There’s two types of people:
1- those that can extrapolate information from incomplete data -- Anon Guest
[AN: I love this but have to resist the urge to fill in the missing information. Thankyou, Nonny, for messing with my brain]
There are times in alchemy that the four elements are insufficient to explain what just happened. For instance, the metal of potash. Purging wood with fire, then soaking the char in water for a week, straining out the charcoal, and then evaporating the water away. That was leeching a form of earth out of the wood. Housewives used it to make soap... but alchemists were fascinated with other properties.
Dampen potash, and run a galvanic current through it, and something that looked like silver emerged from the substance... and then immediately caught fire. Some alchemists had learned to capture the metal of potash in oil. It was clearly metal, but in contact with air, it burst into flame. In contact with water, it did the same.
Fire could come from earth, but it did not come from water. Water was used to extract potash, so it therefore could not allow fire to persist. Water was used twice to make metal of potash. Fire should not be the result. Any hint of fire should have been extinguished. Elin considered the small silver pearl of it at the bottom of the phial of glass. How could oil keep it quenched when water set it off? It was impossible.
Unless galvanism somehow re-introduced the spark? Some had used a galvanic charge to make fire. There was even one madman using galvanism to make lightning. That Tezla. What a weirdo. If lightning could spike a fire, then galvanism could insert fire into a material. But why a metal and not a reinvigoration into wood?
Elin's only logical step was to capture the smoke from the initial fire, to capture the... woodness that burned into the air. Keeping the envelope anchored was a pain, the tightly-woven silk kept wanting to lift her brazier into the air. So annoying.
Next, bringing all the elements back together. The filtered potash water, the formerly rejected char, the smoke, and the galvanic current in the tray tub. She added oil to float on top of the water, just in case, and peered through the veil of smoke and silk to watch what happened next.
No new wood grew out of the char. The metal of potash formed and propelled itself up into the oil, where Elin's ready wooden sieve captured it to put in a pre-prepared vial of oil.
Interesting.
Only some transformations could be reversed. The smoke only settled on the water and made it dirty. The char only floated in it and remained inert.
There was something else at work here. Something... odd.
Elin piled her brazier high with fast-growing plant branches, setting up tinder, and finishing by putting a single pearl of metal of potash against the tinder. She had to add this experiment to her notes.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / buriy]
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