"That is true! Uh, don't cannibalize each other if you do start starving to death, it's not catastrophic and we're not in the Neath so probably Mr. Eaten isn't an issue but, uh, if there are any metaphysical effects of cannibalism I wouldn't expect them to be good, so."

"...Ew. I'll warn everyone, sure. Working under starlight all the time isn't going to help on that front. I'm already feeling dread that London will find this place and smash it up or seize it. Maybe they'll decide to ignore us, like the Floating Parliament, maybe not."

"Well, my light cures starlight, so there's that."

"And we took on a lot of stained glass and some of the stuff to make more. I'm sure there's sand to be had somewhere. Ah, that's a long-term worry."

Nod. 

"How many more rescues before space becomes an issue? Assuming relatively efficient tunneling."

"Space is already an issue. It's going to be an issue for months. But the rock is plenty big, if that's what you mean. There are, I think, fourteen Workworlds worth the name. Well, twelve now."

"Well, the way space is currently an issue, more hands will help as well as make more work."

"...We need a mayor. We need an overseer to organize it all. If some of these people want to go to London that would help. Or if you fenced some cargo and pay for our shopping list with it. God, I don't know if I can handle this. I used to be a lawyer, you know?"

"Heh. I know I can't handle this, but we do what we must. Let me know who wants to go and if I have carrying capacity left I'll haul cargo too." 

"It'll take a couple hours to get that sorted. Could you glow at a bunch of trees in the meantime? I had some people replant the seeds from the first batch."

"I could do that--actually, better idea, you said something about using Hours, can I watch your Loom in action? I can do time-light but I don't have a very solid grasp on how to use it yet."

"Oh! We have whole crews who know things about that actually. They didn't want to send us actual engineers, but we had bootleg looms, and hoarded Hours, we have people who know their stuff."

He leads Lucy over to the front of a rowhouse, where a tall spindly metal machine is being fussed over.

"This is it. Gorky! Teach the nice lady how Hour-spinning works, please!"

"Can do, boss!" 'Gorky' signals the pulley holding him harnessed into the air down, then holds his hand out for a shake when he reaches the ground. "You fixed my blacklung, so my not coughing on ya is thanks to you!"

She shakes his hand. "Well, hey, nobody deserves to have to deal with that. Show me how to make the purple light do my bidding." 

He knows all about how 'bloody impossible bottled Time' works!! The technical side, anyway. Can't help with the space magic side.

Ahhhh, okay, so that's how that...and that...hm, so..aha. 

She switches over and begins projecting a soft purple glow between her palms, playing cat's cradle with it until she has a glossy purple geode in her hands. 

"Oh, that'll be handy! You can just straight sell those. They're stable that way, but they're stable and more valuable but less fungible other ways too - here, lookit this refined spool-" It's sort of like the difference between a neatly coiled garden hose versus one haphazardly spun onto its spindle, criss-crossing and knotting and leaving gaps and unaligned layers.

"Can I see a machine doing something with that?"

"Yeah, we're gonna speed up the beds in a bit. Cycle people through, give 'em some privacy and rest. I could feed it a couple inches right now as a test run...?"

"Once I see how it goes I can probably replace whatever you use." 

He does some shouting and some adjusting and swipes the end with a specialized tool to fray it, then catches the frays in a spot near the bottom of the Loom, and- the apartments are a-glow as the strand is ever-so-slowly pulled through and dispersed into light.

She has to stare at it a little more than she did for the raw Hour but eventually she takes the end of the strand and twists purple light from her fingers onto it. 

"Cor. You know, this big spool's worth a few hundred Sovereigns." He thumps it. It's about the size of a barrel, with wider circular ends and shorter sides. "How exactly are you doing that, maybe we could make it more efficient, are you-" He devolves into jargon. 

She can definitely get more efficient at it with tools, she's doing the equivalent of twisting wool into yarn with her fingers and a distaff would be extremely helpful. 

He 'borrows' some machine tools from the maintenance yard and improvises some things!! This is very exciting!!

She grins and refills any spools they have and tops them up on raw Hours too and then goes off to accelerate plant growth more efficiently than with just Mountain-light.