#lab stuff

fire resistance (actually a reaction with SN-38, pyridine, and benzyl phosphite)

weakness (actually biochar in acetic acid)

harming (actually an unpurified form of a cobalt-porphyrin complex)

awkward (i THINK this is during the reaction to form Cu(pic)2 but it was a while ago so im not sure, could also be an acac compound)

invisibility and poison (actually Cr(acac)3 and Co(acac)3)

regeneration (also Cr(acac)3, the solution above was insanely diluted as it was used for analysis)

health (actually slightly more purified cobalt-porphyrin complex)

BONUS: not quite potions but kinda

dragon's breath (actually a way fucked titration because our burette broke)

brewing stand (actually an insane jerryrig i made to bubble CO into a solution by heating tungsten hexacarbonyl)

I laid this out over the actual set blueprint to get the room dimensions and floor pattern location accurate. the furniture is eyeballed from screen refs using the rainbow pattern, wall panels, etc to measure by. I'm sure it's not to-the-inch, but it's as precise as I could reasonably be. specifically, my diagram is informed by the El talking to Brenner scene in 4x5 because it's the only time you see the whole room in one continuous shot.

symmetry in the Rainbow Room

two years ago, I had the same idea as Dustin drawing midway points to find the center of that flesh wall, and I drew a couple lines determining the center of the Rainbow Room to be right here:

I did this because the weirdest part of the "Well well" sequence, to me, was the times that El straight up respawns in the RR instead of walking into it. since it seemed to be about the middle of the room both times, I wondered if it was the exact center, if for some reason precision mattered, and I think it is.

(no we aren't shown her feet to make it clear, but we can gauge her location when they show their blocking centered on the double doors and also hers between those bookcases, which happen to be the X and Y axes. if she's centered on both axes, then she's in the dead center:)

I never posted that, but with that trivia in the back of my mind, imagine how apeshit I went when I saw Max spawn in the Rainbow Room and:

she's sitting on that EXACT spot, verifiably this time. so there has to be something important about it.

this is why I won't be shocked if we end up learning that this is the more precise center point of the circle wall. (although it could certainly just be a symbolic thing as well. there's actually symmetry/center stuff going on in that training room too so who knows)

anyways this spot is also just about where two of those floor blood puddles mysteriously appear. I must speculate that this blood belongs to people (or alt timelines of the same person) who keep spawning/despawning right here? possibly El herself? a remnant of prior NINA attempts where she failed to harness a memory in time and got snapped for real?

oh yeah, this is also the spot where El gets Vecna'd... sometimes:

she gets lifted a couple feet in front of the spawn point, and she Marvel-lands there as well, but in between, they set up a whole overhead camera angle (not used anywhere else in the massacre sequence) where the only visual information is her location relative to that spot / the mystery blood. they wanted us to know she was Right There soooo bad.

oh speaking of overhead shots, here's the other time they used it to specify where El is standing on the floorplan. teehee.

I bet you can't guess whether the blood in here has any odd behavior irt symmetry or perhaps mirroring!!!

this is a behemoth topic I'll try to keep concise... there are four main stains I use to orient in this room. they come pairs.

first we've got my bros door splat and wall splat, the ones by the double doors.

then my bros drippy and stompy, who face each other on the bookcases. drippy comes down from the top of one bookcase, and stompy comes up from the bottom of the other. (cause it looks almost like a puddle got stomped in. ik that's not what it is but it's the name that stuck for me)

here's a rare couple of times when they let you see them all at once.

(nvm the Can You Spot 100 Differences? of it all, we're only looking at these 4 specific stains rn lmao)

if we arbitrarily declare the mirror "north", drippy tends to live on the west side of the room, on the edge of the bookcase that's closer to the mirror. stompy tends to live on the east side, and on the edge of the bookcase closer to the double doors. wall splat is west and door splat is east. I consider this standard configuration for these four stains because it's this way across most views in which we're shown the room plainly (ie not as a literal or fuckety reflection)

in other words, it's "normally" like this:

let's catch drippy and stompy misbehaving

at the end of the 4x6 bullying scene, El looks in the mirror and sees her little self in the massacred-up RR. I call this view the Bully RR.

it's impossible for Bully RR to be the natural reflection of Standard RR. those who've read this far are the same handful who already know, but I do need to cover this here for reasons.

I hope it makes sense how I tried to show this by flipping my diagram vertically, but if you were to look in that mirror, here's the way you should see it reflected, complete with how our standard few stains should look.

the camera's representation of Big El's view would be approximately this slice of the room outlined in red.

which isn't what we're seeing. in many regards.

wall splat is where he should be, though. great job buddy!!

drippy is correctly depicted as being on the west side of the room, except... he's on the doors edge, when he should be on the mirror edge. this is a huge deal, considering that's... not a thing mirrors can do.

mirrors only flip images left/right, not top/bottom or close/far. a stain on the edge of that bookcase closer to the mirror will still appear closer to the mirror even in the reflection; likewise further will always appear further. a mirror could not make drippy be where he is. this version of him just straight up exists in a different location.

according to the final shot in the sequence, stompy has flipped in Bully RR as well, and is closer to the mirror instead of farther.

confused? ok forget everything I'm saying about room orientation, let's make this super simple. just look at these two screenshots and tell me: regardless of which is a plain view and which is a mirror image, is stompy in the same place relative to that yellow thing on the bottom shelf? and could a mirror change that?

if you're still a production error truther about the blood, then forget about that for a second and notice how the room itself is also arranged differently.

behind little El in the Bully RR, we're seeing a red-top rainbow bend on the wall in the corner of the room that has the benches and maze.

the maze is where you'd expect it to be for a Standard reflection. but the rainbow is not.

the red bend, according to plain views of the room, generally belongs in the quadrant with the pyramid seat thing. here's a shot from the scene that just happened in the room this is supposedly the reflection of.

so how is the red bend over by the maze in the "mirror"?

even ignoring the rainbow/furniture mismatch - there's simply no natural way for the red bend to be reflecting over here instead of over there:

if my diagram isn't making sense, I'll show you with screenshots. here's one where you really see what El should be seeing in the mirror from that angle. purple bend.

I'll also find you a time we saw the red bend in the mirror. you gotta be angled distinctly the other way.

no matter how you slice it, Bully RR is a wholly different version of the room. idk what else to tell you.

now let's catch the splats misbehaving

here's 4x8 when Brenner walks in and El turns around to face him.

door splat, what are you doing in here? you would have to be on the west side of the room to be reflecting there.

"oh, that must be Bully RR again!" haha no, silly. you buffoon. this reflection contradicts both Standard and Bully, meaning it's a third RR. (I named him Shards RR, and I think there are more still beyond those! but this is about the point where I broke mentally and gave up)

anyways, bottom line is, we sometimes see door/wall splat and drippy/stompy swap places.

it was in the course of turning my photoshop layers on/off that the "reflecting" behavior of all of it really struck me.

but it's very interesting that these stains, which sometimes appear in the wrong locations, appear in perfectly the wrong locations to reflect across the axes of the room.

(dw about what's going on in each one or my old labels or anything, I just mean, see the way they're moving around)

so it's not just these four stains, but also the furniture, and the rainbow itself, that seem to be reflecting - independently?? - across the X and Y axes we talked about earlier. the weirdest part remains drippy and stompy because everything else is conceivably mirror behavior, but not them.