Belmarniss comes back after about twelve hours away.

Shroomy is standing in a guard position and spots her as she comes down the slope, and click-clicks away.

The work area is much neater and one wall is partially white! Waltana looks like she could use Prestidigitating. The strawberry plant is about a handspan high, but it looks kind of sickly.

"Hi! I need, uh, nightsoil or spoiled food- Not that there is any- Or dead stuff. Bones, maybe. I underestimated how much fertilizer rapid growth would take."

Belmarniss nods and drops the mushrooms for Waltana's breakfast and goes again.

Waltana will actually walk around at least a few of the neighboring chambers and passages, with Shroomy and a light as a guard. Not far, maybe a couple hundred feet and leaving string behind her so she doesn't get lost. She's just feeling a bit claustrophobic, and a walk helps with that where pacing does not.

Work, work, work. Not too Sparkily. Carve the rocks. Smooth the walls. Hammer the metal. Bemoan your lack of adequate tools. Hug the hard-but-slightly-squishy texture of Shroomy the Mushroom-Clank, and wait. Things are getting better, just keep at it.

Belmarniss comes back with a jar of nastiness.

She wishes she had a mask.

Rock dust, water, three spoons of ground quicklime, and a teensy bit of sulfur, mixed well and heated carefully and then spread into the pot. And then she asks for Prestidigitation and sets Shroomy on 'Growth Protocol' again.

"Well, there we go.  I think it's going well. I'm just... Antsy."

Nod nod.

"I wanna spend time learning Drow if you're up for that?"

Nod nod! Waltana should provide the curriculum she wants, since Belmarniss could speak Drow all day and not communicate what any of it meant, but she's up for this.

Her chosen subjects: Magic, navigation and directions, food words, family and relationship words.

Sure, now she has vocab on those insofar as she can request it, which will be hardest for magic.

Yeah, she doesn't make much progress on that one.

"How much does one strawberry cost?"

"Two silver."

"...I just realized I don't actually know if that's a lot," she says in Germanian. "How much have you spent on things for me?"

"Almost twenty gold and the favor for Johysis."

"...One hundred fresh strawberries, and a favor. That's... About a gallon of strawberries? For all this stuff. That's something. Fresh fruit is expensive, sheesh. I'm not sure how much it will yield yet."

"More than one!"

"Yeah, maybe, ten a day? That's a guess, but it should be the correct order of magnitude!"

"Two gold a day!"

She affects a silly voice. "Ah, here we see again the failures of a free market economy and the vagaries of supply und demand! All that is needed now is an insurance company bankruptcy, and perhaps a futures market squeeze for a perfect storm of economic confusion-"

She giggles. "-Er, that's a quote from a satire play."

Snort.

"I'm already thinking of a lot more things to build, not least of which more electrical growth-boosters, but maybe wait for the berries to start flowing, I suppose?"

Nod nod.

"If you get cloth in little strips just wide enough to wrap around wire, or even get someone to wrap and sew the copper wire, that would speed up my future work a lot. It was the most fucking tedious part. I'm - the halflings are the ones I thought of at first but - I dunno. Probably also not to the point of spending gold to save my time quite yet, too."

"Seventy gold. For a halfling."