warm front

[cumulonimbus]

After Mathilde has left (and Stormy has her schedule for the next few days all written down), Stormy goes aprowl through the house again to make sure she's clear on the layout and see if anybody else wants to talk to her while she is still novel.

Comments

[allthebrightest]

"The new stuff, mostly."

[cumulonimbus]

"What's it going to be good for?"

[allthebrightest]

"Well, most things you can do with steel, I guess. But if nobody comes up with a way to get it out of rocks that doesn't need magic, it's going to be so rare that anything made with it will be mind-bogglingly expensive. So, anything you can do with steel where it's really, really important that it won't corrode or that it's very light."

[cumulonimbus]

"How do you normally get metals out of rocks and why doesn't that work on this one?"

[allthebrightest]

"Heat and charcoal, for most everything else. When you do that with this stuff, you get something weird - it kind of eats the charcoal and turns into something that's not even a metal at all."

[cumulonimbus]

"But it doesn't corrode? Can you like - dissolve the rock around it maybe?"

[allthebrightest]

"I guess somebody could try it. For all I know it might eat whatever you use to dissolve the rock, too."

[cumulonimbus]

"Yeah, I guess. And if it's so expensive when you get it out they probably don't want to experiment on the rocks that have it very much?"

[allthebrightest]

"Yeah. Doing it with magic at least works, unless you really mess something up."

[cumulonimbus]

"Is it more complicated than just sort of - magically slurping the metal out?"

[allthebrightest]

"Yeah. It's all smith-mage stuff, I dunno if I could even explain it. You have to coax it, and kind of sit your magic on it to make sure it doesn't do anything funny, and it has to be hot but not too hot. It's hard."

[cumulonimbus]

"Yeah, that sounds like really finicky stuff."

[allthebrightest]

"And then it's still finicky after you get it out as a metal, but at least it's easier to do things with it."

[cumulonimbus]

"Does it really not have even a placeholder name yet?"

[allthebrightest]

"Thinking of names is hard, and then after people think of names they argue about them. Some people want to call it godsmetal, but Spruce says just because we took this long to find it and it's awfully persnickety, that doesn't mean it's divine. So she just calls it 'new metal'. But then other people say they don't want to stick everyone with calling it new metal in a hundred years when it's not that new anymore, and it doesn't sound fancy enough."

[cumulonimbus]

"Well, how did other metals get named?"

[allthebrightest]

"Long enough ago that they just have names now and nobody's needed to worry about it in thousands of years. Except nickel, but that's a contraction of a phrase that means 'fake copper' in... I forget, I think it was a language spoken in some little corner of an Imperial-speaking country but I can't remember if it was Capchen or somewhere else and I don't remember what the language is called. Or if it still exists. So I guess we could name the new stuff after a metal that already exists, 'magic steel' or something. But I feel like that would get confusing."

[cumulonimbus]

"Yeah. Maybe you could name it magic steel in a dead language?"

[allthebrightest]

"Maybe. I'll ask Spruce if anyone's thought of that. Unless I forget. I'll probably forget."

[cumulonimbus]

"That's why I write things down, so I don't forget them."

[allthebrightest]

"I forget to check if I've written down anything I should remember the same way I forget to remember if there's anything I should remember. I gave up writing stuff down, it never helps."

[cumulonimbus]

"Huh."

[allthebrightest]

"Anyway. Maybe Rahi will show up and remind me there's something I want to talk to Spruce about. She does stuff like that."

[cumulonimbus]

"She could hear that Rook was in the garden - him in particular - and that he came back inside from upstairs."

[allthebrightest]

"Yeah, that's Rahi."