Shepherd your student through some research (Visionary)

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ID: 239046

Spoiler warning! This page contains details about Fallen London Actions.

From: Work with your Visionary Student

Though they need less shepherding than most.

Game Instructions: Your student is currently a novice and will do less well than you would by yourself – but your help may improve their skills.

Unlocked with Experimental Object, Equipment for Scientific Experimentation, Laboratory Services from a Visionary Student 1-2

Challenge information

Broad, Watchful 210

• 144 - very chancy (41%)
• 179 - chancy (51%)
• 214 - modest (61%)
• 249 - very modest (71%)
• 284 - low-risk (81%)
• 319 - straightforward (91%)
• 350 - straightforward (100%)
  

Each point of Research Preparations reduces the base difficulty by 1 point.

Success

Aha!

Description summary:
The Visionary Student's research descriptions vary by Experiment and are shared across several actions on their card. Expand the table below to see the known variations.

Experiment	Research Description
10	Their writeup is sophisticated and supported by solid evidence throughout.
40, 310 - 320	They commit wholeheartedly to the engineering challenge. They experiment with cogs, gears, springs, methods for converting motion in one kind into motion of another.
110 - 130	They bring a savage ingenuity to the work. They appear to regard the question as purely intellectual, and document without qualms how a weapon might be made ever more lethal.
140 - 160	They bring a savage ingenuity to the work. They appear to regard the question as purely intellectual, and document without qualms how a Parabolan Principle might be untethered from those it owes allegiance and perhaps even employed against them.
210 - 240, 260	They consider this kind of work almost a form of play or puzzle […]. They skim through two or three books at once, […] keeping place in the various source materials. They cross-reference and compare. Their notes, at the end, are a labyrinth.
250	[…]Nothing ties the scrip and the land up-river. Laid edge to edge, they do not make up a whole map, and certainly not one with any meaning. Certain landmarks repeat – the river's edge, […] But the representation is distorted, almost Parabolan.
330	[…] They lay the cup down and fill it with water, then sketch the wave patterns formed within. These begin as ripples, but soon work themselves up into a powerful standing pattern […] "The Spirit of the age," they comment elliptically […]
350	Your Visionary Student talks for several minutes about higher dimensional spaces, vibrations of ether as affected by Correspondence placed in nexus locations, the activations achieved by a focused beam of apocyan, and so on.
360	They know how to go about the calculations, even if they are bewildered by the application[…] It would take, by your estimate, four hundred thousand years to perform the experiment they have just proposed. Surely the impracticality will occur to them […]
410	Your Visionary Student is entranced with the optical possibilities of the Focused Albatross. They subject it to cosmogone and viric rays, to irrigo and to contraband moonlight. They submerge it in water and study refraction angles. […]
420	The Warbler praises your Visionary Student with all seven of its heads. […] The Visionary Student is as disconcerted as you have ever seen them, and they find excuses to focus their studies on what can be found in books. […]
430, 440, 460, 465	[…] keen to perform vivisections and work with tissue samples. They request the opportunity to study blood under a microscope. They bring an entire set of scalpels[…]You forbid all this, at least while the behavioural studies are ongoing[…]
450	Your Visionary Student is delighted to be let loose on a carcass to investigate its component parts. Their enthusiasm is unsettling, but appreciated. There are so, so many parts.
470	They are able to show […] that the drug has a stronger effect on bats and bat-like creatures than on any of the other beasts in the laboratory. […] it appears to differentially affect pregnant bats, often by quieting the offspring in the womb. […]
480	The Visionary Student offers to go at the egg with a sledgehammer. But you've plenty of opportunities to hatch the thing; […] Chastened, they test the composition of the shell, and extract compounds of resin, amber, and something that shines like pearl.
485	The Visionary Student observes the egg's similarity to frogspawn, or roe […] when this many eggs are laid at once, usually only a scant few survive. […] the parent of these eggs expected their spawn to be hunted; to be prey; to die en masse.
