[center][h1]Ma'otah's Village[/h1][/center]
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[center][h3]Dawn of the Bronze Age[/h3][/center]

At first, no one understood the true value of what was now known as tin. The miners had come up with a bag of the stuff, small black crystals embedded in granite. They hadn't know what to do with it, at first. The bigger crystals were rather pretty, though.

At first, they tried to separate the crystals from the veinstone. That process was rather simple; crush the stone and then shake it on a small flat plane. The heavier chunks will remain, and the lighter ones will fall off. It wasn't all that different to how they processed some other ores.

When they got a decent amount of black crystals, [i]that's[/i] when things got tricky. What were they even supposed to do with it? A few rare chunks could possibly be used as gemstones, but the others were only broken, unworkable fragments. Still, they couldn't just... throw it out.

They set it aside for the time being, letting the supply grow as they concentrated more and more of the black crystal ore, until a metalsmith just thought, what the hell, why not put it in a furnace and see what happened? It's not like they had anything to lose.

That's what she did, dumping the ore in a crucible and mixing in some powdered black coal and limestone. They had discovered that these other stones, when mixed in with the right amount, rid copper and silver of more impurities when smelted, so she decided to use it here, just to cover her bases.

Incredibly, her flight of fancy actually gave results! She retrieved the burning hot crucible, and was amazed to see that the crystals had in fact melted, and that underneath the layer of slag, was something that looked an awful lot like a new kind of metal.

She ran off immediately to announce her discovery, that sometimes metals did not look like metal at all at first glance, and soon tin production was in full swing.

It was the softest metal they had ever worked with, softer than even gold. So soft, even, that a bar could be easily bent by hand, even by a child. It also gave off the strangest crinkling sound when bent. It melted at a very low temperature as well, less than half of copper's. It was too soft to be useful for smithing by itself... but that did not mean it was useless either.

They knew they could mix metals. They had tried with copper and silver, though it yielded little useful results. Now that a new option was available, they had new mixes to try.

That's how they discovered that adding a part of tin to 9 parts of copper simply made the result... incredibly better than copper in every way. It flowed better when melted, and made casting a breeze. It was more resistant and harder when solid, making using it a a source for tools actually viable. It was much more workable too. It was downright revolutionary as a material.

It was bronze.

They started testing by making a simple knife. They had tried with copper before, but the edge was too soft and dulled too quickly, and so they had stuck with stone blades. But as they doused the red-hot knife in water and ground its edge on a fine-grained stone until it was as thin as a hair, they had the feeling of having found something great.

The sound of the blade slicing through leather like it was nothing sounded like victory.

Bronze began to take over copper in every way. For jewelry, for sculptures, for cookware, and most importantly, for tools. Bronze knives, bronze axes, bronze hammers, bronze tongs, bronze arrowheads even. They were so much easier to make than than stone tools, and though some knappers still persisted in their crafts, they mostly made knives as art pieces rather than as tools.

New forms of weapons began to take shape, too. Knives and spearheads could be made longer, now that they didn't have to rely on finding a good enough rock to begin with. Artists and artisans did as they always did, and they experimented. What if they gave this knife this kind of curve? What if they made it perfectly triangular? What it they gave it only one sharp edge? What if, what if, what if?

Swords, bigger, longer knives that could be used at a distance, became a thing. Of course, nobody expected for them to find a real use; spears were much better for hunting beasts, and they didn't have anyone to fight against either. Instead, they became signs of status or talent in the art of smithing, for they were a difficult and resource intensive thing to make. Ma'otah, as the village's first and sole priestess, and also as a respected leader, was offered one herself, an intricately decorated blade with a brightly painted antler hilt. She began wearing it tied to her waist like jewelry, another kind of embellishment.

The Bronze Age was beginning.

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[center][h3]Tolamu's Discovery[/h3][/center]

Tolamu had been pondering a very important problem lately: food preservation. Though many plants could be dried for storage, some things, like meat, simply rotted too fast to let the air and heat do their work.

