Prologue: Joanna (Part 1)
Joanna sat motionless, on the cold hard reception seat, reading the notice of termination letter she'd just received, yet seeing nothing. "We are forced to prematurely terminate our contract with you due to your increasingly erratic and undependable nature, and blatant disrespect of your superiors."
By her feet, was the portable storage bag with all her tools, stationery, and materials. Her broom leaning lifelessly against the wall by her chair. She called her owl down from one of the high placed windows of the reception area as she made her way out through the busy corridors. Together they flew home silently through the noisy city, her owl flying by her, as quiet as its mistress.
She was greeted by an inbox full of depressing letters when she arrived home: a notice from her landlord, her rent was overdue by 2 months; the letter from the bank stated that the deadline of her student loan annual payment instalment was drawing near; three different notices from three different loan sharks had also found her inbox.
Joanna enchanted a barrier seal around the apartment as she closed the blinds, before going into her alchemical laboratory.
She attempted the crystal sublimation procedure once more, setting up all the instruments in order before lighting up the magic circles and burners. She watched as the blood samples in the three boiling tubes started to vaporise into green, orange, and yellow gases. These subsequently through several distillation cycles along her improvised setup of conduits and instruments; resulting in colourful and sparking vapours fed into a sealed round-bottomed flask. Within the round-bottomed flask, was a monster core suspended in a solution of water and pure bamboo sap.
The solution started to bubble and produced a dazzling spectrum of colours; highly unstable and vapid as it begun to react with itself in an unstable chain reaction.
She activated the magic circle under the round-bottomed flask, lighting up a magical flame and wrapping it around the flask, struggling to use pyromancy to try and control the highly energetic and unstable reaction occurring within the flask, like a cowboy reigning in a bronco. It was extremely mentally and spiritually taxing, as she fought hard to stay ahead of the reactions.
The process was simple in concept, joining balls like beads in a necklace into as long a necklace as possible, with the goal of forming a stable crystal capable of containing and conducting magical energy. The only catch was that the beads did their best to jump all over the place due to holding excess amounts of energy, and were extremely slippery due to hyperactive exotic energy fields that played ball with physics and spacetime within the flasks.
Her manna pool wasn't strong enough to handle the strenuous cycles necessary to control the reaction. Her aptitude in pyromancy was weak, she was primarily a wood mage, and fire magic was alien to her. Even though she was using an improvised set-up designed to reduce the raw power floor for the alchemical procedure, she didn't have the soul strength to enact the fine level of control necessary. She knew all these, yet she wouldn't let herself give up, she wouldn't give up on herself.
She couldn't focus well, and three hours and three failed attempts later. She was physically and mentally exhausted and her manna pool was dried to the point that she fainted. She woke up, checked in the fridge, finding only a lone packet of milk. She took it, tried to warm it, but she was too weak to even muster a passably strong flame.
Giving up, she just drunk the milk, sinking to the floor. Her aching sobs echoing through the mostly empty apartment.
