Weekly Digest 91 - (#288 - #290) (Patreon)

Rudimentary Bound Tools

"Huh," Rian said. "Look at that." He sounded merely like he'd seen something he'd been expecting rather than impressed or excited. Which, given he'd done the initial white Iridescence experiments with her, was fair.

"You're not surprised," Lori said as she finished noting the results of the test.

"Honestly, my most immediate thought is 'ah, of course bound tools that create heat are safe, white Iridescence doesn't react to heat'," he said, pulling back the tongs. The binding of lightwisps stopped glowing. He moved the tongs again. The air directly above the white Iridescence glowed.

"Stop that," Lori said, and Rian pulled back the tongs. He paused, then looked down at them with a frown.

"We forgot to record the size of the bead at the start of the experiment," he said, sounding annoyed. "We should have done a before and after measurement."

Ah. "We'll do that next time," Lori agreed. She had some calipers in her box that could measure the beads.

Rian nodded. "So, does this mean you'll be making bound tools now?"

Lori waved a hand, not so much dismissive as negligent. "We still need glass. Without glass, we can make nothing but laboratory demonstration projects."

"I don't see how. Beads, metal, white Iridescence, bindings you make…" He pointed at the container with the white Iridescence in it. "Make a few of these and we'll have lamps for people to carry around."

"And how will we keep the white Iridescence dry without glass?" Lori said. "And for that matter…"

She reached down to pick up the container, and shook it back and forth like she was trying to sift the samples before putting it down again. "Touch the tongs to the tweezers again."

Rian glanced at her and shrugged, then did as ordered.

There was… someglow, but it was a small, weak glow compared to what had come before, and wavered slightly like a candle flame in high wind about to go out.

"Ah," Rian said. "Yes, that looks problematic and inconvenient. What happened?"

"Bindings need to be anchored for a reason. Wisps interact with each other, and similar how water can dislodge water, waterwisps can dislodge waterwisps."

Rian tilted his head. "All right, that makes sense. If waterwisps can push on water, then of course the other way is possible too, otherwise the waterjet wouldn't work because there'd be no transfer of force between the water and the tubes with the bindings on them. And… huh. Darkwisps. All right, I think I understand…"

It was always convenient how intelligent Rian was. She seldom had to explain things more than once, and never had to try to explain using awkward metaphors involving throwing rocks or sticks or strings. "The lightwisps were anchored to the white Iridescence. When I shook the container, the wisps all moved with the sample they were anchored to, which did not stay in the same positions relative to each other. This resulted in the binding dissolving." She paused, then added. "The latter is not usual. Normally, a binding will retain its arrangement no matter what other wisps encounter it, especially when anchored so that it maintains its relative position."

Rian titled his head. "Perhaps it's because the binding wasn't imbued when you shook the white? After all, being imbued is what normally keeps a binding from falling apart. Here, give me that tablet and we can try again."

It turned out to not be as simple as that. Making a binding of lightwisps, anchoring it to the white Iridescence, imbuing it to theoretically have the binding maintain its shape, and then shaking the container led to a strange result. They actually did the experiment twice, first with the binding imbued and active so that it shone with light, then another experiment when the binding was imbued and anchored, but deactivated so that it didn't glow.

The results were… strange. To Lori's senses, the imbuement was clearly acting to hold the binding together even as the white Iridescence that the wisps were anchored to was randomly displaced. Even so, there was a limit, and just as if she'd anchored a binding to something solid and then broke that solid in half right were the binding was, a sufficient extreme change from the initial starting position broke the binding. The latter, at least, was within what she knew, even if the nature of the position change was unusual.

It proved to Rian, however, that the lamps he'd envisioned wasn't as simple as he thought.

"I guess the glass is necessary after all," he sighed as he finished writing down the day's notes. "It probably holds the white Iridescence and wisps in place so that… well, that doesn't happen. Are you sure there's nothing we can use as a substitute? Something that can hold the white Iridescence in place so that the binding doesn't get moved around?"

