Or Should We Call You Strawberry
Arista sat in the small, formal waiting room outside the admissions office, hands folded tightly in her lap, running through the same mental checklist she'd rehearsed the entire drive over, grades, extracurriculars, the careful, practiced answers to whatever standard interview questions the Averell Institute of Technology's board might ask.
She had not, in any version of her preparation, planned for what actually happened the moment she sat down across from the three-person panel.
The lead interviewer, an older woman with sharp, appraising eyes, studied her file for a long moment before looking up.
"...Arista Adelaide," she said, then paused, something almost amused flickering across her expression. "Or should we call you Strawberry?"
Arista froze completely.
"...Ehm, sorry?"
"We are very diligent with our background checks," the woman continued, setting the file down, warmth breaking through her earlier composed formality. "When we discovered what you achieved in Eternal Horizon: a game well known, incidentally, for adhering closely to real-world physics rather than the more forgiving systems most competitors rely on, well, I'll be frank. We got rather excited to meet you."
Arista sat there, utterly stunned, the careful, rehearsed version of herself entirely derailed. "...You know about that."
"We know quite a bit more than you might expect," the second panelist said, sliding a printed document across the table, screenshots, forum threads, patch notes, an entire compiled dossier of everything Strawberry had ever built across her time in the game. "The continuous casting furnaces. The braiding machine for the mithril-adamantium cable. The pressure differential calculations for the submarine's ballast system. The insulated tube through active geothermal activity." She glanced up, impressed. "Most of this aligns remarkably well with real engineering principles. Far better than I'd expect from someone who started doing this at sixteen, working through trial and error in a video game."
"...I didn't know any of this was being tracked," Arista managed, still reeling.
"The game's developers published several retrospective case studies, actually," the third panelist added. "Your work became something of a talking point in certain engineering education circles. Real-world physics, applied creatively, under in-game constraints, by someone with no formal training whatsoever." He smiled slightly. "A few of my colleagues have used your dome design as an actual teaching example. Load distribution across the hexagonal panel network, tension management at the joints, sound engineering, dressed up as a video game project."
"...I didn't design the dome alone," Arista said. "I had a great crew. The hexagonal shape was the idea of a dear friend of mine. So were the spline joints."
"As I recall from the case study, the dome itself was still your concept, yes?" the third panelist said. "No structure out here ever gets built by one vision alone either. That's not a knock against you. It's simply how good engineering actually works."
"For me, I really liked your roller coaster," the second panelist added.
"The design?"
"That too. But I loved riding it more."
The lead interviewer slid a different folder across the table. "Let's move past the pleasantries. Ms. Adelaide, several of your projects were built without access to modern instrumentation or established engineering data. Pick one. How did you identify the variables that mattered, and how did you design tests that separated one cause from another?"
Arista thought for a moment. "...The cloud material tests, probably. For Squishy's home."
"The material whose behavior changed dramatically under pressure," the second panelist said, checking her notes. "What caused it, and how did you confirm that?"
"We found it by accident first," Arista said. "A submarine failure at three hundred meters, material we'd trusted suddenly expanding under us. One of my crew said right away that twisting a sample wouldn't actually tell us anything, different kind of stress entirely. She was probably right. I built the rig anyway, purely out of curiosity, twisted a sample and watched for anything resembling what we'd seen at depth. Nothing happened. So that ruled out twisting, which meant it had to be the all-around pressure instead. I hadn't proven what caused it. I'd only ruled out what didn't."
"You tested something you already suspected wouldn't work," the lead interviewer said. "Most people skip that step and just trust the better-informed opinion."
"Maybe," Arista said. "But suspecting and confirming aren't quite the same thing. I'd rather know than assume, when I actually have the time to check. After that, we stopped trusting it structurally at depth entirely. We started designing around the expansion instead, bedding, cushioning, anything where getting soft and oversized under pressure was a feature rather than a failure."
"What did you do after that?" the second panelist asked.
"We needed to know if the expansion had an actual limit, or if it just kept going the longer something stayed down there. We couldn't build a pressurized chamber, or maybe we could, but the easier solution was just testing it at real depth, so that's what we did instead."
"But you had no continuous instrumentation at depth," she pressed. "So how did you actually confirm that?"
"We couldn't watch it happen in real time, so we designed around checking instead," Arista said. "A small sample, lowered inside a cage built deliberately oversized, in case it expanded further than we expected. We pulled it up that same afternoon and it had already grown to about twenty times its starting volume. We had no idea if that was the ceiling or just where it happened to be when we checked, so we lowered it straight back down and came back the next morning. Same size. Still not proof of anything, that could have just been a pause. So we left it alone completely for two full days this time, no checking, no disturbing the line, and pulled it up on the third day. Identical to the previous measurement. That's when I actually believed it. One measurement could be luck. No change for two straight days felt like enough."
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"Your projects involved people with very different specialties, priorities, and even ways of communicating," the third panelist said next. "Tell us about a time someone on your team challenged your design and turned out to be right."
Arista didn't have to think long. "Claire. The very first thing she ever did on my crew, actually. I'd built a hybrid steam system for an airship, and I trusted the sail rigging more than I trusted the boiler itself. She looked at it for about thirty seconds and found a pressure relief valve calibrated for ground-level atmosphere, sitting on a vehicle meant to fly at altitude. If we'd launched without catching that, the baseline reading would have been wrong before anything even went mechanically wrong."
