A dot.

The four peered at the script curiously. Madison leaned forward and squinted.

"It looks the same," Andrew said. Madison shushed him as she ran her eyes across it.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Erica asked with curiosity.

"We don't know," Ross informed her. He stared at it as well, but could detect nothing unusual in the strange, bumpy surface. After a second, Madison grunted.

"Do you have a magnifying glass?" she asked without taking her eyes off of the paper. Ross apologized and said he didn't.

"That's ok. I don't think it would help much anyway. See this?"

Madison pointed to a spot near the upper-right of the small rectangle. Ross squinted, but didn't see anything. He told her so and she sighed. Before explaining, she put it back into the container and used another whippet to repressurize it. Turning to the rest of them, she spoke.

"There was a tiny, tiny purple dot, barely visible but definitely there. I think we're going to need a microscope to get a real picture of what it's doing."

"How do you know it wasn't just a smudge or a stain?" Andrew asked. "We've been running all of the place with the scripts."

"Scripts can't be stained," Madison said. "Professor Chambers could explain this much better than I can, but he's obviously not available so I'll do my best. Golems operate via a blending of the transcendent and the immanent; the spiritual and the material. That's why you need special equipment to create the scripts."

"But golems have existed for centuries," Ross objected.

"Yes, and the cabbalists who created them used a very painstaking process to animate them. Modern technology allows us to manipulate the scripts much, much more easily. However, the script and the golem exist in a superposition of the material and spiritual realms; if they were purely spiritual, they would be imperceptible, and if they were purely physical they would be inanimate. The material the scripts are made of has been manipulated so that only the immaterial can bind to it; you can't glue them down or get them wet or paint them because glue, water, and paint can't stick to them any more than they can stick to air."

"So how does the purple dot stay on the script?" Andrew asked.

"That's not hard to answer. It's because it's a transcendental substance, just like the rest of the material used to encode information. In fact, the information on most scripts is encoded via a special transcendental topology rather than language; the machines translate it into English and other human-readable formats for us, but what's on the script is more like the grooves on a vinyl record than actual written words."

Erica yawned. "Are you little virgins almost done? I'm simply dying for a good shag." She stretched lazily, intentionally giving everyone a generous view of her curves. Andrew licked his lips, but Madison shook her head.

"We're almost done, Erica, and then you can fuck whoever you feel like. There are two questions here. First and most importantly, how does this little dot alter the script? Secondly and more interestingly, how does an immaterial substance react to a purely material substance like nitrogen? Golems are possible because the material clay can read the immaterial script, but that's a one-way street. There are ways to shape the immaterial, of course, but they are complex and require heavy effort. If an immaterial substance can react automatically to the material without great occult effort, that's a huge accomplishment. Not just for Yetzirology, but for all of the occult sciences!"

Erica scoffed and sat on the couch, crossing her legs and leaning back. "Madison, dear, at this point I'm begging you. Either unbind me or let one of these two moppets plow me. Or, I suppose, you could get a taste of South London yourself..."

"Andrew, would you deal with her?" Ross snapped. Andrew shrugged and sat next to Erica. He reached between her legs and began moving his wrist subtly. She sighed with disappointment.

"I suppose this will have to do," she said. "At least you prats are done blathering about mudpies."