Alyssa wasn't about to admit it, but she was... kinda starting to enjoy the Jump?
Actually, nah. There were still too many bugs, the best mattress available felt absolutely awful to her mana sense, and she was creeping ever-closer to 'actually willing to kill someone' for genuine spices in their food.
But there were some parts that were starting to be fun. Clark may have been a miserable healer, but unlike his nonexistent skills as a medic, he was developing skills as a cook. Or maybe the tools used in the kitchen were getting better, giving more options for how he could cook things and propping up his cooking with a crutch?
"Tools aren't crutches, Ride," Henrietta suddenly said, causing Alyssa to nearly jump out of her seat. She looked at her Commander suspiciously. Had she...
Henrietta sighed, "Did you not realize you were talking to yourself?"
Alyssa glanced to the side. Oops. "I mean... Isn't it kinda, though? It's an external aid that would artificially increase your skill?"
"That's... how is that a crutch?" Henrietta seemed confused. "That's just a tool. It is not inherently better to know how to do something with nothing but your bare hands. If you don't apply any lessons learned from a 'barebones' approach to a situation to advancing your skill where you do have tools to assist you, it's just a matter of empty bragging. Haleford's skill with cooking is better reflected by these new tools than it was when all he possessed was a clay cookpot. And I know that you've used foci before. How is a direct Skill level boost anything but a crutch, based on your definition?"
"Yeah, but..." Alyssa didn't really know what to say, "Sure. I guess."
She didn't particularly want to stay under the judgmental eye of her boss for too much longer, so she quickly scarfed down the remainder of her breakfast and fled. At least the Blast furnace project was going well, and she was indeed the best person for that particular job.
The last mechanical hurdle that she'd faced was how often the charcoal included in the furnace just... crumbled under the weight of the stone. That, as it turned out, could be handled by just using bigger pieces of charcoal.
Doing so did reduce how much iron she could fit into the furnace in one go, but... eh. It was fine. They had loads of charcoal, and the Blast furnace itself was pretty large. She'd had to go way bigger than she'd initially expected, nearly six feet in diameter and maybe fifteen feet tall? Because yeah, she was putting literal trees worth of charcoal into the thing. It all turned to flames at her fingertips, muahahah-
Alyssa suddenly realized that she was grinning like a mad sorceress, hands extended with fire hovering above her palms as she surveyed blackened and scorched trees soon to be loaded into a furnace...
She sheepishly extinguished the flames and glanced around to make sure nobody had seen her. That was an image she didn't want to be associated with.
She needed to get to work, anyway. The first thing she did was to run around the tower and ensure that the air intakes were still unclogged. There was only one for now, because she needed to manually power it with her spells, but the end design would probably include more, all feeding pre-heated air into the rock and charcoal mixture inside. Those vents were set right above the bottom 'funnel' of the furnace, and angled up so when the rock and iron melted it would run out the hole at the bottom instead of potentially running out the sides.
More advanced furnaces, the likes of which they were nowhere close to building, didn't bother with the blast part of the blast furnace at all. Instead, they conjured tons of fire directly into the iron ore and melted it all into slag and iron. But that approach apparently had a bunch of other complications, like making sure it didn't come out as a giant block of rust, so they were going 'old fashioned' for now. Which came with the challenges that Alyssa could solve.
Puzzles like these were so satisfying.
The top of the Blast furnace narrowed slightly, leaving the top open enough for the rock and burned wood to be added while also letting out the smoke, and while that also let out a bunch of heat, Alyssa didn't really know how best to solve that. At least the jet of fire it sometimes let loose looked cool?
At the very bottom, the furnace had a grate made out of bricks that could let liquid iron and slag out, which just collected in an extended slab-pouring area Alyssa had excavated. How it would be handled long term remained to be seen, because so far she'd had exactly one successful run of the furnace. It had been yesterday, when a bit of iron had poured out of the bottom alongside the slag that kept running out.
She'd known that it was definitely iron mostly thanks to [Rustlewind], but even without that she probably would have known it was different. For whatever reason, she hadn't been mentally prepared for 'slag' to be straight-up lava, which cooled into just normal-looking rocks. But now that she'd gotten used to it, she knew exactly what slag-lava looked like, and molten iron just looked different. Yellower, maybe? A bit more viscous? She couldn't put her finger on it, literally or metaphorically.
That mix of slag and iron had cooled overnight, then cracked into a bunch of pellets that looked like it was sort of half and half of each, with the rocky cooled slag on top of the pure iron nuggets she was after. It was also sharp and slightly pointy, but Alyssa was able to avoid cutting or poking herself too much with the jagged rocks by using ?Tumbling? as gloves.
This was good, but it did make Alyssa wonder how she'd handle things once the furnace was running continuously?
Eh, she'd figure something out. Right now, she just needed to repeat the whole 'actually succeeding' thing. Last time, she'd been kind of...
Well. She should light the furnace first.
