Ernst and I spent hours working on refining recipes. Fortunately, the ingredients were fairly common and he already had an ample supply of them, though he did remark that he would need to gather more after all we had used. It helped that we could continue to tweak the recipes by adding a little more of a given ingredient.
Early in the testing, I realized my fingerprint oils weren’t going to last through all the tests, so with his candle, we made very thin wax fingerprints of my left hand. The wax wasn’t a perfect replica, but it worked for testing purposes. We also were using the very imprecise method of just tapping the powder off of small sheets of paper when we scooped it out of the mortar—Ernst was kind enough to instruct me on which was which.
The latest recipe used chalk, graphite, and just a little soot, or lampblack as Ernst called it. I tapped the side of the paper with my filthy finger, and let the powder onto the wax print. I gently blew the excess off to reveal a decent print. It was fairly easy to see the powder contrasting with the yellow wax. It didn’t clump, it was just sticky enough to the print.
“Goal!” I raised my arms and began singing the Rangers goal song.
Ernst joined in after a few words, as if he had always been a Rangers fan, too. About halfway through, I heard people outside joining in, and somehow musical instruments played the tune.
I had never started up a song in the Realms before, usually the spontaneous songs annoyed me, but I’d make an exception in this case.