Demesne

It was lunch and Rian still wasn't back.

Lori grimaced as she made her move on the sunk board impatiently, trying to ignore the smell of the stew her opponent was eating. Without Rian, the three weren't sitting so closely together anymore. In fact, Umu and Riz were literally sitting at opposite ends of the table.

Fortunately, no one thought this meant they could just sit next to them. The relative silence around Lori was kept.

…

Maybe she needed a smaller table? Come to think of it, a table meant for twelve only being used by five people was a bit excessive. Not to mention the benches. Maybe she should just start eating in her room… or just make a personal nook for herself. She'd always wanted one of those, why hadn't she made one yet?

Oh, right. No books, so she'd have nothing to read besides stone tablets, inventory lists and reports. Yes, best not to torture herself with a private nook without books to read.

Lori repressed a sigh as Mikon finished making her move, and replied with her own. While she was hardly hungry, the smells of the food were getting to her. How had she never noticed how good the food smelled?

She had never been more glad to see Rian walk into the Dungeon.

After a quick and filling meal—"I really have to worry about how you'd feed yourself if I wasn't here."—it was her turn to ride on the boat named after her and head back to where she'd done her experiments a few days ago.

To her surprise, the little protective dome was still there, though now covered by a much thicker layer of Iridescence. The ropeweed she'd cut were also starting to grow small shoots, though it was unlikely they'd be back to the same height as before any time soon.

"So, what are we going to do today, your Bindership?" Rian said after she'd sent another flood to scare off any beasts nearby—thankfully there didn't seem to be any—and beached the boat.

"A brief experiment," Lori said, putting her padded box on the same finger of stone as last time. She looked over the contents, double checking everything, and nodded. "Or test, rather." She drew out the brass syringe, and couldn't help smirking a little at the look of combined disgust and wariness Rian made. "Rian, it's not going to spontaneously leap at you and try to draw your blood."

"That's just what it wants you to think," he said grimly, somehow able to keep a perfectly straight face at the absurd statement. "Just you wait. As soon as your guard is down, it will turn against you and poke!"

It was clear her lord had some sort of disturbed and irrational fear of syringes.

"Grow up," she told him sternly as she continued to unpack the box. Bowls and a length of gold not quite narrow enough to be wire that she'd compressed and pulled using rocks and earthwisps to get it the right length.

"You're telling me to grow up…?" Rian said, sounding incredulous. Had he not heard himself just now, talking about syringes like they were alive and murderous?

Best to just show him an example of what a proper grown up should act like.

"All right," Lori said as the syringe finished boiling. "Pay attention. Today I'll be testing if fresh blood can imbue waterwisps through a conductive connection." She held up the gold for emphasis. "This is gold, whose conductive properties are exceeded only by platin. I'll be using this as a 'best case' conductive material in the test. "

Rian made a note. "So, we're working with waterwisps again? How is this going to work?"

"As simply as possible," Lori said as she waited for the syringe to cool enough to not burn her on contact. "I will take two glass bowls, fill it with water not taken from the confines of my demesne, place the gold so that one end is submerged in each bowl, put blood on one, claim, bind and imbue the water in that bowl, then attempt to connect to the water in the other using the gold."

Technically, she knew it could be done. Claimed wisps could be used to claim similar adjacent unclaimed wisps. Whisperers could use conductive metals to claim, bind and imbue wisps not directly in contact with their bodies. If the blood, or at least the waterwisps with affinity for her in the blood, could be used to act as her body, theoretically it could also claim, bind and imbue through a conductive metal.

However, this fell under the purview of 'something she'd never done before', because she had been cautioned not to do it when she'd been taught. It had just been something too dangerous to do in principle and therefore the logical extensions of it had been unnecessary. However, circumstances had changed now…

She handed Rian the bowls. "Go get water so you don't need to see me draw blood."

It didn't help. Rian still flinched and started twitching when he saw the syringe. Thankfully, he didn't drop the bowls. Lori flattened the top of the dome to lay the bowls on, put in the gold to connect the two, and then added the blood.

Lori then sat down inside her demesne, and began to process of claiming, binding and imbuing the bloody water. Then the real test began.

At first, she tried to do it the way she would have if she'd been holding her staff: taking in magic into herself, then sending it coursing through her veins to align it with water before letting that magic conduct through the wire under her hand, wrapped aound her staff, and into the waterwisps she wanted to bind and imbue. This initially ended in failure, as the magic reached the water wisps and just… stopped, being taken in and imbuing the wisps without passing through the gold to the other bowl.

However, when she thought to physically bind what waterwisps from her blood that she could to the gold, that worked much better. While the magic still partially diffused directly to the waterwisps, some were able to trickle though the gold into the next bowl.

