After having a day to unwind after the frantic traveling to get back to the sky isnd, Alex felt a bit restless. Things had escated a little too quickly for her comfort. Quizzing Aqua a bit more revealed that the water nymphs had been tracking the demonic general’s battle with the angel. Apparently mister skeleton, the cursed doll and the angel had kept attacking it, the demon tried to withdraw but eventually the battle went into the ocean.

  Alex thought about trying to get a ship and head out to fish the doll and knight out of the water but ter the fight went to another kingdom. The nymphs reported that in a surprise turn of events magical girl cosmos sent the angel to another pne and the demon general escaped.

  “I’m not an immortal revenant." Alex told Aqua. “Not sure invading another country is going to be a possibility.”

  “We are a couple months away from spring.” The nereid also thought it was a bad idea to try to keep up with mister skeleton. “When things thaw professor copperpot’s pgue should be ready to let loose on demon nds.”

  “What are we going to do until then?” Alex pondered the situation.

  “You could finish a project.” Fufi offered.

  “The only big thing going on was trying to scale up the flying cloud.” Alex mentioned.

  “They have shipwrights and a whole bunch of people that can look through your work on the toy ship.” Fufi stated. “Don’t you have something that you can work on for yourself?”

  “I wanted to try to make a lifesized doll.” Alex considered. “And long term something that could fight that kaiju of a demon. We could probably do something to make the carriage more secure. I’ve leveled up toymaking a bit and we could set some small dolls on rails to protect it.”

  “You should help Professor Copperpot with his project if you can.” Aqua gave a scroll with hand-written writing on it.

  Alex squirted at the text. “Cursive. Wait. How come his writing is so different?”

  “What is this cursive?” Aqua chuckled. “He wrote that in gnomish lettering. The script is the same as the common tongue, the gnomes just write their letters a little differently.”

  The text read: Transport of live mosquitos

  Alex looked it over, they needed to be carried in a cool, damp box with some kind of sweet fluid to keep them fed. The ideal pce to release them is in warm stagnant bodies of water.

  “Do I even need to use the carriage for this?” Alex got a wild idea. “We already have some toy airships. If we can make a faster airship we could spread the insects to a whole lot of pces quickly.”

  “Meru!” Merumeru jumped up and down.

  “Merumeru wants to fly an airship and drop bugs on demons.” Aqua transted.

  Alex looked at the slime girl. “That should be doable. We just need to have enough material to create these things. If we want to make good airships we should get some light but strong metals. I think in my world they liked to use aluminum or titanium for them.”

  “Hester might know where some of these mines might be.” Aqua considered the problem. “He can’t tell us about where to find his people but if I bet if someone wanted to seek them out for trade he wouldn’t be prohibited from providing them some direction.”

  “We ran across some gnomish ruins on that isnd.” Alex offered. “I believe that the gnomes might have been nearby before the war. Though if they went really far away…”

  “Now that you mention it.” Aqua considered for a moment. “Some of my extremely shy cousins that like to dwell in the dark pces of the sea have mentioned seeing things that look like the old gnomish airships but under water. I wouldn’t recommend going into the midnight zone of the ocean to hunt for them. It is very dangerous for people that need to breathe and finding someone that doesn’t want to be found that deep is next to impossible.”

  “Like Merumeru’s submarine?” Alex asked.

  “Quite possible.” Aqua answered. “Though I don’t know how gnomes could live underwater for any length of time even with them taking weird machine cult csses.”

  Alex pondered this problem. “I’m not an expert but the deeper you go the more dangerous it is. Back in my world they had these submarines that could go thousands of feet deep. But they took whole teams of engineers generations to get that far. These gnomes might be quite good at what they do.”

  “Regardless,” Aqua considered. “I’ve never seen a sea gnome. But if they are living under the ocean then with that battle that went across the sea floor it is going to be trouble for them. The st time that mountain of a demon crossed the ocean he tore up the ndscape so bad that there were earthquakes for weeks.”

  Alex took some time to confirm with professor copperpot about the gnomes. He didn’t say much but did say that the tradition for his people was always to be the one initiating trade after the troubles with the demons. A lot of his replies were prefaced with the saying "hypothetically” so it seemed like his answers were skirting the edges of what the geas to not talk about his people would allow.

  Not wanting to start out with prototyping, Alex worked with Zeke and Trudy’s families to build a decorated ballista for the castle. Nobody had a combat css on the isnd right now but having a cute ballista with some cute bolts that they could put up should be useful in an emergency. There was snow all over everything so they could set it out after things thawed.

  That took a day to throw together. However, it brought another problem to the forefront. They had been running the generator on and off for months now. And even with the thousands of gallons from the tanker truck as a fuel source they had run through all the fuel. Professor Copperpot had bred microbes to recycle the oil but they couldn’t unburn the consumed diesel.

