A Familiar Face in a Window

The full ride came through two weeks later, unsolicited, a formal letter far more generous than anything Arista had allowed herself to hope for, covering tuition and then some. She hadn't even applied for one. She'd already submitted applications to two part-time positions by then, bracing herself for years of careful, exhausted budgeting.

She withdrew both applications the same afternoon, sitting alone in her childhood bedroom with the letter in her hands.

Because I refused to accept 'no recipe available' as a real answer, she thought, smiling. Turns out that instinct pays for tuition too.

Time at university flew by.

Engineering Design was the course she'd feared would bore her, and it felt more like home than anything since the servers closed. Requirements in, solution out, taught by people who cared about the reasoning as much as the result. Materials Science handed her names for things she had only ever learned by watching them fail. The brittle strands from her first casting furnace had a grain structure. The grain structure had a diagram. Marek would have had opinions about that diagram.

Mathematics was another matter. Differential equations refused to mean anything until she could attach them to a pipe or a boiler, and her first midterm came back with a mark that sent her out for a very long walk. Control systems was worse, because it was so exactly relevant. Feedback, stability, response time. Four lectures in, she understood how many ways her casting furnace could have gone wrong while she stood next to it, trusting her eyes and her instincts.

"You can't simply feel when a loop is unstable," the lecturer told the room.

"I did, though," Arista muttered.

"Then you were lucky," the lecturer said, with the cheerful cruelty of a man who had said it to a hundred students before her.

Midway through her second year, Heat Transfer gave her the assignment: design a compact heat exchanger within fixed limits for size, material, flow rate, inlet temperature, and required outlet temperature.

She had a design in her head before the professor finished reading the constraints. A shell, a coil, a spacing she could already feel the shape of. She was sketching a build plan when the professor stopped beside her desk.

"The assignment is to calculate it, not build it."

"Prof, can I make a prototype?"

"No."

"Really? Give me a forge and I can whip one up in an hour."

"Yes," the professor said. "Really."

She calculated it, resentfully at first. Then the numbers came back, and the design she had been so sure of would have worked. It would also have been larger and heavier than it needed to be. By modelling the system first, she found a better version before touching any metal.

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Arista, being Arista, still wanted to see it for herself. A calculation she hadn't tested was an opinion with units.

The university forge was booked solid, restricted to a handful of scheduled lab slots, none of them hers. So she looked elsewhere, and found Bill, a farrier everyone called B.B., short for Blacksmith Bill, who ran his own forge behind a stable on the edge of town.

"You want to use my forge?"

"Occasionally."

B.B. looked her over, then nodded toward the anvil.

She had taken two steps inside when the heat reached her. As Strawberry, she'd barely needed to think about furnace heat. Here it pressed against her face and forearms like a hand, and years of treating it as background noise made her stop a beat later than she should have.

B.B. watched her with mild interest. "Takes some people a minute."

"I forgot that part," Arista said.

"Make me a horseshoe."

Arista glanced toward the racks, then back at him. "I don't have a horse to take measurements from."

B.B. considered that. "Good answer."

He reached for a length of stock and tossed it onto the bench. "Now make me a base horseshoe."

She made it in under an hour. B.B. turned the finished shoe over in his hands, checking the balance, the nail holes, the heel.

"How did you know horseshoes come in different sizes?"

Arista looked at him. "...Human shoes do as well."

B.B. stared at her. "That's your reasoning?"

"Horses aren't all the same size."

"...No."

"Their feet probably aren't either."

"...Also no."

"So making a horseshoe without seeing the horse seemed stupid."

B.B. looked back down at the shoe. "You know absolutely nothing about horses, do you?"

"I know which end bites."

"Both ends can hurt you."

Arista frowned. "...See, that's useful information."

He didn't say anything else about it. But within a few weeks he had stopped hovering, and within a month he had given her a key and a rule: every Tuesday after six in the evening, the forge was hers.

At the end of the semester she built the heat exchanger there, over several Tuesdays, to her final calculated design and not the one she had first sketched. When she tested it, its measured performance landed very close to what her calculations had promised.

She brought it to the professor after the semester ended, wrapped in a towel, with the test data stapled to the front.

"I said not to build it."

"You said that was the assignment," Arista said. "You didn't say I couldn't check my homework."

The professor turned it over and read the data.

"Which design did you build?"

"The calculated one."

He nodded once, and set it on the shelf behind his desk, between a cutaway valve and a mug full of pens.

Calculate first, she thought, walking out. Then build the right one.

She was walking home from B.B.'s forge on a Tuesday night, forearms still warm, her coat smelling of coal smoke, when she passed the furniture shop at the end of her street. A modest, unremarkable storefront she passed nearly every day and had never once had reason to stop for.

She glanced at the window out of habit and kept walking.

Three steps later, she stopped.

...No.

She turned around, sure her tired eyes were playing tricks on her after a long day, and walked back to the window.

On a display shelf, between an ordinary throw pillow and a decorative lamp, sat a plush toy.

Small. Round-cheeked, with two tiny horns and a miniature suit, stitched with a precision that had no business in a furniture shop. She had never seen it anywhere outside Eternal Horizon.

A Baby Beelz plushie.

It matched, stitch for stitch, the limited edition Beelzebub had pressed into her hands in his throne room, the one she'd had to leave behind when the servers closed.

Her heart hammered. That object had died with the world.

She reached for the shop's door, hand trembling slightly, and pushed it open.