Lori didn't want to get out of bed. She really, really didn't want to get out of bed. Her bedroll was thick and soft and warm, and despite what the fabric looked like, it was so very smooth and comfortable and she didn't want to leave. She just wanted to lie down and make up for all those months she'd been sleeping on her laundry on top of a plank of wood…

Groaning, she sat up, then almost groaned again at the lack of stiffness on her back. It felt so good… her bed actually flexed under her, and it was all she could do not to bounce on it. She didn't want to risk damaging the cords that wove together to form her bed. It was too nice to risk!

No, she had to get up, there was work to do… laying down the foundation of the bath house, the glaze firing of the pottery in a few days, she had to stop and imbue the water wheel in River's Fork—

She stopped her stream of thoughts to check on that in panic, sighing in relief to find it still imbued. Ah, but there was so little. She'd need to do that today…

The panic had woken her up enough that she finally stood, stripping down and going to her bath room for a quick rinse of her face and the rest of her. Her coat and laundry were still there, and she hastily checked the former for cracks and drying, sighing in relief when she found no new ones. She'd have to do laundry soon…

Dressed, refreshed, purged and hungry, Lori headed downstairs to eat.

Midway down the stairs, she turned around to get her sunk board, and then went downstairs to eat.

"Good morning, Lori," Rian greeted her cheerfully as he pushed two bowls towards her. She picked one. "How'd you sleep?"

"Wonderfully," she said as she put the board on the table and started putting the stones in the bowls. Mikon reached over to help her, doing their respective sides. "And you?"

Rian shrugged. "Same as usual. All right, less need to pretend I don't hear things happening in the middle of the night thanks to the Um, but beyond that, it's all the same." A strange look came over his face. "Are we really going to keep calling it that?"

"It seems to work fine," Lori said. "Unless you can manage to call it anything else?"

"I will admit, I cannot," Rian nodded in acknowledgement. "But it seems to be working anyway. Still some teething troubles, complaints other people take too long, but right now everyone is being very understanding." He snickered. "And people keep going straight for the bath house, and then to the laundry afterwards to wash bedrolls."

"Has it significantly impacted productivity?" Lori asked as she made her first move, then started to eat.

Rian wiggled his hand back and forth. "Eh, it evens out. Only so many people at a time can go there and wait for someone to get done so they can get a room, and we have more people working now thanks to the houses being done. And after a certain point, standing around outside holding a bedroll starts being embarrassing." He titled his head. "Actually, we're cutting a lot more trees than we were before. We need all the wood, especially for warming the houses come winter."

Lori gave him a look.

"Don't glare at me like that, it's the truth and nothing to do with the quality of the houses," Rian said. "Stone might be strong and, in your case, quick to build with, but they get cold and stay cold. Unless you want to use magic to heat up every house for the whole winter, we'll need lot of fire wood. There's also building material for furniture, tools…" he shrugged. "The work never ends, and we always need more of everything. No one's needed to ask to get their metal yet, but it's probably only a matter of time."

Lori sighed. "I'll have to make storage for that, then," she said. "Not just huts, we'll need something that can protect it against dragons…"

"I thought we're storing it all here?"

Lori waved a hand, then reached for the sunk board to make her next move as Mikon finished. "That's an emergency stockpile for if a dragon's arrival manages to destroy all the wood we have outside, but we can't keep everything in here. We still need room for people and other facilities. No, better if I make larger store room near the sawpit." She hummed thoughtfully. "Actually, I should do just that. It will give me more stone for making the baths."

"Well, be careful," Rian said. "Make sure it doesn't flood."

Lori paused. She sighed. "Maybe I'll just build the storage room into the hill…" Rainbows. And it had been such a good idea too…

––––––––––––––––––

Good idea or not, she had to start on the third bath house. The site chosen was near the long row of houses, on a plot of land that had long been cleared by all the tree cutting. The stumps still had to be pulled out, but with earthwisps to soften the ground and lots of manpower to push and pull the stumps out of the way, it was quickly cleared in two days, the hard roots cut up into small pieces by her water jets once it was ascertained they were too hard to risk their saws on, ready to become firewood once it had dried in the sun enough. After that, she was able to use earthwisps to clear aside the dirt on her chosen site to reveal the bedrock. Always best to build on the bedrock, or else your building might slip. True, a lot of the bedrock had been broken apart by roots, but it was a trifling matter to fuse it all together so it could act as a solid foundation.

