The sudden shocking revelation came sliding in cleats up. It was when he was reflecting on his wisdom in creating a multi-duck centerpiece. It occurred to him that the look and striking power of the piece would be enhanced with a few tiny, well placed, light cores. This led, naturally, to the thought of carving, and that, in turn, led to his black sun core. He had so many exciting experiments to conduct. Just what could one do with a black sun core? He was eager to find out.

Doing experiments with radiation. Around your very normal wife. Who wants to wait a year before considering kids, but wants a big family as much as you do. Duane calmly observed Mazelton rapping his head against the side of the wagon. He didn’t know how many times that made it. A big number, probably.

Alright, alright, it’s not that bad. The whole back yard, ie where he was going to build his house, was hot enough that Danae didn’t let the chickens run through there. Presumably there wouldn’t be any trouble if he did his testing there. And he could do some, yanno, preliminary tests on the trail. Mazelton frowned in contemplation. He had no idea where to start.

The black sun worked, or seemed to work, by forming a core that could create… for lack of a better term, differentials. When it pushed out heat, it pulled in heat. It wasn’t always in balance, but the range it could push and pull were significant. The amount of control over heat that flowed through him or around him, was insane. If it came even kind of near him, Mazelton owned it. This was very different from only having access to what was in his core, and only being able to make use of it through his tools.

Mazelton tried to remember his lessons. What were the core tenants of polishing? All he could remember was his teacher insisting that one must master oneself before they could master polishing. Mmm. It was all about how much energy you were putting out and at what frequency. That little diagram with all the waves going from big, building sized things, all the way down to tiny atoms at the pointy end.

That’s what polishing was, really. You smooth out the radioactive cores into a nice, clean surface, then you very, very carefully etch the patterns of lines and whorls that would bounce the energy around in such a way that it came out at the frequency you wanted. It took a hell of a lot of math to develop a pattern, and a hell of a lot of skill to execute it. Knowing that the pattern had to have a channel right here that was exactly so wide, so deep, and each edge had a slightly different angle was one, immensely difficult challenge. Executing it was another. There was a reason polishing ran in families- maintaining the legacy of the carving patterns.

There was a reason people were willing to kill for even a single new pattern.

Mazelton knew himself. He was never going to invent a new pattern. He just didn’t have the right kind of mind for it. Frankly, he didn’t have the right kind of mind to remember the minute variations that came with polishing an even somewhat advanced core. The fact that he could reliably change the color spectrum of a light core was no small achievement, he felt.

Legacy. Genetics, techniques… and tools. He remembered that the family’s carving legacy could be learned from the tools, once one advanced far enough as a polisher. He had a black sun core. If that wasn’t progressing far enough, what the hell did?

Mazelton dove into the wagon and dug out his roll of polishing tools. He didn’t unroll it, he just kept it in his hands as he sat next to Duane. He let his senses flow through his fingers, through the dense loden cloth and into the tools. The tools, of course, were almost entirely free of heat. They had to be constantly cleansed of heat and dust through the whole polishing process, lest an expensive and surprisingly nasty accident occur.

His senses swept through them, finding that he knew them almost as well as he knew his own fingers. The subtle differences in the knurling on different tools. The surprising edges and hidden rasps on wires as thin, or considerably thinner, than a human hair. Their durability was thanks to a hidden manufacturing method that he was never in a position to learn. He had been quite content with that arrangement, right up until everyone he knew that knew the methods had been killed. Which meant that if he lost or broke one, he was screwed in the short term. He would have to start a furious campaign of letter writing to various Clan houses to try and sweet talk some other Ma chapter to letting him buy a replacement, or teaching him how to make his own. Either way would probably cost him more than he was willing to spend.

He picked his favorite rasp, long and thin, suitable for many tasks. He focused on it, letting the heat from his core run in a circuit through the tool and visualizing cutting a line in a well polished core.

He frowned. He could feel that his angle was wrong. It just… didn’t feel quite right. Looking more deeply at his visualization, he realized that his cut was a bit uneven, and it was throwing off his intended line. The core would not work as intended if he did that. With a jolt, he realized that this was what his teachers were talking about. Once your control of heat reached a sufficiently fine degree, your tools would show you how to use them. Master using the tools, and you have a powerful grasp of the fundamentals of how core technology worked. It wasn’t an instruction manual, it was a way to teach yourself the instructions.

Mazelton tried all his tools, and by dinner time, he had reached one irrefutable conclusion. His tools were a bit lousy. Even if he knew exactly the shape of the cut, the tools were always just a bit off. Not terribly. He could still make those patterns he was capable of making, obviously. But they were never quite as perfect as he knew they ought to be. He was puzzled by this. And then he figured it out, and laughed hollowly. This got him some odd looks, but he ignored them.

His elders really did consider him second rate at best. They gave him the mediocre tools, and reserved the best ones for polishers making higher end products. It was completely fair, utterly reasonable, and it still felt like a punch to the kidneys. Long after they were dead, from the other side of the continent, his elders still managed a really personal “You fucking looser.”

Well. Fuck’em. They were dead and he was alive. Which meant that he was now, officially, the best polisher the Old Radler Ma had.