I've decided to spend a bit of time w 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 colleg samples from various locations. I only retly took the time to enter his b, and I was surprised to see many shelves all of which were stocked with various rocks with paper bels. All of it appeared to be written in dwarvish, which means I 't read it.

  I took the opportunity to offer up some bor to him in exge for helping me learn some dwarvish, and expining what exactly he's w on here, to which he promptly accepted. The basiformation that he had retty much what I suspected. The isnd is voli nature, but this volo seems to have been dormant for quite some time, since he hasn't found any evidence so far of ret eruptions. Kao's isnd seems to be much older, and is heavily eroded, but this oill seems retively young paratively. The other two isnds between it and here are progressively more eroded with shallower peaks. However, there doesn't seem to visually be another isnd in the .

  That doesn't mean there isn't another isnd, just that it might be further away. From high enough up, you see one of the other isnds, so Konkur suspects that this is the st isnd in the given the current evidenbsp; Within the dwarven kingdom, particur dormant volos are where mana crystals be found, as such he says we're quite lucky to have them f here. Other than that though, there are quite a few differences in the voliposition of our isnd versus the voloes he's used to seeing.

  It's somewhat difficult to actually unicate some of the details between us, as not only is he not fluent in the demon nguage, but details such as named ores and positions are basically unintelligible. He point to a rod say something, and then describe it, but without a proper version of that word in the demon nguage, or the text 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 position when observed carefully, as pared to volic rocks from the dwarven kingdom. Many of the samples he has in his b are actually ohat he brought with him, and through those I at least got a basiderstanding of some of the differences. There are a feles he brought with him that are at least somewhat simir to our rocks, but ours are still noticeably different in many areas.

  For one, our samples are pretty dense by parison 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 lio crystal growth acc to Konkur, but the exact meism isn't fully uood by the dwarves yet. I figured I wouldn't fully voluhat I know a method to make those same crystals. Right now, that information is still a pretty well-kept secret. People from the maino think we merely have a motherlode of gigantic crystals under our isnd, and that's how we delivered oo the dwarves, and I'm fio keep the information misuood for now.

  Over the few days, I'm going t Konkur up the mountain to my cave, along with a few goblins, and I'm going mining. I pn on gathering more of our valuable ore for Karsh to make into ingots, along with providing a feles 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 have a sample of all the different kinds of minerals I've found so far.

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

  I asked Konkur what he thought about how we extracted ore o day, and his response seemed to mirror what I came to uand through my versations 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 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 teiques, but sidering humans break rock by thermal shod 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 expin, but it basically lets me sense differences in stoerials." To demonstrate, I used a half power teise on a se of ore near where I'd met an edge of the ore deposit before. "About seve into the wall here, this ore deposit ends. I've used it to find bubble crystal pockets in the past, and also to deteative copper deposits."

  "There are some miners who have an ability that isn't quite identical, but has a simir fun for us dwarves. Some dwarves have an ability that lets them detect how far it is until there is a major ge in stone or mineral position 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 seve back, there is some ge there."

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

  "A bit, but it's a little murky. I at least tell if it's a gas, a liquid, or a solid that resulted in the position ge. Just enough to prevent acts, I suppose. It also only returns the first thied. There have been some acts that have occurred in the past when there were two very close positional ges."

  "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 uand what sorts of differences I was looking at though. I made special training cubes so I could uaails. Even now, that half powered usage left me with a very slight headache that's only just gettier now. I'm a little ied in something you said though. You said it goes in a line. Do you know where the line inates, 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 ter of the palm, whieeds to be in tact with the surfabsp; If it's too jagged and I 't get good tact, then it doesn't wht. That said, I could use it hundreds of times without running out of mana, so I suppose that's an upside in parison to yours, plus I don't get headaches."

  "Yeah, the headaches be a bit of a pain. It's just because there is so muformation at onbsp; 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 o borrow your abilities for anything iure."

  "Oh! Remind me when we're ba town that I wao 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 colleg up here so I see exactly what 'artificial minerals' means."