Strawberry's Descent

The question hit her three days before opening, mid-assembly, watching the finished passenger cars roll into place behind Buzzy's gleaming red-black frame.

"...Wait." She stopped, stylus frozen over her checklist. "How does she turn around?"

Petrov, checking coupling mechanisms nearby, glanced up. "What do you mean?"

"This is a single line. Point to point. Beelz Station to the Human Kingdom terminus. No loop yet, that's not happening until the full ring's finished, which is still months out." Arista gestured at Buzzy's cab, the controls she'd meticulously designed facing one direction and one direction only. "She's built to pull forward. Once she reaches the Human Kingdom, she's facing the wrong way for the return trip. I never actually solved for that."

Petrov set down his tools, considering it with the same calm, methodical patience he brought to every crisis by now. "Options. You could build a second locomotive, stationed permanently at the Human Kingdom end, so each terminus has its own engine facing the correct direction, shuttle logic, essentially. Never move Buzzy past the halfway point at all."

"That doubles my construction cost and doubles the maintenance burden, though. Two engines instead of one, both needing fuel, upkeep, an engineer on shift at both ends permanently." Arista frowned, already sketching alternatives. "What's the traditional fix? Real-world trains solved this somehow, right?"

"Turntables, mostly. A rotating platform at each terminus, you drive the locomotive onto it, the whole platform spins, and the engine comes off facing the opposite direction. Manual or mechanical, depending on the era."

"...A turntable." Arista sat with that, turning the concept over. "That's actually elegant. I don't need a second engine at all. I just need a rotating platform at both ends. Beelz Station and the Human terminus, and Buzzy drives on, gets spun a hundred and eighty degrees, drives back off facing the right way for the return leg."

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"Cheaper than a second locomotive. More moving parts than nothing at all, but considerably simpler than what you were picturing."

"And I've already got gear ratio experience coming out of my ears at this point." Arista was already sketching the turntable mechanism, a simple rotating disc on a central pivot, driven by, she glanced instinctively toward the nearest lava vein, then grinned. "Small steam assist, probably. Same principle as everything else. Doesn't need to be fast, just needs to reliably rotate a locomotive's worth of weight without a whole crew hand-cranking it."

"Cheap, simple, on-brand," Petrov said. "Build it into the terminus design. I'll adjust the platform layout to accommodate the extra footprint."

The turntables went in fast, once she'd actually settled on the design: nothing compared to the tunnel itself, just two modest rotating platforms, one at each end of the line, humming quietly on borrowed steam pressure whenever needed.

By the morning of the actual test run, everything finally, genuinely sat ready, Buzzy gleaming at Beelz Station's platform, three finished passenger cars coupled behind her, each one fitted with Nettle's fly-embossed benches, the whole assembly looking, for the first time, like an actual functioning train rather than a collection of individually impressive components.

Arista climbed into the cab herself, exactly as she'd promised Nettle days earlier, hands resting on controls she'd built with her own two hands from a research binge that had started, all those months ago, with a near-miss on a city sidewalk.

Petrov, Gorthruk, Nettle, Bram, and the ever-present assassin crowded onto the platform to watch, along with a modest crowd of demons who'd worked the tunnel crews and dwarven smiths who'd forged half the track beneath the wheels.

"Whenever you're ready," Petrov called up.

Arista took a breath, checked the pressure gauge one final time, and eased the throttle forward.

Buzzy groaned, hissed, and began to move, slow at first, the way every first attempt at anything always was, then steadier, then genuinely fast, red-black frame catching the warm lava-glow lighting as she pulled smoothly out of the station and into the tunnel proper, three cars of empty, fly-embossed benches rattling gently behind her.

Arista watched the tunnel walls blur past the cab window, warm and red exactly as designed, and felt something settle in her chest that had nothing to do with engineering at all.

"...There she goes," she murmured, echoing words she'd said once before, months ago, over a much smaller machine entirely.

She was smiling the whole way to the Human Kingdom.

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