She logged off earlier than usual that night, the ventilation crisis freshly resolved, and settled onto her bed with her tablet propped against her knees, the same posture, the same restless energy, that had once sent her down a rabbit hole of Damascus steel tutorials before she'd even built her first pickaxe.
Steam locomotive design, she typed, and immediately regretted how broad it was when the search returned several hundred thousand results.
She narrowed it down, page by page, the way she always did: steam locomotive boiler pressure calculations, then steam locomotive wheel arrangement types, then, an hour later, considerably more specific, why do old steam trains have so many different wheel configurations.
The answer, once she actually found a decent explainer, unfolded into something she hadn't fully appreciated before, leading wheels for stability going into curves, driving wheels sized and counted based on how much torque versus top speed a given locomotive needed, trailing wheels supporting the firebox at the rear. An entire language of notation, she learned, existed just to describe it. 4-6-2, 2-8-0, numbers she'd seen in passing on old photographs without ever understanding what they meant.
"...Huh." She sat up straighter, already reaching for her notebook despite technically being off the clock. "So it's not just 'bigger wheels good.' It's about matching the wheel arrangement to the actual job, freight hauling wants more driving wheels for torque, passenger service wants fewer, bigger wheels for speed." She sketched a rough comparison in the margin. "My current design's basically undifferentiated. One configuration, trying to do both jobs at once."
She kept reading. Boiler pressure limits, and why real-world locomotives eventually moved past simple fireboxes into more efficient tube boilers, drawing heat through dozens of narrow channels instead of one open chamber, to extract more usable energy from the same fuel. She thought immediately of her own single, unsophisticated water chamber, sitting directly over either a firebox or, in Hell's case, ambient lava heat, and felt the specific, familiar itch of oh, I could be doing this so much better.
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"Tube boiler," she muttered, sketching furiously now, mentally overlaying the redesign onto her existing lava-adjacent heat exchanger. "More surface area contact between the heat source and the water, without needing a bigger chamber. Same footprint, more actual steam output." She flipped back through her own notes from the prototype build, comparing efficiency figures she'd honestly never questioned too hard once the little kettle-engine had proven the basic principle worked.
Somewhere past midnight, she found herself deep in a forum thread from actual railway heritage enthusiasts, arguing passionately about compound versus simple expansion engines, using the same steam twice, at two different pressure stages, instead of venting it after a single push of the piston. She read it twice, then a third time, working through the logic slowly, the way she always did with something that felt like it might genuinely change her whole approach rather than just refine an edge case.
"...Wait." She sat bolt upright. "If I let the steam expand twice, high-pressure cylinder first, then vent that partially-spent steam into a second, larger low-pressure cylinder instead of just releasing it, I'm getting extra work out of the same fuel, for basically the cost of one more cylinder and some additional piping." She stared at her own scrawled diagram, feeling the specific vertigo of realizing her entire fuel-efficiency math for the network had just changed for the better, unprompted, at nearly one in the morning. "That's not a small improvement. That's the difference between needing constant lava proximity everywhere on the line and being able to run sections that are further from a heat source than I thought I could manage."
She kept the tab open, bookmarked six others, and finally set the tablet down somewhere past two, notebook now considerably heavier with cross-referenced real-world engineering than it had been that afternoon.
"...Okay," she murmured to the dark room, echoing the exact words she'd used the very first night she researched blacksmithing, months and an entire continental infrastructure project ago. "I'm going to break so many things."
She was smiling when she said it. She always was.
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