I've picked up roles really really deep before, but I'm not sure how much resemblance this has to that in the end.

It's not *not* that, but neither is it quite the same, I should think.

Regardless, we have somewhat more pressing priorities.  To wit, I am *concerned* about the thing that was very definitely and obviously lying to our ping-spell about being a bird before it disappeared on us in seconds-or-less; have you encountered the like?

--OVM

I couldn't tell you without smelling it in person. Your idiom's weird to me.

...We'll see what we can do.

...Hm.

If we tried to track down where it *was* - we're going to choose to believe that we might be able to gather a sample of eau d'impostor if we can *find* its location relatively soonish.

...She was using passive sensing.

Now how does she idiomatize that into something that gets her a vector -

Geolocation metadata from the pictures!  Duh!

She just needs to call that back up, and do a simple vector projection -

And, well, get wherever the arrow is pointing her -

And also send a short email with the PO Box address to M. de Gaulle before she forgets, so she can do the thing with the silver for whatshisname -

Alright.  She should be there now.  She has an empty essentia bottle.  Can she find something to store in it?

There are magical traces around. None of them are really BIRD-like. One of them seems succubus-y? But it's old, days old.

...Drat.  No sign of it where I *know* it was.  Don't like that.

Sometimes there's not much you can do. There's a lot of stuff out there. Lots of specialties.

...You think it's a person?  Or was that just in general?

...Bleh.  Well, anyway.  Concealment techniques and anti-concealment techniques both have the same things involved, at this point, which is research.  (Or, more accurately, Ophelia interjects, wildly vibes-based free association.)

...She's gonna see if she can yeet another message at the witch that was/is? a couple kilometers NNE of her, the one that pestered her about pest control.  Should be - hm - oh, to hell with it, she'll let the existing correspondence fill in the blanks and form the channel -

I imagine you don't exactly want to be disturbed by overpowered newbie doing overpowered newbie things, but you've been clued in a lot longer than I have and my other contacts, what few there are, aren't meaningfully locals - I don't suppose you know what might be up with the thing that was giving off a very loud magical-sensory impression of BIRD - before it vanished in approximately seconds from all perception I yet have - that was therefore definitely not a fucking bird?  ...Pardon my language.  (...I should note that if it is you, I'm not going to be particularly - annoyed or whatever.  I'm just worried about whatever-the-fuck this is, because as long as I don't know, it could be anything, you know?  I'd rather not know nothing and then be eaten by a grue.)

Also, if you'd rather have an email - I'd rather have an email, to be honest - here's mine.^[1]

And now wind it up tight, wrap it in a packet, and seal it shut (- the Foundation as a signet sealing the message from any tampering -) until the authorized recipient retrieves it -

She then yeets the little ball of magic approximately two kilometers thataway.  (Or wherever her magic suspects it should be yote, she supposes; she's not exactly going to turn down a hint if she has one.)

(1: Alex includes her preferred contact email at the end of the message, obviously, but as it is likely that any fake email that this author whipped up would be a real email address, it has been omitted from this post.)

It could have been a person. Or something one left behind. Shrug.

No immediate response to her other communication.

Yeah, well, she wasn't expecting an immediate response from the other witch.

...Good grief, what was she doing, anyway...

...Build planning, perhaps.

Oh.  And the body double!

...You know, she could probably help with that.

... -- oh that probably would work, even if it doesn't help so much with the replicability -

Oh, but then if and as it does --

Budding!  ...Huh, now that she's thinking about doing things that way (to wit, with the magical equivalent of induced pluripotence and/or gene-editing) she wonders if they'd make for good tentacle bait...  They'd be kind of indistinguishable from an actual human.

...Right, okay, what would she need for this...

Ritual focus for Ghyran (as yet undefined), and a few drops of blood for proof-of-concept; anchor point and lots of (alchemical) vitae for scaling?  Could involve quintessence, for stability of the pseudomatter...

Hm.  It is as of yet unknown whether leaving an alchemical reactor running for long periods of time would deplete anything.  Further including the question of whether it would be depleting available resources if it was left idle vs. left active...

...Right.  She can test this.  She just needs somewhere to keep all the salt.  ...Actually, does she?  Couldn't she just put a pump switch in A-space?  She could do that, she thinks...

...And if it collapses overnight, visual observation would be sufficient.  Alright.

Now she just needs to handle clocking.  Augh.  She's just been letting it ride, before, but this could go Sorcerer's-Apprentice levels of wrong if she fucked that up.

...Right, now time for some math...

0.9 mm^3 * (- cycle length of the basic salt dupe is grab-turn-drop-grab-move-rotate-drop-grabx2-turn-drop-turn-drop -) 1/12 Hz * ~8-12 hr = (- plug that into WolframAlpha -) ...not more than 4 cm^3?  Okay, so maybe that's not a huge salt-flood problem.  Even at 0.5s/instruction, that's still not more than a Dixie cup's worth of salt.

