Low-Key Loki

"Come by the guild hall," Nettle's message read the next morning, characteristically short on detail. "Got something you'll want to see."

Arista realized, walking the familiar streets of Ashfall Reaches toward the guild's main branch, that she had genuinely never actually been inside it before, not once, despite knowing Nettle for years now. A small, faintly guilty thought she filed away to address properly later, once she wasn't quite so curious about whatever Nettle actually wanted to show her.

Something exploded, somewhere deeper in the building, just as she reached the front entrance.

Arista flinched. Nobody else did.

A guild member wandered past a moment later, mildly singed, one eyebrow noticeably shorter than the other, offering nothing more than a cheerful nod on the way to what Arista assumed was a first aid station, or possibly just a mirror.

"...Should I be concerned about that?" Arista asked, once she'd found Nettle properly.

"Which part?"

"The explosion. The singed eyebrows. Any of it."

"Oh, that." Nettle waved a hand, entirely unbothered. "Just some guild members inspired by Fen's whole 'brilliant results, questionable safety record' approach to experimentation. We've got a standing betting pool on how many of them eventually lose their eyebrows permanently."

"That's not comforting."

"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be funny." Nettle grinned. "Morale's actually excellent down there. Turns out near-misses build genuine camaraderie."

The workshop itself, once Nettle finally led her properly inside, proved considerably more chaotic than Arista's own, walls covered floor to ceiling with sketches in varying states of ambition and abandonment: a proposed grappling-hook boot design, three separate attempts at a self-stirring cauldron, and, pinned proudly at the center of it all, the original blueprint for the decorative, entirely non-functional wooden helicopter still bolted to the ship's deck.

"...You built that thing from an actual design?" Arista asked, studying the sketch with genuine, delighted disbelief.

"Every measurement," Nettle confirmed, entirely unbothered by the admission. "It just also never flies. We knew that going in. Aesthetics."

Bram, already present and leaning against a nearby workbench with the specific patience of someone used to Nettle's guild hall by now, didn't even look up. "I've stopped asking questions in here."

"Wise," Nettle said, before leading her toward a large, water-filled basin dominating the workshop's center, a miniature, carefully detailed model of the mermaid ruins sitting at the bottom, and a small, hand-carved wooden boat resting at its edge.

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"...What is this?"

"Watch." Nettle set the little boat into the water and began guiding it in a slow, careful circle above the miniature ruins, tracking its path with obvious, genuine pride. "Straw. Why are we carrying the shields down at all?"

Arista blinked, caught off guard by the sudden shift in topic. "...What do you mean?"

"You threw Bram overboard multiple times, holding a full-scale shield, and he was fine every single time. The shields themselves survived just as well, no damage, no structural failure, nothing." Nettle guided the little boat around another slow loop, the model's scale making the whole concept suddenly, visually obvious in a way words alone hadn't quite managed. "So why are we having construction crews manually haul panels down from the ship, one at a time, when we've already proven the panels themselves don't care about being dropped into open water?"

Arista watched the tiny boat complete its circuit, the logic settling in with the specific, satisfying click of an obvious solution she'd somehow missed entirely.

"...You could have shown me this in a sketch."

"Yes," Nettle agreed, entirely unrepentant, still guiding the little boat along its patient, circular path. "But then you would have never dropped by the guild house."

Arista winced, caught. "...It's a really nice model, Nettle."

"See? Aren't you glad you came?"

Arista smiled, something warm settling into place alongside the earlier guilt. "...Yes. Yes, I am."

"...You want to just drop them."

"I want to circle the ruins with the ship," Nettle said, setting the little boat down properly now, already pulling out a rough sketch of her own, clearly having thought this through in more detail than she was initially letting on. "Line players up along the deck, position the boat directly above the construction site, and just have everyone unload their inventory at once. Panels fall straight down, land at or near the build site, no manual transport required at all. You're not carrying anything down. You're just... aiming the drop properly and letting gravity do the actual delivery."

Arista stared at the sketch, then at Nettle, delighted by the sheer, elegant simplicity of it. "...That's genuinely brilliant. We've been treating 'get the panels to the seabed' as a transport problem this whole time, when it's actually just a targeting problem. The panels are already proven durable enough to survive the drop. We just need the ship positioned accurately enough that they land close to where the construction crew can actually use them."

"Exactly." Nettle grinned, clearly thrilled to have landed a genuinely useful contribution rather than just merch and aesthetics for once. "My guild's got plenty of players holding stacks of finished panels in inventory already, waiting on assignment. Instead of ferrying them down individually through the diving bells, we just position the ship, call out a drop, and let everyone empty their inventory at once."

Behind her, a cluster of Low-Key guild members, who had clearly been listening the entire time, waiting for exactly this moment, broke into an enthusiastic, rhythmic chant.

"LOW-KEY LOKI! LOW-KEY LOKI!"

Nettle turned, grinning, taking a small, theatrical bow toward her own guild.

"...They do that a lot?" Arista asked, amused.

"Every time I have a genuinely good idea instead of just commissioning more merch," Nettle admitted, entirely unbothered by her own guild's enthusiastic favoritism. "I've made peace with it."

Arista laughed, already sketching the logistics of a proper supply drop: ship positioned directly above the ruins, players lined along the deck, panels released in a coordinated wave rather than individually. "Okay. This solves a genuine bottleneck. We'll need Colm to help position the ship precisely, and probably a test drop first, small batch, before we trust the whole supply chain to gravity."

"Obviously," Nettle said. "I'm reckless, not careless."

"There's a difference," Bram said, from his usual spot of dry observation.

"A very important one," Nettle agreed, already turning back toward her chanting guild members with visible, unrepentant satisfaction. "LOW-KEY LOKI, indeed."