Werewolf hide, being robust, went into the tannery, which had gone relatively dormant. Dave was gone now, so they had no professional leatherworker, but one of the horse trainers, Nick Lancaster, Brigid bloodline, Bronco Teamster, said he might be able to pick up the traits for it, since he already had some ability called Refined tack that let him intuit the design of saddles, reins, bridles and whatnot to make more efficient their harness.
Good news, because Alexander had only rudimentary skill, and no time to develop it further.
Getsome and Impervious, after no little confabulation, decided that a mixed team was best deployed to find the dungeon, with the more defensively oriented Adventurers left to guard the house.
Bonny and Melinda were shoe-ins on the mission, Bonny for her hawk familiar and its aether double to scout far in advance, and Melinda to keep the lights on, given that the creatures they faced would prefer the dark.
Nathan would stay home, his Soak aura available to turn even the less battle-ready villagers into more effective troops, given that they would be allowed more mistakes with the extra Soak. Mark, Ben, Brig, and Cervantes would go ahead with the scouts, to add firepower, literally, in Mark’s case. Their objective was mostly just to eliminate the frontal edges of any resistance, however, so that the scouts had time to withdraw if things went bad. Georgia went with as well, since a second Anchor tank was useful, and her Chronous Bulwark class had a time ward that could catch a surprise attack, freezing it, in case something nasty slipped by the sentries’ notice at camp. Because there would be camps.
The mobile wolf phase of the Nut shapeshifters meant that the creatures could travel huge distances in a day. Much farther than even the quickest scout. Wolf packs were known to travel twenty or thirty miles in a day. That was as much as the Adventurers could make pushing a tough pace, with their combat load and camp gear. There was a brief discussion about using some of the horses, but that was vetoed for the simple reason that they didn’t have horses to lose. The trainers were already worried about long term viability without sufficient breeding stock. Husbandry talents in their classes weren’t up to the point of heading off the inevitable breakdowns that would arise from herd inbreeding.
As such, the party that went forth to find the dungeon would need to hump their gear, with time to fortify camp, and there was no real way of knowing how far they would have to go to locate the source of the problem. The plan was three days. Three days of travel put the recon team sixty miles out from Falcon’s Rest, and, from there, Julie Richards’ familiars could push out another hundred for a reliable survey of the terrain.
Most monsters that bled from a dungeon didn’t stray too far from it. Alexander had a feeling this pack was an exception, the beasts, insane enough to charge a fortress, had roved out wide from their realm into Gaia’s harsh daylight, driven by the need for something. Not for food. They’d been hunting for captives to turn.
Among the more unsettling discoveries from Shiv’s autopsy was the fact that the werewolves were all male. Young males. No females at all. It could have been coincidence, but zero out of fourteen, if the beasts bred in the fifty-to-fifty ratio of most Gaian sexed creatures was unlikely, at best. Either there was a sexual selection to which creatures went hunting, or they had no females in their pack and were looking to recruit. Nasty business.
Wynona Saki’s mana conduction and storage experiments yielded immediate results, a simple loose netting of silver wire at a twenty gauge, about one thirty-second of an inch, drawn by Reynolds with a draw plate around the single huge diamond Jules formed from many smaller set pieces in jewelry. A casually impossible feat of material sculpting.
Alexander had discovered, long ago, back in that first desperate game of survival, that nitric acid, the fuming kind, would dissolve a monster’s core. It separated soon after from the acid, leaving behind a mercury like viscous substance that other materials could absorb, imparting them with some of the properties of the magic that had resided withing the core.
When Saki poured off the residual consumed acid and immersed the silver netting wrapped diamond, about half the size of his fist, it drank the blackness from the liquid, which lost much of its viscosity and became incredibly volatile, sucked up by the vents in the fume hood. A green shimmering softly golden in the lantern light of the lab, was left behind, less than a quarter of the original volume. She lifted from the residual dissolved core a pure black gem wrapped in silver mesh. Her chemical analysis trait was not powerful enough to pry the secrets from that gem, it was too narrowly tailored, so Alexander was summoned to inspect it.
He left his troops to plan, his input having been given early, in general terms, and not required subsequently.
On arrival into the old high school chemistry lab, he was presented a fine lattice of silver wire around a pitch-black sphere. He turned Greater Analyze upon the thing and read from the substance of Gaian knowledge, or whatever information source the skill tapped.
Night Stone (Master quality): a relatively pure, unfaceted diamond immersed in expertly metallurgically extracted argentum of golem origin, and saturated by dark mana similarly expertly extracted by alchemy from the core of creature spawned in the realm of endless night.
This stone can be used to channel dark mana into runic circuits, imbue constructs, catalyze black magics that draw on the night for their strength, or enchant a weapon with a fear aura whose wounds inject creeping madness into the victims’ unable to mount a resistance to the dark mana. Particularly effective against sentient beasts and beings of long life whose accumulated sufferings can be fed upon to spur the madness.