  “This is going to be tricky.” Alex got some wrenches and looked prepared to take the generator apart in the workshop.

  Again, Cassius and some of the men helped but there was no heat in the shop so everyone had to bundle up.

  “Why do you want to take this generator thing apart Alex?” Cassius eyed the contraption.

  “We did some experiments making mills but getting something to run a generator has some unique challenges.” Alex commented.

  “First, if a saw bde spins a little fast or a little slow it isn’t a huge problem.” Alex tapped on the table. “But you see this thing is designed to run at a certain speed, and spin this alternator part… not sure if that is the right term. But it has to spin it right otherwise the frequency of the power will be wrong and I bet that could cause something bad to happen.”

  “So what is the solution?” Cassius eyed the manual that Alex thumbed through.

  “If I can figure this out, the engine can be repced with a mechanical mechanism that spin the alternator. But I think there is some fancy electronics that won’t work because we can’t get it to control a turbine like an engine.” Alex continued thumbing, not understanding exactly everything.

  “This machine is not cute enough.” Fufi commented, unhelpfully.

  “How is that supposed to help?” Alex gred at the fmingo.

  “Cuteness is the answer to everything.” Fufi waved a wing. “I bet if you design this turbine generator thing with lots of sparkles and style then it’ll work out just fine.”

  Given that Fufi had been right about this in the past, Alex got to work making up some drawings for a turbine. Luckily Merumeru had the pipe going from the isnd that passed through a weird portal down into the ke. It had a big valve that they could use to turn off the water. But the generator was supposed to run at 3600 RPM. The turbine likely wouldn’t spin that fast so some creative gearing would need to be invented.

  They spent several days trying to survey and get an idea for how big of a turbine could be put into the pipe. Merumeru pointed out that having only one pipe with the turbine would be a problem for people that liked to use the pipe to travel. So they had to create another pipe and use the big valve as a way to switch it from the open running to running it through the turbine.

  Luckily they had a good plumber on hand that could modify the pipe to fit their needs.

  Also, they had a generous length of power line that went down the road to nowhere. The group of people dug up the power poles, and moved them from the edge of the isnd going to the new power house.

  Merumeru and some of the bcksmiths made the turbine, she had stashed some steel pipes in her pipe storage so they were able to make some bearings and a shaft that came out to attach to a gearing mechanism. Cleaning the snow and throwing together a makeshift building out of a shipping container worked okay.

  Alex and Cassius took apart the generator, removed and reattached certain modified things. She made sure to leave all the control wires in pce. But it just wasn’t the same. She was sure that a change in the turbine speed wasn’t that easy to do compared to raising the speed of an engine. But following Fufi’s advice she put extra care into decoration.

  The gears were shaped like fancy flowers. The main shaft had pleasing spiral patterns etched into them. They even put a happy looking bird on it.

  Lastly, the bcksmiths helped hammer the shipping container into a more pleasing building. After days of work it looked more like a teddy bear curled up and sleeping than a metal box. The masons even joined in and added some stone accents to complete the cuddy bear look.

  “You sure are something.” Grace whistled at the fancy new building. “You really think you can make lightning mana to power your estate with no magic source? Any archmage would call you crazy.”

  “Only one way to find out.” Alex smirked at the gathering crowd.

  “Sister would you do the honors of pulling that knife switch?” Fufi asked the other fmingo.

  “Sure!” Fuzi grabbed the switch and engaged the circuit. Nothing happened, people looked a bit disappointed.

  “That’s only one part.” Alex expined, looking cute. “We have to turn the valve to get the turbine spinning.”

  Cassius did the honors of going and turning that huge valve that they stole from a construction site on earth . Water switched, and the turbine hummed.

  Alex pulled out a volt meter to check the output of the generator. “30, no… 40 volts…”

  The turbine took a moment to get up to speed.

  “90 volts. . . 100 volts.” She switched the meter to frequency. “50 hertz…. No wait 60 there we go. Holding at 60 hertz!”

  Switching the meter back to voltage. “110 volts. 111 volts.” Alex got nervous about this. If the turbine made it go too high, which it shouldn’t, then it could cause some big problem.

  “Holding at 111 volts.” Alex held her breath.

  Everyone watched and Alex kept reading out the volt meter’s reading. After a few minutes it looked like it worked just fine. If everything was set up right this could go quite a while before they had to take it down for maintenance.

  “Hey we got power again!” Alex shouted in delight.

  They looked around and saw some lights on the cabin turn on. Apparently they did something they totally were not qualified to do and it worked out just fine by the power of cuteness.