sense getting out of practice, and it wasn’t like he had the training drone with him, after all). . . but it wasn’t spotted, or faded, or wrinkled. It wasn’t the hand of a seventy-four-year-old man.
Except where it TOTALLY WAS, because it was HIS hand and he’d just spent FORTY YEARS here.
“Congratulations,” Senji said. “You found out the easy way. I nearly got defenestrated when people realized I’d forgotten to die.”
“Oy.”
