Weekly Digest 65 - (#206 - #208) (Patreon)

Bead Economic Theory

When they returned back to her dungeon on the late side of mid-afternoon, they did so with five beads of various sizes sitting heavily in Lori's belt pouch. She had lost track of the time during experimentation, so when they'd gotten back she'd resigned herself to being hungry and therefore irritable, only to learn that Rian had asked the kitchen to set some food aside for them.

Thankfully, Riz's friend had not needed to be told she wasn't invited, and sat eating at a different table where others were gathered. Occasionally, some people would send looks towards Lori. She ignored them, staring down at the five beads sitting on a wooden bowl in front of her.

Beads. She'd made beads. All it had taken was a freakish, random accident and—

"Lori? Your Bindership?" Rian prompted as she continued to stare down at the beads. "Should I be worried? Getting ready for more work?"

What had been a secret procedure only Dungeon Binders knew and could perform had been surprisingly easy. All she had needed to do was create a binding of wisps of all kinds—subsequent tests using only waterwisps, lightwisps and darkwisps had all failed, and it was only when at least five different kinds of wisps, which hadto include darkwisps, had been part of the binding had a bead formed—heavily imbue the binding, and use the binding to try to claim Iridescence.

She stared at the five beads again. While close, none of them were any of the standard sizes. Lori could tell that much even without precise measuring equipment. They didn't feel right in her fingers, which had years of practice at being able to tell the size of the beads in her pouch. There had been six, but she'd swallowed one to see what happened, and it had acted like a bead, dissolving in her stomach to allow her to access the magic locked within it… though now that she knew what it was made from, she just had more questions…

It was so easy. Anyone could do it. Why hadn't they? If she'd known it was this simple to make her own beads, she'd have run off to the edge for a day or two and just made some. Or a lot. They wouldn't have been legal tender, since they didn't have denomination markings, but it would have been useful in her classes and in some of her more difficult jobs where they hadn't provided her with any beads despite the work needing it.

Or perhaps it wasn't that simple. Perhaps she did need to be a Dungeon Binder to make it. And… the procedure for it was very similar to creating a dungeon core, and could only be done outside the demesne, in the presence of Iridescence. The location and the laws and treaties about how creating a demesne is considered treason would probably be sufficient to discourage the sort of experimentation that would lead to this discovery. And given how she herself had been staying within her demesne as possible and not experimenting with bindings when outside its borders…

That made anyone else in the continent replicating the steps she took to discover the process unlikely. First she had been expanding her demesne. Then she had experimented with using a massive binding for easier imbuement before expansion. Then tried to expand while all of the wisps she planned to use to expand were still part of a binding. Given how only Covehold itself seemed to have expanded at all…

"Your Bindership, aren't you going to eat?" Rian said, interrupting her flow of thought.

Lori blinked, shook her head to clear it and focused on her food. It had grown a little cold but that was easily fixed, and soon she was eating warm food as she filled her empty stomach. Her eyes wandered over to the beads, and across from her, she knew that Rian and Riz were doing the same.

"So… Rian, does this mean we're all going to get paid now?" Riz asked.

"Probably not," Rian said.

Lori swallowed the mouthful she was in the middle of. "No," she said firmly.

Riz raised an eyebrow. "Not that I'm implying anything, Great Binder, but everyone knows that not paying a militia is the fastest way to get that militia to quit or revolt. Or anyone else, for that matter."

"You're not militia, you volunteered to come along because Rian," Lori pointed out.

"We can't pay anyone yet, Riz, because of two very important reasons," Rian said. "It took her Bindership… what, half a day to make five beads? There are over two hundred people in the demesne, counting the children. If we pay everyone a daily wage, that means her Bindership will need to make at around a thousand beads a day, assuming a daily wage of four beads, which… is unlikely to happen for practical reasons. Secondly, if you, at this very moment, had any beads… what would you spend it on? You don't need to pay for food, firewood, use of the baths, use of the tools, or anything else. So what do you need money for? It's only useful if you have something you need to spend it on."

