To Live and Uplift Underground 8


The word was out: we were about to move on.


Outskirt migrations were a constant fact of life for us Drow out there, and it was both a headache and a comfort. The headache came from the organizational side of things, though my experience was probably colored by the size of our gang. Then again, if we were less numerous, I could easily envision the headache being replaced with the wonderful stress that came with being vulnerable out in the open. And that, while we were carrying all our things.


The reason why we moved always provided the same level of comfort, though: When a gang, or group of Drow, depletes their ability to extract resources from their surroundings, or they overstay their ability to live in an area, they move on. Maybe the local mushroom groves got too dangerous to keep harvesting them. Maybe the shit pits outside the home caves got too full and the Hearth Mistress screwed up the placement of their homes, so now the shit was rolling back into the caves.


Maybe something, or some things, in the deep started murdering family members, and the notion of uncovering and taking on such a force didn’t excite any desire to tackle the problem in the gang.


It didn’t matter.


Eventually, staying in any one place was not an option, and the relief, the joy even, that came with establishing ourselves in a new area was some of the biggest happiness that Outskirt Drow ever experienced.


It is admittedly hard to otherwise be nostalgic for those times, but there was a simple simplicity in that happiness, one that eluded the harshness of the Outskirts or the selfish apathy of the city. It was pure all on its own, and that, I suppose, makes it worth cherishing.


Anyway, a new spot had been sighted, and now it was a matter of doing enough scouting to establish enough confidence to do it without issue. And, since we were a big gang, my mother’s gang scouted in force.


A full two crews were employed for the purpose and that included, yes, Talia’s crew. With the goings and turnings of her grandmother’s crew, Younger Talia presented me with a full basket of copper ore.


To my excitement, but also consternation, it was chalcopyrite. 


I should have expected it, really; it was, by and far, the most common ore that contained copper. On the bad side of things, it was, by weight, only about a third copper.


On the other hand, chalcopyrite usually also had as much iron in it as it did copper.


I know what you must be thinking and like you, I felt the same sense of excitement. But it lasted for all of a second before I realized what form of iron I’d get from it.


Iron silicate.


Unlike a good iron ore, I would need either a blast furnace to get anywhere near hot enough to melt THAT slag or very funky chemicals that I doubted existed in this world to bleach it. Either way, I was not getting useful iron from it.


But I could still get copper from it, so the disappointment wasn’t too immense.


It was still a bitch and a half to carry.


Luckily, the basket that Younger Talia had given me, the baskets our gang had pilfered from whatever unfortunate bitches came across Talia’s gang, was bulky enough that the only practical way to carry it was by using its straps to hoist it behind my back. Which was to say, it had back straps.


The ore chunks were asymmetrical enough that they piled up unevenly in the basket, making it lighter than I would have assumed. Still, that meant it was, what, 30 pounds? Assuming that the chunks were at least half chalcopyrite and not some other mineral that came with it, that was a third of 15  pounds of copper ore I was carrying. Hypothetically speaking, if my assertion was right, if my sorting was perfect, if my smelting was perfect, if the whole process was perfect, I’d be looking at 5 pounds of copper.


Talia’s crew had looted 5 of these baskets, so, hypothetically speaking, the whole gang had in its possession 25 pounds of copper.


But that was a big if.


But even just 4 pounds would have been perfectly serviceable to make my cousin something she’d be happy to kill with…while leaving me with plenty leftover to work on my own projects.


Just as we’d agreed.


While the prospect of picking up shop and getting out of our caves kept Aunt Kan’a distracted enough that she had yet to order me to make anything else, I took full advantage of my free time to ask our scouts very pointed questions.


Like where the most extensive fungus groves were.


Given that I wasn’t sure exactly how Talia had gotten the copper that I’d asked for, and that it had become apparent that I had too much of an audience in the gang, I couldn’t exactly just work right outside my home cave like I’d been doing till then. Being that a certain amount of prudency was required anyway, I decided that my workplace might as well be convenient.


Somewhere near where I got the obsidian, there was a tunnel that, by this point, was almost sealed shut with outgrowths of hard mushrooms.


Not very imaginative, I know, but that’s their actual name, “Hard Mushrooms”.


