Gah.

The city is: big.

It is a fairly typical þereminian city, which means that it is laid out in neat hexagonal blocks (more efficient packing of things into walkable areas, fewer distressingly long and open straight streets) each of which contains either a park (green space is important to mental health) or a cluster of buildings with shops and public venues on the bottom floors and residences on the upper floors.

Buildings less than three stories (of which a few are visible, even this close to the city center) generally have exteriors designed for climb-ability, with little ledges and hand-holdy bricks. Taller buildings have paintings or murals on some of their faces; all of the buildings have window-boxes with plants in them. This is one of the tallest buildings in the city, so the roofs of other buildings are visible. These tend toward gravel raked into elaborate patterns surrounding the vents of AC units and the rooftop tables and gardens of a people who enjoy standing on top of tall things.

The regular pattern of the city is somewhat broken up by the mouth of the river that flows through it and opens out into the bay, splitting around a pair of oblong islands. The waterfront is a mixture of industrial loading equipment and beach, separated off from each other by walls of trees to isolate the sound some. Normally, the whole area would be alive with people. Right now, it is eerily still — there are still plenty of people in the city, but many of them are underground, on the subway as they evacuate. The remainder are sheltering indoors and staying out of the way of the Emergency Services people. There aren't too many of those either, but the ones that are visible are moving from building to building, doing wellness checks or checks that buildings are fully evacuated, or laying sandbags to direct flood waters, or reporting on the state of the storm drains. A few stragglers jog through the empty streets to get back home before the storm properly makes landfall.

The river is already visibly swollen with rain, fast-running and cloudy as it empties out into the bay.

A woman in a rumpled green robe ducks out from under the shelter of one of the doors up onto the roof, and has a brief word with Vornmeth where he explains what to expect about linking with Restorer of Salt Water and double-checks what information she plans to convey.

The woman turns and gives a bow. "I am Gravilhon, chief engineer of Adequately Un-Swampy City's underground works, including our drainage and subway systems," she tells the Restorer. "I believe I will be able to give you an accurate understanding of how everything is located and connected, and how to place different kinds of barrier for maximum effectiveness."

The Restorer is quite taken with the view. It is noticably larger than the small town they landed in during their first visit, and it's not the scale, it's the intricacy. Their reverie is broken as Gravilhon speaks, and they turn and listen to this.

Their body language is similar to Vornmeth's, reassuringly steady, as if they're carefully integrating what you're saying, deferential to your expertise without giving up their decision making. It's less reassuring with, you know, the scales and the red eyes and the alien fins, though.

"I see. I don't have a name in the same way you do, but my role is to tend to, and care for, the Depths from which I come. I've gone by Restorer of Salt Water here, and while it is incomplete, it's not incorrect, and I'm happy to continue to go by it."

"Are you ready to commune?" they say, and their eyes go from carefully listening to piercingly intense with a red glow. 

knock knock

Her eyes are dragged to theirs, and she marvels at the unexpected sensation.

She was prepared for this! By an explanation all of 30 seconds ago, but, you know, that counts.

She invites the Restorer of Salt Water in, and finds herself in a recreation of her childhood home — a cozy log cabin up in the mountains, strewn with piles of projects. Some are complete, some are in progress, and some are being taken apart for parts. The real house has her dad's model train set, and her parent's card-loom, and her childhood robotics that they're too sentimental to get rid of, even if she hardly visits ...

This mental space has more abstract representations of projects, memories, and periods of her life as well. She lifts a representation of her gaming group's plans for a magical flying castle out of the way and drops the big tuck-away work table down from the wall so that they have somewhere to focus that isn't covered in all of her ... her.

She pauses for a moment, and then remembers Vornmeth's advice about visualizing things. She digs around in the clutter, pulling out a miniature (extremely detailed) model of her city's infrastructure, and letting it unfold on the table. The above ground parts are kind of hazy, although a few buildings are fully detailed, but the parts winding through the transparent concept-of-ground are perfectly detailed. Here is the main subway railyard, and its connection into the wonky interchange under north-downtown. Here is the place where the subway has an inexplicable (infuriating) kink in it because of poor surveying, here is the place where it slopes up to avoid the higher water table from the river. Here are the caverns for holding extra discharge, here are the pumps that motivate that water out into the sea (running full tilt right now, of course). Here is how the rock is permeable, here is where the deep-driven spikes of skyscraper foundations reach down to the deeper layers. Here is where the underground electricity and sewer lines run, and the two pumping stations that send sewage to the water-treatment plant to the north. Here is the remnants of the badly-designed and short-lived pneumatic tube system that has been repurposed to run fiberoptic interconnects, and the place where the fresh water supply lines have to shift down to avoid them.

She gets a bit lost in making sure all the details are exactly right, and almost forgets that the Restorer of Salt Water is there.

