As soon as I arrived at the lab, I saw my two colleagues waiting for me at our table.
"Good morning," I greeted them, "I am not late, am I?"
"No, we've arrived just a minute or so ahead of you," Carl said, and Sibel concurred.
"That's good," I said happily since I had for a moment wondered if I had remembered the agreed-upon time wrongly, but it seemed 7 a.m. was correct and I was on time.
"Alright, let's start discussing which one of our ideas we are going to test first," Sibel said after I took my seat.
"I believe it would be for the best if we start with the Soft Snow series we devised," Carl proposed, and thinking about the series of experiments that used the Soft Snow as an additional ingredient and expanded from there I had to agree that it was a good idea.
Soft Snow did after all have nearly the same effect as the Mystic Ice we created, so there should be a pretty good synergy effect between the two. Besides, the price displayed on our resource list for a 200gr bundle of D-Class Soft Snow was 28.950 Poke, so adding that to the production cost of 50.998,5 Poke for our Mystic Ice, we got a total cost of 79.948.5 Poke.
Such a total cost gave us a good leeway to add more ingredients into the mix without exceeding our budget limit, which was why the Soft Snow series Carl mentioned was the most extensive one we came up with yesterday while we were waiting for the next step of the Mystic Ice production.
Still, I chose to keep quiet for now and decided to wait for Sibel's opinion first. Carl looked at us waiting for our reactions, but I remained quiet and showed no reaction aside from my initial nod.
Sibel also kept quiet at first, but seeing that I had no intention of speaking up next, she took the initiative after waiting for 10 seconds, just before I was starting to consider if I should speak up after all since the quietness was about to become awkward.
"I'm not sure if that's the best one to start with," Sibel began a bit doubtfully. "While the Soft Snow series is indeed promising, it is also the most extensive experiment series we came up with, so I think it might be a good idea to start with one of the shorter ones first."
That was a good argument and Carl nodded in assent, as did I. Still, while she was right with what she said, her answer did not tell us with what we should start our first round of experiments.
"While that is true, you did not mention what we should focus on instead," Carl spoke up just as I was about to raise that point, so I kept quiet and simply nodded in agreement instead.
"Well, I think we could start with the Ice Gem first. While it is the most expensive of our options, it is also one of the shorter ones for the same reason," Sibel gave her suggestion and neither Carl nor I directly disagreed with her.
No, I was contemplating if I should agree with her or not, and Carl was most likely doing the same. Now, unlike in canon gems did not vanish after activating, but simply expended their stored energy to amplify the energy released by those in contact with it. For the Ice Gem that was obviously ice energy in the form of ice-type moves.
Once the gem's storage was empty, it automatically entered a down period and had to gather energy to restore its capacity. Only after it was filled, did it become usable once more.
Honestly, the gems were more useful as move training aid since they were nature's move coaches, showing the Pokemon how the stronger version of their moves looked, felt, and acted. This kind of first-hand demonstration was a really useful training aid and the most common way the gems were used.
It was due to their usefulness, even D-Class gems had a general price of 65k Poke, and it was possible to find them for a higher price than that, or for a lower one if one was lucky enough, but 65k was the general market price.
Thankfully, the price on our resource list was lower than that, and the D-Class Ice Gem was listed as 50k per piece, so it was still within our budget, even if it was already straining our limit. That naturally meant we could only add one or two more items into the mix without exceeding the ultimate limit of our budget.
Obviously, the additions had to be of the cheaper kind, so their only use was as catalysts for certain reactions of/between the two main ingredients.
Still, Sibel's idea had merit since I estimated that we could perform our Ice Gem-related experiments within two to three months. On the other hand, the Soft Snow series could take even longer than that, so doing it afterward seemed like a better idea.
"I agree with Sibel's idea," I ultimately voiced out and only moments later Carl expressed his agreement as well. "I approve as well."
With that out of the way, we began organizing the instruments as well as the materials we would need for our experiment(s). For the first batch of our tests, we only needed our two main items, the Mystic Ice and the Ice Gem as test materials.
As for instruments, we had a pressure machine, which used gravity to apply pressure on any objects placed inside, which we were intending to use to force the two Ice items to fuse. Naturally, we were going to inject a steady supply of ice-type energy inside to prevent the items from breaking.
Well, at least we were hoping that the energy would help. We had to find the ideal degree of pressure first to prevent the items from bursting or cracking during the fusion process.
As for the ice energy, that was going to come out of a batch of Ice Gems. We could have used an ice-type Pokemon for that, but honestly, the pressure fusion is a process that was going to take hours, so we decided that we would rather waste money than waste the Pokemon's time.
We brought over two of those gravity machines since we were going to use the second one on a ground mixture of Mystic Ice and an Ice Gem. Fusing ground ice using pressure was obviously easier, and we wanted to see if and how much grounding down the items affected the end result.
