Serenity nodded at the shopkeeper. “The smith at the shop at the edge of the market, the one with a collection of spears with spearheads made from unusual metals. I didn’t get his name, but he said that if I was looking for specialized materials, this was the place to go.”
None of the shops on Berinath seemed to be named. Serenity suspected that was because there were only a few of any particular type of shop in each dome; there wasn’t really a need to name a place when you knew the owner and could just use their name or the location. It seemed to vary from culture to culture, but formal names for businesses were more common in larger settlements. The dining hall didn’t have a name in Serenity Settlement, because it was the only common eating area; it didn’t need a name other than its description.
The shopkeeper nodded at Serenity’s description. “Lervi, then. Taller than I am, dark hair that really needs to be cut and a burn scar on his right cheek?”
Serenity nodded. He’d noticed the dark hair and the burn but hadn’t really paid attention to the hair. He took a careful look at the shopkeeper, now that he’d been reminded that appearance was important. She was short, only a little over five feet tall, and rather pale. Her skin was a soft brown, almost more of a light tan color, and her short hair was a very pale green. All it would take for her to pass as human on Earth was some hair dye, though Serenity wasn’t certain what ethnicity she would look like. She had a small nose and delicate features; Serenity was fairly certain that whatever she looked like, people would call her cute.
“Right, then. I’m Klari; I don’t want to know how you’d describe my shop’s location.” Klari’s harsh words were softened by a smile as she inclined her head towards him. “Lervi wouldn’t send you here unless you wanted something truly obscure. What are you looking for?”
“I need either a strong, sturdy, magically-conductive material that can stand harsh conditions for a long period of time with little or no degradation or two materials, something magically conductive and something with good insulation properties that can serve to protect an inlay of the conductive material. People keep offering me wood and vines, but that apparently won’t last more than fifteen or twenty years in a wet environment without at least warping and I can’t afford much of any warping at all.” Serenity would strongly prefer to use a single material; it would be far easier for someone else to copy and would allow him to incorporate three dimensional characteristics to the runescript. A secondary material would limit him to inscribing only the surfaces if he wanted it to be easy to copy; that would make it far larger and complicate the addition of proper safety measures. It would be possible but highly annoying.
Klari maintained a smile, though something about her eyes made Serenity think it was more of a strain than her initial greeting. “Decades with no warping in harsh conditions. I assume you can’t allow corrosion or tarnishing, either?”
Serenity started to answer, then thought about it a little more. “Some tarnishing might be acceptable, but only if it won’t inhibit the magical conductivity to the outside. I’ve never seen a material where it would work once it was corroded.”
“No motion, that helps. Will it be under much stress, like a weapon or armor?” Klari’s eyes left Serenity and moved around the room. She had to know where everything was, because she seemed to be considering different parcels even though none of them were marked.
Serenity shook his head. “Nothing that severe or regular. It probably needs to stand up to a little abuse, being walked on or something, but that’s probably all.”
“Cerreth, then, with a frame of tholia, unless …” Klari muttered to herself for a moment. Serenity recognized both materials as metals, though he couldn’t immediately remember their specific properties. “What temperatures do they need to withstand? A cerreth / tholia interface won’t take wide temperature variation; it cracks.”
“Uh.” Serenity hadn’t thought about that. He needed the sample to survive a long time and last past inexpert use. Yes, he could get away with far less, but he didn’t want to. It helped that he wasn’t going to pay for it; he was going to stick the dryad elders with the bill. That might be petty, but it was for their benefit; they should pay for it. “Any temperature that will happen here, even if it’s outside a dome? Is that possible?”
Klari shook her head. “Not with cerreth and tholia. That’s the cheapest option that can take the weather, but it won’t handle freezing. The best option is probably metra; it’s a beautiful metal, easy to cast with, sturdy, nonreactive unless you get it hot enough to melt, and that’s only a little cooler than steel. It holds up well to the cold, too. How much do you need?”
Serenity liked working with metra. It was one of the handful of magical materials he could identify at a glance because of how often Vengeance and the Final Reaper had used it; it held up well for a wide range of Tiers, though the properties did change a bit as you ran more mana through it.
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If Serenity wanted the rune to be sturdy and handle the power, he needed it to be a decent size, probably about the size of a football. It wouldn’t be all that different in shape, either, though it wouldn’t be as pointed on the ends; making it a sort of fat curved cylinder would make it easy to attach all the different pieces of the runescript while leaving a place open for a monster core in the center if they chose to fuel it that way instead of connecting it to a different mana source.