"Rian, even in the militia, we had food, firewood and baths," Riz said. "Admittedly not as good, but we still had them, and we were still paid."

Rian nodded. Both seemed to have forgotten Lori was there. "A good point. All right then. Let's say everyone here is paid for their work. You and your friends are paid for your turns administering the Um, everyone who works in the kitchen is paid for cooking our meals and cleaning up the dishes and things afterwards, people on woodcutting rota are paid for cutting wood, those who go out to hunt beasts for meat… would you say that's fair?"

"Well, of course," Riz said suspiciously. Lori recognized the inherent distrust of someone in a conversation with leading questions.

Rian nodded. "Now, in this situation where you're all getting paid, should use of the baths, getting firewood from storage, and food still be free?"

"We can all provide for ourselves, Rian," Riz said dryly. "Cut our own wood, hunt for our own food, even take baths in our own house."

Rian nodded. "So the woodcutting rota, the kitchen staff, the hunting parties, and the ones who look after the baths are all out of work and don't need to be paid then, is what you're saying?"

Riz paused. At the other tables, people were listening intently. Lori continued eating, wondering what point her lord was rambling towards. He always had one, he just needed time to get there so her idiots could catch up…

"By the same logic, people don't need to use the Um," Rian continued. "They can do that at home. If no one is using the Um, no one has to be paid to administer it. So those people aren't being paid either. Since no one is getting paid, no one needs money."

Riz made a face, as if she thought this was wrong but couldn't think of how to argue how…

"Of course," Rian continued, "it's possible that eventually, people realize they really don't want to have to cut their own firewood, so they pay someone else to do it. That's the woodcutters getting paid again. And the woodcutters could be too tired after a day of getting firewood to cook for themselves, so they pay someone to cook for them. That's the kitchen staff being paid again. And the kitchen staff need material to cook with, so someone pays hunters to go out and hunt beasts for meat, since they might be busy in the kitchen or gathering firewood."

"Stop right there," Riz said. "I can already hear the ending. 'It's basically what we have already, except we're passing money around', right?"

Rian shrugged, smiling innocently. "You said it, not me. Though I point out not everyone reaps the same benefits. Those being paid to cook will only cook for the ones paying them, those cutting firewood will only cut for those paying them, and so on."

"It sounds simple when you say it like that, Lord Rian!" someone at another table called out. "But what about the farmers? Shouldn't we get paid for our work?"

"I'm pretty sure the farmers all got to use the baths, the Um, the laundry area, and got food to eat along with everyone else, Etwart," Rian called out, glancing over his shoulder at someone as Lori finished the soup in her bowl. "In that sense, they're paid just like everyone else."

"But the grain we all worked to raise isn't ours to keep," the person protested. There was something familiar about it… a feeling off… annoyance…

"Etwart, are you really trying to build up to saying how you're taken advantage of and that the harvest raised from the sweat of your brow was stolen from you by someone who's just getting fat on the work of others?" Rian said. "Are you really trying to build up towards that, when you're sitting in a room literally built by one woman who doesn't even need it? Who'd probably have done the tables and benches to if we hadn't gotten ahead of her? Come on man, we've talked about this! You've even agreed it's for the best! Stop complaining about settled matters."

"We brought a lot of that grain with us from River's Fork, Etwart," someone at another table said. "So don't be a slug. You don't hear us glittering complaining about people who want a share of grain that they just helped with and didn't actually own!"

That got another laugh, mocking and pointed.

Rian turned back to Riz. "Now, it's not that we don't want everyone to be fairly paid for the work they do, but right now, paying them with beads brings complications we're not ready for, and without really improving everyone's overall lot. In fact, it'll just make it more complicated. I'm sure you can imagine the troubles we'll get with people losing beads, accusing people of stealing their beads, and so on." Rian paused and said, "But mainly, does Binder Lori look like she's willing to make that many beads when she's already making that annoyed face when we're just talking about the subject?" Rian gestured towards Lori. "Besides, you want to talk about people getting paid, consider this: who is paying Binder Lori to make all those beads?"