Caution: removal of the silver ward may permit dark magic to escape its confinement from an unfaceted or poorly cut gem. Precise cutting by a Master level lapidary recommended.
Sure enough, the mana contained by the werewolves was deeply tainted by madness. It seemed that Nut was a land inhospitable to the minds of Gaian creatures, by its nature. Would that mean that a party sent within the confines of the dungeon had to operate under a clock?
That was a conversation to have with his pros.
In other, more technical news, they’d essentially figured out how to make magic crystals. Alexander’s earlier methods worked, but, it seemed, they did so with a kind of clumsiness, absent the refinement that could unlock higher levels of enchantment. The sight of a mention of runic circuits made him think again of Kim and what the Runic Artificer could do with a source of magic for his workings to draw from. An opportunity lost. Fuck, how it stung.
He tried not to dwell on it, at least they were learning how to use the gains from the monsters spawned in other realms. This Night Stone, not so much maybe, but others? More likely. In fact, they had the remaining part of the werewolf core sitting in the round bottom flask to figure out how to instill into a stone.
Two things that needed work, clearly. First, the purity of the stone. Chemically speaking, most diamonds used in jewelry were merely alright, being of volcanic production in nature, a chemically active environment thanks to the extraordinary heats, pressures, often reactive sulfides, oxides, and water associated with those intrusive magma seepages. They had inclusions, albeit in minor fraction, compared to a synthetic diamond. Second, the jewel had to be cut. He should have mentioned that when he sent the pair off to work on this experiment, but he was with his mind elsewhere.
Every core’d creature had a distinctive shape, which the Scroll described in jeweler’s terms. Nobody had ever come up with a reason for that, but, now, it appeared to influence the nature of how the magic was being controlled, or directed by the core. It wasn’t much, they still didn’t understand how the facets exactly manifested their influences, so they couldn’t predictively carve a gem to produce a desired outcome. They’d have to do it by trial and error, a painstaking process of documentation and careful observation.
Worse, no one in Falcon’s Rest had any level of trait for lapidary, or gem cutting. Off the top of his head, Van Richards, and that one kid, the one they’d found who could merge pieces of stone into seamless pieces. Alexander would have to go get the Oread’s name from Van or Scott later, it had completely slipped his mind. Last he’d heard, Scott was training him in architecture, after they realized how egregiously losing specialized skills hurt the community. Maybe they’d have to refocus that effort now on filling gaps in specific trades currently missing from the skill sets of Falcon’s Rest.
With spring coming, and the agricultural folk about to be full throttle, that might have to wait until next winter to hit high gear.
But he was sidetracked again. Congratulations were in order.
“Saki, you godsdamned genius, by all the gods above, below, and in between, you did it!” He cheered, and then read the Scroll to its creator.
Japanese features obtained a reserved, but pleased smile, and he received a nod of acknowledgement.
“You may worship, but not touch. I know where you’ve been, you scallywag!” She informed him.
“Of course! After Brig put on her little routine in the Survivor’s Well, so does everyone in the town. Does Alexander Gerifalte get any privacy? Ohhh noooo, let us just turn his innocent adventures into a live audience performance!” Alexander complained, still mortified.
It had followed him for weeks, Brig’s joke. Freaking unhinged sex beast with not a lick of shame to her.
“Anyway!” Alexander cried, trying to get things back on track, “We’ve got to work on purity, it’s apparently important for the outcome. Same thing for the gem facets. Jules got us a pretty damned even sphere, but we can do better with the right tooling. Facets, shape, it seems it’s all important, although how I couldn’t even guess.”
He chewed his lip and ran fingers through his hair puzzling over logistics for a moment.
“Did you happen to get any ideas for mana conductivity measurement?” He asked.
Saki shook her head, “Nope! As soon as I immersed the diamond, the black spooky stuff was pulled into it, couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a second. We don’t even have a useful unit for describing amounts of mana, let alone flow rate.” The Master alchemist reminded him.
“Shit.” He commented, discouraged.
Science is hard. Inventing it from the ground up was harder. They’d have to put their thinking caps on and maintain good investigative fundamentals, the scientific method would carry this research.
“Ayuh.” Saki concurred.
Maybe they could use very tiny gems, of definite mass, and scale the amount of mana to that. It wouldn’t be what you might call a fundamental unit, but any way to put a number on the aetheric would help demystify it.
“Fuck it, we’ll figure the details out later. For now, let’s try the same process, but we’ll need jade, which I hope the jewelry store has, and brass, which I think we should have a lot of from the scavenged plumbing and home renovation supplies.” Alexander announced, figuring forward momentum was forward momentum.
