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From:

magician_king

"Wood and water, exactly. Gas. that's a similar word, but different ending. Gasoline is a liquid, gaseous matter is a cloud. Air. Steam."

He simplifies, but with a pleased with his progress so far.

"Even though it feels like there's nothing in the air around us, and we talk about a room as being empty, there's actually gasses floating all around us. It's why when you suck the air out of a paper bag it crumples up tight; it was empty, but not actually empty."

From:

credere

Credence thinks about this.

"So...when you breathe in, and your chest feels full, that's...the gas?"

From:

magician_king

"You've got it."

He says- and he knows how to praise without laying it on too thick. But he's genuinely pleased.

"Now the thing about solids, liquids, and gases is that many of them are the same kind of matter, but in different states. We'll take water, for example. Water is a liquid, and steam is a gas, so the solid version would be?"

From:

credere

Credence realises, with some pleasure, that that's easy. Yet he still sounds unsure when he says:

"Ice?"

From:

magician_king

"Exactly. And what does that tell you- if ice turning to water turning to steam is a pattern, what does that mean about solids turning to liquids turning to gas?"

He says, leading him on, jogging up the last few steps to their floor.

From:

credere

Now, he falters.

"...I don't know."

From:

magician_king

"What does it mean when water in a pot starts to steam?"

He asks, holding the door for him.

From:

credere

"It means that the matter is...changing states? Because it's been heated up," he volunteers, cautiously.

From:

magician_king

"Exactly. And that in their solid states, things tend to be the most cold, but when you heat them, they melt and become liquid, and when you heat them further, the evaporate and become gas."

He says;

"And that is because of energy. Now for this part, we need some nails."

So it's good that they're back at Credence's room, and can start to pull them out of the slats, using the back of the hammer head.

From:

credere

Credence frets, suddenly - what if his cabin needs to be sealed somehow? What if taking the boards off the window means all the air leaks out -

But then one of the boards comes away, nothing happens, and he realises that it's no different from being on deck and berates himself.

The glass underneath has been smashed, fairly obviously having had a missile thrown at it at some point.

From:

magician_king

"Okay."

Says Quentin, when he's got three nails out, abandoning the work to come use them to demonstrate.

"So the behaviour of matter has to do with energy. When a particle gets energy put into it- in this case in the form of heat, it speeds up." Pinching nails together, he moves them, illustrating little collisions for him. "The space between particles becomes bigger. When a particle loses energy, the agitation slows- and when it's very cold, they can still almost completely, and become very tightly packed."

Bunching the nails into a tight little knot.

"These have gone from gas, to liquid, to solid. Condensed, then solidified."

From:

credere

Credence watches that, then looks uncertainty up at Quentin.

"What's a particle?" he asks, preemptively guilty because he assumes that it's so obvious as to preclude an explanation.

From:

magician_king

"One of the nails. One of the tiny little bits that make up water, for example. A tiny bit of something."

He says;

"Little specs so small you can't see them, or the spaces between them. I can show you, but we need a teakettle and some sugar."

From:

credere

"That's alright," he says, then ventures: "Like when a person's skin all looks the same from a long way away, but when you get close you see all the little holes?"

Pores, he means.

From:

magician_king

"But on a much bigger scale."

He agrees, with a nod;

"Think as small a piece of your body as a human is a piece of the world."

Okay, while he turns back to stripping the window down;

"But you can't boil water without outside heat, right? It's a rule about the world that works the same way, every time. There would be no way in the real world to be at a standstill and heat up a cup of coffee."

From:

credere

Credence nods, slowly, and tries to sum up:

"So the...state, of matter, depends on how much it moves? How much....energy, it has."

From:

magician_king

"Perfect. There are some weird exceptions for things that catch fire-" But he makes a handwaving gesture, don't need to think about that right now, so "-magic, is when you break that rule. You could make a spell that would make ice hot. You could make a spell to heat up your coffee out of nowhere. Or a spell to keep ice from leeching the energy, the heat out of you. Magic is when a law breaks. Everything else is determination, fate, or science."

From:

credere

Credence looks...very, very uncomfortable.

"Or the Creator."

Whose wisdom is betrayed, surely, by the act of sorcery.

From:

magician_king

"I knew a man named Richard, who was a magician."

He says- remembering how annoyed he'd been at the time, and how grateful he is now.

"He was a very devout Christian. I wasn't mature enough to understand to get along with him, but I remember him saying, Magic is the tools of the Maker. There is a Person who built the house, and then He left, and when He left, He left His tools lying around in the garage. Then we found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. Now we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic. And when pressed on whether or not God would be angry with us for stealing and playing with what he left, Richard concluded that He would never give us anything He didn't want us to find."

From:

credere

"Of course He would," Credence says, looking bewildered by the idea (and privately unimpressed by Richard's lack of theological rigor). "We are given the capacity to sin so that we can choose to turn away from it, or else salvation is meaningless."

From:

magician_king

"Alice, who was much smarter than Richard, disagreed. She thought magic was organic, something beautiful that grew in and around and behind the world, on account of the complexity of the creation."

He provides instead.

From:

credere

This, Credence struggles to dispute - not because Alice is 'much smarter' but because he knows how Quentin feels about her.

"So why would the Scripture call it an abomination, if we choose to use it?"

From:

magician_king

"I don't really know."

He says, openly.

"It's a question many people have different answers to. Like all religion." And, as it occurs to him; "Hey, have you met Tiffany? Is she still around?"