Riz blinked. So did Lori as she considered the question.

"You bring up good points, and I agree with them," Rian said. "But if you're going to ask about people who aren't paid, what about our Dungeon Binder? Shouldn't she be paid for her work? If you want to talk about people who're being taken advantage of by someone who's just getting fat on the work of others…" He didn't finish the sentence and just shrugged.

Eventually, Lori found her voice. "Rian, don't be absurd," she said. "I don't need to be paid. If I want something in the demesne, I'll just take it."

"Of course, your Bindership. Do you want me to tell the kitchen to make honeyed bread and roast tail meat tomorrow?"

"Rian, what have I told you about holding holidays?"

"As you say, your Bindership. Still, it's not all bad. Even if it'll take time to move on to a bead-based economy again, there's already a wonderful upside to you being able to make beads."

"There is?" Riz said.

Rian nodded, smiling broadly. "We can sell them in Covehold," he said cheerfully.

Lori stared at him. "Explain."

"I don't think Covehold or the other demesne near it have worked out how to make beads on their own yet," Rian said. "Otherwise they'd be making their own and not insisting all goods and services be paid for with Taniar-certified beads. However, that means the only source of new beads is from ships coming in with people and supplies to buy relatively cheap furs."

Lori nodded in understanding. The furs were about the only thing she had heard of being exported by Covehold Demesne when she had still been a student, which had become expensive status pieces from those with more beads than sense who valued that kind of thing. From what she had seen when she had been passing through on her way to here, the demesnes around Covehold simply didn't produce enough surplus of grain or other resources to be worth exporting over the ocean in amounts that made it economical.

"However!" Rian said triumphantly. "That means beads that wizards and bound tools can use are ultimately a limited resource, since to use them for either will deplete the overall bead reserves of this continent as a whole. This is on top of the beads already being removed from the local economy to buy products from the old continent. "

Riz looked like she was barely able to follow, though Lori nodded at her lord's reasoning. Some people in other tables were nodding as well.

"Now, though, our demesne, and you specifically," he grinned at her, "has just become a new source of beads. Not for using as money, because if Covehold allowed that we'd literally end up owning them, but for use in bound tools and for their wizards. Until someone else comes forward with a Dungeon Binder who knows how to do it, we—I mean, you—are literally the only ones in the whole continent that can provide a steady supply of this resource."

Lori stared at him. She looked down at the beads on her bowl. "I see…" she said slowly. She began to grin herself. "As a resource for sale, they become subject to market forces of supply and demand."

"And there is currently little supply and a lot of demand, so we can set out own price! Though it probably can't be that simple," Rian calmed down and cautioned. "There's a good chance Covehold put a law or something in place in preparation for someone finding out how to do this before they did, like some outrageous fifty-percent tax. I'll have to go back and find out more before trying to sell beads. "

"You're not going," Lori said reflexively.

"You're not going!" Riz cried. "I don't want to be temporary-Rian again!"

"I don't want her being temporary-Rian again," Lori agreed. "She is only barely adequate at it."

"See, this is why you need another lord or lady," Rian sighed. "We'll talk about this later. But right now, you might want to consider becoming this continent's one and only exporter of beads for wizards and bound tools. Until someone else figures out how to do it themselves… you'd have an absolute monopoly."

Absolute monopoly… absolute monopoly… absolute monopoly…

Oh… to think she might be able to make two childhood dreams come true in one lifetime.

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Bead Experiments

Naturally, Rian had to destroy her beautiful dreams.

"It won't last forever. Given the incentives to find out how you did it, I wouldn't be surprised if other demesne stumble upon how to make their own beads within a year of us showing up in Covehold selling beads to workshops so they can power their bound tools," Rian said later when it was just the two of them playing chatrang in an alcove in the second level. Well, the two of them and the other three. Riz was once more napping on the bench with her head in Mikon's lap while the weaver watched the two of them play and held a ball of thread for Umu as the latter knitted something.