On the other hand, if he wanted it to be easy to copy, he’d need it to be larger. In fact, he might want a couple of different options. He also had to remember to make the receiver runes.
Serenity shook his head. “I don’t have a great estimate. It’s going to be open in the center, but that still probably means … oh, call it an inch think? I could go thinner than that, maybe half an inch, but much thinner than that and metra can have edge effects if it carries the sort of mana load I’m looking at.”
Even half an inch was more than he really needed, but it was better to overdesign something like this than underdesign it. It wasn’t possible to know who it would catch, after all, but he wasn’t designing the rune to handle people at Tier Twenty or even Fifteen. He definitely wanted to handle Tier Ten and maybe Twelve reliably; he could design a rune that would hold those Tiers fairly reliably for minutes, though people with appropriate Skills or Resistances might break out early.
Higher Tier people would be more likely to break free on their own, but many would be frozen until either the rune failed or the monster core ran out. Making the metra wider would allow more mana to run through the rune before failure, though that might also drain the monster core faster. Everything was a tradeoff.
“Let me see how much I have.” The frown on Klari’s face wasn’t hopeful. The fact that she disappeared into the back where she’d come from was neither hopeful nor concerning, but the fact that it took her twenty minutes before she came back to the customer area was definitely not positive.
Klari held up a paper-wrapped package that she easily held in a single hand. It was bigger than an egg, probably about the size of a can of soda. “This is all the metra I have. It’ll do half an inch thick as long as you don’t need too much area.”
It would definitely work for the receivers. It might work for the main rune, since there was a lot of open space in the runic design, but it probably wouldn’t handle both and it certainly wouldn’t have extra leftover afterwards. “That’s it?”
Klari shrugged. “I said it was the best, not that I have a lot of it. It doesn’t appear in mid-Tier dungeons; I don’t think there’s anywhere closer than the Empire that actually has dungeons that produce metra.”
Metra was common in the Human Empire, probably because of how useful it was. There were also quite a few planets that were Tier Fifteen or higher; that was probably where the metra came from. Serenity remembered it as being common enough that he’d learned how to use it when he learned to make relatively permanent runes, but in a way that made sense. He’d been higher Tier then than he was now, and he’d been in the Human Empire. Something that was sort of common at one Tier might be very uncommon at lower Tiers.
The fact that Klari seemed to consider Berinath mid-Tier showed that she was not as conversant with the greater universe as Serenity was. Berinath was still at a fairly low Tier as far as Serenity was concerned. Even Tzintkra wasn’t a high Tier world, though its higher Tier areas probably did qualify as mid-Tier.
Or maybe his standards were simply extremely high. Most of the universe’s population was below Tier Ten, after all, even though lifespans tended to get longer as Tiers increased. It simply wasn’t old age that killed most people over Tier Seven.
“How much-” Serenity stopped. He’d just remembered that he didn’t need to buy the metra; he had enough on hand. He still had the metra panels he’d taken from the Viper’s setup on Asihanya, after all; he’d never taken them out of his Rift.
He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face. It was probably a little sinister, but it was also yet another way to twist the knife a little on the dryads. He didn’t actually want to hurt them, but making them pay through the nose for something that would help them even though it was designed by a Death Mage was absolutely perfect. “Maybe we can come to a different deal. How would you feel about buying some metra from me and selling it to the Elders?”
“I’m not going to say no to easy Etherium, but why don’t you sell it to them directly?” Klari lowered the chunk of paper-wrapped Etherium to her side.
Serenity shrugged. “I don’t know what to charge them for it. I need it for a runic inscription, but they’re paying for it since it’s for them. I forgot I had it, actually, but I’m not willing to give it away.”
“I’ll have to look it over to see what it’s worth. Once I’ve done that, you’ll need to get the Elders’ authorization and then you can sell it through me. I have-”
Klari stopped short when she saw Serenity open a hole in reality in front of her. He didn’t think much of it, but Klari seemed to pale slightly when she saw his Rift. Serenity grabbed one of the metra tiles, then dismissed the Rift; he didn’t want to bother someone who was helping him. He’d have to remember to open it when she wasn’t watching next time.
Klari stared at the spot where the Rift had been for a long moment before she shook herself and headed into the back. “Follow me. I want to get a better look at that metal. It’s clearly been worked; that can be useful but it can also be a problem.”