Tom fell back on his ass, staring at the cracked stone patched with clay substitute. He’d spent the last week on the move picking up any rock he could find, mixing it with wet mud and trying to build a brick furnace in the back of the truck.

When it exploded from the heat, Tom realized exactly how out of his depth he was. Building a forge actually took skill and knowledge. It wasn’t something any ignoramus could slap together in a week foraging through the jungle with sticks, mud and rocks.

“Well, I think it’s safe to assume that I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tom said, leaning back on his palms while studying the blackened mess of stone and flaking clay.

I mean, how do I tell the difference between mud and clay? Why did the rock explode? How did people melt metals? Do I need ceramics, and if so how do I make them?

Tom was being harshly disabused of the smug confidence of a twenty-first century boy that he fully understood ‘primitive’ technology. He didn’t know shit.

As far as Tom knew, ceramics were worked clay, right? Then why did it explode? Was there some kind of filtering process or additive or was he simply digging up the wrong mud for ceramics?

Tom’s working theory was that there was still some water in the clay and rocks, which caused it to build internal pressure until it went kapow! Either that or one side being hot while the other was cold built some kind of stress tension, but Tom didn’t think it would go boom.

Figuring this out from scratch was out of the question. He didn’t have much time until they were at their destination. Mr. Fluffybottom had been hauling the truck along behind the village as they moved toward the south, dozens of miles a day. The desert was gradually fading into more and more lush territory, first scrubby grasslands, then lush grasses dotted with trees, then honest-to-god forest.

It was nice to know trees looked basically the same on other planets, except the leaves were a deep purple, and the edges of the leaves had thorns on them.

Tom didn’t really know what function the thorns served until he saw a giant sloth-looking creature in the distance, munching on the tender new leaves of a tree, some twenty feet in the air, impervious to the newly formed thorns.

Right. Megafauna.

He hadn’t seen much of the megafauna, actually. It seemed as though the animal’s wariness of humans was roughly the same as on earth: Humans had a tendency to kill anything they could get their hands on, after all. Especially if they were travelling in a big, noisy group of five hundred or so.

Tom himself wasn’t required to do much aside from healing the occasional boo boo: Most adults had mastered the ability to dip into their ‘well’ faintly and for a long period of time, vaguely localizing the ability on a wound.

This allowed them to avoid infections, stop bleeding and heal quicker, making him more of a pediatrician than anything else, and only for the nasty wounds that might kill a child. They had to learn to heal their own wounds sometime, after all.

Still, children almost dying happened a lot more than he was comfortable with. Five so far this week. Vith were tough people.

Aside from the once-a-day healing, which people were justifiably grateful for, he had plenty of free time to do his own projects.

Which lead back to this ruin of a ‘forge’.

“Are you sure that pottery can hold fire?” Nema asked, lowering her hand from where she’d covered her face fromt eh explosion.

“Well, yeah,” Tom was fairly sure ceramic was involved….”somehow.” Damn my teenage ignorance. Not being able to look up the answer to his questions at a moment’s notice was maddening.

Tom shook his fist at the gods…until he realized there was a way to look up the answers to his questions at a moment’s notice. And it was free.

“I’m gonna sleep on it,” Tom said, going to sleep.

***Nema***

Their new shaman’s eyes rolled back in his head as he collapsed backwards onto the ground.

“Do you think he knows how creepy that is?” Beconn asked, stopping by. The young warrior watched Tom with apprehension. “Or maybe he just thinks everyone can sleep whenever they want?”

“The latter, probably?” Nema said with a shrug. It was a little irritating that her man was able to sleep instantly while she had to try at it, but listening to his snoring was starting to become comforting, helping her fall asleep faster.

“I’m writing on his face,” Beconn said with a sly grin, retrieving a bit of charcoal from Tom’s failed experiment.

“Beconn! You’ll do no such thing!” Nema shouted, picking up a stick and running the chuckling warrior off, waving the crude club wildly.

Beconn dropped the piece of charcoal in the chase, the tiny bit of black charcoal disappearing into the forest floor.

Ah, the forest. What a nostalgic feeling, the loamy earth under her feet instead of the hard-packed earth of the desert. Six years was not long enough to forget how good it felt.

Nema experimentally flexed her toes in the dirt.

It was cool.

With a faint smile, she turned back to where her man was sleeping.

Tom’s strange, stubby purple creature was scribbling a distinguished mustache on his face with another piece of charcoal.

“Suzie NO!”

“Wark!” Suzie dropped the charcoal and bounced away ahead of the flailing tree branch.

***Tom Graves***

“Okay, so you’re telling me I need to burn limestone to create the key ingredient to cement, then mix it with heat resistant materials to make my fire cement binding agent, which I can then use to make a more permanent forge.”

