005 : The Cup, Half-Empty
fallacies
Puyo Mage
I didn't make a lot of headway on Monday.
Just past eight, Zenjou told me to go home and continue in the morning — handing me a well-worn college chem textbook, and saying that I should skim through the bookmarked section. I spent the evening reading about the physical properties of glass.
Glass was an amorphous solid — absent of a molecular array ordered enough to qualify as a proper crystalline structure. It wasn't, however, capable of flowing at cooler temperatures and average pressure at sea level.
Despite there being anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom due to centuries of gravity, the technicality that glass could flow was only 'empirically manifest' if it were heated to its transition temperature — 'approximately 550° Celsius for the standard soda-lime glass used in windows and glassware,' according to the textbook
Zenjou was almost certainly aware of this.
That being the case, what purpose was there in instructing me to make the glass 'flow?' Was it simply to frustrate me? To see if I'd arrive at the 'correct' conclusion that it wasn't possible, and therefore admit defeat?
I could see her doing something like that — but somehow, I doubted that that was the objective.
Assuming that Zenjou wasn't full of shit, I was potentially capable of Reinforcing my own body. Ergo, having 'an affinity for water' didn't mean that my 'magecraft' was fundamentally restricted to the control of water.
If repairing the cup by the use of my water affinity was supposed to be a 'simple' task on account that 'glass can technically flow,' the obvious inference was that 'an affinity for water' related instead to a manipulation of specific physical features — of properties akin to those of water.
Below a temperature of 550°, glass wouldn't exhibit a fluid-like viscosity — but as Zenjou had demonstrated, ordinary tap water could be made to take on the solidity of a hydrogel. It stood to reason that forcing room temperature glass to behave like a fluid wasn't entirely without the realm of possibility.
Practically speaking, though, how would I achieve that?
Simply allowing my mana to flow forth wasn't the solution. My first day of experimentation was proof enough of that. Even if flowing water was receptive to Reinforcement on mere exposure, an undirected emission of mana didn't seem to effectively engage with solid objects.
Thus, a bit before noon on Tuesday, I changed up my approach. Placing my fingertips on a larger fragment of the cup, I pooled my mana within it — permeating unto the boundaries of the piece, as if I were directing my insects.
For the briefest moment, the entirety of the fragment was available to my tactile grasp — no different from my body; from the sphere of my insects. With a bit of effort, I could —
There was a crackling noise before me, and I opened my eyes — frowning as I lifted my hand. Upon the paper towel, the fragment had crumbled into smaller pieces. Apparently, I'd overdone it.
"I'm gonna be here all day again," I complained to the empty kitchen.
Like the day before, Zenjou had gone downstairs to her basement workshop, leaving me to fend for myself — maybe trusting that implicit threat would keep me from snooping about; or remotely monitoring my activities by means that I couldn't perceive.
I wasn't about to test her either way — but I wished that she'd left me a few more pointers.
Pouring myself a cup of water from the pitcher on the counter, I drank, considering the pile of glass before me. It probably didn't count as progress, but I'd at the very least replicated the trick that Zenjou had used to shatter the cup to begin with. Maybe that meant I was on the right track?
Directing my mana as an extension of myself was definitely more on the mark than just expelling it. Even though the glass hadn't responded well to saturation, towards the end, it felt like —
It felt like I could control it directly — not unlike the Circuits within me.
"Wait ..."
Maybe a solution wasn't too far out of reach.
Fitting together two adjacent pieces of glass, I instilled my mana within — attending specifically to the line of the breakage.
Like a limb gone numb, it was burdened with far too much inertia to significantly move — but instinct gave that pushing the bits along the fracture to fluidity was within my means. Somehow — even that I'd never before performed this — the transmutation carried the distinct familiarity of a muscle memory.
Though the surface area of the two pieces combined was less than a square centimeter, it wasn't only a few sites that had to be woven together. It was hundreds; thousands; tens of thousands.
I was equipped to deal with them. Controlling my insects had prepared me.
