Chapter 122: Craft

Although Mizu seemed more cheered up when Arthur left, he still believed that he had a boyfriend-duty to help her in whatever way he could. The actual options for doing that felt pretty limited, but that didn’t mean there weren’t good choices to make at all, and they all pointed in the same direction. If Arthur wanted to help, his best shot was getting as much of Mizu’s waterway project done as quickly as possible, so there was more to show her mom when she made it to Coldbrook.

Arthur couldn’t do that on his own. His skills revolved around enhancing the water that Mizu had pumped out of the ground. The only place that he could help with the project was the weller-specific enhancing tea, which he was already making for Mizu. Luckily, he knew just the person who would be up for the job.

“The water pumps, Milo, think of the opportunity,” Arthur said. “You were talking about the town infrastructure before. This is your chance to make a mark. When Ella comes, you can show her what you’ve done. But Mizu’s mom is coming soon. I’m calling in favors, Milo. Big, big favors.”

“Like my mom cares,” Milo said. “You know how interesting she finds blacksmithing? Not at all. Machines are even worse, unless they have to do with cooking. She’s going to show up, yell at me for not eating enough, and then ask me where my kitchen is. And then she’s going to yell at me for not having a kitchen, and ask where your kitchen is.”

“She won’t really yell,” Arthur said.

“No, she won’t.” Milo nodded. “But she doesn’t have to, does she? She’ll glance at my emaciated form, then scream at me by means of severe, intense cooking. Anyway, you don’t have to call in any favors. I have to work on something, and if it helps Mizu, it’s no problem. Especially since it’s probably the highest-lift work I can be doing right now.”

“Really? What about stuff like tools for the farmers, or something?” Arthur said.

“Most people are mostly set on tools. If I was doing anything else, it would be other automation stuff. Machines. The courier carts. Stuff like that.”

The courier carts were Milo’s baby, a project he was pouring a ton of time and thought into. His idea was to make a set of mini tracks parallel to the roads that went all the way through town, allowing a majicka-driven cart to travel on them. The eventual goal was to make it a sort of goods transportation system that people could send deliveries all over town with. On paper, the concept sounded simple until stuff like multiple tracks, hundreds of destinations, and the possibility that the carts could collide was taken into account.

Arthur had seen the plans Milo had for them, and they were complex to a point that they could probably put some pocket watches to shame. And that was before the blacksmith got into the tiny wrinkle of not actually having a runist in town to help him with the parts he couldn’t do himself. If Milo ever got it working, it would make business-to-business supply-sending much more convenient, at the very least. And it would make delivering food to people when they were busy at a problem much easier.

It was cool, it was revolutionary, and it was the kind of thing that might change the whole culture of the town if he ever got it working. But that was where everything was right now. No one was sure if he could get it working.

“How’s that coming along?” Arthur asked.

“Slowly. I’m working on the tracks, mostly. The big mechanical stuff. And then working on the system to actually aim them with Spiky,” Milo said. “There are classes out there that could get that done in a day, he says. But we aren’t likely to get any of them here.”

“Well, I appreciate you taking a break,” Arthur said as he pulled out a map. “I have a list from Mizu of places where she could use a pump. Can you take a look?”

They bent over the map and figured out what they’d work on first together. It was more than Arthur had expected, given how simply Mizu had explained the project. There were pump markings all across the map, some of them for moving the water faster, some of them to increase turbulence for reasons Arthur didn’t understand, and even one that pointed backwards.

“Gods, Milo. Can you even maintain this many pumps?” Arthur asked.

“Sure. But I don’t have to. Not forever, anyway. The actual machine is pretty simple. Mizu dug the channels pretty shallow, so getting to them is just prying up a few bricks and pulling the pump out of the water. I’m building more pumps than we need, so I’ll pull out the broken pumps as they go, dump in a fresh one, and then fix the broken ones to get ready for the next thing. It’s not that bad,” Milo said confidently.

“And they just… run?” Arthur said. “It seems like they’d need a lot of majikca to power themselves like that. An awful lot.”

“They do. But I built them to run off generic majicka-gatherers. Those can be ordered from the city, and each of them will last a long time. Longer than the pumps at least. We got a bunch of those gatherers with our initial supplies as a just-in-case thing. Should last us a year or so, before we switch off the barter to actual currency here.”

