I had an idea. Well, somewhat of a theory I needed to test, but this would work. It would require a little caution too. I was unsure of exactly what I was and would be working with so I would need to do the proper setup, and that in and of itself might take a hot minute.

Metals were, for the most part, impossible to summon, at least in metallic form. So what if I could kind of bypass it, not summon the metal but rather draw it out? If I could, and this alum actually contained aluminum, which I was unsure of. Then I could possibly end up with something really useful.

I'd never seen aluminum in this world, which was a bit of a shame. It was easy to mold, great for pulling away heat, super light, and while I didn't know the alloys some of them were really strong too! It was the perfect thing to use for a number of cool applications if I could get it to work.

That would be a problem for the future though. Mostly because I was greeted by a number of concerned friends as I entered the gates of my school. I'd been so distracted by my new idea for a cool toy that I had totally forgotten about them for a bit.

First came Kala, who just booted everyone else out of the way. She ran up to me and gave me a hug.

"I was so worried when I heard the news, but they told us we couldn't go anywhere and the school was locked down for a day. Everyone who was outside had to stay out or be held off campus until it was all over."

"Yeah... I understand that, are you okay? Nothing happened here right?"

"No, everything was fine. It was just a bit of a shock. That kind of thing just doesn't happen to students normally."

While we were talking Dras came over. I hadn't spoken to him much in the past couple of months. That wasn't his fault so much as mine. Since the whole thing with the dance I'd been a bit stand-offish, and now he was here, looking rather regretful.

"Hey..." he said, scratching his hair.

"Hi... it's... been awhile since we've talked huh."

He nodded, giving a sad sort of smile. "We should though, when you're ready to."

"Yeah."

"Hey, what you got in the bag?" Kala interrupted us, pulling us back from that painfully awkward mess.

"Oh right!" I looked down at the medium sized bag of alum I'd managed to buy. "I saw something on the way in and had some ideas. This is for a project I'm going to do later."

"Anything I can help with?" She asked.

"Not really. It's not even a big deal." It totally was, but I wasn't going to say that outside of anywhere I didn't know was quite private.

The three of us found a quiet room where I got to once again recount the story of the attack for more people. I was rather tired of that by now, but the whole school was curious and I felt like I should at least tell these two. Kala because we were going out and Dras because...

"Dras, it was them. The ones who did the attack on the day we first came to check out the academy."

He nodded. "Yeah, I thought it might be when you brought up the lightning bomb. You're sure?"

"Very, and there's some insane woman leading them. Be careful, she almost took out Professor Endel in a fight."

"No kidding? That's nuts, he's like, a trained battle-mage, and good enough to teach here. They don't hire anyone who's not the best."

"Wait, what am I missing?" Kala leaned in, glaring at both of us.

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Dras looked at me, as if he wanted me to explain. Well whatever of the two of us I was definitely the better storyteller.

"A few years back we came to see the entrance exams for the academy. During that time there was an attack and we fled down to the city underground, ending up way deeper than we should have. We met a few monsters, a couple of golems, and helped get our friend Charles out of there. You've met Charles right?"

"Quiet guy? Pale with eyes that look like he's constantly on alert?"

"Yeah, same guy. He was trapped down there for years. We helped him get out."

"Wow, no wonder he seems a bit off. You're likely to go crazy with complete isolation like that."

"Be nice. He's a really good guy, bit weird, but really decent." Dras said in defense of our friend. My expression must have told Kala how much I agreed with that, Charles had helped me out a couple of times when I didn't even know I needed some help.

"Fine, fine. So, what's the plan now?" Kala asked, her eyes sparkling.

"We keep our heads down and try not to end up in any more terrorist attacks?" Dras gave what might be the best practical answer I'd ever heard from him.

"I have to agree with Dras here. They're out of our league, but we should put some effort into learning how to protect ourselves. I could walk you two through the magic resisting exercises if you want. It's not hard and it might save your life. I also want to learn about making some other defenses, I'll show you when I'm about ready."

That got a series of nods and we decided on our 'rest days' that we'd have a small study session on those. Both of them were excited as getting access to new techniques was often really fun, if quite difficult. This particular one wasn't secret or anything, but most people never bothered learning it. I mean, how often are you attacked?

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During the week leading up to our first practice session I got to work on my aluminum project. I was pretty sure that there was aluminum in the alum, like 60-75%, but there was almost certainly other things as well. To that end I wanted to set up my workspace.

