Strands of reddish hair drifted to the floor, as the elf scowled at the table, carefully checking a measurement.

"It's madness! Madness I tell you!" he proclaimed insistently to the empty room. "Close to eleven hundred thaums, and no coalescence." He tapped the gauge at one end of a table with the end of a short piece of wood. "I wonder if this thing is defective. Not unlikely, since that should have been an exact result, and I'm shy a few points. But I'm over, not under! Over the water, but under the bridge..." That last came out in a singsong voice, a pleasant tenor.

Suddenly changing from a scowl to a grin, he reviewed the table. All sorts of odds and ends, from gemstones to herbs to a few dozen bottles of various liquids were carefully laid out, with foci and runes near each element. "Well, one way to see. I'll just retest these, and see what I come up with." Removing all but a single item from the table, he went to work.

A few experiments later he was just as puzzled. The device that measured magical energies had come up with exactly the expected values on each individual test. "Fine alone, but together a problem?" he murmured. His next test showed that his few samples added up correctly as well. "Critical mass, then? Or interactions?"

Sighing, he gathered a large number of identical bottles and set them up on the table, counted them, and tried again. The needle wobbled and settled on a decidedly strange number.

"Ah hah! So it's the dyes, then! I wonder if it's specific to a color." Carefully, he started sorting the bottles into different lines by the marker he had attached to each cap. Halfway through, he stopped and started to laugh. After a moment, he picked up one of the dark bottles and toyed with it a moment.

"So it would seem that pre-enchanted acids disrupt the entire enchantment process. Well, good to know then. I should have known that having only one kind of sealable bottle on hand was going to cause problems. I completely forgot that I had acquired these." With amusement, he set two bottles out of the way, and carefully started placing all of the other items back on the table. An hour later, as a piece of jade had been successfully fused to the stock of a wand, and left resting beside a large number of now empty bottles, he wiped his brow with the back of a hand and let out a deep breath. "Well, that went well," he said to a chair, before sitting down. "I wonder if all acids behave that way. But I will not look tonight."