Lori wasn't able to start her tests right after breakfast. There was needful maintenance she needed to do after she ate, making sure everything in the demesne (and one thing out of it) that needed to be imbued was imbued. She'd started keeping a list on the wall of her room, which she checked over every morning, even if she did the actual imbuing every other day or so. She could have done it while she was playing a morning game of sunk with Mikon, but the one and only time she'd done that, the other woman had won.

No, never again!

Really, how did other Dungeon Binders do this? She supposed using Mentalism they wouldn't have any problem trying to remember it all, but when did anyone even find the time to do the things she read about if they were doing maintenance work all the time?

But after far too much time sitting at the table with her eyes closed to help her concentrate, Lori found herself sitting in a near-empty dining hall. Rian still sat opposite her, looking bored. Why was her lord just sitting there?

"Why are you just sitting there?" she asked. He was usually much more productive, unless it was part of playing to the crowd.

"I made sure no one snuck up on you and stabbed you to death," he said innocently. "You really shouldn't do that in public you know, it's pretty dangerous."

Lori grunted. "Well, I have to get to work."

"I thought you were going to test water jet ideas?"

"Yes, exactly."

She went upstairs to get her tablet. The slab of rock was flat, reinforced by earthwisps to be stronger and therefore less likely to break should she accidentally drop it or pressed down on it too hard. She also had a stylus made from a slim branch with a pointed piece of rock on the end. It had been naturally pointy when she'd found it, and she'd only had to put it on the end of the stick.

"So, what are we going to do?" Rian asked.

"You will stay silent and I will contemplate my ideas and set them down to rock," Lori said. "Perhaps you can draw the boat you're supposed to while I'm doing it."

Rian wilted slightly, and sighed. "All this focus is doing horrible things to my procrastination. I'll never get anything done…"

"I don't care, stop talking and distracting me." Ah, she'd always wanted to say that!

She looked down at her tablet, flattened down and smoothed out using a piece of leather. She altered the binding of earthwisps on a thin layer of the surface on one side, just enough to take a mark, and used her stylus to draw two roughly parallel lines. With a slightly out of practice hand, she drew the notational symbol for waterwisp, anchoring binding, directional binding, and then an elongated triangle with a line inside one point to indicate direction. Lori stared at it, then remembered and added a grouping indicator. Yes, she was definitely out of practice in notation.

Then she began to carefully draw a box around the simple drawing of a tube and put it in a box, and more lines…

She didn't know why Rian was taking so long at this, drawing was easy! And the only notations he had to specify was measures of dimensions, and none of them had to be for vista interactions either!

Working carefully so she wouldn't have to try to erase anything, Lori drew the tube with the water jet binding inside a solid block, inside a larger, partially hollow block. She was already thinking of making one or both blocks with ice, or at least using bound ice so there wouldn't be any friction. There were inlets and outlets in the larger block to let water through from the ends of the block, but the inner block with the bindings could be slid aside to block the holes and have the water jet tube align with a different channel in the larger block. The secondary channel was shaped like a closed loop, which would allow the water to continue circulating while preventing the buildup of pressure…

"You put in a bend there, you can also make the water go in reverse."

Lori just managed not to jerk up in surprise as the voice interrupted her contemplation. "What?" she said.

Rian pointed at her tablet. "If you put in a bend that goes all the way around instead of a loop, you can give it a reverse setting. That would be useful for maneuvering and slowing down to keep from hitting rocks and whatnot. Which given how much more mass the large iceboat has, it would need something to actively slow it down to prevent collisions."

"Shouldn't you work on your own design?"

"I'm procrastinating!" Rian chirped.

"That is not something to proudly declare." Lori looked down at her design. She could see it. Drawing some lines to block off her initial design as a reference, she began drawing another square. Or rather, a series of squares, all cross sections of the same cube from different angles. Rian leaned forward to get a better look.

"Make your own design drawing Rian," she sighed. He leaned back and clearly forced himself to look down at his own plank and burnt sick, occasionally shooting glances at her and her tablet. It was like being back in school all over again!