Smoking, in addition to drying, would be a good alternative... but trees were scarce, and they did not have that much wood to spare. No way would he ever stoop so low as to use furnace coal for the task either. That stuff smelled and tasted like poison, and he would not dare serve it to anyone, least of all himself! And so smoked meats were reduced to only an occasional by-product of night-time campfires.

He wandered through the village, deep in thought. What else could he use...? Someone of his genius would think of something, wouldn’t he? Water and moisture seemed to be made made things rot. After all, fish  and soft fruits went bad much faster than grains or hard roots. That was why they dried things to preserve them... A new way to remove moisture was needed.

He stopped by the old abandoned well. No one ever used it. They had been unlucky with the spot they had dug it in, as only disgusting water that only made you more thirsty came out of it. It wasn't even good for washing, since it dried out and stung skin. Everyone used the one dug a bit farther out the village, since that one actually gave sweet, refreshing drinking water.

...Wait a second. It dried out the skin?

He grabbed a bucket and fetched some water from the old well. He dipped his finger in it and licked it, frowning thoughtfully at the taste. It actually wasn't that bad when he didn't try to swallow it in large gulps... There was something in that water for sure, something [i]interesting[/i]. He had to get it out.

He poured the water in a pot near a fire, and brought it all to a boil. And then he waited. And waited. Slowly the water disappeared, leaving behind a steam cloud, until there was no more but a sort of white crust on the bottom. Tolamu steeled his nerves, and with great culinary courage, licked the bottom of the pot.

Wow, that's a powerful taste. His eyes screwed shut and he made a face. He could feel his tongue dry out a little bit where some of the white residue stuck to it and slowly melted. Maybe in moderation, it could be used to season food... something to try out later for sure.

For now, though, he went to work fetching and boiling saltwater, each time scraping off the resulting salt into a bowl. And when he felt he had enough, he took a piece if raw meat, and buried it in it.

His first experiment would not be a complete success, but through trial and error, salt-curing would soon take shape.

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[center][h3]A Lost Child's Tale[/h3][/center]

She was running through the bush, laughing merrily. Her mother had let her accompany her to the fruit tree grove to pick some food. She had been so proud to be allowed to help, though it only made sense. She was five monsoons old after all! She was a big girl now.

She held the basket for her mother while she forage, and she picked some flowers herself. She could give them to her dad, or maybe have her auntie show her how to braid them in a crown. Sometimes, her mother would lift her to sit on her shoulders, and she would pick the fruits she could now reach, giggling all the while

They were taking a break now, resting in shadows to wait out the middle of the day, when the Great Fire burned the hottest. She was running around in the grasses, chasing bugs and using her straw hat to carry pretty rocks. Her mother kept an eye on her, but not too vigilantly: the grove was small, and so she knew her daughter could not stray too far.

It happened very suddenly. She heard something near, something like... laughter? Yes, she could hear it well now. Just behind that bush, hidden behind a few arched trees, people laughed. Many people, from the sound of it.

She went closer, peeking out from the tallgrass. Beyond those trees... there really were people! They were all grouped around tall tables, or maybe just normal tables that were too tall for her, and they kept passing each other cups of something in-between cheers and laughs. They dressed weird, and looked even weirder, but they looked like they had so much fun.

She took a few more steps forward, curious. They spoke weirdly, too. She couldn't understand what what they were saying. Maybe she could hear better if she got a bit closer...?

One last step, an invisible threshold crossed, and she was gone.

She didn't notice anything wrong at first. In fact, she thought everything was quite spectacular! There were pretty lights everywhere, everyone was having fun, there was nice music she had never heard before playing... it was great! Sure she didn't understand the games or why so many involved throwing tiny bone cubes, and she one time grabbed a cup filled with something that smelled sweet but tasted really bitter and gross, but she had also found a cup full of sweet, cold berry juice, so it all evened out in the end.

She ran around for a while, looking at everything, laughing when others did, though she didn't why, listening to the others speak in a language she did not understand, putting some of her pretty rocks on a table and looking as someone spun a wheel for her using rules she did not know.

She ran around like this for close to an hour, just looking at everything, chasing every distraction, tasting every food that did not look too gross.

