"Sure. I don't know offhand where to find somebody who'll do that for you, but I bet you can ask at the palace."

"I'll be back at dawn." Pause. "Thank you for doing this."

Portal back to palace?

Portal back to palace.

Once back at the palace, Thanos grabs the first important-looking underling present and tells them that the emperor has passed along one last directive to be addressed before sunrise.

"I'll need access to the best 'artificer' available." He tries out a word that Acata taught him the definition of earlier today. "And access to your best repair facilities. I can provide portals if the artificer and the facilities are far from here, or far from each other."

"The best artificers in the world all live in this city," says the person he interrupted, "but unfortunately half of them are dead and we don't yet know which half—let me see—" She flags down a nearby coworker and passes on the request, and the message propagates to several more people, and after five minutes Thanos has directions to a street by the airship docks on which he will find the workshops of the three best plausibly-alive artificers in the city: an airshipwright whose survival has been confirmed, and a clockmaker and a generalist who haven't been seen since this morning but have at least not been confirmed dead.

While he waits, Thanos dispatches another palace servant to check if Isvey, Keill and Acata made it back alright.

The first person he interrupted hands him a hastily scribbled, but legible, note--it describes the most likely coordinates of the planet's best surviving artifact crafters, and their workshops.

Probably won't stack up to a dwarven ring-forge around a neutron star, but they'll have to do.

It's not far, and he doesn't want to take any chances with overtaxing the space gem, so Thanos sets out for the airship docks on foot.

When he's only a few streets away from the palace, Acata catches up to him.

"Isvey and Kiell are fine, and I heard you were going to Quartz Street to talk to Imai so I decided to come along," she says.

Thanos smiles when he sees Acata trailing him.

Good attitude. Good initiative. Good ground speed on such tiny legs.

Very promising.

"You're welcome to join me. The work we're going to do tonight could be very educational."

"What do you need an artificer for?"

Thanos carefully plucks the infinity gems, one by one, from the knuckles of his mangled gauntlet and tucks them away under under an undamaged section of his body armor.

Once he's sure that all the crackling nexi of deadly cosmic energy are Kept Out Of Reach Of Children, Thanos lowers his arm and gives Acata a closer look at the gauntlet itself.

"This artifact. As you can see, it's badly damaged." He turns his hand over slowly, letting her see the gauntlet's every angle and even run her fingers across its non-jagged surfaces. "It's very important; it keeps my powers under control."

She inspects it with an artificer's eye. "I've never seen anything like it."

"It is not of this world." As they talk, Thanos keeps moving but slows his gait enough that Acata doesn't have too much trouble keeping up. "I had it forged in a dark, distant star... out of the gods' own metal."

She thinks about this for a second, then asks, "Which gods?"

Smirk.

"Puny ones."

Acata giggles.

"So how does it work—? I guess I can wait until you tell Imai," she says, as they make the final turn onto Quartz Street. "That's his house, third one down, with the blue roof."

Thanos knocks on Imai's door.

It is not a subtle knock.

A middle-aged man yanks the door open, scowling—stops short on seeing the enormous blue man at the door—double-takes when he sees who's with him.

"Acata? What?"

"This is Thanos he's been helping with the relief efforts all day he broke his magic gauntlet and he wants somebody to fix it," she says all in one breath. "And the Emperor wants us to help."

A slight, nervous flinch at the mention of the Emperor. "Well, all right then. Come on in, both of you. I'll..." he looks at Thanos, looks at his doorframe, looks at Thanos again, changes what he was about to say: "—open up the delivery entrance around back so you can get into the workshop. And then make tea. And you can tell me about your magic gauntlet."

Thanos appreciates the use of Imai's delivery entrance.