Technically, it was two bathhouses, built in the same long, half-cylinder style as the original shelters and the bath houses they had now, but instead of being separate, they were connected in the middle, with the curving roofs meeting at a thick stone wall to bear the weight and transfer it to the ground. Like the other bath houses, it would need the water to be constantly flowing, which… all right, that might actually become problematic. While it wasn't that far from the river, it was uphill, even if the slope was fairly mild. The first bath houses used underground tubes formed into the bedrock to act as pipes to bring in water, and the runoff was filtered through the ground…

(Actually, she might have to change that. It might be affecting the clay pit, since they were close together…)

Instead of long troughs of water high along the walls that fed down to basins inside individual alcoves, there would be two long basins filled with water in each section, to be used with wooden dippers, which thanks to the carpenters' lathe was much easier to make now. People would sit or stand on either side, getting water from the central basin to wash themselves. She hoped this open design would keep people from using the space for things besides bathing.

That took up about four days of work, one of which was spent excavating more stone, since she'd run out again. Fortunately, she was able to use the dirt at the site and compress it to make it part of the roof, so that helped.

By the end of it, it was still completely unusable.

"Still needs water, huh?" Rian said as they ate.

"And a place for the water to drain to," Lori sighed as Mikon made her move. The weaver was getting better at this. Lori was still winning, but the score was getting closer each time

"Can't we just fill the basins with water in the morning and just refill them when it's needed? I mean, that would use up less water."

Lori glared at him. "That just means that I'll need to personally come in to refill the water every time it runs low." She reached over and picked up the stones in one of the bowls, beginning her turn.

"Not necessarily…" Rian said thoughtfully. "All right, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming you use a binding similar to the one on the water jet to draw the water we use in the baths, right?"

"Basically the same," Lori confirmed as she continued to drop stones.

"So, the binding doesn't need to be on the whole pipe, right? After all, the water coming in will push the rest of the water after it."

"Yes Rian, that's how hydraulics works," Lori said blandly. No more moves. Mikon's turn again.

"I wish I had something to draw with…" Rian sighed, then held up his hands. "All right! What if you make some kind of tube mounted on a pivot or something. Stone, wood, bone, whatever. And in that tube you put in the waterjet binding. When we need water, someone, anyone, puts one end of the tube into the river, it pulls water up and that water goes all the way to the bathhouse to fill the basins. When it's full, they take the tube out, and the basins stop filling. That way, you just need to keep the tube imbued like anything else, and someone else can take care of moving it around to fill the basins." Rian's hand finally stopped making gestures that he seemed to think would help illustrate what he was describing, but just looked random to Lori.

She stared at him as the simplicity of it set in. "That's… that's…"

"Brilliant?" Rian said smugly.

"Obvious!" Lori exclaimed, making her lord sigh and slump. "I should have thought of that!" Why hadn't she thought of that?

"I'll still take credit for coming up with an obvious idea you didn't," Rian said.

"Yes, yes, you're insightful," she said, waving him off. It might not work very well with the system of basins and aqueducts she had, since that needed the water to be constantly flowing at all points for it to be pure, but if she could refit the old bath houses to this…

"Actually, it wouldn't even need to be manually operated," Rian mused. "With the right arrangement of weights, floats, swing arms and ropes, you could do it so that once the level of the water of the basin dropped below a certain point, the tube would swing into place automatically until it was full…"

…

Her lord was brilliant.

Not that she'd tell him out loud.

"That sounds… complicated," Lori said instead.

"Well, it's not something we have to come up with ourselves," Rian said. "We have carpenters, smiths, militia engineers… lots of people whose work has them try and solve puzzles like this." He shrugged. "I wouldn't be surprised if some of the children can think of a simple way to do it, once you explain it to them. Children are smart like that. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if things like this are used in some specialized processes in industries that you never got to work at because the role needed dedicated training."

"It's a distinct possibility," Lori agreed. Then she sighed. "But that still leaves getting the water up there... I suppose I'll have to make a new pipe after all."

"Eh, you can do it," Rian said. "You've done it before. Or would you rather be stuck bringing people back and forth between here and River's Fork?"

Ah, contrast. "I suppose you have a point," she admitted. "I'll have to make a pipe, then a mechanism for the water like you described…" She might have to make a dedicated building next to the river for it, or at least a shed. She could even envision the mechanism, a tube that can be lowered into the water to fill a basin that fed the pipes. Or, even simpler, just the basin, with a sluice that controlled water going into it to be drawn into the pipes… firewisps could be used to keep any remaining water from going bad or stagnant… Or maybe…

"Lori, eat. Your food's getting cold, and Mikon's waiting for you to make a move," Rian sighed.