"Uh, Lori…" Rian said hesitantly. "I'm not trying to question your decision making, which I'm sure is backed up by things that I'm simply ignorant of—"

"Spit it out, Rian."

"This seems a terrible place to store our boats in the event of a dragon," Rian said bluntly. "At least, in my admittedly ignorant opinion. We'd basically be putting them in a shed, and none of our sheds have fared particularly well to dragons. Well, except the ones you buried, but even then, recovering it after the fact was a pain."

Lori looked over the plot of land on the river's bank, black lines drawn on the ground and in the air, and finally had to reluctantly admit the same thing to herself. Even when she'd been choosing it, it was obvious that the spot probably wasn't the best place to shelter their boats, simply the closest and most convenient. Her plan for it had mostly consisted of using excavated stone to make an oversized shelter similar to the Um and the long shelter that now contained so few people the ones living in it were fairly comfortable and not crowded. Well, there had also been the option of making the boat shelter immediately across the river, but then they'd need the boats to get to the boats, and it would still have been the same stone shelter design. Perhaps if she finally made the tunnel going under the river she could move the boat storage to the other side, but for now…

She shook her head to clear it of tangential thought. "Well, what do you suggest?" she said, trying to make her tone scathingly sarcastic and even to her ears simply sounding tired at all this effort she'd just wasted.

Rian shrugged. "Nothing comes to mind," he admitted. "I just know that trying to do this by sticking our boats in a stone shed probably isn't the best idea, but I don't really have anything better." Another shrug. "Admittedly, I only came here to tell you that lunch was ready. I wasn't actually planning to get into a discussion of boat protection logistics."

A part of Lori wanted to skip lunch, to continue working on this problem until it was finished, but that part was quashed by long practice and experience. Depriving herself of food just to try to get in an hour's more work wouldn't lead to anything productive. There wasn't an immediate deadline like a test or exam or submission date, after all. She was a Dungeon Binder now. The only deadlines she had to meet were ones she set for herself.

She still hesitated before finally nodding. "Well, let's go eat then."

Rian nodded, taking one last look at all the lines drawn in darkwisps. "How about we talk about this over lunch? Maybe I can help you come up with something."

Lori shrugged tiredly. Why was she so tired when all she'd really done was walk around essentially drawing lines and taking measurements of boats? She'd needed to get her staff after an embarrassingly long time trying to properly approximate paces with… well, paces. More and more often she'd been leaving her staff in her room, as she no longer really needed the coalcharms, quartz, and wire wrapping for her to use Whispering. All she actually needed it for nowadays was the length markings she'd put on it for measuring, and even that would be unnecessary once she finally learned to utilize Horotracting.

It was quite an annoying tool, come to think of it, and she always had to be aware of it lest she hit anything, and it kept falling over whenever she leaned it on something to free her hands…

Sighing, Lori sat down at her bench, carefully leaning her staff against a notch she'd hacked out with her knife so it wouldn't roll sideways towards her while she was eating. Riz was already there, a cloth wrapped around her head to keep her hair out of her eyes as she used a towel to wipe sweat from her face. She looked like she had been working, given the smell coming from her. Had she been helping with the field preparations? Next to her, Mikon was sitting just a little bit farther away from the other woman than usual. Rian wasn't there, but a quick look around showed he was at the line for food with Umu. Lori rolled her eyes at the sight, but couldn't help but be amused in any case. Apparently he'd finally managed to come to a compromise about them letting him get his own food. Idiot.

For a moment, Lori contemplated going upstairs to get her almanac, or her sunk board, but had to decide against it. She just wasn't in the mood, not with the frustrating problem of the boat storage in front of her. While the grain storage shed was outside the Dungeon, she had placed and design it so she could easily bury the thing in stone so it could be protected from dragons. There was the risk of it becoming something else, like metal or wood or… well, anything else, but that was true of anything and everything, and was why she covered as much of the demesne as she could with darkwisps, so that most of the danger could be reduced down to physical impacts from falling objects or random lightning.

Rian and Umu came back with food, and Lori grabbed one of the bowls and started eating.

"So!" Rian said brightly once the bowls had been distributed, "you're working on where we can put the boats? Anything I can do to help?"

"Get ready to have the area I marked dug out with shovels," Lori said. "We can use the soil in the Dungeon's farm."

Rian nodded, while next to him Riz sighed. "Let's call that the backup plan," Rian said. "You don't seem happy with it."

"Yes, well, I have no other alternatives do I?," Lori said irritably. "After all, what else can be done about them?"

"With the smaller ice boat—"

"Lori's Ice Boat."

Rian stopped speaking for a moment, closed his eyes and let out a breath. "Right, that… you could just let the ice turn back to water, and we can carry the frame inside and just rebuild it afterwards. Even with how big it is, without the ice it's easy to carry and turned sideways. It'll still fit into the Dungeon's front door."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Oh. Right. Lori had forgotten about that. "That's one solution, but we can hardly do the same to the Coldhold," Lori said. "Not easily, in any case."

"It's still easier to try to figure out how to protect one ship than two. Maybe you can bury it too, like you did with the wood storage sheds?"

Lori blinked at the odd idea. But… well, was it really that odd? Certainly, with Whispering it could certainly be done. Only… "There's no appropriate location to do such a thing," Lori said. "At least, not near the town." Which… huh. It was still technically nameless, wasn't it? The demesne had a name, but they had never really named the town outside of her Dungeon… No, focus, not important!

"We have that space in front of the Dungeon…" Rian began.

