Limitless Path

Beth woke at a decent time the next morning, likely right around dawn, though she couldn't tell from inside the suite due to the lack of windows. She rolled out of bed and headed into the bathroom to take care of her morning business and freshen up. Afterwards she prepared some food in the kitchenette while also getting something for both her and Blood to drink. She did wonder exactly how the food and drinks were getting replenished in the suite, as she never saw anybody else entering or exiting the rooms, but she supposed it might just be magic. Maybe she would ask Tazeen about it later to get to the bottom of it.

After eating, she headed upstairs to see if Elana was around. After checking in the lounge and a few other places, she couldn't manage to find the dwarf, so she headed down to the forge on her own to get started. She had seen the startup processes a few times now and had helped in the shutdown, so she was reasonably comfortable in starting the forge on her own. Once that was taken care of, she put on one of the aprons and fetched a set of gloves, which she tossed on the workbench. She was beginning to get familiar with handling the copper for the nails, and she found the gloves got in the way a little of her feel of the metal. As long as she was careful, she could handle the end of the stock that was out of the fire without getting burned.

Beth started on her grind of nail-making, finding something enjoyable in the repetitive process. There was something soothing for her about repeating the same action over and over again, getting lost in the work of moving and shaping the metal. She found that she had an easier time as well, when she lost herself in the work, the rhythm of the hammering and the sound of the forge crackling behind her lending to a certain kind of deep concentration.

It must have been almost two hours later that Beth looked up from her work, ready to go grab her second bottle of water for the day, when she noticed Elana was in the forge as well. The dwarf had inspected some of her work from the morning so far before starting to tinker with something herself at the work area next to the one Beth occupied. She was working with two bars of some kind of dark green metal that Beth was entirely unfamiliar with, a kind that seemed to require both great strength and skill to properly forge.

Beth left her instructor alone, having no questions for her at the time, and resumed her own work after retrieving a large bottle of something similar to a sports drink. It obviously had water as the base, but had some kind of flavoring that gave it a fruit taste, and the small label listed, in Universal Standard, several electrolytes useful for replenishing a human body. The fact that it called out a human body in particular was slightly unnerving, but Beth was just glad it wasn't some bottle full of weird acid that a crazy alien species found delightful.

She worked at hammering out more nails, remembering that this was a practice exercise from her instructor, something designed to let her increase her skills and understanding. She worked rather diligently at the task until she found herself both thirsty with an empty bottle, as well as rather hungry. Considering how fast and easy the cleanup was for her, at least it was currently, she decided to shut down and head up to her room to each lunch and take a break.

She had lost Blood again at some point in the morning, the wolf clearly not interested in spending her time in a hot and likely rather smelly forge. Beth did a quick circuit after she had shut the forge down and put her equipment away, but she didn't find the wolf in any obvious places, including outside her door, so she simply hoped Blood had found something for lunch. That, or the wolf would show up at some point to ask for a meal, considering Beth was only ever in one of two places at the Hall during the daytime.

She returned to the forge after close to an hour, having got caught up in watching one too many matches on the screen in the suite to make for a quick lunch. She went through the process of starting everything up and getting all her equipment ready again; not a long process, all things told. She then was ready to resume the task of nail forging when Elana interrupted her.

"You're making some decent progress on the nails, so let's go over some additional techniques. I'll also show you another simple design that you can work on once you get tired of hammering out so many nails," she said with a small smile. "Now, watch as I work on this. We're going to use the same bar stock that you've been using for the nails."

Elana took the copper rod that Beth had been using out of the forge and positioned it on the anvil. She started striking, using a different pattern than she had previously, to widen and flatten the end of the bar. Beth watched as her instructor hammered out what she eventually saw was an ornamental leaf shape, Elana then hammering out the bar further to create a narrow 'tail' off the end of the leaf.

"You can see what I'm doing here, flattening the end of the bar before stretching some of the remaining material," Elana stated. "Now, watch as I heat this again. I'm going to finish the hammering and shear the piece from the bar."

She put her words into practice, hammering the final shape of the leaf and trimming it off the bar. She then grabbed a set of tongs from the bench and returned the piece to the forge, holding the piece by the leaf and pushing the tail into the fire. When the tail had heated quite hot, she grabbed a set of pliers from the bench and pulled out the piece, holding it out so Beth could watch. She took the end with the pliers and gave it a quick, skillful twist, curling it around to form a small loop.

"Now, we can use the loop to attach it to another piece, or sometimes people like to have little pieces like this as decorations," Elana explained. "We could also work it into something else if we had to, but this is good enough practice for now.

"Now that we're to this point, let's go over in detail shaping metal through heating and hammering. It's something you've already started on the basics of with the nails, but this is a critical skill in smithing in general. There's plenty of times where you're going to have to take a large piece of metal and make it into something…not necessarily smaller, but a far more pronounced shape.

"Take making a sword, for example. You start, typically, with a few rather thick pieces of bar stock, and you end with a blade that's no more than an inch thick at its thickest part. So, how do you do that?" Elana asked, turning to look at Beth as she pulled a thick piece of mana copper stock out of the bins.

