The Ebock Blacksmith shop is just like it's been on my previous visits. Filled with shelves, all covered in different things. Unlike before, I can start to pick out some of them. Some look purely decorative, but others appear useful, including candle holders like I've seen at Eryk's house. A few boxes have nails piled up inside, both the small kind and the much larger nails used for construction. A couple knives on one wall... One spot has a line of things I'm guessing are jewelry, based on the little gemstones in them...

Even so, it feels like I barely pick out a fraction of the things around us. There's just so much stuff. My eyes keep scanning back and forth over it all, until we reach the counter and I find the other thing here that hasn't changed.

Collin.

The half-shona man is just as barely-adult as I remember him. And just as nasty toward Eryk as he practically sneers, "Eryk," turning the single word into an insult.

"Collin," Eryk answers the same way.

Without another exchange between them, Collin waves an annoyed hand toward the door the workshop. "Dad's still working on that favor. Hasn't left the workshop since last night."

Dad? My thoughts skip and stumble over the unexpected word, until I realize something that should have been obvious. With Ebbin's black hair and Rimina's bright green, Collin with dark green is like an exact halfway point between them. And he works here, and Patrick mentioned him taking over one day. Of course he's Ebbin's son.

While I'm fumbling my way through that delayed realization, Eryk circles around the counter, tests the handle, then bangs on the workshop door a few times. I jump when it's way louder than I expected, then glance around to the few customers who immediately take note too. With a few quick steps, I shift behind the counter so they don't see me. It's good that it's taller than I am...

Then I look back to Eryk, shortly before the door opens. My nose wrinkles automatically, a heavy, unpleasant odor sweeping out over me. Like something burning, or dying, or... I don't know. Whatever it is, it's dark and really nasty.

"Eryk, come on in," Ebbin says with a lot less power in his voice than usual. John stays back while I follow Patrick into the workshop, where the terrible smell only gets stronger. It's slightly brighter inside than I remember from our other visits. I wipe at my eyes, the sting of the air starting to make them water. I have to blink a few extra times to try and ignore the feeling.

While Eryk works on wrapping me in a smock, I turn my head around as best I can to watch Ebbin lock the door behind us. As soon as he turns our way again, I see the dark bags under his eyes and the way every blink is slow and exhausted. Was he really up all night? Just to work on things for Eryk?

He raises a fist to his mouth and starts coughing when he waves us over to a counter on the far side of the room. My brows drop. My first thought is the coughing sickness still going around town in places, but it's clear this is different. The way he hacks up from deep in his chest and the rough, dry sound of it are completely unlike the coughs I've heard from people who got sick before. But still, hearing that is immediately worrying. Especially with the awful, rotten smell sitting heavy in here. I'm far more concerned with Ebbin than the far counter he's directing us to... Even so, we all follow him over, where he finishes his hacking coughs, and slaps a hand down on the tall metal counter top with a dull clang.

I finally glance that way, going up on my toes, but I still can't see anything up there since it's so much taller than me. I return my gaze to Ebbin instead.

"This batch is a flop," he starts, shoulders hitching up briefly with another singular cough, before he clears his throat and pushes on. "Most of it's more like rock than metal. And however you do the star metal processing, it didn't even work on most of these."

"What do you mean, it didn't work?" Eryk questions, sounding noticeably alarmed. After all, if it didn't work, that means we might have messed up building our catalyst coil...

"See here? Only these two are any different." When Ebbin points at something on top of the counter, Eryk opens his mouth and looks to me, but pauses, and looks back at the counter.

"Ah, sorry," he mutters automatically, and picks me up to set me up on top so I can actually see. "What do you think, Aria?" he asks, sweeping a hand across the samples. I take a few moments to look everything over, and even at a glance, it's a disaster.

There are bits of rock and dust, some in rough chunks and others practically crushed into powder, scattered all about the metal surface. The test samples we made have been reduced to crumbled rubble. It's still mostly gathered in fourteen piles, seven across and two deep. Just a handful remain in much better shape than the others. The ones that stood up best definitely look more like metal than rock, which would explain why they haven't been blown apart by whatever testing Ebbin did with them.

