The following day, Lori found herself sitting alone at her table, staring at an empty bench opposite her. A part of her had expected this happening, and that part was nodding in satisfaction at being right. The rest wondered if she'd have to get her own food, which… uh, actually, where would she get her food? Except for holidays, she'd never really gotten her own food, so she wasn't sure how it was done…

Her bench shifted, and she glanced sideways to find Shanalorre helping her cousin sit down. Once she was properly seated, the little girl promptly folded her arms on the table, lay down her head, and went back to sleep.

"Is something wrong with your cousin?" Lori said.

"She's just hard to wake up in the morning sometimes," Shanalorre said as she glanced towards the other table. Lori didn't know what she was looking at, but whatever it was, it seemed to satisfy the other Dungeon Binder. She sat down next to her cousin instead of joining the children. "Thank you for allowing the children to visit their parents, Great Binder. I'm sure everyone will appreciate it."

"I don't see why," Lori said, "but I leave that matter to you and Rian."

Shanalorre nodded solemnly. "Should Lord Rian not arrive in a timely manner, do you wish me to get the food for us?"

"…"

"I'll take that as a yes, just in case."

Thankfully, Rian arrived before breakfast started, his plank in hand, but from the way some people were standing up and heading towards the kitchen it seemed about to. He seemed to be more cheerful than usual, his gait more energetic, his smile wider as he sat down on the bench in front of Lori. "Mornin', your Bindership. Looks like a nice day today."

Lori leaned forward and sniffed the air suspiciously.

"I took a bath! And washed my hands. From now on, can we assume I've done both when necessary?"

"In my experience… no."

"Well, how long before your experiences change?"

"We'll see."

Rian sighed. "Here's hoping it's sometime soon." He shook his head, then glanced towards the kitchen. "I'll get breakfast then. What fruits do you want?"

"Pink lady and golden bud," Lori said.

"Mican and hairy blueball," Shanalorre said. "And Yoshka will have the same."

"Got it, your Binderships."

By the time he came back, the three women had arrived, their hair still mildly damp from the baths. Umu sat down gingerly, her faced tinged pink, a smile on her face. Riz's smile was somewhere between serene and self-satisfied, while Mikon was humming happily to herself as she sat next to Umu and put an arm around the other weaver's shoulders. The blonde tried to shrug off the arm, but Mikon put it back, and Umu seemed to just give up and let it stay there.

The three of them seemed satisfied to just sit there, the quiet punctuated by a little girl's not-quite snoring as Rian came back with four bowls of food, a platter of bread, and another bowl full of fruits. "Good morning Umu, Mikon, Riz," he greeted as Lori picked a bowl of stew, took some bread for herself, and got her fruit. "You three stay here, I'll get your breakfast."

"Rian… wait, isn't it…" Umu began as Shanalorre started waking her cousin for breakfast.

"No, no, let him go," Mikon said quietly. "He obviously wants to. Auntie says sometimes you just have to let your man have his way with silly little things."

The blonde's interjection died as Rian hurried off to get more food for them. As Shanalorre grabbed two of the bowls and some bread for herself and her cousin, who was rubbing her eyes and starting to smile blearily, Riz casually took the last bowl of stew, bread and fruit and started eating. Umu didn't seem to notice, but Mikon looked amused at the boldness.

Lori was halfway done with her bowl of stew when Rian came back with food for himself and the other two women. He also looked amused at seeing Riz eating but said nothing, simply putting down the second batch of food down with a cheerful, "Breakfast is here."

He sat down between Riz and Umu—who had moved apart when he'd arrived—and took the last bowl, remaining bread and fruit for himself with a smile. There was a rather pleasant lull—not silence, not with the rest of the dining hall around them—as they all ate.

"So," Rian said, "ready to go to the smithy after breakfast?"

"I don't see if it's really needed anymore," Lori said. "The first two prototypes have been quite satisfactory."

"I'll take your word for it on the second prototype, but shouldn't we at least explore an option that's easier to mass produce? The two prototypes needed skilled workers to make, and took two, three days to make. Sure, the process of making them will likely go faster with proper tools and experience, but if this works, it'll be as simple as melting the metal and sprinkling the samples on it to embed them until the metal cools solid. That could potentially let us make several at a time with minimal skill, and mass production reduces costs through economies of scale."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"You don't even know if it will work yet," Lori pointed out as she started peeling the yellow skin off her golden bud.

Rian shrugged, chewing and swallow his mouthful of food before replaying. "I'm optimistic, and what data we've gathered says it should work. Besides, that's why we're testing it first. If it doesn't work… well, back to the drawing plank." He dipped a piece of bread into his stew and put that in his mouth.

Lori sighed. "Well, I suppose a method that's easier to mass produce has merit… but I don't intend to continue on with this line of inquiry beyond this testing phase. Once I finish my experiments with glass—"

"Don't you mean start your experiments with glass?"

"Once I finish my experiments with glass, I'll be discontinuing the current line of inquiry utilizing metal."

"Given we don't know how long that will take, and given we'll need a way to keep warm next winter, I still think this will be worth pursuing. Besides, the information might still be useful, even if not immediately."

