Time Allotted: 3 Hours
Request: Four items in any manner of the artisan's choosing. One must be a tool and another must be a finished product.
Additional Details: The standard request is for something personal, something large, something fine, and something complete. The allotted time is enough for one person of average skill to make one tool, not four.

Observation:
- The test provider may observe their charge during the course of the test. They may also be presented with items at the end as to not cloud their judgement on the craft presented.

Testing:
- Finished crafts are evaluated for detail work, finish, and quality.
- Finished tools are tested harshly against their purpose. Swords are set against thick slime, hammers will be used to forge, and rope will be stretched taut in a pulley.
- Hard items may be tested for durability by throwing against a stone and inspecting for damage. Soft items are stretched and deformed. Fragile items are handled in such a way that a careless child may be prone to.


Personal Tool: Tungsten Blacksmithing Hammer, Round
Crafting Time: 30 minutes
Crafting Process: Automaton

The exact process was described as a "veil construct made of fractured ordinance in a 4D material router". The automaton appears to have no power source, no way to give it instructions, or any way to interact with it at all. It starts automatically upon the insertion of a material and works best with a regular shape, like a bar or a plate.

The process itself was fascinating. The lady in blue pulled a solid ingot of metal out of nowhere, inserted it into a black frame that also came out of nowhere, and the automaton set itself to work. It has two bars that moved back and forth with a spinning drill in the center that could move up and down. The drill's angle could change as well.

The drill dug into the ingot over and over, spewing black smoke and gray spirals of metal. A large amount of metal spirals were left on the floor nearby. The bar was whittled down to a well defined hammer shape in fifteen minutes and the machine ran on the hammer for another fifteen minutes.

Finished Item

Material: Tungsten. The lady in blue describes this as a metal that can be pulled from ores. Followup questions about difficulty of obtaining the ores and melting them were met with strange answers about easy to melt ores and the dangers of going too hot with its ore. Locating the ore in the wild will be followed up at a later time.

Finish:
▸Head - Diamond-shaped lattice across the solid parts of the head. Perfectly flat and smooth on the spots that are to hit items.
▸Handle - The handle is wrapped in leather and secured with no visible seams anywhere.
▸Securing - The entire hammer is one piece aside from the leather. The handle's end has a smooth ball with a flat bottom.

Mark: The mark is… unsettling. It resembles a fleur-de-lis, but the mark itself wiggles and looks like it is made out of black light. The lady describes it as “A lily flower made of Veil lifeforms”.

Quality: Magnificent

Notes: At the start of the test Minerva took a look around the workspace. Her eyes lingered on some of the tools that are scattered around. She asked questions about the purpose of each one in turn, and questioned why we had poor quality and strange tools. At first I thought she was referring to the tools that are still usable in some fashion, but she gestured towards the best hammer that our smith has granted the guild's common workspace.

At the end of the test, the lady handed this to me and said it was a personal item. I did not test it too harshly as it had been used to craft the other items in the test.


Workspace: Metal and Gelcast Enhanced Forge
Crafting Time: 30 minutes

The lady in blue did not seem to recognize or understand what slime was at first. I explained the basics: The creatures are everywhere and menaces to society. Our military's primary purpose is to fight the beasts and retake the land they have infested. We treat the outer part of their bodies as a flexible, rubbery substance, and the inner part is known as gel. Most tools are made of gelcast, a boiled mixture and worked of the two. Gel can be squeezed to form a slippery liquid slick and some slicks can be burned as oil, but it doesn't last too long.

Some specialty materials are made of slime cores, and of course the cores can perform very short magical feats that are somewhat unwieldly and hard to repeat. The cores can also be put into objects and draw out properties of the object, or they can be worked in pairs at a distance. Some cores have different colors and the colors seem to do different things, but very few people understand what those mean.

She seemed to take a larger interest in slime product than cores. They were dismissed as "batteries" and "imitations".

Overall Crafting Process: Modification

The forge was disassembled piece by piece and changed in every aspect. The lady in blue said it was "unsuitable for high quality forging" and was "optimized" by taking the entire thing apart and putting it back together. It is now suitable for both a single smith and multiple people to use at the same time, up to four at once.

The hard clay bricks that used to make up the coal bed are now smooth to the touch and both easy and hard to see. Two large bellows can be worked by hand for a small person, by foot for a large person, or by automaton or slime worker. Two chutes for charcoal or other material are on both sides of the forge, opposite of the bellows. The coal bed is now square, with sufficient space for working material on the edge and a central block for heating items. There are four covers that can be put on each corner.