In concert; in parallel; in multiplicity —
And it was done.
I held up my handiwork to the sunlight that entered from the windows, admiring the seamless joining of the fragments. Really, it wasn't even a big portion of the cup — but after a full day of this nonsense, it seemed like a notable milestone.
"Just another 80-odd pieces to go," I said, looking to the paper towel on the counter.
"Faster than I expected," said Zenjou, regarding the completed cup in her hand through her half-frame reading spectacles. "Given the restrictions I imposed, I'd have thought that you'd take a week or more at least."
It was three in the afternoon when I'd finally pieced together all the bits of the cup. As Zenjou stated, it hadn't taken an incredible amount of time — especially given that half an hour had gone toward sharing the bad Chinese takeout that Zenjou had ordered for lunch; and another 45 minutes were wasted scouring the kitchen floor for the two slivers of glass inexplicably missing from the pile.
Once I'd picked up on the welding trick, the exercise was mostly reduced to the piecing together of a three-dimensional puzzle.
"Pretty competent for a first attempt," Zenjou continued, "but there's certainly room for improvement. Observe."
Setting the cup on the table, she placed a finger against the rim, speaking a foreign word that I couldn't quite catch. Glowing lines appeared on the surface of the glass — tracing out the fractures that I'd just gotten rid of.
"Those are —"
"Irregularities in the substance of the glass," Zenjou explained. "Expose it to a more extreme heat or cold, and it'll shatter soon enough." Tracing her finger to the section that I'd fractured into smaller shards, she said, "Seems like you discovered the hard way the outcome of excessive Reinforcement — and then overcorrected, restricting yourself to a minimal application of mana."
Way to rain on my parade, Zenjou. Next, are you gonna tell me that Santa isn't real?
"How would you have done it, then?" I asked, offloading my annoyance to the swarm.
"Like this," she replied, flicking the cup.
Once again, the glass broke — managing somehow not to scatter beyond the edges of the paper towel.
With her index and middle finger, she touched a larger piece — kneading it into a round lump. Moving her hand, she rolled it around the paper towel, liquifying and accumulating all of the shards into a single mound of transparent putty.
"You don't fill it to the brim," she said — tapping the surface of the gathered glass as if to demonstrate its rigidity. "It takes a bit of experience, but eventually you learn to judge the tolerances of whatever it is you're working with. Glass, for example, isn't known for its incredible storage capacity — but once you sufficiently inundate the molecular mesh with energy, it's easy to manipulate. This is how glass-working is performed, after all."
She curved her hand about the side of the glass lump, and it again deformed — assuming the familiar shape of the unbroken cup.
"And of course, objects are borne of memory," said Zenjou. "It's possible to Reinforce something damaged in the capacity of what it once was. You need simply to remind it."
Her tone of voice was mentorly — amicable enough that I couldn't even be certain if she'd taken my question as a challenge. That demonstration, though — that was one hundred percent just showing off. There was no way I could've done any of that, seeing as she hadn't actually walked me through the process.
Was I supposed to just intuit the stuff about tolerances or something?
"But, as I stated," she continued, "not a poor attempt. To celebrate the occasion, let's have a change of scenery for the evening. Grab your coat."
"We're going somewhere?" I asked.
Or rather, after a weekend of letting me be, was she finally gonna induct me into whatever gang it was that she belonged to?
"You said that your father would be returning late tonight," she said. "In that case, I'll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice — so long as the pricing is reasonable."
"It's like a quarter after three," I said. "Isn't it a little too early?"
"We'll be taking a detour," she replied. "Meeting up with an acquaintance of mine, just for a bit."
This was beginning to sound like everything I didn't want to hear.
"Where, exactly?" I asked.
Enigmatically, Zenjou smiled.
"Massachusetts."
Choice of sleepwear aside, Zenjou's at-home attire seemed to consist primarily of things that a young female schoolteacher might wear if she were attempting to win a popularity contest amongst her male students. Outdoors in the New England winter, though, she'd be a little underdressed; and so, it wasn't unexpected when she excused herself to change.
