“Hmm. There are some exceptions to these rules, but I think I’ve gotten a grasp on how they work.”
We could make a surprisingly wide range of colors with these combinations. All it took was listing what made which oils change to which color.
“You look like you’re thinking hard, Myne. What are you working on?” Mom asked when she returned from the bedroom with Kamil, who was wrapped in what resembled a long baby sling. His eyes were wide open, maybe because he just filled himself up on milk.
“I’m planning a picture book for Kamil. It’s going to need pretty, colored ink, which I’m trying to make now.”
“You’re making it from scratch? That sounds like it’ll take a while.”
“It will, I think. How’s Kamil today?” I asked while stroking his head. He stared at my face without blinking. I couldn’t compare to Delia’s overwhelming big sister power, but Kamil not crying over my presence was good enough for me.
“Kamil, Kamil. It’s me, Myne, your big sister.”
I spent some time playing with Kamil, until eventually his eyes began to droop again. I watched Mom take him back to bed, then looked back at the list I had made.
“Oh?” While looking through the oil names, I realized that the oh-so-familiar parue oil wasn’t included. “It might be worth experimenting with that, too. I wonder what would happen? Maybe I should bring some to the workshop. And also, we need to test to see whether the ink we’ve made changes color when put on paper, not to mention whether it lasts over time. Experimenting with layering colors will be important too.” I wrote down everything I wanted to investigate that I could think of. These were things I would have to ask Heidi about next time I saw her.
The next day, I went to the temple for my daily harspiel practice, then helped the High Priest. In the afternoon, I spent time with Delia, who was always bored and listless while Dirk was in the orphanage. I had Lutz get some paper and brushes from the workshop; tomorrow we would be bringing them to the ink workshop to test ink on.
And so the next day arrived. Gil, Damuel, Lutz, and I headed to the ink workshop with the paper, brushes, and the rest of our parue oil from the winter. Heidi was pacing in front of the workshop. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she had been dying waiting for us. The second she saw us, her face lit up and she gave a big wave.
“Morning, Lady Myne. It’s so good to see you!”
“Morning, Heidi. Here’s the chart of compiled data.” I showed her the research I had compiled as soon as we were in the workshop. She peered at it with excitement, but then slumped over sadly.
“I can tell what some of the stuff is, but I can’t read most of this.”
“Also, I had a thought while compiling this...” I began listing out all of the things I wanted to try, which earned me a big, eager nod from Heidi.
“I didn’t include any parue oil since you can only harvest them in the winter. This may make for some interesting results. Let’s try it out right away!”
Heidi and Josef began mixing various materials into the parue oil I had brought. She tried out red materials and he tried out blue ones; they mixed them, ground them, and stirred them a ton, but there were no weird changes. Both simply turned into the color of the material put into them.
“Both batches of parue oil turned into the colors we expected. That’s incredible,” I said, looking at the finished ink with wide eyes. I had seen so many weird changes of color that simple, logical results were enough to impress me.
Heidi let out an impressed whistle at the finished ink. “The colors are real vibrant too. If only we could get parues outside of winter, huh?”
Heidi was right. Parue oil couldn’t be used liberally since parues could only be gathered on sunny winter days. The oil was great, but sadly not suited for high volume production.
While Heidi and I were sadly consoling each other, Josef was already preparing for the next experiment. “Let’s try getting the ink we’ve made on paper, yeah?”
Heidi helped Josef bring out all of the ink we had made the other day. I leaned over to Lutz as I watched them prepare.
“Hey, Lutz. Do you think we could make paper out of parue trees?” I asked, full of hope after seeing how well the parue oil worked for this. Trombes were feyplants and they made good paper, so maybe parue trees would make for good material too.
“Nah, that’ll never work. Those trees just melt and vanish when fire touches them. They’d disappear if you tried boiling their wood, and there’s no way we could peel their bark.”
“...Are parue trees really that weird?” Having never gone to the forest during the winter, I had yet to see a parue tree. I’d heard about how they’re strange, beautiful, and only appear on sunny winter mornings, but other than that I really didn’t know anything about them.
“Lady Myne, everything’s ready.”
At Heidi’s call, I beckoned Gil over so that he could test the ink on the paper using his brush. I had brought several sheets of poorly made volrin and trombe that we wouldn’t miss. We weren’t going to be making picture books out of trombe paper, but it was still worth seeing how it handled the ink.
“...Oof.”
Unsurprisingly, the ink even changed color depending on the type of paper it was put on. The colors stayed pretty much the same on the trombe paper, but ended up more dull on the volrin paper, though it wasn’t really noticeable unless you compared the two side by side.
It’s fine, I tried telling myself. But as time passed and the ink dried, the colors just kept getting more and more dull.
“I think we’ll need to
