"Alright Aria, here are all the new metal combinations." And Eryk waves over all the metals lined up neatly on the floor between us. "Sorry it took some extra time," he shrugs. "Had to bring these over to Ebbin so he could test them in more detail and tell me what he thought." I bob my head at his explanation. I already know from what he said on Arcaday that the mixture definitely matters, so I had to take extra time considering how to work that into the names anyway.

Now, I look over the small lumps of metal, about a quarter the size of a normal ingot, seventeen pieces in total. However, some are larger than the others, for some reason. Apart from that, the differences are easy to see over the whole line, even if there isn't that much change from one to the next.

"On this end, we have a sample of pure copper," Eryk says, pointing to the far left one. "And here, tin," he adds with another wave to the far right. "So, I did it like this. In the middle, we have what we were making, equal portions of tin and copper." I nod at that, it's simple enough. "Then moving out, I tried to shift the mixture to one end or the other, about ten percent at a time. It was..." he rolls his head, "kind of hit and miss, getting the measurements without any good tools for it, but I think I managed alright."

"Mmm..." I nod slowly as I consider how hard that probably was, just going by eye. Or maybe he did a lot of little scoops? I'm sure he's already considering how to make better measurement tools for later.

"So here, we have a fifty-fifty ratio, then sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, and so on, to ninety-ten." He waves a hand over each as he moves outward, but I immediately see the issue.

"Wait, that only covers the nine in the middle." The ends are pure copper and tin, so, "What about the other six samples?" Looking them over, the three on each end, closest to the pure samples of either tin or copper look... well, pretty much exactly like the pure metal, I think.

"Those ones are... Well, more of an experiment, I guess. I tried mixing in smaller and smaller amounts of metals to see what happens at the extremes, when they approach one hundred percent purity. I'm sure my measurements aren't great, but I tried for about five, three, and one percent of the other metal."

"Ohh..." That makes a lot of sense. We don't really know how mixing them creates the different properties we've seen, so testing what happens with just a tiny bit of another metal mixed in might help with that.

"As it turns out, pretty much anything below five percent doesn't have any effect. At least as far as Ebbin was able to find. There could still be something, but it's too minimal to see. My shoddy measurements probably didn't help."

"Oh." So... that won't help. Darn...

"Ok, so..." He takes one more look across them, rubbing his chin in thought. "I'll start in the middle. We have our usual half and half. As you know, durability isn't great, but it's extremely lightweight. Ebbin tested it against titanium, and it actually did beat it. Now, moving toward the tin end, we found that the hardness and durability suffered somewhat as we increased the tin content, but the flexibility improved, and it actually got even lighter than the equal mixture."

Even lighter? That could be really useful, couldn't it? "However," he quickly adds, "that only worked up to a point. The samples of sixty-forty was best and seventy-thirty wasn't bad, so I'm guessing the peak is a bit above sixty percent tin." As he mentions them, he points at the two samples, and I notice that they're also the largest ones in the whole line, about twice the size of most of the others. They're bigger, but also lighter...? "After that however, the metal changes drastically."

"Oh?" It's that big of a difference?

"Look here." He points over the far end of the line, the three samples ranging from eighty to ninety five percent tin. "Everything beyond seventy percent reduced not just the hardness and durability of the metal, but the melting point as well. Watch this." Then he takes a hammer from a crate, and aims it at the sample that should be ninety percent tin.

Eryk doesn't hit it all that hard, but the loud clanging in the tiny room forces me to cover my ears anyway. He takes a few swings before setting the hammer aside, and letting me watch as...

My mouth falls open. Is it... melting...? Even as I watch, the lump of metal slowly but surely deforms, sinking down into a puddle on the stone floor.

"Fascinating, right?" He has an odd grin on his face, but I'm not sure why. "This mixture has a melting point low enough that a person's body heat could nearly melt it. Rubbing it between your hands would probably do the trick. Or you know, hitting it with a hammer."

"Wow..." Wait, hitting things creates heat?

"Unfortunately, I have no idea what the application of something like this would be," he shrugs sadly. "It's metal that will just melt on a hot summer day, so it's not like it could be used for any sort of construction. Maybe someone will come up with something one day, but for now, it's probably not too useful. Anyway, onto the good part." And he waves to the other half of the line.

"Here are the tests that favored copper. As you can see from the color alone, the more copper, the more of a golden bronze hue the metal takes on." Just looking at them, I point out one of the samples, and he nods immediately. "Yes, that one is the closest match to the sword from Eschalle. Eighty percent copper."

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Moving back to the whole line, he explains further. "We found that the more copper added, the greater the result's resistance to rust, and the more surface hardness. It even gained some durability too. It lost flexibility and the weight increased, but it's still a clear improvement over iron in nearly every category." Then he indicates to the few pieces on the end.

