After dinner—and beating Mikon in chatrang again—Lori took her chatrang board back to her room, then accompanied Rian—and the other three—back to his house to get the notes. The lightwisps she'd anchored to the outside of the house illuminated the area around it, but the insides were completely dark with the shutters closed, save for the weak glow of coals peeking out under banked ashes in the fireplace.

Rian was in the middle of pulling out the rock she had given him with the lightwisps anchored to it when Lori had simply made a binding of lightwisps in the air. She anchored the binding to the frame just inside the door as she looked around and spotted the stack of stone tablets on the stone table. It was in two large piles on opposite ends of the table, with a single stone tablet between them.

"Can't you leave just one?" Rian pleaded. "I haven't finished that one yet! Just let me go through it so I won't lose my place!"

Lori sighed. Well, she wasn't cruel. "Fine, you can keep that one tonight. Get it back to me tomorrow."

Rian sighed in relief. Fortunately, he wisely chose not to push it. "Your generosity and munificence is boundless, your Bindership."

"I'm fairly certain both those words mean the same thing."

"It was important, so I repeated it."

Lori rolled her eyes, but her attention wasn't really on him. Instead, she subtly sniffed the air. There was a mild trace of woodsmoke, but the chimney was doing its job and channeling most of that out of the house. There was none of the thick stuffiness of a confined space that a human had been living and sweating in, and there was none of that smell…

She made a note to air out her room sometime soon, it was smelling a bit stuffy and lived-in lately.

Lori carefully stacked up the tablets, making sure not to pile it up too high lest the tablets crack under their own weight, as Umu and Mikon entered the room. Wait, did Riz no longer live here? No, those were four sets of bedrolls on the bed, which Mikon had started laying out to make the bed…

"Where's Riz?" Lori asked Rian, who had gotten his plank and stacked the tablets on in. He was moving slowly, and clearly trying to read the notes as he did so.

Rian blinked as he looked up, his reading interrupted. "Riz…? Oh, she's probably doing a shift at the Um, to make up for the time she's been in River's Fork. She'll be in later."

Ah, yes. Riz was one of those who managed to Um and made sure the people who used it also cleaned it once a week, wasn't she? Lori shrugged. "Well, come on, help me bring these back so you can get to bed."

Rian sighed.

"Oh, stop complaining. You can keep them all night once they're on bone and less likely to break when dropped."

"Promise?"

"Rian, this childishness is starting to be disturbing. Did you take too many hits to the head during all those fistfights?"

He snorted derisively. Lori hadn't known he was actually capable of that. "What kind of amateur do you think I am? Does this look like the nose of someone who can't protect his head?"

"It looks a little squashed in and pushed up."

"All right, bad example. But no, I haven't taken hits to the head. A bit too late to worry about that, don't you think?"

She supposed it was. "I suppose it is. Come, we need to get these back."

"You know, you're going to have me transcribe these anyway, why not just leave these here?"

Lori paused, and gave him a bland look. "Well, if you insist. So you're willing to spend all of tomorrow transcribing these notes into bone instead of assisting me with trying to use copper as a glass substitute, rather than waiting a few days?"

"…let's get these up to your room."

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"Shanalorre," Lori said the next morning at breakfast.

"Yes, Binder Lolilyuri?"

"Could you please get Karina for me? I need to speak to her."

Shanalorre nodded. "Yoshka, stay here and behave, all right? Don't make trouble for Binder Lolilyuri."

"Muruburgrebu…" Yoshka managed to vocalize from where she lay with her arms folded on the surface of the table to cradle her head.

The younger Dungeon Binder nodded in approval before rising from her seat and walking off to find the brat. The brat sat at the table behind Lori often enough that Lori had expected to find her there this morning, but the brat had been absent.

Lori stared at the still-empty bench in front of her, ignoring the sounds of Shanalorre's cousin trying to go back to sleep. It was still early, but Rian, at the very least, was usually there by this time in the morning. Had something, perhaps, caused him to stay up later than usual?

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

…

She was both mildly nauseated and self-satisfied at the thought.

"Wiz Lori?"

Shaking her head to clear her flow of thoughts, Lori turned on the bench to better look at the brat, folding on to do so. "Karina," she said. "I notice you're still paying your taxes with seels."

The brat blinked, before nodding uncertainly.

"Given the work you're doing in River's Fork, you don't have to provide any further taxes while you're doing that," Lori said. "What you're doing is more than sufficient."

Karina blinked. "Huh?"

"Binder Lolilyuri is saying that as long as you're catching food for River's Fork, you don't have to give her any seels," Shanalorre said. Yes, that was what Lori had said. Why did she need to repeat it?

"Oh!" the brat said. She frowned. "Don't you like seel? I can try getting you some chokers…"

"No, that will not be necessary," Lori said. "I like seel just fine. This is simply so that you will not be distracted from your work by other concerns. River's Fork needs all the food it can get, since they're not very good with it. Understood?"

