They actually had iron. In a very real, very tangible sense. They had their transport cart trundling along the Ironroad, coming back with thousands of kilos of iron ore. It was enough to keep the Universal Refinery running for nearly a week straight per trip, and very clearly made that particular device the bottleneck in their iron production.
It really was amazing what one single change could do to so drastically alter priorities. Yes, the iron wasn't fully automated, that remained an unrealized goal, but when the only manual-intervention steps were unloading the cart and moving its contents to the top of the Spire? Something which Oliver was fully capable of doing by himself, using his placement brackets to lift tons of rock tens of meters into the air, no less.
It was incredibly close. And even that particular task was liable to be dealt with soon, as Oliver sought to create a motion slide-based elevator. His primary limiter there was, if anything, simply creating enough motion slides. They had plenty of iron for the automated rail system, but only one enchanter.
Perhaps her efforts with developing ?Epizeuxis? would assist there. The subskill had proven frustratingly elusive, but she had also been diverting most of her energy towards the clearing and construction of the Ironroad instead of building out her skills.
She didn't really regret it, though. After an exciting first few days, the ballistae hadn't ended up needing to fire very many shots - perhaps a half-dozen a day on average total - and that production load had proven light enough for Oliver to keep up with even around working on his other duties.
And she could hardly complain about the status of their iron supply line. It might not have coalesced in the exact way she had envisioned, but she reassured herself that that was alright, that it just indicated she was refining and getting better her planning capabilities.
For their next supply line, whatever it ended up being, she wouldn't have them even try to automate anything from the very start. Instead, she would have them source the object by hand, and only once they had a process down would they attempt to offload the procedure to automatic functions.
For iron, that would have meant not doing any drastic preparatory work, such as the charcoal furnaces or boats. Then, once Alyssa found the Ironworks - a potentially misnamed location, made from the optimistic viewpoint that most of the processing would be done there instead of at First Tower - Oliver would process that into raw iron. Then, they could analyze which steps of the process were the most time-consuming and labor-intensive and automate those, repeating ad nauseam until the entire process could run with effectively no direct intervention.
That did mean she was relatively happy with how they had approached things once they had a consistent source of iron, because she hadn't dug in her heels and insisted on doing it her way. That would be how a bad leader acted, and she still refused to be a bad leader.
The excellent thing was that they now had an iron production line in their factory.
The thought came simply, but profoundly. Henrietta gave out a soft "huh," and allowed her arms to droop slightly, and she relaxed against the warm stone of the Spire. She was sitting in one of her favorite perches, a small shelf about halfway up the cliff face, giving her an excellent view of their living area, the brick-making factory, and now the Ironroad as it headed upstream parallel to Tower Stream at its start. She liked it because it was isolated enough to let her think, yet still able to hear the sounds of Oliver working above her, keep an eye on Clark working below, and know if something was coming or going along the road and stream.
But right now, her eyes were just tracing the wood-and-reed track that outlined where the transport cart followed. Solid proof of their factory.
Something about that just struck a chord with her. She didn't know what, she didn't know why. She'd known that it was coming, she'd known what they were working on, she'd even been analyzing its automated production, and yet...
"A factory."
Perhaps there was some part of her that had still been thinking of their task as impossible, that there was no way the five of them could ever build out all of the incredible infrastructure that a portal would require, and yet...
"We built a factory."
Was it completely automated? No. There was still transportation up a cliff face needed, still the need to fill in molds with iron sand, still the need to keep five braziers stocked with charcoal, and of course the continued need for someone - Alyssa, she decided - to keep the ballista loaded. But, they had a factory.
Why couldn't she get over that?
"In less than six months, we've gone from barely keeping a fire going, to having an all-but-automatic source of iron," she mused. It was quite the accomplishment, put like that. Based on the loose characteristics of technological development that Forerunner Expeditions used to categorize worlds, they'd gone from prehistoric stone age to... well, to the brink of the industrial age. They had machines doing manual work for them, and even though humans were required, it was in more of a maintenance role than a functional role. That was an astounding thought, and possibly some kind of record?
I need to congratulate the team more, she decided. We need to celebrate this somehow. We could probably afford to take a day or two off?
Then she reconsidered, Maybe not completely off. But maintenance-level tasks only.
So Alyssa might need to take a trip out to Ironworks to resupply the claynades, Oliver would need to shovel some iron sand into the smelter enchantment, but nothing else. Heck, she could do those things. They were easy enough, and would give her teammates well-earned rest. Because truly, what an amazing team she had.
