“The ink I’m familiar with is mostly made from grinding minerals into a powder and then mixing it with oil. Let’s see... This yellow clay should make an ink colored something between yellow and brown.”
“Okay, let’s give it a shot. Josef, lend us a hand.” Heidi called Josef over and got right to work mixing the oil and clay on top of a granite slab.
“...Huh? It’s not turning brown!”
“B-But why?”
Yellow clay mixed with oil should have made a brownish-yellow color. It wouldn’t make sense for it to turn into any other color, and yet the mixture had turned a bright sky blue before my very eyes. I stared at it, in a daze.
“L-Let’s try using another kind of oil.”
Josef and Heidi tried mixing the clay with the other oils, one by one. First mische, then pedgen, eise, and finally turm. Eise was the only kind that produced the yellow color I was expecting, while the others turned red and greenish-blue, completely outside of my expectations. All we could do was blink in surprise as we stared at the five different colors on the slab.
“This just doesn’t make sense, right?”
“Right. I never would have guessed the kind of oil we used would change the ink’s color. It’s surprising, but I guess we should be glad that we were able to make so many different colors using just a single kind of material?”
Josef, who was now rolling his tired shoulders to stretch his muscles, looked at me with an exhausted expression. “You’re more optimistic than I expected.”
“Well, all I want is colored ink, so I’m happy as long as it doesn’t turn transparent.”
I went ahead and wrote our results on my diptych. Maybe there was a method to the madness.
Meanwhile, Lutz looked at the ink with a hand on his chin. “How’d this even happen? What’s going on here?”
“You’re curious too? It’s really weird, isn’t it? Don’t you just wanna figure it out, no matter what?!” exclaimed Heidi, eagerly clasping Lutz’s hands with a manic grin on her face. It seemed she was the type of girl who really, really wanted to figure out anything she didn’t understand.
I shut my diptych. “Heidi, it doesn’t matter why this is happening right now. What does matter is which colors we can make from combining these materials.”
“Whaaat?! Something mysterious is happening right in front of you, and you don’t even want to figure out what’s causing it?” Heidi’s gray eyes opened wide, and she looked at me with a mixture of surprise and betrayal.
Josef immediately reached out from the side to grab onto her head. “Quit it! This fine lady isn’t a weirdo like you!”
“‘Weirdo’? That’s so mean. I thought she and I would get along great.”
I sympathized with Heidi, but I wasn’t exactly in this to solve any scientific mysteries. I just wanted to make colored picture books for my cute little brother, Kamil. And by the way, while I wasn’t particularly invested in doing research myself, I welcomed any and all books that compiled the results of any research.
“I’m more interested in the result than the process that produces the result. Eise gave us the color I wanted, and that’s what matters. Let’s try mixing that blue powder with the eise next. We may find some important connections and differences along the way.” I pointed at the blue powder and Heidi gave a big nod.
“I can agree with you there. Let’s get back to it.”
Eise had given us the yellow color I wanted, but mixing it with the blue powder that looked like lapis lazuli produced a bright yellow for some reason. It would be perfect for painting a field of sunflowers, but yellow wasn’t the color I was looking for. In the end, it was the linseed oil that gave us a lapis lazuli-esque blue.
“...This might be hard,” I said, glaring at the results written on my diptych. The gap between my knowledge and the knowledge of this world was just too great. The huge number of materials and the five different kinds of oil seemed to make an endless number of possible colors. This might be hard, indeed.
Researching Color-Making
Rows of bottles containing colored ink were laid out in a small glass rainbow, and attached to each bottle was a tiny wooden board describing the combination of oil and materials that had formed the color. Josef was in the process of relocating them to a shallow wooden box.
We had stopped experimenting for the day since Josef’s and Heidi’s arms were tired from hours of mixing, lunchtime was approaching, and the only two diptychs we had on hand were completely full—not even borrowing Lutz’s diptych after mine had run out of space had been enough to contain all of our data. I looked over both while thinking about the results.
“It’s not great that the color is near impossible to predict.”
“But we’ve figured out some general trends, eh? And it’s sooo nice that we have all the results labeled so clearly like this. I’m glad you were around and know how to write, Lady Myne! You’re the best!” Heidi exclaimed, beaming as she looked over at my diptych. She could understand a few words and letters that were relevant to her job, but she was still basically illiterate. In the past, she’d had no way to record the results of her experiments, having to instead rely entirely on her memory.
“I think you being able to memorize such complicated test results is a lot more impressive, personally.”
“Sadly, Heidi only seems to have a good memory when it comes to her experiments. It’s far from perfect,” Josef said with slumped shoulders.
Lutz looked at me and gave a teasing grin. “That goes for Myne too. She only puts in this much effort and dedication when books are involved.”
Lutz and Josef seemed to have bonded over this, and were patting each other’s backs in a show of consolation.
It’s nice to find people you
