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The way that you are going to have to cast the spell to pick the lock requires you to have one finger in the keyway while you are pouring the working material over it. Getting increasingly flustered, you experiment with different combinations of holds and hands until you settle on holding the tankard with your left hand, using your right pointer for the pick and holding your wand in the remaining fingers of your right hand – which is not the side that you have the wand socketed into. The wad of salt in your mouth should more than make up for the salt falling off of the handle of your wand … but the conduit is trailing out of your sleeve, and try as you might, you cannot help but wince as the Socketing Needle waggles and pitches in your arm as you adjust yourself.
Keenly aware that you are holding a socketed wand out in the open, you heft the tankard upward. From your cramped position right in front of the door, you cannot see into the tankard, which again is not ideal – but hopefully you will be able to guess how much is left by weight alone … though now that you think about it, you might not, as you have no idea how heavy the tankard is empty. Pushing that concern out of your mind, as well as the image of the proprietor spitting into the mug, you try to take a deep breath in, but quickly realize that doing so is starting to dislodge the wad of salt underneath your tongue – so in the end, you have to make do with a less-than-deep breath in through your nose. Before you can waste anymore time or get anymore flustered, you start the pour. The moment that the working material hits your finger, you initialize the cast.
Immediately, your finger goes completely numb, and the salt under your tongue starts to heat up. Neither of these sensations are pleasant, but you are smiling broadly in spite of this – and yourself – all the same. The strain from this is magnitudes less than what you would get with Salt-Remediation or Salt-Mitigation, to the point that you cannot immediately feel it, or the drain. The difference is moon and sun, really. As the first of the working material begins to freeze, you tremble a little – but that has more to do with kneeling in an uncomfortable position for so long, and less with the spell. Done properly, the caster should experience nothing more than a slight drop in temperature, right on the focal point of the cast, and nowhere else.
You start your mental count. Without pushing yourself or the Glyph, the spell should only last twenty seconds, which should be more than enough time to get a simpler lock like this opened up. Angling the pour the best you can, you get as much of the working material into the mechanism as you possibly can. The Cold-Touch Glyph that you have can freeze up to a tenth of a gallon, enough to freeze the entirety of the keyway … maybe half a dozen times over? Maybe less. Either way, in this case, it makes more sense to do everything you can to get it right the first time.
