The fourth prototype failed on a grey afternoon in early spring, and Briar sat looking at its cracked housing for a considerable while before finally, properly admitting to himself that he was not going to solve this alone. He found Yseult in the library two hours later.
BRR: I need help.
She looked up from whatever she'd been reading with immediate, undisguised interest.
YSE: With what?
BRR: A device. I've been building it since winter recess. It's failed four times now and I've exhausted every approach my own discipline offers me, which means either the concept is fundamentally impossible or I need someone whose training points in an entirely different direction than mine does.
YSE: And that someone is me.
BRR: You're the best Alchemist in our year. Possibly in the academy. I've spent four months not asking you because I wanted to solve it myself, and I've finally accepted that wanting to solve it myself was costing me more than my pride was actually worth.
Yseult regarded him for a long moment, and Briar, braced for mockery, found instead something considerably warmer settling across her expression.
YSE: That's a genuinely mature thing to admit.
BRR: It cost me quite a lot to say.
YSE: I imagine it did. Show me the device.
She had been, Briar noticed as they crossed toward the lower science wing, in an unusually good mood for several days now, something lighter in her whole bearing that he could not account for and did not ask about. The workshop remained exactly as he'd left it, the accumulated wreckage of four months' failure spread across every available surface, and Yseult moved through it with genuine curiosity, examining diagrams and cracked components with the particular focused attention she brought to any interesting problem.
YSE: Explain the concept properly.
BRR: My soul ability is foresight. I can see through my own future eyes, briefly. Two minutes ahead at the absolute maximum, a few seconds at a time, and only about once an hour before the drain becomes debilitating.
YSE: That's considerably more interesting than you've ever let on.
BRR: It's considerably less useful than it sounds. The device was meant to extend it. Longer duration, further range. I've tried every configuration I can conceive of and the essence conduit destabilizes every single time.
Yseult picked up the cracked housing, turning it over with careful attention.
YSE: Because you're trying to force more out of a fixed supply.
BRR: What?
YSE: Your essence. You've got a finite amount, and you're building something to stretch what it does rather than increasing what you've got to work with. That's the entire problem, Briar. You've been solving the wrong side of the equation.
She set the housing down and turned toward him with the particular bright, focused energy of someone whose interest had properly engaged.
YSE: Sit down.
BRR: Why?
YSE: Because I'm going to show you something considerably faster than explaining it.
She positioned him on the workshop's low stool, and then, without any warning whatsoever, stepped behind him and wrapped both arms around his shoulders from behind, pulling him back against her. Briar went entirely rigid.
BRR: What are you-
YSE: Physical contact's required. Hold still.
BRR: Yseult, I-
He stopped talking, because his face had gone a shade of red he could feel from the inside, and because his head was currently positioned in a manner that made continued speech feel dangerously unwise, and because he had lost, quite suddenly, all confidence in his ability to say anything at all without embarrassing himself catastrophically.
YSE: You've gone very tense.
BRR: I'm FINE.
YSE: You're extremely tense.
BRR: I'M FINE, YSEULT.
YSE: Alright. Just breathe normally and pay attention to how you feel.
He was on the verge of explaining, at some length, exactly how difficult paying attention to anything had become, when he felt it. It arrived slowly, spreading outward from where her arms rested against his shoulders, a warmth that had nothing to do with body heat, and something inside him, some reservoir he had never once consciously perceived, began, unmistakably, to fill.
BRR: What is that?
YSE: Use your ability. Right now.
BRR: I used it two hours ago, I won't be able to-
YSE: Use it, Briar.
He reached for it, expecting the familiar resistance of an ability recently spent, and found instead that it answered immediately and without any strain whatsoever. The workshop dissolved. He was looking through his own future eyes, standing in this same room, and the view held, and held, considerably longer than the two or three seconds he had spent his entire life accepting as his ceiling, and he watched himself turn and say something to Yseult and watched her laugh in response, and the vision continued, extending outward past two minutes, past three, further than he had ever once managed in his life. He came out of it gasping.
BRR: That was four minutes.
YSE: Was it?
BRR: FOUR MINUTES. And I'm not tired. Yseult, I'm not remotely tired, I should be barely able to stand right now and I feel entirely fine.
She released him and stepped back, and Briar, spinning around on the stool to face her, found her watching him with visible, delighted satisfaction.
YSE: My ability is called Catalysis.
BRR: I've never heard of it.
YSE: Very few people have. It doesn't do anything visible, which makes it deeply unimpressive to demonstrate and consequently rather badly documented. Through physical contact, I can increase both the potency and the abundance of soul essence. In myself, in another person, or in an object.
BRR: You can increase how much essence someone has.
YSE: Temporarily. It fades within an hour or so, and there are limits I haven't fully mapped. But yes.
Briar sat very still, the entire architecture of four months' failed work rearranging itself in his mind.
BRR: I've been building a device to stretch a fixed supply.
YSE: You have.
BRR: And the actual solution is to increase the supply instead.
YSE: Now you're getting there.
They worked through it together for the next three hours, and the concept assembled itself between them considerably faster than Briar had assembled anything alone.
BRR: The problem with your ability, as a permanent solution, is that you'd have to physically be there every single time I needed it.
YSE: Which is impractical, agreed.
BRR: But if the essence could be stored. If there were a way to accumulate it during the hours I'm not using my ability at all, when it's simply sitting unused inside me, and then release that accumulated store at the moment I actually need it-
YSE: Then you'd be drawing on hours of stored capacity rather than whatever happens to be available in the moment.
BRR: Alchemy handles the essence manipulation. Storage, transfer, the actual mechanics of holding it stable.
YSE: And your science handles the physical apparatus. The housing, the conduits, the release mechanism, everything that actually makes it a device rather than a technique.
They looked at each other across the cluttered workbench.
BRR: That could actually work.
YSE: That could genuinely, actually work.
Briar raised his hand, and Yseult, without any hesitation whatsoever, met it with a clean, satisfying smack that echoed across the small workshop.
BRR: Neither discipline could have built this alone.
YSE: No. That's rather the point, isn't it.
She pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward her, already sketching, and Briar, leaning over to add his own notations alongside hers, felt four months of accumulated frustration finally, properly dissolve into something considerably better.