"Thank you," she says even as her mind whirls. Nothing is left of it. Pure energy? Made of magic? An entity as abstract as an electrical grid or, more accurately, a storm. No hardware.

"The only problem with it is that I'll need a fair bit of maintenance and recharging even for that much. I want to show you- I finished what I started building in the Spire, it just wouldn't help against Bane."

"Proof of concept, at least. Let's go see."

After a bit of walking and slipping into the rig and powering up- It's heavy, she still doesn't have the legs she'd like for it-

She is wearing a large metal pack with four steel arms with tall, narrow shields oriented vertically on their ends. They take a neutral pose surrounding her in four diagonal directions.

"Behold! If I am struck at with metal or lightning, these will defend me without my input. Go ahead and try it. I can command them, too." A hand gesture, and all four snap into a wall in front of her. Then they go back to neutral. "I had to change them from solid steel to wood-backed steel. Too heavy."

A few of them take stabs at it, with spears and swords and at one point a thrown knife.

"Impressive!"

Huh, what is this feeling, that they should be more blown away than they actually are?

"Well, I want to emphasize how tricky it was to make it defend on its own. Automata like this are difficult, but there are other avenues where something like this can be useful- A saw that cuts and cords logs, or a horse-sized walker that fells trees and hauls them home. A forge to smelt metal independently, if I really push it."

"True. Acting like a live thing is not easy, though it looks obvious to us living things. ...It will serve you well," he says, smiling warmly.

"I hope it will, indeed. And you must have some tales to tell, of finding the new spire- Though if you don't feel like telling them, don't go out of the way on my account."

"Finding the Spire was mostly tedious. You saw part of the Oldwalls; it is all like that. Full of Bane, but mostly the weak ones, and Lantry's sigil work, healing and vigor, meant that the fights didn't wear us down. Walking through many layers, ramps and bridges which open the way only when you find the correct torchkey." He pulls one out of his pack, an angular stone which glows with a steady blue light as if it was clear crystal. "I don't think I can spare it for experiments. Yet."

"-Idea. Portable bridge. Extend it out, anchor it, cross, pull it over, collapse it down. Anchoring'd be the tricky part..."

"The floors are more ordinary stone than the outer walls, and the builders built well, everything's near-perfectly level. Might not be too hard. I think it will come up again, if you want to try it."

"I do, but I also want to try a thousand other things." She shrugs. "The debris cutter first- Perhaps I ought to go get to it?"

A nod. "Maybe best. We'll be back resting at Ascension Hall soon, after we fight the Havoc."

She hisses in displeasure. "-There's a bigger one of those loose down there somewhere? I should hope everything is thoroughly safe before I start moving industrial equipment down."

"A good six hour walk away, and trapped until we fight it. And Havocs are so rare they're nearly mythical. Malices - about double the size of the Scourge and life-draining out to about ten feet - are a real threat, and I will be sure to give you a guard - Barik, a healer, some others - while you're working."

"Okay, great. I'll... Go get started then. Though I'd like to see a proper city at some point, come to think. Or build one."

She nods firmly and turns away to pass back through the spire to her workshop.

"You can come along when I report to the Bastard City, if you don't mind coming within range of Tunon and Bleden Mark. And for building a city - absolutely. Build anew on the foundations where Ardent or Setting-Sun fell. I look forward to it."

"Maybe if my work here goes quickly!"

"Building a city is the kind of thing that gets you known as an Archon. Especially if it's fast - half a year, a couple span. I don't know what power that will bring you - social and magical - but it's worth considering."

She nods. "Very worth considering, and thinking about how to present. Archon of building a city seems better than the archon of wild smithing."

And with that she steps into the portal. Two hours later she's in the Spire forge, working on a huge iron sphere in a dozen oddly shaped segments. The Spark is... Present, but at a very low level. Just a murmur, a hum and pep in her step, she moves steadily, if quickly, and everything is in neat rows.

They do actually follow her through not long after, so some familiar faces quietly poke their heads in to see what she's like at work over the next couple of days. But mostly they're resting, sending and receiving messages, and planning the big fight with the Havoc.

Kohl greets the Master of Mining as he arrives in Lethian's Crossing. But after a brief conversation (in which some rings change hands) he is off again, and bringing the whole group with him. (Even, as Walta may soon hear, Sirin.)

Meroujan Master of Mining has spent a lot of time traveling strange parts of Kyros's Empire under the protection of Tunon (which he has needed, to protect him from the harassment of at least a dozen different Archons at various points), and is correspondingly fairly jaded.

He is, nonetheless, fairly impressed at the huge iron sphere - working anything that size is hard. So he will only be a little bit rude when he approaches her at a pause in her work.

"I hear you're the one who wants enormous deposits of iron and coal. Engineer Waltana, was it? I am Meroujan Master of Mining."

She only spends a couple of hours at a time in the Spire, and seems to have a written plan for what to work on each time she enters. It keeps the insanity much lower, even when she gets excited.

"-Sacrificial anode, but still need to worry about mineral buildup and-" Blink. Blink. "Oh! Yes, welcome, thank you, one moment-"

A notebook is brought out, and paged through, until it reaches a page with sketches and diagrams of some sort of tall tower, and opposite it, a sort of contraption with spinning, toothed blades.

"Yes, my favorite word is industry. I don't know how much you've heard but I'm from far away, where large machines producing vast quantities of things are common. I want to build them here. With a major deposit of iron ore and ideally also coal, I can build this- Continuous miner, chews up rock and ore at a pace you could be hard pressed to match with a hundred people swinging picks. And then this, continuous furnace- Just keep pouring ore and coal in, molten iron comes out the bottom, it'll smelt an average of a hundred rings of iron per hour once you account for bringing it up to heat, letting it cool, and inspecting and repairing for damage. I would suspect that a lot of surface deposits have been exhausted but there's often deeper ones not typically worth digging out, a band of ore underneath a mountain, so that is what I'm hoping for."

He looks surprised by the miner, but outright puzzled at the furnace. "You propose to make that much iron and have it come out good quality without personal attention? I suppose that would require large deposits, but I'm skeptical you'll get anything better than weak pots."

"What the continuous furnace would produce is what I'd call pig iron- Bad iron, basically, cooled all wrong and not totally purified but at least not ore." She turns the page to show a series of other tools. "Industry is about doing things as big as possible, and therefore as cheap as possible. You then process the pig iron further, into good steel like what I have here- Here, a belt kiln to slowly cool it over hours, and smelting pots here so we can skim off slag and add in alloys- I might be able to use automata for some of the process, but the general idea is that an ordinary laborer learns one small part of the work or the use of one specific tool and gets good at that, while an engineer or skilled craftsman oversees everything. If you only need to quench bars of metal the same way over and over again, it's not fun but it's not any more complicated than chopping wood and can pay well."

"Interesting. A poor substitute for an expert Forge-Bound, but for a horde's worth of weapons it could be worthwhile. I can think of a few iron deposits that went deep enough to be worth trying this. How easy will the contraptions be to move overland? The largest iron deposit was in the southwest of Haven, a long trip from either of these Spires and not too close to the Free Cities either."