Arthur 55

"Alright, careful now… careful. You don't want to know what happens if that glass breaks."

Honestly, I didn't know what would happen if that glass broke. Last time it had only gotten on me and the dragon glass floor. For all I knew it would turn plants into mutant monsters if you spilled it on them.

Either way, I had no intention of finding out, as the "generator was carefully lowered into the freshly built concrete pit. It was an enormous Ironwood box with several protruding ports hooked into various wires, which ran off out of the pit underground to other hubs.

Running them underground was difficult to be sure, but the difficulty of construction was a small price to pay compared to the safety setting up this world's first electrical system underground would provide. The Stepstones were stormy, and with neither an easy insulator nor altogether too many people trained in electrical repair work, a downed line would be an utter nuisance.

But underground there was far less concern, and I was already using most of my indentured workers for building up the sewer system as it stood. I had a better idea of the size I expected now, unlike Dragonstone, and a copious supply of imported company engineers with years of experience building the existing system.

It was expensive, sure, even more so than the enormous amount of copper that I was using for wires. Concrete wasn't exactly something I had needed in huge quantities before, but now I had needed to open up whole new production facilities on Storm-Sky just to meet the demand, not to mention losing trade ships as I needed to import stone and steel from Dragonstone.

Still, it was getting done, a benefit of the sheer number of workers available to me here to begin with, between the soldiers from Fort Edric, the training base I had established in the area before setting up shop here, and the levied labor from my not-yet citizens, the plans I had for my capital had been coming together quickly, with an eye towards future construction.

Of course, there was so much shaping to do before even the foundations could be dug. The one dirt path I had dug circling the island needed to be expanded into a future road network, the sewers had to be put in, the channels of the delta had to be widened to allow ships passage to the ocean, and finally, the electrical system had to go down, avoiding the sewers.

Thankfully, only the electrical grid needed my direct supervision, but still, I had an army and a kingdom to run, and that was already a bigger job than any one man could really do.

I was actually a little glad for some of the first little provincial councils cutting into my power on that front. Sure, I wasn't as absolute now as I had been when I took the island a couple of months ago, and besides, they still lacked a general council, so I could still pass things over their heads if I needed to.

I hadn't yet mind, the councils that had formed seemed fairly timid in their actions so far, and my governors were still mostly doing the actual administrative work across the islands.

I grinned as the last of the generators was sunk down into its concrete pit, the last wires being hooked into it by some of Gerald's acolytes.

The sphere's and their properties lended themselves to something a bit different than the standard power network on earth, with their small size and relatively high wattage. By my amateur estimation, they worked best for a system of distributed power generation, rather than the standard large plants I could remember back home. Instead, every few hundred feet a hub was dug into the ground. Each had a generator and a switchboard, along with other control equipment. The copper wire I was using was mostly garbage for now, higher resistance than I had anticipated, but this system helped to avoid the inevitable problems that would cause.

The hubs were numbered and labeled, and each supported the ports in its immediate area, essentially power sockets at the base of each planned foundation. The Hubs were hooked together as a network as well, and in the event of an emergency they could transfer power from the living ones to a dead one, but I couldn't really imagine what could prompt the need for that. They didn't seem to run out of power after all.

Well, actually that was a lie, I could imagine plenty of things that could hurt my generators, but I couldn't imagine why I would want to keep the streetlights on if my city was under attack.

Either way, the system was starting to take shape well, as we're the earthworks surrounding my hopeful new castle, though they were only just beginning as the majority of the workers finished up on the Sewers. Set just at the foot of the Stormpeak, it was about two miles south of the edge of where I currently planned the city to be, but even now the work crews were visible up the slope, digging out the moat which would be fed off of the deaths-touch river.

'Note to self, rename river.'

It wasn't even the worst name on Storm Sky, much less in the Stepstones as a whole.

By all rights, Grey Gallows had been one of the more cheerful ones, Skinner's hook being the most blatantly evil name on the island.

'Whoever had been naming the geography of the Stepstones before I got here was edgier than a Bolton, I swear.'

Anyhow, we were just working on putting in the first of the lamp-posts when I got a fair case of Deja-Vu, as a messenger came tearing up the trail from the south towards me.

As he came to an exhausted stop and delivered his message, I pulled my hand down my face.

It seemed that my Father and Uncle had finally decided the Red Cult had gotten its teeth kicked in hard enough in the Disputed lands. They were sailing back this way just in time for the new year.

I was going to have to host my Uncle. The KING of WESTEROS. In a shoddy tavern of all places.

I glanced up the hill towards the earthworks surrounding what would eventually be a quite sensible castle, I hoped. Something I wouldn't be too ashamed to host a royal visit in. It might have some livable space on the first story by this time next year. Finished perhaps in Three.

I closed my eyes.

'Why does Family always seem to visit whenever you aren't ready for them?'