A Girl's Best Friend
27st of July 2006 A.D.
"Clippy look up what a CLS Class Mercedes is worth I want to see what I'm working with here..." It's a Thursday so there is no one in the house in the morning other than dad and Hank so you can just talk to your electronic assistant without creeping out anyone. After all dad had just seen you be
much creepier.
As she dutifully rattles off the numbers you give an impressed whistle.
Luxury cars are expensive, who'd of thunk it? You can think of a few ways to make this particular car less expensive, but you are still going to need money, what you would have once thought of an an absurd amount of money.
Once. After all you did not used to be able to walk on water either.
After breakfast and checking in with dad whose playing ball with Hank in the front yard, your little brother's fascination with throwing a brightly colored ball not having developed into a liking for any particular game just yet, you make your way into the workshop. As you hose yourself down in the corner the whispers of the sea fill your mind and then they grow and magnify, like fractal flowers in the dark.
The apparatus you conjure from the light of your anima is also
vaguely ball shaped, a one and a half meter diameter banded sphere of dark metal, not-
quite-steel that cracks the concrete floor where it comes to rest. Screens of black glass precisely as tall as you are, not one milometer more or less and barely a few inches thick unfold around it from the shadows of your mind. At your touch the anvil bearing opens with a soft sigh of infusing air to reveal a follow perfectly sized for the small block of graphite whose carbon will be ennobled by your work.
Poisonous green symbols dance across the screens, like electronic raindrops against the dark glass, demanding each their due in careful considerations as unearthly metals at the heart of the anvil burn and crystalize the element that is the foundation of all life. Distantly you are aware that the sheer force of the hydraulic presses unsecured like this would have OSHA screening bloody murder, that the energy consumption to make these things would be worth a significant portion of the final price... if you were drawing from any earthly supply. With a thought you conjure another and another.
The usual issues of the process need not concern you. There is no way to have metal inclusions because the metal of the press is only as real as you will it to be, a manifestation of essence, air cannot pass seals meant to muffle the screams of the forsaken, but there are still other parameters you have to keep your eyes on over as minutes tick into hours, temperature, pressure, friction of the metallic lattice against other parts of the anvils. Immaterial eyes burn as they fly from one anvil to the other, the only light in the room once more bared from the face of the sun.
Facet and cut, polish and grind, once, twice, thrice, look back to the ones that are already cooking, a cut here, a strike there... ooh that looks like a cool cut.... "Good eye Clippy," you say to your assistant, propped up on the table behind you. For the life of you, you could not say where the hours had gone.
Thankfully you find that you can take the half finished stones out, let them to one side and go to lunch, though Daniel does give you a funny look and mom a suspicious one when you show up to the table with wet hair
"What are you making?" Leech asks over her mashed potatoes, curious as ever.
"Just some prep work for another project," you answer, not technically a lie, but you do not want to get into 'I want to recover a demon-Mercedes from the CPD' with mom in the room. Not that there is anything dodgy about making synthetic diamonds... selling them maybe, but that is just details.
You are not sure if Leech caught you glancing at mom as she is tossing the salad or if she just assumes you are naturally up to something but her lips twitch into a sly little smile as she replies. "Gotcha."
After lunch, having begged off talking about your adventures with Matthew and pawned him off on Daniel who had gotten most of the details from Lydia you get back to work. Hands twitching, neck cramping eye straining work, and not just the eyes in your head, but there is something soothing to the soul in it, beyond the complaints of mind and body music to the soul and by the soul's grace you forge them, five diamonds classically cut, each 6.6 Carats, soft blue and clear as the sky at midwinter.
Gained 5 Self-Made Diamonds
Lost 3 Essence -> Now at 9/12
From what you can tell a trained geologist would still be able to tell these are lab diamonds, even if they could not possibility guess what kind of lab, but they are really good lab-grown diamonds. The question now is where are you going to sell them.
[] Gard feels like the sort of person who would buy diamonds no questions asked
[] Lydia told you she has a lawyer who is used to the spooky side of stuff, maybe strange diamonds are covered
[] Harry, wizards probably get paid in strange things all the time
[] Write in
OOC: I went with diamonds because they are a good opener, you can make other stones, but this is the most straightforward and with the simplest input. This was made by Molly, her excellency and a hose for the -1 DC. 
www.shecypearljewelry.com
trulyexperiences.com