Looking down the line, he has thin wooden sheets leaning against the wall, each row labeled with the type of ore it came from. The only real survivors include one of the samples from copper, then the titanium and illium. In fact, just looking across them now, I see exactly what Ebbin was talking about with them 'not working.'

Besides the copper row, every one of the pairs - which would be our tests of combined and uncombined slag - look the same. We ran the lightning energy through one of each, so unless we did mess up our combination process somehow, they should have combined... Maybe the samples only contained one thing, so there was nothing to combine...?

"Which ones are which?" I ask Eryk.

With a few words, he explains that the ones nearer to the counter's edge are the non-combined samples, while the ones closer to the wall are combined. So that is the only one that changed, I note while looking over the copper slag by the wall.

Besides that, the rest all look the same. I have to be sure though, so I tap on my chromium for more air mana. Even though Ebbin has a few extra candles lit, up in holders along this wall, it's still kind of dim, and the extra powerful eyesight makes a huge difference.

Staring with my suddenly incredible vision, I confirm with as much certainty as I can - the ones we tried to combine are identical to the ones we didn't, for every other type except copper. Peering closely over them, other patterns begin to form. It isn't just each pair that are the same. The color and shine of the slag from the titanium and illium, and from the mollite and nuvrite, are exactly the same. The first two being dark, ugly gray bars of beaten down metal, and the other pairs piles of fine white powder. Even the size of the tiny little grains of powder look the same to me.

As for the rest of them, each set of tin, iron, and copper are clearly different. All in varying shades of gray, obviously distinct from one to the next. And, in awful shattered states. Besides the few pieces of metal by me, it's the lightning-combined copper slag that stood up best to Ebbin's tests, with its metallic gray color, and little bits of whitish dust on its surface, really only visible thanks to my air mana.

If that's the only one that combined, does it mean the rest of the ore slag only had one thing left over? All six of them?

Once I've worked my way through all those thoughts, I finally answer Eryk's initial question. "I'm not really sure. So far, I can tell that the mollite and nuvrite slag are the same, and the titanium and illium. For the combinations, I really don't know. It could be there was nothing to combine, but I doubt it." It's hard to put my thoughts into words, how the metal ores are made of all sorts of different stuff, but somehow the slag all comes out as only one thing? I tilt my head a bit, trying to voice my uncertain thoughts. "Maybe there's something else, something we missed. It doesn't feel right that only one thing melted out as slag." I receive a few uncertain nods from the men around me.

I pause, unsure how to go on after voicing my initial thoughts. Then... "So...?" I ask uncertainly, glancing to prompt Eryk. He clears his throat and gets Ebbin to start explaining more about what we're looking at. As the big man speaks, he keeps coughing. I can't follow a lot of it since it sounds like a bunch of stuff about precisely how much force it took to destroy all of our test samples, so I focus more on Ebbin himself. He really doesn't look to be in good shape. Besides the exhaustion in his face and eyes, he has that awful, hacking cough, and the longer he speaks, the more he sounds like he's wheezing to take in the breaths he does. His hands are shaking even though it isn't cold, and one of them has this nasty burn across his palm and fingers. Then there's that pained wince to his eyes, indicating a headache. He really doesn't look good...

Despite my concerns, all I can do for now is listen along with his explanations of how useless these samples are. I can't even call them metal samples, most of the stuff left over in the slag clearly isn't even metal in the first place.

As Ebbin explains, the lumps of mostly rocky stuff are complete junk for making or building anything. Not even up to the standards of regular stone they use to make buildings. But that's no surprise, it wouldn't be waste slag if it was obviously useful. The only real exception besides our new combined one, are the four dark metal samples, which came from the titanium and illium. Being actual metal unlike the others, they're still in one piece after his tests, not completely shattered into chunks or dust.

Still, Ebbin largely waves them off. As weak as mollite, doesn't hold an edge at all, and incredibly heavy on top of all that. Almost fifty percent heavier than iron, Ebbin says. It's so bad it would collapse under its own weight if you tried to make anything particularly large out of it.

