Strawberry's Descent

Gorthruk found her at the workshop, the same old dwarven smith who'd spent a week teaching her pattern-welding, still smelling faintly of forge-smoke even out here in the open air. He approached with the deliberate, businesslike gait of someone who'd rehearsed what he was about to say at least twice on the walk over.

"Strawberry." He inclined his head, formal in a way he hadn't bothered being back at his own forge. "The machine you used to dig to the surface. The great boring rig, blades and treads both. Are you willing to sell it to us for one thousand gold coins?"

Arista blinked, caught genuinely off guard for once. "...The whole rig? The one that's currently sitting half-disassembled in a tunnel because nobody's touched it since the breakthrough?"

"That one. The Republic has an interest. Openly, I'll admit, there are mountains south of the capital nobody's ever managed to fully excavate. Your machine could open veins we've been chipping at with hand tools for generations."

She turned the offer over for a moment, chewing the inside of her cheek, doing the kind of rapid mental math she usually reserved for gear ratios rather than actual currency. A thousand gold was a genuinely substantial sum: more than she'd made off caltrops, commissions, and every side hustle combined since the tutorial.

"...I want five hundred gold," she said finally.

Gorthruk's eyebrows shot up. "Five hundred. Half of what I offered."

"Five hundred," Arista confirmed, already grinning in the specific way that had, by now, made several NPCs and at least one Celestial envoy deeply suspicious of her math. "And five percent of any ore mined using the machine. Ongoing. For as long as it's in operation."

Gorthruk went quiet, studying her with the sharp, assessing look of a smith who'd spent decades pricing metal and knew exactly when someone was offering him a worse deal on the surface that was actually a much better deal underneath.

"...You're not taking less money," he said slowly. "You're trading a lump sum for a permanent cut of everything that machine ever produces."

"Yep."

"That machine's going to run for years. Decades, maybe, if you built it half as sturdy as everything else you've made." He rubbed his beard, doing his own math now, visibly recalculating the actual cost of what he'd just walked in offering. "Five percent, forever, could very easily outstrip a thousand gold within the first year alone, depending on the vein."

"That's the idea."

"You understand I could simply say no, and offer the flat thousand instead, and you'd have no leverage to insist otherwise."

Arista shrugged, entirely unbothered. "You could. But you came to me specifically because it's my machine, built with my design, and near as I can tell nobody else in this entire game has managed to reverse-engineer freeform crafting the way I have. You want the rig. I'm the only person who can build you a second one if this deal falls through and you decide to try your luck elsewhere." She spread her hands. "Royalties just mean I've got a reason to keep improving it instead of walking away the moment the check clears."

Gorthruk stared at her for a long, considering moment, then let out a short, surprised laugh, the same begrudging kind he'd given her over the adamantium, back at his forge.

"You learned something from our little collaboration, didn't you."

"Toughness over hardness," Arista said, grinning. "Also applies to negotiating, apparently. Don't take the strongest offer up front. Take the one that bends in your favor over time."

He extended a hand, thick and calloused, the same hand that had folded adamantium and mithril together with hers just weeks earlier.

"Five hundred gold. Five percent, ongoing, reviewed annually. I'll draft the contract myself, wouldn't trust anyone else to word it properly, knowing you."

Arista shook on it immediately. "Pleasure doing business, Gorthruk."

"The pleasure," he said dryly, "remains to be seen. I have a feeling I'm going to be paying you for the rest of this game's natural life."

"Probably," Arista agreed cheerfully. "But hey, at least you'll be getting a lot of ore out of it."

Gorthruk left with the contract details already forming in his head, muttering something about needing to loop in the Republic's mining council before nightfall. Arista watched him go, and the moment he was out of earshot, let out a small, delighted noise that had nothing at all to do with money.

"Materials," she said, mostly to herself, practically vibrating. "I don't get gold from that deal. I get ore. A steady, ongoing, guaranteed percentage of whatever they pull out of those mountains, forever, without me having to lift a single pickaxe myself."

Nettle, who'd wandered over just in time to catch the tail end of the negotiation, tilted her head. "...You do realize five percent of ore sales converts to gold eventually, right? That's still just money, functionally."

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"It's not functionally the same at all." Arista spun to face her, eyes bright with the particular excitement usually reserved for a new build idea. "Gold I have to spend on buying materials from someone else, at whatever price they feel like charging that week. Ore is just, there. Raw. Mine. No middleman, no haggling, no waiting on a merchant's restock timer. Every batch that comes out of those mountains, some percentage of it lands directly in my inventory, ready to go straight into whatever I'm building next."

"...You turned a business deal into a subscription service for your own hobby."

"I turned a business deal into a supply chain," Arista corrected, already pulling out her notebook, flipping to a fresh page with the reverent care of someone starting something important. "Do you understand what this means? I don't have to stop every project halfway through to go mine more iron. I don't have to ration adamantium like it's precious. Whatever the Republic pulls out of those mountains, some of it is just coming to me, automatically, forever, while I'm off doing literally anything else."

Nettle stared at her for a long moment, then shook her head slowly, the same disbelieving half-laugh she'd been giving Arista more and more often lately.