“You call it barter. It’s more like everything in town is free.” Arthur grew his own tea and boba-root plants to grind into flour, but gave tea to anyone who asked for it without messing around with coins at all. He hadn’t had to think about the differences between a small, coin, and large since he came to the frontier. The last time he had actually used money was back in the city when he was preparing for the move. No one else in the town charged anything for their services either. “I’m actually a little confused about why we don’t just keep it that way. It’s not like anyone ever runs out of money? Do they?”

“Not really, but the money’s not the point. Settlements have tried to go without money,” Milo said. “Short term, bartering or even having everything for free works fine. Long term, everyone switches back to coins eventually.”

“But why?” Arthur asked.

“I think it all comes down to priorities. You’re asking me for pumps, right? At the same time I have to make more courier carts, and say Rhodia wants better blowing-tubes for her glassmaking. Only one of them can be first, right? How do I balance your need for the pumps with how much Rhodia wants a new machine?”

“With money?”

“More or less. So you guys are doing the job of prioritizing for me. Plus, if someone wants something that’s going to take a whole day of my time and stop other work from getting done, then they’ll have to pay more to show their commitment. Bartering works for a while, but people have studied it, and the system becomes inefficient very quickly. Using coins makes people think about priorities. More people actually end up having the things they actually need sooner.”

Milo ducked deeper into his shop as he talked, grabbing a big crate and hefting it onto a cart with some difficulty.

“That actually does make sense,” Arthur said as he helped Milo with the crate.

“All right, Earth-man. I’ve got your pumps. Grab that pry bar off the wall there, and we can go start setting them in their rightful place,” Milo said.

The actual process of putting in the pumps wasn’t as hard as Arthur thought it would be, but it was still pretty intense labor. They’d get to a spot, pry bricks out of the ground, drop the pumps in, then anchor them with spikes that Milo would drive right into the mortar below. Then they’d seal up all the damage they’d done, pick up all their equipment, and move on to the next. Each job took twenty minutes or so, even once they got used to the work.

With dozens of them to get through, the only things keeping Arthur motivated were his desire to help Mizu and the pumps themselves.

“You know, when Mizu told me these pumps were cute, I thought it was a weird weller thing,” Arthur said.

“Nope. These are the cutest pumps I’ve ever made. Maybe the cutest pumps there are,” Milo said as he smiled at his handiwork.

Somehow, and for reasons Arthur didn’t yet know, Milo managed to make each of the square pumps look like a fish curled in on itself. The sides that faced the water were square and functional, but the sides that faced the bricks were scaled, had little fun fins, and looked upward with big fishy eyes. The details were all cast in place when Milo made the cases for the pumps in the first place.

“Why do that though?” Arthur asked. “I know the world has majicka, but I refuse to believe all of this makes the pumps work better. And nobody is going to see them down here.”

“I have to cast the iron anyway. And it only took a few hours to carve the molds. I might be screwing with these pumps for the rest of my life, so they might as well be fun.” Milo cranked up on a brick, exposing the latest channel and waiting as Arthur dropped the pump in. “The added complexity might help with my leveling, too. Even if it doesn’t, though, it just feels right. Like what a smith who enjoys his work would do.”

“Like the goose sage says.”

“Yup. Helps keep my mind on the craft, where it belongs.”

Arthur was glad to find that the pumps being cute and fun really did help him enjoy the work, too. Over the next few days, all of his free time was dedicated to setting as many pumps in place as he could. He’d get up, make tea for a few hours, then find Milo and lay down pumps all through town. As they ventured to the newer edges of town, the work got harder as they started to hit channels that needed to be bricked and mortared before they’d accommodate water and the corresponding pumps.

Lily chipped in, of course. When she could, she’d hang out, tell them what she thought they were doing wrong, and mercilessly mock Arthur for what she called his help-addiction. He took it in stride. While she was there, the work went faster. It was an aura, or something. The system hadn’t defined it yet, but it was getting more noticeable by the day.

Lily, just by existing, made the gears of labor turn that much faster. When she got actual skills to back it up, she’d be a strategic resource for the entire town, more than she already was.

At the end of the third day, they were done. Not with every channel to every part of town, of course, and especially not done with all the channels the town would eventually need. But they had dropped in the last pump Mizu needed to complete what she called the first cycle, a medium-scale planned water circulation that would form a model version of her new way of keeping the town hydrated. As he and Milo drank celebratory glasses of boba and gobbled down over-large dinners courtesy of one of the other cooks in the plaza, Mizu found them.