The day after our little trip to the Bansho Spa, I found myself at my desk, staring at a holographic image of the pillar with the strange Bansho Fam carvings on it.
"Alright. First things' first!" Cracking my knuckles, I got to work.
The first thing I focused on was the actual written language. If I had to guess, it was probably step-by-step instructions, a lot more detailed than the actual pictures. It didn't particularly surprise me that Roshi hadn't been able to decrypt the language, but I was different.
In under an hour, I had a nice decoding program all written up to throw the writings into.
In another hour, the program threw an error. Apparently, there weren't enough words to figure out the language's syntax, which made it essentially impossible to decrypt. Dead end.
I clicked my tongue, generating a new version of the holographic pillar that didn't have the words, undeterred.
Even without the written descriptions, the pillar was covered with images that I could make inferences from. I wasn't stopped yet.
That being said, being unable to read the words was a huge roadblock. They likely described exactly what the images meant and what to do with each ingredient. Without them, it was all hypothesis, experimentation, and trying again.
Luckily, I didn't have anything against the scientific method.
The front part of the pillar had three images on it, but there were two more images carved into the side of the pillar, too.
It actually looked pretty straightforward. Three images for ingredients, probably, then one image of a fiery cauldron and people stirring it, meaning that they needed to be mixed together somehow, and bam! Bansho Fan picture.
But there were dozens of problems that kept it from being so easy. Looking at the pictures, I completely understood why Roshi hadn't figured out how to make a fan from scratch based on them.
Of the three ingredients, only one was straightforward. The leftmost image was that of a leaf. A quick image search through the internet showed that the leaf was from a simple banana tree. Not difficult,
But the other two ingredients were a bit more difficult. If it weren't for my knowledge of the anime, I doubted that I would've even had an idea as to where to start on the rightmost ingredient, which was a rough drawing of a mountain with a little snowflake carved into it.
But seeing that image brought back a memory, and a quick internet search proved that there was a mountain to the east that was covered in a never-ending snowfall, with snow cold enough to freeze literally anything.
So, if the first ingredient was a banana leaf, then the second ingredient must've been magical snow from that mountain. Easy deductions. Hopefully. There was a chance that I was missing something, but they were solid guesses that made sense to me logically.
But the third picture was the one that I wasn't sure about. A picture of a Fire-Eater bird.
It was also the most prohibitive of the three ingredients.
According to the internet, Fire-Eaters were the direct descendents of the Immortal Phoenix, and thus had many interesting abilities.
For one, they survived not by eating food and drinking water, but by directly feeding off of heat. They were completely immune to fire of any kind, and their habitat was literally inside of an active volcano.
Also, Fire-Eaters had massively long lifespans. It wasn't certain whether they were immortal like their progenitor or not, but there weren't any recorded incidents of one dying of old age. Starvation, illness, and other natural causes, sure, but not age.
But, unfortunately, according to the internet, they were effectively extinct. The only one left was an egg, and the entire area was apparently under the protection of a very loose Endangered Species Act. Though it wasn't particularly well-enforced, the only person technically allowed to get anywhere near the mountain with the egg was its caretaker, an old man by the name of Doctor Hikase, who apparently held legal claim over the entire mountain.
I sat down in my office chair and leaned back, deep in thought.
"I need to do something about this, don't I?" I asked myself, spinning around listlessly in the chair. "But…"
From my extra knowledge, I knew that the internet was wrong. There was an adult Fire Eater out there somewhere in that mountain, casually swimming through lava like it didn't have a care in the world. I could find it, and there'd be two Fire-Eaters around.
But that wasn't good enough for me. I didn't know what exactly about the Fire Eaters was necessary for the creation of the fan, which meant that I needed a large number of them for testing purposes.
Making a decision, I created a new file on my desk, titled 'Project Fire Eater'.