The Way Ahead

Edwin returned quickly to Galen's office, armed with his talsanenris agar-replacement and a vial of puddle water, but above all else his scientific mindset.

“So,” he explained, “Bacteria are like most living things. If you boil them, they’ll die. Once they’re dead, it doesn’t matter how much food they have around them, they won’t come back to life.

“Now,” he admitted, “There are bacteria which can survive water-boiling temperatures and can even thrive in those environments, but they wouldn’t live in the stream where I got this.” He lifted the vials of water he’d grabbed, “But that being said, there may be tiny spots of bacteria growth on the dish. It just won’t be anywhere near as prevalent as our control dish.”

“Control dish?”

“Ah… comparing what will happen to doing literally nothing. Which is what you should be doing more often,” he glared, “Particularly with medical treatments.”

“Ah yes, the heartless act of experimenting upon your patients rather than treating them. Such a bastion of morality, are you not?”

Edwin took a deep breath, then figured it wasn’t worth it and snapped at the alchemist, “Better that than killing people for a thousand years because what somebody thought sounded nice. The world doesn’t work how you think it ‘ought’ to. Science and alchemy is figuring out how the world actually functions, and no matter of so-so stories will change that. So yes, I would rather experiment on a patient than blindly trust that what I’m doing is the best. Now, I’d ask them first, but people who are desperate tend to be pretty open to trying out a new system that you think might work better than the existing treatment.

“The important thing is just that you ask. Don’t force them to do something potentially dangerous just because you think it will help them.”

“Ha! As though the fools could know what is best for them. They need a firm, guiding hand to avoid hurting themselves…” he looked at Edwin, “And others, with their dangerous ideas”

Right. Edwin recalled, I’m still in the Empire, where ‘personal liberty’ is choosing in what way the government controls your life.

“Well… setting that aside,” Edwin moved on, “When doing an experiment, you need at least two groups. One is the control, where you do nothing, and the others are your experiments, where you can actually see what changes when you alter different variables.

“In this case,” he explained, “We’re comparing boiled water to non-boiled water. So when I take this vial and divide it in half,” he narrated, “we can use that to compare what happens to basically the same water when either boiled or left alone.

“So with this half,” he lifted one of the two smaller vials he made, “We put it in this dish, and you can use your Skill on it. Then we can see what happens when we use your Skill on bacteria.

“Now, with this half, I’ll take and boil the entire dish we put it in, just to try and sterilize any bacteria that might have gotten in from the food.”

“Interesting methodology. Very well, continue.”

“Okay, so here.” Ediwn mixed his control water into the dish, “Use your Skill on this while I boil this.”

The contraption he set up for boiling his petri dish was simple enough in theory, just a stand that he could set the apparatite onto, but in practice, making a platform out of his skill that could withstand the temperatures of Galen’s blazing fire- which he was using as a heat source in this instance- was a bit trickier.

Honestly, he just hoped the crystal dish would survive the fire alright. It wouldn’t be good if it broke and ruined everything, but there was only so much he could do in that regard. The stand was more vulnerable, anyway, as if he had it resting on the ground too close to the fire, it would be exposed to far more heat.

Eventually, he got a contraption hung from the top of the mantle, suspending the dish on what looked like crystal wires. Once Edwin made sure it was secure, he let it be and returned to Galen, whose Skill had already resulted in a few cultures popping up.

He nodded to himself and looked back at the dish, ensuring nothing was going wrong. A touch of Basic Thermokinesis helped it along, and it was boiling in no time. To be on the safe side, he let it go for several minutes, though he was constantly mindful of ensuring the water didn’t boil away.

By the time he was satisfied with the boiling, Galen had finished up with the first dish and was looking at the circular cultures with detached interest, “This certainly is a fascinating demonstration of trivial life creation, I shall admit. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and not making this a complete waste of my time.”

Edwin silently glared at the man, though the alchemist didn’t look up to see his gaze.

“Now can you repeat the process? Here, this one is complete, though you may want to let it sit for a few minutes before touching it.”

Edwin gently set the dish down on a pre-made stand, allowing the tongs he had been using to carry it dissipate back into magic. With a flourish, he directed the older alchemist to work his magic on the sample, and waited for vindication…

Wait, what?

“I… I don’t understand,” he blinked. “This should have worked, what’s going on?”

