"Good." (Kireh's not sure if rewarding her just for having ideas will do anything, or if she's just channeling ideas from elsewhere, but it's worth a try.) "Could you make a discreet weapon? How long can you store pressurized steam?"

"Even the best insulation isn't perfect, steam cools and condenses. Few hours, a day at most. Can I make a weapon. Yes." Half a dozen ideas flit through her head. Springloaded knife. Steam pistol. Air-pressure pistol. Spring pistol. Wrist-mounted crossbow. Electrical contacts in a suit sleeve, with wires on the knuckles. "I guess it depends on what the qualifiers on 'discreet' are?"

"It's for a customer. My understanding is that it should be easy to conceal and obtained without leaving a record, but it's okay if using it makes a commotion. I was planning to buy a gun from a criminal contact, which is legal as long as the gun isn't stolen."

And the idea about the electric glove is the same as before, which further reassures her that Waltana is able to be sparky about an idea multiple times.

"How cheaply could you make a spring pistol?"

"Bet I could knock one together with the stuff you showed me before. Springs are pretty easy. It'd be, uh, one shot and then winding it for a long time, though."

"Great, would it be quiet? Even if that's not what my customer wants, I expect to be able to sell it to someone."

Time to draw up plans for the rubber machine and pressure cooker and spring pistol, whether Waltana likes that or not, and look at the IEC plan for the drainage pump. "They're also selling plans for a ventilation pump and a mining drill and hunting equipment, would those be useful to you?"

And now off to look at the house!

Having actual, detailed, seriously engineered plans took at is a HUGE help!!!

She makes some progress on sketching out all of the above, hands constantly itching to start working instead of drawing, and goes through a considerable portion of Kireh's supply of paper, muttering under her breath and in the flow of IDEAS, intuition bringing one notion to the fore, then math about pressures and lengths and forces flipping through her head to see if it's sane- She's happy explaining the mechanics of steam temperature and pressure, there's literally a reference book in the library that's nothing but someone meticulously measuring the properties of steam at thousands of different pressures and temperatures and then making Complicated Charts, it's AMAZING how useful that is and how ridiculously tedious it must have been to work out, it's reasonable that the product of such work is expensive, she remembers some of it but that's not an actual reference-

-Right, the house.

"Are you sure you want me along? I'm visibly low-class and might inhibit your- mystique-"

"I wanted your opinions on the house, in particular if a basement room can be a workshop for you, but actually it's more useful for both of us if you stay here and think." She takes out a folded scrap of paper. "Here's a list of questions. Only reveal one at a time and be aware of breathing at least sixty times before going on to the next one."

What could you do with access to a flying machine?

What could you do with help from a glassblower?

What could you do with help from a trained engineer?

Can you make a person better tolerate the cold, or tolerate heavy clothing?

Can you get energy from the changing seasons?

Can you get energy from the ocean?

Can you make glass from rocks?

Can you keep ice from melting?

Can you keep water from freezing?

Can you keep a forest alive without putting it in a hothouse?

What could you do with my body? I can heal from most careful surgery.

What challenges would there be to living deep underground?

Can you make a flame that only produces light?

Can you reduce the amount of food a person needs?

The question about help from a trained engineer is somewhat answered already by Waltana's use of math and the remembered reference book, but Kireh leaves the question in to see if she has anything to add.

Now that Kireh is traveling alone, she stops along the way at the address of the engineer who wanted to sabotage the IEC.

The engineer glares, then eyes her in surprise and lets her in to a fairly large house, empty except for himself, and starting to become a bit shabby. He walks past a bedroom and a kitchen to a workshop, where a Steam Core takes up most of the room, nestled among a great pile of tools and parts.

"This little beauty... Can you guess what she does?" He asks with a malicious grin.

Reveal itself as a monster once installed in a shelter - no, it's a machine, not a construct creature, it does one simple thing. "No idea, but if it looks like a common machine to someone who could tell, I'm guessing it does the job of that machine slightly worse, making products that randomly fail, or behave misleadingly. If not, it's a weapon." Or makes weapons? Sewing violent Chaos in the shelters would only indirectly make the IEC look bad...

"To be clear, I am not going to break any laws intended to be followed and actually enforced, and I want to maintain cooperative relations with the IEC. I'm mainly here to learn more about what happened to your son. Was he killed by a lapse in Lawfulness? I can offer you justice.

Also, I would like to learn more of your motivation, in the hopes of providing you with opportunities more satisfying than sabotage, and more useful to me.

