Fist clenched and smacked into hand, glaring. "Big chunk of sky that's lousy with cliffs and narrow passes and caves. And importantly, far too dense with that sort of thing to patrol or even fully map so far. The Royal Society lives in one of the better-explored sections, by mutual agreement that the more boisterous experiments should be far away from everything else. Look, you mentioned stealing a bunch of locomotives. You should do that to the Resurrectionists, damned grave robbers, and hand over their engines to people who will use them for good. I fully expect you to want the New Street Line to prove itself before handing it lots of stuff, that's fine."

She makes a dismissive gesture at the fist-smacking. "Who are the Resurrectionists? I'm generally in favor of resurrection but your phrasing suggests that they're doing something other than smuggling Mountain-light out of the Neath." 

He fist-smacks again. "No way. They crack open graves and steal valuables, sometimes take bodies to sell to scientists too, and worryingly - fight on even footing with Dreadnoughts. If we're getting off topic we should arrange to speak again. What do you need to get people away from here? The records destroyed?"

"Getting rid of the records is to make it harder to go after the escapees. In order to get people away from here I need some way of transporting them, locomotives would be more convenient in some ways but frankly it would work to transform into my larger shape and pick up, I don't know a big hollow Bronzewood log or a reinforced box or whatever, and carry it myself." 

Hands flung in the air. "Well, it'll help. Some of them have criminal records and might be worse off unless you hunt those down somehow. You can get some locomotives by ousting Resurrectionists or stealing them from private captains but that seems slow. Empty ore containers, maybe. I take it you can't make off with the whole Workworld? I don't have many contacts in the Workworld itself."

Negating arm-slice. "I'm not big enough to do that yet and I don't plan to leave the situation alone until I am, if I ever am, I don't know exactly how big I'll be when I stop growing. Ore containers might work, how big are they, how many are there, how many people are here, can they be connected to each other...?"

He pulls a notebook out of his coat and furiously scribbles on it, then points at it angrily.

"Could put hundreds of people in there if you go standing room only. You could maybe break off a whole factory, you looked big enough a while ago. Ah- Plenty, I think, at least a hundred. We have- Fifteen thousand six hundred forty two 'residents'. Give or take five who might be fake entries, or perhaps someone's dead. Yeah but a long enough train of them might break unless you Correspondence at it I'm not an expert at this side of things-"

She snatches the notebook and points at something in it while snarling. 

"I could Correspondence at it but this isn't something I've done before so I wouldn't want to bet too much on it working. Are the factories sturdy enough to come up in one piece? That's the main qualm I'd have about trying to break one off."

Headshake, facepalm. Expansive gesture. "Fuck, yeah maybe, I was picturing more taking a whole - section - including a street or two and what's under the factories - they say the place has good bones but you'd have to get someone to show you where to break and it might be risky. I doubt much down there matches the official blueprints anymore."

She sighs and shakes her head dismissively. 

"If I could break off an area with, like, self-contained heating, that would work really well actually, like, the High Wilderness is cold." 

He points towards the admin building, hand waving angrily. "There are steam plants that feed central heating and electricity to all their neighbor factories. I don't suppose you stole any blueprints while you were stealing files, huh?!"

She props one fist on her hip and looks at him with arch disdain. "No, not yet, I wasn't taking files to use, but that doesn't mean I can't." 

"Well, fine, there's your plan!" He quickly lists five names. "Those are sympathizers who might be useful if you can get to them at all, but I think you should try to go quickly. Not full Conductors. Almost nobody knows who I am, I just thought telling you would keep this from going too far off the rails. I think they're getting suspicious about our 'argument'. I'm giving up convincing you to leave. I'm also giving up on convincing you to take things slower because that cat is not only out of the bag it's out of the cabin, the hatch, and sailing the winds of the High Wilderness. Hissing."

"I've never been good at taking things slow," she admits, and turns on her heel and stalks back into the building. 

Blueprints, where aaaaare you?

He quickly gives her a location before turning around and dramatically stomping off and reporting 'failure to negotiate'. They're on the second floor, east wing.

She locates the blueprints and examines them for useful cleavage points.

If the blueprints are still mostly accurate she can snip off this whole section of street with two warehouses, a block of bunkhouses, a steam plant, a cafeteria, a maintenance building, a big alloying foundry, and three miscellaneous smallish factories by cutting just one major spar and a bunch of smaller connections.

Perfect. 

She rolls up the blueprint for reference, just in case, and strides out of the building again. 

"Do you have some way of communicating en masse?" she asks cheerfully. 

The agent loudly declares that there's no way they'd willingly hand over the public address system in that building over there!

She suppresses a giggle and flips them all off and goes into that building over there and commandeers the PA system to announce that everyone should pack their things and congregate in the relevant area. 

There is too much panic and discoordination for anyone to resist her making the announcement.

She repeats the announcement a few times, adding "this is not a drill" occasionally. Then she walks outside and takes to the air to see if people are complying. 

Things are pretty chaotic down there. Many of them are complying. Some of them are forming gangs. Some are... Still listlessly working as if nothing has changed. The overseers have all evacuated themselves.

She lands near some people who are still listlessly working and wades into the machinery, fucking it up as much and dramatically as possible with a single diamond punch. 

Panic and screaming! Briefly.

These people all seem worn and exhausted.

"...Wot? Miss...? There's all sorta rumors going down, but we figured we'd just keep working and not get short rations when it settles again."