He pondered that last a little and frowned.
“The brass will be mundane though, not magical. I don’t know how much of a difference that makes.” He admitted.
Saki laughed lightly at the absurdity of it all and summarized the situation, “What the fuck does any of us know? We’ll play it by ear and take good notes.”
Which, really, was mostly the best they could do. They put that plan into action, but that necessitated going to the smithy, and the smelter. Instead of relying on Jules all of the time, they decided to melt the brass fittings down and purify them before pouring a stock wire to draw. It would take only half and hour for the melt, and gave Saki a chance to cross train with the machine shop and smelter.
The Muspelheim volcano smelter in the old bank was where a great deal of the obsidian had ended up. Most of the cars in town had met their final resting place here.
A big, black-violet above ground swimming pool, is what it looked like, with a pool cover made of the same material that lowered down on a manual winch, four sets of chains married together to bring the smelter cover down even. Even a small gap would permit, without exaggeration, volcanic heat to escape. When molten metals could expel sublimated gases of impurities, that wasn’t a good thing, there was a safety minded reason for the vapor catch that ran up through the roof.
There was another good reason for the tight seal, and that was that they were able to produce precisely the atmosphere needed for the particular application of the smelter during pyrometallurgy.
Frequently, oxides needed to be removed, such as in most ores containing heavy oxygen reactivity such as iron, chromium or titanium, or group one and two metals that just freaking loved oxygen. When that smelting condition called for it, the addition of carbon to create a reducing environment, a coke, as in steel smelting, was used. Sometimes, they needed to create a more oxidizing environment to help drive off impurities of sulfides and carbonates in ores, a process called roasting, and air, or pure oxygen if it needed an aggressive treatment, was pumped into the atmosphere to facilitate that.
But, when all you wanted was to melt a big ass chunk of metal and leave it as chemically pure as possible, you used a vacuum smelt or argon flood, which prevented most chemical interactions with the metal while it was at reactive temperatures, except for those contaminants that were within the metal, and many of those burned off in the melt, pushed away by the argon blanket or diffusing into the vacuum, which pulled residual atmosphere every so often to prevent evaporated inclusions rejoining the molten material.
Together, he and Saki loaded a wheelbarrow of brass fittings to be dumped into the ceramic crucible that rode along a stable track in the obsidian. Any number of shapes of crucible could be used, and, so long as they had skids matching the forge, they slid in and out smooth as butter. Alexander forgot now who came up with that idea, but it was a humdinger.
The bathtub shaped crucible made of graphite was what they were using now, half full of about thirty pounds worth of brass fittings. They’d acid bathed the brass to clean it of any miniscule oxides and would be doing the smelt under argon blanket, just a steady flow of the noble gas to protect the brass melt, after an initial vacuum pull to purge the interior.
“Okay! We’re ready to introduce the crucible and pull vacuum!” He said to Saki, readying himself to push the crucible.
Wynona turned on the third and last sterling engine that the village had available, which powered a vacuum pump and gas controller apparatus for the smelter, little brother to the massive steam engine used to power the machine shop tooling. The same make as the little one used to drive the blowers of the forge.
When the cylinders began to churn, Saki pulled the air out of the interior and Alexander pushed the crucible along roller tracks into the dark within, closing the door behind it. He checked the graphite casting, a mold that looked like a folded noodle a half inch in diameter.
They’d be casting as a half inch, or five ought gauge, and then drawing to the much, much reduced twenty gauge using the forge in his smithy for temporary heating. He could have just melted the brass down in the forge, but half the reason for the melt in the smelter was for purity’s sake.
He had no faith in the supposed purity of a small-town fitting supplier, whose stock had sat around gods knew how long.
Alexander spooled up the smelter, using the dire bee’s wax torch that ignited a sympathetic rune, which activated the obsidian to release its magical heat, heat which was trapped by the perfectly thermal reflection inside. This was an improvement to the Jules Heater concept, courtesy of their dearly departed Runic Artificer.
Mt. Dhoom, the name they’d given the smelter by committee vote, was a loud bastard, its black glass walls producing a heavy, dull roar when the extraordinary thermal energy was present within. For a few seconds, the vacuum pulled incredibly hot air, how hot measured by a series of five tungsten bars along the top of the chamber, an analogue measuring system devised by Alexander when they realized that, without digital thermometers, the internal temperature had to be measured through more creative means.
After some review in a physics book he’d tripped across black body radiation, a property of matter to radiate a distribution of light wave lengths with a different peak at a different temperature. His blacksmithing manuals also used this principle to visibly judge when the metal was at the correct working temperature, annealing temperature, whatever. The skilled smith could look at the bar in the forge and tell its temperature, so long as it wasn’t melting.
