Oliver's voice rang out, clear and melodic as he worked his magic. His magimorphic lines pulsed, brightening and darkening in time both with his breath and the cadence of his spell-song. The scent of magic was heavy in the air, the scent of Fire still overwhelming, yet there was enough Arcane magic being worked that its presence was undeniable. Though he wasn't working with words that Henrietta knew, she could catch faint whiffs on occasion of scents she recognized.

  Every so often, he punctuated a word with a hammer-blow, always accompanied by a blossom of fresh magic. Then, as the tiny amount of transmuted tin was worked over and over again, folded upon itself into the same cubic shape, it began to glimmer every so often with a sheen that hadn't been there before. An iridescence of concentrated magic, folded into the material itself a hundred times over.

  Oliver kept going for a while yet, but he seemed to slow down and speak with more thought as he did so, carefully aligning the material into the exact state he wanted.

  Then, he signaled for her.

  Henrietta took her pair of tongs and extracted a prepared sphere of iron from the firebox it had been in. It was glowing cherry-red, so not particularly hot as such things went, but that didn't matter to Oliver. He held his hand a few centimeters away from it and let loose a pulse of magic - ?Inlay? - that caused the surface to ripple slightly. It already had some basic glyphs chiseled into it, but now it undulated and shifted, creating a mesmerizing display as various parts of the iron cooled and heated. Once the motion stopped, Oliver - using tongs, of course - held the cube of tin against various glyphs, each in turn.

  The shimmering metal almost instantly melted and clung to the surface of the ball, filling in the chiseled glyphs as well as some connecting lines even in defiance of gravity as Henrietta slowly turned the slowly-cooling sphere of metal based on what it seemed like Oliver wanted. He couldn't be specific because even with one hand holding the tin, he was still singing his incantation and using his right hand to cast.

  They kept at it for a surprising amount of time, as even once the sphere stopped glowing it was still more than hot enough to melt the tin, yet the tiny piece of soft metal somehow still persisted. Once the tin was entirely gone, Oliver took a few moments to rest, catch his breath, and do a few finger stretches to sort out some cramped digits. They only spoke for a minute or two, confirming their respective parts in the next stage.

  This time, Henrietta took the lead in their joint project. Clay, sifted seven times until only the finest particles remained, mixed with copper dust, ashes taken from the smelter enchantment, and the ground bones of a dragon. That had been mixed with [Unblemish]ed water using an unburnt stirring-stick of charcoal to create a slurry of both mud and Mud. They had a decently large bowl of the stuff, and Oliver was casting some spells to make it stickier and even more well-mixed as Henrietta arranged runestones around the bowl itself. Once things were in their proper place, the iron ball was laid into the mixture and Oliver cast his spell.

  Henrietta pulled the ball out after a minute, confirming that a thin glaze of clay already clung to it. Then Oliver cast a different spell, and the clay firmed up. When Henrietta replaced the ball upon its holder, the clay was barely affected.

  As Oliver continued to work his magic, Henrietta cleansed her hands and proceeded to scoop up the iron ball alongside a handful of regular clay. Then, she worked it between her hands until it formed a sphere. Once it was in its proper shape, Henrietta wet her hands to improve the surface's sheen while Oliver took a break from casting. The Artificer left First Forge altogether, but returned a few minutes later with Clark in tow.

  The process was concluded with Oliver continuing to cast even as Henrietta handed off the sphere to Clark, who used his skill to get the orb as close to perfectly spherical as was possible, and enable Oliver to 'lock in' the last pieces of magic they needed. The Archmage also used ?Duplicast? to take and tweak ?Refine? in a slightly fire-y direction, drying out the ball into a perfect sphere.

  It still needed to rest for a couple of days to truly dry out - they did not want to have to repeat this, especially given how many of the materials would be unsalvageable, and the amount of luck needed to not make the dragon bones ruin everything else - but those days passed remarkably quickly. Jacob finished repairs on Lumbermill, Alyssa was working on a larger-scale prototype of her Blast furnace, Oliver was putting the final touches on a second-generation placement bracket, Henrietta was just about done repairing Ironroad, and Clark had just about gotten the common area back into a usable state.

  Of course, merely 'dry' wasn't enough, and Oliver cast a few more spells on the device as they loaded it into the rebuilt brick kiln for proper firing.