"Rian, make a note," she said, and Rian dutifully grabbed his plank and charred wood. "Conduction works, but requires the blood to be directly on the gold, or other metal being used, I assume."

"Well…" Rian mused, "that… makes sense? I mean, if we go with the premise that that blood is 'your body', then of course it needs to be touching the gold. Unless you can stick your hand in water, then use that contact to reach through a wire you're not touching to claim another bit of water the wire is touching…"

"A good point," Lori said with a nod, reaching for the syringe. "Perhaps we should test what happens when the blood is directly on the gold."

"Boil it first, it's been lying out in the air!" Rian cried shrilly.

A quick boil later—dustlife was potentially dangerous unless one was a Deadspeaker, in which case you laughed at its feeble attempts to dictate terms to you—and there was a new drop of blood applied directly onto the gold. That was more fruitful, and once Lori had properly bound the waterwisps to stay cohesive and bound to the gold, submerging the blood in water allowed it to both claim and imbue the water and reach through the wire into the other bowl.

"I suppose the trick is not letting the magic pass through a 'non-body' wisp before it reaches the gold," Rian mused, making a note. "If it does, it just gets sucked up… what now? Are you going to test if you can use blood to control other kinds of wisps?"

That… was a thought that hadn't occurred to her. after all, using the metal as a conductor, it allowed for contact with substances besides water… She closed her eyes and tried to reach for the blood, tried to identify other wisps…

She shook her head. "Unfortunately, a drop of blood contains too little of anything besides waterwisps to be useful, and it seems exposure outside of the vein has allowed the other wisps to disperse. While it might be possible with more blood… it would likely need to be specially prepared or directly claimed and imbued while in the vein." She gave her lord a flat look. "I'm reluctant to try right now, as I doubt that would be a safe amount of blood to lose."

Rian nodded. "Yeah, that sounds smart. And probably explains why you were still discouraged from doing this with your blood in school, even if we've proven it's relatively safe. The amount you'd need to be able to do more than just water might be too dangerous. Still, this is good news! We've found a way to turn off the waterjet!"

Lori blinked. "What?"

"You've been imbuing the water directly by adding your blood to it, right?" Rian said. "With this, you can keep your blood separate from the water in a gold container, and we can just connect to it the water jet with a wire aaaand you're shaking your head no, why won't this work?"

"That will only work when I am actively imbuing through the blood and from there through the wire," Lori said. "The waterjet doesn't need a constant imbuement of magic, it can hold all the magic it needs already. Separating the blood from the waterjet would not affect the waterjet's output, only my ability to imbue it or alter the binding while absent."

Rian slumped. "Oh…" He sighed. "And it was looking so good too…"

"I don't doubt such a thing is possible," Lori said. "That's how bound tools work, after all, with a bead mounted as a power source and a controllable connection using conductive metal to activate when and how strongly the tool draws magic to perform its function." She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "In fact, I see no reason why I can't use this principle to use blood to replace beads in a bound tool, as long as I'm paying attention to the tool in question…"

"So, we can possibly use bound tools without using up money, which is good since you haven't worked out how to make money yet," Rian said blandly, "except we have no bound tools, and you don't know how to make them yet either, and even if you did, you don't have the supplies for it."

"Succinctly accurate," Lori said.

"So, while it's useful, it's not useful now," Rian sighed.

"Don't be a fool," Lori said. "More than you are already, I mean. Why would I want to test this if there wasn't a use for it? Scholarly curiosity?"

"I'd love to hear the reason, it would be nice news," Rian said.

"This means I can redesign the water jet to be more efficient," Lori said. "It also means that I have a means of powering a small cold storage device on the planned boat that doesn't require adding my blood to water to create ice, which I agree is disgusting to consider when it will be used to store food."

Rian suddenly stood very, very straight. "Lori…" he said, his eyes wide, and just the slightest bit… unhinged. "I know how we can build our boat. I know how we can make it as big as we need. I know how we can get it the shape we need. I know how we can integrate the water jets. And I know how we can do it when we have absolutely no experience with shipbuilding."

Lori raised an eyebrow. "Do you now?" she said.

Rian nodded, his gaze distant, as if seeing something only he could. "Lori… ice floats."

"Yes, Rian, ice floats, because it's lighter than water of the same volume." Her tone was one for talking to annoying children and classmates who needed to get to the point before she walked away.

"Ice floats… and you can make it! Shape it, like you do rock! Keep it cold no matter how hot it gets!"

Lori blinked. Her eyes widened.

And suddenly she could see what Rian could.

She'd had always thought Rian was too theatrical in his speech and manner. This time, however, she thought it completely appropriate as he yelled out what they had both realized, pointing dramatically into the air, "We can build a boat out of ice!"