It took far longer to search the rooms than it did to clear them. The piles of furniture components in the hallway were impressive. They spent about four hours clearing rooms before they took a break. They headed back to the gallery to cook a meal.
Todd carried back two badgers and a porcupine for lunch. Sarah started packing her porcupine carcasses into the set of storage shelves behind the inscription wall in the center of the gallery. Companion stood watch as she worked.
Ellen was closely examining the handful of stones they found. She did not leave these in the hallways like the larger furniture components, but carefully carried them back to the gallery in gathering bags. She was sitting on the floor at the furniture set just inside the doors. There were seven furniture sets in the gallery. Three on each side of a raised center portion. The seventh was on that raised center. It was arranged to look at a freestanding wall that held a complex inscription. Behind that wall was the inventory access and storage shelves. Kai sat down on the chair in the first cluster. Alex collapsed down on the sofa beside him.
“You're going to have to prioritize which pieces you want to take back,” Ellen said to Alex.
“That’s easy enough,” Alex replied. “Glass, ceramic, copper, wood, in that order. Large table tops are a priority. I brought this baby to carry them.” He dumped out his bag of bags to reveal a set of oddly shaped bags. He sorted through them and came up with one with an extremely wide opening that narrowed down to something close to a regular carrying bag.
“Those are my bags!” Ellen exclaimed, recognizing her and Sarah’s work. “How did you get them?”
“No one ever seems to pick the bag back up after the delivery is made,” Alex commented. “This is the one we took the workbench to Enchanter with. I am hoping to get three or four of the heavy tops into it with Grandmother’s help.” Grandmother possessed the ability to pack far more into a bag than should be possible, as long as the items were integrated. She described the ability as a perk. There was a lot of discussion in the group over the maintenance period on what other perks might be possible.
“Did you bring the cart bag too?” Ellen asked, realizing that was another item she had no idea where it went. She made the huge bag to carry the large amount of material they needed for their rest upgrade experiment. The experiment was a great success and a complete failure. Ellen suspected Grandmother was still thinking about the next thing to try.
“No,” Alex responded. “I didn’t think I could carry it through the transport.” Which was confirmation that he kept it. Ellen wasn’t really that upset with Alex. She could always just make more. If she was worried about them, she would have reclaimed them at the time.
“What are all those other bags?” Ellen asked.
“They are the ones we used to take the advanced crafting tools to Chicago,” Alex explained. Three of those bags were in the back room of Ellen’s shop. They still contained advanced tools that didn’t sell in Chicago. That was confirmation in her mind that she had abandoned the empties.
“How are you going to talk Grandmother into doing your packing?” Ellen asked.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Alex said. He picked up another bag. “I’ll let her use one for the anvil,” Alex responded.
“We didn’t find an anvil,” Kai said in a confused voice.
“We will,” Ellen conceded. “Although I think I saw her tuck a loom into her gathering bag. She may not need yours.”
“Ha!” Alex responded. “I don’t believe you.” He looked thoughtful for a moment before he added, “I don’t want to believe you. Come on Kai, grab a couple bags and we'll fetch some of your potential glass scrap. We may not be able to over pack them, but they are all enchanted to lighten the load. We’ll stay close to Companion and Sarah to double the watch. You can try to convert it all while Todd finishes lunch.” Kai picked bags at random and they headed out.
They loaded up two bags of glass objects. Kai loaded the bags while Alex kept watch. Alex helped carry them back. When they returned to the gallery, Alex dropped Kai and the loaded bags at the inventory access.
Kai set each item on the intake shelf and checked if it would convert. He sorted the rejects into piles of different types. He wanted to be able to identify a worthless piece before he picked it up. Kai was surprised when he hit the first item that would convert. He decided to not put it in his inventory, instead he set it aside into another pile. He would keep the first of each type of debris separate so that he could memorize their appearance too. Scrap, which was a digital version of debris that when touched went directly into a person’s inventory, came in only a set number of designs. Kai assumed debris would be the same. He wondered why they hadn’t found any glass scrap.
