This isn't too strenuous, but it's more than a little bit of healing is for him. It's maybe a little moreso than playing with sapphires was at the mixer. Shale is a very easy rock to work with, really, and she isn't touching the copper itself. 

Eventually she is left with one pile of rubble and one pile of oddly shaped chunks of orange and teal speckled with grey and brown bits. At this point, she picks one of them up, leans back against Tim, and starts working on the smaller, more integrated bits of rock, moving much more slowly now. Her backlash accumulation rate slows as well. 

Huh, this is neat.  He couldn't do this all day, but twenty minutes of watching this is cool.  He's actually going to keep himself occupied playing keep-ahead of her backlash rate.  Actually.  This is maybe a bad idea.  "Can you activate your endurance, so I can augment myself?  Without squishing you if I sneeze?"

She half looks back, giving a little 'mm'. Her backlash ticks up as she turns her endurance to full, and then focuses back on her rocks. 

Sara is now Even Squisheder.  He's not trying to hurt her, but she's definitely not going anywhere.  He's aggressively surfing her backlash level while he watches rocks disintegrate under her hands.

Very squished! She can feel the pressure, and knows it's a lot, but it isn't hurting her. 

Rock crumbles under her fingers, landing on the apron stretched across her lap. Sometimes it seems to trickle out of somewhere deeper in the stone, leaving something that glimmers in the fake firelight when it goes. 

When she finally sets the first chunk of rock aside it is all, entirely, copper. The rough metal seems to glow dully, and any tarnish is gone with the rocks, for now. It isn't anything one could make quality jewelery out of, not yet, but it's definitely not rock anymore. 

Huh.  He loses his focus on Backlash Surfing for a second, because that is so cool.  He'll swipe it and start fidgeting with it.  Roll it out with extreme pressure, roughly akin to rolling out dough.  Eventually.  Slowly. and it gives him something to do while he's on Squish duty.

She notices him stealing it and squishing it about, because she notices every rock and metal in her immediate vicinity right now, but she doesn't mind. She's working on the next chunk now, filtering stone from copper dust and consolidating the latter into a new chunk. This becomes more expensive the more copper she adds, but it's barely anything at these amounts anyway. 

As soon as she has a second major chunk, he'll squish it into the blob of Copper Dough.  It's a little tricky because he's mostly doing it by sight because he daren't look down at his hands right now.  But it's a very tactile task.  Relaxing.

They make a veritable copper-producing machine between the pair of them. She actually hands him the next chunk when it's done, a small piece about the size of a grape.

Every chunk after that is smaller still, until the smallest, a pea-sized tidbit, is added to Tim's dough ball, and Sara relaxes back with a long, slow sigh. 

"Alright there?"  He's still got a bit of backlash racking up because he's on Double Squish Duty, but it's not like his backlash really matters here.

She pats his arm with a lightly dusted hand, "I'm fine, just- it takes a lot of focus." 

She is, indeed, breathing okay, and he can feel her backlash start to drain away. 

"Sometimes I'm - jealous.  Of powers that actually require skill.  I know it's stupid, I could have been D-rank or even just not awakened.  But."  He shrugs, which lifts Sara's arms slightly.

She tilts her head to the side so she can look up at him, "You can do skillful work with your power. You're working on it right now," she taps the hand holding the blob of copper. 

"For this, I'm just a hydraulic press.  You're not, you're not wrong exactly.  But it's not like your heart ruby or that really cool bracelet you made, either."  Tim's doing his very best to turn it into a long noodle of copper, he's almost done.

"You're still learning. Eventually, if you keep at it, you will be able to do amazing things with metals like this. It's silly to compare yourself to someone who has been doing things like this so much longer than you have." 

Stomach-poke.  "You're missing the point.  Everything I'm doing right now could be done with a proper toolkit.  Your detection abilities can't be replicated by technology, not without millions of dollars, and your snake bracelet would be impossible for anyone but you to take off."  Sigh.  "I know I lucked out, it's just - what people do, you know?"

She huffs (and pulls her belly in), "I suppose. I still think you are selling yourself short. 

"...do you want to try the snake bracelet on? I noticed that you liked it a lot. I made it for my wrist, it could be fun to see how I'd need to adjust it for someone else." 

"You're probably right.  Um, if you - wouldn't mind?  It's really cool."  Have you considered using different words, Tim.  "Like - it's a really - " please, Tim.

Vague gestures in the hopes of getting his point across!  And then let Sara go.

She giggles as she gets to her feet, "I know what you mean. I'll be right back." 

To her room she goes to get her box of purple snake. It's on the bedside table for now, since she had emptied her backpack for hiking. She's back in very little time. 

Well, at least someone in this conversation knows what he means.  Wrist?  She’s definitely going to have to wrap it wider for him.

It takes more adjustments than that. Just wrapping it wider leaves the snake curled the wrong way, so she needs to spend some time adjusting sections of pale-dark-pale scales to sit properly, and ensuring its slim little head rests on his wrist where it's supposed to. Luckily she has plenty of access to guiding as she works, so she comes out of it net-positive.

Eventually he has a purple snake wrapped three times around his wrist. Its shiny black eyes gleam up at him from its narrow head, above a closed mouth which Sara, at least, knows is full of sharp teeth. 

Whoaahhh.  Tim spends the next ten minutes staring at it and admiring it from different angles.  “How long did this even take you..?”

"Months. Getting the colours right was the hardest part. It was worth it, though." She runs a few fingers down the scales, smiling. 

After a few more minutes of caressing it and gazing at it, Tim will abruptly realize he's been hypnotized.  "Um.  Thank you for letting me look at it.  I could never, I'd be too scared of something happening.  But it's...really nice that things like this can exist."  He's embarrassed, but genuinely happy he got to play with it.  Wristback?

She carefully extracts it, but she leaves the adjustments as they are. 

"Just ask if you want to look at it again, I don't mind. Maybe we should make something for you out of the copper? Something that goes somewhere it won't be in danger from your strength..."