...No, she didn't, the stuff is cheaper than wood* in Night City.

...Unrelated to anything they may or may not be currently discussing, she describes bauxite ore and idly wonders if perhaps they've seen any.

*This is more a fact about the scarcity of wood than the abundance of aluminum, admittedly.

All right, they'll pay her to tell them where they mine it and how they extract it. If she wants more gold than they have here they'll contact the clans at Hammerthorn. 

Sounds like it could be one of many rocks that aren't thought to have any ore value. Tiny amounts of Dvalinn's stone can be made from crushed sapphires by master blacksmiths, though grandfather doesn't personally know how. Is she saying 'bauxite' is the ore they need? They have samples of many ores, and they can get more. 

That makes sense, sapphires are just crystallized alumina, which is processed but not smelted bauxite. She had lab-made sapphire in some of her equipment for its hardness and heat resistance!

...Hmm.

...She really does love teaching, it seems, she muses aloud. She keeps defaulting to it when it might not perhaps be entirely wise. Very little of this is her own personal accomplishment or discovery, she wants to stress. And there will no doubt be bits of the process that she is missing from her reading. She knows the process intellectually, mostly, but it is not her craft.

(The scientific papers on bauxite extraction are mostly corrupted in her storage. She's going to have to rely on popular science depictions, references, glib summaries, and things like that, and reason out a bunch of the chemistry from first principles, and try things that will fail at times... This is a little exciting. She likes Dwarves. They are fellow nerds, or so it seems.)

If she can make sapphires she'll have more money than she knows what to do with. At which point they can help. 

They'll pay her for her teaching, of course. If she'd rather negotiate up front that's very respectable of her, but they've spent enough time dealing with humans that they know not to expect it for things like this for some reason. 

'Bauxite' turns out not to be any of the more likely candidates. Would she know it if she saw it? Does she know where it comes from? It might not be found around here, the ancient dwarves could also transport vast mountains of ore incredible distances underground. It's thought they had a contract with the ancient stones, the bones of the very earth, but it's not known. All the dwarf cities of old were crushed beneath their mountains, or at least blocked off. 

Eh. She's fine with whatever these dwarves later determine to be fair. The reasons for that are complicated and in her case go down to wanting an alliance of sorts for other types of projects, and wanting more industry and wealth in the world in general, and not considering aluminum smelting her calling.

She thinks it mostly comes from equatorial regions. The key things to look for are the orangey color and the inclusion of lots of little spheres. She might be able to tell by eye if she saw it in person and rigged up a special kind of light... If you're not sure about a rock, the only real way is to go through the ore prep steps- Grind to powder, soak in hot caustic soda, let slag settle, filter, cool, add strong acid... She's not sure what kind of strong acid... She's not sure of a lot of the specific details here, honestly... And see if any white powder is produced. Though apparently it may be more of a goo if you use the acid method instead of sprinkling already prepared alumina dust in? Crystal formation from solutions is often weird like that. Then you bake it in a kiln to drive off any remaining water and other volatile compounds, to prep for the actual smelting.

If she shares the steps they need they'll get to it immediately. They can send messages to other dwarf clanholds too. 

...

What they're interested in really is how the dwarves of old got so much of the stuff. Possibly all the dwarves this side of the mountain wouldn't be able to make the legendary Helm of Giants, a great arena made of Dvalinn's stone and known now to lie under twenty miles of granite, even if they used iron or copper instead. 

...

All right, they really do not do this very often at all. But they have their honour. They can share some of their ancestors' secrets too, which they cannot claim to have found themselves but can claim to have inherited from ancient times. 

If she doesn't know what mithril is...

It's a metal the colour of moonlight, and things of magic are made from it. It's far stronger and lighter than steel, and if it's worked just right it can have impossible properties - in one of the halls of their home, a stone chandelier weighing countless tonnes hangs from a mithril chain subtle as a spider's web. In old times mithril armour could be made almost undefeatable, and even today a good mithril blade can be made to cut steel plate clean. There are wilder stories - that it's solid magic, that it is the mother of all metals and would not bow to the tyranny of natural law, that it's the hair of the moon goddess, and that's why they say in some parts chains of it hang down from the sky itself - but whatever is true, it's the kind of thing you might like to know about, if you're in the business of performing miracles like she is. 

It's not beyond them to follow her blueprints, even mid-conversation. None of them have ever seen or imagined such a machine before, and the tolerances are a little bit of a puzzle, but they have a master smith to supervise, and dwarf steel might not be what it used to be but it's adequate for this. 

They can have an example ready before the day is out. 

......Wow, she really wants the chance to observe some mithril under a microscope. That tensile strength must be in ths gigapascal range.

Well.

She didn't think to go buy thread, presuming that it would take more than one afternoon to produce the thing. She'll crank the cam, declare that it looks good, and then-

-Carefully pack it in a safe position in a box, and then pick it up without much visible effort and head back towards town. She'll return tomorrow some time, but she has to go find a place to put this thing!

It's very precious but they do have some, if she returns with a 'microscope'. 

And yes, a workshop full of dwarves can work quite quickly when this kind of thing is afoot. 

Good luck, come back soon and bring us more secrets of metallurgy / interesting crafting challenges!

-Before she goes, do they know good sources for very pure alcohol? Not for drinking, for chemistry. Glassware? She's not expecting Pyrex but something able to contain strong acids and bases, and something cleanable, ideally with consistent volume markings- Oh, hell with it, she'll be back with plenty of unreasonable requests to start rebuilding her workshop. (Probably an attitude that's very understandable, she muses.) Tomorrow.

Now. The obvious candidate to ask about securing land along the river to work with is the church. They seem to be the center of local social life, and would at least be able to inform her who to inquire with. An entanglement with them is kind of inevitable due to their trusted role, despite the Teacher situation... So it's really a question of minimizing attack surface and suspicion.

...Does she remember seeing anything that could be a real estate, construction, or merchant-house concern in town?

...Not for... drinking? 

...Really good dwarf whisky has more alcohol in it than you'd think possible, and it's very pure, but it does have other stuff in it. 

If she wanted just the spirit, then... well, that should be possible. It wouldn't taste right, though. 

Wizards are always getting through glassware, that one at least isn't a problem. 

Land along the river: this gets complicated fast. The approach to real estate ownership seems to be "sheer fucking chaos". The Church does have extensive property holdings in the town directly, including some places on the river where it abuts the town to the north. It's fairly cramped and she'll owe rent on the land to the Church and sometimes other parties even if she buys the house outright. The Church will just sell her the freehold directly if they own it ,for a sufficiently staggering amount of money, which is unusual. In some places the town council themselves own all the buildings, on the same model, but the temple owns the land they're built on. Various nobles of the court of the Duchess of Altgrove own certain streets and townhouses with a variety of exemptions. The riverside land for a mile outside the town is owned by the mayor, an elderly knight who uses it for fishing. 

....................So her choices for doing this now are basically 'lol no'. Well, that is why you are supposed to research things before making a business plan.

She'll buy whatever thread is on offer in the market for market day and haul the crate with the weaving-mill back up to Silvermoon Academy, how about. It's not like she can't carry it with her intensive muscle and bone augs. Maybe work on Tinkering up a motor for it later... Mumble grumble... Maybe the 'unseen servant' can crank the arm...

They're working on improving property law! They just have a lot of things to worry about and aren't really supposed to be a government and the current system of land ownership isn't very far removed from "it's mine because this is a nice sharp sword I've got here". 

At some point you seem to have been registered as a member of the Academy, though it's not clear how. The gates melt open for you. Nice Mysterious Device. It's making clanking noises and everything.