TOSA: …And over there was the cobbler’s workshop. It’s long since been repossessed.
JOCELYN: Oh. It’s a shame I can’t synthesize shoes…
TOSA: The rocks in that path to it are tinstone that no one would buy. We used to be able to sell at steep discounts, but we’d make so little from it now that it’s more constructive to use it as flagstone…
JOCELYN: That’s so sad. And what’s why you can’t get funding? For your mystery project?
TOSA: Not for my project. For the whole town. The project is a drastic measure.
TOSA: We sell our impure ores to the local branch of the merchant guild; they take it over airship to distant places. They’re much better connected than any of us can be, stuck as we are in the mountains. There are all sorts of raw materials here, and that’s how we used to earn our livings and food shipments, but times have changed.
TOSA: No one needs ore from Bhalgura when there’s a less contaminated source for all six metals, even quicksilver.
JOCELYN: Wow, you have mines for every metal?
TOSA: Not anymore, really. Not worth mining. The piles of tailings are just that.
JOCELYN: Hmmmmmm…
TOSA: Is there something amiss?
JOCELYN: I don’t get it.
TOSA: Get what?
JOCELYN: You have every metal, and the problem is that you have impurities? That’s easy to change…and we have reductive metallurgy. Anyone would make a lot of money buying your cheap gold ore…they could pass it through a transmutation engine, project lower metals to gold with quicksilver, dispose of the cardinals? Oh, something similar with the other metals! You could gather it all into gold, divide it up–
JOCELYN: …
JOCELYN: What’s wrong?
TOSA: If you could unburden yourself of the idea that alchemy is easy for anyone but an alchemical engineer, or that working with highly reactive quicksilver is a simplification instead of a complication, or that it can be done on the scale we’re talking about, or that no one has already thought of that and tried it already on this side…it would save both of us a lot of time.
JOCELYN: Oh.
JOCELYN: I’m…going to go write a letter.
JOCELYN: Do you need a hug?
TOSA: Thank you, but no.