Studying (Part I)

Eo and Reya had finally arrived at the Essence Experimentation and Research Facilities.

"Welcome! This is my home!" Eo introduced. "It's a great neighborhood: amazing view because this is in the middle of a barren wasteland, and no angry people complaining because they all fled or died! Also, the rent is 0 credits a month!"

Reya looked at the abandoned building skeptically.

"You sure that place is safe?"

"It has a bunch of dangerous chemicals and stuff, but other than that, yes."

Eo waded through the pile of notes he had messily put together. After giving himself a refresher read, he decided the next best step would be to decompose the tangiform and elemental essence even further.

Eo put some tangiform and elemental essence in separate vials and stuck them in a centrifuge. No doubt this had been done before, but Eo was going to make sure. Plus, he had all the materials to do it, so why not?

Eo spun the two vials for several minutes. Then, he picked each one up and observed it carefully. The tangiform hardly looked separated, probably because of its viscosity. The elemental essence, however, looked very different, with distinct layers that formed.

Eo put the tangiform back into the centrifuge. He asked Reya to confirm whether or not the drawings in the scientists' notes matched those of what he saw. Reya nodded.

Eo kept digging around for papers. After several minutes, he finally found the next page, which detailed the properties of each constituent within the elemental essence. He did notice, however, that it varied from person to person in their sampling. Eo imagined in his head the factors that would affect this: genealogy, age, gender, and so forth. He wrote down the variables and tried deriving an equation. A number just popped into Eo's head. He tried it, and it worked. He fumbled around for a graphing calculator before confirming that he found a constant in his equation.

Reya was watching over Eo's shoulder.

"Did you just… guess that?"

"Huh? I was thinking about the equations and then the answer just appeared in my head."

"You're either extremely lucky or extremely smart. I take that back, you're really lucky."

Eo shrugged and continued working on the equation.

Fifteen minutes later, he managed to derive the equation. Reya saw some notes and showed it to Eo. It already had his equation in it, but arranged in a cleaner way.

"ARRGHh why did you have to show me this now? I thought I advanced something for once…"

Eo took out the tangiform, which had been in the centrifuge for long enough this time. The tangiform was already starting to dissipate, as it wasn't in a proper rune holding container. However, the layers once again matched the scientists' diagrams, so Eo was satisfied.

"Reya, can you help me find all their papers? I'm going to read everything now."

Reya was about to protest when she saw Eo still sitting in his bathtub of metal, bandages all over. Feeling a little bit guilty, she complied.

Ten minutes later, Reya hauled out the eighth box of papers. Eo's eyes bugged out when he saw it.

"I'm still only on the first box… this is torture."

☆

Eo started shuffling through the papers. His eyes skimmed through the papers, absorbing everything they saw. He didn't really think about it, but he could read several times faster than the average speed. Because they were highly technical words, his speed actually slowed down somewhat. Reya was wondering whether Eo was actually reading or merely flipping pages just to make a dumb comment sometime later.

Eo did both. When he was done, he said "Man, I love these scientists! Putting in so much effort into making everything sound so articulate, and then they put a spelling error! Look! Look! See how they spelled "essence" as "esence"? That's pretty funny."

Reya rolled her eyes. "Now that you're done reading that section, here's another box." She pushed the second box to him.

It did take a considerable amount of time to go through that huge volume of information, though. The first box itself took about half an hour. It was gonna take Eo literally the rest of the day to absorb everything.

Reya was bored, so she went upstairs to wait.