Back at her workshop, notebook spread open across the workbench, Arista finally sat down and did something she rarely bothered with, took actual stock of everything currently in motion, rather than just chasing whichever idea happened to be loudest in her head at any given moment.
She started a fresh page, titled it, underlined the title twice for emphasis, and began listing.
CURRENT PROJECTS (in progress, unfinished, or "probably fine"):
1. Steam Engine. Dwarven Republic Prototype proven. Full-scale version needed to drive the conveyor belt. Fuel sourcing solved via elven Growth-magic reforestation (pending pipeline).
2. Steam Engine: Hell Elevator Second, separate build. Different heat source (lava, apparently, obviously, in hindsight). Different application entirely, pulling an elevator car up an angled shaft instead of driving a belt.
3. Conveyor Belt. Dwarven Ore Transport Chain-driven, gear-reduced, powered by Steam Engine #1 once it exists. Currently exists only as sketches and a increasingly confident conversation with Gorthruk.
4. Mana Pipeline, Growth Magic Delivery Proof of concept successful (three acorns, 75% relative efficiency, unexpectedly glowing). Needs: mithril windows sourced from Republic reserves, full field-scale trial, glass diagnostic risers at regular intervals.
5. Hell Elevator, Full Build Car construction, cloud-material cushioning on the base, cable and capstan system, braking mechanism for the downhill glide (Hellhounds no longer needed for this, now that lava's solving the fuel problem, should probably let Beelz know before he schedules a rotation for nothing.)
Arista sat back, staring at the list in its entirety for the first time, and let out a long, slow breath.
"...Huh."
She counted it out loud, tapping each entry with her stylus. "Two steam engines. One conveyor belt. One entire mana-conducting pipeline network. One elevator system, complete with cable, capstan and lava fired boiler" She paused. "That's, okay, written all together like that, that's a genuinely unreasonable amount of stuff to have going at once."
She sat with that realization for exactly as long as it took to fully register, which was, admittedly, not very long at all.
"...Cool. Love it. Let's keep going."
She flipped the page, already starting a second list: Materials Needed, this time, cross-referencing her existing mithril and adamantium stockpiles against what each project would actually require, already mentally drafting a schedule that would somehow need to account for Gorthruk's council, Fen's alchemy timeline and Nettle's fabric work.
Somewhere in the middle of cross-referencing steam engine #1's fuel requirements against steam engine #2's completely different heat source, she paused, tapping her stylus against her chin.
"...Wait. If I'm building two steam engines anyway, and they're mechanically almost identical except for the heat source—" she started sketching a third column entirely "—I should just standardize the piston and flywheel assembly across both. Same core design, different boiler configuration depending on whether it's burning wood or sitting next to lava. That's not two separate builds. That's one design, two heat sources."
She grinned, crossing out half of entry #2 and merging it directly into entry #1's specifications.
"...Okay. That's actually one less problem than I thought I had five minutes ago."
She kept working late into the night, the list slowly reorganizing itself under her hands from a wall of overwhelming chaos into something that almost resembled an actual project plan, still absurd in scope, still the kind of undertaking that would have made any sensible person put the notebook down and reconsider several life choices, but undeniably, methodically, hers.
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"Right," she murmured, finally setting the stylus down somewhere well past midnight, surveying the full, sprawling mess of interconnected plans spread across a dozen pages. "That's... manageable. Probably. Mostly. We'll see."
She closed the notebook, grinning at the sheer, ridiculous weight of it all.
"...I love my job."
With the lava solving the elevator's power problem outright, Arista found herself with a small surplus she hadn't planned for, an entire pack of hellhounds, offered up by an actual Lord of Hell, no longer strictly necessary for hauling a cable up a shaft that a lava-fed steam engine could now handle on its own, tirelessly, without needing anyone to rotate shifts or find something "worth their effort."
She sat with that surplus for all of about ten minutes before turning it into a different pitch entirely.
She found Gorthruk mid-council-preparation, papers spread across his desk, visibly bracing himself for whatever new complication she'd arrived to add to the mithril pipeline proposal.
"Different topic," she said, before he could even ask. "Security."
Gorthruk blinked. "...Security."
"Your council's worried about handing over reserve mithril for the pipeline, right? Not just the cost, the actual physical risk. Once it's cut into windows and buried across a whole field, that's a lot of valuable metal sitting somewhere that isn't a vault." She leaned forward, already warming up. "What if I told you I could get you guard dogs. Free. On loan. From Beelzebub himself."
"...You want to bring hellhounds into the Republic."
"Three meters at the shoulder, apparently strong enough to flatten a mountain if properly motivated, and, this is the part I actually think matters, loyal to whoever's handling them, not just wandering strays. You post a couple along the pipeline route, a couple more near the smelting operation, and suddenly nobody's sneaking off with your mithril in the middle of the night." She spread her hands. "That's not a cost. That's a security upgrade you're getting essentially for free, on top of the pipeline itself."
Gorthruk considered this for a long moment, stroking his beard in the specific way he did whenever she'd actually managed to land a point cleanly instead of talking circles around one. "...The council has, in fact, raised concerns about theft risk. Precisely that concern, more than once, in exactly those terms."
"See? I'm basically doing your job for you at this point."
"There is also," he added, slower now, clearly working through the logic in real time, "a point I hadn't considered until just now. The mithril, once buried across hundreds of meters of field instead of sitting in a single vault, that's actually harder to steal, isn't it. Not easier. You'd need to dig up and haul away an enormous length of buried pipe, in full view, over open ground, rather than simply breaking into one guarded room and walking off with a chest."
Arista's grin spread slow and delighted. "...Huh. Yeah. I hadn't even gotten there yet, but you're completely right. Distributed mithril's a worse target than concentrated mithril. Nobody's tunneling under a whole field undetected to steal a few centimeters of pipe lining at a time. It's not worth the effort compared to just robbing a vault."
"So the pipeline isn't merely equal risk to keeping it in reserve. It's lower risk, structurally, before the hounds even factor in."
"And then you add the hounds on top of that, purely for the sections that do need active guarding, the smelting site, the initial mithril stockpile before it's even used and spread out." Arista was already sketching security postings alongside her existing pipeline diagram, delighted at how neatly the pieces were slotting together without her even having planned it this way from the start. "This is, genuinely, a better security pitch than 'trust me,' which was more or less where we left off last time."
Gorthruk sat back, something that looked remarkably like satisfaction settling into his weathered features. "You've just turned my council's single biggest objection into two separate arguments in your favor."
"I have a talent for that."
"You have a talent for creating the objection in the first place, most of the time," Gorthruk said dryly, "so I suppose it evens out that you're equally talented at dismantling them afterward."
Arista laughed, already tucking the hound logistics into her ever-expanding notebook, right beneath the newly consolidated steam engine design. "I'll take that as a compliment."
"...I'm honestly not certain it was one." He was already gathering his papers, though, the particular energy of a man who now had something genuinely strong to bring before his council instead of just a hopeful proposal. "I'll add both points to the presentation. Distributed risk, and borrowed muscle courtesy of Hell itself. That should move at least a few of the more stubborn council members."
"Tell them the dogs are very well-behaved," Arista said. "Mostly. Probably. Don't let the younger guards test that theory, though. Long story."
Gorthruk paused at the door, giving her a look that suggested he very much wanted to ask, and had also learned, by this point, exactly when not to.
"...I don't want to know."
"You really don't," Arista agreed cheerfully. "But it's a great story for later."
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