“No, it doesn’t hurt to offer, it’s just that I’m not used to teaching. But that is changing soon, and I can’t go into it blind.” Jame sighed. “Let me rephrase my offer; could I use you to practice teaching students?”

Sechen shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

“Thank you.” Jame said with a small smile. “I won’t bother with the theory behind this, as we’re short on time as it is, but I’ll explain my process to the best of my abilities. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask them. In fact, please ask as many questions as you need. I have to be aware of all my shortcomings for when I start teaching.”

“I’m ready whenever you are.” Sechen said, leaning closer to Jame to get a better look. “Are you going to tell me what each thing is?” She asked, placing the salt crystal back in its box.

“When I get to each item’s use, I will explain what they are and why I chose them.” Jame said, removing a golden stopper from the yellow swirled bottle and releasing an overwhelmingly acrid smell into the room. “Protect your mouth, nose, and eyes with your Issi. The ingredients aren’t dangerous, but they are still irritants.”

“Remind me how young the people you’re gonna be teaching are?” Sechen coughed, pooling Issi in the back of her throat to protect herself. “Because new practitioners aren’t going to be able to use their Issi like this.”

Jame paused, set down the bottle, and nodded. “That is a fair point. I’ll have to provide something they can use to protect themselves. Let me write that down so I don’t forget.”

He bent down under the golden rectangle and came back up with a well-worn journal, flipping through countless differently coloured flaps of silk until he got to one that was brown speckled with white. “Procure masks and goggles for children. And aprons. And gloves. Make sure you have a wide variety of sizes for differently sized children.” He mumbled to himself as he traced his finger along the page, a trail of gold following along as he lifted it to his mouth and licked it clean. “Do you have any other suggestions, Sechen?”

Sechen shook her head. “Nothing for now.”

“But you will interrupt if I do something you think could harm the children.” Jame stated. “Thank you for your help. Now, let’s get back to the creation process. Where was I… ah. I was here.” Jame picked up the bottle and tipped it out into the amberwood bowl, filling it a quarter of the way to the top before plugging the bottle once again. “The base of this pill is the mucus of a wandering mind; an Issi beast that causes a person’s thoughts to be broadcast as hallucinations onto reality around them. Not an intrusive mind, nor a whispering mind, mind you, but only a wandering mind will do.”

Jame paused and looked at Sechen expectantly. “Are you waiting for something?” She asked as the silence began to stretch on.

“Note to self; the joke didn’t land.” Jame sighed, shaking his head sadly.

“Joke?” Sechen shot Jame a confused glance. “What joke?”

“Mind you? Different kinds of minds?” Jame stated to yet another blank stare from Sechen. “I’ll just continue on. When using any sort of mind’s mucus as your base, take care not to touch any of it to your bare skin. Any of them will induce hallucinations that range from terrifying to harmless, but your class day will be cut short and you will be sent to the infirmary while the effects wear off. We use the mucus for those hallucinogenic properties, altering those effects with other materials to get exactly the hallucination we are looking for.”

Jame pushed the bottle off to the side and reached for one of the salt crystals. He pinched it between his fingers and broke off a very small amount of it, breaking it into fine grains between his fingers and spreading it around the rim of the bowl. “The shimmer salt is used as a purifying barrier between the bowl and the air around us. This is to protect the ingredients inside the bowl from whatever techniques you use to prepare the other ingredients. A purifying barrier is only needed if you are using a sensitive base, as we are today, but can actively damage your creation if any of your purifying agent gets into the mixture. Am I doing alright?”

“Nothing awful yet.” Sechen said. “Keep going.”

“Thank the Eternals.” Jame sighed, his shoulders slumping for a moment before he pulled himself up straight. “Now I need you to help me. Can you come over here and take one of the marbles between your index and middle fingers?”

Sechen nodded and stepped forwards, taking one of the marbles and fumbling with it for a second until it was lodged between her fingers. “Like this?”

“I guess I should have been more specific. Let it rest in the little skin gap between your index and middle fingers where they connect to your palm.” Jame instructed pointing between his own fingers. Sechen adjusted the marble and raised an eyebrow in question. “Perfect. Now, what you have between your fingers is a captured inkhive worker bee. The organism in this case, however, is the inkhive itself, and the bees are merely a technique it uses to gather food and protect itself from invaders. Which also means the bee will become agitated the moment its holding cell is shattered, so there is a special process we have to go through to get them into our mixture.”

Jame picked up another marble and held it between his fingers, at which point the door cracked open and Vault sidled through without opening it fully. She looked around when she didn’t hear anyone talking, sheepishly running a hand through her liquid-metal hair when she saw Sechen and Jame staring at her.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Only my work.” Jame said flatly.

“Oh, good. I thought it was something important.” Vault chuckled, wading through gold to stand next to Sechen. “Don’t mind me; keep going. This stuff isn’t going anywhere.”