"Rian, this is a rudimentary bound tool," Lori said flatly. "Barely better than a classroom demonstration of metal causing seepage in beads. In fact, save for the white Iridescence, it's exactlythat. It will require experimentation and iteration on my part to create even a simple bound tool to make light that won't be ruined by being left out in the rain or shaken. Experimentation I've only barely begun."

"What sort of experimentation will you need to do? Besides figuring out how to make glass, that is."

It was a question Lori had been considering, but hadn't really made solid plans about. Faced with Rian's direct question, however, she drew together her half-formed notions to come up with an answer. "Besides the glass," Lori said slowly, "I will need to find the ideal sort of binding for the bound tools and the ideal configuration of the bound tools."

"Ideal configuration? Shouldn't it just be kept simple? Beads go on end, light or whatever comes out the other end. Using only a bound tool that makes light as an example, keeping it as simple as this—" Rian gestured to the container with the tweezers, "—at least, in essence, makes it idiot-proof for the users and simple to build for… well, you."

"That might work for simple bound tools such as lamps, but a bound tool for a water jet driver or an evaporator for salt extraction will not be able to function on such simple principles." Normally, this would be the point that she'd stop explaining. Rian wasn't a wizard, after all. He wouldn't understand, and his thinking of magic would be formed from silly stories…

Except he was looking thoughtful. "Ah, I think I see. In the waterjets, the binding itself is in the water, and for the evaporator the salt water passes through the binding to change state." He was nodding. "Yes, that's a level of sophistication above 'light up on contact with beads'. Possibly two, or even three. You'd know better than I do. Off the top of my head, you'd need to at least keep the white Iridescence isolated from water while still having anchored waterwisps that don't can affect the water coming in…" He was nodding to himself now, his fingers tapping in a seemingly random pattern on his forearm. "Yeah, bound tools would be the best way for you to reduce the number of things you need to keep track of."

Lori was… impressed, despite herself. Had she ever related the technical details of how the water jets worked to Rian? "Essentially," she said. "I have some thoughts on how it might be possible, but I'll still need a means of isolating the white Iridescence, which will require glass."

Rian was still nodding. "Yes, yes… you know, we should probably leave some white Iridescence outside of the demesne to see what happens," he said thoughtfully. "At the very least, it might give us more information about exactly why they might use glass in making bound tools… unless bound tools meant to be used only inside a demesne differ from bound tools that can be used outside of a demesne's borders…" He straightened up suddenly. "Wait. Can you actually use a bound tool outside of a demesne?"

That… Lori had never considered that before. Could bound tools actually be used outside of a demesne, were Iridescence was a factor? All the bound tools she was familiar with were those used inside of a workshop of some kind. But… there was some inter-demesne trade, mostly along waterways, as well as travelers. She herself had ridden one as part of leaving Taniar Demesne, heading towards the ports where she'd eventually gotten on a larger boat to this new continent. The boats that travelled the waterways were probably powered by bound tools, since she didn't remember the boat she had taken passage in possessing smoke-spewing chimneys that indicated they were propelled by a steam driver.

Rian snapped his fingers. "I know. We can ask Riz, or maybe Kolinh, if the militia had bound tools that they used outside of a demesne. They'd know, wouldn't they?"

Lori supposed they would. "I suppose they would," she mused. "Very well, find out. Hopefully you will learn something definitive."

"In the meantime, why not practice making bound tools that will only be used inside the demesne?" Rian suggested. He wasn't even trying to look innocent.

"I'll still need glass," Lori said. "What's what bound tools use."

"Yes, well, we don't have glassworkers. We do, however, have smiths. Why not see if metal—like, say the copper we have a lot of—can be used to substitute?"

She gave him a flat look. "You realize that metal is opaque, and will not allow light to pass through, and therefore are useless for making any sort of lamp bound tool?"

"Yes, I recall that," he said. "No, I was thinking… off the top of my head, the reason to use glass is to either keep Iridescence out, or to keep whisperers from altering the binding anchored to the white iridescence after it had been… bound?" Lori nodded, confirming he was using the word correctly. "If it's the latter, well… you're the only Whisperer we have…you know, unless Shanalorre has somehow managed to learn Whispering simply from living in the same demesne as you, and since you haven't spontaneously learned Deadspeakinging healing, that's unlikely. So you can afford to at least try it out."

