Re: Alchemy Training With T!

[Torvallis!]

After some time, Torvallis! cautiously adjusted the pot lower to the flame, as it had been placed quite high. They kept intense watch on it, and when the dust on top began to settle into the tar, they took the pot off of the flame.

"Now, take a small amount of this, and mix it in with our microbrew. After this, we have three steps left, but one we will not be able to do with our microbrew. We cannot give it less of a blessing from lord fire than we already do in a full brew. Still, that should not be an ingredient that would destabilize the potion, so the remaining steps will still let us test for if we have a stable recipe, which is an advantage of microbrewing. We won't be able to tell if the potion would be effective . . . if a potion could be effective with less ingredients, then we would brew the recipe with less in the first place.

But, no negative effects are likely to occur as well, or at the least they should be dampened. You can see the benefit here, where, if we are wrong, when we start boiling the mixture, a normal amount would contain enough energy to severely injure is.

But for now, proceed to the mixing, then we shall skip the mentioned step, and then carefully heat your mixture, high from the flame since there's so little of it, stirring all the while until it boils. Then we have only to cool and bottle it to finish the recipe, but I will be showing you some testing assays to use in your rending on this sample as well"

[Mo'chi]

Mo'chi nodded and made an affirming 'mhm!' He took the pot and began pouring some into the cauldron. He took out a wooden spoon and began mixing.

When it seemed fully mixed, he paused nervously. This could blow up in this next step. True, they're skipping an ingredient, but there's still a chance. He carefully took the pot and held it over the fire, perhaps a little too high.

[Torvallis!]

Torvallis! watched carefully.

They nodded.

"Slow heat and caution is good thinking. Especially since this microbrew will heat up much faster than a larger amount. No sense in rushing if it causes your death"

[Torvallis!]

After sometime carefully observing Mo'chi stirring the cauldron, Torvallis! spoke up:

"Now should be about the time to bring it off the fire. Here, I have a vial and a funnel, we just need to cool it and then we can review testing arrays.

How much do you already knew about testing arrays from your earlier training?"

[Mo'chi]

He brought it off the fire when T! spoke up. "I know a fair bit. I had to test a lot of things." He wrote. He erased and continued. "I wasn't really trained, though. Mostly taught myself. Lot of failures."

Alchemy for a long time for him was trial and error. But at least he knew was he was doing now! ... Mostly.

[Torvallis!]

"Mmm, so you probably haven't done a single testing array! At some point, you should seek out Master Malva's tutelage, she really is quite knowledgeable.

So the basics of rending involve a lot of knowledge of what to expect from a potion. Knowing what to expect, you can start by confirming your guesses and whittling down possibilities.

So, looking at a tar like substance like we've produced, what might you expect of tar-like substances in general?"

[Mo'chi]

Mo'chi nodded. He looked up to Malva! But she seemed to like her secrets and well... he liked keeping his. Except for that one thing she knows now, his gut twisted as he remembered that.
He thought for a moment- tar was sticky, but it was like oil. Oil was flammable. "Sticks to stuff. Oil is flammable, and they seem the same, so it probably is too."

[Torvallis!]

"Now those are two properties we can look at! It's also black and thick.

Sticks to stuff sounds like spider silk, grabberstalk, tar, and a number of things.
Oily can describe a few plants, a few ores, and of course a number of oils.
Black sounds like ink, tar, coal, coalflower, black phosphor.
Thick can describe a substance with a thickener, or with very little moisture.

So now, if this was a mystery potion, we would first examine it, find out that this . . . is nothing because we didn't add the last ingredient. But normally we would be rending a potion, and we would find out, if this was proper, that it was explosive.

That would immediately add some other properties, like flammable, and tell us that we shouldn't test flammability.

Now, we can start listing down every ingredient we know of that might be useful either in explaining some of the properties, or might be useful in an explosive. Reach deeply, include stuff like 'hotplant'. Now that we have our list of 25 or so ingredients, we can start devising which tests to use.

Now it's possible that we need to start off with tests to show us more properties of the potion, and then make that list instead. That's how it goes, sometimes.

After that, the first round of tests we want to do is try and confirm any pretty certain guesses we have. With this, if you didn't know the recipe, you shouldn't feel that certain about any ingredient. Black phosphor may explain the blackness, and that would toss the rest of all of the properties into question. If it's black because of phosphor, then why is it tar-y? Maybe it contains both, but now we have a way to explain the other properties, so maybe it doesn't contain tar.

The second round of tests we do should rule out wide categories of ingredients that we suspect aren't in the potion, but haven't ruled out yet.

Then we need to look at our remaining guesses of ingredients, and start thinking about which tests would rule out the most of them each time. We only have so much potion to go through, even if it only takes a drop, we only have so many tests we can perform.

So now, let me show you a few useful testing arrays to start off . . ."

(OOC: I will now sign off on Alchemy 3)

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