Perhaps she could make some kind of special treat for them as well? Without her skills for it, she couldn't really make anything too grand, but she could surely mix up some fruits and herbs into some kind of celebratory drink. Even if she usually used skills for it, she did know some runes for quick fermentation.
Though Oliver doesn't drink... I'll think of something else for him.
Ensuring her team was properly rewarded and motivated was an aspect of leadership she had been chronically overlooking. That they hadn't been complaining about it spoke to how amazing her team was all the more, but now that she'd noticed the gap in her leadership capabilities, she needed to rectify it. If she didn't, the odds of her team realizing her lack of ability as a leader might rise dramatically, and she did know that perception of competence was quite important to anyone seeking authority.
It was how the Tyrants had gotten away with their con for countless generations, after all.
But, very well. She needed to reward her team.
She jotted the thought down on her notepad, then returned to her planning.
Just because they had an iron factory, a steady supply line of iron ingots, that didn't mean they could stop. It was really just the start. There were, broadly speaking, three different routes they could take to refine their supply line.
The first was the most obvious. Increase its throughput. Make bigger furnaces, more transport carts, harvest more iron ore, overall make their system more robust and capable of making more iron in a given day. Reducing bottlenecks - like the Universal Refinery's rate of refinement - would also count, because the end result would be more iron.
That one wasn't particularly compelling at the moment. They had plenty of iron for their purposes. Ingots and ore were both piling up, and that was fine.
The second option was similar. Decrease required involvement. That was more or less their current trajectory, and would see them adding motion slide rails to automatically fill the Universal Refinery with their iron ore, so that Oliver wouldn't...
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I could use my extra pseudowyverns for that.
They weren't the strongest fliers, but Henrietta could create fifteen of them now, and as such had the wingpower to spare. So long as the rocks weren't too large, she was decently confident in the ability of a half-dozen of the creatures to transport fifty kilos of rock to the top of the Spire each day. They were already loading the Universal Refinery, after all. This would just be moving their collection point out further.
They could just use any motion slide rails he'd made for that purpose elsewhere. There were lots of things that could benefit from them. Creating something capable of continuous motion absolutely needed to be their first 'finished' product.
Regardless, transport of small amounts of stone was one part of the process that suddenly no longer needed regular human involvement. Other places would include having the Universal Refinery automatically feed into the smelter enchantment, automatically delivering charcoal to the braziers to keep them burning, or automating charcoal production in general were all tasks.
Oliver didn't want untended fires, but turning First Tower into a centralized place of fire should satiate him.
Henrietta made herself another note to talk to Clark and find out the latest of what he'd learned regarding making charcoal, and see whether Oliver might be able to make it entirely automatic.
Because, as she'd learned, trying to make a process be entirely intervention-free from the start wasn't the way. Instead, it was to slowly reduce how much they needed to intervene and do until they could just... go hands-off. Like teaching their factory how to ride a bicycle.
As for the third way they could expand their factory, well, they could extend it. It was currently creating iron ingots, but iron ingots certainly wouldn't suffice for everything. Even adding just one or two steps of automatic processing along the path of making rods or nails, let alone automatically creating more motion slides?
More sophisticated outputs would make further development that much easier, and relieve that much more pressure from Oliver. Hells, even if it wasn't fully automated, making it a process which her, Jacob, or Clark could undertake would also help Oliver immeasurably, and the Artificer was their linchpin for technological advancement.
Plus, she still wanted to stick to her long-term goal of creating a supply line for iron that would automatically scale itself in certain ways, and if that was the goal they'd definitely need some fairly complex components being created.
In truth, there was no real way they'd only focus on one of the axis of developments. In addition to making wholly new supply lines for different resources, all three approaches naturally overlapped. Increasing throughput would necessitate lessened human intervention, lessened human intervention would benefit greatly from more sophisticated outputs, and attempting to automate dozens of distinct creations would very much need lots of iron being fed into it.
All of it would benefit from automation, though... so having lots of motion slides would be a must. Independently-motivated machines for long distance or repetitive motion would be pivotal for proper automation.
That could be her next goal for Oliver - extending The Factory to create a basic enchanted item. Hopefully that goal wouldn't be too large for him, but she could think of ways to break it down in case it was. Motion and flame were the pillars of industry, and removing the need for humans to be involved in their creation would be massive.
Would that make ?Amanuensis? redundant? she suddenly wondered. The primary reason she was trying to get the skill now was because of how it would help with copying enchantments to ease some of the rote work that Oliver had to do, but if they managed to create an enchantment machine, the odds of them being able to make something that would work as ammunition for their turrets were high.
