“Girls, what happened? Or have you been like this the whole time?”
Ron’s relative rolled her eyes, enjoying an opportunity to show her awareness: “They are in depression since yesterday!”
“Do not keep me in suspense! What happened yesterday?”
“A test at the sewage factory,” the brunette stepped in and sniffed. “Another one!”
It explained a bit of the situation.
“And how did it end?”
“As always!”
That meant they failed it. I could have guessed that.
By the end of the day I managed to go through almost a third of the documents and get acquainted with the subject of the work. Polak was wrong when he said that I wouldn’t understand the scheme. Drawings are typically made according to the same set of standards; otherwise, manufacturers wouldn’t be able to use them. And it doesn’t matter what you put in the fermentation vat—beer or sewage; from the alchemical point of view, it is all the same, as soon as it is organic. As well as I understood it, they tried to design a complex nonlinear control mechanism as a set of perforated drums, to which the device was supposed to turn under a specific combination of input parameters (like through a set of locks). The idea was beautiful, but it did not work for some reason. I wasn’t sure that I could figure out why the design was failing. Two variants of different complexity were presented in the piles of papers, and, judging by the contents of the documents, both schemes of perforation were developed by the local white mage, Johan. I don’t mean that his schemes were wrong, but he was guided by the logic of the magical process, and the limitations of such an approach were seen very well in the design of my motorcycle. That gave me some hope that the problem could be solved…
Coming to work the next day, I caught Johan stiff drunk.
My coworkers pretended that it was nothing out of the ordinary. I tried not to pay attention to Johan, blend with the team, but it was beyond me. I decided they didn’t understand what was happening. Okay, as to the dark mages, there are few of us in Redstone, and the dark from the university do not talk much to the townsfolk. So the latter do not know what is normal for a dark. But the white ones are a different story. There ought to be as many of them as dirt here! Was I the only one who knew how Johan’s drinking would end?!
A white magician who goes on a drinking bout will usually not come out of it alive. Well, maybe he will, if you resort to involuntary hospitalization. Their psyche is considered to be fragile and not adapted to the ills of life. Once unable to cope with the nervous shock and falling into a chemical relaxant, a white will drown his mental anguish in wine again and again, and he will have less and less willpower to get out of it. But the physical condition of a white is directly related to the mental one…
Perhaps, the firm just wanted one of its developers to die? No, that was a bad joke on my part…
But I needed to save the man, no kidding!
Driving off the secretaries, I made killingly strong coffee and went to bring the guy, with a runny nose, to his senses; I took his hand and put the cup in. Regretfully, I had no egg yolks and pepper handy, but I threw so much lemon in the coffee that my eyes started watering.
“Have a sip, please! You have to drink it out.”
White mages respond to physical contact differently—a touch sets them on an intimate footing and makes willing to trust. Given that alcohol intoxication increases suggestibility, I hoped that he would do as I said.
“In one sip, opa!”
He gulped and painfully winced. A very good effect! I continued to hold his hand and looked him in the eye (it usually helps to be more persuasive): “Hey, buddy, you must go home! Rest well today, gather yourself up for tomorrow. Everything will be fine, I promise! We need your help. You will be okay! Do you want me to take you home?”
He shook his head drunkenly, stood up, and firmly went to the door; drunken whites first lose their brains before the rest of the body gets poisoned. I hoped that he would be able to pull himself together.
After Johan’s departure, the average mood in the office improved by two degrees. Probably, no one dared to start discussion of failure in the presence of that poor guy. After waiting for five minutes to make sure that Johan was gone, Polak loudly clapped his hands: “What do you think, guys, about a five-minute coffee break?”
Employees perked up, and their chairs began creaking. I nipped in the bud their attempts to sit on the drawings, so we all gathered around the secretaries’ table, ousting the unhappy girls. The table was quickly serviced with coffee, biscuits, and salted nuts, and even with a bottle of homemade liquor—which I generously poured into the coffee without delay.
“I cannot hide, my friends,” Polak began, “that the test results have been a big blow for us. But it’s not the end of the world. Who has ideas about the causes of the latest failure?”
Depressed silence reigned at the table.
“Come on, my friends, go ahead!”
“Magic cannot be coupled with alchemy,” Carl said gravely.
“Why is that?” A sip of liquor made me long for communion.
The alchemist glanced viciously at me: “Because those fields are unconnected!”
I pointedly raised my finger: “They interact through the material world! The main problem is to find the common ground, the points of contact.”
“Points? In the vat of shit?”
“What is wrong with the vat of shit from the alchemical point of view?”
“It does not work!”
I patted myself on the chest: “I have a patent for a device, in which a magical unit is built into an alchemical one, and it f*cking works! Although in the beginning, the conjunction was monstrous.” Should I actually show them my motorcycle?
But Carl did not want to listen to my success: “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Usually the problem can be solved by splitting the system into parts,” I shrugged.
At least, that worked for me once.
“Which parts?” Carl muttered angrily.
I shrugged again: “I’ll say when I have studied the process!”
“Carl,” Polak stood up for me, “let the boy learn the process in more detail!”
For the “boy” I would have beaten him in the face, but Mr. Polak was my boss. I had to smile.
The alchemist proudly turned his back on me. I couldn’t care less! Quarters’ relative poured liquor into my cup as a reward (the girls definitely did not like the alchemist). The conversation turned to non-serious topics: attending the spring festival and the company’s barbeque in the countryside. I watched, listened, and attempted to figure why Ron tried so hard to put me in this company. Kindergarten! I felt like I was among children!
“Why don’t you have a job as a magician?” the brunette cautiously got closer, thinking that two cups of liquor would have made me soft.
I feigned a warm, fatherly, and smug smile: “One does not interfere with the other, darling!”
She cutely pouted her lips and tried to take a seat on my lap.
The next day Mr. Polak sent me on a “business trip” to the client’s factory. Well, you could guess where to. I admit, only then did I realize what exactly caused such severe depression in the firm’s employees.
It is hard to give an adequate description of a sewage disposal factory. Not that I did not know before how sewage is treated, but little smelly tubes in the lab did not provide me with insight into the scale of the system that was capable of processing the wastes of the whole city. Dark magicians do not like such things, but I was personally impressed by the magnitude of it: rows of giant pumps, pipes of my height in diameter entangled in staircases, vats with spikes of thermometers, and a constantly dancing flame of emergency exhaust above the pipes (can you guess what gas was burning?).