Ashley’s takeout noodles sat untouched beside the laptop while Hajin’s camera lurched through river spray at the upstream bypass.
"Drop the lever, drop it, that’s the wrong damn lever, you plank!"
A bypass worker stumbled backward with both hands raised, and Hajin caught the crew boss’s swing on his forearm instead. He drove the man into the sluice boards until the frame shook, then kicked the dropped crowbar into the water.
"Next," he barked, spitting river grit, "come on, who else wants a bath?"
Two crewmen glanced at each other, dropped their mallets, and sprinted for the bank without a single word.
"Smart lads, honestly, go home and hug somebody!"
The crew boss lurched up again, swinging a sluice hook at his head with both fists.
"Oh, you’re still awake, good, I was getting bored," Hajin cackled, ducking low.
He slipped inside the hook, slammed his shoulder into the man’s ribs, and twisted the haft out of his grip. The boss hit the shallows face first, and Hajin planted one knee across his back before he could crawl free.
"Stay down, I’m not done with these damn boards yet."
[ IronVanguard: That’s three of them in a minute, and he’s laughing the whole time. ]
[ Seoul_Tactician: Where’s Loccy? Where are the twins? Somebody turn the camera around. ]
’Nobody can turn it, and the fights we can’t see are still happening without us.’
She pinned the reminder before the question could spread into twenty theories about who was losing offscreen.
[ ashley(mod): Only Hajin’s camera is live, so Didi, Loccy, Eirwen and the twins reach us later through their own reports. ]
On screen, blood trickled from Hajin’s eyebrow, and he smeared it away with his wrist.
"Is that his blood?" Nadia squeaked, clutching the blanket.
"Some of it, he’ll complain about it later and then forget."
"How do you know that?"
"Way too much archive footage and a very unhealthy hobby," Ashley muttered, refusing to look away from the frame.
"You’re doing the voice," Nadia observed, tucking her feet under the blanket.
"What voice?"
"The calm librarian voice, the one that means you’re screaming inside."
"I’m not screaming, I’m sorting," Ashley sniffed, chin lifted.
"Sorting while screaming."
Ashley huffed and dragged the archive discussion into the second window, where the real work waited.
---
The founder joined the thread an hour ago, along with two of her analysts who posted under plain company handles. Their first model treated the fitting’s repair seats as one deliberate design, all cut together, offset by one chosen width.
[ orbital_founder: The model failed, and I’m glad it failed early, since Ferra’s gauge numbers refuse to fit one design. ]
[ orbital_founder: Counting from the original channel, the seats sit one step off, then two steps, then three, and each step is the same width. ]
"Oh," Ashley breathed, leaning so close that her nose nearly touched the screen, "oh, that’s the creep."
"The what?" Nadia asked through a yawn.
"The drift, the thing Ferra found, every patch chasing a joint that kept sliding away."
[ orbital_founder: One perfect design gives one offset, but repeated compensation gives a staircase, so somebody fixed this more than once. ]
[ TacticalNerd: Or somebody back then knew modern engineering, just saying, the math looks very Earth to me. ]
[ orbital_founder: I won’t guess whether the maker understood Earth, since a staircase of patches only proves stubborn hands. ]
’Bless her, a famous founder who says I don’t know in public without flinching.’
Ashley typed her own question slowly, rereading it twice so nobody could mistake it for a theory.
[ ashley(mod): Could one smith make all three patches over one long life, or does the staircase need several different makers? ]
[ orbital_founder: The numbers can’t tell us that, they only count the visits, and the hands stay unknown until a record names them. ]
"She’s so annoyingly careful," Nadia snickered, "it’s like watching you argue with a mirror."
"That’s the nicest thing anyone said to me all week."
Nadia scooted closer on the couch and squinted at the chart, "So the boring answer is that somebody kept coming back?"
"The boring answer is usually the true one, and boring answers don’t get anyone hurt," Ashley said, tapping the staircase.
"And the exciting answer?"
"Belongs in a fan thread, labeled fiction, with a big warning sign on top."
On the live window, Hajin yanked a sluice pin free with a snarl and hurled it into the reeds.
"System, if you’re watching," he hollered at the sky, "I want a medal for this, or at least a sandwich—"
The System, presumably, offered neither, and he went back to wrestling the next board with both arms.
A second crewman came at him from the walkway with a boathook, and Hajin met him head-on with a whoop.
"Yes, finally, somebody brave!"
He snapped the boathook across his knee, tossed both halves into the current, and grabbed the man by his collar.