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "Yes, yes. We're doing it, aren't we?" She frowned at him.

"What?"

"I'm surprised that you're actually managing to keep eating."

Rian glanced down at his food, then shrugged. "Don't tell Yllian, but conversation with him isn't exactly interesting enough to distract me from my food."

––––––––––––––––––

After breakfast, they met with the smiths.

Well, they met with the smiths after Lori went to get a glass bowl of white Iridescence samples. She needed fresh samples that weren't too finely ground, so that they'd be a little visible against the copper. The samples she came back with were about the dimensions of the rough grains of salt they had in storage, with a few larger pieces, just in case. Then they had met with the smiths.

Normally, the crucible with the copper to be melted would be placed in a small, sealed furnace designed to hold in heat. While the furnace in the forge could get very hot, it was meant to get metal red-hot so it could be worked and shaped, not to melt metal on a regular basis.

Fortunately, Lori was there. The ingot of copper that they would be melting only needed to be warmed in the furnace before being placed in the crucible. Normally, a Whisperer would need a wand to claim and bind the firewisps in the hot metal, but Lori had her connection to her core for such things.

Despite this, she had to increase the heat of the ingot slowly. The crucible was ceramic and the ingot was already very hot, and while the crucible had survived being used to hold molten copper before, a sudden increase in temperature might cause it to break from the sudden extreme temperature change. A gradual rise in heat for the ingot was needed. As the ingot's temperature rose higher and higher, Lori felt a change in the copper's wisps. Among the firewisps, earthwisps began to appear. From what she'd read, that meant that the metal was close to liquefying.

The earthwisps disappeared as the ingot of copper melted into molten metal. It wasn't something she'd been able to observe when she had first smelted the ore into copper back in River's Fork. Here in her own demesne however, she'd been able to perceive the moment when the metal could be manipulated by earthwisps because of her connection to the core. Supposedly, the same would happen with glass once an appropriately high temperature was reached.

The crucible now contained molten copper with some slag floating on the liquid's surface. The presence of slag always offended her sensibilities. The ingot had been pure copper, the crucible had been cleaned, so why was there slag?

Unfortunately, it was an unavoidable part of the process. The smith who was handling the crucible used tools like a large metal spoon—it might very well have been just a spoon—to scoop up the slag from the surface of the molten copper, dumping them to the side. Slag contained substances that could be recovered, and with enough slag they'd be able to recover some of the copper that had gotten scooped up. There was already a little jar labeled 'copper slag' waiting for the slag to cool down enough to be moved into it.

For all his enthusiasm, Rian was standing well back, perhaps from a healthy respect of the delicacy of dealing with molten metal, but more likely because he found it extremely hot. His face was certainly sweating. Lori wasn't as far back as he was, but she stayed out of the blacksmith's way, keeping the copper molten at a distance as the smith picked up the crucible with a long-handled pair of tongs. Carefully, the smith poured some of the molten copper into a ceramic mold, which had been warmed on the forge to ensure there was no moisture in it that could cause a steam explosion, no matter how small. No one wanted molten metal droplets in the air.

Lori watched as a thin layer of molten copper spread across the bottom of the mold, making a second binding of firewisps to keep the copper in the mold hot as the smith set aside the crucible and put it back inside the furnace, sealing it back with a stone wheel as a lid. It was less to keep the copper warm and more to keep it out of the way. Despite the radiance from the bindings anchored to the ceiling, which gave the smithy a bright illumination, the molten copper clearly glowed a bright orange.

"Samples," Rian said quietly, handing her the glass bowl of white Iridescence and a wooden spoon.

Lori nodded in acknowledgement as she took the bowl from him. Using the wooden spoon, she scooped up the white Iridescence, careful to take pieces that weren't too large. The copper in the mold wasn't all that thick—about two chiyustri or so, from whatshe could tell through her awareness of wisps—so the samples should be much thicker. The idea was to have them float slightly on the molten metal, after all.

She dissolved the binding of firewisps so they wouldn't accidentally interact with the samples. Carefully, Lori gently tapped the white Iridescence onto the metal, watching as the grains—

—sank beneath the surface of the metal and disappeared?

"Huh?" Rian said, squinting down at the glowing liquid. "What happened? I can't see very well."

Lori frowned as well. "Perhaps the samples were too small. Let me try again." She carefully scooped up some bigger pieces of white Iridescence, aware that the copper was slowly cooling. Moving slowly, she sprinkled the sample onto the molten copper.

She, Rian and now the smith looked down into the mold with its thin layer of molten copper. The surface was bright glowing orange and unmarred with anything floating on top of it like slag.

"Lori," Rian said slowly. "Do you have a really big piece in the bowl?"

Wordlessly, Lori used her fingers to pluck a particularly piece of white Iridescence that she had included because she had thought the copper pour would be thicker. It was a triangular fragment at least a yustri thick and half that wide.

"Could you drop that in?"

Lori put the sample on the spoon and carefully used the spoon to drop the sample into the still-molten metal.

The sample sank beneath the surface and disappeared.

"Well… shit," Rian said blandly. "There goes that idea."