With that all said, he points out one more thing. "Slag is no joke. Stuff's nasty. These ones here-" and he gestures to the far side, the four powdery white samples from the mollite and nuvrite, "-like to burn you if you so much as touch them," and shows us the big burn on his hand. "And those," pointing out the tin and iron slag this time, "smell like death." This one he says to Patrick and me in particular for some reason, before bringing a hand up to hold his head when he starts coughing again.

"Are you alright?" I finally ask now that I have the chance.

But he waves off my concern. "Yeah, just need to get some sleep. Eryk wanted this all done in a rush for some reason. You know you owe me a serious favor after all this, right?"

Eryk's response is completely earnest. "Yeah, I've got it."

I pout, not satisfied. But if he says he's fine, there's no real arguing with him. For now, I push the thought away and focus on the smell. "So that's where the smell comes from?" I reply, covering my nose with a hand now, and looking at the iron and tin slag. Just staying in this small, enclosed room is starting to become unbearable. There's a growing pit of nausea in my stomach, and even my head is beginning to throb slightly, the more I breathe in the disgusting air. "Why?"

"No idea. Whatever that rock is made of, it's not something I'd want to mess with."

"Well, it explains why slag dumps are so foul." Eryk thinks aloud. "Want to take these back for more testing, Aria?"

"Sure," I agree easily. Besides the star metal tests, our main goal was finding their effects with mana anyway.

"Ebbin, do you have anything to put these in?" Eryk asks, waving across at the long counter.

"Sure-" He cuts short with another series of coughs, but doesn't even seem to notice them while he thumps over to a cabinet low down near the floor. With a nudge, I share a look with Eryk and tap my durite, but he shakes his head slightly and quirks one eyebrow.

Without even telepathy, I know what he means, and I frown back. Even if I did manage to touch him to give him mana to help with the cough without being really obvious about it, how would I get it back later? I know he's right, but watching Ebbin cough so painfully is making me feel terrible. I could do something about it, I'm sure of it. But it's too dangerous to go around using magic all the time...

I 'hmph' faintly, to show my annoyance, but don't do anything, and return my eyes to Ebbin, just in time for him to lumber back over with a stack of tiny wooden boxes in his arms. They're the same ones out on the shelves of his shop, used to store the fancy little decorative metal things he sells. Probably jewelry, I think.

He sets the stack down on the far side of the slag samples from where I'm sitting, then searches around the workshop until he finds a big, flat metal... thing. It kind of looks like the spatula Emily used when cooking. It's just a single, thin sheet of metal with a handle. He takes that, along with one of the boxes, and carefully scrapes one pile of broken up rock into it. First is the mollite slag that we didn't try to combine. The box goes on another counter once it's filled, then he comes back to do the next.

One by one, Ebbin goes across with tiny precise movements, scraping every bit of rock from the countertop, into each box. Thanks to my extra air mana, I spot a few bits that wind up in the wrong boxes, shards of rock and specks of dust so tiny they shouldn't even be visible. I'll have to keep that in mind when I test them later.

And even without the air mana, it's impossible to miss the... missing section of countertop when Ebbin scrapes away the white powder he said burned him. Anywhere it sat, there are bits dug out of the metal, edges rusted and brown. There are obvious flecks of rust that end up mixed in with the powder that goes into the boxes as well. Hmm...

When Ebbin finishes, the other counter has all of the boxes, organized in the exact same way they were over here, so none of them will get mixed up. It's a bit odd, I think. How we have to be so extra careful so we don't mix them up, since no one recognizes them on sight like they do with normal metals.

Thinking that, I picture them in my head again, like they were on the table before, focusing to memorize all of their appearances.

"...Good." I nod to myself. Air and water mana are really good for this. I get a small questioning look from Eryk, but he doesn't say anything. While Ebbin packs those boxes into a larger box, I consider how even having them memorized, I wouldn't be able to tell some apart since they're identical. I guess it wouldn't matter if they turn out to be the same, but we still can't be sure of that.

Once the boxes are neatly stacked up inside the crate, Ebbin hands it off to Patrick. The large men share a nod, then Eryk goes over.

"Thanks again, Ebbin. I really do owe you a favor for this."

"Damn right you do, and I'll be calling it in," Ebbin grumps, but still shares a solid, warm looking handshake with Eryk, before sending us on our way.