Project: Gamer Ver. Error, File Not Found
Anime Adjacent Entry: 031
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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19/6/1993
Solve one problem just to find another. I finally got the expanded greenhouse figured out-
Yay!
-but there's an issue with, well, a number of things. Specifically in how it interacts with the rest of the world. The internal dimensions are significantly larger than its external dimensions and this reality at least gives lip service to the notion of the conservation of mass and energy. The way these facts meet means that forces acting on the outside of the greenhouse are diluted across the internal dimensions.
So, sunlight is significantly weaker inside. It also means that the greenhouse itself acts like a sort of thermal battery. It took a lot of time for it to heat up with the door closed throughout the day and, at the same time, it's taking a long time for it to lose heat during the night.
Which is honestly fascinating but its an entire direction of pros and cons I hadn't even considered possible.
The temperature is an easy enough thing for me to handle. One of the most basic spells I know allows for the manipulation of temperatures and a bit of work allows for fine control. I've got the floor in my other greenhouses treated with that spell and there's this trick where you kind of twist it and warp it and it can be made permanent but you really need to be familiar with the spell to do that. So, the temperature in all of my greenhouses has a bottom range of eighteen point three degrees Celsius.
It's a little cooler than some plants like but most are comfortable there and it's right in the range for the optimal night time 'resting' temperature.
With that part taken care of, I need to figure out the light situation. Magical lights would be the most obvious solution but the problem there is that most magical lights are either illusions, which won't work, or the ones that I actually know are attack spells.
Which definitely won't work.
I use incandescent over in the normal greenhouses but those are good as supplements, not core resources. They let me extend the daytime hours during winter and actually produce a lot of heat, bringing the temperature up to the twenty, twenty-two range.
With the size of the new greenhouse interior, I'd need a lot of lights to achieve a good 'daytime' brightness but remember the part where I said they were good supplements and not replacements? That's got to do with light wavelength. Incandescent are really strong in red light but weak in the blue range and that imbalance can really stress the plants out. They'll grow long and thin to the point they sort of collapse under their own weight.
Blue light causes the opposite problem. And at high enough intensities it gives me headaches. Plants grown under lights that have a heavy mix of blue in them tend to be smaller and denser, which is its own mix of problems.
Now, there are some expensive options I could pick up for home growers. I saw a specialty store for that over near Furinkan while I was digging around for magical trash. But that's expensive and you would not believe how much money I had to spend on materials to get the space expansion enchantment figured out.
Wizardry. Nobody ever talks about how expensive magical research is.
I think I'm going to have to use a mix of incandescent and fluorescent for now since LEDs can't be manufactured in white yet. That's a simple enough solution, honestly, and the fixtures I'll need to pick up aren't that expensive.
The issue after that is going to be electricity.
I've got options for that, though. I can just manually charge a battery bank with a weak electricity attack spell. That's a simple and direct one. Alternatively, I can figure up some kind of generator.
Hur dur, turn da crank.
I've made something like that before, actually. In my last life. But I don't have access to my workshop at the moment and there were a lot of parts to it that had to be made with some very exacting specifications.
But Fabricate!
Look. That spell is incredibly broken. It is. But it quickly runs into issues when it comes to taking the place of an entire factory or workshop of specialized tools.
Use it to bake a cake? Sure, fine.
Swords? Knives? Armor? Also fine. Those are all things that can be manufactured from raw materials by a single person. They take specialized training, and I learned a lot by failing, struggling and then spending an afternoon with a forge-god.
Cool guy. Hope he's doing alright.
But if I don't know how to do something with the materials I've got, if there's some step where I'm just not educated in how to make something, Fabricate fails. And in the modern world, that's actually covering a pretty significant list of things people would want to make. Like semi-conductors? I don't know how to make semi-conductors.
And if there's some part where I know I'll need to personally examine every single piece for deformations or warps that could cause the whole unit to self-destruct? I won't be using Fabricate.
So no Fabricate for Tesla Turbines for me.
Honestly, it's a bit much considering I'm just looking at running, like, two-dozen rows of lights and a few water pumps. I can just use the same basic premise, an everfull flask of water on top of a platform running a water wheel with gravity, out of... an everfull flask of water and the electric motor salvaged from a washing machine.
I can find one of those pretty easily. And there are a lot of old, broken car batteries sitting in abandoned vehicles from the last world war. Not as good as modern batteries but, really, they don't need to be.
There we go. I'll just keep an eye out for an old washing machine and see about salvaging some of the scrap that I've seen buried in some of the abandoned parts of Japan. It'll probably take me a few weeks but it's not like I need to get everything done -tomorrow-.
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Areru put his pen down and stretched as, elsewhere, his other half handled a rather curious order.
-----
"You know this isn't going to work," Areru said as he stepped into the Nekohanten, bags in his hands, directly into a circle made of salt.
"Feh!" the tiny woman said from her perch on the counter. She reached into the sleeve of her robe and tossed something at the teen.
Tiny white grains sparkled in the fading light of dusk as the salt she'd thrown at him did... nothing.
"Well..." Elder Ke Lun said with a small shrug. "I tried."
"Can I ask what brought this on?" Areru, well, asked as he stepped out of the circle and began to place the bags he'd brought on the counter.
"Oh, the Tendos are throwing a bit of a fit," the old woman explained as she rummaged through the bags to check her order. "The middle child bribed old Happosai and the fool went around stealing those advertisements you were handing out a while back. She was quite upset to see even more of those."
Which explained a little... and didn't explain a lot.
Areru had no idea who 'Old Happosai' was.
"And then someone gave the Saotome elder quite the beating," the elder continued with a quiet, wheezing cackle. "It's even worse than the Ultimate Weakness Moxibustion. Years of training, conditioning and knowledge all... broken. It's like no technique I've ever seen."
Areru waited quietly, humming agreeably as the woman talked.
Was he supposed to be bragging?
"Not many in this part of Japan that practice magic," the woman said, her bulbous eyes rolling to stare into Areru's. "No 'Delivery Ghost' today?"
"She found out that one of her soaps is running reruns on a different channel," Areru explained. "So it's just me for today."
"...Sono toki Hātowa nusumareta?" Ke Lun asked, her lips spreading in a toothless grin.
"Tokyo Love Story, actually," Areru admitted with an amused shake of his head.
"Xian Pu loves that one," Ke Lun told him as she finished checking her order with a satisfied nod. The old woman shuffled over to the till and opened it, swiftly counting out the total owed in small bills. Areru accepted the money with a quiet thank-you but the old woman held onto Areru's hand. She looked up, her beady gaze locked with his own. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and serious. "What was done to the old panda... can it be undone?"
It took a brief moment for Areru to understand that she was talking about the elder Saotome but the man had carried a curse upon him. One that the dragon had been too busy to examine when they'd met.
"...No," Areru said, finality in his tone. "It cannot."
With a deep sigh, Ke Lun released her grip and allowed him to leave. He didn't turn around to look at the old woman as he did so but, even as he closed the door and walked away from her teahouse...
He could feel her eyes, watching his back. And he could smell the subtle, sour stench of her fear.
