(The Zevs have left the main cabin again. It's a really good thing their room is soundproofed.)
"But if you have blueprints or it was invented by someone else, that's completely fine? You couldn't make immortality serum without someone else inventing it first, but if it is invented, by someone else, could you do that even if you don't personally know all of the specifics?"
"Yeah. I have to be able to sort of - locate it. Like, I can produce a book I haven't read by knowing title and author, and I can sometimes do it with title and first few words or publication date and author or whatever, but I can't do 'the book you're thinking of and haven't told me', or 'the best version of immortality serum invented somewhere in the multiverse I've never heard of'."
"Okay. So you could very definitively create the materials my wife needs for resurrection, but our bottleneck is still the number of witches available. Still useful, but - apparently we seriously need to throw more things at research and development. How do you feel about putting research facilities with your level of technology in various planes so we can research methods whose bottleneck are not witches?" He makes a 'hmm' sound. "And I'm going to bet that you don't want daemons, so asking the alethiometer for help will be difficult. How much information about your technology can you pack into an easily-transportable box or something? Ice and I are rich, we can replicate instructions if given them and sufficient time."
"Then we do that, and ask the alethiometer very nicely for ways to use that to make a medical solution for immortality so that it's more easily scaleable. And also make research facilities and hire lots of very smart people to outdo the technology you gave us, and other smart people to use the things that you did give us to improve life for people in general and also make us even more absurdly rich."
"How likely are they to visit my world? We don't even have a portal to it, anymore. But - we could hand it to the colony instead? With the caveat that most of them don't have the education background people from Earth do, what with only recently learning about germ theory."
"And even if it isn't, I bet we can rig up some sort of technology thing to let us get by with a more elegant mirror system, something that keeps one half of several mirror pairs there and has them facing each other when we're talking to people from other planes."
He comes up with the luck charm (a few of his feathers, that fell out naturally and tied together neatly) and holds it up. "And if you can copy this, you can copy medallions, too."
"Well. I'd know if it worked if I made it because it wouldn't have exploded in my face or turned it pink or anything, but - putting it on, seeing if you get just a little bit luckier after. There's probably a way to figure out through magic, but I'm not that good yet."
And then, without further ado, she starts making her dad a house. An underground one, created by turning part of the ground to air and then transmuting supports to keep the entire thing from collapsing. She's borrowing the floorplan she used when making her own house in Heaven - it's pretty suited for a bachelor, though she has to add a kitchen that was basically absent before.
"Think you can add a generator so he gets power? I don't know how to handle plumbing, either," she admits to Cam. "I can do the pipes no problem, but I don't know how to manage infinite water."
Adana starts adding finishing touches, turning the walls to a nice color, changing the floor to carpeting and a hardwood flooring in the dining room and kitchen. She's going to leave the technological things to Cam, but she can do the wiring herself. Electrical outlets (shaped differently than Max, Ice, and Cypress are used to) are put on the walls, along with light switches (but no light yet) and plumbing.
"I'm pretty sure we can manage an illusion, but the problem with illusions are that they aren't actually protective. It just looks like an ordinary tree." He sighs. "Essentially, we're having this problem because we had a Zev make the portal and I couldn't make it fancy and protective."
"Yeah." Cam walks around the tree speculatively, and then makes - a bark layer. It sort of bulges, since it has to be three inches away from a portal that reaches down to ground level and then blend in with the tree's roots, but it actually looks okay, considering. He reaches for a nook in the bark and tugs and displays a cunningly-hinged door. "Bark."
And she goes and messes with the other side of the tree - it seems her changes are a bit bizarre, at first, but then it becomes obvious what she's doing. She's giving the bulge in the tree a compensation on the other side, so that the tree looks like it decided to twist a bit while growing and then changed its mind later. It's pretty subtle, but it helps make the tree look less bulgy.
"Ha. Progress."
