Demesne

Lori actually spent some time at her table, working on making bearings of an even size. She'd long since made a bearing mold using her beads as a template, carefully filling in and smoothing out the denomination markings until she had smooth spheres. A pity she hadn't unlocked the abilities of a Horotract yet. Having an exact sense of physical dimensions would have been so useful…

Also the ability to alter the flow of time, the expansion of space, and the direction of down, but really, after all the building she'd been doing, she found she wanted that sense of exact physical dimension more than those other, admittedly useful, things. Never having to stop and measure anything again! Not needing to kneel down and mess around with water to find out whether a floor was level or a wall was straight! Such power!

She'd be assured of making much more perfectly round bearings then!

As Rian had said, it would be easy to just bind some airwisps to propel air, just like she had done for the air circulation systems in her demesne. The problem was imbuing it. Optimally, she wanted to only have to return to River's Fork once a month until winter came, to deliver the promised ice, but she didn't think she could imbue a binding to last that long. For one thing, she would need to imbue it constantly for an unfeasibly long time. Days, literally. That would be too inefficient in the long run.

While mechanically impelling air to move had its own inefficiencies, like friction heat, wear and stress on the material, she was reasonably certain that it would last long enough for her to look it over for maintenance when she came with the ice, especially if she made it from repairable materials. She'd have to experiment whether stone or bone would be better. At worst, she might have to ask to melt down the ruined air pump for building material.

One thing was certain though. Whatever she built would need wooden components, such as fan blades and a shaft. And unfortunately, she had never been good at woodworking. She could intellectually understand the purposes of hammers, saws and chisels, but her experience with shaping wood was acting as a water cutter to cut several planks into shape at once. And even then, someone else physically moved the wood into her stream for the actual cutting.

She made several small stone models on her table, trying to make a design that pleased her sense of aesthetics, and then other designs for if there were area restrictions. A simple waterwheel connected to a fan seemed simplest, but it would probably needs some kind of gear system to rotate the fan quickly enough for the sort of air flow that would be needed, meaning it would need to be either a large or long wheel so that it would have sufficient torque…

She fell asleep at her table, and in the morning it was slightly disconcerting to have to wonder whether that had been more or less uncomfortable than actually sleeping on her bed.

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"Congratulations," Rian said with dry amusement as she sat down for breakfast, this time with her board. "People are now actively talking about volunteering to go mining. The threat of your bringing back fees and taxes worked. Though now it's probably going to be harder to institute some sort of money system when we finally get too big to ensure no one is getting taken advantage of. But that's a 'Some Other Day' problem."

Lori nodded as she put the stones in the bowls. "Do you think we'll have enough volunteers to properly mine?"

"The minimum number of people needed to mine is one," Rian said. "More just makes it easier, safer and quicker. But Riz put me in touch of some of the men who'd worked the mine when they first opened it, and they seemed willing. We might actually get more miners after the deadline. I'm told the houses will be finally finished within a week, save for proper waterproofing, but everyone's roofs have that problem. The trees with the right kind of sap—"

"Resin," Lori corrected.

Rian blinked. "Isn't that the same thing?"

"All resins are a sap, but not all saps are a resin," Lori said, remembering getting the same explanation once. "Only certain tall, straight trees produce resin that can be used for woodworking. Give orders that these trees are not to be cut down and see if we can start cultivating them. At the very least, start planting whatever they use as seed in cleared areas we're not using."

"Ah, more work to do when the current work is done," Rian nodded. "Probably still preferable to paying taxes, though not as preferable as getting paid and not paying taxes."

"Also, I need a carpenter," Lori said.

"We have several," Rian said. "What do you need them to build?"

"A fan for moving air," Lori said. "Possibly a waterwheel. And gears."

"I'll ask if anyone can do it," Rian said. "It would help if you had a design they can refer to."

Lori nodded. Yes, no carpenter liked having to envision what you wanted in their head. They wanted plans, at least a sketch and rudimentary directions. "I should have something tomorrow evening or the day after, when I've inspected what's left of River's Fork's air circulation equipment. In the meantime, I'll build something temporary for them."

A binding of airwisps for moving air might not last long, but it would at least last for long enough.

Lori reached into a bowl in her board and made her first move as Umu sat down next to Rian with a yawn.

"Good morning, Lord Rian," she greeted. "I'll have your laundry ready after breakfast."

"You don't have to," Rian said, looking pained for some reason.

"Nonsense, Lord Rian," she said. "I've already done it. It would be a waste to leave the work unfinished." She glanced at the board in the middle of the table. "Isn't it your move?"

Lori made her impatience clear as Rian sighed and reached into a bowl to take his turn.

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After breakfast and three close games—ARGH!—Rian promised to get back to her with details for the retting tank and if anyone could build what she wanted, while Lori went to consider her next step.

There was, admittedly, a lot she could do. Build the new bath house, for instance. Get started on the isolated debauchery area that Rian had been so delicately suggesting. Dig up a new water reservoir. Check up on her experiment. Wait for someone to die so she could lay claim to their bedroll and FINALLY have a comfortable place to sleep.