Really, the problem would be if she just let her - natural?, assumption that a reaction operating properly speeds up take the reins, here, because goodness knows if it would stop accelerating until it was stopped and piped out.

...Actually, come to think, she could - no, using realspace for live storage/monitoring would be stupid and involve lots of transmission losses.  And invite evaporation to play.

Now where can she get something to measure the resulting volume with, to within - ah, fuck, she's making an assumption about the size of her salt cubes here to begin with, and one that's probably not even right.  Table salt isn't that big!  At least it is cubic...

...Random googling produces "approximately 0.25mm^3".  Time to rerun the math...

...900mm^3 even, apparently.  What if she split the entire -

No.

That way lies madness.  And floods of salt.

...She's going to run the math, anyway...

...Okay, she was guessing at the volume, but a resulting measure in liters - all but three quarters of a gallon of the stuff, and her without any milk jugs, assuming she had a cubic centimeter of table salt - is definitely Too Much Salt.

...Actually, she could stand to ask Wren.

Or M. de Gaulle.

...She'll ask Wren first, and then bother - actually, no, this might be relevant to the silver prisms thing, she'll ask M. de Gaulle first.

M. deGaulle,

...It has occurred to me, pursuant to the silver prisms thing, that I haven't exactly had any projects that I've left to run overnight before - not that I necessarily expect to need to do so now; I haven't run the numbers yet.  Or maybe I did and forgot to write it down, I swear I remember trying to figure out how many silver atoms across 7.2 centimeters is, but goodness knows that if I did the knowledge has since slipped my mind.  ...I figured that you might be able to elucidate whether I should have any concerns about doing that sort of thing?

--Alex Marche

(...For the record, 0.4 cm / 320 picometers - the diameter of a silver atom - is 1.25E7 exactly.  7.2 cm / 320 pm, meanwhile, is 2.25E8.  This, unfortunately, complicates doing anything as a straight-up binary/flag/whatever system.  Though now that she's thinking about it...)

(...Okay, no, she's not sure what she's thinking.)

(Except -)

(P.S. We should, I think, all be thankful that 320 pm (the diameter of a silver atom, or so sayeth WolframAlpha) is at least something that doesn't produce ungainly amounts of significant digits when we divide it into 0.4 cm (or 0.8, or 7.2), but I am going to have a lot of figuring to do to construct a hexagon of side length 1.25E7 units.)

Mme. Marche,

You would be well advised to note that the spacing of atoms in a grid is not necessarily directly related to their atomic size, owing to expansion and contraction within a range of temperatures. It may be easier to condition the temperature to create an exact shape than to seek extreme precision in material shaping- Although, I am no engineer. It is alright if these things take trial and error to achieve- Frankly the impression I have of your progress thus far is fairly phenomenal. There is no need to rush and neglect the fundamentals.

--DeGaulle

The idiom I'm borrowing for this quite simply Does Not Care about thermal expansion, being as it is directly manipulating the bonds or 'bonds' between atoms on a fixed-width grid - but, yes, noted.  Hmm.  Probably ought to backform from density, then...

Anyway the question I was actually intending to ask there was about leaving things to run overnight, though now that I'm looking at what I wrote with fresh eyes, it makes sense that you answered this one.  Whoops.

--Alex Marche

One tends to find that one's spell structures dissolve without active attention, being anchored directly to the self, or some fairly intensive physical crafting and magical work to stabilize them.

I see.  Thank you, that's helpful to know.

So she would have to run lines through personal A-space to the blueprints, probably.  But maybe she could, nonetheless.  If she needed to.  It shouldn't take that long, surely, given the speeding up...

(And of course there's also the option of believing really hard that she's just Built Different and her spells will stick while they've got things to do, though she still doesn't want to risk proving herself wrong about that.  ...Alchemy diagrams might count, anyway, even if they're not made of fancy materials.  There's certainly some intense focus involved.)

...Anyway, she has the density of silver at STP to factor into her atom-width calculations.

...WolframAlpha, you can do both of the parts of the equation she's setting up independently, why can't you do it when she puts them together?  ...Shenanigans, that's why.

Anyway that looks like...  1.75(1)*10^23 atoms?  She should probably check a single layer, too...

...oh, hell, that's going to be even worse to input.  Unless she can factor out the 7.2 cm.  Which...  She probably can...?

...Well.  First she needs to really nail down the volume.

...At least 7.2 is a multiple of 0.4.  Not that that particularly matters yet except that this is actually eighteen equilateral hexagonal prisms - the only type of hexagonal prism she could get WolframAlpha to cough up, for some reason - stacked on top of eachother and that means she can get more accurate math involved, even if it's got such cursed numbers as sqrt(3)...

...Well, sqrt(3) isn't that bad, really, she's almost memorized what her calculator thinks that is - or was 1.41something sqrt(2)?  But regardless, actually plugging in that adjusted-for-height volume formula produces 1.75(28)*10^23 atoms, which is more atoms, so she's glad she did think to do it this way.