"No," Lori said sharply. "All of the pipes bringing water to the baths pass through there. I would need to reroute all the pipes around where we would put the Coldhold just to be able to utilize it, and I don't want to."

Rian nodded. "Fair enough, fair enough…" he said, and ate for a moment, face thoughtful. "All right, so we need to store the Coldhold at the very least, and it needs to be protected from heavy things falling out of the sky hitting it… what else?"

"Dragon born abominations," Lori listed. "Undead things. Possibly wisplings, twisted vistas, and thought-shades, though only if I'm not able to raise enough darkwisps to protect it along with the Dungeon. Though in which case it would also be vulnerable to being turned into a dragon scale."

"What are the chances the dragon will do us a favor and turn it into wood?" Rian said, sounding half-serious.

"Small, and not to be relied upon. It's far more likely to be turned into some kind of metal, salt, stone, or even air."

"Ah, well, there's goes that idea." A sigh. "So, it most likely needs to be protected from things hitting it really hard or trying to eat it, then? There's really nothing we can do if the dragon wants to try to change its substance."

"True, though sufficient mass around it will act as ablative protection to make it more likely to survive, " Lori said.

"Why don't we just bury it, then?" Rian said thoughtfully. "We make a big hole, you move the Coldhold into it with water, drain the water out, and then we bury it until the dragon goes away? It would certainly give it more mass to protect it than a shed."

"There's still the question of where it would be buried," Lori said, stating the obvious since it seemed to have slipped by her lord's thought processes. "We can't simply bury it now, since it would still be in use, but it would need to be a location where the Coldhold could quickly be moved to from the river once I became aware that a dragon was coming." A thought occurred to her. "Unless it was away when a dragon arrived, in which case it would be a lost cause and those on it would be horribly dead."

Rian winced at her words. "Yeah… that's a separate problem. Though if the Coldhold were fast enough…" He shook his head, then slapped his own cheeks. "No, focus, no tangents!" He shook his head again, then gave Lori an intense stare. "All right, what if we bury it in the river? When a dragon comes, we cover all the wood with ice, then you sink it under the water and cover it with more ice, and maybe anchor it to the ground so it doesn't move. If we give it maybe… uh… say five paces of water above it, the water would blunt the impact of most things falling out of the sky enough that the ice shell would be able to take the rest of the impact."

Lori stared at him.

"No, no, that's a stupid idea," Rian dismissed.

"It is," Lori agreed.

"How about—"

"Instead of using ice, we should go straight to stone," Lori interrupted him. "That way it wouldn't have the buoyancy issues of trying to cover it in ice, and I won't have to essentially rebuild the ice of the hull because trying to separate the waterwisps that the boat needs structurally with the waterwisps of the ice we buried it in would be even more laborious. Stone is also heavy enough that we can simply cover the outside while leaving the inside hollow and it would still sink, so it's unlikely to be swept away." She tilted her head thoughtfully. "The same can also be done with Lori's Ice Boat, so we won't have to struggle to bring it inside."

Rian blinked, and stared at her. "Wait, are you serious?"

"No, I'm Lori."

The chuckle that came out of Rian seemed to be involuntary. "I mean, it's actually a viable solution?"

"For now," Lori said, waving a hand dismissively. "In the long term, some sort of means to shelter all the boats would be more efficient and cost-effective, but for now, as the plan in the event of a dragon, it's certainly a more effective suggestion than building a riverside shelter for them. However, it gives me the freedom to find a better site for such a shelter, as well as not requiring any immediate action on my part beyond having enough stone set aside for both an emergency bulwark and to envelope the boats."

"So… you're procrastinating?" Rian said with a wide grin.

Lori kicked him under the table.

––––––––––––––––––

Lori spent the rest of the day excavating more stone from the third level. It was already half the current size of the second level, but with a ceiling clearance twice as high, so she had technically already excavated the same amount of stone. She was getting better at efficiently excavating the level. On two of the walls that led away from the river were rows of hallways with support arches to hold up the ceiling, each of them running parallel to each other. All she had to do was keep digging deeper into each hallway while maintaining the shape of the ceiling so it wouldn't collapse. When she needed to make it properly part of a large open space, she simply needed to knock down the walls between the hallways and leave behind support pillars.

With her newly excavated stone, she tested the dragon contingency plan the next day, wrapping the Coldhold in a shell of stone while Rian stood nearby with a water clock to time how quickly she managed to do it. After three tries that had Rian wincing, she found the best approach was to create a platform of thick stone underneath the Coldhold, then build up walls around the boat, encasing it in a cube that she then began to collapse inwards to force out the air and water though holes. Once covered and the stone fused airtight, she simply added more and more stone until it grew thick enough for her own piece of mind, at which point it was heavy enough to sink. Then she simply had to move the whole thing closer to the river's center so that the water above it would be thick enough to absorb impacts, as Rian had suggested.

By their tests, her best time was two hours, but they were able to cut it down closer to one by having the stone base and much of the stone mass prepared in advance and sunk under the water of the dock, greatly reducing its depth. She would probably need to adjust it when the Coldhold came back from the ocean with a full load so that it wouldn't scrape against the stone, but that was simple to attend to. Lori's Ice Boat could be encased even faster, and both she and Rian concluded they would probably have plenty of time to secure the two boats in the event of a dragon. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. If they remembered to.

That night, Lori wrote the reminder on her wall, just in case. Her walls were becoming very crowded with reminders, but with her memory, there was no helping it.

Ugh, she really wished she'd figured out how to access Mentalism already!