Setting up the actual copper-mining operation was proving to be fairly easy. The place Alyssa had found was almost right on the First River, a rocky hillside with scattered green patches... only some of which was due to plants. The stone here was veiny and already beginning to crumble, with several places that were... well, rather obviously raw copper. Weathered and oxidized, of course, but still the actual pure metal.
"It still feels deeply wrong for some reason," Alyssa noted, "Like, you find metals and gems underground, not just... lying on top of things."
"It had to be discovered before people could go looking for," Henrietta absently responded. "And while I will agree that though it feels truly odd to have raw metal breaching the surface, it's still not as rich as I was hoping for. Though raw metal will at least be easier to process."
Alyssa shook her head in agreement, "And it should also be easier to transport?"
"I suppose that's true." Henrietta sighed, and handed the Window of Words and Winds back to Alyssa. It was a bit tricky to use for these purposes, because neither [Rustlewind] nor [Inscribe Documentation] were true geological surveys. But, their best guess was that most of this rocky bluff was about as rich in copper as the surface suggested that it was. So several decent chunks, but still mostly waste rock.
Not that it wasn't a lot of copper, but for some reason Henrietta had vaguely assumed it would be as abundant as iron ore had been at Ironworks. Fortunately, the stone was soft, and because it was on a slope, it was well within the capabilities of her more normal inklings to dig out. That was doubly convenient, because trying to figure out how to sustain her diggers both here and at Ironworks was liable to be a challenge. ?Epizeuxis? required her to make all of her copies at once, after all.
"It is a pity I haven't been able to make any better inks," Henrietta mused as she found a good stone wall to conjure her minions upon - ?Universal Canvas? could be so convenient. Alyssa tried to hide her confusion about what Henrietta meant, so Henrietta decided to help the girl out. "Without them, my inklings are limited to base physicality. I would sorely love to replicate the energy-consumption the dragons display when eating our roads in this situation."
Alyssa nodded in understanding, then brightened, "Oh right, that was it!"
Henrietta motioned for her to continue.
"The transport. This is along the river! We can use the hippophant!"
That seemed a little random, and it took Henrietta a moment to place what Alyssa meant. "The... territorial river creature, a bit like an extra-large hippo with a trunk. You ran into it while practicing and scouting one day, then avoided the area?"
"Yes!" Alyssa seemed really excited, and while Henrietta wasn't quite as enthusiastic, she was rather hopeful. It had taken the two of them nearly two full days of travel to get here, and would take even longer to bring back any industrially-relevant amount of copper. Delegating the job to an inkling right from the start sounded lovely. "It didn't work for the Ironroad, because it was too aquatic, but this!" she pointed towards where the First River was just out of sight yet still visible. "This is perfect!"
That would likely work well. She'd need to get rid of some of her inkling designs to make space for it, but that was... probably fine. Something that big would be able to self-defend against the dragons, too. She'd need to design some way for it to carry the native copper nuggets easily... that would work.
In support of that goal, Henrietta cleared out the trees between Coppermine and First River, then designated a spot by the riverbank as where her inklings would deposit anything that looked metallic, with the remainder being piled off in a separate place that they would probably want to process later, once their processes were a bit more mature. She would probably be back later, but this... was good enough for now.
It wasn't difficult to find the hippophant. They just needed to travel down the river for a day and a bit, and it came to them. Its bellowing roar was cut somewhat short by Henrietta throwing an inkling tree trunk at it, then Alyssa launching herself directly above it, then slamming down into its head like a human missile. That didn't kill it, but it did shove the creature's head underwater with a crack and a huge splash, and dazed it long enough for Henrietta to spear it through the neck and pull it further into the water, drowning it and bleeding it at the same time.
The waters ran red as the great beast struggled, but ultimately... it just wasn't a threat. And with no healing magic, even basic kinetic attacks were enough to take it out. Henrietta couldn't help but feel a little bad about how swiftly and brutally the creature had been brought down, though she didn't let it stop her.
With how territorial it was, it probably would have interfered with any of their efforts to ship things down the river anyway.
Once it stopped struggling, Henrietta subsumed it and conjured a small platoon's worth of the megafauna to study it a bit more.
They tried riding it down the river, but it was horribly clumsy in any situation other than fully submerged, and while Henrietta was at best half Alyssa's speed, it was half Henrietta's top speed. It did have more endurance than her flight, but Henrietta could run while her wings were resting, so she was still faster than it long-term too.
Still, it didn't matter to her if one of the inklings took a full week to make one trip from First Tower to Coppermine. She had nineteen of the things, so in practice most would probably just stay in Tower Stream as dragon-guards and short-distance transportation.
By the time she and Alyssa had made it back to First Tower, Henrietta had worked out a basic basket system that the hippophants could use to transport... whatever, really, but for now just copper. Their trunks were plenty strong to lift a heavy load onto their back, and their tendency to stay underwater helped with the long-term weight as well. After checking in with the boys, she spent a bit of time actually designing and creating the harness - which was not as easy as it had been in her imagination - and sent off the first of them to go get copper.
