In such a commission, preliminaries could not be rushed. The personality, reputation and ancestry of Kevan Tal had to be considered, and incorporated into the design. A snake twined about the handle was a reference to the Kevan armorial crest, the interlocking pattern of leaves on the barrel was a punning nod to the family's greatest military victory, while the striking, red colour of the power cell's housing spoke of Tal's firey nature.

And it was not just the outer casing that required an aesthetic touch. The circuits and components within would form an harmonious picture, which the gunsmith carefully outlined now in delicate, black ink before painting in the detail. The resulting schematic was so moving that the smith felt compelled to pen a brief, but touching, poem in a corner just below a watercolour rendering of the trigger mechanism.

The molten metal bubbled and spat as it hissed its path down into the carved moulding, mapping out in three dimensions the carefully thought-out design. A mistake at this stage would mean starting all over again, yet it still remained the least involving part of the casting process. Each joint, each diode, each refractor, would be similarly made and then hand-tooled to make it unique; an exact fit to this one weapon.

Last, and most difficult of all, came the grip. The match had to be perfect, tailor-made. The smith had made specific measurements of the hands of Kevan Tal (367 per hand in fact), a rare time when one of his class was permitted to touch one of the nobility, now those measurements came into play. Every bone and muscle was accounted for, every groove and crease, so that the weapon would be an extension of the holder's arm, moulded to his skin.