Overflow
Arista sat quietly for a long while, staring out at the horizon, the earlier disaster slowly settling into something more contemplative as her mind, as always, refused to simply rest.
"...What if we don't go deeper at all," she said finally, half to herself. "What if instead of pushing straight down, we go around instead. Concentric rings, following the continent's coastline at fixed depths, fifty meters first, then a hundred, then a hundred and fifty. Sunlight still reaches at those depths, which means we can actually see, properly, without relying purely on the stylus."
Bram glanced over. "Slower, though."
"Considerably slower," Arista admitted. "But safer. No pressure failures, no cloud material trying to become upholstery foam three hundred meters down. Just a full, methodical survey of everything at a depth we already know the hull can handle." She pulled up the rough coastline measurements Colm had been steadily compiling. "Problem is, the shoreline around this whole continent's roughly eight thousand kilometers long. Doing a proper survey ring at even one depth would take weeks. Doing several rings, at multiple depths—"
"Months," Claire finished, doing the mental math herself.
"Months," Arista agreed. "So I'm not deciding this one alone. Everyone needs to actually want to commit to that kind of timeline, or it's not worth proposing at all." She looked around at the exhausted, battered, thoroughly deserving-of-a-break crew. "I won't do it unless everyone's in favor."
Before anyone could actually respond, something small and dense clattered onto the hull plating beside her with a soft, metallic thunk.
Arista blinked, glancing down at the chunk of raw ore now sitting innocently beside her leg. "...What?"
Another one fell a moment later, landing with the exact same soft thunk, a few feet further along the hull.
"...Is your inventory leaking?" Bram asked, staring at the small, accumulating pile with open bewilderment.
Arista pulled up her own interface, and stared.
[Inventory: 100/100 Slots — FULL][Overflow Protocol Active: Excess Materials Ejecting]
"...Oh no."
"What is it?"
"I actually almost never use my inventory," Arista said slowly, scrolling through slot after slot of raw materials she genuinely didn't remember collecting, the specific horror of realization dawning with each passing second. "I just grab whatever's on hand at my own forge whenever I'm building something. I don't think I've properly checked this menu since the tutorial."
"...And?"
"And I completely forgot about the five percent mining royalty," she said, staring at slot after slot of stacked, accumulated ore, iron, mithril, even the occasional flicker of adamantium, all of it steadily, silently piling up in the background of her account for two entire years. "The deal I made with Gorthruk. Five percent of every single piece of ore mined using the boring rig, delivered automatically, forever. I forgot it was even still active."
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Bram stared at the growing pile beside her. "...For two years."
"For two years," Arista confirmed, faint and disbelieving. "Every ninety seconds, apparently, based on how fast this is accumulating, a piece of ore's been quietly stacking into my inventory, completely unnoticed, until finally—"
Another piece thunked onto the hull.
"—until finally I actually hit the cap." She pressed both hands over her face, half laughing, half genuinely mortified. "I have been slowly, silently overflowing with royalty ore this entire time, and I never once noticed because I never open this menu."
Bram, without a word, quietly began scooping up the accumulating pieces and depositing them into his own considerably less full inventory, methodical and unbothered, the exact kind of practical, unglamorous help he'd been offering her for two years running.
"...You don't have to do that," Arista said, watching him work.
"Somebody has to," Bram said, not looking up, sorting another handful of ore into his own storage. "You're going to sit there staring at your own overflowing wealth in bewildered horror for the next twenty minutes otherwise, and we have a rescue boat to wait for."
"...Fair," Arista admitted, letting him continue, still faintly stunned by the sheer, accumulated absurdity of it. "I built an entire economy off passive recipe royalties and then forgot I was also collecting a second passive income stream on top of it."
"Doing a Strawberry," Nettle said, from a few feet away, grinning despite everything.
"...Yeah," Arista said, laughing despite herself, watching another piece thunk quietly onto the hull. "Yeah, apparently so."
Arista shifted uncomfortably against the hull plating, glancing up at the sun hanging directly overhead, still blazing despite the gentle sway of the ocean swells beneath them.
"...We've been out here a while," she said, squinting upward. "Should I be worried about sunburn? I don't think I packed anything for that."
Bram, sprawled nearby with his eyes closed, didn't even bother opening them. "You're fine. Sunburn's one of the few things the devs never actually implemented."
"...Really?"
"Really. I looked it up ages ago, back when I spent way too much time outdoors during the catapult testing phase. No skin damage mechanic from prolonged sun exposure anywhere in this game. You can stand in direct light for days and your character model just... doesn't care."
Arista relaxed slightly, though something about the fact still nagged at her. "That's oddly specific to have never been added. They modeled fall damage, drowning, hydra bites, hull pressure at three hundred meters, and just skipped sunburn entirely?"
"Probably wasn't worth the development time," Claire offered, eyes still closed, clearly enjoying the rare, uneventful stillness after the day's chaos. "Cosmetic damage with no real gameplay consequence. Lower priority than, say, everything else in this world that's actually trying to kill you."
"...Fair, I guess." Arista settled back against the plating, some of her tension finally easing now that one more small worry had been crossed off the list. "Still feels weird. A whole ocean full of sea monsters and pressure hazards, and the one thing that never made the cut is the thing that would've actually happened to me by now, realistically."
"Immersion," Bram said, entirely deadpan, still not opening his eyes.
Arista let out a short, tired laugh despite herself. "...Don't."
"I'm just saying. Six-hundred-year-old ocean, permanently sunburn-proof skin. Nobody said the immersion had to be consistent."
"I hate that you're right." She closed her own eyes, then cracked one back open, a thought surfacing. "...So, Fen and Claire's suntanning?"
"Completely useless," Bram said, still not opening his eyes. "Besides the relaxation, obviously."
She let out a short, tired laugh despite herself, finally letting herself relax fully against the sun-warmed hull, the distant hum of an approaching steamboat just barely audible over the gentle lap of waves. "Wake me up when the rescue boat actually gets here."
"Will do," Bram said, already sounding half-asleep himself. "Try not to get eaten by anything else in the meantime."
"No promises."