“As I told you, boy. You’re seeing dirt and thinking it’s alive, claiming to be able to show that life doesn’t form under the right conditions- where else would it come from? You keep spouting nonsense, and by your own words, you’re wrong.”

Edwin looked at the dish in confusion. There were fewer cultures than the wholly untreated one, yes, but the ones that were there still blanketed most of the bottom. If he didn’t know better, it would have looked like the heated mixture had just changed the type of ‘mold’ that had grown. What was…

Hm. Were bacteria magical here as well?

“Do you have anything you wish to say?”

“I can still prove this. I just need a better setup, I think. One that I thought about for more than ten minutes.”

“Hm, yes. I suppose that with sufficient changes and perhaps a new potion of sorts, you could indeed change the conditions enough that growth would no longer happen. But you outlined your… ‘experiment’ and it failed.”

“But…”

“Get out of my office. You’re wholly unsuitable for any form of medical license, clearly, and would simply use the permit for your uncouth ‘experiments’ upon your patients.”

“I know what I’m doing, though!” Edwin protested.

“You clearly do not. Now get out or I’ll report you to the Registrar.”

Over the course of his research, Edwin had come to a realization about why exactly he found alchemists so frustrating. It was just a general pre-scientific mindset, actually. Basically, instead of looking around at the world, finding something interesting, figuring out what caused that, and then using that discovery to predict other parts of the world, they skipped the first step entirely. Alchemists looked at what they thought should be the case, and then fiddled around with all manner of variables until they either found something that more or less worked how they thought it ‘ought’ to, or gave up.

He could see it even in his coworkers. Keir and Rhita both thought that porcelain was made with bone, and so they only ever worked with bone meal and other ingredients. In the unlikely event they somehow made porcelain, despite them not using any of the main components, they’d misattribute their success and focus on whatever bone they had finally tried alongside it as ‘the key.’

That was probably how their potion-making worked too, wasn’t it? Someone had thought that a certain substance- say sand- ‘should’ be able to put people to sleep, and then played around with it until they found something that worked. Of course, there were still some kind of magical shenanigans going on that kept him from making potions… unless it was just the result of their standardized Skills? Maybe because he was missing- he checked his notes- Mixing, whatever magical oddities were at play refused to blend together because he didn’t have the right equipment to make it work.

That would actually make sense, come to think of it. It could be any number of the fundamental ‘alchemist’ Skills, really. Potion-making, Mixing, Emulsify, Process… Heck, it might even be Colorimetry or Timing and his inability to tell with enough precision when he needed to perform certain steps that caused the entire procedure to fail.

Whatever the reason, though, it made it insanely difficult to explain why his approach was different from the others’. After all, from what they could tell, Edwin was just basing his ‘bacteria are real’ claim off of exactly as much evidence as most of their propositions, and was now just trying to brute-force his way into making it make sense.

He’d tried boiling- that hadn’t worked. Cooling hadn’t worked either, though that one may have been more a result of not having any particularly effective way to cool, let alone freeze, his water. Ice was a luxury he didn’t know how to make quite yet.

So Joriah had fire-immune, or at least fire-resistant bacteria that were way more common than on Earth. Perhaps it was just Panastalis, and some chemical in the water? It was a bit concerning that in the event he encountered a waterborne disease, boiling water wasn’t an assured method of preventing its spread. Perhaps he should try to make an autoclave? Maybe he could use that to figure out what temperature these pyrophiles died at.

After all, if you can’t burn something, you just haven’t used a big enough fire.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t test any other ways that might kill bacteria. After all, it wasn’t like he had any bleach or other common disinfectants to work with (not that he’d ever use it on drinking water)… he was pretty sure that filtering and distilling the water was successful at killing the bacteria, but his cultures still had growth even when he tried using only that, and he couldn’t cultivate anything that never experienced any growth short of not including any food in the experiment, which was hardly a surprise.

That said, he expected it was due to the simple fact that he couldn’t filter and distil, and thus properly sterilize, his talsanenris nutrient soup. If he had a powerful ultraviolet light, then he might be able to sterilize it that way, but he had literally no clue how to make a UV lamp.

He had probed Memory to the best of his ability to no avail save a vague tickling sense it had been covered in a book he had read at some point. Maybe once he leveled it some more, he’d have better luck, but for now… he didn’t quite have the recollection to piece together tiny fragments of what he’d learned and letting Research fill in the gaps.