Therefore, they had a measurement of temperature from the tungsten bars based on their progression from dull red to white hot, as long as the bars weren’t melting.
It worked, but took time to learn to make fine distinctions. You just pulled the bar out from its slot a short distance and looked at it to check the temperature. There were five to be certain that the temperature distribution was even, a relic of the experimental stages of building Mt. Dhoom, the temperature was incredibly precise and completely even, only one bar was needed these days for an accurate measurement.
Slowly, checking the bars regularly, Alexander showed Saki how to increase the temperature with a dial, which opened a diaphragm made from a camera shutter, permitting air to hit the runic torch, whose carved scripts transmitted the increasing heat of the burning dire bee’s wax on its tip to the runes connecting torch to smelter, which burned hotter in response to more air.
Careful, repeated experiments had allowed them to notch the dial to determine the temperatures in roughly two-hundred-degree increments, given a roughly linear difference in bar temperature and its color progression.
Alexander didn’t trust the dial completely, hence the rods still stuck into the interior, but it was a fast way to adjust the temperature within the smelter space. Fast controls, and reasonably swift response in heat, meant it was still an excellent way to control the output of the Muspelheim obsidian.
Saki took to the training easily, and they completed the melt in the half hour he thought that they would, pouring into the argon flushed tube mold to produce a beautifully pure brass wire with one flat side, thanks to the top of the mold being open. That didn’t matter, the drawn wire would be perfectly round.
They had Wynona’s experience in the lab to thank for that argon, she would refill their stocks by fractionally distilling liquified air, to remove the 0.94% fraction that was the noble gas. Winter bear cores and her ethylene glycol coolant once again to the rescue for that cooling purpose.
“Done!” Alexander called, satisfied with the semi round stock.
“Thank fuck!” Saki replied, not being particularly fond of the smelter or this metal work, even if she could do the tasks easily enough.
There was too much eyeballing and estimating for her liking, she preferred a triple beam balance, volumetric flask, pressure gauges, and titration burets, hard numbers given by all to guide her processes.
After another hour, they had produced an almost lime green gem, wrapped in brass netting. The remaining solvent within the flask had completely evaporated, leaving nothing of the original core behind. Thus was a pure magic crystal produced. Alexander inspected it to see what they had made.
Chimera Stone (Greater quality): a relatively pure, unfaceted jade housed in expertly metallurgically extracted brass of mundane Gaian origin, and saturated by life mana of transformational quality by a Master alchemist from the core of a shapeshifter.
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This stone can be used to channel metamorphic mana into runic circuits to cause them to obtain variable paths, imbue constructs with shape shifting properties, catalyze chimeric transformations of organisms, or enchant an armor with a self-fitting property, causing it to mold to its wearer, as if bonding to the user over time.
Caution: mundane brass cannot perpetually constrain mana, removal of the brass ward may permit metamorphic magic to escape its confinement from an unfaceted or poorly cut jade. Precise cutting by a Master level lapidary recommended.
A low whistle from the one-time brick laying Reynolds filled the alchemy, ehem, chemistry lab when Alexander read the description aloud.
“Hot damn!” Saki exclaimed, jubilant at the successful implementation of their methodology, “We’re good at this!”
“Yes, we are!” Alexander gloated, and the two traded high fives, first with each other, then with Jules, who wanted to see what all the hubbub was over that had demanded so much of his time.
“This is straight up some bullshit.” Jules announced, even though he could, himself, move body parts around or even create new ones, at substantial physical cost in calories and rest to recover.
It was, indeed. But it was bullshit that was going to go to bat for humanity. He didn’t know right away what the Chimera Stone would be good for, other than the obvious use making armor that didn’t require uber precise fitting to acclimate to its wearer, a substantial source of the time needed to craft good protectives. He wondered how small a Chimera Stone would be required for any particular piece of gear, and if it interfered with Kim’s runic work. These were necessary questions to be answered.
Alexander would not compromise the efforts of his former comrade, not and risk losing arts that might one day be made more generally applicable. He owed Kim’s memory that his gifts to humanity not be lost. Runes, whatever they were, would continue to serve the folk that had discovered their secrets.
“Okay! Last round!” Alexander called, and he opened the belt pouch hanging heavy from his belt to reveal three glistening orange cores, the ones he’d pulled from the sunlight elk.
“These are condensed solar magic. We know the creatures of Nut don’t like sunlight, but Melinda is the only one who can wield it, currently. Whoever goes in, they need a light source without draining Melinda dry. I think we can make solar lanterns, or, at least, big time magnifiers for our gracious Luminous Pathfinder’s abilities.” The young man revealed his angle.
Basic science was well and good, but what he wanted was a more applied technology. A weapon, at best, and a tool at worst. The magiteck of these infused crystals would fill a missing branch in the Falcon’s Rest tech tree.
