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All of that does seem to point towards it being a musket ball after all.
By the time that you have finished the decoy, you really have not figured anything else out. Even though you were not expecting to, you cannot help but feel disappointed. Well, whatever. Maybe if you sleep on it, something will come to you. Or if you ever do make it to Aldoin’s house, you might find something capable of shedding some light on this. But now, it is time to finish the decoy. You grab the counterfeit, and head over to the Glyphery, checking the crook of your arm where you socketed your wand and the Life Loom before it.
After checking to make sure that the needle is clean, you seat it, as close as you can to holes from earlier. There really has to be a better way to do this – if you keep this up, you’ll deflate the vein before you finish your education. You disconnect everything you can from the core, your reasoning being that in the worst-case scenario, if it is not plugged in, then you cannot decalibrate or destroy it. Once you have the Glyphery down to just the bare bones of what it needs to run, you load the fuel and the catalyst into the internal chambers, then you use the hand crank to pressurize the core.
As you are sitting there, going over everything in your head, it occurs to you that things might be a bit more temperamental than usual – and not just because you are still Strange. You are also going to be trying to run the Glyphery without anything in the Inkpot, something that you have never done before, and more importantly, something that you do not know if it can be done – or if it should. Just like using the tooling without the core active. You rub at the back of your neck while you wonder what would happen if you put olive oil, or water into the Inkpot, just to have something in there. Does the Ink act as a lubricant? Is there even anything on the Glyphery that requires lubrication? Or maybe it just needs the presence of some liquid to work properly, like how Remediating or Mitigating living things requires a saltwater solution instead of just piles of salt because of the way the magic works.
Okay, thinking about it logically, dumping Strangeness into the decoy should take … what, ten seconds? Fifteen at the absolute most? Engraving or Scrivening even simple Glyphs takes hours, while more complex ones are done incrementally over the course of days. With nothing else to go on, you have to believe that when the standard operation of the implement is takes hours, running it without Ink for a few seconds should not damage anything. It can’t be that delicate, right?
Actually … oh, Maker’s Mercy, will you pull your head out of your ass before you suffocate yourself? You are going to do this, so why the Hell are you always trying to second guess or talk yourself out of doing exactly what you know you need to do? If anything feels off, then you will stop it – by wrenching the needle right out of your arm if you have to.
