"And... more powerful weapons are made, hmm, very complicated and exact, out of many metals..."

"More complicated takes longer than less, but I can do it."

"How does the metal affect things?"

"Ah... I don't have the vocabulary for a good explanation yet," he says. "There are about seven things a magic weapon made of only one metal can do. Different metals do different things. More than one metal in the same weapon does a new, more powerful thing."

"That is a reasonably good explanation! So steel is fire?"

"Yes—" and now they can add 'steel' to their vocabulary list.

And Emily will conjure bits of other kinds of metal so they can be added to the list, too! Copper, gold, silver, platinum, zinc, lead, titanium. Are any of these in the seven?

Kyralaine asks to see the samples and holds each one for a few seconds. She diagnoses them all as magically active, and recognizes and provides translations for copper, gold, silver, and platinum.

"And I think I've seen zinc in a - mix - with copper; together they do the same magic as zinc but stronger. I don't recognize lead or titanium, but I can tell that lead does the same magic as gold but weaker, and titanium does the same magic as zinc but much stronger."

"What does copper do? What does zinc do?"

"Copper does - I don't think we have the word yet - um, loud weather? Zinc does... I don't know if we have the word yet..."

"Lightning?" she guesses, sketching a puffy cloud with a lightning bolt coming down from it.

He laughs. "Yes! Lightning. Copper does lightning." He provides a translation and adds it to the vocabulary list.

"Do we have words for what gold, silver and platinum do?"

"Gold does light, silver I don't think we have the word, platinum... the opposite of fire?"

"Cold?" she guesses, looking at Anna, who has the white flower.

Anna shrugs, and demonstrates cold by conjuring a glass of water set to last for a few seconds and then freezing it. "Cold. Freezing. I froze the water."

"Yes! Platinum does freezing."

He adds this new verb to the vocabulary list.

"So we need the words for silver and zinc...I should conjure more things, see if there are more 'strongers' you didn't know about like titanium."

"Yes, let's find out."

Aluminum? Bismuth? Cobalt? Chromium? Manganese? Tin?

Aluminum is a weak version of copper. Bismuth is a very strong version of - a metal they haven't encountered yet; manganese is a medium-strong version of the same effect. Tin she recognizes as opposed to just diagnosing its magic; it appears in a different copper alloy with a different effect, or alone with a weaker version of that effect.

Chromium... does something, but she's never encountered a metal with this effect before and has no idea what the effect actually is.

Something totally new! Awesome! It's safe to make a chromium pin and test it, right?

In theory, yes. A mere pin shouldn't be very strong, and this feels like it might be a medium-strength metal.

She makes a chromium pin.

And Kyralaine balls up a stray piece of paper and puts it in a bowl and carefully aims the pin at it, and...

...about half of the crumpled ball of paper collapses into a papery puddle. She pokes the remaining paper gently with the pin. The liquefied parts appear to be slowly solidifying again.