Lori hummed thoughtfully. "I'll consider it," she finally said. "Though I still don't see what kind of bound tool could be made from that."

"A heater," Rian said. "Firewisps, anchored to white iridescence, held in place with metal… we can use it to heat the bath water so you don't have to imbue it anymore. It would also be helpful in keeping everyone warm. That way, we can divert people away from having to gather and prepare firewood. If we make it hot enough, we can use it for cooking too, and as a general purpose evaporator heat source."

She blinked at that, her head tilting sideways thoughtfully. Yes, a binding of purely firewisps would work for that. The intensity of heat wouldn't change—well, unless she changed it, because as Rian said, she was the only Whisperer in the demesne—but it could be deactivated, and if would run on beads without her oversight…

Wait. Firewisps.

While firewisps could create heat, they could also destroy it. And while she'd stop being able to perceive and claim firewisps when their became colder than her body temperature… they would still be there. Firewisps, bound to destroy heat, and keep destroying heat, as long as they had a bead to power them…

She could stop manually making solidified air and solidified water to cool their cold rooms.

…

She could stop manually making solidified air and solidified water to cool their cold rooms!

Not only that, the bound tool could be taken to River's Fork for their cold room as well, removing one more reason she might possibly need to leave her demesne to go there!

And… if she could create bound tools for ventilation… if she could create a bound tool that could make a shroud of darkwisps to help blunt the effects of the passage of dragons… then she might never have to set foot there ever again!

…

Well, no, she would probably still have to go there to build new things and install further bound tools, but still! Her need to go there would be GREATLYminimized!

…and… well… the shroud of darkwisps was unlikely to be effective, or else she'd have heard of them being used to protect towns and such… but maybe that was because it was just more efficient for the Dungeon Binder to cover the entire demesne with darkwisps? The experienced ones probably knew better than her how best to go about it…

…

No, no, she wasn't letting cold, terrible, sensible reality ruin this for her!

"All right, we'll try your idea," Lori said. "Find out if the smiths have the time and the right equipment to melt some copper for us."

Rian grinned widely.

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It's A Euphemism

It turned out the smiths were currently busy doing maintenance on the metal tools the demesne had. Lori decided it was best not to interrupt them, but she had Rian arrange for them to be free to assist her the following day.

That prompted Lori to go check that the treasure room was in order. Fortunately, all the dragon scales were still there. The anatass scale had a chunk of it removed, but that was from her wand. The pile of copper ingots was piled neatly on the ground next to the scales, arranged in a neat alternating pattern. In one corner, a pile of planks that contained months of inventory records lay. Lori might have to tell Rian to transfer those onto bone tablets to make a smaller stack and so they could get the planks back. She used—had used—thin stone tablets on which she wrote with a beast-tooth stylus after softening a thin layer of the stone, but even she had to be careful with that lest she drop the tablet and break it.

With the bone tablet proving more durable and lighter—if a far more limited resource than rock—her permanent record keeping could switch to that, although… well, her time would be bound up in making the tablets and softening a bit of the surface of the bone so it can be written on. Thankfully, the writing wouldn't be allher. Rian could write, and Shanalorre had shown she could as well. The other Dungeon Binder's handwriting was actually better than his. And she remembered… ah, yes, they had an astrologer, right? She remembered something about Rian having him write things out. So that was three people to do the writing for her right there!

It was late enough in the day that she had dismissed Rian so he could… well, do Rian things. The bone tablet, she took back and inscribed the notes more permanently onto another bone tablet, then spend the rest of the afternoon making blank bone tablets to transfer their old notes onto. It was mostly something to keep her hands occupied as she thought about what she had learned and how it might be applied to practical bound tool making.

While she'd realized that white Iridescence was most likely a component—admittedly sometime aftershe'd decided to put experiments on hold in favor of bead production—today had been the first time she'd had the opportunity to confirm it. It was nice to be able to confirm things and not simply have only thought experiments to base her plans on.

