The month went by pretty calmly after that aside from two or three occasions. Prime/Beedrill managed to finish his first round of limit-breaking, closing in on Optimus/Butterfree, who, at the time, was still working on finishing the second round. Still, he managed to do that just a bit over a week later, opening up the distance between them once more.
I was naturally happy to see that the two were steadily approaching the gold stage, especially Optimus, who made it to the final round of limit-breaking. The other event that happened was related to our project at the lab, or maybe calling it an event was wrong since it was related to the result at the end of the month, so not a singular event, but the result of work over a period of time.
Well, semantics aside, we managed to make significant progress, and I was giddy when we managed to produce a "failed" Mystic Cryo Gem with a 99% fusion rate on Giratiday, just two days before the month was over.
Ok, we might have failed to reproduce that result the next day, and only managed to produce a 98% gem at best on Palkiday, but that still meant that we managed to achieve a maximum fusion rate of 99% by the end of the month.
Furthermore, our stable fusion rate had reached 95%, which meant that the gems that did not break had a minimum fusion rate of 95%, and the numbers that did end up breaking were a bit less than 1 out of 10. Oh, we had come so close to achieving a functional/successful Mystic Cryo Gem, that I could smell it.
Well, okay, maybe it was Carl, who was so excited that he was perspiring that I was smelling, but it remained a fact that we had come extremely close to finishing the current product, so it was no surprise that we chose to do some overtime on Dialday, which happened to be the first day of the new month.
I was sure every other boss or supervisor would have loved to have employees that were voluntarily doing overtime, but not ours. James told us to go home before the second hour was up, and after the vacation, we were back to our Arcday to Dialday schedule, so we had to stay away until Arcday as well.
Due to that, I ended up going back to Hope Town for the first weekend of the 5th month of 2182. Well, at least my parents were happy to see me, so that was a good thing I guess. Regardless, I spent the weekend at home and came back to the lab on Arcday to finish that last percent we were missing to get our hands on the first successful Mystic Cryo Gem with a 100% fusion rate.
Unfortunately, it took us nearly three days, until close to 5 p.m. on Giratiday, for that to happen. That last step took a surprising amount of tries, and even then we could be considered lucky since there were cases where others were stuck for weeks or even months at that last step. So, we should have been grateful it took us only 3 days, I guess.
Anyway, as soon as we had the confirmation from the device that the Mystic Cryo Gem had a 100% fusion rate, our trio was excited, and since it had been roughly four months since our last evolution attempt, the others were polite enough to "share" our enthusiasm when we shared the news with James and the rest of the project team.
We did the preliminary test, set up the central stage, and everything, before going through the evolution test, but sadly the Mystic Cryo Gem failed to trigger the Eevee's evolution. The good news was that this was the first time this particular Eevee got to participate in one of our tests, so we did not get thrown a dirty look by the Eevee when the test failed, since that part was actually more hurtful/sad than the failed test itself.
Also, I was finally able to check the gem's status screen. I couldn't do it before that since Sibel had been the one who had been keeping an eye on the production site when the success happened, so I did not have a proper excuse to touch it until now without looking, maybe not suspicious, but definitely odd.
Anyway, I took the chance to check the status while moving the gem back to our workstation.
'Name: Mystic Cryo Gem
Type: Ice
Class: D
Uses:
The Mystic Cryo Gem is a compound item created through the fusion of Cryogonal Ice and a Mystic Ice Gem, and as such can not be found in nature. The Mystic Cryo Gem is an object containing highly concentrated refined ice energy.
Due to the nature of the materials used in its creation, it is capable of increasing the power of ice-type moves by a third. It is further capable of increasing the training speed of ice-type moves and there exists a small chance that the Mystic Cryo Gem might trigger moments of inspiration regarding the ice element. Additionally, the Mystic Cryo Gem is capable of turning any non clashing ambient and introduced energy into ice energy."
The end of the first part was a bit different, but practically gave the same impression, and most of the second part was identical to the second part of the Frost Gem and Yache Gem before.
Still, I had to reread the last bit to make sure I had not misunderstood it, and that it was saying, what I was thinking that it was saying, and when I confirmed that, all I could think was "Oh, shit. That's bad," or rather that could be pretty bad.
Regardless of how I looked at the description, what it implied meant that this thing could and probably should be classified as a strategic object, and I was pretty sure that the moment its capabilities were understood, the sale or propagation or whatever you wanted to call it, would most likely be controlled and/or monitored.
Now, most people would say "What is so bad about this? You're exaggerating, I can see nothing that is as problematic as you're making it out to be."