“Yes.” Luz said.

“Okay so…what’s limestone?” Tom had heard the word used many times, but he never needed to know exactly what it was and where to find it.

“It’s a sedimentary rock formed of calcium carbonate at the bottom of the ocean. It’s soft, and grey to white in color. Chalk is a form of limestone. Seashells are high in calcium carbonate and could be used as a substitute in a pinch.”

“Seashells. That I know how to find.”

“If you’re planning on refining steel, do you wish to know how to make coke?”

“Umm, sure?”

“Coke is produced by subjecting coal to high temperatures without access to oxygen. This refines the coal into coke, able to burn at temperatures hot enough to melt iron and steel.”

Tom set his paper down.

“Let me get this straight.”

“Yeah?”

“In order to make the thing I need, I have to burn calcium carbonate, then I have to use that to make a fixture to burn another thing so I can make the fuel I need to burn the third thing, to make the thing I need?”

“More or less.”

Damn, that’s a lot of burning, and it isn’t even including making a crucible.

“And each step is going to take a bunch of trial and error?”

“Presumably.”

“Son of a bitch.” Tom rubbed his temple.

“If I might make a suggestion.”

“Fire away.”

“I could screen outsiders for you to summon who have spent hundreds of years as assistants to soulmongers in a similar technological era, and would have the comprehensive breadth of knowledge required to recreate the iron age you seem to be aiming at. The presence of an experienced assistant would also include helpful tidbits like the fact that the smoke from burning oyster shells can cause blindness.”

“That would be good to know.” Tom said, writing ‘knowledgeable assistant’ down on the paper, next to ‘smoke blindness’. “Unfortunately, between healing a child a day and paying off my debt, I’m tapped out until people start dropping like flies around me.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said, glancing up. “Are there outsiders who have spent time in higher technological stages than the one Earth is currently in?”

“According to the materials we have received from Earth, there are more advanced worlds out there, yes, but Outsiders in those worlds are seldom able or allowed to understand how the technology works, so summoning them with the intent of leaping your society’s technological advancement forward is somewhat pointless.”

Tom frowned. “What materials?”

***Nathan Glover, NSA Agent***

“You’d think for a bunch of secret government scientists expected to perform forbidden experiments on other humans, you’d be more willing to kill people! We could be so far ahead of where we are now because you wanna do things the ‘ethical’ way.”

Carol’s mood cycled between sour and sadistic glee. Sour was actually more palatable for obvious reasons. Nate and the rest of the team had quickly learned which was which.

“The familiars are currently pulling in an averaged thirty soul pulses per diem with Big Bertha here,” The scientist said, patting patted the massive gold cylinder they’d crafted from the specs in the book.

It had been like pulling teeth requesting a transfer of three hundred kilos of gold from Fort Knox, but the president had personally made some phone calls, which shut that tight-fisted colonel up.

Hah. Nate thought, a silent observer to the exchange between Carol and the scientist.

“And there are no less than fifty familiars patrolling major hospitals. The profit margin is fantastic.”

“Give me specifics!” Carol spat. “What does it mean, nerd?”

“Um, due to Big Bertha’s efficiency, it means we’re outproducing our monthly payment by forty-five hundred percent. That’s forty-four thousand soul pulses per month, after payment.”

“That’s…” Carol paused. “That’s actually pretty good. Carry on.”

“Carl is working on decoding the chemical formula for the piping. He thinks he can improve the insulative effect of the gaurite manifold if we understand it’s atomic structure better.”

“How’s is the bio section doing?” Carol asked.

“They’ve identified a genetic marker in the E.T.s that they think might be the cause of their powers.”

“Really?” Carol frowned. “I thought you were just going to try to breed them.”

“What…No. That’s not what we…is that what you thought we were doing?” the scientist asked, her face crumpled in disgust.

“Eh, I got most of my science from movies.” Carol said with a shrug.

The woman gave an exasperated sigh before continuing.

“It’s actually fascinating, we noticed the E.T.’s bile has traces of nitric acid in addition to the standard muriatic acid, so we worked backwards, looking for genes that could be responsible, and we found one that alters how ammonia is handled in the body. In their physiology, the ammonia that would normally be excreted as waste undergoes catalytic oxidation and is reintroduced to the gut as nitric acid, which allows these aliens to dissolve –“

Nate’s attention was cut short by a blip from his earpiece.

“Excuse me,” Nate muttered, heading out into the hall before he took the call.

“This is Glover.”

“Agent Glover, time for you to clean your desk out. The powers that be have decided to pull the plug on the project. Make your way to the elevator. Don’t talk to anyone on the way out. Do it now."

Nate’s heart gave a solid thump of dread in his chest.

They’re gonna kill everyone.