Cypress stares at the tree for a while mutters something about 'environmental light conditions' to himself, and then - the tree is subtly illusioned. The shape of the tree isn't changed much at all, but the texture of it looks more whole. The roots seem to meet up perfectly with where the bulge is, and the tree looks perfectly coherent. For sanity's sake, the nook in the bark is still present.
"There," he says, brightly. "That should work."
"Actually, it might be better if we made little apartments, it's entirely possible Phix and I might decide here's safer than home. Also, her mom's probably going to get resurrected, and might need a place to stay. So like, tiny kitchens, bathrooms, a washer and dryer, plumbing..."
"Four apartments, a nice big first floor for - meetings, congregating for planning of shenanigans? With its own bathroom so we don't have to invade people's apartments, and one for the portals to be installed in... I'll start it without any furniture, and a couple floors with nothing in them except for the stairs between the portals floor and the apartments, and as we use it - I will make a labelmaker. You can label parts of the Belfry with what you think ought to go there and when the labels have accumulated I will cruise through and make the requested additions."
And then she starts muttering things about where to put what medical equipment and how diseases and pestilence won't be a problem with Spring but whether or not it's worth the space given up to have backups just in case she's not present. She also starts drawing out a basic floorplan of the medical bay on a mostly empty page of her notes.
Temperature regulation's handled by Ice, negating the need to keep the entire place enclosed, so they don't. They don't open the entire mountain up, but they do want it to be pretty easy to leave, too, so various exits to the outside world are made. Adana does some fiddling with the content of the mountain in order to keep the entire thing from collapsing in on itself, but she hides the high-tech, strong, super tough, not-actually-nice-to-look-at alloy behind more aesthetically pleasing rock mosaics.
Electrical wiring is completed throughout the entire place, with a very large generator situated neatly by the base of the mountain. Water filtration is handled similarly. With the difference in technology levels, Cam has to add a method to convert power and there are two types of outlet instead of just the one - one for Cam and Adana's level of technology, and one for everyone from twenty-first century Earth. It's likely they'll have to add more, but since they don't actually know what those are yet, they can't do anything more to compensate for them except leave lots of room in the wiring and space in the walls.
Along with the meeting room, medical bay, apartments, library and computer lab, various conveniently located bathrooms, portal hub, and secret passages to various important places and exits and entrances out of the mountain, they add a room specified for Ice's rituals. It gets two carved diagrams into the floor - one for resurrection (the updated version that works on mages properly) and one for granting immortality. There's another large, blank space for other rituals, and an absurdly large pantry filled with dried and neatly labeled herbs for use.
Another addition is one that isn't actually working yet - Prime and Cypress are very, very insistent that a mirror network with more than two mirrors attached to each other is impossible, but they would both very much like a technological solution to this problem. Unfortunately, no one present has the know-how to actually manage it. Yet. Adana promises sincerely to work on it, she's been itching to learn about technology eventually anyway, and is pretty happy to spend her time studying that. Until then, they have the space set aside with plenty of room for the angel to work in.
Less importantly, but for the sake of fun, they add a giant recreation room of doom. It gets equipped with a large television, various video game consoles (complete with games) and a neatly organized movie and television show collection. Hilariously enough, they are probably not going to use this very often, but having it around seems like a good idea in case of traumatized, harrowed alts. Or possibly just for when someone is bored. Either one.
For the sake of placating the neighboring gods, they also put a shrine to each in the compound. One on Rae's side, one on Perinixu's. It's probable they both will get little use, but both gods will appreciate having little shrines dedicated to them anyway.
When pressured for an opinion of the place, Zevs ask for a sparring ring, which is provided. The Zevs are extremely excited about this. They (well, Zane, but the other Zevs help with ideas) fill it with lots of weapons and gleefully start trying them on each other. Non-lethally, thankfully.
And then, they have a portal hub and base of operations.
"You know, we could move in here," he points out to her. "Since if we go back where we were living yesterday we have accessibility problems and I am disinclined to move in with your dad. We can still visit our world whenever and in our spare time not be shot at for being loose daeva."