"I know that," Lori almost snapped in annoyance. Everyone wanted to have a monopoly and to break one if they didn't have it. "That's why it's best to maximize our profits while we do have the monopoly."

"That's going to hurt us later," Rian said. "Even if it's only one or two other competitors, we suffer a distinct disadvantage when it comes to location, since we're the demesne furthest away from Covehold. That means it will take longer and cost us more to bring our beads over to where the market for it is. I feel that instead of focusing on maximizing our profits, we need to maximize our reputation and customers. Even if there are others who are closer, if we have a reputation of being reliable and good to deal with, it will help offset problem of not being as immediate. People will seek us out to buy what we have, and having limited stocks will drive up the price by itself. It's how people work. And besides, having your customers practically run up to you and scream 'take me beads' is just good economics."

"Now you're just being facetious," Lori said, moving her Mentalist.

Rian peered down at her piece. "Mentalist, right…" he muttered. "Thought it was a Horotract for a moment there. Yes, yes, I know, the marks are different, that's why I looked. So, are we going to experiment with making more beads tomorrow?"

"'We'?"

"Of course I'm coming along, you're going to the edge of the demesne. Besides, you need someone to write notes for you, and I can operate the sled."

"Coming with you," Riz muttered, not opening her eyes.

"Thank you Riz, your company is greatly appreciated," Rian said as he moved his core behind his Whisperer.

"Remember, you volunteered," Lori pointed out.

"Yes, Great Binder, not being paid," Riz muttered. "Even if you have beads now."

Lori rolled her eyes. "I have five beads. If I paid you with one, what would you even do with it?"

"Use it to pay you to make our house warm for a week," Riz muttered as Mikon smiled fondly down at her. "Napping now."

"Huh. That's one way to set the bead standard…" Rian said thoughtfully. "One bead keeps a house warm with magic for a week, so a bead can buy a little under a week's worth of firewood…"

"We are not using that to set the standard."

"Well, we'll have to think about it eventually," Rian said. "So far, people understand that the copper is a resource held in trust for the entire demesne, but that's only because I worked really hard to get as many people from every family to agree to work at the mine at least once, so everyone feels they have a stake in it. But we're going to need to start using it eventually, one way or another. If we don't and it just sits there, people are going to be tempted to start stealing what they consider their share."

Lori grunted. "We'll sell half in the spring for more materials for the demesne," she said.

"Like window paper?" Rian asked hopefully.

"I still don't think that's really how it's done. Won't it get wet when it rains?"

"Not when it's oiled to repel water," Rian said. "Besides, they're meant to be behind shutters when weather happens— Oh. I just had a thought."

Lori sighed. "What now?"

"Now that you can make beads, could we set up the Coldhold so that it's maintained by a bead instead of you directly?" Rian said. "Like what you did to check if the bead we brought back really was a bead?"

Lori blinked as she considered that. It… was actually very viable. Most of the Coldhold's structure was merely bound to be solid, and therefore not conduct heat. Such a binding wouldn't need much imbuement. With enough beads…  "It should be possible, but doing the same thing to the water jet driver would be wasteful," Lori said.

Rian looked thoughtful. "You know… you have beads. You have wire. You have glass. Isn’t that what you need to make a bound tool?"

"Probably."

Rian raised an eyebrow. "'Probably'?"

"Bound tools such as drivers require more components, obviously. Metal for the drive shafts, gears, the casings… it will depend on what sort of bound tool I will try to make…"

"…you've never actually made a bound tool, have you?"

"It's made with Whispering. I am a trained Whisperer."

"Just not trained in bound tools, though?"

"I'm sure I can learn. Bound tool artificing was only a three year post-graduate course, and I've seen, used and examined several industrial bound tools when I was working."

"…it can't be that easy, otherwise making bound tools wouldn’t need that long to be taught."

"…well, regardless, I'm sure I can figure it out."