The clothes that she donned, on the other hand —
"What are you wearing?" I asked, incredulous.
A form-fitting turtleneck top. Black stockings. Leather thigh-highs. A miniskirt shorter than the ones Emma modelled last spring.
I'd mentally placed her in her mid-twenties at our first encounter — but dressed like this, she might as well have been a college freshman out on the town to party. Per her facial features alone, it was difficult to tell her age; and given that we'd be crossing state lines, on the off chance that we got pulled over by highway police, I didn't look forward to explaining that we weren't involved in anything illicit.
Honestly, the boots made her look like one of the working girls over on Market Street. Hopefully, this wasn't some ritual dress code requisite for 'spellcasting.'
"If you've got it," said Zenjou, "there isn't a point not to show it off." She eyed my jacket and my loose jeans. "Rather, I should be the one asking that question. If this is the way you normally dress for school and so forth, I can safely say that I've been acquainted with nuns less prudish than you."
"Aren't you cold at all, wearing a skirt that short?"
"No, not really. It's one of the more useful benefits of Reinforcement. Dressed the way I am at present, I'd be fine even in the frozen wastes of Scotland."
So saying, Zenjou paced over to her Volkswagen and unlocked the passenger-side door. I was momentarily confused — but actually bothering to look through the windows for the first time, I realized that the driver's seat was on the wrong side. Had she shipped the thing over from the UK or something?
Noticing my gaze, Zenjou laughed.
"In case you were wondering," she said, "yes, my 1953 is indeed roadworthy and legal, per the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act. And yes, the police would nevertheless be inclined to flag me down — if in the first place they were capable of noticing the placement of my steering wheel."
She was admitting to casually Mastering the police — just so she could drive around in her vehicle of choice, hassle-free.
This woman was utterly impossible.
"Come on, then," she prompted. "Into the car already. I'd like to be back in Brockton before the evening rush at latest."
Just past eight, Zenjou told me to go home and continue in the morning — handing me a well-worn college chem textbook, and saying that I should skim through the bookmarked section. I spent the evening reading about the physical properties of glass.
Glass was an amorphous solid — absent of a molecular array ordered enough to qualify as a proper crystalline structure. It wasn't, however, capable of flowing at cooler temperatures and average pressure at sea level.
Despite there being anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom due to centuries of gravity, the technicality that glass could flow was only 'empirically manifest' if it were heated to its transition temperature — 'approximately 550° Celsius for the standard soda-lime glass used in windows and glassware,' according to the textbook
Zenjou was almost certainly aware of this.
That being the case, what purpose was there in instructing me to make the glass 'flow?' Was it simply to frustrate me? To see if I'd arrive at the 'correct' conclusion that it wasn't possible, and therefore admit defeat?
I could see her doing something like that — but somehow, I doubted that that was the objective.
Assuming that Zenjou wasn't full of shit, I was potentially capable of Reinforcing my own body. Ergo, having 'an affinity for water' didn't mean that my 'magecraft' was fundamentally restricted to the control of water.
If repairing the cup by the use of my water affinity was supposed to be a 'simple' task on account that 'glass can technically flow,' the obvious inference was that 'an affinity for water' related instead to a manipulation of specific physical features — of properties akin to those of water.
Below a temperature of 550°, glass wouldn't exhibit a fluid-like viscosity — but as Zenjou had demonstrated, ordinary tap water could be made to take on the solidity of a hydrogel. It stood to reason that forcing room temperature glass to behave like a fluid wasn't entirely without the realm of possibility.
Practically speaking, though, how would I achieve that?
Simply allowing my mana to flow forth wasn't the solution. My first day of experimentation was proof enough of that. Even if flowing water was receptive to Reinforcement on mere exposure, an undirected emission of mana didn't seem to effectively engage with solid objects.
