Alex, reminded of Ariel's earlier rebuke about her ck of involvement in defeating demons, sat on the docks. She watched a mini-sub depart briskly, a fmingo soaring in its wake, carried by the updrafts.

  Suddenly, a scout emerged from the harbor water, startling both Alex and Fufi. "Hey Alex," the scout began, "aren't you going to join the others in exploring the area?"

  “How would I go about doing that?” Alex straightened out her toymaker’s dress and regarded the human-turned mermaid because of an equipped magical item. She felt a bit of a bnk on her name and felt bad about it.

  “Are there any boats that we could float?” She gestured from the water. “Maybe we could try to float another wreck like you did back in the barony?”

  “If there was a wreck intact enough to float it isn’t in the harbor Marina.” Fufi answered Marina, beating Alex to her name.

  “Perhaps further out?” Marina pressed.

  “Have you found anything we can float?” Alex eyed the woman in the water.

  She shook her head. “Around here, just debris. I helped Merumeru load up that bathysphere a couple times but she left it here at the dock.”

  “Is there anything useful down there?” Alex asked.

  “We got the easy stuff.” The scout expined. “There are mostly small things, and perhaps better stuff but someone keeps filling the harbor with ash-filled runoff from the streets. So I think things are buried now that are bigger and we didn’t get early.”

  “What about outside the harbor?” Alex wanted to verify something.

  “I like to adventure, but going too far away from nd. . .” She shuddered. “Ariel may be comfortable doing that but not me. It gets deep fast. And if I can’t see anything but bckness below me that makes me nervous. Plus, even with pathfinding skills, there is no trail to follow when all around you is water as far as the eye can see.”

  “I don’t bme you.” Alex regarded the open ocean before them. “Floating something out of a river versus floating something out of the ocean is probably a whole different level of difficulty. But we have to find a way to travel off the isnd. Only having that one portal pipe isn’t ideal. And without a shipwright I think that limits our options.”

  “How can I help?” The woman asked.

  “Ariel wanted me to remake the air boat with the balloon on it.” Alex frowned. “The more I think about it, that might work just for a couple people, but only in the air and calm waters. If we could find something that does what we need to, or at least used to before it sank then maybe that would be a good starting point.”

  “I’m just a simple scout who has been stuck at the same level for years.” The wet-haired girl sounded a little overwhelmed.

  “Haha,” Alex awkwardly chuckled. “Sorry, thinking out loud. I suppose a good short term goal would be to find stuff we could salvage to work on a boat from. I don’t know what is all down there, but metal scrap, or anything that might be useful in some way? We could give it to the smiths to melt down.”

  “I can do that!” She gave a sloppy salute and dived back into the harbor.

  “Just be careful.” Alex spoke in a whisper. “We’ve already lost half the people that we saved from the wastends and Yvne’s barony.”

  While the fairy and slime girl set out on their exposition of the shallows of the area, Alex got motivated on the design for a new doll.

  She pinned a sketch in her notebook. “I had this idea from when Ariel had a peg leg.”

  Fufi watched the sketch take shape. “There is something weird with the legs.”

  The concept doll had propellers and two sets of rudders instead of feet. “There needs to be two axis of movement. That way it can turn up and down and left and right. I’m not sure what the right term is. Rudder and fps?”

  She drew up a sketch of the leg that would spin, driving by a spring that could be wound. It functioned quite a bit like the mini sub but needed to be wound every 10 minutes because that is how long the enchantment would st. The doll had webbed hands and looked surprisingly like Ariel did before she got turned into a fairy.

  “You are making a doll of a sea elf.” Fufi expined, like she had just won a guessing game. “Kinda…”

  Alex filled it out a bit more. “These can move 90 degrees in either direction.”

  Fufi interrupted. “I don’t like how the legs look. Her feet are not right at all. Why not make them more like fish fins? I think that would be cuter.”

  “But it won’t work if the material is soft.” Alex compined.

  “Trust in the power of cuteness.” Fufi rebutted.

  Given all her experience, Fufi had a good point. “If it doesn’t work and she just runs off in whatever direction you have to take responsibility.” Alex gave a half-hearted reply to the fmingo.

  Alex bugged the smithy for help with creating a doll that would function under water. Another wooden doll was out, because it would always want to float. An iron doll was out because salt water plus iron equals rust. The probably-highest-level smith had been having some success with the paldium ore and suggested using that. Using a complex mechanism that functioned simirly to a lung, the 3 foot doll could adjust buoyancy by expanding or contracting the air trapped inside the chest cavity.

  The magical girl toymaker used a simir gearing and bearing set up to let the spring let all the mechanical energy out of it at a fast rate to get the propellers that were enchanted to preserve kinetic energy go at a fast rate. The key would need to be wound with each use of the propellers but they should get going very fast and stay that way for 10 minutes.

