The information in this thread should be considered to be available for review and reading by higher ups in zenko as well as the city.
Log entry 1:
It is with some sorro that i create these logs to document my findings in the creation of life. Efforts to bypass preemptive measures have failed leaving me little alternative. Let this be a permanent notation on my record that i am knowingly violating the third law of the mage's guild in that i seek to create a construct in the form, shape, and soul of a son and or daughter for myself and my mate. I do so knowingly of the consequences should this ever be discovered by the guild. I have yet to hear if the new guild master has revoked this law as i have been out of touch for the last few years with the guild. Last i knew, creating constructs such as these was, to say the least highly illegal and immoral.
I have finished the math on this, We can indeed create a construct however we dont have the peaces or materials normally required. River's knowledge on the matter is exploratory, if she was a professor at the guild teaching in the colleges and institutes, I have no doubt great things would come of it. However that does not change the fact that currently we lack the normal materials. As such i have conducted a small study as a proof of concept, My findings are grim but promising. By harmonizing a person sized crystal of Tass with our arcane resonance, we can essentially create a false life sign for the crystal to recognize. I've injected and saturated the crystal with numerous chemicals, compounds, and arcane energies. Failure rate with this is far too high for my liking. At this point i'm looking at a failure rate far worse than mana poisoning survival rate if left untreated. So far out of 30 tests, only one subject proved hopeful. However upon further inspection, the toxic cascade inside the crystal proved too much for the new life form and the crystal shattered. Casualty rate at this point is 100% with only a small margin of useable information gleamed. I will continue tests.
Log entry 2:
River's pet Yuri seems uncomfortable around the crystals. I doubt the creature understands what's going on or is even capable of comprehending it. Regardless of her pet's dislike for my work, I remain hopeful at the very least. I've made little progress in the project. Casualty rate is still 100%. Something is interfering with the process that i haven't considered yet. I keep everything in a sterile environment, but crystal after crystal shatters. hot environment, cold environment, doesn't matter. I've removed all stimuli from the area, even put up arcane dampening runes all over the place to make the area a neutral zone for mana... yet nothing i do makes a difference. I need to find some way to take the external stress on the crystals away.
Log entry 3: First casualty of the day was not one of the crystals. My lab assistant Cody attempted to assist in removing the external stresses off of the crystals by levitating one of them with wind magic. The crystal got three feet off the ground and exploded like a black powder bomb. a four foot peace of shrapnel skewered Cody and pinned him to the wall. The shard pierced his right lung. Lucky we're on lismore, and some of the world's most gifted healers were nearby. Cody is expected to make a full recovery. After the levitation incident i attempted to place one of the crystals into a vacuum chamber. The Crystal detonated with such force i Doubt we'll be able to salvage anything from the vacuum chamber. Took us three hours on the hand pump to remove the air from the tank too.
Log entry 4: I've been reviewing some notes on constructs and i'm trying to implement then to the best of my ability in the project. So far we've seen limited success in the matter. Unfortunately we have yet to isolate what is causing the crystals to shatter. Casualty rate is still at 100%, though we are learning things in the process. I've ordered my team to scale back the experiments as much as we can. We've gone from 30 tests a day, to 10. I'm not concerned about running out of resources, It would take months of this and many more tests a day to remotely come close to it.
Log entry 4 supplemental: Visited Cody today at the hospital and made a surprising discovery that gives us a peace to a puzzle. I detected a third arcane signature that did not belong to me or river. Running tests on some of the other shards show the same signature... Whether or not this is the formation of a new singular signature or not that is consistent with all of our tests so far is unknown. I'm looking at this with several possibilities in mind and i'm trying to keep an open mind about this... It is a step in the right direction though. We are learning.
Log entry 5: Cody was released from the hospital today and he's back on the project. Though he arrives just in time to hear the news from a runner. Zenko high command has reopened the Dark technology project for small scale utilization. A hilt here, a arm bracer there, that sorta thing. Unfortunately it's an ill omen for the team, many of my team are immediately on edge. Jana lost her brother to the project and Cameron barely escaped with his life. I'll be sending a formal protest response back with the runner. Hopefully this alleviates some of the team's stress. Today we're forgoing any further tests on crystals and we're crunching the numbers from the last few tests. There's a pattern here somewhere, and we have to find it.
Log entry 6: I'ts been four days since i sent the formal protest response. The team was unnerved when the response was overturned and rejected. Upon recherche, my response never made it to relina's ears or eyes. It was shot down before it ever got to her. This is unfortunate but understandable. We've begun narrowing down the causes for the shattering crystals. we've ruled out the third signature we're detecting as a possible cause. if anything it's what's keeping things contained. I've divided the team into two groups. One group will be working on the dark technology project. Command has yet to send the first orders for our project, but we're preparing prototypes none the less. The rest will be working with me to try and solve this problem. We did make progress today however if unexpected progress. An accident occurred in the lab where a worker tripped down the stairs and spilled a keg of Ether just as the crystal was exploding. Ether managed to splash on the crystal and stabilized it for a moment, keeping it in a odd self orbiting stasis. The anomaly lasted for five minutes before it destabilized and fell to the ground harmlessly. Regardless i am ordering blast shields from our artillery division as a precaution.