Rian sighed.

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Over the next few days, Lori and Rian went out to the moving edge of the demesne to conduct more experiments with beads. And of course, make more beads. With Rian taking notes—because otherwise it was just them doing wasteful and strange things, not proper scholarly research—and Riz and one of her friends keeping watch for beasts, Lori was able to confirm some of her initial suppositions about the process. The final size of the bead relied on how heavily imbued the binding used to claim the Iridescence was, and while it wasn't possible to make a bead with darkwisps alone, tests with all possible combinations of wisps showed that bead formation would definitely not occur if darkwisps weren't present.

Given what she knew now about how they were made, it made her wonder why beads were as unreactive as glass. It was literally made of wisps, magic, and Iridescence, yet like every bead type she had ever used, she couldn't anchor wisps to it. In fact, given it didn't dissolve in water, beads acted frustratingly nothinglike the materials they were made of!

She also couldn't bind or even claim the beads in question. Not by touching it, not with a wire—all that did was imbue the wisps in her skin and in the binding around her—not with her demesne, not with a binding of wisps like the one used to make a bead… the beads didn't even identify as wisps in her awareness while within her demesne, simply another void like glass, or people. And even glass would probably appear in her awareness once it was heated to a molten state! So would people, for that matter.

"That probably means there's some kind of interaction that's going on that we don't understand yet," Rian suggested as he wrote down notes on the results of her trying to anchor various wisps and combinations of wisps. Even darkwisps had done nothing, not even being displaced from its position when Lori had waved the bead she was holding through it. "And our understanding of the interaction is limited by our inability to perceive it because we lack instruments. If we had a parvusight, for example, a closer look at its structure might be answer some questions and bring up new ones."

"I could try to make one," Lori mused. "It's all just concentrating light, after all…"

They made on in one of the alcoves in the second floor, putting a bead on a stone-molded stand to hold it in place while she'd spent time creating bindings of lightwisps to magnify and focus the image of the bead, and then doing it again with darkwisps to block out ambient light, and then doing it a third time while directing an intense light at the bead so that the magnified image wouldn't be so dark…

The resulting image, while clear and even aesthetic if you were of a mind for it, was utterly useless in providing any sort of answers, and Lori had dissolved the binding in frustration as she went to her room to calm down and expand the demesne.

Fortunately, other tests and experiments yielded more quantifiable answers, while creating even more questions in the process. One who followed the Mysteries of Alknowledge—or Rian, since she wasn't sure if it was the same thing—would say that was the natural state of the pursuit of knowledge. Lori, who was not a follower of the mysteries or Rian, found it annoying and time-consuming.

Lori found the process resulted in some measure of energy lost. She had taken the largest bead she had managed to make, one close to twenty chiyustri, and had dropped it into a small container of water to measure its volume. After dumping the water into a bowl to get the bead out with no water loss, she had swallowed the bead and had used only the magic stored within it to imbue the binding used to make the next bead.

The bead that had resulted was visibly smaller, and some imprecise calculations she and Rian had hastily done led them to conclude it had lost around a quarter of the total energy from the original bead.

"Maybe the amount goes into stabilizing the bead itself?" Rian suggested. "After all, given the materials involved, beads should dissolve in water but don't."

"A possibility, but unprovable, since there's no way to make softer beads," Lori said.

"No way that you know of," Rian pointed out. "For all we know, softer bead are some sort of secret material known only to Dungeon Binders that they use as mattress stuffing or something."

"It annoys me I can't actually refute that."

Rian smiled that smile he did when he was trying to look innocent while being annoying. Until she had met Rian, Lori had not realized it was actually possible to do that with one's face.

He also noticed something that Lori had never really considered or noticed: Iridescence did not react to beads. They didn't grow on beads, and putting beads down on Iridescence dust didn't suddenly cause them to start visibly crystalizing, as opposed to when an imbued binding occupied the same space as the colors. They only got a reaction when a metal wire in contact with a bead made contact with Iridescence.

