The word soap hung in the damp mountain air like an unexploded mortar shell.
Elder Gu stared at Frank, his scarlet brows twitching in utter disbelief. He looked around at the gathered exam guards, then back at Frank’s grease-stained overalls.
“Soap?” Elder Gu repeated, his voice climbing an entire octave into shrill mockery. “The Nether Scribes have let loose the memetic black ink of the First Epoch! The very fabric of human memory and land-wide training is dissolving before our eyes! And you stand there babbling about washing laundry?!”
“I’m not doing laundry,” Frank said. He pulled a brass measuring tongs from his pocket and using the blunt end to scratch a math into the wooden tabletop. “I’m formulating a heavy-duty degreaser. The ink falling from the sky is a non-polar organic hydrocarbon. Water alone can’t touch it because of water’s skin and atom-deep flow-charge mismatch. Oil and water don’t mix.”
Frank looked up, fixing Gu with a look usually reserved for a homeowner who tried to patch a leaking gas line with duct tape.
“If you try to burn it off with your sacred alchemy furnaces,” Frank continued, “you’ll aerosolize fifty thousand barrels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The smoke will drift across the eastern valleys, settle in the groundwater, and cause congenital birth defects for eight ages. You don’t burn oil spills. You emulsify them.”