She ignored him, continuing her drawing. Yes, he was right, the block with the tube through it that held the bind could reasonably be moved to more than one position. Add a hole, say here, and run a pole through it connecting to the inner block and it would move just fine, even without a frictionless ice coating. Which she'll add anyway, because why not, adding in the notation for waterwisps less one tick to denote it was ice and an anchoring binding…

She frowned, then started a new drawing. There was no reason to the make the tube cylindrical. It could be any shape as long as it was structurally stable. In fact, better if it was an elongated slot than a round tube. That way, the inner block could have thick internal walls for structural stability… actually, there was no reason if it couldn't have a few reinforcing parts in the tube as well. That would keep it from deforming under the pressure of the water passing through and getting stuck inside the outer block…

Yes, and with the tube with the binding slightly elongated, it can transition between the various tubes in the outer block that let water pass through, again preventing excessive pressure from building up. The tube in the inner block and the various pathways in the outer block didn't all have to completely align, after all.

Now, how to orient this? Vertically or horizontally? Vertically was much smoother, and if she put the circulating pathway on the bottom, it would default to not moving so if whatever was being used to move the inner block and hold it in place broke, the waterjet would just stay where it was and they wouldn't have to chase it around. On the other hand, horizontal would be easier to operate… theoretically, at least. Hmm… wait, there was no reason the intake and outflow had to be at the same level as the two blocks, right? The outer block could have external pipes leading into the water to both draw it in and send it out to propel the vehicle it was attached to. That would make a horizontally sliding block much easier to manipulate…

Of course, there was the question of how to seal such a system so that none of the contents leaked out… or not too much of it, anyway. This would need tight tolerances… though unlike with the theoretical ball valve, it could easily be done with straight lines. Very straight lines.

Still, the idea was simple enough that she could probably make some models to test how it would work before building it full-sized…

"Rian—"

"How can I help?" Rian said, far too quickly, brightly and loudly.

Lori gave him a flat look. Then she looked down at his plank. While there were drawings on it, none of them looked like a boat. "Did you get anything done at all?"

"I was procrastinating!"

"Still not something to proudly declare," she sighed. "I will be expecting it from you tomorrow."

"Who needs sleep anyway?" he said, still cheerful. "Can I see now?" He was actually pleading.

Lori gave him a flat look, then sighed and carefully pushed the tablet towards him.

He reached over enthusiastically, taking the tablet and turning it around. Then turned it around again. Tilted his head.

"Okay, what am I looking at again?"

Lori sighed and began to explain, pointing out the features.

"Huh. I'm surprised you considered how this had to be operated by someone else," Rian said. "I know it was my idea, but I do NOT like having to lift the whole water jet out of the water just to get the boat to stop. If this works as intended, it would be much easier. Even one of the children would be able to operate it." He paused. "When we make these, we'll have to secure whatever boats they're on better. Even the children would be able to operate these! That's just asking for trouble!"

"While it would work, making them would be difficult, even for me," Lori said.

Rian frowned, clearly not understanding. "Why do you think that?"

Lori stared at him, then pointed towards the loop. "They're shapes inside solid objects. What sort of tool could even be used to make that with if not Whispering?"

Rian looked at it. "Take a solid block. Cut it in half. Hollow it out, put the two halves back together, then glue or secure them in a frame somehow." He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Lori opened her mouth to retort, but nothing came out. Because yes, now that he'd said it out loud, it WAS the most obvious thing in the world. She glared at him instead, but he even had the good grace not to look smug. She let out a huff. "Well, all right, I supposed it can be done…"

"Not something you've seen done?" Ah, there was the smugness. Teasing, at any rate.

It made Lori feel better. Annoyed, but better. "I'm not a carpenter, I just worked in their shops," she retorted.

Rian hummed. "So, are we building this?"

"In the small scale at first," Lori nodded. "A test model to see if the concepts actually work out of the drawing tablet."

"Rocks, then?"

Lori nodded. "Rocks."

