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Emiko looked around the new research outpost. It was fairly small by Starlight's standards but it could be expanded later if necessary. The station was a mere 2 kilometers in diameter and only the same amount wide making for an inner surface of about 12 square kilometers. For now it was mostly park land and some small farms. There was constant soft illumination through the transparent siding of the station's outer ring from the silver mist outside and fusion powered lights provided brighter illumination on a daily cycle. The strange mist didn't seem to be affected by gravity and was close to uniform in every direction they'd sent probes out for at least a few million kilometers. A magecrafter had come through and determined that the mist was probably harmless but none of them were currently available for follow-up tests so at least for now the team here would be relying on resonators and good old-fashioned physics.
"I think I may have been using the word 'pure' badly? It is normally understood that a pure substance still can be warm, and thus contains fire. Pure water can freeze, though I'm not sure what form water at freezing temperatures would take in the absence of the Earth field, because frozen water is normally solid."
"Ok, now I really want to test phase shifts. Do you think anything would go badly wrong if I try to boil the water you gave me?"
Riley pauses in her crafting and attempts to heat the water by introducing disordered kinetic energy.
Adding disordered kinetic energy to Elemental Water supported by only the Water field agitates it, but doesn't bring it to a boil. If Riley adds a lot of energy, she can agitate it enough to get a weird sort of mist. During this process, Griffie comments that the residual Fire must have dissipated by now, so apparently in the absence of the Fire and Earth fields, water just stays liquid.
"Well that's strange. Freezing things is always harder so I'll assume that works the same for now and focus on making the other fields."
"Is there anything else you think we should be testing? Or anything you'd like to know about our kind of matter. I guess the answers to questions about our kind of matter are probably also in books."
"That's an easy test." She walks over and pulls a black disk out of a drawer then puts it down in front of Griffith.
"Alright, I should be able to project all four fields now in any combination and turn them off and on."
"Magecrafting is really good at copying. Teasing apart everything your bubble does was a bit tricky though and some of it like making air from nowhere is too expensive for me to replicate to a significant degree."
"Fair enough. I think the first thing to do is confirm that everything's working. I think the simplest way to do that is too try boiling and freezing small amounts of water and then try bottling some air and seeing if it dissolves." She starts off by setting up the fields in a bounded area above one of the lab benches. Then she transfers the water to a breaker and uses a hotplate this time to try to boil it.
In the presence of the full set of elemental fields, some of the disordered kinetic energy introduced to the water by the hotplate is converted to Fire. Very slowly. Eventually, with the Air field making gaseousness possible, the water starts to boil. Griffie comments that they can boil water faster than that over a normal cooking fire.
"Based on the fact that some of the water is turning into fire I expect that a fire made with your sort of matter just moves fire element into the water which is less energy intensive than transmutation."
"Oh, is that what's going on? That's interesting. And heating water with fire excites the fire in the water, too."
"I notice that the water doesn't become part air when it becomes a gas. I wonder if the air field is still important for that. I'm going to try switching off the air field in the test area." She does and the yellow lights in the clusters marking the corners of her test area wink out.
Griffie opens their mouth to reply, but not before Riley performs the test. The Water immediately re-condenses. "For the record, that matches what would have been my prediction," Griffie states.
"It was in my hypothesis space too." She restores the air field. "Given that heat doesn't quite work the same way with your type of matter I'm trying to figure out the best way to freeze water would be. The simplest thing would be to bring it in contact with cold substances made of my kind of matter but maybe you have another idea."
"Well, turning the Fire field off while keeping the Earth field present will work, and pretty quickly too."