Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I've decided to spend a bit of time working with Konkur to gain some insight into the mineralogy of the world and how he's studying it.  For the first month or so of his time here, he was collecting samples from various locations.  I only recently took the time to enter his lab, and I was surprised to see many shelves all of which were stocked with various rocks with paper labels.  All of it appeared to be written in dwarvish, which means I can't read it. 

I took the opportunity to offer up some labor to him in exchange for helping me learn some dwarvish, and explaining what exactly he's working on here, to which he promptly accepted.  The basic information that he had was pretty much what I suspected.  The island is volcanic in nature, but this volcano seems to have been dormant for quite some time, since he hasn't found any evidence so far of recent eruptions.  Kao's island seems to be much older, and is heavily eroded, but this one still seems relatively young comparatively.  The other two islands between it and here are progressively more eroded with shallower peaks.  However, there doesn't seem to visually be another island in the chain.

That doesn't mean there isn't another island, just that it might be further away.  From high enough up, you can see one of the other islands, so Konkur suspects that this is the last island in the chain given the current evidence.  Within the dwarven kingdom, particular dormant volcanos are where mana crystals can be found, as such he says we're quite lucky to have them forming here.  Other than that though, there are quite a few differences in the volcanic composition of our island versus the volcanoes he's used to seeing.

It's somewhat difficult to actually communicate some of the details between us, as not only is he not fluent in the demon language, but details such as named ores and compositions are basically unintelligible.  He can point to a rock and say something, and then describe it, but without a proper version of that word in the demon language, or the context for the word, it's difficult to grasp at the underlying information.

Despite this, I was able to at least get the gist of the situation.  Our rocks here are of a slightly different composition when observed carefully, as compared to volcanic rocks from the dwarven kingdom.  Many of the samples he has in his lab are actually ones that he brought with him, and through those I at least got a basic understanding of some of the differences.  There are a few samples he brought with him that are at least somewhat similar to our rocks, but ours are still noticeably different in many areas.

For one, our samples are pretty dense by comparison to a lot of his samples.  Some of our samples also have small bubbles within them, which I had seen myself.  If you get deep enough, those bubbles don't even stay small sometimes.  That behavior is linked to crystal growth according to Konkur, but the exact mechanism isn't fully understood by the dwarves yet.  I figured I wouldn't fully volunteer that I know a method to make those same crystals.  Right now, that information is still a pretty well-kept secret.  People from the mainland seem to think we merely have a motherlode of gigantic crystals under our island, and that's how we delivered one to the dwarves, and I'm fine to keep the information misunderstood for now.

Over the next few days, I'm going to bring Konkur up the mountain to my cave, along with a few goblins, and I'm going mining.  I plan on gathering more of our valuable ore for Karsh to make into ingots, along with providing a few samples for Konkur.  Then I'll sample rocks around the ore, along with rocks around the native copper, and deeper in the cave, so that he can have a sample of all the different kinds of minerals I've found so far.

The mining and sampling expedition went well over the course of five days.  I recovered enough ore to replace what we used all last year including trade.  Ultimately, with access to both crystal recharging and smart use of stone shaping, freeing large amounts of ore is pretty easy.  I brought along a team of ten goblins to haul ore for me, and honestly, they struggled to keep up with my pace.

I asked Konkur what he thought about how we extracted ore on the last day, and his response seemed to mirror what I came to understand through my conversations with Shasta a few years ago.  He said, "It's a bit unorthodox, although its definitely better than how the humans do it.  I'm sure you're aware that many dwarves can magically cut blocks from stone, and that's no different for ore.  It seems like whatever you're doing is more flexible, but uses more mana.  For this task, it's worse than our techniques, but considering humans break rock by thermal shock and physical force, this is better than them by a mile.  Of course, we couldn't hope to be as flexible with our stone crafts as your abilities seem to provide, so there does seem to be a tradeoff."

I decided to further pursue the issue, "I also have a bit of an odd ability, which is a bit hard to explain, but it basically lets me sense differences in stone materials."  To demonstrate, I used a half power tectonic sense on a section of ore near where I'd met an edge of the ore deposit before.  "About seven feet into the wall here, this ore deposit ends.  I've used it to find bubble crystal pockets in the past, and also to detect native copper deposits."

"There are some miners who have an ability that isn't quite identical, but has a similar function for us dwarves.  Some dwarves have an ability that lets them detect how far it is until there is a major change in stone or mineral composition in a straight line.  The limit is about fifty feet, but that's plenty in most cases.  It's fairly cheap to use too, for those who have it."  He then walks up to the wall I just touched, and briefly after says, "Yup, about seven feet back, there is some change there."

"Does it tell you any other information, other than if there is a change in composition?"

"A bit, but it's a little murky.  I can at least tell if it's a gas, a liquid, or a solid that resulted in the composition change.  Just enough to prevent accidents, I suppose.  It also only returns the first thing detected.  There have been some accidents that have occurred in the past when there were two very close compositional changes."

"Well, the way mine works is it spreads through the whole material based on how much mana I give it.  So it's sort of a sphere shape.  It took me a lot of training to actually understand what sorts of differences I was looking at though.  I made special training cubes so I could understand details.  Even now, that half powered usage left me with a very slight headache that's only just getting better now.  I'm a little interested in something you said though.  You said it goes in a line.  Do you know where the line originates, or is it a bit wider than an actual line?"

"Well, it is not actually just a line.  It's about the size of my palm."  He says, holding his hand up to demonstrate how big the area is. "Straight from the palm, oriented along the center of the palm, which needs to be in contact with the surface.  If it's too jagged and I can't get good contact, then it doesn't work right.  That said, I could use it hundreds of times without running out of mana, so I suppose that's an upside in comparison to yours, plus I don't get headaches."

"Yeah, the headaches can be a bit of a pain.  It's just because there is so much information at once.  Sensory overload.  Although I've slowly gotten more resistant to it.  So I suppose with enough training I could get over that drawback, but it's not really worth it, I don't use it that much, and rarely at that high of a power."

"Well, I'll keep those things in mind in case I need to borrow your abilities for anything in the future."

"Oh!  Remind me when we're back in town that I wanted to ask you about your opinion on a few artificial minerals I've made using the same ability I use to mine."

"Then I suppose we should hurry up and finish all the sample collecting up here so I can see exactly what 'artificial minerals' means."