"The gauntlet functions as a channel for cosmic energies, creating resonance between six different nodes." He lowers himself into a sitting position upon a sturdy-looking trunk, and then sets his left arm down on a workbench beneath a bright glow-rock light. "Its underlying material does not, in all likelihood, exist anywhere on this world. It is impervious to kinetic rearrangement in its current state, but extended exposure to immense heat can make the metal slightly malleable. I don't know precisely how it'll interact with the 'magic' you use on this world, but that could provide an avenue for realigning the gauntlet's resonance channels."

With his right hand, he slips a couple fingers under his belt and squeezes the reality gem. A large gadget sitting on the tabletop a few feet away morphs into a replica of the (undamaged) infinity gauntlet. "That's what the artifact looked like when originally forged. I can maintain the simulacrum for a couple hours if I concentrate, which should give you time to study the design in depth."

"Hmm—Acata, can you hand me that magnifying glass—"

Acata hands him the magnifying glass. He examines the replica, then the damaged original.

"You're right that I haven't seen this material before. I'd appreciate anything you can tell me about its properties. And will restoring the physical structure suffice for repair—and to what tolerances, if so—or does it have magical functions as well?"

This is a somewhat confusing line of question for Thanos. In his experience, all energies--including the ones that more primitive species refer to as magic--draw from material resonance structures of dimensional geometry. Imai, and others of this world, seem to be laboring under the assumption that magic is a Tangible Thing distinct from the other building blocks of the cosmos.

In any case, he doesn't know that much about the high-level cosmic science underlying the gauntlet or the exact properties of the material it's comprised of. He does have an intuitive 'feel' for how the cosmic energies flow through the gauntlet, and can take an educated guess that misalignment of the internal structure accounts for the current misalignment of those energy channels. Returning the gauntlet to its original form should at least mitigate the problem, even if it doesn't fix it entirely.

Thanos imagines that hashing all this out verbally with Imai will take quite a lot of words, and he'd rather just not.

Instead he simply says: "Get started. Don't worry about the tolerances."

He'll pay attention to the feel of the energy channels as the artificer reforges it, and tell him which changes have positive, negative or neutral results.

If nothing else, they ought to figure out a great deal tonight just through trial and error.

Imai blinks, slightly taken aback, and then turns to Acata. "Remind me your elements exactly—?"

"Self-dedicated Light and Fire, birth-dedicated Ice and Shadow, born Sky," she says.

"No Land, lots of Light—you focus on the externally visible details, then, I'll do what I can with the subtler internal aspects."

Acata nods. They each take up tools and begin examining the replica gauntlet and altering the damaged one to match. They don't seem to need to use heat in order to reshape the metal; they just concentrate and apply firm pressure, and it slowly bends to their will. Sometimes Imai does the same thing to a particularly hard-to-reach component without even touching it, although it's much slower this way.

"Very good. I can feel the energies flowing more smoothly."

                                       "No, that just made things worse. Turn it the other way."

            "That's very clever, Acata. The first and fifth node can communicate directly now."

                                                                                  "The palm serves as a contact switch for the overall mechanism"

      "Don't worry about the vambrace, it's mostly decorative."                                                                 "Are you tired? It's alright if you need to take a break."

Thanos coordinates the two artificer's efforts throughout the night. Though his instructions are brisk, he has a gentle tone and pays the little humans occasional compliments so that they'll know their work is appreciated.

Acata and Imai work very well together. Under their hands, the condition of the gauntlet steadily improves.

Then, at around half past midnight, Imai rubs his eyes and glances at a clock. "Depending on the urgency of the repairs, I might like to call a halt for the night and pick it up in the morning after I've slept," he says. "It's been a very long day."

"I understand." Thanos lifts his arm and flexes his left fist. The joints still catch in a few places, but the repairs have restored most of the gauntlet's range of motion. "These repairs should suffice to get me through another day without a resonance overload. That's all that's necessary for now."

He rises to his feet, gives Imai a nod of thanks, then turns to Acata.

"Little one, do you have a place to spend the night?"

"I live near here," she says. "I can walk home on my own."