Strawberry's Descent

The combat problem sat unsolved for longer than any other piece of the design, mostly because Arista kept catching herself reaching for the same instinctive answer and immediately, deliberately setting it back down.

A harpoon. Scaled down from the fifty-meter version, obviously, something that could pierce hide at close range instead of across an entire battlefield: the logic was right there, proven, already sitting in her toolkit from the hydra fight.

She got as far as sketching the outline before she stopped, stylus hovering, the small, still-unhealed weight of a title she hadn't asked for surfacing again.

Oppenheimer.

"...No," she said out loud, to the empty workshop, and crossed the sketch out with two firm, deliberate lines. "Not again. I built one weapon because the system left me no choice. I'm not defaulting to 'harpoon' every single time something dangerous swims near me just because it worked once."

She sat back, forcing herself to actually think the problem through properly instead of reaching for the familiar answer.

How does sea life defend itself, she wrote, and let the question sit.

Camouflage, useless for a hull that size, nothing about a submarine could realistically hide from something already close enough to attack. Venom, she had no biological delivery system, no reasonable way to weaponize poison mechanically, and frankly no desire to start down that particular research path.

Electricity, though.

"...Electric eels," she murmured, sitting up straighter, the idea arriving sideways exactly the way her best ones always did. "Not a weapon that kills. A deterrent. Something that hurts enough to make anything smart enough to feel pain reconsider, without needing to actually pierce or destroy anything."

"...I don't have electricity, though. Not real generation, not batteries, none of it." She frowned, chewing on the problem properly now. "I need an actual source before any of this becomes more than a nice idea."

She logged out that evening, laptop open at her actual desk, the specific kind of research rabbit hole she used to fall into constantly before any of this had started.

How to generate electricity without a generator or fuel source, she typed, and started reading.

Waterwheels came up first, obvious, reliable, and completely useless for her actual problem: a submarine hull had no consistent, one-directional current to spin anything, and even if it did, mounting an exposed, moving mechanical wheel on something meant to survive contact with a sea serpent sounded like an excellent way to lose the wheel on the first real encounter.

Wind turbines, similarly obvious, similarly useless. No wind existed at ocean depth, and even near the surface, a submarine wasn't exactly positioned to catch a steady breeze.

She kept scrolling, kept reading, chasing link after link deeper into increasingly obscure corners of physics she'd never had reason to think about before, until she found it: a short, dense article on piezoelectricity, certain crystals generating a genuine electrical charge under mechanical stress. Quartz, specifically, compressed hard enough and fast enough, producing a modest but entirely real discharge, no moving fluid, no wind, no fuel required at all, just pressure, applied correctly.

Modest wasn't the goal, though. Modest, scaled up, repeated, and properly channeled, might be.

She logged back in less than an hour later, the shape of a working mechanism already fully assembled in her head, faster to sketch now than it had been to research.

"...Okay," she said out loud, to nobody in particular, grabbing fresh paper. "Time to tell the team."

"...Overdrive valves," she said, sketching quickly now, the whole mechanism unfolding in her head faster than her hand could keep pace. "Normal operation, steam drives the propeller, same as always. But if something attacks, big lever, single motion, redirect the steam entirely. Instead of turning the screw, it slams into a bank of heavy hydraulic pistons."

She drew the next stage, a reinforced chamber, packed dense with steel-cased quartz crystal clusters.

"The pistons don't need to be elegant. They just need to hit hard, and fast, over and over, compressing the crystals under enormous, repeated mechanical stress. The harder the steam pressure, the more compression, the more voltage each strike squeezes out." She grinned, watching the design solidify. "It's not one big spark. It's a constant, driven stream of them, for as long as the crew keeps that lever pulled and the boiler keeps feeding pressure into the pistons."

She moved to the final piece, the hull's exterior, currently just plain reinforced steel in her earlier sketches, now redrawn wrapped in something new.

"A net. Woven copper wire, uninsulated, covering the entire outer hull, held away from the actual steel body by ceramic or glass standoffs, so the charge never actually reaches the crew inside. Water conducts beautifully, so I don't need to fire anything through open air like a real Tesla coil would. I just need the charge sitting right there, in the water, the instant something makes contact."

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Claire, arriving partway through and immediately drawn in by the sketch, leaned over the design with growing, professional fascination. "...Faraday cage principle. The current takes the path of least resistance, which means it stays concentrated on the outer net instead of penetrating inward toward the hull itself."

"Exactly. The crew stays completely insulated, safe on the inside, while the entire outside of the vessel becomes—" Arista tapped the final detail, a faint, glowing blue haze she'd sketched rippling around the hull's exterior "—a charged field. Anything that touches it, bites it, wraps around it, gets hit immediately, without me needing to aim anything or pierce anything at all."

Claire studied the completed system for a long, considering moment. "...This isn't a weapon. Not really. It's a boundary. Something that punishes contact instead of seeking out a target."

