The professor sat behind a ludicrously large desk, made of an odd amalgam of teak wood, oak, mahogany, and brass. It was the brass work that would give most people pause, not being relegated to burnished drawer pulls at the like, but also a noodle-like patchwork of pipes, valves, and gears. The whole office smelled of cardamom, tobacco, tallow and oil. He was hunched forward over a large upturned leather top hat, a screwdriver in one hand, a tiny but vicious looking torch in the other. His long hair, the color of wormwood shot with ash, had largely worked its way free from the half-hearted attempts to restrain it, hanging perilously close to the flame of the torch, which escaped Professor Dimsdale’s attention completely. Without looking up he called out for his assistant.
“John! Another mug of your rye here, my good man!”
John stumbled in promptly, a fresh mug already in hand, deftly maneuvering past crates, stacks of books, piles of tools and various nearly unidentifiable devices with practiced ease. He was a young man, not quite a score old, but his face bore wrinkles of a man twice his years. A deep rough scar circumnavigated his neck. He set the mug gently down on the professor’s left side, decidedly away from the torch in his right. Only then did Dimsdale look up from his work, as if startled by John’s arrival.
“I thought you didn’t care for my homemade spirits, Professor. This is your third this eve.”
“Nonsense, my lad. Tis a wonderful concoction. Not fit to drink, but makes for excellent flux.” Dimsdale punctuated his statement by promptly dunking a thin copper tube into the mug, waiting a moment, and then removing it to show how nicely it was cleaned. John scowled, which perplexed and puzzled Dimsdale, who failed to see how this could be anything other than a compliment to John’s skills as a vintner.
Such was the lot in the professor’s life. He was a man who understood sciences both modern and arcane, who had seen things that most people not only believed strictly mythical, but sometimes hadn’t even written myths for yet. He worked with metal, steam, alchemy, even time the way a baker works with dough. And still, he never mastered the intricacies of the human ego. This, along with his tendency to get mentally (and oft physically) lost in his work to a staggering degree, was why his social calendar and his love life stayed perpetually blank.
John took a deep breath, let the unintended barb slide off his back, and eyed Dimsdale’s project at hand.
“What seems to be the matter with your hat, Professor?”
“Boiler is not performing as I would like. Not nearly hot enough for tea,” he replied, now using the strange torch to heat and bend the freshly fluxed copper tubing. The blue flame licked around the metal, tingeing green where it made contact. His fingers, calloused from years of wear, were heedless of the creeping warmth along the surface. The going was slow, but seemingly effortless as he affected a perfect ninety-degree bend without a hint of crimping. He eyed the tube, then the inside of the hat, and smiled to himself. He reached in with both hands, up to his elbows. The distance was quite impossible, the hat only a little over three hand spans from brim to crest, yet by the time he reached where the pipe was to fit, he was nearly to his shoulders. A loud round of clinking, clattering, and cursing ensued as he set it into place.
“Torch please, John,” he said, withdrawing his right arm. John deftly obliged, always happy to assist the professor and ever curious about his hat in particular. He thanked him and reached back in, very nearly setting the opposite sleeve alight as it passed. John winced audibly, suspecting that as long as Dimsdale had been working that night, he was certain to have splashed himself with the rye at least half a dozen times. The professor proceeded unscathed, however, and set about the business of mounting the newly fashioned pipe into place.
“There, solid as micro-crystalline igneous monoliths, that.” John just nodded, as usual, feigning comprehension of the old man’s euphemisms. “And now for the tea test.”
The professor reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a funnel which he then set into a small port on the top right side of the hat. “Now water… water… Ah! Here we are!” as he picked up the mug John had fetched.
“Begging your pardon, Professor,” John interjected.
“Not now, John, nearly done here.”
“But Professor…”
“It can wait, John, far past teatime as it is,” refused Dimsdale as he lined up the mug to pour.
John looked quickly about, grabbed a discarded mug near the end of the desk, and promptly poured the last splash therein onto the still-burning torch, evoking a brilliant blue flash and ear-ringing pop. The old man jolted, and only just managed to avoid spilling his mug all over himself.
“Blazes, you addled billy goat! Why you nearly…”
The professor paused, as his eyes went from torch, to mug, to funnel, and his mind extrapolated the probable outcome of pouring ethyl alcohol into an elemental-fueled boiler. He decided that as interesting an experiment that would make, it was unlikely to yield tea.
“Good show, John. Bring us a beaker of water then, will you?”
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