9th of Saun, very very late in the trial
Jonathan had gotten back to the Academy astonishingly late, but his talk with Doran had spaked a new vigor in him. He wanted to invent, he wanted to create, but the fire in him now had an additional set of logs on it. He wanted to make himself into a famous Transmuter and inventor. He would show the world that Aberrants could do things that were good just for the sake of being good. That they weren't all murderous creatures with soulless aims of flaying everything in sight. More than that, this was a labor of love. He'd enjoyed his time with Victor, and now he wanted to do something special for the noble. The noble had showed him kindness and sweetness, and his kisses had been so innocent. He was falling for the man. He wanted to create something beautiful for him. Something that reminded him of Victor. Something in reds, perhaps. But he needed to find the right chemical first, and he needed to find some way to make it more explosive. The fire flowers had to be perfect for Victor. He wanted to show them to him on the first night he arrived.
He took out the small bottle of green sparks and set it on the lab table, sighing. He had to find another metal. He had to. He went back down to the academy stores. He hated robbing them of reagents like this, but there had to be a metal that did the trick. The glass purification metal he had was enough for the green sparks, but could he find more colors? Could he find reds, blues, and yellows? Maybe purples? He had to discover them and the only real way to do that was through trial and error. That meant he had to grab a sample of every little metal that the academy could provide. It took three trips. Some metals like gold were heavier than others and took prolonged effort to get them back to the lab. Others had to be stored in oil to prevent them from reacting with the air, and still others smelled bad or were dense. He spread them all out on the lab table and looked at them. Alright. He had to begin this scientifically, carving off little tiny pieces of each one. There was no way he was repeating his first experiment by blowing himself across the room and making the entire lab smell like head cheese.
He began with gold. Gold corroded slowly, incredibly slowly, and even though his magic hugged around it like an old lover it didn't produce any sparks. His magic loved gold and silver. It was beautiful the way his ether slithered into the crystals and broke them down. His ether delighted in it. It swirled through his fingertips and his spark reacted gleefully to it. The problem was, it didn't do anything, and there was something just horrifically wrong about corroding gold into nothing. He set those aside, and pulled copper to him. He knew copper oxidized green, but what if he did it faster? He carved off a little piece with corrosion, going slow as to prevent any reactions, and settled the little curl of coppery beauty into his palm. His ether reacted strongly. Copper was the favored material of the lightning immortal. Her lightning raced through it like nothing else, and Jon had always appreciated its rose-gold beauty more than that of silver or gold. He liked copper, he liked everything that could be made from it and its unique color. He felt closer to it.
Jon was expecting another form of green to come from oxidizing the metal faster. What he didn't expect was a bright blue flash. It was navy, it was sapphire, it was the flash of a peacock's deepest blues and every sailor's nightmare. Gods, how he loved it! A slow grin formed as the light faded from his eyes. These flashes were bright, unspeakably bright. He shook his head a bit and blinked to get some of the ghostly images out of his eyes, and set the copper aside into another pile. He scribbled a little note on the table below it. 'Blue'.
Iron did nothing. Steel did nothing. He ran through dozens of materials until the pile grew and grew. Blue and Green still sat alone, the only two elements to react with something other than turning a different color or crumbling into black nothingness. He sighed and set down a lump of a soft, silvery metal he was sure would have reacted. All it did was become slightly warmer and resist corrosion at all. He sighed and turned over a pale white crystal in his fingers. It was chalky, and coated his fingers when he handled it. He'd grabbed it out of impulse, because he'd thought it strangely pretty. It was cloudy and strange, but it had a prettiness to it that reminded him of the snows outside. He stroked his thumb over it. What the hell? He closed his fist around it, and let destruction rein in his palm.
Jon could never have predicted what happened next. His hand blew open with a brilliant yellow that burned his eyes and consumed the room. Everything was bathed in gold. The tears of an element, washed along the walls and shining out of the windows. He stared. He was blind. For several heartbreaking moments he saw nothing but white, and terror wound around his soul. He blinked, frantically, until black spots began to bleed into the white. He shoved himself back from the table and rubbed his eyes. The black spot spread and began to attach to one another, and little windows appeared in that blackness. Bit by aching bit, his vision returned. He could see outlines of the table, the windows, the chairs, the elements in front of him. He blinked away tears and stared. The white crystal made gold! It made a shining, beautiful gold that the gods themselves could have never come up with! He grinned to himself through the tears and redness. He could feel his cheeks were wet with tears of pain and realization.
He had enough colors. Blue, green, and gold. Yes. He could make a testament to his lover with those. He bundled up the rest of the metals and made the long, slow trips back to the stores. He tucked them away just as they were, and grabbed more of the white, powdery crystal and several thumb-sized ingots of purified copper. Sulfur. He needed sulfur, and a mortar and pestle. The rest of the night belonged to making the sparkling powders, and he was excited. Tiredness was not in his vocabulary. Sleep was a concept far away and long ago. He needed to mix them tonight! He needed to test this. He wanted to see sparks just as he had with that brilliant emerald green he had showed Doran. This was a labor for himself. This was a labor for Victor and to make Doran proud of him.