Honestly, with the flowers not being present as much, they probably didn't even need the claynades...
She'd reassess all the factors later. ?Amanuensis? would still be useful in making her inkling army even larger, but that wasn't even close to a bottleneck. She should have higher priorities, and she had two skill slots open at the moment.
Her eyes flit over to the paper which had her latest Oliver-transcribed [Status] on it.
Class: [Master Inkscribe] (Card, Rune, Shadow)
Level: 10
Major Stats: Dexterity 10, Aura 4, Mind 7
Regular Stats: Recovery 1, Generation 0, Cohesion 2, Skill 5, Capacity 6
Minor Stats: Strength 0, Resistance 0, Power 0
Skills (3/5): [Refined Calligraphy] ?Epizeuxis? ?Etch? 15
She'd been distributing her points across Skill and Mind lately, and each point she put into Skill and didn't fill... well, it wasn't exactly wasted, as from her understanding it granted some kind of semi-nebulous benefit to the rest of her skills, but it was certainly less useful to her than more points to help her keep endless things straight, improving her physical capabilities, or improving her Cohesion.
Maybe she'd put more points into Cohesion next time she got levels? Extra control and robustness to her magic wouldn't be bad, it just... wasn't directly applicable to her inklings, so it would only be useful if she actually got a skill which she frequently used directly, and she didn't know when that would happen.
Henrietta grit her teeth. It seemed like every time she tried to anticipate what they'd need, she was wrong, making her not only unable to actually prepare for the challenges that arose - costing her time that a good leader wouldn't need - but she also then wasted time by preparing for the wrong things.
Why was this so hard? Mark had made it look so easy.
Well, bemoaning it wouldn't make it better. As the leader, she needed to set an example for her teammates, and that meant no whining.
After a bit more time deliberating over some more mundane, boring specifics, she unfurled her wings and swooped down to where Clark was, appropriately, digging into a charcoal-making pile.
"Haleford."
"Commander!" Clark brightly greeted her. "Has my work been good?"
"You've been fantastic, Haleford. But I don't know how good your work is until I look at it and you explain what you've been doing."
"Right! Right, of course. So, it's not always the easiest, because there's a lot of Water around these, so they don't burn the most even, but that can be worked around so long as I build a central pile out of dry wood, or even more charcoal itself. Then it can get hot enough to dry out the wood... or something?"
He turned towards her, looking for approval, and while she couldn't unilaterally give it, she could still help him along, "I don't know much more about the specifics for what's happening than you do, Haleford. But all I'm interested in right now is that it does work."
"Of course! It does work. However, I have been attempting to [Unblemish] the wood into a drier state. That has been a bit of a challenge because water is not truly a blemish, but because it is water my skill is still capable of reaching it slightly."
That was impressive. "Have you spoken about your findings with any of the others?"
"Jacob tried to teach me a bit about how to focus more on just the Water parts of my skill, which was very helpful!"
"Hmmm. Ask Ride at some point for assistance as well. Her tactile arcanoception is well-suited to magic of this nature. She may be able to provide a bit of insight into what you're doing inside the log, which might help you with actually forming a subskill... which I'm assuming hasn't happened yet?"
"I do not believe I have," Clark shook his head, "But Oliver only checked me out a couple of days ago, and I might have gotten something since then!"
She loved the optimism. "So you're working on expanding into light transmutation... what happens right now if you [Unblemish] some half-burned charcoal?"
"Oh!"
Henrietta waited for Clark to continue.
"I have not tried that," he finished. "But it seems like a good idea!"
He started looking around for a suitable stick, and Henrietta shook her head, "Don't worry about it right now, but that could be another good way to get some practice in. Start with something that's half-transmuted and see if you can figure out how to either push it all the way or pull it back to where it was."
The jump from a restorative to a transformative effect was a bit of a big one, because it required the magic to do some fundamentally different things. Fortunately, the System was quite good at supporting those kinds of alterations. It still had its limits, of course - it was unlikely that a elemental Shadow restoration skill could gain a transformation subskill - but both Water and Hero were both elements of change, in their own ways. Clark learning how to leverage them in either completing or undoing an external change would go a long ways towards expanding his own skill capabilities.
"Other than your magic practice, I want to hear more about the charcoal. How much do you make in a normal pile, how big is your normal pile, how long does it take..."
They had their factory.
Now, they just needed to grow it.
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