Location:Obsidian Academy — Warded Courtyard
Date/Time:Early Cinderfall, 9939 AZI — Evening
Realm:Lower Realm
The bolt wouldn't sit right.
Jayde turned it between her fingers — careful, precise, black hair falling across her shoulders as she leaned over the workbench. The bolt was for the second Hearthstone Cooker prototype, a minor component in a minor project, and it wouldn't seat because the threading was off by a fraction of a degree. She could feel the misalignment through her fingertips the way she'd once felt hull stress through bulkhead plating — a wrongness too subtle for instruments, too obvious for hands that had built things for sixty years.
She adjusted. Threaded. Tested.
Still wrong.
Tolerance deviation: 0.03 degrees. Within acceptable parameters for civilian hardware. Reject and re-cut.
She rejected and re-cut. The motion was automatic — file, measure, test — and it gave her hands something to do while her mind ate itself alive.