Something told Alexander that mere torchlight wasn’t going to be enough to part the gloom of Nut. They needed the sun to combat the night. And, by all the gods above, below, and in between, his friends would carry the sun with them!
Saki nodded, along with Reynolds. They’d worked hard this day. Not so very long, all things considered, it was only noon, but hard, demanding perfection from themselves in all things. That kind of focus took it out of you.
“Let’s do it then. What do we need to use for the siphon this time?” Wynona asked, ready to be on with the true goal of this day’s efforts.
Alexander inspected the core and reported, “We require gold, my talented assistants. Pure gold to harness the power of the sun. Which means we’re going back to the smelter, all the shit in the jewelry shop is an alloy, there’s no pure gold to be had, and we’ve already seen that it matters for efficiency in the mana siphon and contain.”
Wynona Saki groaned at that twist in the tale, but followed dutifully back to the jewelry shop, and then the smelter. The good news was that they weren’t going to be doing thirty pounds, like last time. The bad news was that they had to separate gold from the common jewelry alloys of copper, silver, nickel, platinum, zinc, and, sometimes, aluminum, to say nothing of the coatings that got used on occasion. It might prove to be rather a bitch to get all the metals separated out, but, fortunately, the noble metal they wanted was, mostly, dissimilar in melting points.
Copper and nickel were the only ones too close to gold, with a difference of only forty to fiftyish degrees Fahrenheit difference.
Alexander was convinced they’d have to dissolve chemically the resulting ingots and recrystallize them to achieve sufficient purity, probably using Aquae Regis, the combination of three-parts nitric acid to one-part hydrochloric acid, which was required to dissolve gold and platinum. Nitric acid alone could grab the copper, and nickel contaminants, as a pretreatment. These procedures were well within Saki’s repertoire.
It was just a damned shame electrolysis was still impossible, that was a sure-fire method to get pure metals to crystallize.
His fears were realized. The smelt was good, excellent in fact, and they were able to do a fractional smelt to pull off first the zinc, then the silver, then they got a mixture of gold copper and nickel, and, lastly, a reasonably mass of pure platinum, which Saki had uses for anyway. Once the ingots were cooled from their molds, the group, sans Jules, who, in his words, “Had shit to do, so good luck geeks!” departed for the alchemy lab.
There, they dissolved the alloy mixture in a preparation of Aquae Regis. The gold chloride solution was decanted off, then filtered through vacuum filter, more shoulder work for Alexander, before being treated with Ammonia solution. Then they baked it in a cast iron oven to burn off the gold hydroxide that resulted, leaving behind a pure, glistening metal.
The process of isolating their siphon material took about two hours total. It was decided then that they should call it quits before they made a mistake in their waning mental clarity. Especially Alexander’s, he’d spent most of the night playing love games with Granny, and had slept, perhaps, two hours.
He crashed face first onto his bed, forgetting to eat, and slept like the dead.
image [https://imgur.com/3D1kmaW.png]
At some point, Annita Nguyen infiltrated his slumber, and he semi awoke to being half smothered in a pair of modest, but very sensitive breasts. He rubbed his face against the softness and relaxed completely. The smell of the woman who wrapped herself around him lulled him back to sleep instantly, not to rise again until well past morning’s light.
An incredible dream, provocative, uninhibited, centered around lascivious acts with Granny, both remembered and imagined, brought him slowly to waking, close to the moment of climax.
Alexander woke with a hunger and bit the dryad’s neck gently, which she responded to by rolling over on top of him, her golden gaze intense. A few short minutes of play later and she was riding him aggressively, swaying hips rocking, and her own eyes closed in concentration on her labor.
She made the low “Uuummm” that heralded her shivers, and he grabbed her hips to help her along.
“Ah!” The startled woman yelped, not prepared for his assistance.
Annita’s almond shaped eyes darted open and she blushed bashfully at his warm gaze, as she did sometimes. They were still new to each other, and he found it adorable.
“Morning.” Alexander greeted her, nonchalantly, joining the motion of the ocean, which sent the girl into a lean forward.
“Was…I supposed to set an alarm? No? So, I can go back to sleep?” He asked, joking, but slightly breathless, and realizing that he wasn’t going to be setting any records for distance on this race.
Her recovery was quick, and she picked up the pace, threatening to end things in a hurry.
“No…need,” She panted, “If you manage to sleep through this…I can just bury you, say a few words…hah, fuck! And forget your name.”
He never managed a riposte, without the inhibition of her first-time aches, she took him over the edge with ease.
There, sodden with sweat, with her unbound hair draped over his face, the smiling Vietnamese lady whispered “Granny Nguyen wins again!”
They enjoyed a post coital cuddle while the sun beamed in through curtains not completely closed. The absence of clouds outside made that ray of brilliance shine bright, lighting the room easily on its own.