There was plenty of area in one of our labs where there were setups for carrying fumes away, as well as preventing splashes or explosions. These were things that could happen when magic went very, very wrong, particularly with items or certain magical ingredients. So taking a spot in one of the rooms with lots of protections in place was easy enough.

It was rather like a chemistry lab, only all of the sciencey stuff was replaced by fantasy equivalents. There were beakers and the like, but they looked crude with corks and open flames. Glittering solutions were in the cabinets that I didn't have access to. There were even a few cauldrons of various make. It was clean though, more like an alchemists lab than a witch's hut. I supposed that made sense since what was done here was far more formal, and nobody would allow dirt in our pristine educational institution.

I found one of the tables that would work for what I was up to. The enchantments had blocks for splashes, and one that would purify and remove all gases that came off. I would have to power these myself, but that was no big deal. It was a bigger problem that I'd had to choose a time when there wouldn't be anyone around, and that meant it was late at night.

The spell I would need to design now would be simple enough in what it would do. I needed to separate out all the different elements into their pure forms. A few questions told me that some wizards had worked on similar things when messing around with metals and trying to get alloys to revert back to their original forms. Unlike those I was not trying to pull out a known from the alum. My goal instead was to pull out everything based on atomic weight.

I hummed, focusing on my goal. I pictured myself pulling each and every one out, sieving them by the size of their atoms. It was imperfect but I'd sorted plenty of things before so this shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

Problems started quickly. First was that a lot of whatever made this stuff up was some form of gas. I could tell this because it was steaming it's way out of the stone, making it smaller and smaller. It wasn't too mana costly, but I was losing so much to whatever gases were getting pulled away that I really worried about what I'd end up with. Second was that all that gas leaving at once was making the sample I was using move a lot. That was solved with the simple movement spell I'd been using for years.

I watched in horror as my sample shrank and shrank. Finally, to my great relief, it started to move apart into... three large blobs, and a few very, very small ones. When it was all done I had two metal samples and one that was a bright yellow stone. The yellow stone was obviously some form of crystal. It looked weird on the tabletop, and I honestly had no idea what the heck it was.

The two metals were my other head scratcher. I didn't know what they were exactly, but my guess was that one of them was the aluminum I was after. With no other options I took some tongs and picked both up, looking them over. Since that did nothing I moved on to poking them. One was way softer than the other, and at that point I thought I might have my aluminum. Well, the only other test I could think of was to test their density. Aluminum was known to be one of the lighter metals at least.

When I put a small bit of what I thought was aluminum into the water I was using it appeared that it was far less dense by weight than anything we were using in class, that was a good sign in my book. The other piece... well it caught on fire and flew around the little container of water. That was both good and bad. It was good in that I now guessed it was some form of alkali metal, but bad in that that shit was dangerous. I found a small phial with oil to store it in, since I was fairly sure that's what my high school chemistry teacher had done.

I tossed out the trace elements, not knowing what they were and honestly not wanting to screw with them. I now had aluminum, some alkali metal (I was fairly sure), and some unknown yellow stuff. I considered what I knew about them, and how I could use them.

While I had some ideas on uses for myself there was the issue of how rare they were. I hadn't seen or heard of aluminum, so... I figured I'd ask. I took the time to form it into a small block with a bit of heat and some of the metal molding spells that were fairly standard issue in our labs, no problem. The next morning I took it to someone I knew would be able to identify all the stuff I'd made.

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Professor Hern was surprised when I showed up at his office. That had nothing on how he reacted when I told him that I'd found some interesting samples while browsing the market. I did leave the alkali metal behind. I was worried about how dangerous it could be.

"Well, this is just sulfur, nothing too special, but very pure. It's also been shaped nicely into a marble for some reason. Interesting, but not overly valuable." The crystal seemed to be something easily explained enough.

With the second we had a very different issue. He took sample and his eyes went wide. Probably because it was so light. After asking if he could reform it he melted it, changed the shape, tested density, tensile strength, compressive strength, seeming to get more and more wide eyed with each one. He pulled out an old tome from behind his desk and went over it as well, even running mana and heat through the sample using one of his tools, each time going back to his reference book. Finally he stopped and looked at me.

"Alright, you said you bought this in the market?"

"Yes sir," I lied.

"Do you know what it is?"

"Some weird metal?"

"Alana, this is sky-metal. At least as near as I can tell." His eyes were intense, like someone who'd walked into his yard and found a diamond sitting there.