This adhesive is a reminder that our designs manipulate elemental proxies--marbles, if you will--rather than the atoms themselves, a one-to-one abstraction of the underlying representation on what occurs during alchemy.

Unless, of course, there's STICKY everywhere, in which case your pistons cement themselves fully retracted, your arms do not open, bonds mysteriously form where they shouldn't, and so on.

This is why it's important to build this machine in as small a footprint as possible, because there's less cleaning work to do.

I made some High-Grade Reconstructed Solvent to clean my transmutation engine when optimizing a few cycles out of this design for my correspondnent, but I think my preferred cleaning agent for this substance would have been hellfire.

- Alchemist Kazyan, reporting on Alchemist Jasper