"Thirty seconds," the third panelist repeated, noting it down.
"When you're leading a project outside your own expertise," the lead interviewer asked, "how do you decide when to trust your own judgment and when to defer to a specialist?"
"I used to think I had to understand everything myself before I could trust it," Arista said slowly. "That took a long time to unlearn. Now I ask whether the person disagreeing with me has actually done the thing they're talking about. If they have, and I haven't, I listen first and argue second."
The questions kept coming after that. They moved from the Drowned Court's hexagonal panels to the casting line that had nearly failed before Marek caught it, from an abandoned tunnel route to designing spaces for people who didn't move, live, or even breathe the way she did. They asked about regulations, instrumentation, and what she would do differently if any of it had to keep real people alive.
Arista answered as best she could. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes after thinking it through out loud. Once, she simply admitted she didn't know, which somehow earned her another note on the lead interviewer's page.
The lead interviewer glanced down at the last page of her notes.
"There is one project we haven't discussed yet."
Arista knew which one before she said it.
"You built a railgun."
Arista felt her stomach drop. "...Yes."
"Why?"
"At the time, I didn't feel like I had much of a choice," Arista said. "I had a quest active with a permadeath clause attached: defeat a monster of equal or higher level, no stat points allowed. I chose a hydra, because it was the only higher-level threat whose territory I actually knew well enough to plan around. Nothing I already had could reach something that size and that dangerous. The railgun was the only answer I could think of in time."
"You dismantled it immediately afterward," the lead interviewer said. "What changed?"
"Not exactly, but close enough. Nothing changed, that's the honest answer. I already knew, the moment I finished building it, before I'd even fired it once. I told the dwarves I was working with that I'd take it apart publicly, with witnesses, the moment the threat was gone. I didn't want to be someone who kept something like that around, even successfully used, even justified."
Arista paused.
"Then I fired it. Once, out in the open wasteland where the hydra made its territory. It worked exactly as designed, killed the hydra outright. I dismantled it three days later, in front of everyone who'd asked to see it happen, exactly like I'd promised. It wasn't until afterward that I learned what I hadn't accounted for, a city built directly beneath that same stretch of ground, kilometers down. The impact had shaken loose enough to break windows and bring down chimneys, despite everything happening so far below where I thought I was aiming at only one hydra. I got lucky. Nobody was hurt."
"Do you consider the railgun an engineering failure?" the third panelist asked.
"No," Arista said. "Technically, no. It did exactly what I designed it to do. That's what makes it worse, not better."
"Since you specify technically," the lead interviewer said, "was there a different area where a failure did occur?"
Arista sat with that question longer than any other that day.
"...Before construction," she said finally. "I knew exactly what it was for. I never once asked whether there was a smaller answer, a closer-level monster I could have hunted for the same quest instead, a weapon less absolute than the biggest thing I could engineer. I went from zero to the single most destructive option available, in one step, and called it necessity. That's the part I got wrong. Not the math."
"Would you build it again?" the second panelist asked. "Knowing what you know now?"
"No," Arista said, immediate and certain. "Not that, and nothing like it. I haven't touched a weapon design since. I don't think I will."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you," the lead interviewer said, something gentler in her voice now. "That's not an easy thing to put on the table in front of strangers."
"It's in my file either way," Arista said. "I'd rather you hear it from me."
Arista sat there, overwhelmed, the specific, complicated grief of the past few months tangling with something else, a warm, disbelieving pride she hadn't expected to feel quite this soon after saying goodbye to all of it.
"...I just wanted to build things," she said finally, quiet and honest. "I never set out to prove anything. I just kept running into problems, and I didn't like leaving them unsolved."
"That," the lead interviewer said, "is precisely the instinct we look for in this program. Most applicants arrive with polished portfolios and rehearsed answers. You arrived with years of undirected, self-taught problem-solving, built because you refused to accept 'no recipe available' as a real answer."
Arista let out a small, startled laugh, one of the first that had come easily since the servers closed.
"...I really did refuse that, didn't I," she said, mostly to herself.
"Consistently," the woman agreed, smiling. "Repeatedly, and at increasing scale." She closed the file, leaning back slightly. "So, Ms. Adelaide, or Strawberry, if you'd prefer, why don't you tell us, in your own words, why you actually want to study engineering here."
Arista sat with the question a long moment, the rehearsed answer she'd prepared no longer feeling remotely adequate, and found, instead, that the honest answer had been sitting ready inside her the entire time.
"...Because researching for hours offline, then applying what I learned in-game, that's how I found out who I am and who I want to be out here too," she said, steady now. "Not just making something work. Making it worth the people who'll actually use it. I want to learn how to do that properly."
"Thank you for your time, Ms. Adelaide," the lead interviewer said. "I think we have a lot to discuss between ourselves. We'll let you know our decision by mail."
Arista stood, walked around the table, and shook every panel member's hand in turn, a smile on her face. "Thank you for considering me."
As soon as the door closed behind her, the third panelist spoke first.
"Her premises weren't all a hundred percent accurate."
"That's rather why people attend school, isn't it?" the second panelist said.
The lead interviewer was already gathering her notes.
"I want her here. I don't care how. Make it happen before another university scoops her up."