"Can one amount of copper get to know you for all the other copper that there is or do projects in copper start out hard and then get easy every time?"

"Sort of in between those. I think it has to do with where it was mined. I get along fine with Gold Ridge copper, but we got some in once from a different mine and it seemed like it didn't know me as well."

"Huh. That's funny. What does it do differently when it likes you?"

"I dunno, it's just... friendlier. It feels different. And it's easier to work with, I just don't know if I can say any specific ways."

"What makes the picky ones like people or not?"

"If any of them ever didn't like me, maybe I'd know!"

Stormy giggles.

Niva grins.

"So I probably don't want to go to the forge. But braiding wire that's already wire probably doesn't take being in the forge, if stuff like that comes up and I'm bored."

"Yeah."

"What did you work on today?"

"The new stuff, mostly."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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?"

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

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

"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."

"Yeah, that sounds like really finicky stuff."

"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."

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