The Flux Workbench

The Flux Workbench crafts everything an ordinary one does, and flux recipes besides: instrument parts, devices and the fluxionist's gear. They are paid for with the flux of the land under the workbench and the currents of the place. A pinch of quickdust on a crafting table — and the oak darkens, veins of flux run through it, bronze binds its corners, and the crafting grid turns into the Wheel of Currents.

+Flux Workbench

In the middle of the Wheel lies the grid, and around it six sockets for shards: the four Springs in the order of the Wheel and the two Poles, Lattice above and Fray below. To the right are the bowl where the thing appears and the lens-vessel with the flux of the place, the same as the Loupe's: what the craft will draw shimmers on the flux itself. What you lay out stays on the workbench when you step away.

A flux recipe asks for more than things — it needs the currents of the place. Tide flows by rivers, Strata in mountains and caves, Ember in deserts and the Nether, Gale everywhere, and Lattice is rare: it flows in the snows. The socket of a current that flows here glows in its color.

TideStrataEmberGaleLatticeFray

What the place lacks, a shard from its socket provides — one per craft. But such crafting is rougher: a borrowed current settles into the land as murk. Where to work is the fluxionist's choice: by a river, in the mountains, or with a store of crystals.

Crafting draws flux from the land beneath the workbench, and it seeps back by itself — from the bed and from the land around. Below the bed floor crafting takes nothing. In a drought, shards come to the rescue: each is set flux, eight measures of it, clean, without murk.

The first things the workbench gives are parts for instruments: drives that turn on flux, a coil, glass backed with antimony and a prism that splits a beam of flux into currents.