The four said nothing. They had no intention of giving up the information yet. They were succeeding in sowing the seeds, but the longer they had exclusive access to the higher rate of pay, the better, as far as they were concerned. They walked back out into the forest and continued grinding, repeating this process until night fell and the stalls closed down for the day.
The four agreed to meet up again early in the morning, when the appraisal stalls re-opened, but for the night they would go their own ways. Dakkon walked down to Letis’s stall location and, although it was unpainted and unadorned, it already had six large troughs each filled over half way with water.
Letis wasn’t around, but Dakkon decided he should give freezing a trough a try. Until now he had never attempted to freeze more than a palm-full of water. Would it even be possible? He wasn’t entirely certain.
Dakkon utilized his Condense and Hotspot skills to create a small point of intense cold in the center of one of the troughs. He concentrated on the point, pouring in his mana and transforming it into frost. The expanse was rapid. In seconds, freezing water bowed the center of the trough’s wood, cracking it, and spilling the remaining water on the ground. By the time Dakkon had realized what was going wrong, it was too late to stop. One receptacle was out of commission, and he had only managed to freeze about a fourth of the trough’s water.
“Wow,” thought Dakkon. His ability to turn water into ice was quite a bit more advanced than he had suspected. He stared at the broken trough and contemplated what this could do for him. “I can definitely find a use for this in combat,” he thought. If he could do the same with heat, causing someone to erupt in fire would be one hell of a nasty surprise.
Dakkon decided he’d give his skill, Condense, a more thorough evaluation soon, but for now he needed to figure out how to freeze the water without breaking every trough. He experimented with a few different methods and decided that the easiest way, which didn’t immediately drain him of his mana, was simply to create three small, condensed hotspots along the bottom of a trough and supply them with much less mana than on his initial attempt. Dakkon found that the more mana he poured into a cold, condensed hotspot, the more fiercely it froze, and he assumed that a similar effect would happen for a fiery one. There didn’t seem to be a cap on the amount of mana he spent, either. He suspected he could just dump it all in, if he wanted to. At the end of Dakkon’s experiments, he was left with five large troughs filled with ice plus one which he had broken.
The curiosity of what he would be capable of when using heat instead of frost overtook him. Dakkon regenerated his mana to full, walked a safe distance away from Letis’s stall, found the stump of a tree, and designated a small area in the center to be the focus of his heat-based hotspot. Then, he held his breath and—all at once—poured every bit of mana he could into it. The sensation of using all his mana at once left him feeling thoroughly chilled, even though he was creating heat. The stump’s center glowed red like an ember, then a single, piddly flame rose no higher or wider than his pinky finger from the wood.
Dakkon was displeased. Had anyone been nearby to see the thermomancer’s abject disgust painted so clearly on his face, they would have felt a tug of empathy for his woes—or they’d laugh. Dakkon gazed upon the miniscule flame which he had created and disavowed it. He couldn’t be seen trying to defend himself with that, or he’d become a laughing stock. Dakkon wouldn’t abide by that. It was too early to completely disregard the ability, though. Once condensed, the utility of his freezing hotspot had surprised him. He was sure that the fiery version could be applied practically. It must be difficult to focus, for instance, with a red-hot iron in the eye, and who wouldn’t turn to face a sudden, sharp burning sensation on the back of their shoulder?
The thought of a hot coal anywhere on his body sent a shiver down Dakkon’s spine. It would be a cruel trick, but it ought to be effective. The real challenge would be figuring out how much of his mana reserves it would take to be an effective distraction. It was something he would have to devote some time to figuring out.
Dakkon decided he would sit around and wait for Letis to show up on his own, providing him with the time he needed to test how to best use his condensed hotspots. First thing first, he’d need to know exactly how damaging and distracting his fully-powered miniature, remote fire poker could be. In the absence of any nearby test subjects, Dakkon gritted his teeth, placed a hotspot on his arm, and condensed it—pouring in all his mana.
[You have burned yourself for 30 damage. Remaining HP 620/650]
[Like a moth to the flame, you seek a goal no matter the price. You have gained a rank in Thick!]
“Y’ouch, damn it!” Dakkon exclaimed unwittingly even though he had been anticipating the experience. Despite the low damage dealt for the amount of mana he spent, the pain was extraordinary. It felt as though he had driven a nail into his arm, salted the wound, then cauterized it closed all in an instant.
It was clear that he wouldn’t need to exhaust his full mana reserve in the future to mete out a painful distraction. Dakkon decided that now, since he knew the approximate peak conditions of his skill for the moment, he would work up in intensity until he found a difficult to bear strength. Once he knew that, he could adjust the intensity for his intended target. After a couple hours of regenerating mana, then expending it in various tests, Dakkon found that the optimal size was about the same as the cherry ember of a lit cigarette. At that size, Dakkon only needed to spend about a sixth of his mana to create a sensation so unpleasant that his target would, without a doubt, try and tend to it immediately. Still, he decided that he’d use a fourth of his mana in a real fight to be certain of the effect.
The frost version of his condensed hotspot, by contrast, didn’t seem even remotely practical for combat. Since it could freeze water rapidly, he assumed he could freeze wet ground to create a slick surface, but when he tried using it on the skin, it proved to be surprisingly ineffective. Dakkon had no idea why something which could freeze enough water to splinter wood in the blink of an eye wasn’t able to cause more than mild discomfort to his skin. He wondered what would happen if he tried using the ability on his wet eyeballs, but decided to save that particular experiment for a later date, when he had a different lab rat to experiment with. It was when this grim thought was passing through Dakkon’s mind that he heard a banging noise from the direction of Letis’s stall.
Dakkon headed back toward the stall and saw Letis bent over and working on the broken trough with a hammer in his hand.
“Hey there, Letis. What’s cracking?” asked Dakkon.
“Cute,” said Letis. “If you want to break my stuff, it may be more discreet if you didn’t use your funky cold magic to bust things open with giant ice cubes.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Dakkon. “But you seem handy enough with a hammer.”
“I just built a wooden stall,” said Letis pointing to the somewhat shoddy construction with his hammer. “That’s about as far as I’ll get with woodworking. There’s no way I’ll be able to make this trough hold water again, but we can put crushed ice in it.”
“Speaking of which,” Dakkon pulled the promised chisel out of his bag and held it out to Letis, “here’s your chisel.”
“Just what I’ve always wanted,” Letis said glibly as he snatched the offered tool, shaking his head.