"Lovely, thank you."

She watches for when they reach fourteen liftfruit, and then starts a new pile for any further harvests.

A few more trickle in, and at last Gloria comes flitting back with a pair of ripe lift-fruit, one in each hand. 

"I think these are the last ones, I checked the grove pretty thoroughly." 

She places them into the second stack, which has only two fruit in it right now.

Eighteen fruit in all. A good harvest, for such a small grove. This breed seems quite bountiful.

Lily smiles. "That might even be enough to run the shipyard at skeleton capacity. We'll have to discuss." 

"We will, yes, but hm. When the agricultural systems are fully operational, can they harvest unattended? How much can you be self-sufficient if we give you sufficiently many initial liftfruit, Anima?"

They can harvest unattended, but there's currently no infrastructure in place for automatically moving harvested fruit to the core in the chapel, or I wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place. That could be fixed, but as it stands currently you'll need to make sure to have someone here to tend the core.

"Good thinking, Maya. If there's no way to keep the facilities operational without someone tending things, we'll have to fix that if we want everyone to be able to leave together. Okay, everyone sit down and eat while we scheme." She picks up another fruit and digs in. "Do you know anything about what it would take to construct that infrastructure, or what it would look like?"

Hailey paces nearby and grabs a fruit as well. "Probably that'll be done at the shipyard, using some of equipment there, so Lily's instincts may well be right."

Neo and Ruby sit down and dig in as well, listening curiously.

A runic circle would have to be added to the Church, blazoned in brass and powered by the cores. The other ones can be seen in the Lab beneath the church, so you can see what you'd be working with. It's delicate work; you'd need a proper artisan to do it well.

"Is there anything we could do that would be... less onerous?"

You could construct a more temporary circle, of, say, salt, but it would be less stable and more prone to faults. Not what you'd like in a critical system, I'd assume.

"Um?" Ruby raises her hand, then scratches the back of her head sheepishly. "I think I could do it? When you mentioned a runic circle, some stuff... clicked for me? Back when we thought this was gonna be a game I picked artisan skills, and I did some metalwork outside of games before all this, so if we get the foundries going in the shipyard I can make one. I'll need to study the existing circles like Anima said so I can figure out how it links up to everything, though."

Then I think you should be safe to cast a new circle. It'll be a laborious process, but it should still take less time than a full month. You'll need the foundry in the shipyards, yes, and some of the workshops. But it should be doable.

"Oooh yay!" She bounces in place.

"So that suggests a plan with an optional modification. We rush the foundry and workshops, lay in the circle, then build the ship and head out so we minimize how much time Sin spends as an empty-headed fuckpet, optionally doing a round of exponentiation on the fields first to give us more slack in our mana budget for facilities. Suggestions?"

Sounds solid to me!

Sin nods eagerly, not really concealing her eagerness to minimize the time very well.

Lily shoofs Sin's hair a little more and smiles.

"Sounds like a plan. I don't want to split the party this early either." 

"It's a good plan, but d'we wanna exponentiate first? Can we afford not to?"

"Good question. It would just take more time to exponentiate. Perhaps the sinny sin can wait two months?"

"Eeeeeeeeeep."

Gloria giggles and pats Hyacinth on the forehead. "Just teasing."

"Anima, how many cores would it take to run enough of the shipyard to build and integrate the new circle, and would the new circle increase operating costs once it was built?"