Boring, In the Best Way
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Two: Boring, In the Best Way
Arista spent the better part of an afternoon emptying her overflowing inventory into the storage shed beside her forge, ore cascading out slot by slot until the small building sat packed nearly floor to ceiling with two years' worth of quietly accumulated royalty payments.
"...I have enough mithril in here to build three more zeppelins," she said, staring at the sheer volume of it, still faintly disbelieving. "I genuinely had no idea."
"You could sell most of it," Nettle pointed out, helping stack the last few crates into whatever remaining corner space existed. "Considerable amount of gold sitting in raw material form, doing nothing."
"Later, maybe. Right now I just needed it out of my inventory so I stop tripping over the overflow notifications." She shut the shed door, satisfied, already turning her attention back to the actual work waiting for her.
The new lining took two more weeks to properly source and install, fresh cloud material this time, tighter tolerances and a more careful sealing process throughout, confirmed this time against an actual scaled simulation rig rather than pure hope.
Before the actual diving began, Bram called an admittedly overdue meeting on the subject of shifts.
"We are not doing this the way we did the storm," he said, arms crossed, entirely serious. "Nobody stays logged in around the clock for a multi-week survey. And there's no actual reason to. Nothing's visible on the seabed once the sun's down anyway, so night diving's pointless regardless."
"Surface every evening, anchor alongside Nettle's ship, stay put until morning," Claire added, sliding a neat, gridded chart across the table. "No current to fight if we're not actually moving. Then during daylight, three shifts, roughly four hours each, with a short overlap between them for proper handoffs."
Arista studied it, genuinely impressed despite herself. "...When did you have time to make this?"
"While you were busy burying yourself in a shed full of mithril."
Nobody argued the system, and it held cleanly enough through the first several days, the rotation settling into an easy, predictable rhythm nobody had to think about twice. Evenings became genuinely restful, the whole crew surfacing together, tethering alongside the familiar creak of Nettle's hull, actual dinners, actual sleep, actual mornings that didn't blur directly into the previous night's shift.
"...I forgot what my own kitchen looked like," Bram admitted one evening, climbing up onto the ship's deck for the night. "Genuinely forgot, for a second, where I kept the good mugs."
"That's what happens when 'just one more depth reading' turns into eleven hours," Claire said, following him up. "Ask me how I know."
"You wrote the schedule specifically to prevent that happening to you again, didn't you."
"Immediately after the third time it happened, yes."
Colm was the exception almost immediately.
"...You're still here," Bram said, three days in, finding him hunched over the mapping station well past the end of his own scheduled block, stylus still moving across an already-dense chart.
"Almost done with this section."
"You were almost done with this section six hours ago."
"There was more detail than I expected."
Bram studied him a long moment, then simply reached over and closed the notebook, gently but with absolutely no room for negotiation. "Log out. Sleep. The seabed will still be there when you get back."
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"I could just—"
"Colm."
Colm logged out, grumbling, and the next morning, when his scheduled block came around again, Arista found herself covering the gap instead, notebook in hand, considerably less confident than she usually felt walking into any new task.
"I am not a cartographer," she warned him, the evening before, gathering everything she'd need to actually manage without him. "If I hand you back a chart full of nonsense, that's on you for not sleeping properly."
"You won't need to be one," Colm said, already sketching out a simple reference key on a spare page, patient and thorough despite his obvious exhaustion. "Depth's fixed for the whole ring, so that part's already handled. I just need soundings logged at regular intervals, anything that reads as structured rather than natural flagged separately, and rough current direction noted every hour or so. It's mostly just recording what the instruments already tell you, in the format I can actually use afterward."
"That's suspiciously simple."
"It's not simple. It's just repetitive, which happens to look similar from the outside." He tapped the reference key once more. "Follow this, and I promise it'll be genuinely useful. You don't need instinct for this part. Just consistency."
She managed it well enough the following day, dutifully logging soundings at the intervals he'd specified, flagging one section that read slightly too regular to be natural before deciding it was probably nothing and noting it anyway just in case, and handed the completed pages back to him that evening with the specific, slightly nervous pride of someone hoping they hadn't quietly ruined weeks of careful, patient work.
Colm reviewed it properly, thoroughly, and looked up with genuine, visible relief. "...This is good. This is actually really good."
"I followed the instructions."
"Most people don't follow instructions this precisely. They improvise halfway through and call it initiative." He set the pages down carefully, already filing them into the growing master chart, then paused, studying the one flagged section she'd noted despite her own uncertainty about it. "...This, actually. The overly regular reading. Good instinct, flagging it instead of dismissing it."
"I wasn't sure it meant anything."
"Neither am I, yet. That's exactly why it's worth flagging." He glanced up properly now, genuine warmth in it. "Thank you. Genuinely."
"Go to sleep at your actual scheduled time next round," Arista said, entirely unbothered, already heading off toward her own overdue rest. "Or I'll just keep doing this, and you'll have to live with knowing I did an adequate job of your life's work."
"...That's surprisingly effective motivation."
"I know."
The first survey ring, at fifty meters, went by without a single incident worth logging.
The second, at a hundred meters, proved equally uneventful, gentle currents, scattered reef life, the occasional curious fish drifting past the viewport before losing interest entirely.
Weekends had quietly become an exception to the strict shift rotation, all five of them tending to linger online together well past any individual's actual scheduled block, less out of necessity and more because nobody particularly wanted to log out early when everyone else was still there, still talking, still enjoying each other's company regardless of whose watch it technically was.
"...This is almost boring," Bram said, midway through the second ring, watching yet another stretch of unremarkable, sunlit seabed drift past. "In the best possible way. I've gotten used to something trying to kill us every time we go underwater."
"Not everything has to be a crisis," Claire said, checking her instruments with the same calm, satisfied efficiency she'd brought to every previous system. "Sometimes an engineering project just... works, exactly as designed, and nothing dramatic happens."
Colm, for his part, was having the time of his life, back at his own station now, thoroughly rested and considerably more insufferable about it than anyone had expected.
He'd barely left the mapping station in days, hunched over an ever-expanding chart, meticulously recording depth soundings, coastline curvature, reef boundaries, current patterns, every scrap of data the slow, methodical survey produced, cataloged with the same obsessive, delighted precision he'd once given his secondhand coastline guesswork back at the glassworkers' guild.
"...This is the first accurate map of an entire coastline this world has ever had," he said, mostly to himself, sketching another careful line onto the growing chart. "Not guessed. Not extrapolated from rumors. Measured."
"You've said that about three different things now," Nettle said, amused.
"It's true about three different things," Colm said, entirely unbothered, already moving on to the next section of chart. "I don't think I've ever been this happy doing actual work."
Arista, watching him from across the compartment, felt a small, quiet satisfaction settle into her chest: not the sharp thrill of a crisis narrowly survived, not the restless itch of a problem still unsolved, just the simple, steady pleasure of watching something finally, properly work the way it was meant to.
"...Ring two, complete," Claire announced, checking the final depth marker against Colm's chart. "No incidents. Full data set recorded."
"Ring three next," Arista said, grinning, genuinely looking forward to the prospect of an uneventful hundred and fifty meters for the first time since this entire expedition began. "Let's keep going."