"Because she's Rae's acolyte," explains Spring to the daeva. "If you spot me flying it's because of this necklace Prime made me. Anyway. Idania, the winged people do magic architecture, how do you feel about the architectural decisions you made when you had to cajole people into hauling the relevant objects up a mountain?"
That sentence and the implications of it actually causes her to briefly drop out of the sky and land slightly less than gracefully. And then, after a brief stumbly correction, she says intensely, "No. Not at all, magic architecture, what do you mean by magic architecture, what are the exact limits of what you magical winged people can do? Because I have ideas."
"Fairies you can get to do relatively brief things for, like, food or trinkets. Angels haggle more but they're still in the market for material goods, especially complicated ones. Us demons are tricky to pay but you can get nice ones to do things for you with book recommendations."
"I do know a lot of books, but - you're under Cypress's fancy translation spell, right? I bet the demons I summon wouldn't be, and it's not like I know that many foreign books." She tilts her head. "What do the non-nice ones want people to pay with? Do they just not make deals, or is it more like, 'Bwuahahaha, let me have two continents and an island and enslave all of the people on them, and you can have a pretty house," or something?"
"It's really tempting to say, 'giant freaking house with lots of absurdities,' but if I'm honest, something smaller and more personal's better. Nice bedroom with a large and fluffy bed, spare bedroom for a friend, kitchen, dining room, living room that is secretly trying to be a library when it grows up big and strong, nice view, big windows, bathrooms that are kind of huge for the size of the house and also in comparison to normal houses in general. Oo, ooh, and a workshop, with - tons of equipment, how high tech can you go?"
"I want that. I want instruction manuals for that, I want - I want things that are progressively more complicated for me to take apart and understand and then put back together again, I'm not picky on what I'm aiming at but I want to be on the cutting edge, damn it, and just because I have the rest of forever doesn't mean I am going to slack on getting started. I want to learn it, I want to have learned it yesterday, and I would like lots of equipment to learn all of it as fast as possible."
"I - don't know? Anything I do know is dwarfed in comparison to your technology levels, so I am considering myself a glorified baseline, except for the things I've figured out about how mage-magic works with acolytehood. But I can really only cajole my boyfriend into testing things so often, because, stupid mana regeneration. Uh - quick, what's a thing that you do not know a lot about but want to learn about?"
"Hmmm. What baseline does that require to get a helpful understanding of it? How useful is it to do? Actually - is anything in magic undiscovered, I can do magic, that probably requires me to learn less about the mechanisms behind things happening in order to make actual breakthroughs for stuff. But I'll be doing that, too, bet I can combine things," she half-mutters. "I can keep doing the mage thing by proxy, the multi-portal necklace thing was my idea, obviously I can manage things there, even if the wait time's a pain..."
"I - don't know? I have zero baseline to work off of, you realize. Basic technology that you have that is normal and ordinary for you to have around, like - like - I looked up things on Wikipedia, like a toaster? Or something? And either the promise that it is definitely safe for me to take apart or books on how it works. I need to understand what level I am working with, I am literally just sort of - floating off of the idea that everything is run off of magic and that is so not true, I know it, there's magic and then there's technology that looks like magic, and I need to build some sort of comparison point to figure out which is which and work from there. I like understanding how things work. And I don't, I am absurdly far behind through no fault of my own, and I don't know where to start."
"Okay, look, if you're working from Wikipedia you're thinking - early twenty-first century stuff. How about I outfit you with toasterlike kitchen appliances when I make your house, and as long as they aren't plugged in you can pretty much take those apart however you like, and I'll give you their instruction and spec manuals too? And from there you can make more informed requests and we can ratchet you up to our time."
Cam and Aya work out what kind of house she wants while she collects things she wants to keep in their current forms out of her existing residence and Adana gets rid of it, and then Cam puts the new house for her in place, and then he and Adana go and make one elsewhere on the mountainside for themselves. All this takes more than an hour, after which they do Idania's too.