As before, the Restorer enters and takes the position that is subconsciously indicated as the visitor's place, in this case standing next to the big tuck-away work table. Again, they carefully avoid looking at things not indicated by Gravilhon, mostly through continued eye contact which might re-add some of the alienness of their presentation.

As Gravilhon starts visualizing the city - her city - the Restorer picks up on the intent to show, and starts absorbing all the details. They carefully absorb all the small connections, all the history mentioned in passing, all the carefully collected details. Gravilhon might notice that collecting the details is more exhausting than it would be on her own. No matter the shape of the transfer, the transfer comes with a cost.

After about three minutes, the Restorer realizes Gravilhon might not end up getting to the locations of the storm barriers before she's spent.

The Restorer, getting a sense for the emotional life of Gravilhon through the osmosis of being in the mind space, hesitates about speaking. Instead they add a set of miniatures of storm barriers of different sizes and nudges them onto the edge of the model, on her side of the table, by way of invitation.

Oh! Right. She was looking at the calculations for these just a little while ago. See, the storm surge is going to be channeled by the shape of the bay, so they need breakwaters here and here. Those are hard to do with sandbags; they should be this tall, and angled to direct the force of the water like this. These other areas won't be directly hit by waves but will have to resist flooding. This corridor needs to stay clear for the continuing evacuation, so lower barriers will be needed here and here, but Emergency Services already deployed sandbags there, and if the Restorer of Salt Water needs space to clear out the existing drains, that water is best directed this way, which means this barrier needs to go in last ...

She rapidly places the desired barriers, sorting them in order of priority, and conveying the wordless engineer's intuition of necessary structural characteristics.

She glances up at the Restorer, and then looks over at the model aircraft hanging in the corner.

"Is there any other information that you'd like me to give you? Do you need to ... take it, or anything?"

"It is your intent of what is for me that steers what I choose to look at and absorb. This mode of conveyance is sufficient!"

They consider for a few moments. In a manner that might feel to Gravilhon like looking in a mirror, the Restorer is absorbed by the miniature.

"Okay, so flush out the drainage systems this way, and... Mhm, mhm..."

"If the barriers could be any size and somewhat free when it comes to shapes, would these shapes be ideal? How many meters would this be, ideally? In some cases, larger might be easier."

"... oh, well if larger might be easier, it would be best to oversize this one and this one. Standard storm barriers are shaped like this for stability, but if you can keep them fixed in place somehow, you could curve the outer wall like this to shed force — Oh! If the shape is free, you could use a valvular conduit here to let water drain from behind this barrier but not come through it. That will only work on these two, though, since the others need to be whole."

She sets a diagram of a valvular conduit on the table beside the city model, and then accompanies it with a sense of the geometry of a force-dispersing seawall.

"For scale, the class A barriers must be at least four meters. The rest have a height profile scaled off of that, like this. But extra height won't be a problem anywhere. Greater length mostly only helps in the sense that it will let you cover further down the priority list, but if it's easier to have longer barriers you can freely extend into these areas — they're shut down to traffic and should be empty — or any of the parks."

"Ah, alas, not that free of shape sadly."

The Restorer studies the area where extra long barriers could go. As they do, Gravilhon becomes aware of a faint psychic noise around the edges of her awareness.

The Restorer notices that she's noticed. 

"The start of the end of our time in this space is here. I believe I've understood what I needed to understand here. If there's nothing else you'd like to show me, I will leave your mind now. Or you may eject me if you prefer." 

They gesture to a button assembled from parts out of her childhood robotics projects to the side of the table.

"Try not to focus on the noise."

She was briefed on this part. She tries to focus on figuring out whether she's left anything out, rather than the opportunity to explore the effects of actual magic.

Nope! No. She has nothing more to say.

"I think that's everything. Thank you; please depart."

They nod, walk away from the table, and out the door to the outside of the cabin. 

Gently, the environment of the cabin starts to fade, and the awareness of her body slowly reappears.

The other two þereminians can tell that this is ending before Gravilhon comes to, by the red of the Restorer's eyes going dim.

The Restorer blinks, and turns to look at the city again. Their city, that they will protect. This time, there is less amazement, and more analysis.

They gradually work through the deep knowledge they inherited and fit it, piece by piece, to the real world. Subways, caverns, drains and barrier locations.

They stand like Gravilhon, when she's too absorbed by something interesting to look awkward.

Gravilhon takes a deep breath, to avoid fretting now that the project has been passed off to someone else for implementation.

"Is there anything else you need to start implementing the plan?" Vornmeth asks. "It probably doesn't make sense for anyone to come with you if you're going to be rapidly teleporting, so it might be best to regroup afterward."

"I think I have what I need, save one question to the both of you. Some barriers might be quite oversized. This might lead to some neighboring areas, not already designated for barriers or overflow, being crushed. In those cases, shall I prefer the collateral damage of crushing, or instead either no barrier or too small of a barrier?"

The Restorer looks to the coast. How close is the hurricane now? In how much of a rush are we, here? What effects are the hurricane having on the city at this point?