"Uh, I would think it's in the same way we've been doing with the nails. Just hammering the piece out under heat, like with the nails, moving the metal into a thinner shape. And hammering it in the right place to make it move the right way?" Beth replied, ending with a question.

"You've got the basic idea," Elana nodded in return. "We're going to shape the metal, and as we're hammering the shape out, it's going to become thinner. Sometimes people have difficulty in really wrapping their heads around this, but all we're doing with the hammer in a basic shaping is pushing the metal around. It's pushing the metal from one part of the bar to another part, which will also push the metal beyond the current shape of the bar, and thus we make something new.

"Alright, now watch as I shape this mana copper. We'll have you keep working on the smaller pieces for a while, but this should help you learn more about the process of shaping the metal. Now that it's heated, I'm going to start shaping it into the basic shape. Watch just how I hammer it."

Elana withdrew the heated bar from the fire using a set of tongs and held it on the anvil. She began hammering the bar with her forging hammer, starting to flatten the bar first and foremost. She also controlled the movement of the metal, explaining as she hammered, "You see where I'm striking? Look how I'm hitting it to shape more in one direction versus another. I want to make this into a knife, I don't want to just flatten this, I want to move the metal along a certain plane."

She continued hammering the metal as it cooled down a little, returning it to the fire while it was still glowing a dull red. The two waited for a couple minutes while the metal heated back to an orange-white glow. Elana removed the metal from the forge with the tongs a second time and hammered it again.

"When you hammer that, there's a lot of, like, uh, flakes coming off it. Is that bad? What is that?" Beth asked.

"You don’t see it as much on the nails, but it's the same throughout," answered Elana. "It's just scraps of metal, sometimes slag, depending on what you're working on. You're hammering a metal into shape under heat; high heat, even. You're gonna get flaking from the metal as you hammer it, that's not really avoidable. You just have to be aware as you're doing the heavy hammering that you will make a bit of a mess, and if you're not wearing an apron or gloves, you might singe your clothes or body."

Beth nodded at the explanation as she watched Elana hammer away at the copper bar, lengthening and thinning it while not allowing it to widen too much. Elana used a set of alternating strikes as she was drawing out the metal to narrow it down to more of a point. She returned the beginning of the blade to the fire and let it start to heat again.

When she withdrew it the next time, she spent time working on the opposite end, hammering out a narrow cylinder across from the tip. She needed a second heating before she finished this part of the blade and returned to the actual blade portion. She worked the blade into an even more recognizable blade shape, using another two heating periods to get the shape finalized, including fully shaping the tip. After a final quick heating and working with the hammer, she set the blade on the anvil, turning to Beth.

"How much of that did you get?" she asked.

"I definitely learned just from what I saw. The way you rotated the piece as you hammered was certainly something I noticed. The alternating hammer strikes and turning when forging the tip was interesting." Beth replied. "Also, what's with the cylinder part at the base?"

"That piece is called the tang," Elana answered. "It's the part that will slot into the hilt. So, most blades like this are made of three main parts; you have the blade, like we have here, you have a cross guard that will sit at the base of the blade and protect the wielder's hand, and you have the hilt, which is what the wielder holds onto. You also have the pommel, the circular piece at the base of the hilt, but that's usually either part of the hilt directly or just considered a part of the hilt and not counted as a separate piece."

"I see, so this part at the base will slot through the guard and into the hilt, which is how it all attaches," Beth said. "Is there ever a time when you would forge a dagger or sword as a whole piece? Like make the hilt and cross guard all from the main bars of metal you use for the blade."

"You could do that, certainly," Elana replied. "The issue is that it's going to be more complex and time consuming. And, not to mention, the cross guard can be fairly tricky to forge in as one piece, especially without introducing any weaknesses into the final product."

"I see," Beth said. "What about actually attaching the blade and other pieces? Is there some way we have to, like, melt them together or something?"

"There's a number of different ways to handle that," Elana explained. "The reason I left the tang rounded is that we can actually use a little more advanced ideas and carve a screw pattern into the tang. We can then thread the interior of the hilt and the pass-through of the cross guard and screw them in place. We'll likely also use glue, which is often used in applications like this, and there are also a number of magic ways to augment the attachment outside of glue. I don't use those methods, as there are too many beasts and arena fighters at high level that have some way to disrupt mana. Having your sword fall into pieces during a fight isn't any fun."

"That's pretty neat," Beth replied. "I assume there are other ways to do it. I don't think they used threading to make swords back in the old days."

"There are," Elana said. "Most commonly would be to use some type of two-step glue or an epoxy. Something that will form such a strong bond that it almost becomes part of the material itself. Again, there are ways to bind it with magic, but I have always been of the opinion that that is less reliable than traditional methods."

"Just gluing everything together? Wouldn't that be a weakness? I can't imagine glue can be that strong," Beth questioned.

"If you use the correct glue, it can be quite strong. It's often the case that a blade will break before the hilt separates," Elana replied, putting the roughly finished blade on the side of the workbench. "We'll come back to that later. For now, focus on your technique and how the metal responds to what you're doing."

"Right," Beth responded. "Thanks for the demonstration, it really helped."

"Hey, that's what I'm here for. Ask me or Tazeen if you have any questions about smithing," Elana replied simply.