490	The Visionary Student gets out the tools of a rockhound, and chips away a granite-coloured flake from the outside of the egg. It is unquestionably stone, a true fossil. But it is also warm, as though life remains within.
495	The Visionary Student lines up nearly a dozen different animals, from rats and spiders all the way up to a fungal pony. They take the heart from every one.
510 - 530, 610	They study the bones for signs of damage and evidence of ancient attachment points. They create wax and plaster models of the other bones that might[…] have connected with this one. They propose diagrams of how the deceased creature most likely walked.
540	Beneath their hands, cartilage flexes and bone flows. Their aptitude for the arts of shaping is shocking, […]. When they finish, the ribcage is a flowering, spiderlike thing, and they arch an eyebrow in your direction. "Everyone has hobbies."
810 - 830	They do not find rocks very interesting. They consider geology a slow subject. They compose witty limericks rhyming the word 'strata'. Their work is, of course, excellent all the same.
910 - 920, 950 - 960	They do not come up with one single solution. They come up with dozens of variants, instead: fine gradations on the same formula, variant approaches that would yield minutely different results.
930	[…]"Some of the ingredients are obscure, or have sources well beyond the Neath. One of these compounds is only available from across the Unterzee. Other elements, however, remind me of the work of FF Gebrandt. That chemist, or one of her disciples[…]"
940	They are amused that you're doing this research. "What next? Are you going to synthesise Airag?" They make careful notes, all the same, and don't sample too much of the substance themselves.
970	They have plucked some of the fine hairs off the egg with a pair of tweezers. It looks like they're trying to weave some kind of minuscule coat out of them.
980	They attend carefully to the coin, transcribing fragments of the inscription to an alloy of their own devising.
990	Unable to do much with the tiny samples you have recovered, they are content to stare at them and make uncannily pertinent observations on your own work.
1010 - 1040	[…]they give the impression of not working on the problem […] close their eyes and pluck a few repeated notes on a fiddle, until you are tempted to break the instrument[…]a few lines on a graph, a pair of equations. That is all. That is everything.
1045	They plot […] the bulb's light against […] measurements of sunlight. They translate the points […] into an equation expressing the difference between what Is and what Might Be, disregarding […]. They write a proof, and then write it again in Hudum.
1050	They hypothesise a translation of the brickwork into a message in Assyrian. Then they interpret it as an equation expressing the relationship between a dead star and a live one. […]Even for them, this is not a straightforward puzzle.
1210	They take a keen interest in the microscopic evidence. They slice the sample thinly and put it under the lens; they diagram cells and locate the organs of growth and self-duplication.
1320	They attend carefully to the artefacts, and return with a carefully worked-out argument for date, material of manufacture, and likely geographical source.
1340	They attend carefully to the physical substance of the creature, and return with a compelling thesis for the sacral role it held within its original social context.
1350	[…] they lie down in a corner […] and say nothing for an afternoon. Then they […] suggest that there's bound to be a great deal more of this material […] probably very valuable if one could get hold of it […] "Though I wouldn't count on that. There are old grudges […]"
1610	They contemplate the wide zee, the curls and bends of river and canal between hither and yon. They make a careful notation. A whole ream of the race to cut out.

[Find the rest of the story at https://www.fallenlondon.com]

• Watchful is increasing…
•  You've gained (4 + Equipment level) x Laboratory Research

Rare Success

They are growing tremendously

Description summary:
Same as for regular success, above.

[Find the rest of the story at https://www.fallenlondon.com]

• Watchful is increasing…
•  You've gained (4 + Equipment level) x Laboratory Research
•  You've gained 1 x Laboratory Services from a Visionary Student (up to 5)

Failure

Hmmm...

They grit their teeth and work, but their head and heart are clearly not in it. There are days when they just don't concentrate as they should.

•  You've gained (3 + Equipment level) x Laboratory Research