#original medium: Minecraft book and quill

[fracturedgodhead]

Sink (short story ig)

She was a researcher, honorably discharged after nearly 45 years in the field, not for lack of ability, but as a result of that tiredness that can only come from stagnation in your job. She was also an acolyte of water, a thing that garnered her some flack from her colleagues, with talks of "unprofessional biases" and "skewed analysis". By the time she had left though, she had already proven them wrong tens of times over. At some point though, she just grew tired of it, in the beginning of her career it had just been more fun, new discoveries were being made on a monthly basis, with major advancements delivered annually, but these days science was just slower. A somewhat significant discovery may come in a year, and one major discovery had been made in the past 15 years, and not for lack of trying, the field she was in had only grown since her employment and was still going strong after her departure.

Anyhow, she had fled the field due to its stagnation and went to pursue her truer passion, water. She left and went straight to the sea, buying a ship, becoming a seawoman and taking any jobs she was capable of. At this point, she is working on a job for a new research group (a small group of 18-22 year-olds all water acolytes or agnostic) calling themselves "All the way down". They didn't say too much about their research goals, which was unusual for scientists, especially young ones, but they paid enough, and they let her keep the equipment, which was an unusually generous deal. Even more so considering what the equipment was: a state-of-the art IMU in a mono-malgasteel frame, about the size of a coffee table, but only as heavy as a dictionary, and stronger than steel. The IMU had an accuracy range of 10^8-10^-12, a ludicrous amount, with a 4 Ghz sample rate to boot, capable of measuring the vibration of a 40Mhz tuning fork 30 feet across a room with 40 lbs. of mass bearing down on the IMU itself. The frame has ludicrous specifications as well, able to easily take 20,000N of compressive force with only 0.01% normal deformation (the most strict threshold for material failure), and able to plastically deform up to 3 degrees, an even more insane metric considering it's rigidity. And more than that, it is made of malgasteel, and mono-malgasteel no less. A (good) piece of malgasteel is a quasi-crystalline, holographic, macromolecule. A highly composite alloy forming a single continuous crystalline structure with insane material properties (as mentioned). And its most miraculous property, exposure to elemnic earth can compose the energy from the elemnic earth into the greater crystalline structure, it can regenerate; not only can it regenerate, it can regenerate using one of the most widely available substances in Flux. This material is invaluable, economically speaking. It is a magician, turning literal dirt into something much more valuable than diamond. It's miraculous properties derive directly from the core science of crystal holography, making crystals which grow into complex macroscopic structures based on the microscopic properties of the seed it grows from. There are of course, many other sciences involved in the process of actually creating a malgasteel object, but crystal holography is the one which originally theorized the existence of malgasteel.

Nerdy rambling aside, so far, the job had been going well, all she had to do was go to a specific spot selected by the scientists and drop the device down to a specific depth and record for a specific amount of time at a specific time of day, for a month straight. That seems like a long time, but the scientists needed an ungodly amount of data for a new technique they were testing to find an as yet unknown component to the physics of elemnic water.