The difference between this one and the two objects before this was that the others released their stored ice energy into their surroundings, while this one turned the energy in its surroundings into ice energy as long it was not made up of or contained a lot of either fire, rock or steel energy.
So, the first one consumed its own energy to spread the ice energy and needed to replenish its "battery" so to say, through either normal/neutral or water energy that it could convert to ice energy, or directly absorb ice energy.
That was not a problem in an environment that had those energies available like the sea or a lake or a tundra. Everywhere else, it required someone to supply the energy, so that it had the necessary energy levels to function.
Meanwhile, the second one straight up turned the energy around it to ice energy and could use the same energy it altered to replenish itself, creating a cycle that allowed it to work infinitely without any outside input regardless of the environment, as long as it was not located in or close to a volcanic zone, or surrounded/covered by steel/metal or dense rock.
Depending on how large its area of effect was, it could potentially change the whole environment it was placed in, turning any place into an arctic or tundra zone. It could freeze lakes, or theoretically even the ocean if we wanted to exaggerate a bit. The Mystic Cryo Gem could basically be used for terraforming to create an ice world if its range was big enough.
Okay, I had to admit that the last points were not that realistic, but using a whole bunch of them could have serious consequences on nearly any environment, and there was a pretty big likelihood that it would/could be misused.
Still, regardless of possible risks, it was an object that could honest-to-Mew reshape an area, so it was an incredible creation, and if we could incorporate the environmental effects of the Mystic Frost Gem and Mystic Yache Essence Gem into it as well, it could become one of, if not the most important item/object for all ice types.
Nonetheless, we still had to actually determine its properties at the lab, before it was time to seriously consider that step. What I felt had to be discussed at that moment, however, was what to do after the capability tests.
According to our previous plan, we would have worked on Vaniluxe Ice next, but I proposed skipping that one directly and to start working on the combinations instead. The fusion of the Mystic Frost Gem and Mystic Yache Essence Gem or rather the infusion of both Frost Cap Extract and Yache Berry Essence into a Mystic Ice Gem.
If that one did not work as an evolution trigger for Eevee, we would add the Cryogonal Ice into the mix as well since that was still within the limits of our acceptable price range. Just so, but still within the limits. Heck even if the first compound worked, I would suggest working on the last compound for its possible effect, but I had to wait until we determined the effects of the Mystic Cryo Gem for that one.
Doing that, actually took more than a week, and as I had expected, our test elicited attention within just a few days. Heck, even Professor Oak came by and observed our tests a few times, which showed how critical the results we were getting were.
You knew you were something big and/or important if the Big Oak himself showed up to take a look and make sure everything was going well. In fact, the number of times he came over to watch our Mystic Cryo Gem tests was higher than the total number of times he came to our part of the lab to actually oversee the progress of our Eevee project.
Anyway, it took until the end of Dialday of the third week to determine most of the details of the additional effect. I focused on that one since it did not take us long to determine the effects of the abilities since we already did that twice with the previous two gems, so determining that the effects were pretty much the same was not that hard.
The alteration effect however, was something new, and the other two quickly realized the implications of what they were witnessing /seeing, so we were as thorough as we could be, especially after the Professor made an appearance, and then another, and another, and, you get my drift.
At the end of the first day, we had to relocate to another location for our test, since it became apparent that the radius a single Mystic Cryo Gem could affect was bigger than the area we were assigned in our part of the lab.
Due to that, we chose a secluded part of the property outside the actual building that we thought was sufficiently big. We forthrightly took our gem, the instruments we needed to measure the growth/expansion of the ice field, and set up shop out in the field.
Well, due to that we had to restart the experiment at the new location, but that was no problem. Naturally, the expansion, the increase in radius, was faster at the start and then began to slow down with each additional meter since the actual affected area increased by a lot each time.
It took until around the middle of the sixth day for the expansion speed to stop slowing down. More specifically, it took 131 hours for its expansion speed to become a line parallel to the time axis, meaning it grew by the same amount of centimeters each hour.
On the 8th day, which happened to be Dialday, we decided that we would start working on the Mystic Yache Frost Gem on Arcday if the growth of the ice field caused by the Mystic Cryo Gem did not stop until then. We would simply keep an eye on the expansion test on the side, while we focused on the Mystic Yache Frost Gem.
If it did hit its maximum sometime during the weekend, we would know exactly when that happened, since we did put up a camera system that documented the situation for us while we were at home since we did not receive permission to stay at the lab over the weekend.
To quote James, "A camera can do just as good a job at simply watching the field expand as you can. In fact, it will probably do a better job, so go home and come back on Arcday."
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