She almost wished she could blame their day off for all of her woes, but that would be neither helpful nor fair. Even if they'd been keeping up with the entirety of their standard chores, there wasn't much that could be done about one of their ballista turrets getting jammed, leaving a gap in their defenses just in time for something to come through and kill all of her diggers.
Oh, and then it went and broke the track for the transport cart for good measure. So, when their little minecart had arrived at the Ironworks it hadn't stopped and turned around. Instead, it just kept rattling forward straight into the open pit of the mine. So now it was just a broken pile of reeds and iron at the bottom, its little engine block still grinding away - it had gotten so noisy since Oliver and Jacob had first made it - and spinning half an axle uselessly in the air.
She sighed. She'd hoped that Alyssa had been slightly exaggerating.
"I believe that I am capable of creating a new cart," Jacob reassured her. "With the tools that Smith has been creating, it can even be created out of wood should that be acceptable."
"Strength comparison?" She asked.
"Unclear."
"Do whichever one will be faster," Henrietta decided. Decisiveness made up for many faults, "We can worry about upgrading our creation methodology once our workmanship is what causes things to break."
"At your command."
"I'll bring the engine block back with me, is there anything else you'll need?"
Jacob looked around the clearing. "I ought to be capable of managing on my own."
"Glad to hear it. Is your toolkit going to be enough to fix the ballista?"
"It will take some time to determine that, but it shall be a good test as to whether there is anything further that may benefit it."
"Excellent."
Jacob had, over the past few days, been assembling a 'field repair kit' of sorts, a small pouch filled with iron hooks and hammers meant to clear out the mechanisms of the ballistae. None of the tools had been very complicated, and Jacob had utilized assembling the kit as much of an excuse to learn how to use the forge as actually getting a set of tools.
She approved, and somewhat wished she'd thought to direct him to do so herself. The more everyone got practice with creating things, the better off they were. Alyssa learning magery was an excellent avenue of development, though by no means an endpoint. Jacob's general ability to assist with practically anything was excellent, and with him taking the initiative on learning blacksmithing they could do even more.
As Jacob began work on diagnosing and repairing the broken ballista, Henrietta quickly verified that all of the ammo hoppers were full and then pulled a handful of her larger pieces of paper, rolled tightly for transport, and scribed out new diggers to replace the ones killed.
With that done, and with Jacob not needing her help yet, she carefully extracted the engine block from the cart wreck and returned home.
Once at First Tower, she checked in with Alyssa - who was currently working on her magic - but declined to bother her when she saw how steadfastly she was focusing on the spell Oliver had given her to practice. Little dancing lights had gathered right on the edge of what would be Alyssa's field of vision, but it didn't look like the Ranger had noticed them. She was, it seemed, too busy contorting her hands and limbs in chaotic but obviously deliberate ways.
Oliver she visited to see how his new sliderail design was performing. He'd finished the design just a couple days prior after all, and there were still a lot of unknowns with how it would act and hold up.
What she did see was promising, with just a single issue that she could see...
"So, most of the enchantment is going to be in this ring, right?" She held the iron band up to her eye and gave it a bit of a sniff. Technology, Force, and Arcane, mostly, but with a bit of other spice. Nothing really unexpected, but it was good to confirm. "And your design is ring-based?"
"It is a circular design, with an inferred central glyph," Oliver... that sounded like agreement. It could be difficult to tell sometimes.
"So, given how snugly this ring fits around the rod, how are you intending to deal with supports?"
"Supports?"
"This sliderail can't just float suspended on nothing, Smith. What do you intend to attach to it as to ensure it doesn't move?"
"I..." Oliver appeared to be speechless. Yeah, that was about what she'd expected. He seemed to be in a loop of looking at his rail, the ring, and his System, looking for answers that he hadn't written there previously.
At least Oliver was generally easy enough to read now that she'd gotten to know him better. She wished she could have done so before the Jump, but... Well, at some point she'd be mad at the people who had been in charge of orchestrating all of that, because they truly had not been ready by any reasonable metric, but that point would come after their portal was made and they were back home.
She decided to cut off Oliver's trailing noises, "It looks like an excellent prototype, Smith. How much will you need to alter the design to simply add supports along some side, like with a train track?"
"...A lot," he faintly whined. "And yeah, it'll be needed for corners, long stretches, so, so much."
"And for loading and unloading," she pointed out. "It would be preferable if the loops didn't have a distinct start, to avoid them needing a distinct end. None of our skills include phasing."
"That could just use a section of the rod that can lift out," Oliver quickly pointed out, which she conceded. "But..."
He sighed, and buried his head in his hands. "This is going to be a pain. It might not even work..."
"Do you need a familiar to work you through it?"
"I don't think so?" He didn't sound very certain.
"I'll come back to check on you in a few hours," she reassured him.