Then the tainted rainbows started visibly crystalizing on the surface of the wire, spreading over the surface of the bead and the piece of ice Lori had used to press the wire between the two. They hadn't grown into either surface, but rather the crystal's growth simply covered over them. The growth stopped when she removed the wire, leaving the bead visibly reduced and the wire covered in a mostly symmetrical Iridescence growth blooming outwards from the wire at its core.

The experiment had put added context for why beads should never be placed in a metal container.

It was Rian who'd suggested they try to break apart the large bead.

"It's too big to use, and besides, seeing what the cross-section looks like might be helpful," he said as they'd been packing up the sled to go back to the Dungeon.

"You just want to hit it until it breaks," Riz accused fondly as she secured the spears.

"All right, I'll admit to that, but think about it. Have you ever seen a bead break?"

"No, because people are careful with their money and any changes to a bead that removes the denomination markings renders it not acceptable as legal tender," Lori pointed out. "Admittedly, the only way to significantly alter the shape of a bead is to put it into the bead receptacle of a bound tool, where it will start to get smaller as it's used."

"This isn't legal tender, it's a big rock that won't even fit in your mouth," Rian pointed out. "Which reminds me, we need to experiment to see how to put our own denomination markings for when we eventually start using it as money… But setting that aside, beads can't actually be unbreakable, or else it would have far more uses besides power and money. It would be used as ball bearings, when you need bearings that will never ground down."

"Rian, don't be absurd. If you use beads as bearings, the material it rests on can't be metal, or else there will be the possibility of seepage. And any device that can wear down bearings like that can't be made of anything but metal, or else other parts will start to fail."

"Hmm, good point. But I think we should at least try to break it. It will give us a lot of useful information about its material structure, if we manage it, and given its size, it will be a much more visible cross section than one of the small ones."

Lori considered the large bead now lying in its own stone shelf, on top of a piece of leather so that it didn't start seeping from possibly metals in. The only possible use she could currently think of for it was using it to power the wired bindings in her dungeon in place of the core, but if she did that, she'd have to remake all her bindings all over again when the bead ran out, and then she'd put the wire back on the core anyway…

And now that Rian had proposed the idea, she had to admit she was a curious about what would happen. If it was unbreakable… well, that would expand the things they could use it for…

"Sure, why not? It's not like it's currently useful for anything."

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Breaking Bead

"So… the only hammers we have are made of metal. Will that be a problem? Seepage and whatnot?" Rian asked

Lori shook her head. "It shouldn't be as long as the metal isn't also in contact with a binding. Metal is a conduit, not a receptacle."

Rian frowned. "Why is seepage such an issue, then? Shouldn't it only be a problem if a bead is around bindings?"

"Can you see bindings to avoid them?"

"Ah. Good point."

After she had given Rian authorization, he had arranged for assistance with breaking apart the large bead. He'd also informed her that for some silly reason, the rumor was going around that the bead wasn't actually a bead but a dungeon's core. Therefore they had to be careful of idiots 'accidentally' spilling their blood on it.

The bead was being broken outside, near the mouth of the tunnel leading out to the woods, in case there was some sort of unfortunate explosion. Lori didn't think there would be, but the cold should keep most people away, though she had to undo the binding of airwisps so that they wouldn't seep from the bead. They were trying to break it, not drain it.

First she set down a surface of stone, with contours and a low wall in place to keep the bead from moving around and rolling. When that was done, Rian put the bead in place, and she altered the shape of the stone base to hold the bead more securely. Piece of scrap wood were then wedged in to place to hold the bead tight.

They had immediate scrap wood because the assistance Rian had arranged involved calling the biggest and most muscular of the blacksmiths, carpenters, sawyers, woodcutters and the stone masons. The blacksmiths had brought along a selection of their hammers, long-hafted things with steel heads, while the stone masons had blunt-looking metal chisels with wooden grips.

