"- those aren't letters, right?" asks Sivni.

"These ones are letters," gesture, "but these are just plants." She's pretty sure this means she's done something horribly wrong but it'll probably go better for her if she pretends she's actually being completely reasonable rather than jumping to apologize. She can't quite manage a smile but as long as she doesn't aim for anything but matter-of-fact her poker face is okay.

"Oh, okay, I didn't recognize them and wasn't sure if my Allspeak was glitching."

"They're from my planet. I can eat them but I don't know if you can."

"We can eat most stuff humans do. There's a couple weird ones that'll give us upset stomachs, but most stuff is labeled if it's Amentan-safe or not."

"Cool. I haven't gotten to see any multiversal food labeling yet."

"Huh, new world?"

"Yeah, we still don't even have a name for it. I hadn't actually been anywhere else before coming here for class."

"Well, welcome to the multiverse! Isn't it exciting?"

"It's great!"

"My wife is already pregnant with our third - I guess humans like different things - what do you like about the multiverse?"

"I have no idea what I'm going to decide is my favorite thing about it in a year or two and that's kind of cool. Everything I learn makes me like it more. But, I guess, I think the art is interesting and - it's kind of a downer to say the concern for universal flourishing was a nice surprise, isn't it."

"I was surprised too! I was low key expecting, like, evil or at least unhelpful, since they took so long, it didn't really occur to me that they could be, like, a kind of young society."

The teacher turns on a slideshow about the basics of Dwarf-style crafting. At its most basic, crafting an artifact is about precision manufacture. However, the idea isn't that the result has precision-manufactured features - if that were it, demons could make magic stuff in this style - but the process involving a lot of very precise interventions on the project. Modern technology... doesn't help nearly as much as you might think. Preindustrial Dwarves can make glowing rings or ever-sharp swords no problem and Space Dwarves never discovered the techniques at all even though you don't have to be in a flat Arda to do them. Basically, you're compensating for not having osanwë by "talking" to the metal and if there's a thermostat control system or a servant etcher or anything like that between you and your project, you're not really talking to it, are you. So technology in Dwarf-style forges is mostly for safety and replacing dirty fuels with clean heat and stuff like that - you still have to use hand tools.

Well, if she doesn't turn out to be strong enough to do it, there's probably magic to change that. She pays attention to the slideshow.

It looks like strength isn't a major feature as long as your tools are good quality; you can get a lot of leverage this way and that.

They're going to start with a glowing article of jewelry and then the rest of the course is intended to get them competent to produce immortality necklaces, since those are a really hot commodity.

"If you want to learn other kinds of artifacts afterward, do you have to take a different course?"

"The immortality ones are complicated enough that in the course of learning to make them you'll be able to take the specs for another kind of artifact and make it no problem," says the teacher.

"Thank you," she says even though that's not quite the thing she was wondering. Doesn't seem worth pushing her luck, anyway.

...She should be taking notes on this, shouldn't she. Unfortunate how she didn't think of that until literally right now.

When the slideshow concludes they go to the stockroom to pick out materials for their glowing jewelry - they can make it a ring or a necklace or a bracelet or almost anything, and the teacher wants them to all be doing different stuff so he can illustrate how this affects the process.

"Can it be a brooch or is it important that you wear it on you instead of on your clothing?"

"It's important that it touch the wearer's skin. A brooch could do that but it'd be a mite stranger," says the teacher.

In that case she guesses she'll do a torc, unless anyone else wants to do that in which case she'll come up with something else.

Nobody else is specifically attached to doing a torc. Sivni is doing a gold earring.

They will now get a nonmagical introduction to the uses of the various tools in purely physical terms, so they know how to not chop off their fingers or cause metal filings to fly into their eyes or anything. They can try the tools on the metals they chose for their projects, since different metals have different textures.

She's very methodical about testing the tools. She is also using gold due to that being a metal her people ever work with.

Gold is very soft!

The class ends for the day after they've all had the safety lecture and an introduction to the tools.