By the start of the semester, only a handful of the last-year students still needed to do some form of final project to earn their graduation. Now, however, we have a lot more students pursuing those sorts of things since the whole student body has been informed of the requirement. The proactivity is nice to see, but we do have to prioritize what jobs and tasks we give according to who will graduate the soonest.

We've also had dozens of students come to each department with their own pitch of something they could do to complete the requirement. About half of the requests were accepted, though we hadn't really expected so many students to want to take on tasks during class times rather than during breaks. As long as it doesn't interfere with their performance, we've decided to allow it. The tasks we've specifically allowed are ones that can be completed in a start and stop manner, such as translating or transcribing written works, or extending or organizing mathematics tables or data sets.

I also started to review some of the data that was collected by the interns I hired over break. Some of it was fine, and some of it showed me that I have a lot of unconscious practices that I need to actually teach others if they're doing something like data collection. I've always been very cautious about properly resetting experiments, ensuring that all data I collect has the same strict starting conditions. It was clear from some of the data collected on suspension springs that they'd inadvertently allowed both wear and tear and weather conditions to influence the data they collected. Since metal's properties vary with both of those, large swaths of the data they collected were useless, since they didn't record that peripheral information.

I'm not so strict as to punish them for it. It was partially my mistake, and they still did collect some useful data than can be built upon moving forward, so I'm still signing off on them having completed the requirement for graduation. I'm fully hoping that this year we'll see improvements by leaps and bounds for data collection and new technologies flowing from the academy. At the end of this next semester, I plan on conversing with the other department heads to determine who, if anyone, should have any sort of employment offered to them post graduation. It's a pretty small group who are graduating because of the split that occurred in the first class, with most of them being held back due to us not having a good grasp on running things, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't end up hiring any of them.

I also received a report that a lot of individuals who had wanted to purchase human made mana-engine tools have switched over to buying from us. Our liaisons in the dwarven capital have been quite good at gathering information. While that would be good news normally, the rumors I've heard surrounding it aren't good. The word is that they've indefinitely stopped their production. Some of the rumors are pretty mundane, that it's not cost effective for them to make such complicated tools, that they can't compete with our prices, or that they're having trouble sourcing fluorite. While those could be true, there are other darker rumors that people were only sharing when they were drunk or trying to scare someone.

These rumors state vary wildly, from the place that they were building it exploded and no longer exists, to everyone working there suddenly got a new form of 'crystal sickness'. For reference, there are only three diseases that I've ever heard of documented by the humanoid races: leveling sickness, crystal caused sicknesses and wasting sickness. I've never witnessed wasting sickness, but it supposedly takes many forms, and is generally caused by extended periods of having no mana. From the descriptions of this new form, blistering of the skin, loss of hair and nails, vomiting blood, and eventually death, I am seriously worried about it being radiation sickness.

It was a concern I'd had for some time that when others started to tinker with fluorite, they might start trying to add other materials. It's entirely possible that, within whatever location they were making all their iron-doped heat fluorite, they were also just doing full scale experiments with other fluorite doping. Both copper and silver are incredibly dangerous in that regard, and if they grew a large silver fluorite crystal, that area could be radioactive for decades.

If that was the case, I doubt they could cover it up forever, if they're even trying to. This was a relatively recent development, so if I don't hear anything extra about it soon, I'll be a little less concerned.

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I wish I could say that I didn't get any updates on the situation, but about half-way through the semester, I got an update. The situation developed slowly, and then suddenly. Over the course of two months, the gruesome rumors became more and more prevalent. At a certain point, there was suddenly a number of official statements about the situation. On the human continent, near to the elven continent on the northern end, sits a moderately sized human country called Veldenar.

The king of Veldenar has made an official statement that their production of fluorite crystals 'inexplicably' caused sudden and widespread illness and death within their city of Elarheim. That city had a population of around 20,000. The city is now totally abandoned, and they've indicated an over 50% fatality rate that was still climbing. They've said that they cannot even return to the area as people continue to succumb to wasting sickness if they spend even a short time in the area. They've also reported that tons of animals have died in the nearby area.

Unfortunately, they've also decided to use this as a statement that fluorite based machinery is actually incredibly dangerous, and that people should destroy their machinery and crystals unless they want to risk illness. Considering that the prevailing wisdom for almost all of history on the continents was that natural fluorite crystals were fairly dangerous, it wasn't long before many individuals began destroying their machines. Of course our ambassador explained that our crystals were safe, and that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of what happened, but that did little to quell the fears of the masses.

Given the circumstances, I'd wager that the elves and humans actually do know what they've made, but are taking the opportunity to sabotage our growing market control. The best thing we can do is tilt our hand and let the world know what probably happened, along with methodical information. The downside is that we'll be revealing a lot of knowledge that other countries would have to discover about crystal growth and properties themselves. Of course, in another year or two, some of that information will be out in the open anyway in the form of our graduates re-entering the dwarven continent.

Of course, who knows how many will believe us immediately. It does sound like a convenient excuse from our side. However, we also do have the reliable history of our machines going for us. We need only ask how many dwarven soldiers or workers received such an illness from our crystals. Even then, it could take years to decades to rebuild the reputation necessary to establish the market again. The students too seem to be aware of the situation, though at least the upper classmen in engineering are aware of the underlying situation.

Indeed, the technology we're working with is actually quite dangerous at it's baseline level. Through some amount of experience in this world, and knowledge of the amount of safety protocols that are used for hazardous lab work from earth, we managed to avoid a lot of potential catastrophic outcomes ourselves. If I had, at any point, made a large silver-doped fluorite crystal on Kembora, that would have been it, life on the island would have probably been doomed.

So, in the interest of preventing future tragedies, we'll let the world know what we know so far about fluorite. I'm also going to focus my efforts this semester on developing two new fields of study within the science department that have some relation to the already existent geology. I doubt they'll have classes for a while, since the fields are both fledgling, but having someone working in an academic manner on each will prepare us for having courses on it in the future, when enough groundwork has been laid.

First, I want to establish crystalline magical studies. This not only researches fluorite and mana crystals, but also quartz and any other crystal that exhibits some kind of magical property. This will require a somewhat complicated lab setup, but thankfully we have no shortage of quartz. Despite finding fewer and fewer ores and fluorite as the miners dug higher and higher up the inside of Kembora, they did at least continue finding quartz. That will provide us with a decent amount of mana isolation for laboratories for the safe handling of magic materials.

Second, I want to establish a department focused on identifying the makeup of different rocks. We only recover a small percentage of iron from our basalt that we mine. I know that quite a bit of the remnant is silicon dioxide, but there are a lot of unknown elements involved in a lot of our rocks. I'd like someone to start finding a way to isolate new metals from resources we have on hand. This has obvious implications in testing more doped materials in fluorite, but also for the future development of metal alloy research. The foundation of both is actually being able to isolate more elements.

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