#4123

Ah, the Sylladex. Across the entirety of my long, long journey through this comic, you've remained my oldest and dearest friend.

I honestly thought you'd run out of ways to surprise me - but as usual, I underestimated just how far you can really go with punch-card alchemy.

You flip the card over and look at the back. The thing about this modus you think is really cool is that instead of showing a completely useless wobbly garbled code on the back, it itemizes the components which could be used to create it!

The comic has just given us a way to reverse-engineer item recipes, which was one of the only missing pieces left to slot into the alchemy system. Back in Act 4, John was convinced that this was impossible, but Sollux solved it off-panel, and now we know how he did it.

This is pretty crazy, isn't it? We can deconstruct items now, allowing us to disassemble any object, and take a peek at the concepts that it's synthesized from. The potential utility here is insane. If this modus works on ghost images, we could tear apart a Kernelsprite, and see what makes it tick. Hell, we could tear apart a Genesis Frog.

...we could tear apart Skaia.

Just another wonderful innovation by your favorite company. It releases many products of an experimental nature, often with applicability to other kinds of technology and products which haven't hit the market yet.

But, of course, this wonderful innovation comes with some serious strings attached. I'm sure it was given to Jane for a reason, and she'll undoubtedly end up using it in a way that causes problems for us, and solutions for Lord English.

Ayy, it's the Matriorb!

Granted, this doesn't really help Kanaya recreate the thing. The orb's code was never that hard to obtain - just draw it on Jade's Pictionary modus, or something. No, the real issue is that the Matriorb is virtually inimitable, and as a result, its Grist cost is astronomical. Plus, it requires a type of Grist that we've never even seen before.

Edit: Wait, hang on. That's not the cost of the Matriorb, that's how much it would cost to use the Matriorb to make the hat. Strange, that the same item can have multiple Grist costs - but nonetheless, my point still stands. The Matriorb is probably too expensive to alchemize casually.

I suppose there's nothing stopping us from editing the Matriorb's code to try and make it cheaper. Like, perhaps we could scale down the recipe somehow, and try to just synthesize a single troll's genome, rather than the genetic base of an entire race. That would be a lot more affordable, and still useful.

You captchalogue your FAVORITE HAT, which is also your ONLY HAT. You spent basically your ENTIRE CHILDHOOD in this hat, pretending to be hard boiled detectives and whatnot.

I guess it sort of makes sense that the Matriorb can be used to make Dad's hat. The orb represents Alternian parenthood, and the book of prophecies it was merged with could represent the future. Combine those two concepts, and you get the future of parenthood, from the perspective of Alternia - in other words, the parenthood of humanity. So, the merger yields an item representing a human parent: Dad Egbert's hat.

Still awstruck now we managed to really do it!

It was a crazy journey, and that doesn't even closely discribe it.

That tome we discovered online, ordered out of curiosity. A tome full of strange discribptions, signs and passages in a foreign language we couldn't descipher.

But there were passages in english aswell. One fascinated me in particular. So I went for it.

Material was needed, a liquid to be brewed. Out of soil, organic material, and one thing in particular: tadpoles.

I was obsessed. Of cause I told myself, that it possibly is a big hoqx. But a part in me just had to try it.

It took quite a while to prepare everything, several tinktures, objects treated in a special way, a sort of alter even made for parts of it.

And in the end I found myself holding a cup of a thick, greenish substance. It was time.

Besides all that Ryan and Bryce didn't really participate. They were joking, even interfering here and there. But they stayed close and checked my progress and couldn't hide a certain interest behind all that foolsplay.

So when I had finished the tinkture they gathered at my place, looking at the strange substance with no more jokes on their lips.

"It's enough for two"

"Don't you...?"

"No. Someones needs to kepp it safe. Keep you safe"

They looked at me with slight concern. But before someone could say more I gaave the cup to Ryan, nodding before he took a big gulp.

His distorted face was proof of the expected taste, but Bryce didn't bother, pulled the cup to himself and finished the rest of it.

"Urgh... thats disg..." he wanted to say when he suddenly looked at me with wide eyes.

"It..." he continued, but his whole body strted to twitch, to convulse as he looked at Ryan.

Ryan stood still. The liquid doesn't seem to have the same effect.

But the moment I possibky shared that thought with him his body started to twitch aswell. Bith of them churned in cramps, pulling their faces in horrid grimaces as they seemed to be shaken at their core.

Soon I noticed their skin getting pale before I clearly could make out a shift in their statue. They got smaller! Their skin smoother, their eyes bigger until they vanished into their clothes while they had shunjen down to merely a foot of hight, shrinking even more, the only trace of them beeing the moving fabric.

Then the movement stopped.

I stared at it for a brief moment, unable to really progress what just happened.

"Ryan, Bryce!" I said stupidly, rushing towards the piles of clothes left behind, bending down to carefully push the folds of fabric beside.

The first thing I saw had been in Ryans shirt. A bit of pale, blueish gray skin got visible, a body of the size of a penny with a tale of the same length. It was a... tadpole. Or kind of. A bit bigger than I remembered them to be and clearly of very different colouring.

I carefully shoved in into my hand. "Ryan...?" I said with an unreal undertone.

The body moved, slightly, but I sughed in relieve. It turned a bit, bringing its eyes in my direction, opening them slowly. And as that... thing... looked at me, something in me couldn't help but believe that this really was Ryan! Or rather, I couldn't do otherwise.