Beam POV: Day 76

Current Wealth: 168 gold 47 silver 29 copper

Solitaire was concerned, I could tell that much from the fine, subtle behavioural patterns I’d learned to read in him over our long years of friendship. The slight arching of an eyebrow, the twisting of a lip, the tightness in his jaw. And, if one were particularly observant, the fact that he was pacing around swearing at everything that moved.

“Shitting metallurgy.” He snarled, to no-one in particular. “Thousands of years we’ve been using it, about time to swap it out for something else, I say!”

I did my best to tune the rambling out, deciding to just let him tire himself with it rather than try to engage. Ardin, perhaps understandably, was less at ease with it.

“And yet here you are, relying on primitive metallurgy to do yer amazin’ ends.” He growled, shooting a glance back at Solitaire, then quickly focusing back upon his work. Upon my work.

We were grinding metal ores to bits, ready to blast them in our new furnace. It hadn’t taken Ardin long to create the thing, a nice, big iron chamber with an additional compartment around the outside to pump and circulate water. Cooling the container while hell itself coiled around inside. We weren’t entirely sure what level of heat it could survive, though, and until we were, we’d be taking no chances. Thus the grinding. Make things powdery and dust, and they reacted faster, demanded lower temperatures. With luck, saved us all one giant furnace.

It was that need for luck, more than the need for work, that seemed to be needling Solitaire so much.

“Here I am.” He agreed with Ardin, practically spitting the words. “Taking things one step at a time, I suppose. Not like we ever moved past metal at all, to begin with, it’ll keep being useful for centuries more. Sorry, Ardin.”

He flashed a glance at the blacksmith, who caught it and nodded in silence, seeming mollified at least as he continued grinding. Conversation was fleeting past that point, interrupted by sporadic blasts of focus on our end as we all hurried to finish our menial work and test out the furnace. Ardin, above all of us, seemed eager for that.

Finally the time came to test our creations, and we all watched eagerly as Solitaire concentrated on the coals and fires, soon conjuring a roaring, snarling mound of flame within our furnace.

One of the largest issues, of course, had been in storing the molten material within something that melted at a higher temperature than it did. We couldn’t. So instead we’d all built the furnace to tilt, and rested our metals in a trench at its bottom. The hope was that we could pour whatever mixtures we ended up with out of it, if not we were all in for an annoying time scraping the stuff free.

“How long will it take?” I asked Solitaire. He paused, then shrugged.

“No idea, I don’t know the specific heat capacity of molybdenum. Give it a few minutes?”

As reassuring as that was, I didn’t feel reassured in the slightest, and found myself chewing a lip in thought as we all stood around the furnace and watched. By the time it was finally ready for us to open it up, I felt the tension reaching a crescendo. Half expecting some big explosion to erupt from the interior as we tilted it over and unlatched the door.

Even kept surrounded by circulating water to drag away the excess heat, it was hot to the touch. Hot enough to feel through the pair of specially-thick leather and wool gloves I’d worn for just such an issue. I tilted, the contents poured, and all of us watched.

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It wasn’t liquid, and we practically deflated at the knowledge. Solitaire was the first to notice why that was mistaken, and Ardin was just a moment behind him.

“The powder.” I gasped, as it finally dawned on me. I saw it all only as the stuff cooled enough that it was no longer glowing, homogenous, luminescent white fading to orange, then red, then nothing at all. The steaming metal was different, its shades changed, its substance transformed.

Notably, it was an it. Singular, one powder, now, where we’d added in a mixture. Solitaire laughed.

“Powder metallurgy.” He noted. “I’ve heard the term, never actually bothered to google what it was. I’d guess this is it though.”

He sounded uncharacteristically confused, and I resisted the urge to spoil his good mood by teasing him for it. He’d been on edge since Corvan had started working for us, very on edge, this little triumph might’ve been the first relief he’d gotten from the fact.

Solitaire did strange things while under pressure, typically resulting in a lot of breaking and not very much mending afterwards.

“Powder metallurgy.” Ardin mirrored, thoughtful as Solitaire reached for the metal. Solitaire looked thoughtful, too, but in that special Solitaire sort of way, that usually led to him doing something that would’ve been stupid even for a non-genius. I’d long since learned to keep him from such tactical blunders, and slapped his hand aside.

“Is it cool?” I snapped, glaring at him. He met my eye, glaring back harder.

“Should be.” He replied. “It took 28 seconds to lose enough heat to go from orange to dull red in its blackbody emissions, and that was 53 seconds earlier. Would you like to see my maths?”

It stung, a bit, having him jab that at me. He knew full well I couldn’t make sense of it, but before I could say anything Ardin piped up.

“Still hot, idiot.” He grunted, eying Solitaire sidelong. “Too hot for most people at least.”

Solitaire scooped a pinch of the metal powder up, sneering.

“I’m not most people, am I, I’ll have you know these fingers were tough enough to go through an orc’s e-ah piss and shit.” He dropped the powder, then shook remnants from his fingers where it still clung, cursing more.

“Ahhhh shit, wank, wanky shitty shit wank, fuck.” He breathed, waving his hand to and fro, as if he hoped to make the pain lose its grip and fall off. He didn’t succeed, but where he failed in relieving his own agony, he put on quite the show for Ardin and I. We watched, grinning to each other as he did his little dance.

“Stop smiling.” He snapped, glaring almost as hotly as the metal, now. “It’s not funny.”

“Can I see your maths now?” I asked him, trying not to laugh as I did. “I just suddenly got the strangest feeling that, somehow, it might possibly be slightly flawed.”

Solitaire might have cut through glass with the look he gave me after that, but it only bounced off my smile like so many other things before it. Ardin looked even less daunted, and actually took things a step further by scooping up more of the powder himself.

“Hm.” The smith noted. “Looks like my fingers will go through an orc’s eye, too.”

“Bite a cock.” Solitaire snapped, kneeling down and taking some of the metal himself to examine it. “Now shut up and let me study this, I’d like to learn as much as is possible about the shit we’re about to be wrapping around our friends, particularly how heat resistant it is.”

A silence fell over us at that, Solitaire’s from concentration, mine from the memory of a fallen giant and nostrils filled by the scent of seared flesh. Ardin, clearly, was quick enough to read a room when it was as obviously flavoured by emotion as this one. He kept quiet too, and we all just sat in wait.

Fortunately, Solitaire was a fast bastard. He didn’t take long to be nodding to himself in satisfaction.

“Right, that’s all I’ll learn from it as powder, now we need to make it a single solid to do some proper stress-tests.”

Another silence, this time broken by Ardin.

“How do we smith it?” He asked. “We couldn’t melt it, and this powder metallurgy doesn’t seem to fuse things, eh?”

Solitaire paused, glowering suddenly, but before he could reply a new voice cut in.

We all turned to see Corvan eying us.

“Well.” The old man leered. “I happen to know quite an effective way of generating heat, if you’re willing to negotiate for it.”