Oh, and top it up. That might be important too.
A couple of trees that had been growing near enough the Blast furnace had served as the main structure for the ramp up to the top. A lot of reeds had gone into that, because [Leafstep] could only go so far when she was carrying baskets full of charcoal and iron ore up a steep slope.
Then, as was becoming practically a habit, Alyssa added some more branches, reeds, and mud to the ramp. Each day, it got extended out a bit further in both length and width. It honestly might have been easier to just... build it next to one of the natural variations in the terrain, but it was a bit late for that. So, she was instead basically making an artificial hill that the transport cart might one day be able to trundle up on its own, making it easier for her to fill the furnace...
Not that they even had enough ore to fill the thing its entirety. But, she made up for that with a ton of charcoal. Not literally, but like... it was a lot. And it seemed to work better when they were mixed together, which she wasn't that capable of doing, but she still did her best.
With that day's ore and fuel added to the furnace, Alyssa went to light the flame, only to find out that it was still hot and smoldering from the night before. It wasn't giving off a ton of heat, though everything here was hot from constantly baking in 'molten iron' level temperatures... maybe it was giving off heat? But then she would have felt something from the top.
Eh. She didn't need to light it, that was what mattered.
Yesterday, she'd finally gotten a new spell working, and she was going to try giving it another try. Oliver had taught her some words for 'wind,' and she'd been putting them to good use.
The cast started with her cupping her hands together and activating a double ?Blowback?. The force buildup was negligible to begin with, but she blew into her cupped hands, creating a small chain reaction as her Skill pushed back on the tiny amount of Force the wind was applying to her.
"Gust," she whispered into her hands. "Breeze gust gust breeze. Windswept. Ember. Breeze."
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That last 'breeze' was supposedly different from the ones she was using earlier, and meant 'a gentle wind on a warm summer night' or something like that, and it did a thing to the magic that she could feel but didn't really know how to describe. It was like it made the spell into a ball of cookie dough, but bouncing around crazily between her palms.
She blew on it again, and the spell began to spin and rattle around. "Fire," she spoke slightly louder, and the spell began to get warmer.
Another "Breeze" loosened up the spell like it was composed of yarn, and she could feel the individual threads as it almost began to vibrate within her hands. By timing it correctly, and with a few false starts, Alyssa was able to loop the spell-yarn around her fingers and began to slowly stretch it apart.
That kept the ball from bouncing, and Alyssa teased her hands and fingers apart, like she was sustaining some kind of crazy cat's cradle made out of writhing snakes. She had to constantly make adjustments to prevent it all from bouncing out of her grip and collapsing, which included an almost constant muttering of various magical words spat out at different parts of the spell to 'smack' it back into place.
Then, she 'tied' the spell around her right hand with her left, interweaving the strings around her fingers and contorting her hand into a position that let her keep her ring and pinkie finger pinched against her hand to keep that part of the spell still, while wrestling the rest of the spell in place with the rest of her fingers augmented by her left hand. She'd used a level not long ago to give herself a point of Aura, and while it kind of offended her on a personal level to not specialize it into a substat when she could, she didn't know enough about which parts of the soul she should pull into increased physicality to help her cast like this.
Eventually, she managed to corral all of the magic such that it was held tightly in her fist, but it kept wriggling and trying to escape. Fortunately for it, Alyssa was about to give it just what it was looking for. She held her hand maybe a foot or two from the air intake of the Blast furnace, then thrust her palm forward while releasing all of the spell-threads with a flick, simultaneously activating [Ignite]. A couple strands stayed snared to her fingers, but most of it rushed forward in a spell effect.
[Flamewind]
The new skill came as something of a surprise, because that very much wasn't a [Ranger of Far Lands]-sounding bit of magic, but Alyssa couldn't pay it too much attention as a heat haze surrounded her fist and a hot wind started rushing past it. Small flickers of orange flames popped up as well, all rushing forward into the air intake.
The furnace took a few minutes to properly respond, but the heat coming off it distinctly increased and smoke began billowing from the top. Thanks to the feedback Alyssa was getting from her new skill, she found that she could step a bit further back from the furnace and still keep the breeze firmly pointed into the Blast furnace.
It was kind-of boring work, just maintaining a skill and pointing it into an air intake, but Alyssa felt like she had too much going on. She didn't know much about her new skill, but she couldn't wait to see everyone else's reaction to the revelation that she had earned an off-class skill, by hand no less! That was bound to be impressive.
She pushed the skill a bit harder, and the feel of the air around her suddenly changed. With a bit of a start, Alyssa cut off the [Flamewind]. That didn't alter the feel of the air, though, and she looked around slightly confused at what she was feeling. Had the breeze changed, or something like that? Had she just imagined it? Something felt different, but both before and after the change, she hadn't been feeling anything.
The idea of ignoring it briefly flitted across her mind, but was swiftly discarded. It wasn't her job to ignore things she noticed, it was her job to notice them and advise the Commander on whether or not it was worth paying attention to.