"That sounds... good." He let out a low whine that Henrietta wasn't really concerned about. She figured that there was about even odds that he'd have figured out everything he'd need to update the sliderail by the time she was at the bottom of the Spire.
Given how happy he looked when she glanced back at him, it might not even take that long.
"And you just cover and uncover the holes down here to shut off the fire once it's ready," Clark slapped a bit of mud onto the base of one of his his charcoal furnaces. "Or to get a bit more air in, if it's not ready yet."
"How do you tell which is which?"
"How the smoke looks!" the Healer happily explained, "It's like... when it's really thick and gray, it isn't ready yet. But when it gets thin and... sorta blue? Then it's ready. And from there it's about looking at how sooty the smoke is, for whether it's burning well in the right ways."
Henrietta took a few deep breaths near each of the half-dozen mounds involved in the burners. Fire was abundant, as were Ash, Steam, Wood, and even a bit of Water. That could... no, not really. She couldn't have Oliver create a divination gauge that any of them, or her inklings could easily read. She was already having him do too much.
But there had to be something she could do... well, the fact the smoke changed color and fullness indicated that there was probably a chemical change in the wood offgassing as it carbonized. Something like that would probably be possible to smell, even if not by a human nose.
And that meant...
"Ride!" Henrietta beckoned the Ranger over. She had simply been maintaining her hatchets, which was something Henrietta didn't feel bad about interrupting.
"Commander?"
"Find me a creature with a good sense of smell, not much larger than a dog... what was its name again?" Clark had officially adopted the petalfur that hung around him and given it a name, but Henrietta couldn't remember what it was.
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"Do you mean Tully?"
"Right, Tully. If it turns out that petalfurs have great senses of smell, you can grab one of them, but I don't know if we really want to turn one into an inkling."
Clark shook his head vigorously.
"Yes. So, try to avoid petalfurs if you've got other options, but we need something not too large, decently intelligent, and with a sharp sense of smell. Slight preference for alive, but I know you don't have many tools to facilitate trapping right now."
Alyssa nodded, "Yes, Commander. What priority?"
"Call it medium. It outranks all of your current tasks, but you don't need to drop everything and run off."
The Ranger saluted and started talking to herself as she began using her [Rustlewind] to find something that fit Henrietta's honestly slightly unreasonable request. She had faith in her underlings, though. Her own unreadiness to be a leader aside, to even be considered by the Forerunner Program, candidates had to already be incredibly competent, and the baseline competency required had if anything gone up since her first Expedition.
"Once Ride succeeds," Henrietta explained to Clark, "I'll make an inkling out of whatever she finds, then tweak it to make it easier to train. I want you to try to teach it what kinds of smoke should have holes covered up, as opposed to those which should be dug out."Does that make sense?"
"It does! This should be quite enjoyable!"
"And how's your progress on getting subskills or otherwise getting new skills?"
"It's going good!"
After a moment, Henrietta realized she probably wasn't getting much more out of him. That was fine, she didn't need the details. "Keep working on it, see if you can get the Charcoal Furnace to assist you in some way, make sense?"
After another confirmation from Clark that he would do so, she had one final thought, "And, while you're at it, could you start building your future furnaces along the Ironroad? I can clear out area in the treeline if you need it, but cutting down on the smoke around here would be useful."
It wasn't that bad, honestly. But no need to make it worse.
"And you've been working with some wet wood?" Clark confirmed it, and Henrietta continued. "Good. Keep doing that, we have a lot of downed trees from making the road, we should put them to use."
Henrietta reclined in her perch, newly upgraded with a reed mat, and pulled out her stashed papers. The general environment was starting to get to them, even through the basic box they were being stored in. She should probably have Oliver ward it against Nature, but his current design really only worked on stationary items, and developing a wholly new enchantment schema really wasn't worth the effort compared to her... well, if she got ?Amanuensis?, it would be trivial for her to make copies onto fresh pieces of paper, so it didn't really matter.
They had other priorities.
Lots of priorities, even.
She had a list.
High-level
- Make a portal (Targeting, Transport, Power)
- Create a self-scaling iron production line
- Determine what the local magic is
- Verify if and what the Calamity is
Production Lines
Materials
Iron
- Copper (on standby)
- Charcoal
- Paper
- Concrete
- Glass
- Cloth
- Lumber
Products
- Claynades
- Sliderail/Motion Slides
Individual
Personal
- Make an inkling to guard the Ironworks
- Make an inkling capable of carrying messages between location.
- Find another project for Clark
Oliver
- Investigate how to maximize sliderail production
- Automate sliderail factory totally, if possible
Alyssa
- Investigate the Shelter tunnels
- Learn magic, particularly light magic in service of #1
- Find a creature to send messages with
- Find a creature with a good sense of smell
Clark
Investigate best way to make charcoal
- Train some creature for charcoal-making
Jacob
- Fix Ironworks ballista
- Create new transport cart
Henrietta was certain she was missing far, far too many things, but as far as momentary status-checks went, it was a good start. Good leaders should know what their teams were doing, and her Mind wasn't high enough to remember it all constantly. But, her class was literally made for writing, and so writing she would do.
