Strawberry's Descent

Bram found her mid-sketch, studying the zeppelin design with the particular scrutiny of a man who had, by now, developed genuine expertise in identifying exactly how dangerous one of her projects was likely to be before she'd even finished building it.

"I want on the crew," he said, without preamble.

Arista glanced up. "...You want to fly over open ocean toward an unconfirmed landmass, on a vehicle that's never been tested."

"You say that like it's meant to dissuade me at this point." He leaned over the sketch, studying the gondola design, the propeller mounts, the reinforced envelope structure. Then his expression shifted, something like genuine surprise crossing it. "...Huh. This is safe."

"...Excuse me?"

"By your standards, I mean." He gestured at the design: redundant propulsion systems, a fully enclosed gondola with proper structural bracing, emergency descent mechanisms clearly marked at multiple points. "No exposed cockpit that could anchor against something and tear the whole craft apart. No single point of failure I can immediately spot. Actual safety margins built into basically every subsystem." He looked up at her, one eyebrow raised. "Let me guess. Now that you're the one riding it, suddenly it's safety first."

Arista opened her mouth to argue, found she genuinely didn't have a rebuttal, and shut it again.

"...That's fair," she admitted, wincing. "I never actually noticed the pattern until you said it out loud like that. Catapults, gliders, the cockpit that nearly killed you, all of that got built fast, tested on someone else, iterated through failure. This one I'm flying myself, over open water, toward something I genuinely don't understand yet, and apparently my brain quietly decided 'be careful' the moment my own life was actually on the line instead of someone else's."

"I'm not even mad," Bram said, and seemed to genuinely mean it. "I'm relieved. This is the first project of yours I've looked at and thought 'yeah, I'd actually get in that voluntarily' instead of being pressured, guilted, or accidentally volunteered into it."

"You're always volunteering. I never guilt you into anything."

"You absolutely guilt me into things. 'Master Blacksmith's Apprentice' was not earned through purely voluntary participation."

Arista let that one go, mostly because he wasn't wrong, and turned the conversation back toward the actual design.

"So, crew. You're in. I'll need at least two more, probably, for a proper reconnaissance run. I was thinking—"

"Question first." Bram tapped the gondola's forward section, currently just marked as an open observation area on her sketch. "Is it possible to build something that magnifies vision? Like binoculars, or a proper long-range scope. If the whole point of this flight is spotting a landmass from altitude, over open ocean, with nothing but rumors for a rough direction, we're going to want to actually see it as early and as clearly as possible, not just squint at the horizon and hope."

Arista sat back, genuinely struck by the practicality of the suggestion. "...Huh. I hadn't even gotten that far in the design yet, I was still solving 'stay in the air reliably' before I got to 'actually see anything useful once we're up there.'" She grabbed a fresh corner of the page, already sketching. "Lenses, properly ground and aligned. I've never actually built optics before, that's a completely different discipline than anything I've touched so far. Glass shaping, focal length, magnification ratios."

"Do you know anyone who'd actually understand that kind of precision work?"

Arista thought about it for a moment, running through her now-considerable roster of specialists, Nettle's fabric work, Fen's alchemy, Petrov's engineering, Gorthruk's metallurgy, and landed, slowly, on someone she hadn't properly worked with before.

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"...I might. There's a glassworker's guild in the Human Kingdom I've heard mentioned a few times, mostly in passing: precision lens work for scholars and cartographers. I've never actually had a reason to go looking for them before now." She grinned, already adding a new name to her ever-expanding list of people to track down. "Guess that's the next stop, before the zeppelin's actually finished. Can't map a landmass I can't properly see."

Bram nodded, satisfied, already mentally adding himself to the crew roster with the same resigned, inevitable acceptance he brought to everything now.

"You keep working," Bram said, already pulling on his travel gear. "I'll find the glassworker. You've got a zeppelin to finish and a race to not lose."

Arista glanced up from her frame calculations, genuinely surprised. "...You're volunteering to go recruit someone. Without me guilting you into it."

"I contain multitudes," Bram said, entirely deadpan, and left before she could respond properly.

The Human Kingdom's glassworkers' guild turned out to be a small, unassuming building tucked into a quiet side street, considerably less grand than Bram had expected given the precision reputation attached to it. Most of the actual lens work, he learned after a few inquiries, came from a single figure who rarely left the workshop's back room, a young man named Colm, cartographer by trade, lens-grinder by necessity, who'd apparently taught himself optics purely because commercial mapmaking demanded better sighting instruments than the guild could otherwise source.

Bram found him hunched over a workbench, meticulously polishing a small lens against a soft cloth, so absorbed in the work that he startled visibly at the sound of the door.

"...Oh. Sorry. I didn't hear you come in." Colm set the lens down carefully, not quite meeting Bram's eyes, voice quiet enough that Bram had to lean in slightly to catch it properly. "Can I help you with something?"

"I hope so. I'm looking for someone who can shape precision lenses. Magnification work, specifically, long-range viewing, not just corrective glasses."

Colm's posture shifted immediately, some of the earlier shyness giving way to visible, cautious interest. "...What kind of range are you needing?"

"Honestly? I don't fully know yet. It's for an expedition, aerial reconnaissance, spotting a landmass from altitude, over open ocean, further than anyone's ever needed to see clearly before." Bram gestured vaguely at the general scale of the problem. "The person actually building the whole vehicle is better at explaining the specifics than I am. I'm just here because she doesn't know optics and I know how to ask around."

At the word expedition, something shifted in Colm's expression entirely, the cautious reserve giving way to something closer to barely contained excitement, though he still spoke carefully, like a man unused to anyone actually listening to him.

"...The storm region. The new landmass." He said it slowly, testing the words like he didn't quite believe he was allowed to hope for this. "I've been trying to get someone, anyone, to take my maps seriously for years. Cartography's not exactly a respected trade in most kingdoms, everyone wants a sword, or a shield, or something flashy. Nobody wants better maps." He gestured at a stack of meticulously detailed charts pinned along the workshop's back wall, coastlines and depth soundings rendered in careful, obsessive detail. "If there's a whole new region out there, I want to be the one mapping it properly. Not just guessing at coastlines from secondhand rumors, like every version of this world's map has ever had to."

Bram studied the charts for a long moment, genuinely impressed by the precision on display, nothing like the rough, half-informed sketches Arista usually worked from, but careful, exact, clearly the product of someone who cared far more about accuracy than most people ever bothered to.

"...You want to come yourself," Bram said. "Not just build the lenses and send us off."

"Yes." Colm said it immediately, with more conviction than anything else he'd said since Bram walked in. "I don't just want to grind glass for someone else's expedition. I want to be there. I want to actually chart the coastline myself, firsthand, the first time anyone's ever seen it properly." He hesitated, some of the shyness creeping back in. "...If that's something the crew would actually want. I understand if you'd rather just take the lenses and go."

Bram considered him for a long moment: quiet, meticulous, clearly starved for exactly the kind of opportunity this expedition represented, and just as clearly, precisely the kind of specialist Arista's growing, chaotic roster always seemed to need without knowing it yet.

"...I think she's going to want you on the crew specifically," Bram said finally, grinning slightly. "Fair warning, though, everyone who joins one of her projects ends up in considerably more danger than they originally signed up for."

Colm looked back at his carefully detailed, secondhand-guesswork maps one final time, then at Bram, something quietly, steadily resolved settling into his expression.

"...I've spent years mapping coastlines I've never actually seen. I think I can handle some danger, if it means finally seeing one firsthand."

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