Thus, a bit before noon on Tuesday, I changed up my approach. Placing my fingertips on a larger fragment of the cup, I pooled my mana within it — permeating unto the boundaries of the piece, as if I were directing my insects.
For the briefest moment, the entirety of the fragment was available to my tactile grasp — no different from my body; from the sphere of my insects. With a bit of effort, I could —
There was a crackling noise before me, and I opened my eyes — frowning as I lifted my hand. Upon the paper towel, the fragment had crumbled into smaller pieces. Apparently, I'd overdone it.
"I'm gonna be here all day again," I complained to the empty kitchen.
Like the day before, Zenjou had gone downstairs to her basement workshop, leaving me to fend for myself — maybe trusting that implicit threat would keep me from snooping about; or remotely monitoring my activities by means that I couldn't perceive.
I wasn't about to test her either way — but I wished that she'd left me a few more pointers.
Pouring myself a cup of water from the pitcher on the counter, I drank, considering the pile of glass before me. It probably didn't count as progress, but I'd at the very least replicated the trick that Zenjou had used to shatter the cup to begin with. Maybe that meant I was on the right track?
Directing my mana as an extension of myself was definitely more on the mark than just expelling it. Even though the glass hadn't responded well to saturation, towards the end, it felt like —
It felt like I could control it directly — not unlike the Circuits within me.
"Wait ..."
Maybe a solution wasn't too far out of reach.
Fitting together two adjacent pieces of glass, I instilled my mana within — attending specifically to the line of the breakage.
The glass was a part of me —
— and I was a part of the glass.
Like a limb gone numb, it was burdened with far too much inertia to significantly move — but instinct gave that pushing the bits along the fracture to fluidity was within my means. Somehow — even that I'd never before performed this — the transmutation carried the distinct familiarity of a muscle memory.
Though the surface area of the two pieces combined was less than a square centimeter, it wasn't only a few sites that had to be woven together. It was hundreds; thousands; tens of thousands.
I was equipped to deal with them. Controlling my insects had prepared me.
In concert; in parallel; in multiplicity —
"— weave."
And it was done.
I held up my handiwork to the sunlight that entered from the windows, admiring the seamless joining of the fragments. Really, it wasn't even a big portion of the cup — but after a full day of this nonsense, it seemed like a notable milestone.
"Just another 80-odd pieces to go," I said, looking to the paper towel on the counter.
"Faster than I expected," said Zenjou, regarding the completed cup in her hand through her half-frame reading spectacles. "Given the restrictions I imposed, I'd have thought that you'd take a week or more at least."
It was three in the afternoon when I'd finally pieced together all the bits of the cup. As Zenjou stated, it hadn't taken an incredible amount of time — especially given that half an hour had gone toward sharing the bad Chinese takeout that Zenjou had ordered for lunch; and another 45 minutes were wasted scouring the kitchen floor for the two slivers of glass inexplicably missing from the pile.
Once I'd picked up on the welding trick, the exercise was mostly reduced to the piecing together of a three-dimensional puzzle.
"Pretty competent for a first attempt," Zenjou continued, "but there's certainly room for improvement. Observe."
Setting the cup on the table, she placed a finger against the rim, speaking a foreign word that I couldn't quite catch. Glowing lines appeared on the surface of the glass — tracing out the fractures that I'd just gotten rid of.
"Those are —"
"Irregularities in the substance of the glass," Zenjou explained. "Expose it to a more extreme heat or cold, and it'll shatter soon enough." Tracing her finger to the section that I'd fractured into smaller shards, she said, "Seems like you discovered the hard way the outcome of excessive Reinforcement — and then overcorrected, restricting yourself to a minimal application of mana."
Way to rain on my parade, Zenjou. Next, are you gonna tell me that Santa isn't real?
"How would you have done it, then?" I asked, offloading my annoyance to the swarm.
"Like this," she replied, flicking the cup.
Once again, the glass broke — managing somehow not to scatter beyond the edges of the paper towel.