Most of those would take time, however, and would be interrupted by tomorrow—and she'd have to prepare her experiment equipment to bring with her tomorrow, wouldn't she? Her syringe, at least, and a container of some kind. Just stone, maybe since she wasn't willing to leave one of her glassware behind. It might be considered an added variable, but at the moment she didn't care. Besides, if it worked, then she'd just make sure anything she did in the future included stone she'd shaped.

She went back to digging more sleeping niches on the second level. It was a different experience with the ropers and weavers there. While their equipment was there—she recognized the looms from a play she'd seen, and the tool whose exact name she didn't know from one time she'd applied for work at a ropewalk—only some of the weavers seemed to be actively using them, Mikon among them. Many seemed to be using long sticks and turning bundles of twisted fibers into cord. Strangely, both the weavers and the ropers—she could tell the ropers because they were all male, and three were children—seemed to be using similar tools for the process, with minor differences attributable to aesthetics.

The digging occupied her until lunch, giving her a nice pile of stone to work with. Out of boredom, she'd tested if they could pass lightningwisps, but sadly there didn't seem to be any metal ores in her Dungeon. Not where she'd been digging, anyway.

At lunch, Rian had finally given her the details needed for a retting tank. It turned out it didn't need to be very deep, but it did need to be stagnant and able to submerge a lot of ropeweed stalks so they could decay and release the fibers that were used from making thread.

"Apparently the water left after that happens is good for plants," Rian said. "Just don't drink it or get it on your wounds."

"Noted," Lori said blandly, considering the layout of the settlement currently. From the sound of it, it would probably be a good idea to keep the resulting water away from their drinking water in case of seepage.

There was just enough space between the sawpit and the fields to put in the requested retting tank so the used water could be directed towards the fields. Speaking of which, she supposed the fields were looking good. Not all the crops were the same height, since some had been planted as seeds, others had been uprooted from River's Fork and transplanted, and a few had been wild vegetables replanted, but there was clear organization, if nothing else.

There also didn't seem to be anyone working there beyond a few who were watering the plants using clay pots filled with water. Did crops really need so little upkeep, or was everyone just lazy?

Sighing, she inspected the space. Bedrock wasn't too deep down, so she could anchor the retting tank, and it shouldn't be too hard to make some sort of pluggable drain so the water could be released down to the fields. She'd have to build some kind of storage cistern though. Maybe just extend the current irrigation water cistern? Or would mixing the retting water and relatively clean water be bad? She'd have to get Rian to ask…

The specifications she got wasn't much of a tank, in her opinion, more like a shallow wading pool, but apparently it was what was needed since their demesne had no naturally stagnant bodies of water. Moving the dirt out of the way—using compacted dirt for this was probably not structurally sound in the long run—to reveal the bedrock, Lori began transferring and shaping excavated rocks to make the pool. It wasn't very deep—only about up to her knees—but it was fairly sizable so it could hold a lot of water and therefore ropeweed.

Lori wasn't sure she understood the processes involved, but then again, she'd never worked in this industry. The retting pool was finished well before dinner, a seamless, stone basin that would apparently be manually filled with water. The runoff water for irrigation was close enough that people could make their own arrangements for filling the tank. Lori had at least made sure the stone surfaced had a rough pattern to help with traction and footing, so that there'd be no accidents from people slipping on smooth, wet stone.

After that, she had a restful afternoon sitting near the curing sheds, drying the cut timbers. Just her, sitting there maintaining and adjusting her binding so that the wood would cure evenly, doing familiar work.

Then, as the sun dipped low and Lori estimated its angle to be the same as when she and Rian had left the samples outside of her demesne, she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on finding her link to her blood outside of her demesne. It was a struggle for a moment, trying to reach for wisps of her body but outside herself and her demesne, trying to remember how to make the connection again, but…

There! Two mostly contiguous groups of mostly waterwisps. While one was much more… tenuous?... than the other, both were in her awareness despite the overall distance from herself—and now she realized perhaps that didn't matter, because there were both very close to her demesne's edge, after all. Still, it was a good sign. While the one she'd been experimenting with for longer was easier to perceive, likely a result of greater affinity from use and greater imbuement, the sample that had simply been imbued was still there as well.

Cautiously, Lori reached for the latter sample, and met the same narrow sensation that she had felt at first as she tried to re-establish her claim and imbue it. Beyond that, however, there was no difficulty repeating her first test of the day before, and soon she was actively imbuing the waterwisps, their presence seeming to grow stronger in her awareness.

She opened her mouth to announce the results—and then snapped her teeth shut in frustration as she realized Rian wasn't around to take notes. Sighing, she reached down, compacted some of the dirt underneath her into a compressed block, and began writing the results on that. She'd add it to the rest of the notes later.

It wasn't over yet. Each successful test led into another thing she had to test. But at least this was a good progression, and what she'd discovered already boded well for the third incarnation of the water jet and the eventual Covehold mission.

Pushing herself to her feet, passing the men who were putting away their tools and equipment—some bowed to her, and she nodded back in acknowledgement—Lori headed for dinner, already thinking of making stone bowls and stone tubes she could bind airwisps to…