The roof of the building was unlike anything Felipe had experienced before, but it was different in a way he had come to expect. The large dome of hexagonal shapes that were probably glass he knew of beforehand, as it stood both uniform and in stark contrast with the city’s otherwise anarchic fantasy vibe, and he decently sure it would be both hotter and more humid in there than the city proper. What he wasn’t ready for was the nature of the light.
“Mother of God,” Felipe swore to himself as he shielded his eyes. “Why is it so fucking bright in here?”
“It’s actually almost the same brightness as outside, maybe a little brighter, but the color of the light is more like that of the sun, and it has UV rays and whatnot,” Lex explained as they hauled their unwieldy empedocling box to the center of the dome, where the long metal grow vats terminated in a negative space circle of sorts. “But it may be a little disorienting since you’re not used to it, I’m still trying to find out if we get vitamin D like we’re supposed to in the regular light, I know the plants won’t grow for beans in it, but research is slow, for reasons I hope are intuitive.”
“So you’re saying this whole town needs a…” Felipe started.
“No, stop it.” Lex interrupted him, but Felipe wasn’t going to let himself be stopped
“A D injection? A shot of D”
“God you’re a child.” Lex rolled their eyes. “But yes, potentially, which obviously isn’t ideal. Don’t want our bones to grow soft.”
“Soft bones because of a lack of D…” Felipe mused.
“I’d call you a pervert but then again I’m hardly in a position to judge,” Lex grumbled as they worked on unleashing their elemental cargo. “Anyway, Alicia’s trying to figure out what the Campfolk do to get their vitamins. Gotta be something y’know.”
As much as Felipe wanted to come up with yet another innuendo to complete the sequence, he felt himself unable to gather his thoughts enough to do so. As to distract himself he ambled down along one metal vat, looking casually at the plants seemingly growing out of the holes that dotted the metal covering in meticulous straight and narrow order.
“So this is the famous Hydroponic Farm, huh?” He observed as he touched a lead of some kind of leafy green. “I expected it to be wetter.”
“All the water’s at the bottom. Well there’s water, then there’s gravel,” Lex explained. “And it’s not all water either. That’s what I’m here for today.” Lex opened the carrying box and let the empedoclings scatter out on the floor, where they wasted no time to start scurrying about with apparent curiosity. “Gotta check the tanks. Water level, nutrient content, whether there’s mold, that sort of thing.”
“How glamorous.”
“You tell me,” Lex said as they opened a hatch in the top metal layer of the vat “Ideally, I want to set up a continuous flow setup, but we don’t quite have the know-how for that yet. I’m also seeing if I can use the empedoclings for anything in that regard. Being mostly-stable magical constructs they could stand for some of the automation, but… well… I’m still trying to find out how much thinking actually goes on in the magic that passes for their brains, and consent and cooperation could be a challenge.”
“You don’t say,” Felipe observed as he took in the sight of two earth Empedoclings re-creating some kung-fu film fight scene, while a water one tried its hand at some wuxia-inspired acrobatics.
“Anyway, we’re running this thing as co-op as we can, I try to take some extra shifts to let the empedoclings roam. It’s also good for… let’s see, it might be time to refill, it’s good for taking a break from my magic research.”
“So you’re out here touching grass, as it were?”
“Mostly touching slurry, well, I try to not touch it too much. Don’t want to get my hands dirty or my germs in the slurry for that matter.”
“I see, and where does those terrifying root baby beasts of yours reside?”
“Tank 6, that one,” Lex motioned towards one of the tanks with their foot.

Felipe ambled over to tank 6 and took a look at the by-now infamous homonculad plants. The visible part of the thing wasn’t too exciting, as what would be above ground on Lex’ fresh new crime against nature looked a fair bit like dandelion leafs drawn by someone with a slight but notable anger problem.
“You harvesting these?” Felipe asked, instantly regretting it once the conversation moved the way he suspected it would.
“Just the first batch. Do me a solid and open the flap will you?”
“Of course,” Felipe said through gritted teeth. Lex didn’t fear the grody-looking roots exactly, but they were not pleasant to behold. He fiddled with the locking mechanism a bit before he figured it out, a pair of metal wires clamping the base of the leafy part, ensuing that the plants would follow the top when Felipe lifted the flap. “Let’s go meet the horrors.”
Upon pulling up the metal flap and revealing it’s terribly gnarled little passengers, Felipe was forced to conclude that the sight of the homonculads had not become any less pleasant to the eye.