You don't seem to be using most of the space in this house; are you interested in renting it out, keeping only the workshop for yourself? Do you have any experience as a bodyguard, butler, accountant, or musician, or in working with engineers who have a spark of genius?"

"He was killed in a riot! A riot, because they couldn't control the fine folk they'd carted in to do the heavy lifting! Justice and cooperation, and here I thought you were evil. Well, if you don't want to help me I'll just have to do it myself. You swore to keep things to yourself that time, didn't you? Maybe I'd better not tell you anything else and just wish you good day, hmm? Those sanctimonious bastards got precious Jeremy killed, the only thing I had left that matters. I don't fucking care about much else unless you can resurrect people."

"I'm Lawful Evil. If there's a way for me to get the person responsible, for you to torture and send to Hell, great. I prefer coercion to cooperation, but I'm too weak and limited to coerce the IEC.

I'm happy to help you get revenge. Who was in charge of preventing riots? Who put them in that position? Who set their policies? Maybe the IEC as a whole can be blamed, maybe not. If we can figure out who to blame, you can focus the entirety of your effort on ruining the guilty without waste.

I will not disclose anything you tell me, or allow it to change my actions. The purpose of this visit is to pair you up with myself. Unless I find another person to pair you with, or you give me permission, I will not contact you again.

There is a distant possibility I might be able to arrange a resurrection someday. What is the condition of your son's body?"

...He takes a deep breath. "If there's anyone I might believe it of, it would be you. Though do no such thing if you determine that he's in Heaven, mind you. It's in a steel coffin in a graveyard in Swansea. Ought I retrieve it while I can?"

He'll fetch the note they sent him and wrack his mind for context and old conversations, with some prodding from Kireh to assist in poring over it all. Jeremy Clyde was an engineer at Site 445, on Severny Island, killed in a 'labor disturbance'. The official note is clearly trying to avoid blame, but he has letters from Jeremy describing the deteriorating situation. The Site Captain, one Roger Avon, imported huge numbers of Russian laborers who didn't understand English or have technical skills, didn't have enough translators, and things fell apart very quickly when the Russian government supplied moldy potatoes and inadequate steel for their part of the deal. Poor housing at the site, poor healthcare, alcohol everywhere, strikes and unrest. And he got hit in the head with thrown rocks while trying to keep things from escalating even further. Site 445 was declared a failure, abandoned and evacuated- Apparently over half of the workforce died. All because Roger Avon is A BLITHERING FOOL who DESERVES TO DIE!

"Thank you for directing my anger! I shall have to figure out where he was assigned next!"

"Yes, retrieve it. I don't know what the requirements for resurrection might be, as magic works differently here and I have much to learn, but in general keep it in a state close to how it was when he died.

It is good that you are focusing your passion." She is in fact delighted with his progress. "It sounds like the Russians also need to be investigated. ...What do you know of the current relations between the British and Russian governments? It affects both the official approaches I might use and my ability to take matters into my own, hm, claws."

"I'll look into it. I don't really know much about international politics. Russia's been closer and closer to the European powers. They lost the Crimean war, some four decades ago, mostly thanks to bumbling at sea, and their economy's worse. We're not at war now anyway, and we sold them the Generator designs for a bunch of Siberian islands they weren't using anyway, I remember hearing. England imports coal and wood and raw iron in vast quantities, exporting machinery and tooling." He sighs. "Russia is very poor. Not some savage tribe, quite, but they just don't have the industry, not like England or America, they're still mostly peasants. Perhaps they're to blame, but it's not as easy to strike a whole country with the tar brush as a single man who you know made mistakes."

"Hmm. There might be a single Russian man, but yes.

Can you make further inquiries yourself, or do you want me to, or do you want me to arrange a different intermediary for you? I can adapt to whatever budget you offer.

What does the machine do?"

"I can make my inquiries. Be a bit more subtle than you doing the same... Oh! Well, not much at first. Perfectly average Steam Core, London type. At least, until I fail to perform a certain secret procedure for too long, whereupon it will start to almost work, doing fine most of the time but occasionally sending the systems haywire. Losing track of cycle counts, hitting the valves a bit too hard, shutting down for ten minutes then acting like nothing happened. That sort of thing. There's the risk it simply gets put out of use before becoming truly dangerous, admittedly... But steam cores are rare enough that I can hardly see it standing idle for long."

"Ah, the part where it works until you stop suppressing it is clever. Are you still going to use it against Roger Avon?"