It would be fantastic when she was back to an actual Alchemist-type class, of course. Even just returning Mud as a primary element for her arcanoception would be lovely, but having the magic needed to ply her primary trade would be even better.
Regardless, it was too far out to actually make plans for, probably. Her current philosophy on the matter was that there was no such thing as the 'right' amount of planning, it was just a matter of filling in unknowns with what could be predicted.
But, maybe she was just saying that to make herself feel better.
She'd written things down before now, of course. But now she was going to actually seek to consistently write things down. Looking into the future, she could see this becoming a sort of bulletin board that her team could use for task assignments and tracking the status of automated projects, and eventually becoming computerized and integrated with their [Status] access. Maybe she should look into skills to facilitate that? Magical to-do lists ought to be accessible to [Master Inkscribe].
But right now, she had ink and crude paper, so ink and crude paper was what it would be.
The tasks she'd set out for the entire team were their broad-scale goals, large projects that started off as incredibly distant, so they could have the morale boost of actually accomplishing something that had once seemed impossible.
In conjunction with that, the Production Line papers were intended to keep track of what Henrietta felt that they could make into production lines. They weren't always the easiest - making cloth or concrete would both take more advanced machinery than they currently had made - but they should represent the basic materials she had to work with.
Or, in the case of Products, the kinds of more complex items it seemed like they could produce without human intervention. Whether she was right might have been as of yet unproven, but she had faith in Oliver.
Then, it got to their individual goals. Balancing work between the five of them, with their vastly different skill sets wasn't easy. She wanted to be as fair as possible, but how fair could she really be when Oliver was the only reason any of this was even halfway doable?
A thought crossed her mind, and Henrietta jotted down 'study runistry' on her personal to-dos. If she was going to have Alyssa learn how to cast, it was only fair she brushed up on the art of drawing magic into existence. She knew a bit about runes thanks to their use in alchemy, and hopefully that would present a good starting point. Using her artscape wasn't enough of a challenge to justify being her 'only' task outside of bossing the rest of the team around, even if she did do a lot of fill-in here and there that she wasn't writing down. A separate list of ongoing tasks might be in her future?
Oliver's two tasks were both connected yet monumental unto itself. She'd direct Jacob towards helping him, but she was asking him to implement an entire production line entirely on his own. That felt unreasonable, but she didn't have any sense of scale for what a reasonable amount of work was or wasn't. After a few more production lines were made? Sure. But the first one... that made it tricky.
Alyssa's tasks were all 'fetch quests' of various sorts. Run to the Ironworks and drop off ammo for the turrets. Go out into The Jungle and find a creature that was good at sniffing. Go and catch a fast-flying bird large enough to carry a small piece of paper. Explore the caves around Shelter, see if the salamander there was still alive... it was being expanded substantially by the open-ended task of 'learn magic,' but did it matter?
Henrietta didn't think so.
Clark was the trickiest one at the moment. He had a lot of ongoing maintenance tasks - cooking, making charcoal, purifying water, healing - so much healing. Blisters, burns, cuts... it usually wasn't much, the kind of injury that would likely heal in a day or two, but when they had a Healer already trying and succeeding at leveling, he always wiped them away before anything bad could happen.
At the same time, Henrietta didn't want to exhaust Clark's invaluable optimism by having him spin his wheels on daily chores. She needed to figure out some appropriate project for him to focus on long-term that wasn't maintenance.
He had been working on building a meeting area out of their roughshod bricks... perhaps that could be made his official duty? Making a Meeting Hall, a Lounge, a Common Area, whatever they called it for their meals and discussions? The place they could relax and talk at the end of the day, fully enclosed and with proper wards from Oliver. That... would work. That seemed like a good project for their Healer to focus on.
And then, there was Jacob. Jacob was incredibly insightful and patient, making him an ideal partner for Oliver. He also was good with his hands and quick on his feet, and with their ballista turrets doing their jobs in scaring away the wildlife, he didn't have much to do on a day-to-day that was Warrior-like.
Hopefully helping Oliver was adequately capable of keeping him occupied, as a disgruntled team member would make everything else so complicated. Perhaps she should also add 'find something for Jacob' on to her list, but he was already doing so well with mechanical devices. With him already blacksmithing and working on repairing the transport cart, it seemed to be an obvious extension to have him work on mechanical systems in general. She'd talk to him once he was done with his current repairs to see if that was something he'd be comfortable with.
Otherwise, he served as a good floater. He had the perspective needed to help Henrietta with her planning, the patience to work with Oliver, the physical capacity to keep up with Alyssa, and the wisdom to keep Clark working on the right things.
They were, to be sure, a bit of an eclectic group. But Henrietta was glad to have each and every one of them.
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