Strawberry's Descent

Petrov showed up to the next planning session with roughly twenty new faces trailing behind him, a mix of demon and human character models, all moving with the slightly stiff, unfamiliar gait of players still adjusting to controls they'd only just learned.

"...Who are all these people?" Arista asked, genuinely startled by the sudden crowd.

"Coworkers," Petrov said, entirely matter-of-fact. "Real-life ones. I sent out a message to my whole department once the global quest hit: figured if I was going to be spending every evening on this anyway, might as well bring people who actually know what they're doing."

One of the new arrivals, a stocky demon avatar who moved with considerably more confidence than the rest, raised a hand. "Structural engineer. Fifteen years, mostly bridges and tunnels. Petrov mentioned you needed help dividing this into manageable sections."

"...Grids," Petrov clarified, already pulling up a rough overlay of the continental map, dividing the remaining network into clearly bounded segments. "Instead of trying to coordinate seven million people as one undifferentiated mass, we split the entire remaining build into discrete zones, each diagonal broken into quarters, the outer ring broken into eighths, Tabula Rasa's build-out split by district. Assign a zone lead to each, coordinate through them instead of trying to manage the whole thing centrally."

Arista watched the map fill in with color-coded sections, the sheer, overwhelming scale of the remaining project suddenly rendered into something that actually looked manageable, piece by piece, the same way six thousand demons had once become twelve-person crews instead of one impossible mass.

"This is so much better than what I would've done," she admitted. "I'd have just kept yelling instructions across an increasingly large crowd until something caught fire."

"That's rather why I brought backup," Petrov said, dry. "Speaking of which—" he gestured toward the rest of his group, still introducing themselves in scattered clusters across the room "—we're not the only real-world professionals who noticed this project. Word's spread past my own office."

A woman near the back raised her hand. "Plumber. Actual, licensed, real-world plumber. I saw the mana pipeline specs someone posted on a fan wiki and nearly had an aneurysm at some of the joint tolerances you were running before the mithril lining update."

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"...Those tolerances worked fine," Arista said, faintly defensive.

"They worked despite themselves, not because of good design. I fixed forty of them in the test section alone this morning. You're welcome."

Another hand went up, this one belonging to a broad-shouldered dwarf. "Miner. Actual coal and hard-rock mining, twenty-two years. I've been watching your boring rig footage since the original tunnel went viral. There's a ventilation calculation error in your current spec, nothing dangerous yet, but it'll compound badly once you're running full crews at the scale this quest needs."

"...Petrov already caught the ventilation thing."

"He caught that it was a problem. I can tell you exactly how many additional shafts you need per kilometer, and where, because I've done this math for real mines that didn't have the luxury of infinite lava heat solving half the problem for me."

Arista sat back, taking in the sheer, accumulating weight of actual professional expertise now filling her workshop, structural engineers, plumbers, miners, and from the sound of the ongoing introductions, at least one electrician who'd apparently gotten very excited about the glowing mana-conductive pipeline and wanted to discuss "proper conduit separation standards," whatever those were.

"...This is insane," she said, mostly to herself, grinning despite the sheer scale of it. "Six months ago I was hand-forging every single rail spike myself because I didn't trust anyone else to get the tolerance right. Now I've got actual licensed professionals fixing my mistakes before I even know I've made them."

"That's what seven million players and a functioning global quest gets you," Petrov said, already pinning zone assignments to the map. "Real expertise, arriving faster than you could've recruited it yourself, because the game accidentally became interesting enough that people wanted to bring their actual jobs into it for fun."

The plumber leaned over the pipeline schematics, already red-inking corrections with the brisk efficiency of someone reviewing a code violation. "Also, for the record, whoever designed the original test loop deserves credit. The core concept's genuinely sound. It's just been executed by someone who learned everything from forum posts instead of a trade certification."

"That would be me," Arista said. "Guilty."

"Good instincts, rough execution. We'll fix it together." The plumber didn't even look up. "This is going to be fun, actually. I don't get to build anything this ambitious in real life. Zoning laws."

Arista looked around the room one more time, professionals from a dozen real-world trades, seven million players mobilizing across an entire continent, a project that had started with a single, half-joking question about pickaxes now genuinely, properly becoming something built by people who actually knew what they were doing.

"...Okay," she said, grinning, already reaching for her notebook. "Let's build this properly, then."

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