"Well, that depends on whether I can formulate a plan that actually hits him. Get assigned to his shelter, p'raps? If he has one, I'll be making inquiries there too..."

"Okay. Let me know if you ever want to sell it to someone who won't ask questions about the spaces for extra parts or whatever is in there.

I need to go to an appointment now."

(She wants to ask more about Severny Island and try to get permission to investigate it herself, but realistically it's probably too far away and already stripped of valuables, so not worth whatever he would charge her to draw that much suspicion.)

Time to look at the house for sale. Does it have good ventilation? A basement room? Servants' quarters? How close are the neighbors?

What's the price?

The house for sale is on the west side, three blocks from the outer edge of the riverside factory area. It's a big place and has about fifteen feet of garden on all sides. The man selling it is a stuffy-looking bureaucratic type, a subtly different social role than 'engineer'. Closer to a noble, though he makes sure to disclaim actual nobility and mutters something about banking. It's a large and fancy place, three stories plus a large basement, servants' quarters for eight and an extensive set of kitchens and storerooms for them to use, with its own coal bunker and boiler, piped hot water to every room, a big central air fan installation (which isn't professional workshop quality, but is miles better than opening a window), and an electrical generator powering all the lights. It's light on easily-removable furnishings, while large installations like the furnace and kitchen appliances are still present.

The sticking point is: He wants one thousand pounds for it. Immediately. Also, he's pretty clearly a bit intimidated by Kireh. Or maybe just very very anxious.

She stays away from him and keeps her claws folded behind her back. It would be wrong to try to make him like her, of course, but it's fine to avoid frightening him further. She doesn't care what personal reasons he might have to worry. Of course he's in a hurry to sell - owning land in the whole city is going to be pointless soon unless you plan to build a shelter. Or maybe he has debts, or wants to raise money for a bribe. The furniture is already gone without a trace, so he probably didn't think it was possible to sell the house at all. Or maybe the custom here is to sell houses empty.

It's a good house. Fancier than she'd prefer to pay for, but maybe Mr. Cromwell will like that, and the equipment and the amount of space she thinks she can negotiate for are excellent. If the city is abandoned, the location is convenient for salvaging the factories, and being within the city and away from the ocean might protect from the worst of the weather.

Kireh has little experience with money. When she was alive, she didn't have money of her own until her husband died and she joined the army, and then she still didn't have much opportunity to spend it before she was killed. Mortal followers of Marra use money with non-Marrans, and in cross-hierarchy trades among themselves, but it's risky to haggle: discussing a deal is a way to build affectionate emotions. It's better to set a price in advance or ask a shared superior to set terms for a contract.

One thousand pounds seems fine? Renting at twenty pounds a month would pay off a loan in fifteen years, which seems like a normal amount of time, in the hypothetical where life continued without the oncoming cold?

"Immediately? It will take me at least an hour to gather information and arrange a loan. Is that acceptable? Also, I want to read your mind, or get similarly strong assurance of your honesty by some other means. I will pay you the average of one thousand pounds and your actual minimum price."

"I understand you don't have the money right this second, it'd be mad to carry that much. Paid in full before you move in, and preferably as soon as possible, though mind I am speaking to other prospective buyers. But see here, I won't permit you to violate the sanctity of my own thoughts unless you compensate for that. I can provide deeds to prove my ownership, purchased free and clear eighteen years ago, there's no liens or loans or leeways against this place, it's mine to sell and the land it sits on. I'll drop up to ten pounds off the price to pay back for you hiring a solicitor of your choice to confirm it."

Haggling is such a waste... "Understood. I'll make a counter-offer after consulting with a solicitor."

She'll talk to Mr. Cromwell first though.

Earlier-

A maid comes into the rented inn room with a heavy bucket of coal for the hearth. "Excuse me miss, er..." The maid eyes the scattered papers and parts and tools, and the young girl with grease-stained hands hunched over the desk and muttering. "Er, coal for your hearth?"

"Give it here," she briskly demands. "And where did I put the whetstone, this broken junk..."

The maid frowns and sets down the bucket, then quietly observes the young woman, who doesn't even seem to notice her peering around the room. She pretends to tidy up and clean the hearth, brow furrowed at the random assortment of junk and parts. She watches over the young woman's shoulder for a bit, where she's fussing with tiny metal pieces and lenses, hands moving in fast, complicated ways that the maid can't really make heads or tails of. Metal bits, bits of string, a small knife shaving away at one of the parts, a bit of oil applied... It certainly looks very technical, at least.