"We're going to need Claire again," Petrov said, already thinking several steps ahead in the way he always did once a project properly took shape. "And Colm. If you're serious about actually finding whatever's down there instead of just theorizing about it."
"Claire, obviously: pressure systems are her whole specialty, and a submarine's going to have considerably more of that to worry about than a zeppelin ever did." Arista was already nodding, mentally reassembling the crew roster. "Colm too. Someone needs to chart depth the same way he charted currents, nobody's ever mapped what's actually down there, so the expedition doubles as the survey again."
"Same pattern as last time," Petrov observed. "Explore first, document as you go, because no existing data exists to draw from."
"Story of my entire career at this point." Arista grinned, already halfway out the door with her notebook. "I'll message them both tonight. For now, I've got an actual engineering problem to sit with."
She didn't sleep. Tablet propped against her knees exactly as always, the familiar restless energy of a genuinely difficult new problem keeping her wide awake long past any reasonable hour.
How do submarines actually work, she typed first, and the answer that came back made her sit up straighter almost immediately.
Ballast tanks. Controlled flooding and displacement, adjusting buoyancy by choosing how much water to let in or force back out. That part, at least, mapped cleanly onto principles she already understood, pressure, volume, controlled fluid movement, not so different in spirit from the boiler systems she'd built a dozen times over.
The propulsion was where it all fell apart.
Real-world submarines, she learned, deep into her third hour of research, ran on diesel engines at the surface and battery-electric motors submerged, diesel for the long-distance cruising, electric because you couldn't burn fuel in an enclosed space without air to feed the combustion, and because batteries, silent and self-contained, let a submarine actually stay hidden and submerged for meaningful stretches of time.
She had neither.
No oil reserves anywhere in this world, as far as she'd ever encountered, nothing resembling the fossil fuels that powered half of real-world engineering. No electricity, either, not in the sense of batteries or generators or anything beyond mana-conductive curiosities like Fen's glowing pipeline compound.
Steam. That was it. That was the entire toolkit she actually had access to.
"...Okay," she murmured, chewing the end of her stylus, staring at the specific, glaring problem now sitting directly in front of her. "Steam needs fire. Fire needs oxygen. Oxygen doesn't exist in an enclosed hull sealed against a full ocean's worth of water pressure, not for very long, not without some way to keep replenishing it."
She sat with that for a long moment, running through everything she already knew. Buzzy's compound cylinders, the metro's lava-fed boilers, the zeppelin's charcoal-briquette efficiency gains, none of it designed for an environment that couldn't vent exhaust, couldn't draw in fresh air, couldn't do any of the ordinary things a steam engine took for granted.
"...Closed-cycle," she murmured, the term surfacing from some corner of her research she'd almost skipped past. She dug back into it properly, and there it was, real-world naval history, submarines and torpedoes that had, in fact, once solved almost this exact problem. Combustion systems that carried their own oxidizer instead of drawing air from outside, burning fuel in a sealed environment by supplying the oxygen chemically rather than atmospherically.
"...I don't have oil to combust in the first place," she said slowly, working the logic through out loud, "but I don't actually need combustion at all if the goal's just heat. I need a heat source that doesn't require burning anything, doesn't need oxygen at all."
She sat bolt upright, notebook nearly sliding off her lap.
"...Chemical reaction heat. Not fire. A reaction that generates its own heat without consuming atmospheric oxygen: closer to how orichalcum reacted to mana than to how a firebox reacted to burning wood." She was sketching furiously now, the shape of an entirely different kind of boiler taking form. "Fen's compound already proved that certain reactions release usable energy without traditional combustion. If I can find or formulate something that generates sustained heat through a sealed chemical process instead of open flame, I don't need air intake at all. The boiler runs sealed, indefinitely, however long the reactive material lasts."
She stared at the sketch for a long moment, exhaustion and excitement fighting for control of her expression in equal measure.
"...Okay. New research target. Not propulsion first this time. Fuel first." She glanced at the clock, wincing at how late it had gotten, and reached for her tablet one more time anyway.
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Chemical reactions that produce heat without combustion, she typed, and settled back in for what was clearly going to be a very long night.
"...I'm going to need Fen for this one too," she murmured, already adding another name to the crew list. "This isn't a blacksmithing problem anymore. This is an alchemy problem wearing an engineering costume."
The next day Arista gathered the whole team around her workshop table, notebook open to the rough submarine sketch, and launched straight into her pitch with the same restless energy she always carried into a new project.
"Okay. So. As we know, that ocean's been sealed off for six hundred and four years—"
"It's been a few months," Bram said, entirely deadpan. "The devs just placed NPCs with dialogue trees that say six hundred and four years. There's no actual six-hundred-year-old water anywhere. It's a number in a script."