With her index and middle finger, she touched a larger piece — kneading it into a round lump. Moving her hand, she rolled it around the paper towel, liquifying and accumulating all of the shards into a single mound of transparent putty.
"You don't fill it to the brim," she said — tapping the surface of the gathered glass as if to demonstrate its rigidity. "It takes a bit of experience, but eventually you learn to judge the tolerances of whatever it is you're working with. Glass, for example, isn't known for its incredible storage capacity — but once you sufficiently inundate the molecular mesh with energy, it's easy to manipulate. This is how glass-working is performed, after all."
She curved her hand about the side of the glass lump, and it again deformed — assuming the familiar shape of the unbroken cup.
"And of course, objects are borne of memory," said Zenjou. "It's possible to Reinforce something damaged in the capacity of what it once was. You need simply to remind it."
Her tone of voice was mentorly — amicable enough that I couldn't even be certain if she'd taken my question as a challenge. That demonstration, though — that was one hundred percent just showing off. There was no way I could've done any of that, seeing as she hadn't actually walked me through the process.
Was I supposed to just intuit the stuff about tolerances or something?
"But, as I stated," she continued, "not a poor attempt. To celebrate the occasion, let's have a change of scenery for the evening. Grab your coat."
"We're going somewhere?" I asked.
Or rather, after a weekend of letting me be, was she finally gonna induct me into whatever gang it was that she belonged to?
"You said that your father would be returning late tonight," she said. "In that case, I'll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice — so long as the pricing is reasonable."
"It's like a quarter after three," I said. "Isn't it a little too early?"
"We'll be taking a detour," she replied. "Meeting up with an acquaintance of mine, just for a bit."
This was beginning to sound like everything I didn't want to hear.
"Where, exactly?" I asked.
Enigmatically, Zenjou smiled.
"Massachusetts."
Choice of sleepwear aside, Zenjou's at-home attire seemed to consist primarily of things that a young female schoolteacher might wear if she were attempting to win a popularity contest amongst her male students. Outdoors in the New England winter, though, she'd be a little underdressed; and so, it wasn't unexpected when she excused herself to change.
The clothes that she donned, on the other hand —
"What are you wearing?" I asked, incredulous.
A form-fitting turtleneck top. Black stockings. Leather thigh-highs. A miniskirt shorter than the ones Emma modelled last spring.
I'd mentally placed her in her mid-twenties at our first encounter — but dressed like this, she might as well have been a college freshman out on the town to party. Per her facial features alone, it was difficult to tell her age; and given that we'd be crossing state lines, on the off chance that we got pulled over by highway police, I didn't look forward to explaining that we weren't involved in anything illicit.
Honestly, the boots made her look like one of the working girls over on Market Street. Hopefully, this wasn't some ritual dress code requisite for 'spellcasting.'
"If you've got it," said Zenjou, "there isn't a point not to show it off." She eyed my jacket and my loose jeans. "Rather, I should be the one asking that question. If this is the way you normally dress for school and so forth, I can safely say that I've been acquainted with nuns less prudish than you."
"Aren't you cold at all, wearing a skirt that short?"
"No, not really. It's one of the more useful benefits of Reinforcement. Dressed the way I am at present, I'd be fine even in the frozen wastes of Scotland."
So saying, Zenjou paced over to her Volkswagen and unlocked the passenger-side door. I was momentarily confused — but actually bothering to look through the windows for the first time, I realized that the driver's seat was on the wrong side. Had she shipped the thing over from the UK or something?
Noticing my gaze, Zenjou laughed.
"In case you were wondering," she said, "yes, my 1953 is indeed roadworthy and legal, per the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act. And yes, the police would nevertheless be inclined to flag me down — if in the first place they were capable of noticing the placement of my steering wheel."
She was admitting to casually Mastering the police — just so she could drive around in her vehicle of choice, hassle-free.
This woman was utterly impossible.
"Come on, then," she prompted. "Into the car already. I'd like to be back in Brockton before the evening rush at latest."
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