Alexander trailed a finger aimlessly somewhere around Annita’s L-3 vertebrae, which she enjoyed almost as much as he did.
“You trying to pick a fight?” She mumbled, relaxed.
That question deserved special attention. Was he? It wouldn’t have been a bad way to spend the morning, even though he had things to do. Yesterday had been tense, waking to an attack in the wee hours, and then busting ass for most of the day, on almost no sleep. Granny’s morning offensive admittedly set off by his own teasing, was, to say the least, welcome.
“Maybe,” He answered dreamily, and let the hand drift down to squeeze a nicely curved bottom, “What are you going to do about it?”
A few halfhearted wriggles accomplished not much except to make him think that, perhaps, this was a grand idea after all. He let the other hand wander from its resting place on a shoulder on around to the front, cupping the softness on her chest.
“Hey! You’re not old enough to play with those!” She whined, but the smoky delivery and a subtle raise to make herself more available was all the hint he needed.
They took another spin around the world and collapsed, sunlight still pouring through the window, but at a distinctly higher angle. Gods, what had he been missing in Annita Nguyen? The young man mused absently. She made certain to answer that question, with authority.
“Okay, this time, for real, there’s stuff to do.” Alexander eventually rebelled against his spooning assailant.
Granny, realizing that she was ravenous, decided to permit the day to begin.
“I’m stuff, and you already did me, let’s play another game. It starts with you fixing me breakfast. Then I’ll give you a good, hot water and soap scrub, ya filthy animal.” Annita ordered.
That was fine by him, he could eat one of the mules about right now.
Alexander Gerifalte put a hand beneath the woman, who, despite her commands, still refused to get off him, and arranged her sideways. A casual bench press lift of the soft, stubborn dead weight, and he dropped her off the side of the bed, where she lay in a heap, giggling.
Breakfast was a single skillet affair, which he liked to think he had long since mastered. Granny came downstairs wearing one of his shirts like an evening dress, so low did it hang, bare, brown legs swishing along gracefully. He had to admit, it was an unexpectedly powerful sight, the girlfriend in a long t-shirt maneuver.
“Dig in! Probably going to be right straight out today.” Alexander indicated the cast iron skillet, with its caramelized onions and bell peppers, single huge omelet, and strips of chewy bacon, with granola bars on the side.
Granny came up for air a minute later, with a piece of omelet glued to the corner of her mouth and leveled a suspicious golden stare of narrowed eyes at him.
“And you accuse me of witchcraft! This grub has been tampered with, and I’ll need to investigate further to determine the extent of the crime, but you’re in trouble Mister! Have you no doubts about that!” the silky voiced woman threatened happily, ignorant of the small chunk of omelet still hanging from the corner of her-
Oh! Nope! Tongue got it, we’re good, rescue mission aborted.
Alexander pretended shock at the discovery of his warlock schemes over his half of the skillet, “Hush! You can’t prove anything! More weight I say! Add more rocks and be damned!”
Needless to say, breakfast was his victory.
The big pot of water for baths was steaming on the stove when they finished the repast. By all the gods above, below, and in between, he missed a hot shower. Getting a delicious back scrub was a consolation prize. Together, they scrubbed vigorously with soap and rags, before donning fresh clothes.
Alexander had assumed that Granny had one ratty wardrobe that she washed daily. The reality of it, made clear by the bundles of clothes escorted somewhat shyly from Georgia’s house, with that one taking no pains to hide her approving nod, was that she had about a half dozen of the ratty wardrobe. The greys, browns, greens, and flaps of fabric were intentional, to break up her outline, and she swore that mixing and matching the bottoms to tops kept the critters from recognizing her.
Whatever she did, it worked, so he didn’t challenge her claim. They parted with plans for supper, probably no dinner since he’d be up to his ears in work. He didn’t know how the Dryad planned to spend her time, but she loved to work too much to be idle; she’d find a way to be useful.
Saki greeted him with one delicate eyebrow raised, staring over top of the volumetric flask she’d been measuring, her crimson skill vibrant against the sterile white walls of the alchemy lab.
“Sleep in?” She asked, a knowing smirk on her lips.
Everybody knows everything you do, as soon as you do it, the young man lamented, recalling this was an aspect of small-town life that he’d never cared for. He understood Granny’s shack, he did indeed.
“Something like that.” He answered, choosing discretion as the better part of valor.
Without further ado, Alexander went to the purified gold stock. Today, they were going to bottle sunlight. He explained the procedure, she double checked the rational and agreed, and he left to take care of the gold siphons. Saki begged off, pointing to a bench full of projects that needed her attention. Jules was hard at work under her direction making very specifically shaped glassware that was, absent his skills at manipulating materials, impossible to make or to replace without him. Alexander left them to it.
