"Steampunk gnomes," Danika repeated. "Like the ones at the gnomeworks? But they didn't seem very ridiculous?"

Devon Yu chuckled and transported them both to the island space where they held their morning meetings.

Danika wondered if the traveling merchant would still be waiting in her space when she returned.

Ariana greeted her happily, and then asked, "What do you think is the most recognizable feature of the steampunk genre Danika?"

"Gears?" she suggested uncertainly.

"That's what I said!" Paul exclaimed.

Takahashi shook his head, but he smiled.

"Victorian fashion," Ariana explained without waiting for Danika to ask. "Gears are prominent, but what the publicity people are hoping for is a Victorian make-over."

"This wasn't in the meeting this morning?" Danika questioned.

"No, we were just informed about half an hour ago," Devon Yu explained. "On the one hand, they've embraced the complex devices that they were trying to get rid of last time. But on the other hand, I feel like this is even more ridiculous than an Arabian themed desert."

"This is for the next expansion?" Danika asked.

"No, just for the update," Paul answered her first. "They want to wrap the money grubbing tactics and the messenger modes with it."

Danika listened while everyone talked for a bit and then hesitantly asked, "Why the gnomes? I mean, yeah, Antikythera is a city of gears, but gnomes are the earth elementals? Won't it unbalance the other elementals if just the gnomes get… er, re-themed? Why not include all of them?"

"What race would you target then?" Devon Yu asked with amusement.

"The dwarves," Danika replied promptly. "Their culture has already been shaken up, so it would be a good time for them to have a cultural revolution to go with their industrial revolution wouldn't it?"

Ariana rolled her eyes and complained, "How can you agree with him so easily when you weren't even here for his arguments?"

"What?" Danika asked blankly.

Paul laughed, and pointed at Devon Yu, "That was his first suggestion."

The head of their department only replied complacently, "She's just looking at it logically."

Takahashi grinned and told Danika, "Ariana objects because dwarves wouldn't look good in the female corsetry common to steampunk costumes."

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Ariana sat up and swiped through her menus until she located existing outfits that were already reasonably close to the common costuming used. Then she called up the instances of a pair of gnomes, a pair of humans, and a pair of dwarves wearing the costumes. "Look," she demanded.

The gnomes, like the etain, pixies, and nadia were essentially androgynously human shaped. The costumes fit them just as well as they did the humans. The dwarves were shorter and bulkier, and Danika had to admit that the corseted outfit just didn't emphasize things in a flattering manner on the female.

The corset did remind her a bit of the armor that many dwarves already wore though, and Danika asked, "What if you replace the internally reinforced parts of the clothing with elaborately decorated external armor like they often wear now?"

"Um, making samples would take awhile, but I could design that and show you tomorrow," Ariana replied.

Danika blinked and then asked, "Can't your dragon do it? I think mine can." Everyone looked at her with varying degrees of surprise. "Um, mind if I ask it?" she asked nervously.

"Go right ahead," Devon Yu instructed.

Danika's assistant popped up as though it had been waiting, and she asked, "Can you replace the internally reinforced pieces of those clothes with external armor?"

"Of course," her celestial dragon agreed promptly. It made the changes and then turned to her with a proud look.

"More copper and brass colors, and with elaborate inlays," Danika instructed.

Her assistant gave a little huff, but complied.

Takahashi was the first to nod and say, "That combination actually looks both very dwarven and rather victorian. Only the hats seem wrong."

"The hats were internally reinforced, and these helms were the closest in shape to them," Danika's assistant replied promptly.

"How did you teach it to do that?" Ariana asked.

"I don't understand, you're the one who showed me how to ask my assistant to help me complete my jobs," Danika complained.

"Watch," Ariana commanded. She dismissed the six figures and summoned them again as they had been before Danika's assistant had modified them. Then she called up her own assistant, and asked it exactly the same thing Danika had, "Can you replace the internally reinforced pieces of those clothes with external armor?"

"I don't understand," Ariana's assistant replied. "Do you want to replace everything that has been sewn?"

Danika gazed at the little celestial dragon in surprise. She glanced at her own assistant who still hovered beside her, looking smug.

"What kinds of things do you usually ask your assistant to do?" Devon Yu prompted.

"Um, everything I guess?" Danika replied a little guiltily.

Devon winked at her. "Let my assistant try," he told Ariana.

"Mine too," Paul volunteered.

Eventually everyone tried having their assistants attempt to fulfill the request. Takahashi's came closest to matching the intuitive level of Danika's, but Devon's was also close.

Devon Yu explained to his frustrated and confused department members, "The variable outcomes are because of the way our assistants are designed. Instead of forcing everyone to learn their commands, they were designed to learn yours. Lin Hao could explain it better, but they were modeled after some of the top search engine interfaces."

Ariana protested, "But I've been here almost as long as you have, so shouldn't my assistant be one of the most adapted? I use it all the time, both at work and outside of work."

Takahashi responded first, "I think yours is more limited because you were here since the beginning. You know what it should be able to do, so you don't ask it for things beyond that. I have been trying to give mine more general commands and seeing what it does with them ever since we worked on the expansion together." He glanced at Danika and added, "Fortunately mine hasn't developed the attitude hers has though."

Devon Yu laughed when Danika defended her assistant with, "Sometimes its complaints and suggestions are very useful?"

"Mine used to try to suggest a lot more in the beginning, outside of work, when the app for it was new," Ariana admitted grudgingly. "But it was annoying so I told it that it couldn't suggest anything more than once every five minutes."

Danika blinked and said, "My assistant is very unobtrusive outside of work. Much nicer than I expected, it only speaks up when it thinks there's something very urgent or I ask it something."

Her assistant popped back up beside her and complained, "You said you would uninstall the app if I was annoying! I am not annoying!"

"Yeah, you've been great," Danika agreed, and her assistant nodded smugly.

Devon Yu chuckled, but he only said, "So, back to the original subject, let's go ahead and discard the gnomes as targets for the steampunk theming."

Paul spoke up, "I think we should use them as the trigger for the dwarven industrial revolution though, since they already have automated factories, and the two races are related."

Someone else countered with, "No, the trigger should be the railway to the surface that the dwarven racial capital could really use."

"I'd rather not introduce railways," Devon Yu objected mildly. "I was thinking that maybe we could sneak something a little more futuristic in, like sand skimmers."