After getting rid of Landoor, Rian turned to the assembled men. "All right," Rian said while Lori put together a binding to emit warmth. They were working outside, after all. "As many of you may have heard, her Bindership has worked out how to make beads. We're still in the starting parts of that, so no one is going to have to remember how to pay taxes any time soon—" everyone's eyes widened at that, "—but that's not why we're here. We're here because her Bindership gave me permission to try breaking this bead open."

"So it's not a dungeon's core?" one of the blacksmiths, red-haired man with work-darkened skin, asked, sounding disappointed as Lori used darkwisps to mark the binding's location, putting it far above the bead so that it would warm everyone efficiently.

"No, that's not how dungeons work," Rian said as Lori checked to make sure there were no bindings were near the bead. The earthwisps that had been used to shape the stone was inert and unbound, and there was nothing in the air above it. "If this were really a dungeon's core, we wouldn't be able to move it and it would vanish as soon as it was inside the demesne. No, it's a really big bead. If we had any sort of bound tool, we could probably run it for an absurdly long time. As we don't… we get to break it open and see what's inside."

Everyone looked at the bead.

"Can we even break a bead?" someone Lori vaguely recognized as one of the carpenters asked. "I've never heard of a bead breaking."

"They can't be unbreakable," Rian said. "Otherwise someone would make a big bead like this and use it as the head of a drop hammer or an anvil or something. It would be really expensive, but then they'd have a perfectly round, smooth, unbreakable hammer head. It's not as if there's some reason beads can't be big. We have a big one right here."

The men, craftsmen all who had probably seen a drop hammer at some point, all looked thoughtful.

"If we can't break it, can we use it as an anvil?" one of the men holding a blacksmith's hammer—so he was probably a blacksmith—asked.

"Or a round form?" added one of the carpenters.

Rian turned to Lori. She rolled her eyes. "Schedule it among yourselves, at least until we have a bound tool to wire it to," she said, waving her hand dismissively.

"Though that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to break it," Rian said dryly. "So let's put our backs into it, all right?"

The other men gave him dubious looks. While Rian could hardly be called lean, some of the men looked like they weighed twice what he did in muscle. Well, that was probably an exaggeration, but one smith had arms thicker than Rian's legs.

"Maybe you should just sit and watch, Lord Rian," one man said kindly.

"Eh? I'm not that weak, am I?"

All the other men looked away.

"You're that weak," Lori said.

Rian sighed. "You didn't have to say it out loud for everyone. Can I at least hold one of the hammers that's not being used so I can feel useful?"

The men gave him a hammer to hold. Rian promptly fell over backwards into the snow. “I can’t move… all right, take the hammer back, I’m too weak!”

Lori sighed as the men laughed and helped him back up. Rian and his stupid theatrics…

After covering the bead with some tent canvas so that if it broke the pieces couldn't go flying and holding the canvas in place by using some rocks to tuck it against sides of the stone platform, the men began trying to break the bed. First, the largest-looking blacksmith picked it the heaviest-looking hammer, held it in both hands, and just swung down at the top of the rounded mound that was the bead. The head of the hammer rebounded with a dull sound, but with a smooth and practiced motion the blacksmith had the hammer ready again and was swinging down a second time.

Each successive swing came down with just a little bit more force. After five increasingly heavy swings, the blacksmith stepped back, and the tent canvas was pulled aside so they could examine its surface. Rain crouched down next to the bead to get a closer look

"I think it's cracking. It didn't have those cracks before, did it?" Rian said, pointing to something on the surface of the bead.

Everyone crowded around him to peer at what he was pointing at, though they made way for Lori when she leaned over. At first, there didn't seem to be anything on the cloudy white surface of the bead, but a closer look revealed stark white lines. They seemed to be just under the surface of the bead, following a wiggling path like lightning. Lori ran her fingers over the smooth, glass-like surface, but she didn't feel any breaks or imperfections along where the cracks were, only perfect smoothness.

