Solitaire POV: Day 76
Current Wealth: 168 gold 47 silver 29 copper
It’d been a pretty shit day so far, all things considered. I’d gotten the hell kicked out of me in a fight with an old man, spent several minutes watching a friend of mine convulse, and at the end of it all I’d gotten blue-balled on playing Operation with Corvan and the nearby pile of metal scraps.
Oh, and my ribcage currently resembled a jigsaw puzzle. All in all, not exactly a win in my books. Still, it could've been worse. Things could always be worse when one fought a wizard.
Xangô had made himself scarce about half an hour earlier, right after he was finally, properly sure that neither Argar nor myself would spontaneously drop dead. Which had left the rest of us alone with Corvan. I’d surely lived through more awkward silences, but for the life of me, I couldn’t actually think of any.
“What’s your brother doing?” Corvan asked, abruptly. It was just the two of us alone, for the moment. He’d decided he could trust us, going by the lack of our beheading him as soon as we knew he wasn’t immediately needed anymore, and I’d decided I could trust him on account of the magus seeming to understand what would happen if he killed any of us and left the others alive. He’d seen our growth in power, and was quick enough to realise we’d not hit the end of it.
Not quick enough to realise we could’ve just been holding off on killing him for fear that he’d done something to sabotage the healing process, though. Moron.
“He’s busy doing important things.” I replied, not even bothering to hide how dismissive I was, and barely resisting the urge to deliberately emphasise it. Fortunately Corvan was, apparently, just about sapient enough to notice anyway.
“You’re not very good at answering questions, are you, boy?”
“You’re not very good at understanding answers, are you, prick?” I shot back, only to find the wizard grinning. Clearly he was well aware how much he got under my skin, which meant the only way to equalise our conversation would be getting under his even deeper.
“How did it feel getting the fuck knocked out of you by a bunch of people less than half your age?”
As far as jibes went, I had to say I’d come up with subtler. But sometimes a sledgehammer was more useful than a scalpel, and with an ego as big as Corvan’s I had a feeling this was one of them. It seemed I was right, because his face soured like milk in a desert, and his response was launched back as quickly as uzi fire from an amateur.
“How did the three of you grow so much stronger so quickly?” He asked, the creases of age deepening across his features.
“We’re really, really hard workers.” I replied, and he scowled at me.
“Don’t play me for a fool, boy, I know magus magic when I see it. What you did wasn’t that, and nor was whatever let you survive that impact against the wall. Your brother in particular was using something else, too. So what is it, and how?”
I considered his words, thought about all the cards I had available to play. Truth might give him the tools to shine some light on our abilities- as a practitioner of magic he might well know a few things the world’s authors didn’t. But it would also give him more confidence, and that tended to move people against you. Keeping him in the dark altogether would only sew his distrust. How could I deny him an answer without making him think he’d never get one from me?
Simple.
My foot lashed out, and it connected hard with his face, knocking him flat on his back and sprawling all four limbs outward. I’d held back, not wanting to actually kill or seriously injure the old fuck, and all too aware that my growing strength left me closer in raw power to that bear we’d met upon arrival than my former self. By the pained groans coming from Corvan, I deduced my kick had been successful in not snapping his spine and instead only just giving him a mild concussion.
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“Don’t call me boy.” I said, coldly, “And don’t forget to apologise the next time you set one of my friends on fire.” I stood up, taking my leave before the wrinkly fuck could right himself and start asking more inconvenient questions. With any luck he’d have run out by the next time we spoke.
Beam interrupted me before I could even begin to consider what I’d be doing next, wandering over with that twisted, concerned look he always had when something was seizing his head into thoughts he’d rather it avoid.
“You alright?” I asked him, knowing full well what the answer would be already. As I am simply a giant bleeding heart with a skeleton and nervous system, however, I asked regardless, intending to coax my friend into speaking and venting out whatever had him so worried.
It worked, his words came fast.
“We’ve been having trouble with some of the new metals. Specifically the, uh, molybdenum, Ardin says his forge can’t get hot enough to properly work it, let alone melt it and mix it into the rest of the alloy.”
That wasn’t what had been troubling him, I knew that much without even needing to think about it, but likewise I knew that Beam had been deliberate in sharing the practical issue rather than whatever emotional one was clearly gnawing away at him. I’d offered my hand, and he’d chosen not to take it. That was fine, ideal actually. I was much better at dealing with practicum than humans, anyway.
“I’m not surprised.” I confided, starting on my way to the forge. “Molybdenum melts at…” I paused, sifting through my memory for the relevant data. It came quickly. “2,600 degrees celsius.”
Fuck, that hot? Military ceramics melted at a lower temperature than that, you’d have a hard time generating that sort of temperature with thermite, let alone some caveman’s furnace. Apparently Beam had some understanding of the implications too, because his face fell.
“I don’t think we can get anything that hot, Solitaire.” He noted, crestfallen. He wasn’t exactly wrong.
“Well our idiot gene-mates can alloy it with things, somehow.” I thought aloud. “There must be a trick.” It was irritating that I hadn’t already learned it, but then I’d had a fairly narrow education. Already I’d stepped off the rails of my lunatic mother’s teachings just by recalling the properties of various modern alloys, having learned that much from my sporadic interests and rapid googling-habits rather than any proper teachings.
Fuck, what I wouldn’t have done for some internet access. Even just an hour, I’d have the city wrapped around my pinkie by the 50th minute.
Beam, however, seemed to have other, pettier concerns.
“Did you just call the human race your gene-mates?” He frowned. I ignored the irrelevant question, focusing instead on the more pressing concern.
“Beam, concentrate, how do we make this work if we can’t generate the heat needed to melt our products?”
“We don’t.” He frowned. “Right?”
Was he right? No, I decided.
“Have you ever heard that modern furnaces are all made of tungsten?” I asked him. He shook his head, as well he should. “Me neither.” I concurred. “I’ve not heard that they’re made of anything particularly special at all. Which tells me that the trick here isn’t just finding a more heat-resistant material.”
If it was, we were fucked. I didn’t know how much tungsten was in the air, but I knew that I’d probably have visibly aged before gathering enough to assemble something as big as even a grain of sand, let alone proper industrial equipment.
But it couldn’t be that, could it? I was getting distracted, focusing on irrelevant details, what mattered here was whether I could coin a way of heating something up regardless of container material. How might that be done?
Well, obviously my one major advantage was that the air inside my furnace wouldn’t all be a uniform temperature. Particularly, the space near its centre could be a lot hotter than at its edges, which in turn would likely be cooler than the metal walls. As heat differential increased, convection and conduction both shot up as well. This was essentially why holding your hand against a 300 kelvin piece of metal for 1 second was a lot less painful than holding it against a 3,000 kelvin piece for 0.1 seconds. It also meant that cooling down the furnace itself would cause heat to be sapped away from the air within ever faster.
But how fast? Was there a point at which we’d have the coals burning so fast, the fire flooded with so much oxygen, that there’d be no time for all the excess energy to get dragged away into the metal?
I couldn’t know. That was annoying, and unexpected. Usually I just intuited things about the world without even meaning to, but not, it seemed, today. And I didn’t have the knowledge required to sidestep the failure of nature’s gifts.
I did have the means to find out, though. The slow way. The practical way. I smiled, thinking of how I’d almost melted a crater into my warehouse floor experimenting with those coals the other day, and began to explain to Beam what exactly we’d need to do things the Fun way.