Basin Material: Sand Ash Bricks
Crafting Process: Unknown

The bricks of the forge were separated easily by some kind of device that vibrates. It made a lot of noise and drew a lot of attention from others, but somehow left the bricks intact while turning the mortar into dust. The lady then picked up a brick in one hand, a pocket of slime in the other, somehow turned the slime black, and put the slime into the brick. Each time she did this the material and her hand went into the brick itself. Her arm would move around strangely. This was repeated a few times for each brick until it was solid, dark, and tough.

The material itself was not made through any known crafting process. It doesn't appear to take any damage at all no matter how hard it's thrown, nor does it chip the ground it's thrown on. At best there were minor scuffs on the ground and minor variations in the texture of the brick. It is strange to look at and doesn’t bounce like one would expect of a gelcast material. It's almost like I'm not seeing the brick itself, but can see where it should be or was.

When asked what the new brick material was, the lady gave various descriptions about delicate sand, creatures burning to ash, the nature of life, a faraway plane known as The Veil, and a lot of names and ideas I couldn’t follow. These are noted elsewhere. The only name from this that makes any kind of sense is “Silicon Carbide”. For the sake of future readers I am calling this material by the closest items that I understand: Bricks made of Sand Ash.

Cover Material: Clay Gelcast

Merdiwen demonstrated how powdered material put into gelcast can have different and related properties than what their base materials imply. Clay put into gelcast is light and temperature resistant to a significantly higher degree than twice-baked bricks are, but are somewhat more bouncy and prone to deformation. The material is lightweight and makes a somewhat pleasant rolling sound on stone, instead of the scraping that you normally hear. He describes this as "Ceramically enhanced slime".

The standard method for creating clay gelcast is to make a baked brick, then pulverize them with a heavy spiked two-handed hammer. The powder is massaged into gelcast evenly with a labor-intensive process and formed into bricks, then baked.

Crafting Process: Automaton

The lady in blue went to the nearby pile of bricks, picked one up, and dropped it into another black construct she called a "Crusher". The automaton is a series of two boxes with four flat sides. The bottom box is an empty basin with pyramid shapes on the floor. The top box similarly has pyramid shapes protruding from its bottom, adhered to or made as one piece of a large plate. The plate would continually press into the empty box over and over again, gradually crushing anything inside it. Any objects placed into the bottom box come out as a fine powder that would make even the most dedicated Smash-Crafter jealous.

Below the shredder was a black cylinder with a rotating bar in the center. She describes this as a "Mixer". A small fire was running under the mixer for the entire time it was running. Into the mixer went an equal quantity of brick powder, gel, and rubbery slime skin. To me this appeared to be an accurate recreation of the entire process on which Clay Gelcast is made, but at a much faster rate than any human could hope to do by hand.

Four batches of Clay Gelcast were made. They were laid out on a flat, boxed-in square surface to dry. A small amount was cut out of the center of two sides and formed together to make two handles.

Chute Material: Iron
Crafting Process: Smeltery, Unknown

The lady in blue went to the nearby store of iron, a large quantity of it in a cart, and walked outside. She returned in fifteen minutes with multiple long metal plates. When questioned, the only thing she said was “You have a good smeltery outside, why not use it?”. It appears that she used the structure that Thruul M'Gon left outside.

Melting iron that quickly is known to be possible in that structure, but the exact method is unknown. Questioning Merdiwen on this leads to his standard response of "Just put lava in the tank, everything melts faster when you use the fiery pits of the earth!". The lady smirked at this response and merely nodded as the nature of the Smeltery was explained.

The metal plates were put together into a chute using an odd method. She first set up the plates at an angle, making sure that they were very evenly put together. The lady then manifested a mask over her face with a small window and a hot rod that emitted blue fire from the tip. She pulled a spool of metal from nowhere and set to work joining the two iron plates. By the end they appeared to be one large piece with a wavy pattern where the seam should have been. This was repeated to form two large square tubes

Final Crafting Process: Assembly

After all the parts had been gathered the lady in blue placed down the entire structure brick by brick. Clay gelcast was used between each brick as mortar. A large square was left in the center for heating objects. The chutes were attached to the sides and had a rope attached for dropping material, and two holes were left for the bellows when they dried.

Apparently the new forge was fit for work. The lady did not consider the forge to be part of the four items created and timed the forge to be used at the same time as the blacksmithing hammer.

