--- Kat ---

Kat was actually having a lot of fun. It made her wonder if perhaps in another life without any fantastical demon powers if she would’ve ended up some sort of construction worker. After volunteering to help fix up the roof, she’d had a box of supplies and a small set of tools shoved into her arms and been told to get to work. Not rudely, but nobody wanted to pay all that great attention to her. The plan had originally been to ignore the roof and accept some weakness... but her offer to do so meant that they wouldn’t have the same excuse. Was it better? Yes. Was it more work? Also yes.

Still, Kat was having fun, and she got to work with Lily to do it. The first step was to just completely tear out the current roofing materials. Minus the support beams. Those seemed to be in great condition even after all these years. At least for the central ones. There were a few secondary supports that had fared a lot worse. However, Kat had a little tool for fixing that!

One of the things she’d been given was a moderately sized pen-like object. It wasn’t all that large of a tool, but considering the shape it was larger then any normal pen. It worked a bit like one of those fancy 3D pens you could get these days that let you make sculptures ’in the air’. In this case it wasn’t quite so fancy in some ways, but in others it was really cool.

What the ’pen’ allowed her to do was fill in cracks in the wood by running it along the breaks. From what she was told, the material would sink in and fill out the entire crack as long as she kept it nearby for a few seconds. It was specifically designed to work with wood and would apparently reinforce it quite well. It was also bright green so you’d know if it had been used to repair the wood at all in the past.

Of course, while Kat was handed the pen in question, Lily was the one to actually make use of it. The pen was too small to have proper storage for mana and Lily needed to be holding it for the thing to work. Sure she could do so with a thin line of shadows if Kat wanted to take a swing at it, and she did once... but after that it was better to just leave Lily to that work. It was a fine division of labour. Lily went around fixing the cracks, while Kat gathered the rest of the ceiling and shoved it into the ’trash’ box. Which was the same as all the other boxes, just that it had been designated the one for trash.

It originally had other supplies inside but they’d been stacked in the corners. A supply cache that Kat would soon get to work with. They were mostly just wooden slabs, along with a slightly different ’pen’ that would fuse the two wooden planks together. Kat wasn’t sure what the difference was between the one Lily was using and the one she was using, other than the big crystal on the end that stored mana for her. Well, that and the fact the fusing didn’t seem to generate any change in colour. It just sort of blended the two pieces of wood together a bit.

Perhaps that’s why it has space for a crystal at the end? Though looking at it I think the crystal might actually run the entire length of the pen. Kat shrugged and got back to work. Whatever the case was, the pen worked. It was also surprisingly heavy for how small it was. Kat couldn’t really feel the weight the same way a human would, but the momentum it carried was substantial. She wondered WHY it was pen-sized. Considering the weight it might have been more comfortable as a larger contraption to avoid hurting someone’s fingers just trying to hold the thing.

Once that was all done, Kat was excited to get to the next part. It was the most complicated bit of kit by far... at least from an engineering perspective. From a user perspective it was quite simple. It looked like a leveller that you’d use for smoothing out concrete or plaster and in this case it didn’t just smooth out the quick-drying liquid in question, but also created and swiftly hardened it as well.

There was a rather simple button on the top of it that switched it between two modes. The first ejected the liquid, and the second forced it to harden. There was a second button elsewhere to turn the thing off completely, Kat supposed just to keep things cleaner and easy to work with.

Now, Kat wasn’t sure how this was normally done... but the fact she could fly meant that it was easy to simply apply this substance to the underside of the wooden boards to give everyone a smooth surface to work with. Though... what exactly it wasn’t Kat couldn’t say. It looked like concrete if you squinted but other than the colour it wasn’t all that similar in other ways. The main ones being the lack of bubbles, and the weight. It was much lighter then concrete, hence the reason she could use it for the underside of the roof. It didn’t seem like plaster either... but maybe it was? Kat couldn’t say she was all that familiar with the liquid form of plaster.

Regardless, smoothing out the ceiling was nice. Kat just needed to make sure that not only did it fit into all of the cracks in the wooden boards she’d put down before with Lily, but that the overall surface was nice and smooth. It also enlightened her as to why some less then stellar wooden planks had been thrown in with the batch. Some of them had large holes in them, but as long as it was mostly there this not-plaster would fill in the rest. Though Kat did wonder how long this stuff was meant to last.

The actual ’smoothing’ part was simple. Just run the leveller over a small section of ceiling to apply the liquid, then quickly come back a second time to freeze most of it in place. Kat wasn’t meant to freeze all of it, just most of it. Leaving a bit at the edges was apparently optimal to ensure it all blended properly and didn’t become a second ’slab’ leaving a noticeable crack in the material. It could be smoothed out later of apparently, but she was told it would be a pain to do so. Kat wondered if that was true when you could fly.

Still, it was relaxing. A few big sweeps of her arm to apply it, another set of matching sweeps to set it, and then you carried on, expanding the roof swiftly. Kat was almost shocked at just how quickly she was able to finish up with the main room. The individual cabins proved to be more of an issue, but that was due to the fact she needed to be careful around the walls AND she needed to add in extra ’ceiling’ where the walls met the roof. Apparently it was better that way? It was a pain in the ass, and the in-between bits above the walls weren’t the same height... but Kat was having fun so more effort wasn’t necessarily a problem.

When Kat finished everything up she wandered back to the main room and found that it was mostly finished. Well, the smoothing was finished but the carving was still ongoing. Some people were working on the corridors though, so Kat wasn’t sure if that was a good sign, a bad sign, or simply how things had been divided. Shrugging, Kat walked over to Appoline and asked. "So I finished with everything and I was wondering if you know what the liquid this leveller produces is?"

"Ah, we call it plastercrete," Kat heard a bit of auditory distorting around the word as Appoline spoke. It seemed that it wasn’t at all what the stuff was called, but also that it was in the same style, a mashup of two words to indicate what it was. Though the literal translation seemed to be closer to ’settingliquid’. Kat wondered what dictated the change then?

"... it was created as a way to quickly fortify areas... but it has a number of issues. It’s a good tool at least," sighed Appoline.

"What are the issues?" asked Kat.

"It essentially NEEDS to be enchanted," Appoline explained. "It’s just not that strong or stable by itself. It has... maybe five years of lifespan if you just leave it as is? That’s without exposure to the elements. I imagine if you used it outside it would be lucky to last two years. One might be possible..."

"Oh, so it NEEDS to be enchanted?" asked Kat.

Appoline nodded, "Yes but it falls short in that area as well. It’s... acceptable as an enchanting medium but frankly there are so many better ones. It’s good only because it’s cheap to produce and works in a pinch. I imagine these defences are only meant to be semi-permanent."