Her mind was already thinking of further experiments for tomorrow. The idea was to basically suspend white iridescence with a binding of firewisps anchored to it in molten copper to try to prevent the white iridescence from moving so that the binding won't become disarranged. Of course, in hindsight, it was an extreme step when they could do a similar step using earthwisps and white Iridescence being suspended in stone, or bone. It wouldn't be possible with water, unfortunately, unless one did it with dry solidified water. Done that way it would probably work, but as soon as the imbuement keeping the water solidified ran out… well, it would turn into ice that would start melting…

Which… wouldn't actually be water the white Iridescence could dissolve in at that point. Would that work? Bury some white iridescence in the ice hull of the Coldhold, anchor the binding to it, and when the imbuement ran out, theoreticallythe binding would be maintained long enough for someone to put a bead to some kind of metal contact and wire to imbue the binding and solidify the hull again.

They should probably test that. As long as they got all the water, they could recover the dissolved white Iridescence.

… she probably wouldn't use it on the Coldhold, though. Too easy for another Whisperer to claim the binding through the ice or the metal contact for the bead, and alter it. At least with her blood, her claim to the waterwisps through her affinity would allow her to perceive and fight such a thing. Hmm… would wisps anchored to both white Iridescence and another point that wasn't white iridescence maintain the anchor after the imbuement was used up?

The thoughts occupied her mind as she softened bone and then flattened it out on a sheet of leather on her table, then started to cut up the thin slab into smaller tablets. She only managed to do two slabs when Rian knocked on her door to announce it was time for dinner. He was smiling, and… well, it didn't make her annoyed to look at it.

The seel hanging outside her door was removed, and she handed it to Rian so that it would be added to tomorrow's breakfast. She wondered if she should start putting some sort of rack next to her door instead of a hole to hang the hooks on. Recently all the seels the brat had been leaving her had been long enough to touch the floor.

The three were already at the table, and for some reason they were all huddled together and speaking quietly, their tones urgent. Lori didn't bother to listen as she took her own seat on the bench opposite them. At least, that was the intention as she waited for Rian to come back, but the way the three kept glancing at her as she began to set up the chatrang board…

"What?" she demanded flatly as she finished putting the last pieces into place.

Riz and Umu immediately looked away, one looking over at another, the other looking down at the grain of the wood. Mikon, however, met her eyes. "Thank you for lifting Rian's mood," she smiling in a Rian-like way.

Lori shrugged. "He's much more competent and efficient when he's smiling. Smiling for real," she amended. "That said, his enthusiasm for such things is nearly disturbing. Useful but disturbing." Still far better than his strange voting fetish, though.

"Do you think if we asked him to write things for us, it would lift his mood too?" Mikon asked. On either side of her, the other two leaned towards Lori.

"No," she said bluntly. "It's not that he's writing things down, it's what he's writing down. He's writing answers to questions he thinks are interesting to answer, as well as recording the process of attaining those answers." She titled her head. "Though I don't see why you'd need to do such a thing to lift his mood. Aren't the three of you sleeping with him?"

The three stared at her. Umu was reddening for some reason, while Riz was… well, it looked like she was trying to glare and not doing it very well. Mikon sighed as Lori heard snickering coming from the other tables around them save from behind her.

…

Wait…

She should probably have left this alone. After all, whatever they got up to had nothing to do with her. That said, the possibility of some sort of misunderstanding on their part out of ignorance… "You… know sleeping with someone is a euphemism, right?" she said as she claimed and bound the airwisps behind her to keep her words from being audible to the children. It was… well, probably futile, but she felt she had to make the attempt. "You don't actually sleep, you…" She touched the tips of her thumbs and forefingers together, making an elongated hole shape with either hand, then began to rub them together.

"Of course we know that!" Riz hissed, glaring around her as if trying to deter listeners. "What do you think we've been trying to do?"

"Glare at Umu until she goes away and willfully ignore how Mikon wants to—" Lori made circles with her fingers again and repeated rubbing them together, "the both of you."

Riz and Umu glanced at Mikon sitting between them. The other weaver shuffled away slightly, staring at the table again, while the perpetual non-officer sighed.