Glistening bars of the metal were a pleasing reminder of yesterday’s efforts. He felt like he was getting better, like his skills were polishing. Ten pounds of chemically pure gold went with him to the smithy, where the forge easily melted the ingots to produce the liquid he poured into round stock molds. Those cooled rapidly, but he drew one of them out into four feet of twenty gauge before it did. Reheat, draw, reheat, draw, Alexander repeated until he had a spool of wire fifty feet long. Three of the one pound round stock segments he left undrawn, so they could play with the thicknesses of wire later.
Back to the old high school chemistry lab he went. Outside, under a gorgeous blue sky, a rarity in early March, the citizens of Falcon’s Rest were hustling to business. The agricultural folk especially, were going to be all stove up, they were pulling daylight to dark shifts getting Alexander’s former garden projects scaled up to production for the entire settlement.
Mules pulling harness were turning Entling blood enriched soil, compost, wood chips, and the dung of chickens, equines, and porcines to create furrows of rich fields inside Falcon’s rest. It made a pleasing, earthy smell, that filled town in a satisfying way. The sight made Alexander feel good. It motivated him. He wondered what it was like to work your entire life and never experience seeing people who needed the results of that labor firsthand. Terrible, he decided, as he walked through the repaired doors of the school, which had been ripped away with most of that wall by an animated silver ore golem. Sometimes he forgot how quietly he moved.
“Alright, Saki, we’re ready for the, Holy shit!” Alexander’s distracted announcement was interrupted by Jules Reynolds standing with four arms, the extra set emerging from shoulders that took up his bottom three ribs, and he was in a very tactically secure location between Saki’s legs.
Jules was shirtless, not surprising, nobody tailored for Mortal Kombat mini-bosses. What was a little more surprising was that Saki was also shirtless, with a great deal more of her crimson skin showing than he was used to. And she’d been boffing in the lab, which was breaking several lab safety protocols.
A deep sigh accompanied his witness of this development and he turned away, giving the pair some semblance of privacy.
He should have known, folk in Falcon’s Rest were more than a little active. Being all relatively young, mostly physically fit, thanks in part to the effect of tiering up to the third tier, which had come with significant improvements to physical parameters, and under a lot of pressure, did that. The young man hadn’t been ready for a workplace dalliance to take place inside his workplace, however. There were dangerous chemicals in this joint! No wonder half the gossip down tavern-side was about who was in whose bed. It would settle down eventually. Probably.
Clearing her throat, Saki played off the interruption with amazing aplomb, “You did that much faster than yesterday.”
Alexander shook his head exasperation in his tone, “Gold is softer than brass and golem silver. You could have spilled something.”
A reclothed Saki, with the usual white lab coat on over her standard attire just replied, “I could have. But Jules can turn anything that spills into a solid and we can just pick it up and put it in a spill bucket, pretty much without harm. It’s fine. Ehem, Jules, later?”
Reynolds was wearing a big overcoat over top of a sleeveless shirt that had holes in its side, the extra arms folded around his waist, making him look comically proportioned.
The Quintessence Shaper bowed slightly and said, “As the lady wishes.” Overtly formal words for a joking tone.
To Alexander he merely said, “All work and no play, makes Jonny a dull boy. Good luck nerds!” before departing.
Just as violence had become an expected and understood part of life in the Green, so too had love and love games become part of life in the settlements. People flourished under pressure.
“Whatever, let’s just pretend that didn’t happen. Commencing memory purge.” Alexander announced, before retracing his steps out the door.
An enthusiastic crafter, riding high on successful machinations, entered the lab, calling “Alright, Saki, we’re ready to make the magic crystals!”
Saki, in her usual place behind the bench, wearing the usual amount of clothes and goggles, and holding a calculator that did not work, looked up, and said, “Wow! That was fast! Acid’s in the fume hood.”
With that soft reboot completed, they got down to the nitty gritty.
A solar powered elk core crushed to powder went into the fuming nitric, red orange vapor rolling from the big round bottom Erlenmeyer flask. Jules, before he’d gotten sidetracked, had already prepared three spheres of the gemstone that had affinity for sunlight magic. Good old-fashioned quartz. Broken glass from windows ruined by goblins, ogres, car crashes, and what have you was easily formed by the Quintessence shaper into glass orbs, which sat on the lab bench, crystal clear and waiting.
The core solvent disappeared the core dust in moments and transformed into a brilliant yellow orange, with faint green tinges. The sun had a major green peak in its visual spectra, Alexander recalled. So cool, the way Gaia’s nonsense mated up with known science sometimes. So frustrating when it didn’t, at all, other times.