  Only once that was done were they able to finally see if their project was successful, and Henrietta eagerly used the Window of Words and Winds to find out, unwilling to wait for Oliver to [Appraise] the object.

  Honestly, better than she'd been expecting. The internal flaws were mildly concerning, and if they were so fundamental that it made it into the item's Documentation, it probably wouldn't be something that Clark could fix, but she'd still have him try. Actually, Clark definitely wouldn't be able to repair subtle strictly-internal flaws based on a magical structure, but that wasn't a reason to not give it a go.

  The Catalytic Orb actually wound up sitting around for a couple of days once again until a good opportunity arose. Henrietta had needed to recreate the diggers at Ironworks after an attack had overwhelmed their defenses, Oliver's work on placement brackets spiraled into a frantic bit of debugging as his work somehow broke their force-pillow beds, Clark had needed to spend some time healing Alyssa of some fairly nasty burns and Jacob of a broken hand, and so forth. Once that had happened, Oliver had used all five of them in a complex ritual as he created...

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Their new 'Bronzing Crucible' was one of the most advanced pieces of tech that they'd yet made, and truly looked the part. It bore a strong resemblance to a pithos, but with a much larger mouth than such a jar would normally have, and ghostly spectral-green fire emanated from that mouth, pungent with the smell of Metal, Technology, and Steam.

  That fire also spilled over its edges, coalescing into bright lines and runes all along the side of the pot, until eventually dripping off the bottom like a liquid and renewing the enchantment-gleam of the hexagonal plate below, because the entire design was floating just shy of a meter off the ground. Three false-feet, each of which crackled with hints of silver lightning and housing the newest generation of Oliver's placement brackets, were responsible for keeping it all aloft, and to slowly spin it in place. Henrietta thought that it might have been an intentional stabilizing effect brought on by one of the crucible's two copper handles, or the fired-clay ring hanging off one of them, but she wasn't sure.

  Oliver kept darting back and forth, potentially trying to narrate what he was doing for the rest of them... but talking far too quietly to be heard over the passive sounds of industry spawned by the Universal Refinery and smelter enchantment. "Okay, the draw from the Refinery is acceptable... boost it a bit... wish we had a better source of Lava... Phlogiston radiation is acceptable... Okay! Ready to go! Three, two, one... now!"

  He cracked his staff against the ground, and the scent of magery filled the air. His voice was able to pierce the general background chaos, each syllable resonating off of something more profound than mere air.

  Jacob stepped forward, emptying a basket full of copper nuggets into the crucible. They clanged, ringing the metal like a bell, and the sound didn't dampen as they continued. Instead, it seemed to amplify, only growing louder as Alyssa muttered her own spell and blasted her side of the crucible with fire. A moment later, Oliver mirrored the action, and while Alyssa needed to actively maintain her stream of fire, it was clear Oliver didn't, and the Artificer moved on to other tasks even as his spell continued.

  The ringing grew louder, and even though she knew there was no variation in the sound's intensity it felt like it was pulsing as her ears continually adjusted and re-adjusted to it. The flames bathing the crucible appeared to pulse in time with the sound's imaginary waves, then Alyssa hopped back with a yelp. In the blink of an eye, the very normal flames she'd been creating transformed into the same ephemeral white-green flames the crucible was creating and were sucked away from her hand, forming themselves into a swirling fire-tornado wreathing the crucible.

  Even under the heatless, ghostly flames, the iron of the crucible itself was beginning to get noticeably hot, though not quite on the level of glowing. It made it such that when she and Clark stepped up to the crucible, each of them on opposite sides, she had to steel herself from cringing away at the heat. She held out her hand towards the spinning metal, creating a very small inkling covering to protect her fingers, and activated the combination of [Refined Calligraphy], ?Universal Canvas?, and ?Etch? they'd need for this part.

  On the other side, Clark was using his own skills, and Henrietta caught a whiff of Oliver drawing on both of their magics and weaving them into a spell. A brief wobble of the cauldron caused it to brush her fingertips, and Henrietta bit back a hiss as it burned her fingertips. It was fine, Clark could heal it afterwards.

  New glyphs, overlaying and complementing the existing design on the crucible, blazed into existence before fading as the cauldron got hot enough to start themally glowing. Jacob stepped forward, emptying a new basket full of copper into it, and Henrietta suddenly realized that the ringing noise had stopped at some point. And now, whatever noise the copper nuggets were making as they landed in the cauldron wasn't audible over the general background clamor.

