Checked out the airport. It's mostly been restored to serviceable condition, however it's very expensive to buy tickets because fuel of that grade is something that takes a lot of resources to make, and they won't accept ammunition, only prewar bills and coins. The point of it is that they used the plane to fly over a load of tools, parts and chemicals needed by the desalinization plant crew to increase capacity and maintain the equipment, stuff that is apparently available in excess in California. The plane however is going to be here till they have enough cargo, passengers or a mix of the two to make it cost effective to fly out again.

Additionally I got bored and wandered around the market while Rogan and Tahoe (an intelligence officer who was with the actual team I and the others were providing a distraction for) are finalizing how we get paid and the duration of our contract will be to protect the SLC "missionaries". Tahoe has a few screws loose, then again I think we all do in one way or another, might be how we survived. Anyway in my wandering I found a guy trying to sell some rocks he'd found poking around a copper mine that had been, up until a recent earthquake gotten buried by a pyroclastic flow. He says it's like a natural battery, the nearby shopkeepers called him a snakeoil salesman. I gave him a shot and messed around with it using a voltmeter I found out in the ashlands in some town we wandered through and it does indeed have a charge, albeit very low, less than 1 volt. I bought him a sandwhich and that bought me a few chunks of the material about the size of a baseball, all of which I did test first and it all has a charge proportional to the size of the material.

So the material itself is copperish with a rosy tint to it. At first glance a person could be forgiven for thinking it was just chunks of refined copper ore, it's darker and not a shiny, with a bit of electrolosis in water I was able to tanish it even more and it didn't turn green like copper but was more of a reddish gray. I broke off a chunk and dug around till I'd found a mineralogist who'd worked in the mine before the war. A few hours of doing various tests on it his determination is that it's an alloy of copper, lead and zinc rich silica. I relayed the story of how the prospector had found it in a copper mine that had shut down and then been hit by a volcanic landslide and he figures that under those conditions such an alloy could have been made through sheer luck, but can't explain the electric charge. Additionally the alloy has a low melting point, 230 degrees Fahrenheit, however it becomes very malleable at 150 to 160. 

I've been experimenting with it since then and managed to make simple battery like how in highschool chem you could use pennies vinegar and cardboard and a bit of sandpaper to make a basic wet cell battery.. it's kinda like that only I'm using distilled water to just wet some paper, and layering thin plates of the metal that I flattened out with a controlled fireball and a hammer... it was actually harder than I'd expected because I can boil water pretty easy and keeping it cool enough not to melt the metal was a challenge. I wonder how thin I can get the plates and how long it'll keep a charge... this is going to be interesting to experiment with.