"Are you- oh, you are," I said. "Hey Antonio, wasn't expecting you."

About a month ago, I'd gone to a series of dog parks with Lisa, and one of the dog owners we met there was a man by the name of Antonio Sanchez, a Tejano man who hunted game birds and, apparently, worked as a delivery driver.

"Roxy, right?" he asked. "What brings you here?"

"Unfortunately, nothing good," I said. "I'm part of an ongoing investigation, and we think someone pulled a fast one on you. Do you mind if I come inside and ask some questions about one of your clients?"

He paled a little, which was understandable, considering that he'd just learned that the cops were keenly interested in what he'd been doing. And no amount of me being one of the good ones, or him legitimately being considered a victim in this would set his mind at ease, because cops didn't have a well-earned reputation for light touches and compassion, especially when it came to brown people.

"...S-sure," Antonio said.

"Thanks. So, do you recognize the name Gideon James?" I pulled out my phone- I'd bought a new one after realizing that I did still need a screen to show other people pictures with- and pulled up a photograph of Gideon. "This guy?"

"...Yeah, yeah, I recognize him," Antonio said, stepping back and waving me into his house. "Is he the one you're investigating?"

"More or less," I said. "We're pretty sure he was doing what he did under duress- supervillain bullshit, you know how it is- but, all the same, we do need to look over what he was doing and figure out why, so we can track down the mastermind behind it all. So... anything you can share with me would be really helpful."

"Of course, of course. What do you need to know?"

"Due to some departmental politics, I only have a small slice of the information available to me," I said. "Information about particularly weird deliveries, selected by naively-written queries... it's kind of a mess. Right now, all I know about your job is that you delivered a hundred and sixty vibrators, and on another occasion, you delivered the same number of reusable menstrual cups."

"Gideon told me he was a contractor and wasn't entirely clear on who he was working for or what they were doing," Antonio said. "But that he was pretty sure it was some kind of poorly-run charity startup. Some kind of charity shop? Like, you know, a Goodwill knockoff or whatever... look, I don't know. I delivered a lot of weird shit. And I think they were also doing a soup kitchen type deal?"

"Go on," I said.

"So most of the time, I was being kinda wasteful," Antonio said. "Delivering stuff with a pickup truck that would've fit in the passenger seat of a compact, that sort of thing. But about a third of the time, I was delivering bulk bags of some kinda vegetables."

"Do you know which ones?" I asked.

"I recognized the potatoes, but there were two other kinds I delivered, too," Antonio said. "Didn't really recognize 'em, though."

"Was one of them a big, round, white and purple ball?" I asked. "A long skinny root on one end and maybe some greens on the other?"

"Yeah, yeah, and the other one was... some kinda grain?" Antonio said. "They were little perfect circles, real thin..."

"Like these?" I asked, showing him my phone again.

"Yeah, exactly like those," Antonio nodded. "The hell are those, anyway?"

"Turnips and lentils," I said. "Lentils are basically a kind of bean, real popular in India. And turnips are a root vegetable hardly anyone eats anymore because they're tough and bland. Mostly they get used as fodder for livestock."

"I see," Antonio said. "So..."

"So, while I have drawn a conclusion from this already, it would be irresponsible of me to share that with you, and I should really keep asking questions and get a better picture of what's going on. Have you been delivering any of these vegetables on behalf of anyone else within the last four months? And do you know if any of your colleagues have been doing the same?"

----------------------------------------

"Turnips, lentils, and potatoes," Detective Brown repeated.

"What about this information makes it some kind of coup?" Liquid Courage asked.

"Aren't potatoes one of those vegetables that people say you can live on indefinitely?" another detective, whose name I didn't catch, asked.

"Close," I said. "Potatoes are almost nutritionally complete, but they lack key vitamins and minerals, and the protein content is kinda low, so you want to supplement them with something. In Ireland, they supplemented this with dairy, because they had a lot of cows pastured on unfarmable hills. But dairy is an animal product, and unless you've got the animals themselves, those cost money. More than simply switching from dairy to a vegetable source of protein and a vegetable source of vitamins and minerals."

"Lentils and turnips," Liquid Courage said. "Okay, those three vegetables together make up a more-or-less nutritionally complete diet. So fucking what? Tell us why this matters."

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"Is this evidence that Skinner has followers she needs to feed?" Detective Brown asked. "Big whoop, we already knew that."

"It isn't about feeding her followers," I said. "If it was just a matter of feeding a bunch of humans, that's not that hard. Human civilization is built around that kind of thing. No, this specific blend is what she grinds up for organic feedstock when she's doing mad biology."

"...Oh," Detective Brown said.