"We saw the best structural properties with eighty percent copper, after that, the gains in hardness and durability didn't offset the losses in weight and flexibility. It starts to get too rigid and brittle. Then like I said before, at ninety five percent and above, the mixture reverted to be effectively indistinguishable from pure copper."

"Mmm..." I slowly look over the whole line, considering everything Eryk explained. So, the ratio of the metals can create all sorts of different results, some with properties that don't seem to have anything to do with either of the metals that go into them. But at the same time, some of those properties, like the light and lightning they created inside mana fields, seem directly related to what they're made of.

Looking at it now, it's clear that back when we saw the half and half combination and I thought 'add more lightning,' I actually wasn't too far off. It's just I needed to add more copper, not durite.

But... who's to say if that pattern holds for all the other metal combinations out there? As we've already seen, nothing about tin or copper have any reason to reduce a metal's melting point to near room temperature when it's mostly tin. But then that goes away entirely if it's almost all tin. However this actually works, there's clearly more going on than what we're able to observe ourselves.

"...Alright," I finally say. "I think I get it. I'm not seeing any patterns we can use for figuring out what other metals to combine, so we're probably going to have to just go through all of them and see what we get."

Eryk frowns a little. "Hmm, I was hoping you would see more than me, but I guess not."

I shrug. "Maybe I'll figure something out when I have more information to work with." I'm not expecting much, but maybe.

"Alright, good enough," Eryk concludes. "Now, what about your part? Have you come up with a good way to name all of these?"

"I think so. Well, I have two ideas, actually. First, I was thinking that since not every combination will actually be anything useful, or that you'd want to sell, we could probably give the main ones you sell their own unique names. Like, you know how you said the sixty percent tin mixture would be the best version of the cheap, super lightweight type? We could give that one its own name, while all the other ratios use a name that just follows a pattern so we can tell them apart."

Grinning immediately, Eryk goes, "Yeah, that sounds great," and ruffles my hair. "We can definitely come up with names for some of them, as long as we don't need to do every mix under the sun. So, how about the second part?"

"Right, so, this one is... a lot more complicated, obviously." He gives an agreeing gesture as I work my way into explaining. "So, there were issues with different metals having similar names, and with how some of them would sound in Ternian, and a whole bunch of other problems too. So I was thinking, we could use different names for them when we put them together." It's clear he doesn't get what I mean, so I quickly elaborate.

"Ok, so you know how tin and titanium both start with 'ti?' I was thinking we could use 'Po' for tin. If we base the names of the metals on their properties, like how they interact with mana instead of their actual names, then the letter combinations won't immediately give away which ones are used in our mixtures."

"Oh, wow." With one hand rubbing along his jaw in thought, Eryk mumbles, "That's really smart." Then his look falters. "Wait, 'Po?' Why not 'Li' for light?"

"Ahh, that. Lightning also starts with those letters, so I went with 'positive' instead."

"Positive?"

I quickly wave off the question. "It has to do with some specifics of how light mana works." That's not a lie, but what really gave me the idea was the way those huge diagrams in the rail unit building used pluses and minuses to describe light and dark mana as positive and negative. But I can't really mention that.

"Anyway, there's more. We need a way to say how much of the metals are used in the mixtures. I had two thoughts in mind. First, whichever of the two metals made up the majority would go first in the name. And second, we follow each with 'Type' and a number, for the percentage of the main metal."

"Mmm..." I'm not sure if Eryk gets it, so I quickly give an example.

"So, you know the best lightweight metal you mentioned? It would be sixty percent tin, forty percent copper. That would be 'Pocu Type Sixty.' We only need to give the first percentage, but we could include the other too if we really wanted. Basically, I chose this pattern because it will work for every combination we try with it." Also, I think it sounds cool, but I'm not going to mention that...

Eryk nods a few times. "Yes, that's very well thought out. Just one thing. You said 'pocu,' not 'poli?' Why is copper 'cu?'"

"Ah, that. 'Pocu.' Comes from 'positive,' and 'current.'"

"Current?"

"Durite makes lightning mana, so it gets 'lightning.' Copper makes a lightning current, so it gets 'current.'"

"Huh, fair enough," he shrugs.

I let him consider that briefly, before clearing my throat. "So, the only other thing to left to consider is when we have combinations of three or more metals. I... haven't really gotten there yet. For those, we could probably put a number between each part, or just use four or six numbers with each pair telling what the percentage of each metal is. I don't know, we have a ton of pair-combinations to do already, so we can probably figure that out when we get there."

"Yeah, that should be fine," he chuckles and waves it off. "You're right, we have a ton of work ahead of us. I really need to start stepping up my production of test samples..."

While he gets distracted by that for a moment, I let out a long, shallow sigh.

"Something wrong, Aria?" Eryk suddenly asks.

"No," I show a small, awkward grin. "It's just that naming things is hard."

"Haha, yeah, he laughs, and rubs my head cheerfully. "Naming things is hard."