"Sst, Bram." Arista didn't even look up from her notebook. "Immersion."
"I'm just saying—"
"Immersion, Bram."
Bram raised both hands in surrender, settling back with the specific, put-upon patience of a man who had learned, long ago, that this particular battle was never worth fighting.
"As I was saying," Arista continued, unbothered, "six hundred years sealed off means an entire ocean's worth of depth nobody's ever explored. We saw one sea serpent near the surface. I want to know what's further down, and I've got a rough plan for a steam-driven submarine to go find out."
She'd expected excitement. What she got instead was Nettle, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
"...And if we run into another sea serpent," Nettle said, "except this time we're not on a ship with a full combat crew and open water to maneuver in. We're in a sealed metal tube, underwater, with considerably fewer escape options."
"Right, so, actually, I already thought about this." Arista brightened, flipping to the relevant sketch page. "What if the whole hull's covered in cloud material? Same stuff as the shield, the wingsuit, all of it. If something attacks, it doesn't puncture, it just bounces harmlessly off, over and over, and eventually the thing just gets bored and swims away. Basically we become the world's largest, most indestructible chew toy."
Silence.
"...A chew toy," Nettle repeated slowly.
"A very safe chew toy."
"You want to build a submarine, put five people inside it, and then intentionally design it to be gnawed on by something the size of a small building, on the theory that it will eventually lose interest."
"...When you say it like that—"
"There is no good way to say that, Strawberry." Nettle rubbed her temples. "I watched that serpent nearly take out an entire hull. It did not look bored at any point. It looked hungry and extremely persistent."
Claire, who had been quietly examining the hull cross-section this whole time, chimed in without looking up. "Also, practical question, unrelated to the chew toy plan, which I also don't love, how are you planning to actually see anything down there? No sunlight penetrates past a certain depth. Doesn't matter how good the hull is if the crew's just staring into pitch black the entire time."
Arista opened her mouth, ready with an answer, and found she genuinely didn't have one.
"...Huh." She sat back, the confident momentum of her pitch deflating rapidly under the combined weight of two entirely reasonable objections. "Okay. That's, that's a real gap. I solved 'how do we survive an attack' with a bad idea, apparently, and I hadn't even gotten to 'how do we see anything' yet."
"Bioluminescence, maybe?" Colm offered, tentative. "If Fen's compound reacts to mana with light the way the pipeline did—"
"That's actually promising, but it's external light, not necessarily vision, those are different problems," Arista said, already scribbling notes despite the deflating mood. "Okay. I clearly need more research before this plan's actually ready to build. Combat viability, visibility, probably a dozen things I haven't even thought to worry about yet."
Nettle softened slightly, watching her processing the pushback without the usual reflexive defensiveness. "...I'm not saying don't build it. I'm saying don't build it fast this time. You've got a track record of figuring these things out properly when you actually sit with the problem instead of rushing the first version."
"Yeah." Arista managed a small, rueful grin. "Yeah, fair. No chew toy submarine. Back to the research phase."
Bram, still lounging with his arms crossed, offered one final, unhelpful observation. "For the record, in a world that's only actually existed for a few months, I don't think 'the ocean's ancient and mysterious' really—"
"Immersion, Bram."
The rest of the team drifted off gradually after that, Colm already sketching bioluminescence notes on his way out, Claire and Bram trading some ongoing argument about hull tolerances that showed no sign of resolving anytime soon. Nettle lingered behind, apparently in no particular hurry, watching Arista tidy her scattered notes with the specific, unbothered patience of someone who had something on her mind and no intention of rushing toward it.
"...I was thinking," she said eventually, once the workshop had properly emptied out.
Arista glanced over, only half paying attention, still sorting sketches into some semblance of order. "What?"
"You built Thoth."
"...Yes?"
"You named him."
"Also yes." Arista set the notebook down properly now, giving Nettle her full attention, sensing exactly where this was headed and not entirely trusting it. "Where is this going, Nettle."
Nettle's smile was already starting to form, slow and entirely too pleased with itself. "He calls you Creator."
Arista went very still. "...Nettle."
"You're basically his mum."
"No."
"You gave him a body."
"Stop."
"Named him."
"Nettle."
"Taught him how to have fun."
"I am not his mother," Arista said, with the flat, hopeless conviction of someone who already knew this particular argument was already lost.
Nettle considered that for exactly as long as it took to look thoroughly unconvinced. "Alright. Then what exactly would you call the person who built him, named him, gave him a purpose, taught him how to live, and now spends an unreasonable amount of time worrying about whether he's actually happy?"
Arista stared at her, visibly searching for a rebuttal that simply refused to arrive.
"...Shut up."
Nettle grinned, entirely delighted with herself. "Mum it is."
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