Rian started to nod too, then paused. Then he grinned. "Wait, I just had a better idea."

Lori raised an eyebrow. "Somehow I doubt that."

––––––––––––––––––

Lori hated being wrong. And while it was certainly better than trying to hollow out a block of stone or bone blind, why did all of Rian's ideas involve her doing most of the work?

"This is very strange," Lori said instead. "Who thinks of something like this?"

"People who need to make molds," Rian said. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Hold this," she ordered. He complied, and Lori wrapped the cord she had around where she wanted to cut and slowly softened the stones so that it sliced through the stone. It was as close to the line she'd scored as possible, though of course it wasn't perfect. She used the flattened, smooth offcut of wood that Rian had gotten from the carpenters to level the face that she'd cut, scraping off what protruding bits she could.

Lori looked at it, then shrugged. Well, this was her first time trying this, so she couldn't expect it to be perfect. She reminded herself of this firmly, lest her impulses get the better of her and she wasted time on this. "I think this is ready," she said.

The table was… slightly messy. There was a thin layer of softened rock that had been scraped off their modeling material and had run out of imbuement on top of the table now, so thin that it was crumbling to shards that was slowly turning into dust. In the midst of that was a large bowl of water and their model. Or rather, models.

Both were built around little bricks of stone roughly the size of a fist. They had both started exactly the same size, made from the same mold. One had been hollowed out with a hole in it, and a long protruding cylinder on the long perpendicular face. The other…

Well, the other had protrusions coming from it. The protrusions were rounded tubes in shape. At one end, a protrusion stuck out one side, bent upwards to face back the way it came, then curving down again, into the block, like a strange handle. In the middle were cylindrical protrusions at roughly the middle, like someone impaled the block on a long shaft. At the other end was another protrusion that curve upward and back the other way, then kept on going.

"You know, in hindsight, we should have made this out of ice," Rian said thoughtfully.

"We?" Lori said pointedly.

"Sorry, I meant you, your Bindership, you did all the hard and very technical work."

That didn't make her feel any better. Especially since Rian had a point…

"Let's get this over with," Lori said. She picked up the model with more protrusions and lowered it into the stone bowl of water next to them, submerging it but being careful to make sure the mass was centered in the water and wasn't close to any of the sides or the surface.

Then she bound the water into ice.

They slid the resulting mass out of the bowl and put it on the table upside down for stability. Then Lori softened the stone and carefully began pulling it out of the ice, leaving behind hollows in the shape of what had been there before.

For a moment, they both stared.

"So… how do we cut it in half?" Rian asked.

"This was your idea," she reminded him. "You think of something."

"I suppose that's fair," Rian nodded. He thought for a moment. "I'll be right back." He hurried off.

He came back with a confused Deil holding a hand saw, and the carpenter proceeded to saw through the ice while Lori maintained the structural integrity despite the parts being sawed off, and Rian held the ice in place, especially when it had to protrude a little over the edge of the table so Deil could saw all the way through it.

"Thanks Deil!" Rian said as Lori carefully pulled the two halves apart, reinforcing the ice so that it wouldn't break. "You can go back to work, sorry for bothering you!"

Lori carefully placed the other model inside the hollow. It fit in perfectly. Nodding, Lori placed the two haves back together.

Rian and Lori stared at it.

"It occurs the me the block that moves around inside should be smaller than the space it's sliding through," Rian said slowly.

"You were in charge of making it," Lori said pointedly.

Rian sighed. "Yeah, this is definitely my fault…"

It took two more tries, but eventually they got it right. The inner block moved, it lined up with the tubes inside, and the tubes worked as they wanted, allowing water to circulate in place, reverse or pass through the block.

"Well, it works," Rian said tiredly.

"It works," Lori nodded, equally tired.

They stared at the block.

"We're going to have to make this bigger, aren't we?"

"What do you mean 'we'?"

"Sorry, your Bindership."

Lori sighed. "Rian."

"Yes, your Bindership?"

"You thought of this. Find a way to make it easier to do."

"Yes, your Bindership."