"...And that's only a little bit of it."

Dog. Seriously... Dog???

"'Please vote for this'? Okay, that's actually kind of hilarious."

She can't help but let out a snort of laughter at the 'drop table' one.

"At least people are having fun. I'll go over the deluge with you, Shen. Let's filter out all the jokes then post it, vote for however many you like, the ten with the most votes survive to round two?"

The first half of Marlene's life is directed toward structure and stability. Her parents are college graduates with big dreams and big debts, and she can't follow them. She knows it's a weakness, that she has the potential to launch the next Amazon or discover the Theory of Everything, but she can't. She gets a job unsticking robots in a warehouse and lives with her parents until she can afford a pipefitting class.

She knows it's a selfish, privileged thought, but she thinks it anyway: she can handle being poor, but she can't handle being broke, which is a different thing that's not entirely about money. Maybe the 'human touch' pays better than carrying shit for the actual pipefitter, but it leaves her mom a wreck every weeknight, and Marlene is not going to let herself get trapped in that cycle of burnout. So what, she's selfish and privileged and can't bear to think about how lots of people say they can't handle being broke and then go broke anyway.

It helps that she's lucky enough to actually enjoy rice and beans. It helps that she can fit herself into a tiny room without getting antsy about it. It helps that she doesn't have any expensive medical issues - and obviously she's not going to transition until she can afford the endogenous estrogen gene therapy, which costs as much as a car, and not a budget brand. (The implants are nice if you don't want to take pills every day, but they only last a few years, which is useless as far as she's concerned.)

When she turns thirty, her parents give her the money they had wanted her to use for college. It's not much, objectively, but it's about what she saves in a year, and it's enough for her to start studying to be an aircraft mechanic. "You always wanted to fly," her dad says. "Lots of people work in ground crew while they study to be pilots, right?" (She does not actually have what it takes to be a pilot, and he would know that if he actually looked. Then again, he somehow hasn't figured out that she's trans, despite her friends calling her 'Marlene' in front of him.) She snarls. "Where did you hear that, maybe last month when I was talking about my classmate Gary?"

She graduates and moves to Albany. She apologizes to her dad. She earns more money than she's ever had in her life and saves half of it.

The second half of Marlene's life is about enjoying the structure and stability she's secured.

She does her job. Night shift sucks, but if everyone hates it that's all the more job security for her. She runs every evening before work and then binges Wikipedia on the bus to the airport with her phone brightness on max, obsessing about a new topic every week or two.

She buys an old, sturdy computer and learns to program. She fills her GitHub with a dozen projects, each abandoned with more TODOs than functions. She downloads hundreds of pirated textbooks and reads the first chapter of each.

She finally transitions. (The way with pills every day; she likes having savings.)

And then, the Exodus project begins. It's obviously the purpose her life was missing up to now.

But can she get in? A background in the military would have been nice, like all those old astronauts. Her current job in aircraft maintenance seems like the next best thing. The only problem is that it's her only thing, and that's not good enough.

She makes a list of skills it would be nice to have. There's no way she's going to become a licensed engineer, but she can learn the basics, right? Actual engineers probably spend their day using specialized software for simulations that needs a bunch of on-the-job training anyway, right? She doesn't actually know if that's true, but it's her only hope. She finishes reading some of the textbooks and does the exercises. She's not going to be as reliable as a real expert, nor as comprehensive as a thumbdrive of files, but she's aiming in between those two: real, living, flexible understanding of the core parts of many fields.

She writes a terrible text-only rip-off of Kerbal Space Program. She makes flash cards. She begs every contact she has to get her a chance to shadow different engineers for an hour and see what their work is actually like. (And then she makes a list of everything she didn't understand.)

The Exodus applications open. She writes up a 'resume' that describes why she thinks she fills a valuable niche, only mentioning her traditional qualifications at the end - 8 years at United Airlines, Aviation Tech with A&P Certificate - and then getting weird again to say that she has studied to be an Avionics Technician too but didn't bother taking the test because that would mean less time for studying.

She gets in! ...to the training program. Which is also an extended interview. She worries every day that this will be the day they decide that she's too easily tired or unsociable or should have started studying a decade earlier, and each dinner the gossip is about someone else getting canned.

Launch date approaches. She gives away her savings to her friends, everyone who helped her, even hunts down that now-retired pipefitter. And a bit for her parents, grudgingly. 

She's not the next Bezos or Einstein, she knows that now. It was never an option. But she has a purpose on the mission. She can handle everything about about launching shuttles, even if the computers are destroyed and they have to do the math by hand, and she can design a replacement for any part if it's only one part missing and her replacement is allowed to be heavier and worse. She's not a genius, giving new insights to humanity. She's not even a mediocre mechanical engineer. But she can keep this chunk of knowledge alive.