...The 2x-volume prism is 1.40(23)*10^24 atoms, running the same math of (density of silver / mass of single atom) * (volume of space described by that size of prism).

Now the question is how to get the 7.2 cm out of this.

...Well, probably dividing by 7.2 goes in there somehow...

...fucking hell, this rabbit hole goes even deeper than she thought it might.

...After some consultation with the Internet and completely rethinking her approach, she has 6.2689*10^14 atoms for a single hexagonal layer of the small prisms, and 2.5076*10^15 for the double-sized prisms, with a number of layers that adds up when she eyeballs it.

...This is still going to be rather a lot of - oh, hey, for loops.

...Nested for loops, gods and the titular Zach help her.

...Okay, first, she needs to deconstruct a bunch of silver bonds to feed her blueprints loose atoms.

let deconstruct() = {foreach(input in pipe){in reactor0: input debond; while(reactor0.hasContents){in reactor0: output;}}; //Where reactor0 is a single giant input/output and tiled with (Spacechem) manual debonders.

//Now she can begin the hard part.

let sbigtri = WolframAlphaResult(0.4cm / ³√(mass of silver atom / density of silver at STP)); //Which she has looked up, but preserves in its original format for truncation-resistance reasons,

let sdbltri = 2*sbigtri; //Because it's 0.8 cm,

let height = 7.2cm; //She'll double that in-situ for the vertical assembly phase,

let triconst(stri) = (stri)-->{in reactor1: for(i=stri; i>0; i--){let x = stri-i; [repeat-i]([input-alpha] [grab] [repeat-x](trans1) trans6 drop return) activate-bonders output};//where reactor1 is a series of -60°-angled automatic bonders extending infinitely but every grid-piece is also a manual bonder, trans1 is a glyph for translating 'forwards/sideways' at 0°, trans6 is a glyph for translating 'downwards' at a -60° angle, and the input is single atoms of silver,

let hexconst(stri) = (stri) -->{triconst(stri); in reactor2: input-alpha; triconst(stri-1); in reactor2: input-beta grab trans1 rccw rccw trans3 return; triconst(stri-1); in reactor2: input-beta grab trans5 rcw rcw return; triconst(stri-1); in reactor2: input-beta grab trans2 rccw return; triconst(stri-1); in reactor2: input-beta rcw drop; triconst(stri-2); in reactor2: input-beta activate-bonders output;}; //To align the triangles so that they make a hexagon, if she did her geometry-arranging right - the 60-degree section subtended by input-alpha is directly opposite input-beta.

let prismconst(stri, height) = (stri, height) -->{for(i=WolframAlphaResult(height/³√(mass of silver atom / density of silver at STP)); i>0; i--){hexconst(stri); in reactor3: input trans7; /*Where trans7 is 'translate up (vertically)' and reactor3 is full of vertical autobonders*/} in reactor3: output;}

for(i=0; i<54; i++){prismconst(sbigtri, height);}

for(i=0; i<6; i++){prismconst(sdbltri, 2*height);}

if(pipe1.hasContents /*pipe1 being the output from reactor0 and the input to reactor1,*/){pipe1.toggle() /*to reactor4*/; in reactor4: run(); /*reactor4 producing a continuing solution of silver wire.*/}

...Now all she needs is the silver.

...How much carbon would she need to do this the long way, anyway?  32 times the number of atoms in the silver prisms, so... 32, times the total volume, divided by density of carbon, produces just a little over 22kg or just a little less than 50lbs.

...She could probably afford that.

She looks up the going rate.

...She could definitely afford that.

Right.  Mail de Gaulle.

Having suddenly completed the alchemical blueprint your friend needed, I appear to be possessed of a burning desire to - after having secured the requisite mass of silver by way of a truly execrable bit of wordplay and some charcoal (total outlay est. $40+sales tax, plus transportation costs, so it's not like it's going to put me out much) - run it, and see what happens.  I intend to do so, being as I've really little better to do with my time at present, and I have done so much math for this so I want to see the result of it all.  If and as this successfully produces the prisms your friend wants, where should I send them?

--Alex Marche

And now it's off to the nearest Home Depot or equivalent.  ...Wait, actually, she can just use the weekend bus to Walmart from here, they also sell charcoal...  ...Hold on, nope, it's Monday.  Augh.  Well, rideshare it is.

On the way to the store... Suddenly, everything goes grey as a complicated, subtle, but undeniably powerful and thorough magic washes over the world and separates the magical from the mundane. She finds herself standing on the sidewalk, her ride racing off without her.

There's a figure standing on some sort of circular golden stage in Magical Girl regalia- Poofy skirt, elaborate gauntlets, impractically oversized weapon, ringlet blonde hair. She shouts, "There, now I can go all out-!"

Shit fuck --

-- bubble!

She tries to pull the Light around her in a paladin's shield bubble - solid and impenetrable, for all its gossamer visual effects, hoping for everyone's sake that it will at least hold until it's tested -

- and calls out "Bystander!"