He identified three different kinds of glass debris and found a total of twelve pieces convertible to scrap. It was a shockingly high number. Grandmother paid him for his demonstration of the glass craft with thirty-one pieces of scrap. It was the most he’d ever seen at the time. Kai and Alex only carried back a fraction of the broken glass they’d pulled from the rooms and stacked in the hall. The amount of scrap he was likely to see from this run made him start rethinking whether he needed to ask about sand at Seagrass.
His plan to try making glass from sand was based on recent developments in leatherworking. Until very recently all the human made leather was done with very little use of magic. It wasn’t quite the manual version used on Earth, but close. On Grandmother’s spell-buying tour of the human squares last season, a leather worker in Londontown sold them the spell to make vellum. Ellen was able to tease out from this method four spells, which when applied slightly differently, produced leather of multiple thicknesses.
The group was now working on the theory that the real thing could be substituted for the magical version in the early steps of crafting. Upon hearing this theory over the maintenance cycle, Kai looked up how glass was made on Earth. He was surprised to learn that the base method behind all glass making was to melt sand. Since glass scrap was so hard to find, he thought it was worth trying, then he couldn’t find any sand.
Kai decided he would still ask about the sand. This area was too high of a tier for him to come here on his own. Buying sand from the selkie would be a much safer method.
Todd called out that lunch was ready. Kai picked up his three debris samples and put them in one bag. He took a sample out of each of his not-convertible piles and put them in a different bag. Carrying both bags he hurried over to join the others for lunch.
The porcupine did taste odd. Companion happily consumed most of it, but Kai decided he needed to at least try it. The badger was delicious. Kai knew that was in large part because Todd was a great cook. Kai made a note to make sure he picked up any spoons he came across and give them to Todd. He thought he would try making some out of glass too.
“How did you do on the glass scrap?” Alex asked him.
“Terrific,” Kai responded. He set down his food for a moment and fished out his three samples from his bag. He sat them on the edge of the table in the center of the furniture grouping. This was the grouping directly across from the door to the food preparation area. “Those three shapes convert,” Kai said. He spilled out the other rejected samples on the floor. “These ones don’t.” He picked his food back up and returned to his meal.
Companion was sprawled out on the floor. The selkie didn’t trust the softness of the gallery’s furnishings. One of the rejected samples rolled within his reach. He picked it up and studied it. He could see that it wasn’t identical to the three pieces Kai said converted, but it wasn’t much different. Some of the rejected pieces were large odd shapes, but this one was pretty close to the same size as the winners.
Companion heaved himself up into a sitting position and scooted over to the table, where he held it up next to the closest match. “It looks about the same to me,” Companion observed. “What happens when you drop it into the furnace?” Companion was not a crafter, neither was Alex, Todd or Grandmother. The primary crafter was Ellen, at tier four she was considered a master. Sarah was primarily an enchanter, but, being Ellen’s sister, she could craft as well. Kai, at tier two was the most inexperienced of the three.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He wondered what did happen? He’d been thinking about dropping raw sand into his glass furnace, why did he not think about trying non-scrap glass?
“Ellen,” Grandmother asked, “what happens when you put a piece of iron Staging into a smelter?” Staging was Grandmother's word for anything that appeared in a room and wasn’t scrap or debris.
“I don’t know,” Ellen responded.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Do you think it damages the tool,” Alex asked, “or explodes?”
“Maybe?” Ellen responded. “I can’t recall having heard of anyone trying it.”
“Don’t tailors spin some of the raw fibers from plants in the greens into thread?” Todd asked.
“Yes,” Ellen said with certainty. “Those aren’t integrated at all. That Staging is integrated, it just isn’t coded for glass scrap.”
“Are we sure it is integrated?” Grandmother asked. “I’ve never taken Staging out of the structure. Some items found here aren’t, beyond just the biological sourced ones. Coins for instance are the metal they appear to be. If everything in here was integrated, the recordings would show all dark gray items, but they don’t. There may be nanobots in everything, but most items are mostly constructed out of exactly what they look like. Crafted items are the only thing I know that is consistently true nanomaterial.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And maybe intact components,” she added.