Log entry 7: Limited success. Valkresh's idea of submerging the crystal in water worked somewhat. Unfortunately it still exploded. We were behind the blast shields so naturally we were protected. River's pet? not so much. the poor sodd was trying to deliver river a light snack when the tank holding the crystal and water exploded. I'll give the cat one thing, he can hold his ground. Yuri barely seemed to notice or comprehend what was going on. But in short, the tank ruptured, Yuri was soaked with a torrent of water, and the meal he had brought my mate was washed away. No harm to him as far as we can tell. However it is interesting to note, despite the added pressure from the water, the crystal was far more stable than it was in open air. We're looking into ways to increase the stability using this as a new baseline.
Log entry 8: We ran 10 tests today. Out of all of them, the test where we utilized chilled water with additional supplemental tass crystals worked the best. The crystal stabilized completely. Further examination of the stable crystal is required. Most of the team is optimistic. So far the crystal has lasted 7 hours, far longer than any of the previous tests.
Log entry 9: One of my assistants had a radical idea today. Instead of chilled water as cold as the northern ice, Searing hot water far past boil. Most of us expected immediate failure. Though surprisingly it met with the same success as our ice water test, which mind you is still going strong. This is interesting, We will have to look into this. It should be of note that neutral temperature water causes the crystals to shatter within five minutes. We are on the road to success here!
Log entry 10: It's been two weeks. The cold water crystal shattered after a week to the day, same with the hot water crystal. Those two crystals gave us more data than we could have imagined and we've spent the last week reviewing the data, no more tests were conducted. The data is still more than we can decern at the moment. Felt it was more than time for a log entry. Our next task is how to combine both hot and cold in the same enviorment without cancling eachother out. We're looking at defieing a law of the arcane, should be intresting.
Log entry 11: We've constructed twelve arcane barriers between us and the new holding tank. Each more than enough to absorb the full force of a naval cannon blow. We've created an enviorment where both hot and cold thrive. Devided right down the middle of the tank to boot! on one side water as cold as the northern waists, and on the left, water so hot the moment it touches air it vaporizes into a massive cloud of steam! All of us expected catastrophic failure, but oddly enough the crystal seems to be stable.
Log entry 12: It's been an entire month, the crystal finaly shattered three days ago. We've also found out why just now. Further investigation shows that a mutation occured within the crystal that was unplanned and unexpected. It created some sort of arcane virus. The remaining shards of the crystal are in top level quarantine. Not even the chief of the island's security is permitted in the same room as them. This virus makes mana poisoning look like a head cold to be treated with hot honey mead. Five of my assistants are still in the hospital. We've drained their arcane energy several times over. We almost lost Lorine from blood loss. The barriers were insufficient. I'm ordering the second recherche team to create dark technology blast shields to compensate for the next test, though it will take a while to generate the resources for it.
Log entry 13: Huge sucess! This crystal is stable! beyond sub zero Ether mixture on one side, Far beyond flash point ignition on the other. The crystal is stable and shows no signs of desegregation of any kind. Entire team is hopeful.
Log entry 14. The crystal is still stable, and the crystal has recognized our patterns and has started constructing the first stage of life, The soul is just now starting to take shape. This is far beyond any other test we've ever done in scale of success. Data keeps coming in about the Virus. Arther has dubbed it Tassnicite, I'm labeling the virus with cleanse and purge orders should it ever manifest beyond these laboratory walls.
Log entry 15: We've detected trace levels of the Tassnicite virus inside the crystal. We're looking into ways of bringing it under control. This is the closest we've come to actualy creating a child, I'll not see some lowly virus get in my way. By Ah Zu Lah, The child will survive.
Log entry 16: Time is figuritively running out so to speak. I wish we could have done this without taking the life of another. However data does not lie in it's raw form. It says what it says and it's not my place to approve of it or hate it, i must however accacpt what it says. Upon river's advice, I am constructing somoething to help the process utalizing dark technology. I'm hoping the regulation golem i'm constructing will help with this. We are so close it's turning my fur grey... or rather white... sometimes its annoying to glow.
Cody, ever the adventurous sort has gotten back from the city's library's forbidden section. I hear he even muscled his way past the guards. I understand he was researching arcane resonance patterns associated with death. He seems to belive that another member of the zenko's arcane resonance is at play here somehow. Cody was always one who had a sixth sense aobut these sorts of things. I will humor him on this, If he wants to go back and sift through zenko classified records on mages who have died and left an arcane imprint, He has my support on the matter. I dont think many will be pleased on his snooping though. Looking back on the deaths of so many, the echos they leave... always makes us look back to that one day at the inn, the loss of our primearch during the great war.
Log entry 16 supplemental: Cody woke me up in the middle of the night with a look i've not seen on him since we first started tinkering with the aspect of dark technology weapons back in the old zenko. A look of mixed terror and excitement. He's identified the third signature. It's a fragment of a soul that much he's certain. though who he thinks it is... is disturbing. I'll be contacting relina later about this. If there is a remote possibility cody's findings are true... She must be brought up to speed. Well, brought up to speed and we'll need access to the one place in zenko even i dont have clearance for, The reliquary of artifacts.