"Brave, but bad at it," he wheezed, setting the crewman down on the bank almost gently, "sit there and think about your choices."
[ Seoul_Tactician: He broke a pole over his knee and then tucked the guy in, I can’t with this man. ]
---
The breakthrough came from a handle nobody in the thread recognized, posting between bites of somebody’s lunch break.
[ soupatnoon: Small thing, everyone compares that iron punch from the longhouse frames against the collar stamp frame turned upside down. ]
[ soupatnoon: The punch strikes from the narrow end, so if you flip the collar frame to match, the notch stops lining up with the corners. ]
Ashley scrambled for the archive clips and set the longhouse still of the punch right beside the lamplit fitting collar. She rotated the frame once, laid it against the punch’s working edge, and stared until both her eyes started burning.
"No way," she whispered, "no way, it’s two marks."
"Two what?" Nadia sat up, blanket sliding off one shoulder.
"The three corners are the old stamp, and the notch sits wrong for the same strike, so somebody added it later."
"Like initials on somebody else’s painting?"
"Like a repair note scratched beside the maker’s name," Ashley corrected, already typing, "but nobody gets to call it a signature yet."
[ ashley(mod): Good catch from soupatnoon, the collar frame was compared upside down, and flipped it separates a later notch from the original mark. ]
[ orbital_founder: That’s exactly the error my analysts make every other week, and the casual eye caught it first. ]
[ soupatnoon: I just sort shipping labels all day, upside down is my whole career. ]
Ashley laughed so suddenly that she snorted, and Nadia threw a cushion at her for the noise.
"Hire that person immediately," Nadia demanded, retrieving the cushion for a second throw.
"I moderate a stream, I don’t hire anybody."
"Then give them a medal, a sandwich, whatever Hajin asked for."
---
Ashley opened a private message and started writing everything at once, then deleted two thirds of it.
Nadia peered over the couch arm with her chin propped on her wrists, "You just erased the Earth engineer theory."
"Nobody can test it from a camera, so it stays out of his ears."
Nadia tapped the frozen screen with one finger, "And the dead mystery builder?"
"Out too, he’s mid-fight, he gets questions with handles on them, not ghost stories."
’Three returns, one later notch, and nothing that pretends to know a name.’
Nadia stood, marched into the kitchen and came back with the noodle container and a fork stabbed upright in it.
"Eat."
"They’re cold," Ashley whined, poking them.
"They went cold while you watched a man throw planks, so eat them cold, that’s your punishment."
Ashley pouted at the congealed noodles, then ate three forkfuls under supervision while Nadia hovered like a prison guard.
"More."
"You’re worse than Vella," Ashley grumbled, chewing.
"I don’t know who that is, but I already like her."
"She hits people with a ladle when they skip dinner."
"Then I definitely like her," Nadia cackled, rattling the noodle container, "and you’re lucky I only own a fork."
---
On the live window the last bypass crewman stopped struggling, and Hajin dropped into a crouch against the dripping wall. He dragged a wet sleeve across his mouth with his chest heaving, while the river noise thinned behind closed boards.
Ashley hit send before the pause could end, her thumb almost shaking with nerves she refused to admit.
[ Ashley → Hajin | Private: Analysts think the repairs show three separate returns to the same fitting, each patch one step further, and the collar stamp was compared upside down, flipped against the punch the notch separates from the old mark, so a later hand added it, and nobody knows who or why yet. ]
His eyes went distant for a breath while the camera stayed fixed on his scraped knuckles.
"Huh, three times," he muttered, half to himself, "somebody kept walking back to the same broken thing."
He tapped his knee twice, then reached for the next lever with a crooked, tired smirk.
[ Hajin → Ashley | Private: Got it, Ferra’s gonna yell, the forge above this dump keeps books, so we match your returns against them when we get up there. ]
[ HearthKeeper: He’s smiling at nothing again, our mod definitely said something smart. ]
[ IronVanguard: Bypass shut, crew down, and he still wants a sandwich, what a legend. ]
[ ShadowMage44: Cheering for everyone we can’t see too, hold the line, girls. ]
"You didn’t tell him what to do," Nadia noticed quietly, curling back into the blanket.
"I can’t see Loccy’s fight, or Didi’s, or anything past his shoulders," Ashley murmured, "so I don’t get to run it."
"Just hand him better questions."
"Exactly, questions he can carry up a hill."
Ashley leaned back with the cold fork in her hand and let the cheering scroll past unmoderated.
’Somebody kept coming back to that bridge, and now somebody else is going up to find out.’