The brat nodded slowly, still frowning. While she could understand what she was being told, she clearly didn't understand why. Well, as long as she obeyed.

"Very good, then," Lori said. "You may go back to your breakfast."

Giving Lori a quick bow, the brat walked away, still frowning.

Shanalorre looked after her, her expression shifting slightly from her usual smooth calm, before turning to deal with the table full of children—and two Mikon-faced women—behind Lori. She usually sat with them during lunch, since that was when the table had the most people because of all the other children that joined them, but made sure they were well at all times. Only when she found nothing amiss did she turn to sit between her cousin and Lori again.

Rian finally arrived then. "Good morning your Bindership, Binder Shanalorre," he said cheerfully.

"Rian. Did you enjoy reading last night?"

"Yes, actually. Could I…?"

"You'll give it back to me tonight. You can have it back in a few days when you start transcribing."

"Well, it was worth a try. So, looking forward to later?"

Lori eyed him, but he didn't seem any different. But then, she wasn't exactly sure how he'd look different after the three had finally gotten their way. Though she supposed the lack of obvious difference might, in itself, be an indicator, since she could always tell with her mothers, to her regret. "Yes, I suppose. Though after giving the matter some thought, it occurs to me we might need to perform multiple iterations."

"That's a given," Rian said, shrugging. "After all, we're basically trying to make a replacement component from scratch since the necessary material is… well, not unavailable, but not currently workable. It's only natural it won't go right the first time. This is more like attempted application than research and study. Or rather, attempted application that doubles as research and study, since we haven't seen how the white stuff reacts to hot metal."

Lori tilted her head. She supposed that was a point, though she couldn't think of what sort of reaction that might be. But then, that was why thought experiments were a terrible, terrible research method whose delusional adherents had been removed from the face of the world.

She hated it when he had a point, ugh.

Still, the reminder was necessary. She'd been thinking that they'd simply have the smiths somehow imbed the white Iridescence in copper, which… well, showed a distinct lack of thought on her part. She'd worked in metal workshops and smithies, she knew, generally, what they were capable of, had a decent idea of how copper was worked…

"What, exactly, are we going to ask the smiths to be making?" Lori found herself saying.

"We're trying to replace glass with metal, copper, as a means of—"

"Yes, yes, I know that," she said, waving a hand. "I mean what exactly what are we going to have them make? As in, physically manufacture."

Rian opened his mouth.

Rian paused.

Rian closed his mouth slowly.

…

"You know what I find helps in these situations?" he said eventually.

Lori gave him a flat look.

"Something to draw with. Much easier to develop something that way."

Lori kept giving him a flat look.

"I'll go get my plank."

––––––––––––––––––

"—then we hammer it tight to hold everything in place."

"That… might work, but I don't think we'll be able to use glue, at least at the moment. The only adhesives we have that we might be able to use as glue are flour paste, dried honey, boiled tree sap and the bone glue the carpenters boil. And I don't think any of them can take such a beating. Might be best if we layer it between two sheets, crimp the edges, and then slowly work our way inward." Rian drew a visual representation of the ideas as he spoke, though Lori could grasp what he meant. "We'll probably have a few samples gets misplaced, but most will probably be where we put them."

Lori considered the alteration, then nodded. "It seems doable. Add it to the list at a higher priority."

It… wasn't a very long list. At the bottom had been Rian suggestion that they take molten copper, sprinkle white Iridescence on it—which he theorized would float because its mass was far less than that of copper and wouldn't dissolve because it wasn't going into water—and then press a sheet of copper down onto the sample and copper so that the metal would fuse together with the white Iridescence trapped between them.

That had gone on the list because Lori couldn't actually think of points where the idea was unsound, or any instances were they would lack the tools to try it. Much higher up the list was the permutation where they put the white Iridescence into the molten copper, allow it to embed as the copper cooled, and then put the other sheet of copper on top of it. That should really have removed the item at the bottom of the list, but Rian had pointed out, in that too-cheerful way he had when he was being annoying on purpose, that they might need a more secure and watertight seal to prevent the white Iridescence from getting wet.

As Lori reluctantly let the item stay, she noted to herself that Rian clearly had a fetish about substances at very high, dangerous temperatures.

…

Still better than his voting fetish.

As Rian noted down the idea on one side of the plank, a bowl was shoved in front of him by an exasperated Mikon.

"I know better than to interfere with you writing down what her Bindership has you write," the weaver said, "but as soon as you're done with that, you're eating, Rian." Riz and Umu both nodded in agreement.

He blinked at the interruption, then stared at the bowl as if he'd completely forgotten what it was. He glanced up, blinking again when he saw the half-empty bowl in front of Lori and the spoon in her hand.

"Honestly Rian, this is a bad habit of yours," Lori said, dipping her spoon into her bowl as she spoke.