"You could have taken a thousand gold. Retired the whole royalty idea. Bought materials outright, whenever you wanted, from anyone."

"Where's the fun in that?" Arista was already sketching, half her attention already gone somewhere else entirely, trebuchet ratios, glider wings, whatever came after that. "This way I never run out. This way the well never runs dry. Money's just a number that goes up. Materials are the actual raw ingredients for the next dumb idea I have." She glanced up, grinning. "And I've got a lot of those left."

Nettle rolled her eyes, half-amused, half-exasperated. "Next thing you're going to say is you're going to build a hand-cranked conveyor belt for the dwarves so they don't even have to carry the ore out themselves—"

She stopped mid-sentence, watching Arista's whole face light up in real time, notebook already flipping to a fresh page before Nettle had even finished the thought.

"...I shouldn't have said that."

"A conveyor belt." Arista was already sketching, stylus moving fast, muttering half to herself. "Okay, think about it, the mining's the bottleneck right now, sure, but even once Gorthruk's crews are pulling ore out efficiently, someone's still hauling every single load out of the mountain by hand or by cart. That's exactly the kind of inefficiency I fixed with the boring wheel. Same problem, different stage of the pipeline."

"I was making a joke."

"Jokes are just ideas that haven't been researched yet." Arista didn't even look up, already sketching a rough belt-and-roller system, gear ratios scrawled in the margin out of sheer muscle memory at this point. "Chain-driven, has to be. I already know how to make precision chain links, that's a solved problem now. Crank stations spaced along the belt length instead of one central point, so the load's distributed across multiple people instead of one poor soul cranking an entire mountain's output alone."

"You already have a catapult project. And a trebuchet project. And a wingsuit that keeps getting eaten by hydras."

"I can multitask." Arista finally looked up, grinning in the exact, dangerous way that had, by this point, become something of a warning sign in its own right. "Besides, this one's easy. I've basically already built every piece of it before. Chain: solved. Gears, solved. Crank mechanism, extremely solved, ask Bram's arms about it. This is just... assembling parts I already understand into a new shape."

Nettle pressed her palms against her own face, dragging them down slowly. "I have known you for less than a month, and I already know exactly how this goes. You're going to disappear for a night, come back having read four hours of conveyor belt physics, and then build the thing while making jokes about ore the entire time."

"That's the process, yeah."

"I need to stop giving you ideas."

"You need to stop giving me ideas out loud," Arista corrected cheerfully, already halfway out the workshop door, notebook tucked under one arm. "Gorthruk! Hey, Gorthruk, wait up, I've got a follow-up proposal for the mining contract—!"

Nettle stood alone in the workshop for a long moment, staring at the empty doorway, then let out a long, resigned sigh directed at absolutely no one.

"...I shouldn't have said that."

Nettle called after her, mostly out of reflex at this point, the kind of parting jab she didn't expect to actually land anywhere.

"Hey, while you're at it—" she raised her voice, half-laughing, "—why don't you make it run on steam?"

Arista stopped dead in the doorway.

Nettle watched her shoulders go very, very still.

"...Oh no."

Arista turned around slowly, notebook already forgotten at her side, an expression on her face that Nettle had started privately cataloguing as the one right before something in the world changes forever.

"Say that again."

"I was joking—"

"Steam." Arista said the word like she was tasting it for the first time. "You're right. You're completely right. I've been so stuck on manual cranking, chains, gears, people-power, all of it, because that's what I know how to build. But if I've got a forge hot enough to isolate adamantium out of solid rock, I definitely have enough heat to boil water and drive a piston."

"I genuinely did not think that far ahead when I said it—"

"A steam engine doesn't need four people rotating in shifts. It just needs fuel and someone occasionally checking the pressure gauge." Arista was already pacing now, the particular restless energy of an idea taking hold faster than she could write it down. "The conveyor belt wouldn't need crank stations at all. One engine, one continuous drive, running as long as the fire's fed. That's not just an upgrade, that's a completely different category of machine."

Nettle dragged both hands down her face. "I have made a terrible mistake."

"You've made an excellent mistake," Arista corrected, beaming. "This is the best mistake you've made all week."

"I need you to understand that when I said 'steam,' I meant it the way people say 'why don't you just build a rocket while you're at it', as in, obviously not, that would be insane, that was the joke—"

"Rockets," Arista repeated, slower this time, eyes going slightly distant in a way that made Nettle's stomach drop.

"NO." Nettle pointed a finger at her, sharp and immediate. "No. Absolutely not. I am revoking all future joke privileges. From this moment forward, I say nothing even remotely resembling an idea in your presence ever again."

"Too late! Already thinking about pressure vessels." Arista was scribbling furiously now, half out the door, one foot already in the courtyard. "Steam first. Rockets can wait. Probably. Possibly. We'll see how the steam thing goes."

"That is not reassuring!"

"Gorthruk!" Arista's voice carried back through the doorway, already fading into the distance. "New proposal! Bigger proposal! Sit down, this is going to take a while—!"

Nettle stood alone in the workshop once more, staring at the ceiling, addressing whatever deity happened to be listening.

"...I need to learn to keep my mouth shut."

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