  The doll wore a one-piece swimsuit, had a snorkel, and goggles that did nothing.

  It took a couple of days but eventually Alex crafted a sea elf doll with propellers wrapped in two axis of fish fin type rudders that could be retracted to look a bit more like flippers than the back part of a submarine. She took them out to the dock and id back in a chair then prepared to activate [possess doll] while Fufi would stand watch.

  Alex pced her phone in the doll’s webbed hands. “Time to take the plunge.”

  “Wait.” Fufi fpped her wings. “You almost forgot the most important part.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked.

  “You have to name this cute creation.” Fufi demanded.

  “Hmmm.” Alex blurted out the first name that came to mind. “How about Ariel two?”

  “No no no.” Fufi shook her beak repeatedly in disagreement. “You can do better than that.”

  “Help me out a little?” Alex frowned, being bad at naming.

  “How about Tidea?” Fufi blurted out, sticking her beak up.

  “Welcome to Lilly Pad.” Alex named the doll and welcomed her to the pretend adventuring party that they made with Merumeru. “Your name will be Tidea.”

  Without further dey, Alex activated [possess doll] and had the unreal experience of shrinking in size to a 3 foot tall person who had what felt like diving flippers permanently attached to where her feet should be. She turned out the fshlight app on her phone and walked off the dock into the water.

  The doll quickly sank to the bottom. She pced the now-oversized phone down and wound her key. The propellers in her feet activated, and she swiftly grabbed the phone before the thrust propelled her away. Turning on the video recording, she unched upward like a rocket. It took both arms to keep the phone from flying out of her grasp. She ascended at an angle, breaching the water like a whale. However, the paldium doll couldn't fly and crashed back down into the harbor with a spsh. Frozen by shock from the unexpectedly rapid movement, she torpedoed downwards, embedding her head in the muddy seafloor.

  Ten minutes ter, when the propellers stopped, she couldn't see anything due to the massive cloud of dirt her kicking and thrashing had stirred up from the bay's sediment.

  Alex tried to scream, but like most other dolls, this one cked the ability to speak. She thought she was going to drown. Eventually, as the propellers ceased, her panic subsided, and she realized that a doll couldn't drown.

  She put the phone down again and expanded the compressed air in her fake 'lungs' to achieve positive buoyancy. Quickly grabbing the phone once more, she slowly floated back to the surface.

  Fufi noticed the doll, holding the phone, bobbing in the harbor's gentle waves. The fmingo flew over, nded in the water briefly, and picked up the doll by her swimsuit in its beak.

  The fmingo attempted to fly, but the three-foot-tall doll was the heaviest one made yet. While the doll could float, it was only just barely. So, Fufi ended up dragging the doll back to the pier.

  Alex ended the phone app's recording and deactivated the [possess doll] skill, returning to her original body.

  “How do you feel?” Fufi slurred, the doll’s arm in her beak causing her words to not form well.

  “Dizzy,” Alex stumbled to her feet and after a moment managed to pull Tidea from the water and onto the dock. “That doll is much faster than I expected.”

  “You were much faster than the mini submarine.” Fufi agreed.

  “It is going to take some practice to get used to doing stuff underwater.” Alex grimaced. “When I stirred up all that dirt I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t tell up from down and wanted to shoot to the surface and get fresh air.”

  “I’m gd you made it back okay.” Fufi fpped a wing. “When I saw you shoot out of the water I was wondering if we’d need to go fetch Marina to find your doll and phone.”

  Alex pulled the phone from the doll’s death grip. “I guess I didn’t need the fsh light. I thought it would get dark if I hit the bottom of the harbor.”

  Fufi shook her head. “You’d have to go a lot deeper. I can see the bottom from here. Though if you go a bit further it gets a lot deeper fast. Luckily you didn’t shoot straight out to the harbor entrance. At those speeds your might have made it to water that was hundreds of feet deep before the propellers stopped.”

  “I forget how deep you have to go before it gets completely dark.” Alex pyed the recording on the phone. It wasn’t very useful, the camera was jerky so it was nauseating to watch. “Maybe 200 feet?”

  “It is probably a lot more than that.” Fufi guessed. “Besides, didn’t Ariel say that if the water is so deep that everything is completely dark, that means that you are in the realm of real dangerous things?”

  Alex remembered the same. “I don’t want to find some kind of megadon or giant squid that has been sleeping for a thousand years.”

  “Did she say that was down there?” Fufi sounded scared.

  “No,” Alex looked out over the water. “Just that her people don’t swim into the dark. My imagination is making up stuff I suppose. I wouldn’t know what is hiding that deep. Maybe it is just gnomes that figured out how to live down there. If they made a city that deep then no demons would be bothering them again any time soon.”

  melchi