[b]"Mama! Mama!"[/b] she shouted excitedly, [b]"Come here! Look at what I found! There's so many people here!"[/b]

Her mother, of course, did not answer her. She stopped moving, smile growing a bit uncertain.

[b]"Mama? Can you hear me?!"[/b] Her smile fell off entirely. Why didn't her mother hear her? She hadn't gone far, she was still in the grove! [b]"Mama! Where are you?! Mama!"[/b]

Tears formed in her eyes as she panicked, and she could feel sobs build in her chest. [b]"Mama, I'm sorry I ran off, please pick me up... I'm scared!"[/b] She began walking, not looking around has she had done, but rather looking for the way she had come in. But wherever she turned, she only found more tables. More strangers. More games she didn't know or understand.

She was scared. She was panicking. She wanted to find her mama, to have her hold her and tell her everything was alright... [b]"I wanna go hoooooome!"[/b] she scream-sobbed into the crowd, closing her eyes huddling on the ground.

Everything went still and silent, then. She hesitantly opened one eye, and then the other. The people were gone, and so were the games. Instead, in front of her, sat a little pile of black stone marbles. In front of that pile, a circle was drawn in the dirt, with an equal amount of white marbles dispersed inside.

She sniffled a bit. She knew that game. She played it all the times with the other kids in the village. And she was very good at it. That thought calmed her down a little bit, and she picked up a black marble. With a flick of her finger, she sent it flying into the circle and crashing into a white marble, cleanly bouncing it out of the ring. She smiled a little bit.

One by one, each white marble was knocked out of the circle and replaced by a black one. Each time, she felt a little bit better, like she was doing the right thing. And when the last white marble was removed, a tricky shot that had her think about her angle thrice over, branches bent in front of her, and she saw the fruit tree grove again, the normal one. And then she heard... her mama! Her mama was calling for her!

She ran out of the door, tears once again streaming down her face, but because of relief this time, not fear. [b]"Mama! Mama, I'm here!"[/b]

She crashed in her mother's arms, gripping on for dear life as she began babbling about how lost she had been, how scared and how sorry she was for running off. She did not notice how shaken the woman looked, how she held her daughter just as tightly, if not more so, or how her face was also streaked by tears and her chest shook with relieved sobs.

She would soon learn that she had not been gone for an hour or so as she had thought, but for 3 days, which did explain her sudden and inexplicable hunger. She would be asked many questions, about what happened, about where she had been, but she could not answer. Her memories of those days simply slid off her mind like water off a goose's back.

She only remembered people laughing, having a lot of fun, and then being very, very alone and scared.

[hider=Summary]
Some miners come back up with cassierite, a tin ore. People first aren't sure what to do with the black ores, but still decide to isolate it from the veinstone, to salvage a few bigger crystal to use as gemstones. They keep the cassierite unusable as gemstones, which is most of it, just in case. Since it was just sitting there, unused, a young metalsmith decides to try her hand at smelting it, just for fun. Incredibly, it does work, and yields crude tin. Through further experimentation, metalsmiths discover bronze. They realize just how good of an alloy it is, and start using it for everything, including tools and blades, which were still made of stone at that point. The new advancements permit the creations of new forms of weapons, mostly swords, though they are considered ceremonial and decorative, as well as status symbols, rather than true weapons. Ma'otah is offered one of these swords, and she begins wearing it tied to her waist.

Tolamu ponders how to better preserve food. Simply drying doesn't work for everything, and smoking on a large scale would require more wood than they really have available. He passes by an old well that was abandoned because it only managed to draw saltwater from the submerged seas and not drinking water. He remembers some of the properties of that water, and experiments a bit, evaporating saltwater in a pot so that he's left with only salt. He considers using it as a spice, and invents salt-curing.

A young child accidentally falls into the Carnival while picking fruits with her mother. She has fun at first, though she understands very little of what's happening. However, she pretty quickly realizes that she's been separated from her mother, which sends her in a panic and breaks the Carnival's enchantment on her mind. The Carnival then presents her with a game she does know: playing marbles. She wins the game and is allowed back into the world, where she runs to her mother who has been looking for her for the 3 whole days she's been missing.
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