Simple Thermodynamics
"I don't know what to tell you," Elea the pyromancer tells her civilian girlfriend, Angelika one day when she asks the pyromancer about her machines, and why they were universally more useful for freezing and cooling things than actually setting things on fire. "It's simple thermodynamics."
A banner of ink painted onto silk fluttered in the walled city of Frankfurt, secured against rogue robots and the Polish alike. Elea had grown up along the beaches and the river lands, so thus found the city rather pleasing, while Angelika from the mountains found it rather nerve wrecking with all the machines walking around. She was still spooked around the Choir robots, which amused Elea greatly because Angelika had long luxurious locks that fluttered wildly whenever she jumped.
"We were told to beware of machine sounds," Angelika protested when Elea teased her about it. "As it could be a sign of an incursion!"
"Pyromancy machines for all your cooling needs," Elea's flier read on her workshop bench. Angelika was rather critical of her chosen title. "If your focus is on cooling things," she asked. "Wouldn't cryomancer be a much more appropriate title?"
"No, because I don't actually directly cool things," Elea tried to explain to her. "I manipulate heat. My machines steal heat away from the location, and in doing so cool things down," she says. "It's a relatively simple application of paralogic and thermodynamics when you think about it."
Angelika mumbles a non-committal note of acknowledgement as she wanders away, looking at the pile of cooling machines in Elea's workshop. They decided to pick up a new cooling machine for their apartment from their unsold merchandise, and were looking for the one with just the proper design.
Elea doesn't even remember making most of these junk. Most of them are prototypes in some way or form, or composed of such embrassing and strange motifs that she can't bear to display them at her own house. "Hey," Angelika says. "How about I help you pick out the machine?"
"I thought you didn't know anything about paracausal machines," Elea mumbles as she walks up to Angelika. Whenever paralogicians display their wares in the city fare, Angelika's more concerned about the *aesthetics* of the products and the paralogician themselves than the usefulness of the machine itself. "Oh, I don't know anything about your fancy paracausal magics," Angelika says. "But I am trained in conventional sciences. And I do know you pretty well."
She points out a simple looking machine with calligraphic markings on front. At first, Elea is not a fan, but than she notices the complex scientific notations engraved on the bottom edge. Heat diffusion equations.
"And tonight," Angelika whispers into Elea's ear. "We are gonna see how far you can get in reading all these equations before I make you--"
"Okay, we'll take this one," Elea says, forcefully.