  She took a couple of steps and caught a glimpse of the inside, which now contained a fair amount of molten copper mixed with the unmelted and newly-added nuggets. It flowed and rippled oddly, little droplets of molten metal jumping out of the liquid only to fall back inside a moment later.

  Henrietta retrieved the Catalytic Orb from a custom-designed holder for it, carefully wrapped it within an ink-flail, and delicately placed it within the cauldron. The ghostly flames weren't quite normal fire, and as such didn't damage the ink construct, but as soon as she passed the lip of the Crucible, an absolutely enormous amount of heat assaulted the construct and almost immediately destroyed it. Fortunately, she was able to finish placing the orb into the swirling lake of molten copper before it fully decohered, but she still wanted to flinch at the incredible amount of power the very handmade crucible in front of her was keeping contained.

  More copper was added, then Henrietta stepped forward to add more glyphs to the Crucible. This time, she fully controlled their placement, using her own knowledge of alchemy to adjust them appropriately.

  They were, from a certain point of view, cheating.

  But ultimately, all technology was the result of 'cheating' reality in various ways. Getting it to behave in desired patterns far more regularly, far more easily, than it would ever do on its own. That was the superpower of humanity, the ability to spit in the face of Tyrants who insisted that something 'ought' to be done a certain way, and instead simply doing.

  So cheat they did.

  Transmuting copper to bronze was... complicated. Alchemically speaking. Even though the latter metal was chemically ninety percent the former, with only about a tenth of its mass being derived from anything else.... It resisted corrosion more, it was harder and tougher, was more resonant, and had a lower melting temperature and took to casting more easily, and thereby had a higher aretropy. And alchemically increasing the aretropy of an object could be difficult. It wasn't impossible, but it required special care, and most ways simply displaced aretropy from somewhere else, much like how chemically the best way to lower entropy in a system was to offload that entropy into another system.

  For obvious reasons, they didn't have much of a way to directly move aretropy around. [Unblemish] was, among many other failures, too inefficient to suffice. There was simply no way they could directly add aretropy to their mass of molten copper and expect to have any useful amount of bronze at the end.

  But, tin wasn't substantially higher in aretropy than copper. It was softer, but it also had a lower melting temperature. It was slightly more corrosion resistant, but also had an allotropic transformation that could cause it to spontaneously lose integrity at low temperatures. They didn't have the same aretropy, but they were close enough that [Unblemish] would work as a baseline for transforming copper into tin. Alas, their current enchantment was woefully underpowered to fully transmute hundreds of kilos of copper into tin, even with the Catalytic Orb boosting.

  But given a bit of time, it might be able to transmute... oh, maybe ten percent of the copper mass into tin?

  And oh my, what a strange coincidence. Ten percent tin, ninety percent copper just so happened to be exactly what bronze was. And thus, they would transmute copper into its 'more excellent' cousin while barely needing any amount of direct aretropic manipulation.

  Once Henrietta was done with directly writing on the cauldron, she moved to editing some of the magic circles the Bronzing Crucible was nested within, once again balancing the glyphs to keep the entire spinning contraption going as it slowly worked its magic. Alyssa, Clark, and Jacob left not long after, leaving only herself and Oliver working hard at ensuring the machine ran properly, smoothly, and excellently.

  After all, they had plenty of excellence to go around.

  Patreon, while the is like the comments, but with a higher aretropy.

  think Dream/Hand/Hero was the most liked request? In any case, that corresponds to the ever-classic [Drunken Master]

  Elements: Dream, Hero, Hand

  Role: Execution (warrior)

  Major Stats: Strength, Resistance, Recovery

  Minor Stats: Dexterity, Cohesion, Aura

  Base Stats: 2 Strength, 2 Strength (Drunk), 4 Resistance (Alcohol-excluding), 2 Recovery, 2 Recovery (Alcohol-excluding), 3 Skill (Drunk), 2 Dexterity (Drunk), 3 Mind

  Description: While certainly underwhelming in appearance, the Drunken Master is certainly not to be underestimated. Somehow always stumbling their way to their next drink, as well as every conflict which they can intervene within, it is impossible to tell what is accidental and what is intentional with them. Somehow, their every move is one which works for their ends, even if they do not seem to expect it. The less aware of their surroundings they seem, the more dangerous they become, and the more which challenging their strength becomes an invitation for humiliation.