Althana Finishing Projects

It took the better part of a month and would have probably been longer if some materials hadn’t been procured, but she had lucked out. Althana’s atelier was now just shy of completion, some minor additions needed to be made to fully complete it, but the place was now more than complete enough to house her, Yuri, and the other members of his harem in their own rooms. As per her plan, Althana made sure the guest room designed to house Yuri was the biggest, with three others being almost as big, all on the lowest floor of the Atlier’s basement arrangement. Of course, this also meant Alma was on the lowest floor with her own personal space as well. Althana estimated the establishment was somewhere between 88 and 94 percent completed already, and it would likely be fully completed by the end of the year; which so happened to be five months and change away.

The soap project was progressing surprisingly well; a few monster fats had some interesting results, but it was discovered some of them didn’t play nicely with the other basic soap-making materials. Having the fat quite literally explode on you when you add the water or ashes made Althana thankful the test barrels were cheap and the area around it was reinforced; she lost quite a few impromptu homunculi during those experiments. And having Lithira handle local resource gathering helped cut down on some of the more superfluous costs.

Usagi tested the soaps for scents, both before and after use, which Althana was grateful for; even if Usagi was asking for the recipes for the soaps with the least scent on both fronts when she found them. Yuri explained it was a shinobi thing that came up in research back where he grew up; those who followed Usagi’s vocation had rules about cleanliness that included minimizing your own scent, so any cleaning materials that could effectively erase their scent in some way were seen as a good thing. Althana liked the low, and no-scent soaps for a different reason, which made adding in scents easier. She probably spent more time than she should have finding the soap formula to compliment her flower-infused soaps for the project. That approach was two-fold; Althana liked the scents of certain flowers, so having some soaps that carried the scents of those flowers was something that excited her, and nobility tended to like their cleaning products to have pleasant scents, which usually means something that resembles the scent of sweet smelling flowers.

The bathhouse had been finished while they were away, and Althana was thankful she had the good graces to leave her five most completed plans for the facility’s pipe network with the guild when they left. The facilities were still under construction when they took a trip to Usagi’s home village, but now the facilities were functionally complete, if not entirely complete yet, but that was likely due to change by the end of the month. Rigging a system for heating incoming water so it was hot but tolerable, and a separate system for managing cleanup for outgoing water was a pain in the ass, but Althana had managed to develop the appropriate mechanisms and left incredibly detailed instructions on how to implement them with her plans on how to work the water system. If her calculations were accurate, and she hoped they were, they would start seeing an artificial water system running through the town by the end of next month. Yuri had mentioned how a subterranean system like that was set up back where he was, both in the modern era and historically, and the word he used for the whole system didn’t sound very enticing, so much so that Althana had intentionally blocked out the word from her mind.

Althana also had another project she was running, driven by the features of the other women in Yuri’s orbit. Althana had very little in terms of physical features, and every woman in Yuri’s collection of partners had considerably larger busts than Althana had been used to seeing on a regular basis before arriving here; Althana was far from busty in terms of figure, but all the other women he spent time with had that defined larger chest. Althana was smart enough to know she couldn’t compete with that, but only one or two had larger-than-average butts, and Althana figured she could probably compete with that; assuming she got the formula right and the enhancement actually was complimented by her plain figure.

Gnomes, like Althana, were known for their brainpower. But they were also known for their mining and crafting prowess, so a considerable number of their populations had some physically impressive specimens. Althana herself wasn’t a wimp, her figure was actually pretty toned, but it wasn’t as noticeable as was typically seen in larger races of the world. Not that such things mattered much, Yuri said he admired the aspects of all the ladies in his harem. Althana was just feeling a need to have some way to show she could compete a bit more visibly when it came to her figure.

Althana had spent the past few days slowly brewing a sample in one of her smaller test cauldrons; she wanted to make sure she got everything just right. And her test potion was almost done; or rather, it would have been if not for one little issue she neglected to account for. Half the time, Althana went from one of the smartest people in the room to an outright airhead when she was in close proximity to Yuri. Her test potion was all wrong because she got distracted by a day or so prior when he dropped in earlier than she anticipated to check out his room at the atelier, which he insisted would be temporary until he could work the details for his own private facilities. Althana, and the rest of his current harem, was actually in the process of drawing up design plans for what could be his new abode. Granted, none of them had any actual experience with construction or architecture, so it was pretty slow going.

Althana turned her attention to the test potion, not really knowing that she had made a goof in her making of the concoction; chances were that wouldn’t matter much before she knew it. Althana was used to things going wrong in the lab; her prep work for the test batches of the soap mixes was proof of that, but chances are she would be finding out she had made an error in a way she wasn’t anticipating. And, ironically, her overpreparedness for testing would prove as beneficial as it was problematic.

After checking on her special batched cauldron, Althana passed it off to a small trio of homunculi that were basically scraps left over from work to make the atelier and some of its tools and had them follow her out into the woods as she grabbed a special mirror she had made that could alter its size for a limited amount of time and headed out the door. She would later be thankful for being noticed and followed by some members of Yuri’s harem who had actually noticed her attempt to slip into the woods unnoticed with a small entourage of simple constructs carrying a cauldron.