Finished Structure

Materials: Black Bricks, Clay Gelcast, Iron, Wood, Leather
Finish: Smooth. Fit for purpose and ideal in function.
Mark: No visible marks of any trade.
Quality: Masterwork

Large Item: Broad Blade Felling Axe
Crafting Time: 30 Minutes
Crafting Process: Smeltery, Work Hardening, Automaton

After both a new Forge and Hammer had been made, the lady wasted no time in making the next tool. She grabbed one of the largest tools off of the example rack, one high quality brass ingot, took both outside, and made a cast of the axe head. The cast was refined to remove any pits and rough parts with a rottenstone soaked rag, then polished up with particularly amorphous gelcast to smooth out all of the edges. Had she not asked about this process right before the crafting began I would have thought she was an old master at work at appreciating the cast into a finely worked piece, nor did she consider the cast or the forge to be part of the items needed in the test.

The axe's material is made of a special iron alloy called Air Steel. More details are included further down.

After the axe had cooled sufficiently, the edge was taken to the forge. It was heated continually, then pounded and drawn out with the Tungsten Hammer. The material was placed in the Spinner for ten minutes while the lady worked on a thick oak handle to hold it. Partway through the work, she stepped over to the spinner, took the axe head out, and placed it in the Router while she worked out the proper balance point and the handle wrapped with leather.

Material: Air Steel
Crafting Process: Smeltery

A special type of steel was made made for the next tool. A large quantity of pure iron, a small quantity of charcoal, and a medium quantity of tungsten were mixed together. Three sets of powder were pulled from nowhere and sprinkled into the basin as well. The specific recipe is as follows:

6 parts pure Iron to 1 part other:
▸7 parts pure Tungsten
▸1 parts Charcoal, powdered
▸4 parts unknown metal powder, dull silver
▸5 parts unknown metal powder, medium gray
▸2 parts unknown metal powder, very shiny

Through continual usage we have determined that lava is the ideal fuel for the Smeltery. Charcoal and coal are hot enough, but need to heat up the entire structure to function properly. Cores can be used on the heat pipes that exist inside every Smeltery but they run out of charge quickly. The structure seems to be purpose-built to harvest every last drop of heat from a strong heat source like lava, and even enhances it to absurdly hot levels.

The standard process of heating the tower up and stirring it with a ladle, scooping off any slag, and pouring the result into a cast was followed. Unlike other steel methods that are quenched in water or oil, this was left out to air cool for a few minutes. The axe is worked into its final shape on the forge, then attached to another veil construct called a "Spinner" for five minutes. The construct looked very basic: it was a cylinder with a protrusion from the center that contained a vice. The vice spins very rapidly.

The lady explained that this type of steel is tempered by the air itself, and as soon as it is hard enough to stay in one piece it was in the device. A strict warning was placed to not go near the fan, as doing so would likely lose limbs. A great deal of care was taken to make sure that the item itself was balanced and mechanically sound, lest the tool fly off and impale the wall or the nearest person.

The lady described the material as "High Speed Steel". As the material is tempered by air, I have taken the liberty of calling it Air Steel.

Finished Item

Material: Air Steel Head, Oak Handle, Leather Handle Wrap

Finish:
▸Head - Hexagonal-shaped lattice across the flat parts of the head. Perfectly flat and smooth on the spots that are to hit items.
▸Handle - Leather Cover with grip points four fingers apart.
▸Securing - The handle appears to fit perfectly inside the head as if it was one piece. The handle's end has a smooth ball with a flat bottom.

Mark: The lady's wiggling Fleur-de-lis on the end of the handle.

Quality: Magnificent

Notes: This item was tested by chopping down a nearby tree. The axe is both lighter than expected and exceptional at taking out large chunks of wood at a time. It has a fine handle that has a reasonable amount of bend, with the outward grooves giving solid places to both grip the handle and to know exactly where on the swing you are at.

This axe is by far the best one I have ever tested, odd gelcast alloys included. It will be given to someone who respects superior quality and maintains their tools properly.

Complete Item: Blueprint Drafting Set

For the sake of the reader, a number of assumptions are included in this part. First is a list of items in a standard drafting set:

▸Ruler. Incremental measurement units in sets of 12. Best used for measuring lengths consistently
▸Set Square. Easily build something at a 90 degree angle. One regular triangle and one long triangle are included for 30, 45, 60, and 90 degrees
▸Level. A T-shaped piece of metal or wood with a small pointed plumb weight attached to a string that points directly at the ground. The handle may have a window in it to see the plumb from both sides.
▸Drafting Compass. Used to measure and draw circles
▸Chisel-Knife and Hammer. Drafting is often done on the work directly as parchment or vellum is expensive. If a piece needs to be replicated it is usually set in wood or stone.
▸Leather Roll. Has various places to put items.
▸Chalk, soapstone, or charcoal. Temporary marks can be made using this white rock that easily falls apart.

