[Prompt 4: Saving Time]
Snowfall was common in Coerthas, blanketing the caverns and highlands that rose towards the Dravanian highlands to meet the cooler temperatures there, the hardy forests and their inhabitants used to the chill that so much of Eorzea shed.
Lucien adjusted his visor, the thin veil of cloth concealed under the flip of leather keeping his eyes from aching at snowblind; he wasn’t sure how others handled the long patrols in the sharp snows and ice that clung to the treacherous lands from the Calamity. He wasn’t sure if Aedwen had something she rigged for others, either, as the kir was as loathe to approach her for assistance as ever, especially after their last conversation.
If she hadn’t been holding his declaration for fitness under proverbial threat he might’ve laughed more at her insinuations.
As the kir so rarely did he was being lightly followed by his project, taking the modified bits with him; he’d been skimping on sleep to pour more time into his workshop project though he couldn’t say whether or not he recalled half of the bells aside from the blur of being bent over his drafting table, carefully carving the small molds out so that the modifications to the usual array that powered the bits could be cast. If he’d been home he wouldn’t have needed to carve the molds, spend the time casting them. If he’d been home he might not have known how to either, a process that would give him entire suns back if the project rolled for larger approval.
His mother would’ve been astounded - perhaps happily, perhaps not - to see how he’d taken the skills he’d begun as a goldsmith and applied them like a clockwork master to the process of refining the bits. Tweaking the arrays that allowed them to draw from the aspected crystals that he’d put inside their chassis, refining the design because he’d gotten part of the workshop assignments and he would be damned if he didn’t make something to show for it.
At some point he needed to test the molds to make sure he could replicate beyond the prototype but that would be after he laid their design out entirely, and tested them thoroughly in the field.
Or, as he frowned, found someone else to help test. In a manner that left him in less dire straights than he’d have been in before.
It’d be beyond embarrassing if he ended up as bad as the first demonstration had been.
What he really needed to do was spend time in the drains of it now, though...
...when he had more bells banked, perhaps.
