Storm Island Expedition

One More Week

Over the next 7 days, the group waited out for Gavin to get better.
Ella had earned the equivalent of a Cyclopean Apothecary Degree with what she had learned.  None of what she learned was revolutionary to the knowledge from the mainland, but she could tell there would be a few mixes of use to the rest of the world.

Cedric took up an interest in the local mining site.  He noticed that many of the Cyclopes tools tended to wear out and break over time.  After handling a basic iron pickaxe for a try, it shattered after picking a pair of ores.  The locals seemed to accept the situation with their tools, but Cedric delved deeper.
At first glance the ores looked 'normal'.  He grabbed the pick from his own tool belt and started working at the various deposits.  His first attempt did yield some iron, but it started to crumble in his hand.  A second attempt resulted in the same problem, iron ore that just crumbled nearly into dust. After nearly a dozen attempts, none of the ores came out as a solid mass, two attempts; his mining caused the ores to virtually explode into nothing.  The process repeated itself with every other ore he tried.
He eventually took the ores to the town furnace, and started working with them there.   His first experiment was with copper and tin.   Normally the two ores would melt down into an alloy of bronze, 1 part copper, 1 part tin, without any trouble.  But each attempt produced mixed, if often bad, results.  Ores that would normally have produced a simple load of 14 bars, instead, netted barely 4.  The bars didn't even appear to be of good quality.  The nearby piles generated by the Cyclopes were just as poor.
He briefly considered using the iron ores, but given how shoddy the success rate for those typically was, specifically without a Ring of Forging, he simply opted to move straight to steel.   Again, his attempts at making steel bars were as poor as bronze, barely a third of the bars survived the smelting process.

On a whim, Cedric placed a few of the cooled bronze bars into the furnace again.  Individually, a few of the bars when taken out and cooled, crumbled to dust.  A few others showed no improvement at all. One or two bars seemed to have the impurities heated out of them.  He ran another experiment putting two bars in at the same time.  As he had hoped, the bars survived the reheating and produced a single perfect bar.
Not wanting to consider wasting effort on reheating bars, especially after such a high failure rate, he opted to try a simpler approach.  If 2 'imperfect' or 'impure' bars could produce a single 'good' bar, what would happen if he tried 2 sets of ores from the start?
His first attempt with 2 copper and 2 tin ores took a few moments longer than normal to smelt than he was accustomed to.  In the end, a single bar did come out, and without any of the impurities he had seen before.  He then tried a full load of copper and tin ore, and to his delight, all of them were successful.  Follow up experiments with steel and mithril gave the same encouraging results.
Meanwhile, a small crowd of Cyclopes watched on intently to Cedric's every move.
Eventually, Cedric had a small pile of purified bars to work with.  One of the Cyclops blacksmiths picked up a bar and started forging with it.  To his surprise, the bar didn't give him any trouble, and he had a short sword (though in his hands, it more resembled a dagger.)

Cedric turned his attention to the pickaxes within the village.  Most were sized well enough for his grip, but for the Cyclopes, they barely fit in one hand.  Drawing on what he learned from the dwarves around Ice Mountain, he began hammering out a bronze pickaxe that would be close to two-handed for the Cyclopes.
One Cyclops grabbed the pick and began to eye it, and then perform some test swings.  He was quite impressed.  Another Cyclopes motioned for Cedric to make another, seemingly interested in making more of the same design.  Barely an hour after showing the first Cyclopes how it was made, the village had nearly replaced all of their pickaxes with the superior models.  One Cyclops was inventive enough to make some tools that resembled two-handed hatchets (or at least they would be in Cedric's hands.)

Meanwhile, Hodgins had taken up listening to the detailed history of the village.   It was a long and storied tale.  He wasn't certain how much of it was truth, and how much myth, but it certainly filled in the blanks from the time of their founding, to today.  Sadly, he didn't consider much of it to be 'interesting', and thus left many notes out.

As the week eventually passed, Gavin slowly appeared to get better.  Hodgins, Ella, and Cedric had gathered in the hut finally expecting to take Gavin back south to the port.
On the seventh day, Gavin suddenly took a turn for the worse.  A fever developed, sweating, pain.  The herbalist found a greenish spot on his arm, where it infection first appeared worse.
'Bad!  Very bad!' she called out.
'What do we do?' asked Ella.  'Is there another potion?  Remedy?  What herbs do you need?'
'No potions.  No herbs.'
The other were confused 'What do we do then?'
'Nothing.  Cure no work.'
'So, what then?  We just let him die?'
'Yes.'
Hodgins put his foot down.  'We did not wait all this time just for our friend to die here.  There must be SOMETHING.'
The old Cyclops pondered for a moment, calmly walked over to the worktable and grabbed a cleaver.
Hodgins and Ella were terrified she was about to kill him outright, but before they could react, the old herbalist struck.
Gavin cried out in shock and pain.
The herbalist quickly applied a firebrand, then a tourniquet.
'Few more days, then we see again if he get better.'
The trio turned pale at the sight of what just happened.

Three days later, after painstaking applications of herbs and ointments, Gavin's fever did indeed break, and he was awake.  Though still in shock.
The trio slowly started escorting Gavin southwards to the port.