We also brought over three portable heaters and three freezers. The heater was obviously to melt the ice items so that they could be mixed after liquifying, while the freezer was there to refreeze the liquidated ice.
One heater used electricity, one used Fire Shards, and the last one used Fire Gems to generate heat. On the other hand, the freezer did the same using electricity, Ice Shards, and Ice Gems respectively.
For the melt/freeze test, we were also going to perform tests replacing the instruments with Pokemon to see what kind of a difference the energy provided by Pokemon made.
Finally, we were naturally also planning on testing a mix of both methods, where the items are partially melted under pressure to ease the process before they are refrozen while still under pressure, but that one required some extra steps, so we were going to leave it for the end.
Properly testing the first two fusion modes was probably going to take a week or two anyway, so we began directly working on that. It took us an hour but finally, both gravity machines and the three heaters were in use. Once the first step was done, Sibel kept an eye on the machines, while Carl and I began working on another batch of Mystic Ice since we noticed that our 40 pieces would only suffice for two or three days.
It took less than 10 minutes for Sibel to report that the Mystic Ice and Ice Gem inside the first gravity/pressure machine had cracked, so we replaced them with new ones, while the old ones were moved to the batch for the second machine.
For the new round, we increased the amount of energy sent to the items. Unfortunately, while they held out longer than before, the new items still cracked 22 minutes later, so we replaced them with a third set. For the third round, the energy input was lowered back to the standard and the pressure was reduced by a bit (2.5%).
Just like that, we kept adjusting the various experiments. At the end of the day, the first pressure/gravity machine failed to produce a successfully fused Mystic Ice Gem. That was what we were going to call the successful product.
While we did manage to produce a complete fused block of ice from the second pressure machine, the one with the ground items, the results were lackluster and failed to meet our expectations, so that set of tests could be considered unsuccessful as well.
The liquify/solidify tests also failed to produce satisfactory results. However, after 8 rounds, it became obvious that the electrical set gave the worst results, regardless of how high/low the temperature used during the process was.
Well, one thing that surprised us, was that we ended up using nearly all 40 Mystic Ice pieces on the first day, so we were really happy that we had kept producing new ones while working on the tests, or we would have had to do that tomorrow without being able to perform any tests in the meantime.
I spent the time after dinner with my Pokemon and only left Utopia to sleep. The next day, we continued our tests, while making sure we kept creating more Mystic Ice to meet our demands. Thankfully, we managed to reduce the demand at the end of the day, thanks to eliminating the electric heater/freezer from the second method group.
That the number of cracked/busted items coming from the first pressure machine was reduced helped as well. Nonetheless, we still ended up without any "successful" products, but none of us had been expecting any instant success, so we did not allow that to affect our motivation.
That evening I entered Utopia once more to spend time with my Pokemon family, and when I informed everyone of my arrival I was quickly greeted by an enthusiastic fluff cloud hugging my head. That was obviously an overly excited Saphira/Swablu and I quickly understood the reason for her enthusiasm, when she asked me to check her status.
Saphira had finally managed to complete her limit breaking, which meant that she was ready to break through to the silver stage. Moreover, we had previously decided, that she would evolve to Altaria before she broke through, so she was doubly excited and could not wait to evolve.
I hugged her and praised her a bit much to her enjoyment before I called the others over so that they could witness her evolution and then after a short break her breakthrough.
Everyone was excited, and I heard Gible being extra cheery. He was actually vocally rooting for Saphira, knowing that she would turn into a fellow dragon after her evolution. That she would be extra fluffy in her new form was probably a bonus as well, just like the fact that her fluff reduced her chances of getting scratched by his scales to zero.
He could by now control his scales and turn them non-damaging on command, but Saphira liked giving him surprise hugs, so her fluffy protection had made an impression on my little dragon.
Anyway, I began applying the paste I had created for her on her body before I fed her the potions I made. I had to go all out for her evolution supplements since Saphira's potential was already pretty high, and aside from some Altaria blood, I even used a Dragonite/Dragon Scale, and some Dragonite Blood.
Knowing Altaria's mega typing, I also added a ground Togekiss feather into the mix, while ensuring that the injection of fairy energy would not clash with the abundance of dragon energy, which was an extremely costly task, and would probably still have caused a slightly negative effect on any dragon species aside from Altaria.
However, she was worth any and all effort I had to invest since she was a member of my family, and I was hoping, that even if the Togekiss feather proved otherwise useless, it would at least increase her fairy affinity a bit.
Regardless of my extra wishes, I stepped out of the evolution zone after I finished my job and joined the others circling Saphira. Once I was with them, I told her she could go ahead, and Saphira began to light up.
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