She left the Blast furnace - barely even acknowledging that some slag was starting to drip out of the bottom - and bounded across Tower Stream in a single ?Springlaunch?. She used [Rustlewind] to track down Henrietta where she was practicing her magic halfway up the Spire, and gave the Commander a bit of a satisfying startle when she landed just a couple feet from the other woman's papers.
"Ride! What brings you here?"
"I felt something," she reported. "I was testing a new skill-"
"A new skill?" Henrietta interrupted, impressed. "Apologies. Congratulations. Carry on."
"It might have been my imagination, but... did you feel anything change a few minutes ago?"
Henrietta regarded her warily, "What kind of change?"
"I don't know. The winds changed, maybe? Nothing stood out, there wasn't anything I noticed, and then suddenly I was noticing a different nothing, and didn't like the feeling."
"Do you think you might have imagined it?"
Alyssa fought back an instinctive reaction that it was a dismissal. She had a job to do, and potentially an important one. "I might have," she honestly replied. "I was actively experimenting with my new skill, [Flamewind], and that could have influenced things. "
It almost hurt to have to so casually talk about her new skill instead of properly building it up, but she did have a duty.
Henrietta didn't seem to be too fixated on the skill either, which was unfortunate. Maybe Alyssa could still have fun with the reveal later? The Commander was thinking deeply, for long enough that Alyssa started to feel awkward just standing around. She nervously shuffled her weight between her feet, and debated sitting down. But before she could come to any conclusions, Henrietta looked back up at her.
"This is the first time you've felt this?"
"I think so?"
"And you said that this was a bad change? You felt foreboding rather than fortune?"
That one was tricky, but... Alyssa hesitantly nodded.
"Okay. We'll take it seriously. Go get Haleford and Veeran. I want them within First Tower properly. I'm going to get Smith. Today's task for everyone has changed to construction-work on the lounge."
Alyssa felt a bit weird about a vague probably-nothing bad feeling she had resulting in this much of a change in plans, but also if something bad was about to happen, she didn't want them to be completely unprepared...
Well, that was why Henrietta was the boss, and not her! Henrietta's command meant she could rely on that instead of trying to explain the fact she felt very briefly kind of weird. It meant all she needed to do was find the information, then pass it along to someone else for the decision-making, like a good scout.
Alyssa told Clark first to get back to the main area, then rushed over to where Jacob was setting up extra saws in Lumbermill. By the time she finished there, Henrietta and Oliver were already waiting there, the former drumming her fingers on a table holding a couple pieces of paper and the latter using his staff to direct a bunch of placement brackets to gently set down in a corner.
"Something has definitely happened," Henrietta reassured her. "Smith can't narrow it down either, but he says that something has changed, and his divination has started acting differently."
"It's not really different," Oliver piped up, "I'm getting the same results that I was before, it's just now they... feel different?"
“Nonetheless, once the others get here, I plan to have us determine if there is anything we collectively sense, and subsequently work on a singular project in close proximity to one another until the noticed sensation has passed, or until it becomes untenable to act differently and we must accept the altered risk state."
"Ooh, look at the clouds!" Clark wandered in, eyes fixed on the sky, still incapable of taking anything seriously. The petalfur he’d adopted was cradled in his arms, nuzzling into his hand as he stroked its snout.
"Clouds?" Henrietta fixated on, "What do you see?"
Alyssa turned her gaze upward as well. The sky was the same flawless shade of blue as it had been since they first arrived, free of any features like a sun, moon, or even visible pieces of weather. It seemed like Clark had either lost it even more than usual, or he was… seeing things.
“Damnit,” Alyssa and Henrietta said in unison.
If Clark was seeing things that looked like clouds in the sky, that meant enormous clouds of magic were accumulating in the sky, and given Alyssa’s sense of foreboding, they wouldn’t be good clouds.
“Haleford!” Henrietta barked, “Describe them.”
“The clouds? They are a very appealing form of fuscia and violet, glimmering keenly in the daylight in a most stunning way. Though they are accumulating somewhat rapidly, it is quite stunning to behold. Can you not perceive them yourselves?”
“Not when they’re magic.” Henrietta’s eyes were darting back and forth at everything they had out and loose. “Ride. Gather up anything you think might not stand up to a storm very well. Start with my papers, up where you found me. Smith, start making a box and ward it with the strongest protections you can manage. Go!”
“You believe them to be mana? They do not...” Clark was apparently not a complete idiot, but his voice fell quiet as Alyssa ran off.
She was like a lead caught in a hurricane, leaping from rock to rock as fast as she could. Once she arrived, she scooped up almost all of the papers scattered around and protected by little more than paperweights, bundling them in her arms and leaping directly off the cliff, taking the fastest way she could back to the protection Oliver was making.
But that meant when the storm struck, she was halfway to the ground. Winds blasted through meager defenses and sent her flying, over the wall and into The Jungle beyond.
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