Demesne

Two days proved sufficient to relieve Lori of the urge to check her notes. The act of having to decipher and in some cases correct her own writings and diagrams had made her stop wanting to do so, and while her hands were no longer injured, she didn't want to possibly burn them again. Perhaps in a few days. A week at most. Maybe two weeks…

…

Probably when she'd forgotten she'd burned her hands.

So she set aside her notes for the moment, keeping them pressed with a tablet on one corner of her stone table, and went back to work. After all, there was always something she needed to attend to in her demesne.

The first order of business had been finally getting the Coldhold out of the river. Almost against her will, Lori found herself unfortunately agreeing that the process to safely extract their largest boat out of the water was time consuming and, on her part, attention intensive. It took most of a morning's careful maneuvering to get the stone cube containing the boat from the middle of the river back towards the docks, where she slowly raised it up before opening the cube to finally float up the boat.

By the time the boat was released once more and floating on the water, Lori was already trying to think of where she'd put whatever boat storage structure she was going to be building.

However, that was for later. If she was going to be building a new structure, she'd need raw material. And while she still had a large surplus from when she had excavated the grain storage room in the third level, she wasn't sure that would be enough.

Besides, she still had to expand her dungeon's baths, which would probably require drawing from the surplus, and were something simple she could start with. Lori had dug them up after the first time that a dragon had passed over her demesne and she realized that she would need to shelter her idiots inside of her dungeon again in the future, and ever since had essentially just left it be. Aside from putting in lightwisps that were directly imbued by her core once she had the wire for it—which on consideration were no longer really needed since she could just connect everything with lines of lightwisps, ugh, she needed to find time to do that…—Lori really hadn't done any further work on it.

She supposed it was about time to change that.

Excavating the space to expand it was slightly problematic, since she couldn't just make it deeper. Her dungeon's water reservoir was behind the baths, and while there was a little more space for her to dig out, it was only about a pace or two before the back of the baths broke though into it. Given that one of the walls of the baths was up against the passageway leading towards the reservoir and the other faced the dining hall, there was only one other direction to expand, but that direction was concerningly close to the surface, and Lori didn’t want to accidentally break through the side of the hill they were under. Those paces of stone surrounding her dungeon was protection in case another islandshell was dropped on top of them.

That meant there were four possible ways to expand the dungeon's baths: building a second bathing area somewhere else such as the second or third level, digging downwards from the currently established baths, simply reconfiguring the current baths so that more people could bathe in the available area, or bringing in stone to extend the baths into the area that was the dining hall and expanding it that way.

The first option was violently rejected. She was not going to lay out more pipes through the stones of her demesne, and she didn't want to have to dig out another bathing area. No, no, not happening! The population of her demesne would need to at least double for her to even consider such a thing!

The second option was… doable, but in the long run would probably be extremely dangerous. Combining wet stone floors and stairs seemed an accident waiting to happen, not to mention she couldn't think of how she would organize everything. If she simply dug downwards, that wouldn't really expand the bath's area unless she excavated under the dining hall, and she wasn't confident enough in her skills to be certain that doing that wouldn't cause the dining hall to collapse down into the expanded bathing area.

The third seemed more immediately doable. Remove the water basin in the middle, put in water spouts along the walls above head height, and they would have showers. It would naturally predispose people to be quick and not linger, while also allowing more people to use the baths simultaneously. However, she knew from experience that people had also used the dungeon's baths to do their laundry during the winter. And as she did not want to have to make a second laundry area in her dungeon for the winter—if there was going to be a laundry area, she was going to keep it for herself!—the shower stalls would not be viable, as laundry would probably need more open spaces and surfaces.

That meant the most viable option was the fourth one, using stone to expand the bathing area into the dining hall. As much it was the most logical course of action, a part of Lori felt annoyed at the need to encroach into the space. There was plenty of room—the dining hall was much larger than they needed, with plenty of separation between tables and an open space at the far end from the entrance of the dungeon… which was where the bathing area was—but still, the perfectionist in her was annoyed that the dining hall would no longer be perfectly regular. And she couldn't even build a second bathing area on the opposite side, since there were entrances to cold storage rooms for their winter meat along those walls. Unfortunately, the baths were needed infrastructure, especially with them leaving summer behind and coming another season closer to winter. Well, probably leaving summer behind, it was hard to tell since the dragon was still trailing its threads across the sky.

Ugh, the perfect symmetry of her excavated spaces…

Well, if she was being honest, it was unlikely to be perfectly symmetrical. The dining hall had been her earliest mass-excavation project, and the pillars and supporting arches had been shaped piecemeal. The same with the walls. A horotract—or anyone at all, really—examining the chamber's dimensions would probably be able to see it was distended and distorted and not even close to being straight at all. Lori had managed to studiously ignore this by not looking too closely at it all and assuring herself that the work she had done last year was sufficient…

…

Anyway!

