: Prompting Needed_

Potential Progress

From Daily Quordle 337 (12/27/2022) VALVE, VAUNT, VIPER, TORUS

Bertram watched the tubes fall from his assistant's hands. The feeling of helplessness fell over him as the glass shattered against the stone floor with a cascade of sharp, twinkling sounds. To his credit, Grax looked contrite almost at once and even threw his hands up over his head to fend off the waves of concussive magic Bertram had unconsciously summoned into his upturned palms. "ARE. YOU. KIDDING ME?" The head wizard's roar thundered around in the chamber and caused some of the flasks rattle in their stands. He hadn't meant to lace his voice with strands of entropy, but that was the least damage he could have done in his outrage. Grax fell to the floor and gathered his robes in his hands to protect his skin. He swept his arms in wide, encompassing circles and willed the shards of broken tube to scoot and roll towards him. Luckily Grax was one of the few gunds shipped in from the latest service population refill that had some knowledge of potential and kinetic will. In short order the glass gathered itself in Grax's robes and the little being muttered something in its native tongue as he backed out of the testing chamber. "And you better get more tubes," Bertram yelled after him. "From Trinh Long. Not from their brother. Blasted man couldn't make a testing tube correctly." The gund chittered a somewhat placating response then bled into the darkness beyond the entryway.

The wizard stared into the gloom beyond for a moment before dramatically whirling on his heel to look at the rest of the project that had not been thrown upon the floor. The Cryosan wilting viper was still in its hermetically sealed box. That was good. From what he could tell – Bertram leaned in to examine the creature's body – it was still breathing. Good. He scanned the rest of the table. The various stones charged with entropy and kinetic flows vibrated against their obsidian chains. The clinking of the links had started off as a trifling annoyance, but Bertram had begun to hear an almost musical quality to their randomness and that pleased him. All the sharpened implements were polished and in neat rows. And of course, the bag of Trundellro black salt was ready for casting. The bag was only open a bit from the top, but he could still see the silver glow of the illuminated scoop poking out.

How he had convinced the Mechron Science Division to part with that much salt, he'll never know. But he was glad for the acquisition. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to reproduce the chain of words he had spun to convince those mechanically infused dolts.

A whisper of slippers on stone caused Bertram to jump. He spun back towards the entryway to find Trinh Long himself standing in the chamber. The blue and white arcs of perpetually streaming energy jumped between the induction rods overhead and the lights played across the man's gaunt features. His black hair, though, reflected splashes of the light and gave the glass worker an almost ethereal appearance. The two men locked eyes and Bertram dropped his gaze first in a slightly – very slightly – reverential sort of bow. Trinh remained still. "Mr. Long," the wizard called, stepping down from his workspace and spreading his arms to attempt a hug.

Trinh took a step back and pointed to his load of glass tubes in his arms. "Let's not try and break these, Bert." He smoothly stepped past Bertram and set down the glass on the pile of burlap and velvet meant for keeping the tubes off the stone floor. He then lifted one of the tubes that curved and connected to itself to create a hollow hoop of glass around two lengths across. "I'm curious about... well, a good number of things, but..." Trinh held the object in both hands for the fraction of a moment before asking, "What do you need a closed torus for?"

Bertram's face split into a grin. Talking about experiments to a tradesman was one of his delights. "Well, I don't want to vaunt-"

"Then please don't." Trinh's face was a chiseled carving in tanned sandstone. The arcs above glittered against his eyes. "I'd accept a simple answer. I have terrorized gunds to attend to."