Sechen’s eyes lingered on the package Vault had just set down, a golden pyramid with black symbols that looked like a combination of letters and paint splatters. She couldn’t explain why, but she wanted whatever was inside of it. Badly.

“Well, then, continue we will. Sechen, you need to gently squeeze the marble between your fingers until a hairline crack splits it right down the middle. Novia designed these to do exactly that, so don’t worry about it not cracking right.”

Sechen tore her eyes from the pyramid and shook her head to clear her thoughts. “How much strength should I put into this?”

“Start with barely any, and work your way up until you feel the marble giving way.” Jame squeezed his fingers together in example until the marble started to shake. “Once your marble’s cracked, and the bee angered, shake it until the insect has completely liquified. After that, simply raise the marble above the bowl and separate the two halves as if it was an egg.”

With a nod Sechen started squeezing her fingers together, feeling absolutely no give from the glass marble she was trying to crack. She looked up at Jame, who coated his fingers in gold and squeezed them together, signaling that it was fine to use her Issi if she needed it. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, connecting one of her halos to her container and feeling its power course through her. She opened her eyes to the marble starting to strain under her newfound strength, a murklight halo wrapped around her wrist like a hovering bracelet. With a steady increase in pressure while watching the marble like a hawk, she eventually felt and saw the tiniest crack shoot through the surface of the marble. And with it came the rage of its inhabitant.

“AHP!” Sechen cried in surprise as the marble almost tumbled out of her fingers, the bee ramming itself into the glass, stumbling forward to keep it from flying out of her hand. Jame swiped the bowl out of her path without so much as blinking, holding it close to his chest while he waited for her to get it under control. “I just need to shake it, right? Right?!”

“Shaking it is the second-to-last step, yes.” Jame said, his voice quivering with barely restrained laughter.

Sechen steadied the marble between her fingers with her other hand and waved it up and down, hearing the little bee smack against the glass shell with a grimace-inducing crunch. That crunch devolved into a wet smack, which then devolved into a thick sloshing of liquid. She squinted down at the little marble and gingerly plucked it from her hand, an inky black paste shot through with tiny perfect squares of a clear, jelly-like substance all that was left of the little bee.

“I liquified it.” Sechen said in disbelief.

“Very good. Now turn around so you can put it into the bowl.” Jame instructed, the laughing edge still in his voice. “The marble is designed so nothing will stick to it, so make sure your fingers don’t taint the ink as it flows out.”

She nodded and carefully moved her hand over the bowl, grasping the sides of the marble as well as she could while gingerly opening it. The ink flowed freely through the tiniest crack, yet she still took almost a minute to completely drain the marble. The clear cubes just wouldn’t fall, and her fingers shook like leaves to keep a good enough grip on the marble’s halves to get it open wide enough. She breathed a sigh of relief once the first cube made a tiny splash into the liquids below, followed almost immediately by the rest of them.

“And that is step three done.” Jame said proudly, picking up the bowl and placing it on the shelf behind him. "We need to let it sit without mixing for ten minutes so the construct cubes can soak up the mind mucus, then pierce each of the cubes with a sliver of armorfleece ram’s horn. We’re using copper armorfleece ram for today, thanks to its softness and relative volatility which will allow it to more readily take on the properties of our mixture. Other armorfleece horns could be used, but they would have to be prepared specifically for this purpose, which adds time and expense to this creation.”

“So what do we do for ten minutes?” Sechen asked.

Vault answered before Sechen’s words had finished rolling off her tongue. “We can show you the thing.”

She traced one finger on a symbol that looked like the letter C had been combined with an T, then thrown onto the pyramid from a few feet away while the paint was still wet. The symbol started flaking away wherever she touched; like ancient, brittle paper crackling lightly in the air before breaking apart into nothing. She spun the pyramid and did the same to the symbols on the other three sides, then placed her palm on the jet-black capstone and flared her Issi. The capstone exploded with golden powder, reaching a foot-wide radius around Vault before it paused in mid-air, reversing itself back onto the capstone and dying it gold. With a mechanical whir the pyramid blossomed, the capstone hovering in midair while the sides slowly lowered themselves to the golden table. Vault snatched the capstone before it could fall to the table, gesturing grandiosely at the cluster of metals that were revealed.

“Face the brilliance that is crystallized greed.” Vault said proudly, her face lighting up as she spoke. “Sure it might look like normal gold, but I’ve been infusing this sucker with my Issi for a really, really long time now. And now I want to give you a piece.”

Sechen almost laughed. The little chunk of metal gave off more Issi than Rainshear’s weapon had, and that had actually produced a manifestation. “Why in the hells would you give this to me? I don’t have Issi like yours at all, so what’s the point of it?”

Vault raised her chin and beamed at Sechen. “You need another focus.”

“What?” Sechen blinked, looking between Vault and the gold before it hit her. “Oh. But why are you giving it to me? If contracts are such a big thing here, then what am I going to have to pay for this?”