"Her Bindership doesn't want to know, Riz," Mikon said, still smiling and looking unperturbed.

"I don't. I really don't," Lori confirmed. Still, an almost morbid curiosity filled her. They haven't? At all? It had been two, almost three seasons! And the few times she'd visited at night to talk to Rian in private, all four had clearly intended to sleep in the same bed! Granted, the house had lacked that smell that came after her mothers… but… Had they never bothered to even suggest it?

This flow of thought was interrupted as Rian came back, now without the seel. "Hey, I'm back," he said, and the three women opposite Lori seemed to jump in place. Umu moved one way and the other two moved another, making a place in front of Lori for Rian to sit in. She let the binding of airwisps behind her disperse, and the sound changed slightly as the sounds from the children's direction finally reached her. "Ah, did I interrupt something? Were the four of you talking?"

"No, you weren't interrupting at all, Rian!"

"It wasn't anything!"

Mikon simply smiled at him. "Did you have fun today, Rian?" she said as she made the first move on the chatrang board.

He blinked at the direct question, then his smile widened. "Yeah, it was fun. Just what I needed after the past few weeks."

"I thought that was what finding reasons to fistfight people was for?" Lori said blandly as she responded to Mikon's opening.

"No, that was to tell them they're annoying. At best it's cathartic, but not actually fun. While there are people who find physical violence fun for its own sake, I'm not one of them. The aches afterward remind why it's such a bad idea."

"You've done it several times."

"Yes, but in my defense, it's usually after I stop aching and therefore need a reminder." Rian shrugged as Mikon made her next move, moving another militia to be able to open the way for her wizards. "So I talked to the smiths again before I called you down, and they're ready to help with the experiments tomorrow. Hopefully, it will work."

Lori nodded. "Rian, we had an astrologer around here somewhere, right?"

"Yes, Cassan," Rian said promptly. "What about him?"

"Can he write?"

"Oh, yes. He's one of the people I've asked to help me keep track of our inventory. Why do you need something wri—wait, are you planning to have experiments without me again?"

Lori gave him a flat look as he suddenly leaned towards her from across the table. "No, I need people to transcribe some things for me. And for you, for that matter." She moved her Horotract, moving it over her militia.

He blinked. "Huh?"

"I want him to transcribe the records on the planks being stored onto some tablets," Lori said. "It will let us stop using the wood for record keeping. The same for some other materials that I don't want to keep recorded onto stone anymore."

"Oh! I'll talk to him, he should be willing to do it. But I thought you had to do it because the stone tablets broke easily?"

"I will still need to be present, since it will involve softening earthwisps, but he should be able to mostly do it himself. I will need you to write too."

"Oh?"

"Yes. I need you to transcribe our research notes."

Rian raised an eyebrow as Mikon mimicked her move, lifting her Horotract over the militia as well. "Don't trust anyone else to know what it says?"

"No. You already know, so you copy it."

A small sigh. "Yes, your Bindership."

Lori pointed at him. "See? It's not just being asked to write something."

"Uh… what?"

"You still have the notes in your house?"

"Uh, yes. I was planning to read them tonight—"

"No. We'll be taking them back to my room. You can peruse them when you're transcribing."

"Can you leave just one…?"

"No. If you want to entertain yourself tonight, find something else to do."

Next to him, three women stared at Lori. She ignored them.

Rain didn't notice. "Well, I suppose I can think up more experiments…"

"I already have my own experiments I want to run," Lori interrupted. "Stop trying to think of ways of staying up late. My orders about you getting rest still stand. I want you at your best for tomorrow's experiments so you can take proper notes.

Her lord pouted—what was he, a child?— but sighed in a resigned sort of way. "Yeah, I suppose you're right."

"I'm always right."

He gave her a flat look. "Didn't you decide to ride a moving rock?"

"You decided to go hunting while sleep deprived."

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Another of Rian's Fetishes

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 embers 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 to 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 stack 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, I've 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?

…

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 howhe'd look different after the three had finally gotten her 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 we're 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 is 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 were 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 it's 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.