Strawberry's Descent

Walking back into Tabula Rosa, still faintly salt-stained and windswept from the entire ordeal, Arista spotted a familiar figure near the central plaza and beelined straight for him.

"Petrov!" She caught up, arms crossed, mock-accusatory. "Are you avoiding me? You were online. I sent a party request. You didn't respond."

Petrov, entirely unbothered, glanced up from whatever logistics document he'd been reviewing. "Nettle told me you were building an airship." He said it plainly, like that explained everything. "I like to keep my feet on the ground."

Arista blinked, then grinned, sensing an opening far too good to pass up. "...Petrov. Are you afraid of heights?"

"I prefer not to discuss my relationship with altitude."

"That's a yes." She leaned in, delighted. "Then why didn't you join Nettle on the boat instead? Sea level, solid deck, no altitude involved whatsoever."

Petrov was quiet for a moment, the specific, dignified silence of a man weighing exactly how much humiliation he was willing to accept in one conversation.

"...As I said. I like to keep my feet on the ground."

"...Seasick too?"

He didn't answer immediately, which was, in itself, answer enough.

"...Oh my god." Arista pressed a hand over her mouth, delighted beyond measure. "You spent a year and a half managing a project that included a continental railway, a fifty-meter artillery piece, and an actual dragon, and the two things that actually stopped you cold were altitude and waves."

"I manage risk," Petrov said, with as much composure as he could still muster. "I do not enjoy personally embodying it."

"...If you're afraid of heights, then why come to the railgun project at all? That thing was mounted two-thirds up a mountain."

Petrov was quiet for a moment, something briefly, genuinely sincere slipping past his usual composed reserve. "You needed me."

Arista blinked, the joke dying quietly in her throat.

"You built Gantt charts for a war-adjacent superweapon."

"On solid ground. With excellent structural footing."

"You coordinated seven million people across an continent-spanning infrastructure project."

"From an office. With a chair. Nowhere near a cliff or an ocean in sight."

Arista laughed, loud and genuine, drawing a few curious glances from nearby market stalls. "This is the best thing I've learned all week, and I got exiled from an entire civilization for building a dragon."

"I heard about that, actually," Petrov said, visibly relieved at the subject change. "The whole server's talking about it. You want to catch me up properly, or should I just read the forum threads like everyone else?"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Oh, I'm telling you properly. Sit down. This one's got a golem philosopher, a scrap heap full of discarded consciousness, and a Ship of Theseus joke that actually landed for once." Arista dropped onto the nearest bench, patting the space beside her. "But first, for the record, if we ever need a sixth crew member for a future expedition, I'm now aware you're disqualified from anything involving planes, boats, or, presumably, tall ladders."

"I would climb a tall ladder for you, Strawberry," Petrov said, dry. "I would simply complain about it the entire time."

"That's all I ask." She grinned, settling in. "Okay. So. It started with a broken bio-dome seal..."

Arista's grin faded slowly into something more thoughtful as she worked through the story for Petrov, the words slowing near the end.

"...So, technically, I'm banned. From the entire golem territory. Permanently, or an act of war happens." She said it almost absently, mind already drifting somewhere else entirely. "But here's the thing that's actually been sitting with me since we got back."

Petrov set down his coffee. "Go on."

"The storm border wasn't natural weather. It was the actual game boundary, six hundred and four years of it, deliberately keeping that entire region sealed off until the devs decided to open it. That's not lore. That's a design decision." She leaned forward, the old restless curiosity creeping back into her voice. "Which means everything on the way there was also placed deliberately. Including the sea serpent that attacked Nettle's ship."

Petrov considered that. "...You think it was seeded specifically for this event."

"I think the devs didn't just remove a wall and say 'go explore.' They built an entire ocean's worth of content in advance, waiting for someone to actually sail far enough to find it." Arista stared out at the water visible beyond Tabula Rosa's outer wall, the vast, only-partially-charted expanse Colm was still slowly filling in with real data. "A sea serpent big enough to seriously threaten a properly built combat crew isn't an accident. That's balanced, deliberate encounter design, sitting there for six hundred years, waiting for the exact moment someone finally sailed past the barrier that used to make it irrelevant."

"...And if there's one deliberately placed encounter," Petrov said slowly, following the logic, "there's probably more."

"That's exactly where my head went." Arista turned back to him, grinning now, the old dangerous spark fully returned despite exile, exhaustion, and everything else the past few weeks had thrown at her. "We only saw the surface. One serpent, one sighting, purely because it happened to breach near a ship. But that's an entire, previously sealed ocean. Six hundred years of content nobody's ever been able to reach." She glanced back out at the water, voice dropping slightly, equal parts wonder and genuine unease. "...I wonder what else is lurking below the surface. Something that never needed to breach, because nobody's ever gone looking for it down there."

Petrov studied her for a long moment, recognizing the particular, familiar shape of an idea taking hold long before she'd even said anything more concrete.

"...You're already planning a submarine, aren't you."

"I built one with wings once, in theory, before I figured out clouds don't work like water." Arista grinned wider, notebook already half-pulled from her bag on pure reflex. "A real one, though. Built for actual ocean depth instead of atmospheric barrier physics. There's an entire vertical dimension of this new ocean nobody's touched yet, and if the developers seeded a serpent near the surface just to greet unwary sailors, I genuinely don't want to know what they left waiting in the trenches."

"...You do want to know," Petrov said, dry. "That's rather the entire point of the sentence you just said."

"Okay, fine, I desperately want to know," Arista admitted, already sketching a rough hull cross-section, old submarine-with-wings notes resurfacing from where she'd shelved them weeks earlier. "But I'm allowed to be nervous about it and desperately curious at the same time. Both things can be true."

Petrov sighed, the long, familiar, resigned sigh of a man who had, once again, watched an ordinary conversation turn into the opening pitch for an entirely new impossible project.

"...I'm staying on dry land for this one too, aren't I."

"Obviously," Arista said, grinning, already lost in pressure-hull calculations. "But I promise this expedition won't need a zeppelin. Just something that goes down instead of up."

She glanced at him, delighted.

"...Wanna help me build a submarine?"

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