Original Preservative

I enlarged the note on my personal terminal for better vision as Sazzy climbed up and sat on the counter. There weren't any chairs in the room after all.

Looking over the note, I saw that there wasn't any form of measurements used. However, since it looked quite similar to pudding, I assumed both the portions of egg as well as Jasmine milk were the same. But what to do with the blue vegetable?

Since the preservative didn't contain any shredded up bits, maybe the Colonizers grinded the blue vegetable up before adding it in like clam powder? But at the same time, from my experience at trying out international recipes, they never really grinded anything. The most commonly used cooking methods would be frying and boiling. And it was usually either one of them, with no mixing of the cooking methods.

[Well I think we can try both of them. One batch would have fried blue vegetables, the other one would have boiled blue vegetables. At least we know all of the ingredients!]

Chirping in, Sazzy then discreetly passed a container into my hands. And so we divided the blue vegetables into two batches, the fried and the boiled. For the boiled blue vegetables, I was thinking of dividing it into a further two batches, one with the boiled water with the vegetables, and one without the vegetables.

First, we set our blue vegetables to boil in the boiling machine in front of me. We read the instructions on the machine carefully, and then managed to set it to boiling temperature for about 15 minutes.

Then we moved on to the fried batch. Maybe just like some ingredients, a reaction will form between the fried blue vegetables and the vegetables will dissolve into the mixture thus giving us a homogenous clear mixture.

Turning on the portable stove, I placed a pan onto it. Beside me, Sazzy was reading out loud the steps to fry vegetables.

[First let your pan heat up for around 5 minutes. Then you can add a little water to check if it is hot enough. Once you see the water boiling, you can add the blue vegetable straight inside. Due to the water and mineral content in the blue vegetable, there is no need to add any form of heat transfer medium. While frying the blue vegetables, make sure to regularly turn them over so they do not get burnt. The moment they turn a dark blue, remove them from the fire and set them aside to cool.]

I followed the steps that Sazzy had read out, and we both watched with fascination as the color of the vegetable changed. From a sort of normal dull blue, to a hypnotizing dark blue. But this dark color probably meant that frying was not the method the Colonizers used.

Just to try it out anyway since we had come so far, I put the pieces of fried blue vegetable inside. No reaction.

Seeing that it was a failure, we pushed this container aside and refocused our efforts onto the boiled blue vegetables.

At this point of time, the boiling blue vegetables had given the water it was in a very pleasing light shade of blue. It did not look pleasing in an edible sense, but it was still pleasing nonetheless.

Once the time was up, a red light on the machine turned off and we took the pot out of the machine. I poured them into two equal sized containers as evenly as possible, then fished out the vegetable pieces out of one of the containers using a pair of disposable chopsticks.

The first batch we tried was without the vegetables. We mixed the Jasmine milk and the egg thoroughly first, making our base mixture, and then slowly poured in the boiled vegetable water. Constantly stirring it while Sazzy helped me pour the water, we soon noticed that the mixture was a little too watery. Although the light blue color had mostly disappeared as we mixed them, at one point the mixture suddenly turned from its transparent 'color' to a very stunning red in color.

"The beginning looked promising. This may be the one. Although we still have to fiddle around to find the right proportion."

And as an extra measure, we mixed the boiled water with vegetables into a new mixture as well. Maybe the vegetables would help?

When mixing, the larger vegetables got in the way of the mixing, and created areas which were not homogeneously mixed. But other than that, it seemed the presence of the vegetables didn't seem to affect the mixture.

Putting all three of the first batches of experiments to the side, I recorded down our steps and my thoughts on the final product onto my personal terminal.

In the middle of writing, I saw movement from the corner of my eye and turned my head to see Sazzy emptying the contents of the containers into the trash. She then placed the containers onto this small circular indent on the research table.

Holding onto it tightly, I saw the inner circle of the indent give way to a nozzle that sprayed water at high pressure on the insides of the container. Then when it was done washing, Sazzy moved that container over to another indent, where this time a nozzle most likely blowing wind to dry the inside of the container appeared.

Neat!

Tilting over to look at these indents, the washing one had a water droplet like symbol, and the drying one had a wind like symbol.

Curiosity satisfied, I went back to writing my notes as I heard Sazzy wash and dry the other containers.

Once finished with the notes, Sazzy had all the containers in front of me, washed and dry, to do our next batch of experiments.

Using the three containers, I made three different versions of the preservative with different proportions. For now, all of them were using the pudding ratio for the Jasmine milk and egg. But if these experiments failed, that would mean that we had to take more time to find out the actual proportions for all three ingredients instead of just one.

Doing each one, we measured the amount of total water added using containers with markings on them. Although I couldn't read the markings, it at least allowed me to figure out roughly how much water I had to add.

We would start out with three markings that were very far apart from each other. Then we would take the best two results and the next batch would be three more different markings that were in between these two original markings. This would continue until we find the most optimal amount of boiled vegetable water for our assumed ratio of Jasmine milk and egg.

Fortunately, at the end of the many many experiments we did, we didn't have to restart it to find out the correct proportion of Jasmine milk and egg. It turns out that the Colonizers had used roughly the same ratio for the preservative as they did for the pudding.

In front of my hands was a container that looked extremely harmless, but when allowed to sit in darkness, was poisonous enough to cause the tide of war to change.

At first we relied on how similar it looked towards the original preservative to judge our success. But we quickly encountered a huge problem. After the fifth batch, all of our experiments looked the same to my naked eye. So for every experiment after that, we left the experiments out in the light for 5 minutes before Sazzy would check for their toxicity. Since the original was so deadly because it seemed safe under the light, we set it as our success criteria.

Most of our experiments didn't pass this test. A large majority of them remained toxic even after long exposure to light. So we took the two experiments that had the least toxicity, checked their boiled vegetable water content, and then did three more experiments within those ranges. And finally by the tenth try, we had recreated the original preservative that would probably pass any toxic test, unless it was dark.

I wrote the complete recipe into my notes and stretched.

We had been experimenting for the majority of the day. And due to the never changing lights of our surroundings, I hadn't realized that a total of 6 hours had passed since we started experimenting until I looked at the time on my personal terminal.

With a final clean up, we set aside our things and headed out the canteen to grab something to eat.

Since we had finally recreated the original preservative, the easier part was over. Now we had to find a way to combat this poison. And we didn't have a note to guide us this time.