"This is the sort of innocuous-seeming detail that you cannot pick out as a red flag without knowing precisely what you're looking for," I said. "Which is why I need full access to Gideon's files and that goddamn database."

"But-" Detective Brown began.

"Just give her the damn files, Leroy. We are not having a repeat of the Idaville Incident."

"...Fine," Detective Brown said. "Will that be all, Doctor?"

"Give me ten minutes to comb through the files," I said. "It may be that we're gonna need a lot of mundane boots on the ground knocking on doors and asking questions."

----------------------------------------

"So, here's the problem," I said. "We have a ton of places we need to search, but we only have a handful of people to search them."

"What's the solution?" Akane asked.

"Robots," I said. "One of my three specialties is robots, and while I don't use them often, that's because so far I haven't really needed to. But, back home, they're what I used for backup, and now, they're what I'll use for this big ol' job."

"I'm gonna be honest, I forgot you had robots as a specialty," Akane said.

"A robot made you breakfast this morning."

"...They're very unobtrusive."

"Whatever. Anyhow, I have tricks for batching out identical copies of a given gadget, and the robots I build are capable of participating in the building process and even doing it without me, once I've got two of the bastards built. Buuuut, the next problem is that our work area is the basement, and also, so is Lisa's bedroom. Sure, it's a real bedroom now, with an actual wall and a real door and some proper soundproofing insulation, but... well, our workshop being right outside Lisa's bedroom door still feels simultaneously inconvenient and unsafe."

"You don't use the workshop very much, do you?" Akane asked.

"I do nearly all of my work at a computer, so, no," I said.

"Well, prepare to be amazed," Akane said, leading me to a big square in the corner of the room, precisely three meters across, with black-and-yellow hazard tape on both sides of the three-meter outline. "And witness... the real workshop!" Once we were both within the square, she hit a button in a box mounted on the wall, with a very thick and beefy conduit running down and into the floor. Oddly, next to the box and on the other side of the dividing line, there was a matching button, box, and conduit. "...I said, the real workshop!" She hit the button again, and finally, a noise was made, and the concrete we stood on began to move, along with the box. At the same time, a wrought iron safety railing raised up out of the floor, coming up to about four feet high at its peak.

"So, you built a mole machine to dig out a giant secret underground workshop," I said. "And then you installed a cleverly-disguised freight elevator connecting it to our basement."

"Also to our garage," Akane said. "I make vehicles, remember? Of course, right now I'm focusing more on transformation, playing around with density and volume and all that jazz."

"I assume you have an application in mind?" I asked. "I mean, aimless dicking around is fun, I've done plenty of that, but for some reason most mad scientists prefer goal-oriented dicking around."

"If I can reliably shrink and un-shrink complicated things," Akane said, "then I can build vehicles longer than three meters down here and then get them out of here."

"...And you can't be bothered to just dig a bigger tunnel?"

"The math says this is the biggest tunnel our house can safely support."

The elevator came to a stop, and I hummed appreciatively. Akane was a formally-trained aerospace engineer, and as a formally-trained engineer of any sort, one of her earliest, most-practiced skills was the ability to do useful math about material stress and strain and loading. Sure, in Akane's case she'd developed that talent towards the end of making jet engines that didn't explode, but as a mad scientist, she could transfer that skill more than one might think.

The limestone our house was built atop had been expertly carved and buttressed with steel. And despite knowing that this was likely the product of intense calculation and optimization, I couldn't help but shiver as I noted that the steel support beams and limestone were shaped very organically and melded together, like ligaments anchoring themselves to bones.

The space itself was quite serviceable, with no pillars in the middle of the floor to get in the way and high ceilings helped along by the domed structure. The lighting was well up to OSHA standards, and the floors had been carefully carved flat and level from the bedrock itself, left precisely rough enough for people to safely walk on.

"This," Akane said, sweeping her arm across our field of view, "is the real workshop. So, Roxy... think you can work with this?"

I hummed appreciatively, stepping off the freight elevator. Over there were well-stocked supply shelves, there were some machine tools, and in the back was a big ol' 3D printer with a hopper of special plastic that, when put into the sintering kiln right next to it, would produce a perfectly serviceable metal part that would've been a much bigger pain in the ass to cast in a foundry.

And, of course, then there were the far less mundane fabricators, built by Akane and I, able to produce all sorts of miscellaneous shit.

"I'm gonna need to prototype the scanner in question today," I said. "Get it working, draw up a procedure for production... Then tomorrow, I wake up bright and early, eat a big breakfast, and then spend all day down here, building robots and getting an assembly line going. That'll take up some space, but..."

"We've got space," Akane said.

"Yeah. Yeah we do." I turned back and nodded to her. "Yeah, I can work with this."