They couldn’t be eaten unless you got to them when they were just buds, and tended to be a bitch and a half to harvest if you waited too long to do so. It was these that we mostly got our wood alternative from, but they were capable of making routes impassable all on their own if they were allowed to grow unimpeded.


There WERE other reasons to want them and problems that made them annoying, but as it regarded me at that time, I was after only one resource: roots.


Whatever their source, all fungi roots burned.


It had taken me all of three days to properly rip a good enough amount of mushroom roots from the walls and then sieve the minerals and dirt out of them. Unlike my glue-making enterprise, I’d need way more heat for this.


Much, much more heat.


I wasn’t actually sure how strong a fire I could actually make with fungus root, but I decided to use as much as I reasonably could lest I make all this effort go to waste.


However, I will admit to you now that it was more a consequence of finding myself with too much time on my hands.


You remember the copper ore, right? The first step in processing the copper ore was crushing it down to the finest consistency that I could manage. Finding a good rocky outcrop with a relatively flat surface was hard, but it was only a matter of time. That took all of an hour in the tunnels that I decided to make into my new work spot. By that point, I had settled on a hand-sized smooth granite rock that, it turns out, I really liked using to knap. Right then, though, it worked just as well to grind the ore into smooth sand.


The problems with that started almost as soon as I began.


Grinding those rocks took a while, but sorting the hard bits where iron and copper bonded to sulfur was, well, soul-crushing.


Not because it took a long time, which it did, but because it yielded significantly less than I hoped. Out of the huge rocks, which I was methodically crushing, came useless gray dust and, occasionally, priceless green dust.


It was my job to judge the bits that I was crushing to sort the latter from the former before they were rendered into a form too small to easily separate. But the more I did it, the more I noticed that my green dust was becoming gray.


And that my “useless” gray piles glittered.


I would get copper out of this, when all was said and done, but at this rate, would I even get enough to make Younger Talia something, let alone have any left over? Was 4 out of 5 pounds even possible? At this rate, I’d be lucky to get 1!


Luckily, our surroundings often provide unlikely answers. Because fungi couldn’t just grow anywhere, unlike what it seemed like most times. The mushrooms of the underground might be particular lovers of heat and carbon dioxide, yes, but they had something in common with all other types of mushrooms too: they needed moisture to thrive.


Water seeped through the walls of these tunnels at many points. Given the relative porosity of my home, it’s hard for me at this point to envision an underground system where water isn’t easily sourced. The fact that there were any fungi growing in these caves at all meant that there had to, at least, be one regular flow of water falling through here.


Me? I was able to find 5.


Dirt and water made clay. Time out in the open made them dry. Thus, making wide pots and filling each halfway with water was almost a thoughtless endeavor.


Into these pots I dumped all the dust that I made from rocks I crushed. The ore, the useless gray dust and even the green dust I had collected just to be sure. I divided them into different pots, of course, so as to not make my efforts go to waste, but this would either work whole sale or it would not work at all. With rock dust thrown into the water,  I stirred each pot with my hand, immediately making the water misty, and then I just…waited.


Or, well, used that time to prepare for the smelt.


Digging a hole in the ground was easy with my stone tools. Lining it up with clay so that heat wouldn’t escape too fast into the surrounding sand was easy just with my bare hands. Laboring walls above the pit, however, was a good use of the time that I had. I knew that making bricks for the smelter would be best, for reasons that I couldn’t properly remember, but I did not believe I would have the time to experiment with baking bricks back then. And I still think it was the right judgment call.


I made the smelter go up to my knees and then made it wide enough to slip around my chest. I left a single hole at its bottom open, though, to allow a draft to constantly pull in fresh air into the fire once it got going.


Lacking the relevant knowledge about this sort of technique, I could not tell you the sort of temperature such a setup could make now, let alone back then, but, lucky for me, it was in the range of the 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit that I needed for this.


Being incredibly porous, my dried clay pots eventually “sweated” all the water they had in them in a matter of days. By the time they did, I had my setup done as well as a metric assload of roots that were significantly drier than they had been when I ripped them out of the wall.


The sediment the pots left behind had divided itself into layers. The lighter parts of it, those with the common minerals I didn’t want, settled on the top. Being heavier, the copper and iron bits settled on the bottom.