She'd send off one each day either until the first one came back or it became apparent that something had gone wrong. With a trying-to-be-accurate guess that it would take one of the hippophants eight days to make a full round trip, Henrietta realistically expected it to be more like twelve days, but once that lead time was established they'd be getting one load of copper per day, however large that may be.
Only then did she turn her attention to the next steps. Considering she'd been gone for half a week, she'd both been expecting to see some amount of progress in their ongoing efforts and not, because four or five days - it could be hard to keep track when away from First Tower - ultimately wasn't that long as far as actual development was concerned.
But she should have had more faith in her team.
"It's strictly a surface phenomenon," Oliver explained. "I can't measure how deep it goes, but that copper patch is just the result of me scraping off the bronze with a knife."
"But it is bronze, correct?"
"Yeah," Oliver confirmed.
Henrietta turned to Clark, who was beaming even more than usual. "A most excellent job, Haleford. I anticipated this would take far longer for you to accomplish this. And well done to you as well, Smith. That focus was exceptional.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Clark saluted. Oliver didn’t say anything, nodding silently in assent instead.
She had been the one to point them at their goal and provide a bit of a framework, but the success itself was all theirs.
“Can you keep making more bronze?” She handed the lumpy mostly-copper nugget back to Clark. “There's some more preparations I'll need to do before I'm ready to move into full deployment. Smith, we have enough copper for you to get started on some of the radiators, yes?"
He nodded.
"Is there any use to continuing work on a copper version, before we get larger quantities of bronze?"
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"Each has their own advantages, but bronze is far better for casting and generally working with. Far less work, less intervention, all that. Maybe even automation? I know that's what you want, and I'm most of the way there with what I already have." Oliver shrugged, "It'll require adjustments, but they won't be super deep ones."
"Then work on some copper prototypes, keep figuring out the big problems."
Oliver shrugged, "I'm most of the way there already. Changing materials would cause me to need to rework most of what I'd be doing past this point."
Henrietta paused. That was fast. "In that case... focus on improving your general tooling. The next generation of placement brackets, some more broadcast glyphs, maybe a new workshop?"
Oliver thought for a moment, then nodded. "Sure."
"In which case, I wish both of you the best of luck in your endeavors. Oh, Haleford, you do have somewhere to put the bronze shavings when you're done, yes?"
"I have a bowl, I can show you if you desire?"
Henrietta held up a hand to forestall him. "Just wanted to make sure you had something. If you think it's good enough, I believe you."
Of course, even then Henrietta wasn't able to get to her work immediately. Alyssa and Jacob needed direction of their own, and she put Alyssa back on Blast furnace development, and Jacob just needed some clarifications on how she wanted the Lumbermill to work once it was rebuilt.
And then, finally, Henrietta was able to get back to alchemy.
Bronze had been humanity's metal of choice for thousands of years for many reasons. It took to casting - the metal kind, not the mana kind - incredibly well, could be forged incredibly easily, was quite strong, corrosion resistant, and just generally was better than iron in most applications. The 'Bronze Age' had really only given way to the 'Iron Age' when many of the trade routes needed to get tin and copper into the same place had fallen apart, forcing people to look for alternatives. Iron had won not because it was better, but because it was cheaper. Insofar as 'more widely available and not an alloy' meant 'cheaper,' in any case.
Nonetheless, while copper was a perfectly fine metal, it wasn't terribly suited for their purposes. While soft enough to be cold-forged, it was an incredible pain to cast into shape, and that metalcasting would be a vital part of their ability to scale past their limited manpower.
The problem, then, was how to get tin. It was a far rarer metal than even copper, and the odds of it happening to be just past Alyssa's current [Rustlewind] range were slim enough as to not be worth planning for. So, they needed some other source.
With the way things worked out, that source happened to be Clark's new subskills. While [Unblemish] was a restorative skill, it was a very transmutive restorative spell. That in itself was rather fortunate, as the two spell types were... traditionally opposites? Restorative skills, like healing, cleaning, mending, and so forth all worked to restore a target to some 'ideal' state of itself. People who got deep into that branch of magic tended to talk a lot about 'ideal forms' and were frequently quite particular about defining the 'true essence' of things.
Transmutation, on the other hand, was traditionally far more practical in its concerns of altering the current state of an object. [Unblemish], as demonstrated by its ability to remove knots from wood, could do both restoration and transmutation. To be sure, it wasn't actually a transmutation skill. But Clark's ?Refine? gave him a 'lever' allowing him to redirect the skill into making more substantial changes, and once a lever existed... it could move the entire world, with the proper fulcrum.
The fulcrum in this instance was the focus-bowl their Artificer had made.
It was designed to put pressure on the alchemical nature of the copper within it, encouraging it to become a 'more excellent' form of itself rather than simply becoming a purer and purer version. Classical alchemy stuff, in the most literal sense.