"That's exactly what I wanted," Arista said, quiet, something settling in her chest at hearing it phrased that way. "I don't want to build another gun. I want to build something that says 'don't touch this' clearly enough that most things learn the lesson and swim off, and if they don't—" she shrugged "—it still doesn't kill them. It just makes contact a genuinely bad idea."

Nettle, examining the sketch over Claire's shoulder, nodded slowly, some of her earlier wariness easing considerably. "...I like this a lot better than the chew toy plan."

"Low bar," Bram said, from his usual spot of amused observation, "but yes. Agreed. Electric eel submarine over indestructible bait submarine, every time."

Arista sat back, surveying the completed mechanism: overdrive valves, crystal chamber, charged copper net, the whole system converting stored steam pressure into a defensive boundary instead of an offensive strike.

"...Okay," she said, satisfied for the first time since the whole combat conversation began. "That's the last major system. Ballast, propulsion, the mechanical stylus for depth-reading, and now this." She glanced around at the assembled crew, old restless energy fully, properly returned. "Let's go build something that keeps us alive down there without me ever having to point a weapon at anything again."

The lightcrystals were the obvious first attempt, familiar, plentiful, and already proven to do something interesting under stimulation, given they'd been lighting the Republic's tunnels for generations without any maintenance whatsoever.

"They just glow, though," Arista muttered, mounting a small sample into her improvised test rig, a scaled-down version of the piston chamber, hand-cranked instead of steam-driven, purely for proof of concept. "That's light, not necessarily voltage. Different property entirely. But it's worth ruling out properly instead of just assuming."

She struck the crystal with the test piston, watching her crude gauge for any spike in charge.

[Test Result: No Measurable Voltage][Material Response: Increased Luminosity Only]

"...Yeah. Confirmed. Light, not charge." She set the crystal aside, unsurprised but still faintly disappointed. "Makes sense, honestly. The mechanism that makes them glow is probably completely unrelated to piezoelectric compression. Different property, different use case."

Gorthruk, summoned once again into service as her de facto mineralogy consultant, studied the failed sample with professional interest rather than disappointment. "The lightcrystals respond to mana exposure, near as our own scholars have ever determined. Ambient charge, ambient light, not mechanical stress. You are testing the wrong stimulus entirely."

"Right. I need something that reacts to pressure specifically, not magic exposure." Arista turned to him, hopeful. "Do you have anything like that? Something the Republic's mined that nobody's ever found a practical use for, purely because generating a spark under mechanical stress isn't something anyone's ever needed before?"

Gorthruk considered this for a long moment, stroking his beard in the specific way that meant he was genuinely searching his own extensive knowledge rather than simply humoring her.

"...There are veins deeper in the mountain few bother excavating," he said finally. "Not because they're difficult to reach, but because nothing about them has ever seemed useful. Clear, faceted stone, mostly. Miners call it 'singing rock,' informally, strike two pieces together in the dark and you'll sometimes see a faint flash, hear a faint crack. Nobody's ever found a purpose for the property. It was simply noted, catalogued, and left alone."

Arista straightened immediately. "...That's it. That's exactly the property I need. Show me."

They descended into one of the Republic's older, less-traveled shafts, Gorthruk leading with the easy familiarity of a man who'd walked these tunnels for decades, until they reached a vein of pale, clear crystal embedded deep in the rock, unremarkable to look at, nothing like the warm, steady glow of the lightcrystals she'd grown so used to.

She extracted a sample carefully, mounted it into her test rig back at the surface, and struck it with the piston.

[Test Result: Voltage Spike Detected][Material Response: Piezoelectric Discharge Confirmed]

The small gauge needle jumped, sharp and immediate, exactly the reaction she'd been chasing.

"...There it is." Arista grinned, delighted, striking the crystal again to confirm, watching the needle jump reliably each time. "Consistent, repeatable, scales with impact force, the harder I hit it, the bigger the spike. This is exactly what the crystal chamber needs."

Gorthruk studied the readings over her shoulder, genuinely intrigued despite having no real stake in the submarine project himself. "...For years the Republic's mined past this vein without anyone finding a use for it."

"That's kind of the story of everything I've ever built," Arista said, already sketching the full-scale chamber requirements, cross-referencing crystal quantity against the piston force she'd need for meaningful voltage. "Somebody else's overlooked material, plus a completely different problem nobody thought to connect it to."

"I will inform the council that the vein has finally found a purpose," Gorthruk said, dry. "They will likely ask what that purpose is."

"An electric eel submarine," Arista said cheerfully, already calculating how many kilograms of "singing rock" the crystal chamber would actually require.

Gorthruk was quiet for a moment, processing that with the same weary, long-suffering patience he'd developed over two years of exactly this kind of conversation.

"...I will tell them it is for research purposes," he said finally. "The full explanation can wait until you've actually tested it against something alive."

"Fair," Arista agreed, already heading back toward the surface, notebook clutched tight, one more piece of the submarine's design finally, properly solved.

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