Still, it was a good sign, since it meant that hitting it repeatedly was doing some good. Putting the tent canvas back on to cover around the bead, the men stood in a circle around it and, wielding their won hammers, began taking turns hitting the bead. Rian had to relinquish the hammer he was holding, but he was put in charge of keeping counting out the rhythm of the work.

Soon an almost constant series of hammer blows were falling down on the bead as Rian kept time. With nothing better to do than watch, Lori sat down on a block of bound ice pulled from the snow and started preparing for expanding her demesne later. Despite herself, she found her knee bouncing to the rhythm of the hammers as the men worked. It made her strangely nostalgic, remembering the days she used to be a student and worked in the small metal workshops to earn beads.

The dull echoes faded into the background as she did their work while they did theirs in the cold winter air. every so often they'd stop and pull back the tent canvas, examining the surface of the over-sized bead. From the sound of it, more and more cracks where developing, but from where she was sitting away from them so she wouldn't get hit by the swinging hammers, the bead was still unmarred, so the cracks were likely very small and subtle. Still, the number of cracks were apparently growing, because after very check, the circle of men went back into place and resumed hammering with vigor.

It was about an hour before there was a result that wasn't just the hammers rebounding dully. Lori glanced up, pausing in her imbuing as she heard a sudden crack. She rose to her feet, then had a moment to look down in annoyance as she realized her boots were resting on mud from the passive heat around her. It took her a few moments to dry the mud sufficiently so that her boots wouldn't sink into it. By the time she managed to make her way to the bead, the tent canvas had been carefully pulled back.

The surface of the bead was shattered, its glassy surface and cloudy white interior marred, and a curving shard lay lopsidedly on top of the outline that matched it, along with many smaller, less distinct pieces. Small, fine shards were scattered around the cracks, the wind causing some of them to slide down the sides of the bead to the stone stand below. She'd have to be careful to collect everything from the base later.

"See, we broke it," Rian said excitedly.

"Well, there goes using it as an anvil," one of the blacksmiths sighed.

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Once the outermost glass-like shell was broken—and hadn't resulted in any sort of violent explosion or reaction—the tests began.

Well, after moving the bead, of course. Now that it had shown breaking it wouldn't cause it to explode—not that there had ever been any reason to think it would—Lori ordered the bead moved down to an alcove in the second level, where she could test it under more controlled conditions.

The bead, stone stand and all, was carefully picked up and moved, the tent canvas thrown over it again so that the wind couldn't blow away the loose shards. Once the stand was placed in an alcove, Lori got more stone and blocked off the alcove from the breezes caused by the air circulation. It was only when the air inside the alcove she had requisitioned was completely still did she carefully remove the tent canvas off the bead, absently handing it off to Rian.

The first thing she inadvertently learned was that while beads didn't react to water, the contents of beads definitely did. She found this out when she reshaped the stone sand to get at the bits and fragments of the bead that slid down beneath it and found, among the powdery remains and shards, small drops of cloudy white translucent water that almost, but not quite, looked like flour had been dissolved in it.

It was, she noted, not unlike the appearance water took after it had been used to dissolve and wash away Iridescence, a multicolored sheen like a layer of oil refracting light. However, unlike water that had dissolved the colors, the drops of water in under the stone stand didn't gradually become clear water again. Instead, the drops remained cloudy white.

"Huh," Rian said, writing notes down on his plank. "Is it… supposed to be doing that?"

"It shou—" Lori caught herself, shook her head. "I don't know. It's doing it, however, so it probably is supposed to do that."

"Maybe we should take samples?" he suggested. "Can you gather them up with your syringe?"

Lori thought of all the stairs and rolled her eyes. "Or I could just do this instead," she said, reaching out to binding the waterwisps in the few droplets.

The second thing she inadvertently learned was that while beads were as unreactive as glass, the contents of beads were not. She had just claimed and bound the waterwisps when the cloudy water suddenly became clear and the binding became imbued.

"Wait, you cleared it?"  Rian said. "How?"

Lori stared down at the now-clear droplets. "Rian," she said, "write this down…"