Sobon was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an architect. As such, the first upgrades she made to the walls were simple, brutal, and clinical. Her first action was ripping out all the existing enchantments, which was essentially trivial from this side, given how they'd decayed. She used standard Crestan spiritual markers to mark the wall's corners and a little added math to define a set of boxes that were completely contained within the material of the walls themselves. Then, with a subtle application of the native qi inscriptions, she simply defined that entire region within the walls as a single, continuous, but oddly-shaped space, separate from the real world--a pocket dimension that just so happened to overlap with the real world almost perfectly.

Sobon could have done the same in Crestan aether script, and would again later, but for now, her purposes were better served with the wall region existing outside of normal space. With it separated, Sobon spun up every aether dyanmo she had, charging all their thorns while she very carefully began to script out a mixture of Crestan and Qi techniques. It was nothing amazing--in fact, it was brutal and inefficient. Once she had the script finished and an adequate amount of power to start, her pattern began working through the material of the wall, reforging it into a flawless, if somewhat changed, whole.

It was well known in materials science that flawless materials essentially didn't exist--on an atomic scale, there was no point in even pretending. Flaws were critical in some materials to provide flexibility, which improved overall strength. But flaws were also the place that materials began breaking apart, and once you removed enough of them on a large piece like this, many materials became so hard that it was difficult to find a place to begin breaking them. And since the wall contained no small amount of carbon, silicon, iron, aluminum, and sometimes even titanium, it wasn't hard to rearrange the material into layers of armor around a core of leftover junk. What was more difficult was keeping the volume of the material exactly the same, given the shifting densities of the material, and given all the flaws in the original. Sobon simplified by leaving occasional spherical voids when the material was insufficient.

For all that you could see on the outside, though, work that ended up taking Sobon more than a day seemed to have done nothing at all, and when she released the spatial script and brought the wall interior back to the real world, both Lui and Mian looked at her, confused but unwilling to question her.

"Only a start," Sobon said, without clarifying, then put aside her reforging script and worked on replacing the defense and privacy wards. For the most part, Sobon didn't worry much about finding an ideal solution--she reinforced the armor layers of the wall within its bounds and created force barriers that would keep anything from going over the wall or attacking from above, without bothering to try to key it to anyone or anything.

For the gate mechanism itself, Sobon replaced all of the physical hinges with a pure aether mechanism, just to balance things out for now, and she improved the gate's authentication with a triple lock--one that checked the person's soul and qi core signatures, and also required a simple coded qi pulse. The first attempt required Sobon to be the one to register new entrants, and it lacked some advanced features that Sobon would wish, like any kind of panic mechanisms.

It's not as though she paid no attention to what was happening in the interim. While the wall was reforging, and in between modifications to the gate, Alassi helped Lui to rearrange things that Mian had bought until they found something that made them all comfortable. Mian, for his own reasons, took one of the sheds. Lui had looked ready to take the other for herself, but Sobon convined her she had every right to stay in the main house if she preferred. And when it seemed like that was what she really wanted... Besides which, Sobon had plans.

Sobon's own understanding of spatial expansion patterns wasn't extensive. Although Sobon knew many foreign space forces used spatial expansion to cheat on the size of their spacefaring vessels, Crestan designers didn't. According to the few classes where it had been discussed, spatial expansion had a larger effect on your ability to warp ships than it should, and Crest wants its ships lean. Ships in the Rapier class that she'd served on were high aspect ratio, nearly a kilometer long but less than a hundred meters in width and height. From certain angles, it was a pain in the ass to target, and it could run away from a bad engagement like few other ships in known space. When, of course, the situation didn't demand it stand and fight.

However, there were field bunker patterns that could squeeze an entire company into a space barely contained by all its exit doors, and that pattern was required knowledge for aether techs. It wasn't comfortable--it was cramped, part of the spaces were taken up by mechanical spaces, and aether was awful at creature comforts--but the ruthlessly efficient packing had a long and storied history of hiding oversized forces behind enemy lines.

So Sobon carefully removed the floor of the other shed, marked out the geometry, then expanded downwards, creating a deep shaft where none should have existed. This was no Qi inscription--Crestan patterns extended natural space, creating a disturbance when it was created but requiring minimal upkeep. Then, she marked and expanded outwards from the shaft, creating what should have been an underground bunker.

It was a bit more complicated than that. The expanded space had an awkward relationship with the planet's mass, so gravity was a little off. Sobon navigated the empty space like only an experienced spacer could, making small motions and never overreacting, but when Lui poked her head in and accidentally knocked a bunch of pebbles down the hole, she couldn't help gasping.

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"Grandma, what...?" The girl leaned down, watching the pebbles swish around near the entrance, uncertainly.

"Mm. It's complicated if you don't know the basics." Sobon finished laying out the quartz rod she had formed from the sandy soil, and engraved with spatial stabilizing marks. Once the bounds were properly stabilized, the expanded space would require almost no maintenance. "Gravity comes from the center of the world, and everything falls towards it. But this extra space dulls the effect of it--"

"Grandma, I don't understand what you're saying," Lui said, poking at the floating pebbles.

