Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

After returning to the city, I set up a handful of jobs to start moving both the gypsum and paper we have made for trade to the new warehouse on the other side of the island.  I spent three days producing sealed shipping crates for both the paper and gypsum.  This is required before either is able to actually be moved to the other side of the island.  I made a significant number of spare crates which only need to be sealed in the future.  Gypsum, like paper, has problems with being exposed to excessive moisture, so the spare crates should at least tide us over for a period of time, though I should really employ a goblin with stone shaping to make them occasionally if we're going to be shipping out so many materials in sealed containers.

As I discussed the new setup for trade good with Konkur, he gave me some good news.  As they've gotten deeper into the deposit, they've started uncovering quartz.  This reminded me that I was in the process of making a new precision tool before news of the war had broken out, and had completely forgotten it.  Though, if we have quartz crystals available, then I don't see a reason to continue working on that project.  The initial reason was so I could make very fine meshes for separation processes based on density, to separate out the quartz from higher density metal bearing fragments.

It might still be useful in the future, but for now, the quartz crystals themselves provide what we might want for glass.  I've directed Konkur to preserve any quality quartz crystals, either in purity or in size or in uniqueness, but the rest can just be stored however to be processed later.  He told me that was what he was already doing, which made me feel like I was being a little overbearing, so I apologized.  He's already a skilled mineralogist, so I should have somewhat expected he would have a good grasp on the situation.  He chuckled in response, and said it was fine, and it was good we were on the same page on the matter.

After getting everything squared away with our shipping plans, I decided to wait for Tiberius to return to actually get a good understanding of what he was working on, and perhaps provide insight if I thought of anything.  Ultimately, he didn't return for another six days from when I started waiting, so I had to find things to keep myself occupied within the town.

I found a pretty good use for my pulverize ability.  I've had mixed results in the past with trying to use stone shape on different materials, but I decided to try out pulverize on a few things, the first being soil.  The soil here is interesting, it's fairly rich in nutrients, because of the volcanic history of the island, but it's also quite rocky.  Pulverize seems to solve the latter half of the issue, as it seems to break down any chunks of rock into a sandy material within the soil.  This honestly improves the soil quality drastically, and makes it a real shame that I'm the only individual with access to pulverize.

The second use of value is that it works on quartz crystals.  I also realized in the process of working with the quartz that pulverize doesn't rely on the material being in contact, like stone shape does.  Stone shape travels through an established path in the material to continue shaping and carving away at it.  Pulverize seems to literally just pulverize all stone materials within the area in front of my hands of the size I designate.  If there is air between me and the material, it still works.  For the quartz, this mean I can take a whole pile of crystals, put them in a wooden crate, and shatter them into powder, which can be used for making glass.

So, I spent the six days by pulverizing quartz, then improving the quality of some of the fields around town when I ran out of low quality quartz to pulverize.  Quartz would have been a real pain to pulverize due to its hardness, and it would have likely damaged our pulverizers over time, so getting it done this way is a real boon.  With a few tons of quartz sand on hand, we should be able to retrofit a bunch of the buildings in town with glass windows.

When Tiberius finally arrived back to town, the goblin and hobgoblin who were with him were each carrying two large fish, which I recognized as the electric fishes.  Ultimately, they hauled them all the way to the lab, and once there, told me that I owed them a significant sum of money for all their work.

That answered the first question that I had as to how Tiberius had convinced them to work for him.  I had half a mind to tell them that I had promised no such thing, and just let them beat the crap out of Tiberius to take their frustrations out on him, but they do actually deserve pay for their work.  The real person who needs reprimanding is the mad scientist making unreasonable promises.

I informed them that I wouldn't pay quite the sum they'd been promised, but we'd negotiate a fair pay for their work, and that Tiberius was in a lot of trouble for making promises like that without my express permission.  I also realized from this whole debacle that as a society, we're operating quite heavily on trust, which given our small size is understandable, but we need to move to 'trust but verify' as the operational norm.  This basically happened because I spent so long working on building the lab which Tiberius now uses, which made most people just assume that if he said I had offered something, then it was fine.

I'm thinking I'm going to need to come up with a wax seal, or special coin of some kind to be used when I have an indirect statement that needs relayed.  Though the question at hand before that is exactly how I plan on punishing Tiberius.  Regardless of the result of his experiment, this sort of behavior needs to be curbed.  I can't have people operating in this way, at least until they've earned enough clout to actually support this sort of spending, like Zeb.

While I think about an appropriate punishment, I watch him work.  Ultimately, the organs and blood won't last forever from these fish.  I wouldn't want the goblin and hobgoblin's work to go to waste.  It seems like Tiberius has gotten used to getting what he wants from these particular fish, and drains both the blood and harvests the organs from each in a few minutes.

I can't say I've been particularly sanitary in the past, but he's just hauling the organs in his bare hands down to the crystal room, and putting them on his improvised device.  Once he gets everything positioned where he wants it, he mounts the device above the crystal, and begins filling the container with blood.

The blood starts arcing again, but this time, the arcing electricity starts coalescing and traveling up the device.  It then arcs off wildly from the organs that he's aligned angled in a forward facing way.  It's reminiscent of a tesla coil.  While interesting, I'm honestly not sure if there is a great application for this sort of device.  In essence, this is static discharge.  I suppose if we wanted to make ozone, or electrically break ionic bonds it could be a way of using mana to achieve that goal.  I have a few improvements that I could envision making to the device for those goals.

Tiberius seems disappointed that his experiment still didn't work in the way he wanted.  He seems to have realized he's in trouble, and had been avoiding making any eye contact.  He had the gall, however, to say he needs more of the electric fishes, in what broken demon language he speaks at least.

I decided then that the best course of action wasn't to punish him myself, but let Zaka decide on the punishment, that was the sort of role I envisioned Zaka filling within our society after all.  I told Tiberius that before he can continue any of the work on whatever it is he's trying to make, he had to go before Zaka to submit for whatever punishment is deemed fair for his prior actions.

I ended up having to practically drag Tiberius the whole way from the lab back to the city.  The whole time he was saying things like, "Just a little change, and it'll work!", "I'll get it to arc across the room, I just need a little more time!" and "I'm doing what you told me to do, why am I being punished?"