So as much as it annoyed Lori to have to alter the shape of her Dungeon's dining hall, her Dungeon's baths would need to be expanded.

The first order of business was sealing off all the pipes leading to the bathing area and draining them all of water. Fortunately, as a Dungeon Binder, all she needed to do was turn the water into ice and set it aside to throw into the river later.

Then she started excavating.

While she had no intention of putting the expanded bathing area beneath the dining area, on consideration Lori decided it would be prudent to further minimize the possibility of water flooding out from the baths and outside to the dining hall and down the nearby stairs leading down to the second level. Thus, she was excavating half a pace downward, both so that the bathing area would be lower than the floor outside it and so that she could minimize the amount of stone she'd have to bring back inside or move up from the third level—she might as well excavate that for building material too, and get a start on finally completing it.

In the back of her mind, Lori had vague plans beyond simply making the baths bigger so that more people could use it at a time. Since the water to be used for bathing was purely for external washing and not for consumption—at least, it better not be—then it didn't have to be as completely clean as their drinking water. Combined with the fact that a lot of the water that had been dumped into the third level's drainage cistern had been used bath water, and clearly the baths needed a way to minimize waste water that would be deposited into the third level, both to conserve their stores for drinking water and so that all the bath water didn't end up causing the cistern to overflow and potentially flood the dungeon farm.

She'd need to recover the water the way she'd been doing in River's Fork, removing most of the dissolved impurities so that the water could be used again for bathing. That would mean having to make a small reservoir to hold the recovered water, and since there was always some kind of loss in any sort of system, at the very least the reservoir would need some way of prioritizing the recovered water over the water from the reservoir…

Despite it being work and ruining the shape of her dungeon's dining hall, the familiar rhythm of excavating and then building was comforting to Lori. There was something simply satisfying about building something, with no unexpected complications, not needing to worry if some abomination would appear or not, no having to work late into the night or waking up early, just making something she'd already made before. It was actually the easiest bathing area she'd built to date, as the walls went straight up and she didn't have to worry about hitting her head on a low, curving roof when she was working on something up against the walls.

She was having the carpenters make the short flight of stairs that would lead down into the baths, since wet feet on wet stone was an accident waiting to happen, and the carpenters told her they'd be able to cut a texture into the steps to help people keep their feet. It was also one less thing she'd need to do, which Lori was coming to appreciate. Having the masons and plasterers to take care of making the floors and walls level and plumb respectively was very helpful.

While she wasn't able to double the length of the baths—there wasn't that much room to build—Lori had been able to extend the size of the baths by about a third. She put in spouts for showers near the doors for people who would be quick, while past that was the long basin filled with water for less quick baths and doing laundry in the winter.

As the craftsmen worked on the wall and floors, Lori worked on the basin and drains. The basin was a bit wider and deeper than the basins in the other baths, since she needed it to have a large capacity. Around the basin, she had scooped out gutters to catch water and allow it to drain to the far end of the baths, where she had excavated out a shallow cistern for all the waste water to drain into. Wooden panels would be used to cover up the cistern, allowing for the people to still bathe on that end, as well as letting them recover the bars of soap that would inevitably fall in.

A pipe and a binding of waterwisps would draw in the water and pull it up and along a length of pipe. In the middle of the pipe was a hole leading down into a large bucket—which the carpenters also made—and a binding that would turn the water into vapor. The vapor would continue along the pipe, pulled along by another binding of waterwisps, while the debris that the water had originally carried would drop down into the bucket. The vapor would be condensed back into water and deposited back into the bathing area's basin.

When in use, the bucket would need to be emptied every day—after stoppering the pipe so that no water was entering while it was being done—to keep it from overflowing. The waste debris was relatively dry, so it would be no trouble to handle. If the basin ran low on water, another spigot directly connected to her dungeon's water reservoir could be opened to add more, but that was only if the water ran low. Lori was confident the bath could function for several days before water lost to the air was noticeable enough for the basin to require filling.

Building the baths took a few days, with the last pieces being the wooden stairs leading down, the panels that would go over the cistern, walls to keep anyone outside of the baths from being able to peek inside, and the little shelves for people to place their clothes while they took a bath. The carpenters were delayed because they were also inspecting the Coldhold's wooden parts for damage. Even then, they could do little for the wooden parts that were encased in ice. And while they had Deadspeakers now, the crazy one who named her sweetgrass—Lori checked the rock in her belt pouch—Taeclas by her own admission was not very skilled with working on dead wood in general and carpentry in particular, while the more capable but lazy one—she checked another rock—Lidzuga was a resident of River's Fork.

Fortunately, they already had a procedure for checking the internal components of the Coldhold once the external woodwork was deemed not damaged.