god, i don't understand those celebrity alchemists. can this be off the record? thanks. right.

the other day i had that guy - yes, Zorflax Critelli, same guy as last time - come knocking on my door with yet another formula he needed built. literally just menial work, just a distraction from my research i tell him, give it to one of the students i tell him. but *noooo*, he wants it done "properly"- and not just that, mind you, but he wants it "small". but it's a polymer, i tell him, it's infinitely big. he says he wants it to be "small". small my ass.

aaaanyways, you can't really outright refuse work from someone like that, not much arguing to be done there. but you know what? then he has the gall to go, "oh, and it needs to work on a real transmutation engine too, none of this... homebrew stuff, with all its guts spilling out on the floor like that. ain't that a reaction hazard of some kind?" while pointing at my ongoing work for the last two months. *yes*, contrary to the rumours i *do in fact actually own* a V-series, you can stop joking about it now!

eventually i shoo'd him out and tried to get to work. scribbled notes in the usual style, and really not an approachable formula either. the only obvious way to make this "small" was to make it vertically short and easy to pack. then i thought - wouldn't it be funny to make the instructions tray small too? useful to absolutely nobody, but a clear sign effort was put in- yes, that'll do.

with a goal in mind, i set out to work. just by looking at the output, i assumed that a height of 4 hexes would be all i need, and an instructions tray width of 4 should be easy enough. a simple arrangement of arms could create an "L" shape of fire, with other arms racing between eachother to pull it across an array of triplex bonders and calcifiers into something close to the true result. but the whole time, i kept getting distracted by a single thought: period 3.

such constructions are typically annoying at best. two arms simply cannot pass a molecule between eachother in that time, unless ancilliary atoms are used to help shuffle pieces around. yet the idea wouldn't leave my mind, so i turned to an alternaive engine better suited for this prototyping. an old research partner had modified it to store an internal buffer of various kinds of atoms, and built glyphs that would produce a single one of any kind, making it trivial to test this kind of setup.

i had... limited success. individual parts of a possible solution were possible, including the final pushing construction, but i could never get it to properly work even with the ancilliaries pre-placed. and i could never get the bonding pattern to work correctly... and after holding back my ambitions slightly, i realized that you cannot actually get the bonds correct in height 4 *at all*. the machine i have prepared for Mr. Critelli functions in 5 height and period 4, only using the extra row at the very last moment. i'll show you later, it's pretty neat, though i'm sure you can make it much faster with the extra row available.

and i was satisfied. for a moment, until i noticed that, if i bent the rules slightly, i could do it in height 4 yet. i could treat the product as being a smaller, height-3 slidy polymer with triplex prongs attached. the inner polymer could be built in only height 4, with the fire atoms getting smuggled across and reattached at the very end; with the entire in-progress molecule getting pulled back-and-forth to allow reaching to the "end", it could only build a finite length. even more useless than the other machine, it doesn't even produce a usable fuse! though i suppose that does make it small, huh.

and finally, i achieved it. i gave period optimization a feeble attempt, introducing an extra arm that could take over part way through, but ehhhhhhh i don't think it really matters. the guy is NOT going to see this piece of shit anyways.

now... that same research partner had gifted me another set of experimental glyphs, ones that allow for certain motions of atoms with no arms involved at all. come over for lunch, i'll show you what i've been up to with those. hot drink of choice?

- alchemist luna's private correspondance with alchemist yosh