Saki did the basket weave this time, precisely arranging the gold filaments around the quartz sphere, before bringing up the frame to net the gem, like catching a fish from a lake. Then, with a twist, the thin wires were braided to form a secure cage of pure gold around the quartz, and they were ready to create a Sun Stone.
It went just that easily, gold siphoned the solar magic into the depths of the gem, drank it with incredible alacrity, and the volume of the remaining solution in the flask reduced somewhat before becoming volatile and steaming up into the fume hood vent, leaving an empty flask with a vibrant yellow-orange crystal inside.
Sun Stone (Master quality): a chemically pure, unfaceted quartz, housed in similarly pure gold of mundane Gaian origin, and saturated by solar mana concentrated to weaponized intensity by a Master alchemist from the core of a Sunlight Lance Elk.
This stone can be used to channel radiant mana into runic circuits to cause them to power aetheric workings of light and heat, imbue constructs with sunlight weapon properties, catalyze light eating reactions, or enchant objects with intense bursts of damaging light or steady output of noonday brilliance. This effect is amplified when the stone is fed a source of heat and or light. Sun Stones of greater than usual quality drink and store sunlight directly, replenishing their aetheric power rapidly.
Caution: mundane gold cannot perpetually constrain mana, removal of the gold ward may permit solar magic to escape its confinement from an unfaceted or poorly cut quartz. Over channeling of a Sun Stone without proper shielding and facet geometry may cause a catastrophic failure. Precise cutting by a Master level lapidary recommended.
The quality of the stone was exemplary, despite the absence of magical nature to the materials used. What made up for that lack was the sheer purity of the materials. Gold well over ninety-nine point nine-nine percent purity, over quartz that was even better than that, silicon dioxide, quartz with utterly pristine composition. That the work was presided over by two Master Alchemists probably helped things along as well, Gaian rules seemed to operate in that fashion.
The planet did not intervene directly, but the gifts given, the traits and skills, did, in some manner, tend to have potent influences on outcomes. Alexander chose not to look some gift horses in their mouths.
Instead, he picked up an immaculately crafted Sun Stone, and marveled at the way it filled the room with soft light, as if they stood under the open sky, instead of a dim, lantern lit lab room, absent windows.
“This is going to save lives, Wynona.” He said with certainty.
There would be a raid into the Nut dungeon soon. As soon as it was found, the Adventurer squad had left yesterday.
With this feat of magiteck, the party that traveled into night would be carrying a piece of the sun with them.
He wasn’t done yet, however. Alexander Gerifalte had some ideas for how to use these stones. Together, he and Saki completed two more full sized stones. Only one more core from the rare variant of Elk wondering the mountains, correctly dubbed Sunlight Spear Elk, was in his lock box. Later, they’d try doing ten smaller glass spheres, to test creating stones of smaller size, for less potent purposes.
Humanity had not greatly enough appreciated its achievement in creating light from electricity. Small sun lamps would be greatly appreciated by the townsfolk of Falcon’s Rest. The fact that they could recharge under a good clear day was that much more a reward for his and Saki’s research.
Alexander retrofitted an oil lamp for the rest of that afternoon. Within the housing, the Sunstone hung from the top of the lamp frame over a standard wick. The burning lamp wick would feed its light to the Sun Stone, allowing it to create greater luminosity than the stone by itself. On the front face of the lamp, Alexander mounted a set of convex lenses scrounged up from a telescope, and other sources, within a mirror polished argentum cone. He had to go back and affix a camera shutter diaphragm to control the output, blocking the focus array after the modified lantern burned a small hole in the lab wall.
Had the lantern been pointed in a different direction, that mistake would have resulted in the destruction of the lab. A new rule, by common decree between the pair of alchemists, arose: thou shalt not create weapons of destruction within the lab.
The sun lantern, as his Greater Analysis labeled it, was a rousing success. Even better, Mark Ross, with his mastery of fire magic, could carry and power it, meaning the party of six that journeyed into the realm of night would have at least two who could light the stygian dungeon. Mark and Melinda, that was two for certain. Alexander who could see in near total darkness, and whose antimagic abilities would hinder the abnormal abilities and Soak of the beings within.
Who for the rest?
The young leader spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about it, and about how to best use the other two Sun Stones. He decided not to make any decisions without consulting Annita, who had a way of spotting things a lot of people missed. Her wise woman routine was a sham, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t wise. Just full of shit, sometimes, and sort of weird most of the time. Alexander could dig it, they had that last thing in common.
After congratulating Wynona again, he left the Pyroclastic Cannoneer to her other projects, and took the rest of the day off. Jules’ words echoed in his mind, “All work and no play, makes Johnny a dull boy.”
The man wasn’t wrong, so Alexander tracked down the witch woman Dryad to her greenhouse orchards. There he helped her with her tasks, watched her apply her abilities, and, generally, spent time enjoying life while helping to make things grow.