Advanced drafting sets also include scribe materials:

▸Vellum, Parchment, or Paper. At least 10 sheets
▸Writing implement. Often a quill, occasionally made of glass.
▸Pen knife. Used to scrape ink off a page or cut the end off of a quill.
▸Inkwell. Made of cow horn, glass, or crystalline gelcast.

The second assumption is that the raw materials were not gathered by the Lady in Blue, but were available for use. This includes tools, materials, and loose items like chalk powder. All of the items were available at the time in the Slime-Craft guild's common workshop.

An inventory of the materials used for this kit includes:

▸Oak wood - One rod, two planks
▸Leather - One sheet
▸Sinew - A small amount equal to three core, primarily used on the leather roll
▸String - A small amount equal to one core, primarily used on the level
▸Brass - A small amount equal to one core, primarily used on the level
▸Iron - Three ingots
▸Charcoal - Two core for material, fifteen core for fuel
▸Pyrolusite - Three core for material
▸Chalk - Loose powder, pressed into multiple solid cylinders the size of a pen
▸Glass - The end of a rod

This list was given to the Lady in Blue. She spent the next hour putting various amounts of Air Steel into her Veiled Router, casting various items in the Smeltery, and carving out notches in all the miscellaneous bits. Each item was checked against her minimimum standard of quality, then assembled at the end into one package.

Finished Item

Material: Listed above

Finish: Functional. Each piece was made explicitly to be easy to use.

Mark: The lady's wiggling fleur-de-lis was placed neatly on every item somewhere. This includes the inside of the bag, the bottom of items, and generally anywhere that doesn't impede the usefulness of the item itself.

Quality: Flawless

Notes: Each individual item in this list would be considered a tool and evaluated as such. Any individual person should not be capable of creating an entire drafting kit with multiple knives, a hammer, a set square, and paper in three hours, let alone one. A master may take a few minutes to make a Set Square and carve all the notches into it for measurement, but that process takes time and would need to be measured and verified.

I have no words for this. The only thing I can say for sure is that the speed of creation on each item in this kit lowered the overall quality from the highest quality tool to pass through the Tinker Society to the level of what a master in the craft would be expected to create

The item was given to me at the end. I have placed it in the common workshop for now next to the drafting area.

Fine Item: Set of Three Jeweller's Eyes
Crafting Time: 30 minutes
Crafting Process: Automaton, Handicraft

For the last tool, the lady has cast three rings about the size of an eye. After the cooling period they were put into the Veiled Router for fifteen minutes, then lenses were inserted and one end was dipped in gelcast.

The lens crafting process was entirely unremarkable aside from the glass used appearing from nowhere, like many of the other items she has manifested. The glass itself is made of "Pure Quartz" and was cut to shape, placed on a polishing table, and polished to the desired viewing angle. This process happened three times. Some of the Lady's movements during the polishing were odd, but the motion appeared to be regular and completely mundane.

Merdiwen was heard chuckling at least five times during the lens crafting process. Perhaps he could see something that I could not.

Finished Item

Material: Air Steel, Soft Gelcast, Quartz Glass

Finish: Smooth to the touch, yet still easy to grip. Includes details too fine to see by the naked eye.

Mark: The lady's wiggling fleur-de-lis was placed on the top of each tube, but is very small. The lens with the highest mangnification is required to view them in any detail.

Quality: Perfect

Notes: Unlike standard Jeweller’s Eyes, this set of three is made to be inserted into your eye socket. This frees up both hands and all of your face for other objects like goggles and fine picks.

Close inspection reveals a small wavy pattern placed regularly on the outside of the cylinder. The lenses are required to view this pattern properly. The pattern seems to somewhat mimic the ridges that fingers have, which makes gripping the item that much easier.

While a set of lenses that increase the size of anything you view through them may seem like what is needed for fine detail work, none were used to craft this item. The details are so fine that they are hard to see on the item itself and very regular.

The lady mentioned the guard’s watch and the passage of time more than once during this process. Apparently the lenses are intended for construction of some kind of timekeeping device that I am not aware of. Followup questions were met with intricacies of gearing, fine tuning of a spring, and hands. I am not sure what to make of putting hands on a device other than their ability to hold items.