It all started with Lex’ experiments at how to secure a source of reliable caffeine under current conditions. Coffee was out for several reasons, chief of which were that the coffee bean was, and continues to be, a particularly prickly customer when it comes to growing it, especially in soil nutrients. Several variations of the concept of tea was similarly passed on due to predicted poor caffeine yield. Thus, faced with a problem with no good natural solution, Lex had decided to leave the realm of the natural and venture forth into the realm of the creepy, arcane, and creepily arcane. The eventual solution came in the form of something that looked an awful lot like Alchemy from what Felipe could tell. In an ominous-looking tome, Lex had found the recipe for a concoction that one could use to conjure up seeds that’d grow into a number of plants, and after some harrowing experiments, Lex figured out how to make one that would produce caffeine in sufficient quantities. There was really just one problem with the Homonculads, and it was well reflected in the name. The roots of the damnable thing really, really, REALLY looked like a twisted, wizened humanoid form. You wouldn’t notice it right away, but every second the eldritch roots remained in your sight it’d be harder and harder to not see it, how the plant would form a bulb partially underground, around which the pale, sinewy roots would curl in such a way that it was hard to not think of them as the limbs of some sort of contortionist packing themselves into a ball. Felipe wasn’t sure if there was magic at play here, or if he really didn’t vibe with the plants, but either way, they unsettled him.

“Ugly-ass things,” Felipe said under his breath.
“Oh, they’re not so bad,” Lex had moved to join him without Felipe noticing, he did his best to not startle but he wasn’t entirely convinced he pulled it off. “I mean yeah they don’t look super appetizing, but grinding them into mush to cook Go Juice out of them really does take the edge off.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” Felipe said, turning away from the plants. “Did you make them look so profane on purpose?”
“Not on purpose no,” Lex conceded as they went about bunching up the homunculads. “But I can’t rule out that ideas of the Mandrake or Alrune getting cross-contaminated with the idea of a homonculus in my mind while I shaped the magic. All I remember is thinking REAL hard about the chemical properties of caffeine for the duration, so who knows what else slipped in there.”
“Magic really is a terrible thing,” Felipe knew this would be a point of disagreement between them, but he didn’t feel like being diplomatic today. “Relying on the human mind for form.”
“I think that’s part of the draw, honestly.” Lex said. Felipe was starting to notice that something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what. “I mean yeah ok the ‘something for nothing’ of it all is nice, but I think the potential it leads to is very neat.”
“I’ll leave that to you… then…” Felipe found himself staring at the pale blue of Thereafter’s synthetic morning sky. “Hey, what is that up there?”

Thereafter’s sky was a trick of the light moreso than Earth’s own blue sky, Felipe knew this, but he didn’t exactly think about it too often. There was some distortion to the field of magic that kept the air in and the skies blue, as to not make people nervous about passing void debris, but technically it was see-through. This meant that Felipe could see the glittering thing in the sky much earlier than he would if it was approaching earth, and the strange way he thing reflected, if reflected truly was the word, made it stand out in the otherwise empty sky.
“Looks like we’ve got… incoming?” Felipe shielded his eyes from the UV-rich dome light to see more clearly. “That’s not void junk I think.”
The void was a largely rather sedate place as long as nobody made a concerted effort to stir shit up out there, but the fear of a large chunk of world somehow gaining and retaining a collision course with Thereafter was one of the concerns that The Council discussed with some frequency. They hadn’t reached a consensus, but Felipe found some peace with how it’d be a well-researched and pluralistic chaotic mess before they were all smashed to pieces.
“Yeah that’s not debris,” Lex agreed as they finished gathering up the batch of homonculads and laid them out on a nearby table to dry out. “Not sure what it IS yet, but I figure we should be wherever it ends up landing.”
“Right. The sky’s falling and you’re running toward it and not away.” Felipe quipped.
“Of course, how else am I going to swing a home-run on the thing?” Lex swigged, insomuch as anyone could swig, a mouthful of Go Juice syrup. It went down considerably less smoothly than it had done for Felipe. There was, after all, a trick to it. “Dear lord in heaven that’s grim. You drink it like that?”
“It’s expedient”
“It tastes like eating a bear.”
“I don’t…” Felipe started.
“Yeah yeah you don’t mind eating a bear very funny gayboy, let’s go be heroes and shit.” Lex interrupted him before bolting towards the stairs. It was all Felipe could do to hurry after them.
“What about the empedoclings?” Felipe asked as he too dashed into action.
“Close the door on your way out, they’ll busy themselves around here and if we’re lucky they won’t even burn down the place.”
“I admire your optimism.”
“Oh shut up and run, if I got the bearing of that thing right it’ll crash down somewhere on the outskirts of town.”
Felipe, for once, did as he was told

Author’s Note: After three books we now finally get to see the hydroponics setup. In earlier outlines I had this place show up already in book 1 or 2, but the plots of those moved in such a way that it wasn’t a good place for that kind of thing. We’ll get more into how Lex helped develop this thing when it’s their turn at the POV helm, unless a better opportunity should arise in this one. It might not because we’re gonna hit some complications at Plot Kilometers Per Hour very soon, but we’ll just have to see won’t we?

Catch you later!

V.S.D