“What happens if you put iron scrap into the glass furnace?” Todd asked Kai.
“It turns off and you have to fish the scrap back out,” Kai said, glad he knew the answer to that one. He tried just about every kind of scrap during the lean times in Chicago.
“So, no explosions,” Todd said to Alex. Alex looked disappointed.
“I’ll get my furnace,” Kai said. He set his plate aside and went to fetch his pack. He didn’t go anywhere without his furnace. It took up the majority of the space in his pack. He gently pulled the furnace out and unwrapped it from its protective layer of leather. He set it down on the floor in the center of the group and tapped out the spell that turned it on.
Heat and light spilled from its interior. The furnace looked like a porcelain vase with a hole in the side. It was equipped with an integrated stand made out of black iron. Kai pulled two blowing tubes from a side pocket of the pack. He set them on the floor in front of the furnace, hoping they would be needed. He accepted the glass chunk from Companion and dropped it into the side. He flinched at the thought of it exploding.
There was no explosion. The furnace continued to glow. Peering into the hole in the side, Kai could see the glass chunk just laying there.
“I don’t see any change,” Kai commented. “Scrap would show signs of softening by now.” Kai thought about using the spell that made the furnace hotter.
“Well it didn’t turn off,” Ellen observed. “Maybe it takes longer? Spinning natural fiber does take longer than spinning fiber scrap.”
“I think it would take longer,” Grandmother observed. “If it is really glass, the furnace might be integrating it. Which really means replacing at least some of the original material with nanobots. That would take a lot longer than just changing the appearance of existing nanobots.”
“Where would the nanobots be coming from?” Sarah asked.
“The furnace itself might construct them from the provided glass, or the structure might be providing them by running them up the legs of the furnace from the floor. In this case I don’t see how the structure could be replacing the entire lump with a slight of hand, but I wouldn’t rule that out either,” Grandmother answered.
“It’s starting to slump,” Kai reported. He tapped out the spell to raise the heat of the furnace, and picked up one of his blowing tubes. About two or three times longer than Kai expected the glass finally melted into a puddle in the bottom of the ceramic. Using the tube Kai fished the glass out of the furnace. He cast a release spell on the furnace and an adhere spell on the tube. Pulling the blob of molten material from the bottom he cast sphere on the tube. The glass on the end of the tube spun into an imperfect sphere. He cast two more spells on the tube to help even out the ball. Finally when the mass looked almost right, he cast form. A perfect sphere formed. He pulled the softly glowing ball from the furnace and cast cool.
He tapped the sphere on the ground and the tube released it. Kai turned the furnace off and picked up the sphere to inspect it. There was no trace of heat in the glass ball. The surface was uniformly smooth and the glass perfectly clear.
“It looks right,” he said to his audience.
“What is it for?” Companion asked.
“It isn’t for anything,” Kai explained. “I think of it more as an ingot.”
“Can I see it?” Ellen asked. Kai handed the ball to her. She looked at the ball for a moment before asking, “How long does it take to make one out of scrap?”
“I’ll show you,” Kai said. He picked up one of the three debris samples and repeated the process. In about a quarter of the time he produced a second ball, which seemed identical to the first.
“Can you put these into your inventory like a metal ingot?” Ellen asked.
“Yes,” Kai responded. “This furnace holds about three scrap worth of glass. Da always filled it when he did work and pulled the leftover as the ingots. If you have less than a full ingot left in the bottom it forms a smaller sphere that you can’t put in inventory. I think that might be why Da started making marbles.”
“We’d better start packing up,” Grandmother announced. “I think we’ve collected more material than we need, especially if Kai can convert the glass Staging. We’ll pack everything going back to Home Square into the storage shelves and head on to Seagrass in the morning.”
That evening Kai fed pieces of glass into his furnace and converted it to ingots. He’d put all the debris directly into his inventory first since that was the faster option. He found the tool would shut off if he couldn’t get the entire fragment through the door. That reduced his haul, since he couldn’t convert the larger pieces. He sorted them all out big pieces and set them aside in a pile. It was late, when Alex came by to check on him.