Skimming all the “waste” until I could only see beautiful green dust was a much, MUCH quicker job than sorting by hand. I am sure I still lost out on a whole lot of copper doing that but, by the time I was left with a gathering of green “sand” that I could be happy with, I had enough leftover that I was sure this could all work after all.


I had made a bunch of small bowls of clay in that intervening time, and made them small before letting them air dry to lessen the chance that they would crack while they were being baked. 


So prepared, the only thing left to do was to start the smelt.


You gotta pre-heat the smelter before you can really get started. I started the fire by using some of the super-dry root shavings that my gang had, and then kept piling on the wall root until a cheery fire got going.


I then filled the whole smelter with roots and allowed the fire to light them all before “topping” them with fresh roots to replace any volume lost.


And THEN I placed the clay bowls full of green dust on top of burning roots.


As the fire burned, the volume of roots inside the smelter decreased and decreased, turning into both smoke and heat. Being near a fungi grove, I never managed to gas myself with it because the bloody mushrooms gobbled it up. But I still replaced the roots that were burned.


Feeling some trepidation, I had to eventually cover my clay pots with fresh roots. This sort of primitive metal extraction wasn’t my forte, but there was no way that the fuel “touching” the ore would in any way “taint” the results. But, just in case, I domed the roots around the clay bowls as much as I could.


But I shouldn’t have bothered, because eventually the fire got so hot that I couldn’t bear to try and arrange any more.


At the end of it all, I disproved two fears.


One, that the roots, in burning, might alter the crushed ore in any way.


And two, that the smelter would not be hot enough to smelt the copper.


I could not tell you of what purity the copper was but when all the roots had burned, leaving the charred insides of a cracked clay smelter behind, there were a bunch of fired baked clay bowls behind.


With nuggets of copper embedded in slag.


I did not whoop, not just then, but the desire to do so was overwhelming.


I MIGHT have jumped up and done a little dance, but, well, no one can prove that I did, and I will not speak to you anymore if you go try and claim otherwise.


I didn’t have a scale to weigh my “harvest”, of course, but you learn to sort the weight of things out in the Outskirts through feel. But I had a whole past life where I measured things daily to compare to.


After extracting all the copper nuggets, I measured them in my hand, moving them up and down to feel the heft of their weight.


And then, and only THEN, did I actually whoop.


3 and a half pounds.


I doubt that’s the exact measurement, but the weight was close enough to it that it didn’t matter.


Not the mathematical ideal of a perfect extraction of 5 pounds, and not my “realistic” hopes of 4, but still magnificent.


This…this was it.


If THIS was the only thing I made, it would pay for itself dividends even if I didn’t make weapons out of it. Younger Talia would NOT turn down the yield of this much rendered copper.


But I, of course, still intended to make something out of it.


Just like being a knapper was not enough for me, being a copper smelter was not the height of what I could do. This, just like the stones, was merely another step. Another rung climbed.


But making a proper weapon with this…required that I get one more thing.


“Huh,” Soli said from where she was cleaning the haft of a short spear when I came to her. Being a Keeper, she was as well-equipped as any veteran in the gang so her spear was tipped with solid steel. I came into her personal room, where she slept, and found it full of many bags of woven root thread that held what I suspected were all the things that we entrusted to her, “I suppose you heard then?”


“That we’re moving? Yes,” I shrugged. I briefly wondered if her room was always like this or only when things weren’t settled down, “But, if you don’t mind, I would like some materials to work with.”


“Ah, so you haven’t,” she clicked her tongue and reached over to search in one of her bags.


I leaned in with curiosity, wondering what she was talking about, when she pulled out what I recognized as a knife-club.


Except, it wasn’t one that I’d made.


“Some of your fellows are starting to turn these in,” Soli told me, looking me straight in the eye as I felt a wave of vertigo crash into me, “I say this because you are part of the crew and they are not, but I know Aunt Kan’a has not been pleased with you as of late.”


“That’s-” I licked my lips as I felt lost for a moment, kicking myself for not having anticipated just this.


“You can be a male that’s in good favor,” Solis told me, “Or you can be irreplaceable.”


“But, Arione, you can’t afford to not be one or the other.”