But while the true alchemists of old were blindly feeling around and needed decades or centuries to discover singular techniques of transmutation, Henrietta actually understood the interplay between the Tapestry and atoms well enough to derive new formulae from scratch. The key was refinement. Copper and bronze were alchemically rather similar, but bronze had a substantially higher aretropy - the alchemical measure of 'self excellence' - than copper did, and [Unblemish]'s Heroic nature meant it was fully capable of aretropic enhancement.
Now, it wasn't that simple. Obviously. But it had given them a starting point, and that was usually the hardest part.
And now, Henrietta had an iron bowl full of bronze shavings scraped off the surface of a transmuted copper ingot. It was itself within a small kiln made of clay and bricks, and powered by one of Oliver's experimental fire-burner referential glyphs. With some coaxing and a fair bit of work, Henrietta managed to melt her metal scraps, forming a puddle of liquid bronze. Then, she removed it from her miniature kiln and, holding a pair of stirring rods - one clay and the other iron - like chopsticks, whisked the bowl of molten metal for a few moments, getting a proper whiff of the elemental interactions.
There wasn't any feasible mechanical way to separate tin and copper from one another, they completely lacked the chemical means - various acids, certain fluxes, and so forth - and electrical separation was completely impossible right now. That only left magical methods, and while the Universal Refinery was excellent, it divided things based on their predominant elemental property. Pulling Metal out and away from Sand was entirely doable for it. One Metal from another Metal? Not so much.
Fortunately, there were other methods available which could work with less-prominent elemental Associations. Water, Hero, and Light still clung to them heavily from their [Unblemish]ment, some Technology and Arcane from Oliver's contributions, there was plenty of Metal going around, Lava from the metal being molten, Mud from there being alloys... about what she'd expected.
Comparing it to the scent of pure copper, also refined by Clark's skill, gave her something to work with. Arcane, Water, and Mud were the primary absences, and a slightly acrid scent indicated that there was a bit of elemental instability between Nature and Technology as the latter attempted to assert control over the molten mixture.
With a few premade runestones from Oliver, Henrietta set up a quick magic circle to keep the bronze molten. She then paused for a moment as she realized she knew just why the circle for keeping melted metals was set up the way it was, then started setting up a second magic circle outside of the first one.
Magic circles were a huge part of alchemy just in general, and though years and years ago she would have learned some of the basics for how and why they were constructed, that had been decades and multiple worlds ago. Her new runistry studies had brought some of those old memories to the forefront, and she could appreciate the handiwork that had been second nature to her for so long in a new way.
After a moment, she realized the structure smelled a bit off, and adjusted the stones a bit to ensure they kept working. She'd need to do so regularly throughout the process, which was why alchemists preferred to use runestones rather than hard-carved diagrams. Even if the external Tapestry was perfectly controlled, changing elemental balances in the substances they worked with meant there was never really a single 'best configuration' to use through an entire procedure.
More advanced alchemy tools automatically adjusted their configuration to maintain a specific environment dynamically under changing conditions, but those had the obvious issue that came with any device violating the Focus Exclusivity Principle, in that they cast the spells rather than the alchemist, but sometimes that didn't matter.
Henrietta briefly toyed with the idea of using her tendrils to adjust the runestones, but her ink-flails really didn't have the level of fine dexterity needed for that. And it wasn't like manually shuffling the runes around was that hard. She'd probably need to expend more focus directing her tendrils than just using her hands.
The second circle slowly took shape, as Henrietta built out different configurations, monitored what the Window of Words and Winds said in conjunction with her own nose and other senses, and kept stirring the molten metal.
Once the circle itself was fully assembled, Henrietta dropped in a new runestone, one simply inscribed with a glyph for 'Tin,' and continued stirring. The stone bobbed on the surface of the molten bronze, and the outer circle pushed on the elements at play within the mixture.
There were a couple of different principles at play. The primary one was simply an anti-Mud effect that would encourage separations, but almost as important was a Water repulsion effect that would push anything associated with elemental Water towards the center of her little crucible, using the same principles at play in their water pool. Combined, the Water-imbued tin would be provoked into precipitation, and the Tin symbol would serve as a natural nucleation point for the metal. As those forces interacted, Henrietta modified her 'keep molten' circle such that its effects were primarily focused on elemental Mud, and would thereby naturally allow the purified metals to solidify.
Copper, having a much higher melting temperature than tin, solidified around the edges first. And as it slowly crept forwards, the glowing molten metal took on slightly different colors and scents, until she was left with an iron crucible filled with hot but solid copper cupping a small amount of molten tin.
The Tin rune was removed with Henrietta's stir-sticks, and the tin metal itself was transferred into a fresh bowl. It still wasn't pure, but once it had cooled down, a quick visit with Clark fixed that.
It wasn't much, but it was plenty for what would come next.
Henrietta smiled. Now came the fun parts.
Patreon, of course.
Discord though, as it feels easier to engage with people there, and being tactically silent feels less awkward for some reason.
How well do you understand the mechanisms of the Factory?