“What are all these?” Alex asked of the large piece pile. Kai explained how they wouldn’t completely fit into the furnace, so the tool shut down. Alex picked up a piece and turned it in his hand. He tapped the end of it against the ground. It bounced back like steel.
“I once saw Grandmother shatter an entire glass baluster with ring of death,” Alex observed. “The glass shards flew out like a rain of knives.” Kai was rather happy he hadn’t been there to see that. “Ring is a force tree spell,” Alex expanded. “I wonder if these could be broken with a force spell.”
“I don’t think I want to experience a rain of knives,” Kai commented.
“I didn’t mean the ring,” Alex said. “I meant something lower tier. Sarah was talking earlier about how the butcher in town uses force blade to cut bones. Perhaps force tap would crack this in two. Do you mind if I try?”
“What is force tap?” Kai asked after he agreed to let Alex try. He was unfamiliar with the spell name.
“It’s force blade cast on a blunt weapon. I’ll go ask Ellen if I can borrow her repair hammer,” Alex responded.
Alex returned with Ellen following close behind. Ellen was carrying a blacksmith’s hammer, while Alex was lugging an anvil.
“Where did the anvil come from?” Kai asked, because of the earlier conversation he was certain they didn’t find one on the scavenging run.
“I have a set of crafting tools stored here,” Ellen explained. “We found it when we first discovered the gallery.”
Alex set up the anvil away from Kai’s furnace. Ellen picked up one of the largest pieces from Kai’s discard pile. She positioned it so that a piece that was small enough to fit into the furnace overhung the flat surface of the anvil. Holding down the section on the anvil with her hand she tapped the overhang with a hammer. Nothing happened.
“Did you imbue it?” Alex asked.
“No,” Ellen said. “I am still thinking about it. It seems like if I do, I will just overpower my hand and send this fragment flying.” She mimed the action by pushing down with the hammer and allowing the back end to rise.
“Only if you're weak,” Alex countered. Ellen gave Alex a look that said, speak for yourself lowly tier three.
“I was thinking of Kai. We need a method he can use,” Ellen said aloud.
“Didn’t you say one of the spells the Tinkerer taught you was how to mend cracks in glass? Can you reverse that to cause cracks?” Alex asked. Alex was excited by that idea, since a spell like that could be used in combat to break an opponent's glass armor. Alex lived to add magic to physical fighting techniques. Ellen looked thoughtful.
“I don’t really see how,” she said. One thing about the method to mend cracks that stood out to her was that the repair started at the small end and worked towards the large end. If she got just a small crack started at one end, could she grow it across the complete piece?
She tilted the piece, so that it was only touching the anvil in a line along the edge. This piece of Staging was designed to look like it started life as a shelf. It was flat with rough edges. Ellen tapped the edge of the glass piece with the hammer, right above where it rested on the anvil edge. She felt minimal feedback into her hand holding the piece. She decided it was worth a try and cast force tap on the hammer.
The piece shattered. It wasn’t a rain of knives, although a few shards did go flying. Ellen maintained her hold on a group of splinters, cutting her hand. She studied the way the cracks formed and traveled, as a drip of her blood ran down the glass. When Alex noticed the blood, he cast a heal on Ellen. The blood pulled itself up the glass and disappeared back into Ellen’s skin.
“Maybe not tier two,” Ellen commented. She set the fragments down. “Let me go fetch my gloves.” Ellen came back not just with her gloves, but an assortment of blacksmithing tools. In the end she figured out a method to break the sheet type of glass using force blade on a file to score the material first. The resulting crack needed much less force to form and the direction it ran was very controllable. Alex looked at the file intensely. He wondered if he could wield it like a knife.
Everyone went off to bed shortly after. It was now very late. Their earlier trip though the transportation system left their time sense skewed for the day. The transportation system always left the traveler feeling well rested, like they’d just gotten up after a full night's rest. The late night shouldn’t affect them.