Volume 3 - Ch 3.11
Cant help it but to fill curious now that the thing has finally been delivered, huh? Very well then, listen and be ready to be surprised. You see, this thing here is actually a custom-made bathtub!
I declared so to Roxanne, filled with pride. That being said, now that said bathtub has finally arrived, it will have to be filled with water, and just that process might be more than a little pain in the ass. I have already established that since I have the ability to use magic then we would not need to draw water from a well or a river, but now that I actually started going over the logistics of filling the bathtub with without the aforementioned methods, it only now dawned upon me that in order to have just one bath a crapload of water would have to be made with my Water Magic, and then I would also have to use Fire Magic to heat all of that water up, and all those things will likely eat through all of my MP in no time, causing me a lot of headaches and plunging me into depression.
A bathtub you say? As in something you use to take baths in?
Yup, exactly. Just like you said, you use it in order to take nice, long, relaxing baths. If you dont mnd, then I would like to start preparing one right away.
Understood. Is there something I can help you with.
For the time being, why dont you bring some jugs in here? We can fill them up while I will fill the tub with water.
Unfortunately, I have no idea exactly how long the entire process of filling the tub with water is going to take, but I will use my Water Magic as many times as it takes to get it done as soon as possible. The fastest way to go about it should be to use consecutive Water Walls back to back and have just enough MP left to use Warp so that I could go replenish my MP in the Labyrinth when I will start feeling my mood worsening.
First things first, we took the entire bathtub and washed it until it was squeaky-clean, and after that Roxanne brought a few jugs that were placed inside of the tub.
Could you place all of them a little bit farther from one another?
That way some water is bound to be spilled outside of the jugs once they will be filled to the brim, but that would only be a problem if they were placed on the ground. Now that they are in the bathtub itself, we can spill as much water as we need to without worrying about it going to waste.
(And now to raise the waters temperature Fireball!!)
I threw a Fireball int one of the filled jugs to see how much warmer it would make the water. It went from straight up cold to somewhat lukewarm.
(Looks like itll need at least a second shot, huh?)
And I fired a second fireball into the jug. This time, the water was hot enough not to need a third shot, so I repeated the process with the other jugs until they had enough water in them. As for why am I going about filling the bathtub in such a roundabout way, the answer to that is pretty simple: the jugs are made out of pottery which is somewhat heat-resistant, so no matter how many Fireballs I will fire into the water that is being stored inside of them, nothing bad should happen to them. On the other hand, since the bathtub itself is made out of wood, so there is always the danger of the tub itself catching fire and getting burned if I tried to throw Fireballs directly into it. There are probably more effective ways of increasing the waters temperature without risking doing any damage either to the bathtub or the surroundings, but for the time being noting better than what we are currently doing is coming to my mind. The other option available would be to pour the cold water into the tub and then shoot Fireballs at it until it gets to the desired temperature, but I have a feeling that it would take way too many spells to be called cost-efficient, so until we wont figure anything better out, the method of using water-filled jugs with Fireball-heated water and then emptying it into the bathtub proper is probably our best bet. The rest is only a matter or rinse & repeating the entire process as many times as needed.
However, the issue of finding the best method for filling the bathtub with water was not the only one we would need to take care of: it seems that when it comes to the water placed in the jugs, one Fireball only makes it lukewarm, and the temperature that can be called just right is reached after adding another shot into it. That is cool and all, but that only stays true for as long as the water remains in the jug. We have multiple jugs that have to be filled and then heated, meaning that when I will move on to take care of the second jug, then the third one and so on and so forth, the water that has already been heated in the previous ones will start to cool down, so it will most likely require two more shots of Fireball to be heated back to the desired temperature. No, that sounds like more of a hassle than it is actually worth, not to mention that it would also take a long time to fill in such a way. Hmm, what to do, what to do indeed maybe it would be better to lower the overall temperature by diluting it all with water form another Water Wall at the very end?
No matter what I am going to decide to do in the end, it wont change what I have to do now: go to the Labyrinth in order to get back all of the MP that I have used up to filled all of the jugs with water.
It is hard. I have to admit: filling the bathtub with hot water proved to be a much more of a difficult task than I ever imagined. And to add to the list of gripes that I already have, the process of recovering MP might also not be as efficient as I would have liked because we are in our house in Quratar, and the place where we are going to get my MP back is the Labyrinth in Veil, meaning that a trip back and forth is going to deplete my MP anyway.
Currently, the quickest way to prepare a bath for me and Roxanne looks more or less like that: first, I use almost all of my MP up to create water with Water Wall thats going to be used to fill the bathtub, and then I use as many Fireballs as needed in order to heat up the water stored in ceramic jugs. When that part is over, I have to make sure to have just enough MP left to go to the Labyrinth, get back all of my MP, make the trip back and then repeat the entire process until I run out of MP again so that the cycle could continue. Do you see the picture that I am trying to paint here?
However, whether we like it or not, the Labyrinth of Veil is the only place where we can go to do things like that because of how deserted its lower floors are. That is one aspect in which Veils Labyrinth is a much more convenient place than Quratars Labyrinth, where even the first few floors are almost always crowded with people no matter what time of day you would try to go there. That is why even though this is a closer, much more efficient option, we cannot go and use it.