The important thing was that he knew he was right. He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes, knew exactly what the problem was, but nobody would listen! He wasn’t crazy, he was right!

“…That’s what crazy people say, isn’t it? ‘I’ve seen the truth, you need to listen to me!’” he asked as his ranting to Inion drew to a close.

The fey nodded, and Edwin buried his head back into his pillow with a frustrated sigh.

After the... less than stellar outcome of his medical license attempt, and subsequent investigations into what went wrong, Edwin mostly just returned to his work on porcelain, though with much less enthusiasm. It had been a couple of months of just glassmaking, after all, and he was starting to get bored.

Plus, his coworkers had heard vaguely that something had happened, and would not shut up about trying to figure out what was going on. Fortunately, whatever rumors were circulating didn’t directly reach him, and those that he heard about indirectly were super contradictory.

Sometimes, people seemed to think he had made some sort of new healing potion slime, another time it was that he was secretly a healing mage pretending to be an alchemist despite what Identify said. Sometimes, he’d successfully gotten his license by revealing some brand-new treatment, other times he had been laughed out of the room by proposing that all dirt was alive and could be used to make golems.

Those were, thankfully, about as close as the rumors got. Other people said he’d shown some way to properly transmute blood into fire or fire into blood, or he’d introduced some fourth Attribute into the basic collection.

All told, Edwin’s days of anonymity were long over. Previously, he could go basically unnoticed on his daily errands or when going up and down the tree, but these days simply walking around attracted stares and the occasional whisper. It was not the sort of attention that he wanted, nor that he liked any all that much.

Finally, he couldn’t take it any more and told Fissath exactly what had happened with Galen. He categorically refused to tell Rhita and Keir because of how much they bugged him about it, not that Thoril or Wendell were too much better. Cope hadn’t said anything, but Edwin could tell that the way the man looked at Edwin had changed, and he knew there would be some kind of confrontation with him at some point.

“Tiny, invisible slimes?” the avior asked incredulously.

“Well, not exactly. But sort of. You know how insects and that sort of thing can be really, really small until you can barely see them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, life doesn’t stop there, and it just keeps getting smaller and smaller.”

“Makes sense.”

“Bacteria are, to some extent, as small as life can get. While normally living things are made up of uncountable numbers of building blocks- cells- of all different sorts, bacteria are only made of one.”

“Uh-huh. So what was the problem?”

“Well… I’m not entirely sure. My current theory is just that the native bacteria are way, way more resistant to temperatures than those I’m accustomed to. But I can’t conclusively prove that, and that’s the problem.”

“Makes sense. Pass the Arycal?”

“Right, sorry.” He handed over the white, clay-like disaster waiting to happen. Months of keeping the kiln running had taken off a bit of his fear of the substance, though he was still quite skeptical of it’s supposed complete stability.

The formula for how it was kept stable was a Guild secret, and he didn’t qualify. Then again, given the normal sorts of potions the Guild dealt with, Edwin wasn’t sure that he’d feel reassured by finding out what nonsensical blending of substances prevented the two hyper-reactive elements from doing anything.

“So… yeah.”

The avior shrugged, “It’s interesting. I don’t know enough about medicine to tell you if it seems reasonable though. The idea that tiny creatures that live inside of us and make us sick is hardly the strangest thing I’ve learned since I got to Panastalis, anyway. It’s certainly more reasonable than some of the nonsense the Pair like to cook up, anyway.”

“So then what would you say is the strangest thing you’ve heard?” he asked, their conversation naturally shifting along.

“Well, this one time Rhita tried to explain to me how…”

“Alchemist-Errant Maxlin,” a voice called out as Edwin slunk down the road after a relatively boring day of work. It took a moment for him to process the statement, but once he did, he perked up and looked around.

The source of the voice was readily apparent, as a tall, dark-haired woman in fine, but durable, clothing approached him. He didn’t think he’d met her before, but…

Eternal Master of Manifold Potions and Elixirs

Yeah, nope. Never met someone with that kind of class before. Sheesh, how did you even get something like that?

“I am Master Kertoa,” Her voice was firm but not harsh as she spoke to Edwin, and she looked him straight in the eye the entire time, his eyes unable to look anywhere else, “and you and I are due for a serious conversation.”