The Sealing Plate

The tunnel stood knee-deep in the last remnants of drained water by the time they finally walked its full length, boots splashing through the shallow, receding pools, the boring rig's scattered remains still lying where the violent breach had left them days earlier.

They emerged into the dome proper for the first time, vast, dry, echoing, the ancient ruins finally standing in open air after who knew how many centuries submerged, the great kelp-draped mermaid statue rising in the center exactly as they remembered it, only now surrounded by breathable air instead of dark water.

Nobody spoke for a long moment, simply taking it in.

Bram broke the silence first, practical as ever even in the face of genuine wonder. "...What happens to the tube now? Once we're done, does it stay connected permanently, or were you planning something else?"

Arista's grin spread slow and delighted, the exact expression that always preceded a solution she'd clearly been sitting on for a while.

"...I actually thought about this already," she said, opening her inventory with a flourish. She pulled out a heavy adamantium plate, circular, sized to match the tube's mounting collar exactly, its edges lined with a soft, cushioned ring of cloud material. Small, evenly spaced holes ringed its outer edge, spaced every few centimeters, and at its center sat a sturdy, unmistakable handle.

"...Is that a shield," Bram said, flat, already recognizing the pattern.

"Technically, yes," Arista confirmed, entirely unrepentant. "Sealing plate, classified as equipment purely so it could travel in inventory instead of needing separate transport. Same trick, different application."

She handed him a small pouch, heavy with twenty individual screws.

"There are matching openings around the tube's mounting collar, sized exactly for these. Once the plate's properly seated over the opening, screw it down at each point, cloud material forms a clean seal against the collar, and the tube disconnects safely from the dome without leaving the connection point vulnerable afterward." She grinned. "Bram, will you do the honors?"

Bram looked up, properly up, toward the dome's high ceiling, thirty meters overhead, where the tube's connection point sat mounted against the final hexagon panel.

"...How exactly am I getting up there?"

Arista had already thought of that too.

She gestured toward the tube itself, where a length of sturdy rope: repurposed from one of the original diving bell rigs, descended slowly down through the tube's opening, lowered carefully from the surface crew still stationed above.

"This'll hoist you up," she said. "Straight through the tube, right to the mounting point. Once you're up there, you can brace yourself using the handles on the two neighboring hexagon panels, same grip design as everything else, to hold position while the crew above releases the rope and hauls it back out."

Bram studied the rope, then the distant ceiling, then the sealing plate in his hands, weighing the whole plan with the specific, resigned scrutiny of a man who had learned, over two years, to recognize precisely how much danger a "should be fine" carried.

"...That sounds tricky."

"It'll be tricky," Arista agreed, entirely honest. "But I think you can do it. You've handled worse with less preparation."

Bram let out a long breath, testing the rope's tension, glancing once more toward the distant mounting point thirty meters overhead.

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"...Fine," he said finally, tucking the screws securely into his belt, gripping the sealing plate under one arm. "But if I fall from thirty meters onto solid ground that used to be an ocean floor, I want it noted that this was, once again, technically my own fault for volunteering."

"Noted," Arista said, grinning, already signaling the surface crew to begin the hoist. "Ready?"

"...As I'll ever be," Bram said, and let the rope pull him steadily upward, toward the last, small piece of the entire project still waiting to be finished.

Bram reached the mounting point exactly as planned, hooking one hand around the neighboring panel's handle, bracing one foot against the other, gripping the rope with his remaining limbs until the slack finally cleared and the crew above began drawing it back up through the tube.

That left him with two working limbs and a sealing plate to install.

He pressed his stomach flat against the plate, pinning it firmly to the tube's opening with his own body weight while his one free hand went to work, twisting the first butterfly screw into place, then the next, methodical and careful despite the awkward, precarious angle.

"...Halfway," he called down, voice echoing across the vast, empty dome. "Ten more to go."

He worked steadily, screw by screw, the seal tightening cleanly against the mounting collar exactly as designed, cloud material compressing evenly around each fastening point until, finally, the last screw clicked home.

[Seal Confirmed: Tube Successfully Disconnected]

Bram checked his handiwork, gave the plate a firm, testing push, and found it held rock solid.

Then he looked down.

Thirty meters of open air stretched between him and the dome's ancient stone floor below.

"...Well," he called down, already resigned to the obvious answer, "quickest way down is to let go."

"BRAM—" Arista's voice, sharp with immediate alarm, carried up from below.

He let go anyway, dropping cleanly away from the ceiling, but not before his free hand had already flicked open his inventory mid-fall, equipping the same cloud-material shield he'd once carried through his very first catapult tests, the one that had turned every subsequent disastrous landing into something considerably more survivable.

The shield deployed just in time, absorbing his fall with the same soft, forgiving bounce it had given him a hundred times before, letting him land in a controlled, rolling tumble across the dome's ancient stone floor instead of a catastrophic impact.

He came to a stop flat on his back, staring up at the distant ceiling, breathing hard but entirely unharmed.

Arista reached him a moment later, half-laughing, half-furious. "You could have just asked for the rope again!"

"The rope was already halfway back up the tube," Bram said, still catching his breath, grinning despite himself. "This was faster."

"You just fell thirty meters!"

"I fell thirty meters with appropriate safety equipment," Bram corrected, sitting up, dusting himself off. "Same shield, same principle, same reason it's kept me alive since day one of this entire chaotic project. I wasn't being reckless. I was being efficient."

Arista stared at him for a long moment, torn between genuine exasperation and the specific, familiar fondness she always felt when he did something that terrified her and turned out perfectly fine anyway.

"...Wait." Something shifted in her expression, equal parts realization and mild betrayal. "You just equipped that straight from your inventory. Mid-fall."

"...Yeah?"

"So the clip." Arista pointed at him, faintly accusatory. "The chest-mounted, quick-release, pop-it-open-one-handed-under-stress clip. The one Nettle and I spent an entire week engineering so you could access the shield fast enough during the wingsuit flights."

"...What about it."

"It was never necessary. Not once. You could have just pulled it from your inventory this entire time."

Bram considered this with the specific, dawning horror of a man realizing an inconvenient truth several hundred chapters too late. "...Huh."

"Huh," Arista repeated, mildly offended on behalf of a full week of her own engineering effort. "We built a whole mechanical latch system. For nothing."

"To be fair, the wingsuit did need your hands free for the actual gliding part."

"That doesn't make me feel better."

"...The seal held?" she asked finally, letting the argument go.

"The seal held," Bram confirmed, glancing back up at the distant, now-permanently disconnected mounting point. "Tube's fully sealed. Dome's finished."

Arista looked around properly then, at the vast, dry, echoing space, at the ancient ruins finally standing in open air, at the great, weathered mermaid statue rising serene and patient at the center of it all, no longer hidden beneath a hundred and fifty meters of dark water.

"...It's finished," she said, quiet, disbelieving despite months of careful, patient work leading exactly to this moment. "We actually finished it."

Bram, still sprawled on the ancient stone floor, looked up at her and grinned.

"...Welcome to the Drowned Court, Strawberry," he said. "Or, I suppose, the un-drowned court, now."