Now it's the third ...half... of Marlene's life. It's exciting being on a new planet, of course, but stability is still vital. Carver is in charge now, and they have protocols for establishing a new government, and they must balance between populism and totalitarianism.

Her name submissions were Janus (kinda obvious, already the name of a moon of Saturn) and Icehole, which she hopes the officers don't veto. She meant it seriously, as a way to keep morale up.

"Hey. Merta. How are you?"

Mumble.

"You have work to do. You can't hide under a blanket. Well I guess you can hide under a blanket a little bit longer, while I borrow the incident report and bring it here and while you read it, but then you have to do things."

Merta whines and limply tries to pull Calsa under the blanket with her.

Calsa shakes her off. "I'm fine. I was hanging back with Chime so I was one of the first ones out.

The incident report is really interesting. Part of it was written by Larian, the kappa, who Fuzzer hired as a 'Safety Officer' on the spot. You should go introduce yourself to your new teammate."

The harpies, minus Audron, float a narrow barge along the tube with food and more people.

From the Frozen City is an aasimar, a thin seven-foot-tall winged humanoid covered with iridescent feathers, holding a rope that blends into a spike brandished by...

...a glowering stetcap (a short furry person with a thick square snout and tiny round ears) who looks around unpredictably.

Behind the aasimar is a wroth.

And there appears to be a whisshopper next to the wroth, but the whisshopper might actually be anywhere in the area. Only the stetcap would know.

And here's a black beetle with long antennae. Like a wroth or a whisshopper, he has more than four limbs. Six, or eight if you count his wings, or ten if you count his elytra too, or twelve if you also count his antennae. He carries a wax tablet with werewolf-carved writing on the backside, which he holds out:

Hi! I'm Siamek, the fourth contribution from the Freedom Democracy. Like a wroth, I can't speak, but I can hear fine and I understand Sotalese, common Elvish, and spoken High Elvish. I can write on this tablet in all of those, and I can sign in Nosimasna Pidgin, Signed High Elvish, and Teng-Allheart Wrothsign. I'm so happy to meet you all! My species is an FD secret :)

The contribution from Koy is a siren, fishy and feathery, with long dark green hair. She sedately steps off the barge and looks around. "Hello, new companions. I'm here to protect you, and I look forward to making new friends. But to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, I must make it be known that if you try to breed me, I will kill you, and if you succeed at breeding me, the path between Koy and the baby will be built with death."

The fourth person from Lei is one of the emperors.

He knew it!

Experiments with the boulders of ice on the ground establish that it's more prone to break the more heat is applied. One of the catfolk is a jeweler, who compares it with how glass explodes if you put it in flame unevenly or touch it with a cold tool. Further experiments are focused on ways to apply small amounts of heat deep inside the ice without going into a dangerous place oneself.

Touch the ice with a hot stone rod? It works but you can't get very far with it. Make a hole and lower in a stone holding catfire on a chain? Sure, and you can scoop the water out with buckets. The jeweler points out that the water is analogous to hot glass and maybe shouldn't touch the ice... and experiments bear out that concern. So they'll make a tiny aqueduct to get the water off the mountain?

A team tries putting water into a piston and spraying it into the air, where it freezes and blows away. That seems easier, as long as the snow isn't going to be a problem somehow - a crew is assigned to make snow using that method, upwind of an unused part of the boulder pile, continually for a cycle.

Would it be possible to melt the ice by spraying molten ice on it? Yes, it's certainly possible, with the water getting pushed back out the hole to be heated again, but some of the water is disappearing... and then the boulder cracks and water gushes out. Ultimately, this way is slower, more complicated, and more unpredictable than inserting a flame-covered stone.

Back to the simple method, now with a shaft that spins a pump to push the meltwater out to the top.

Problem: if a catflame is incidentally covered in water, it boils a bubble of steam that can crack the ice. Solution: put the catfire into a hollow inside the rod, where it can't get wet. Problem: now the rod explodes. Solution to that: leave a tiny hole for hot air to get out while sealing the flame.

Problem: if water gets at the pump shaft, it can freeze and then it's hard to unstick the shaft without breaking it. Solution: use a bubble pump, like a tiny version of the really big pumps in Kef, using a tiny turbine to push the air, like in Audron's design.

The next challenge is connecting segments of rod together without leaking air or water, but actually making the tube has been good practice for that.

They confirm that boring an upwards sloping drain from the bottom works too. Getting them to meet is hard but it's fine if they need multiple attempts; they're going to need to remove a whole lot of ice anyway. They confirm that they can line the L shape with stone and gradually expand it.

Time go to on top of the mountain and start! With a ship like a bell. Everyone will stay inside the whole time. Normally the ship will be frozen (and if the ground collapses it's obviously fine). They go up by freezing the separate 'floor' and then everyone hauls the ship upward by rope handles. Going sideways is similar.