"The entrace to this space is 'down', but not as strongly as normal," Sobon simplified. "I'll make it normal, later."

Although Sobon listened for more questions as she worked, she was surprised when Lui simply asked, "Is it safe to come in?"

"Yes, of course."

Lui was a gentle child, but a bit clumsy, and when she hopped into the hole in the floor, the gravitic shear pulled at her in odd ways, and it was all she could do to only bang her head into the walls twice. Sobon turned to watch, but the girl's panicked flailing quickly became her stubbornly wedging herself into a corner, with small uses of qi that Sobon doubted she was even aware of. Once she had her bearings, she explored the odd sense of weight that the room gave her, slowly testing various motions with the tenacity of a stubborn child.

"It's interesting, isn't it?" Sobon didn't try to offer advice, and she didn't think the girl would want any. "It's not a deliberate effect, just how the world reacts when you intefere with it."

"You've seen... I mean, Sobon has seen..." Lui caught herself against the wall. "Sorry. I mean, I guess I know that you're..."

"I'm Sobon. I usually am, although Alassi is in here."

Lui nodded. "Do you... interfere with worlds, where you come from?"

Sobon just laughed. "Not as often as some." The worlds and worlds she couldn't talk about, especially when it came to the Founders, drifted through the back of her mind. "But gravity--what you think of as weight--it's only normal, the way you think of it, close to the ground. And there are places in the heavens that are far from the ground indeed."

Lui looked "up" for a moment, before remembering that the hole was now "up", and even then, there was nothing to see but the roof of the shed. "What are the heavens like?"

Sobon considered the question, before going back to marking up the quartz rod with stabilizing scripts. "It's a bit like the ocean shore. There are cities on worlds, and great seas of nothing between them. Ships cross them, and are posted out in that sea, for many years at a time."

"I've never been to the ocean." Lui's voice was small.

"If Ki'el makes it here, she will tell you about it. She was from an island village." Sobon paused. "Be gentle with her. She lost that home, and her family." Sobon didn't need to look to sense Lui's polite but resolute nod. "Both the ocean and the heavens have their hidden horrors. But one of the greatest horrors is always other people. Ships of war, and pirates. Thieves and murderers. Desperate people who have chosen a road they cannot turn back from, and will do whatever they must to win, or to escape." Sobon fused two rods together to form a corner, then took the next segment and began carving.

"But the horrors are what happens out beyond the reach of civilization. And civilization, if it survives, is capable of great things." Sobon paused. She wasn't really a poet, and finding things to say about civilization was hard. "The largest city I ever saw... if you raised a mountain in the middle and stood on its peak, you couldn't see the edges." That barely said anything, really. There were some very small mountains out there, and Sobon was thinking of a very large city indeed.

"How?" breathed Lui, and Sobon smiled quietly to herself, resuming her carving. "How can you fit so many people in to a place, safely?"

"Hard work and good design. For ages, the hardest problem was clean water. Later, it was keeping the... the qi clean and even, everywhere." Sobon didn't try to elaborate, this time, instead barely touching on the topic. "Cleaning. Transportation. Communication. Policing. Emergency response. Corrupted leaders. Greater things are only possible as you fix one problem after the next one. Every time a civilization fails to live up to its responsibilities, centuries of progress are threatened. Too often, they are lost. And with success comes complacency, always. People forget what will happen if they refuse to work towards the future."

"Is it... really possible, if we could just do all those things right, though?"

"Just?" Sobon gave a single, but honest, bark of laughter at that. "Learning to do something like that for the first time can take centuries, and only if the conditions are right."

Lui was quiet for a long moment. "The qi... the energy of this city is already so upset. Too many powerful people who hate each other. I felt it before I could see it. The barriers help, but..." Sobon heard her push off the wall, and glanced over to see her coming up behind. Sobon stiffened, but allowed the girl to grab hold. "I worry."

[ She is definitely too sensitive, ] Sobon groused at Alassi, but the woman's spirit didn't bother replying except with a vague sense of smugness. "I know," Sobon said, tiredly. "If I stay long enough, or come back, I'm sure I'll end up involved, one way or another. But as long as there is a place here, then I'll start by making it safe."

"Can it really be safe? Enough?" Lui's voice was quiet, and the sound of her fear was unmistakable.

That wasn't an unreasonable question, given the kind of enemies Sobon expected to make, but she was dismissive of it anyway. "Safe enough, yes. But nothing is perfect." She set aside the engraving, almost done, and gave Lui the hug that the girl definitely needed. "And when I have time, I'll teach you about ...qi, so that you can escape. There shouldn't be a problem any time soon."

"Even after what happened?"

Sobon didn't let the question phase her. "The greatest problem would be if you were attacked when I'm not here. But, I don't expect to leave before this place is well defended." That was a practical matter; Sobon knew, and not just from the Ri'lef notes on qi, that there was a period of adaptation to high aether. Sobon expected she could raise her qi capacity to the highest possible without outside help, and then perhaps higher, if the Ri'lef would help her with their... starbeast nonsense, or if they could help her create an analogue out of other materials. "While I'm here, you shouldn't worry."

Lui nodded, but stayed there for long minutes after.