Several flower sprites caught sight of me and Althea as we walked to our destination, stopping to nod, wave, or bow as they walked around. Most of them didn't have anything to do right now, but found themselves random little tasks just so that they didn't end up mobbing Althea and I. They knew that I hated that.
Althea and I made our way to a building hastily constructed on the top of the hill that the Initiative was built into. While well-constructed, it was certainly small.
But luckily, the door was all that was necessary. The moment we reached out our hands to touch the plain, wooden door, we were suddenly transported into the center of a beautiful forest full of trees that would dwarf the redwoods on Earth.
These were treants. Tree spirits, essentially dryads that hadn't quite managed to evolve that final step yet. They were also some of the citizens of Ramiris's domain.
Ramiris's special ability was called Mazecraft. Basically, it carved out a completely new dimension in which she was an absolute overlord. It had a bunch of restrictions to it, but even Horus was unable to overturn Ramiris's commands inside the space once I entered.
In this particular 'floor' of Ramiris's labyrinth was a city filled with all of Ramiris's protectors and servants.
That included the treant village, and Big Bro's named insect army in charge of gathering honey and protecting them. The dryads still monitored the forest, but far more loosely, and from here nowadays.
This place was also connected directly to the place that had once been Vester's lab in the Sealed Cave, meaning that Gabil, Vester, Kaijin, and even Veldora spent quite a bit of time in this pocket dimension.
But the door to Tempest opened out to a totally different spot. I preferred using the front door, in Risa City, just to get the full experience for myself every time. Spatial Transporting my way in without going through the entrance simply felt like a cheat to all of the time and effort that Ramiris had spent designing the beautiful facility on this floor.
A small amount of walking, and we found it. It was a gigantic building made of shiny blue Tempest Steel, a material specifically created by combining magisteel and very, very tiny amounts of matter from the bodies of either Rimuru or I inside Rimuru's stomach in a very specific process that only Isis and I could actually carry out. Tempest Steel was crazy strong and reacted only with the intent of people directly connected to Aether. Even nuclear magic wouldn't put a scratch on it, but even Ramiris could mold it like clay if she wanted to, despite her tiny, weak hands. Truly a god-tier material, though only third strongest, behind Big Bro's heliocane sword and the dragontite that Big Bro Veldora could make with careful but concentrated magicule application.
As soon as Althea and I got within a few feet of the entrance to the building, part of the wall melted into the ground to create an opening that we walked straight through.
Inside was a large entrance hall with several doors, including an ornate one built into the wall. A couple of flower sprites were walking around, going from wall spots that marked different laboratories and other administrative areas, where experiments or other things that I didn't want to know about until they surprised me with the end result. Even though the number of people who actually worked here weren't too numerous, quite a few of the labs were in use with long-term experiments.
We made our way to one of the furthest in-use labs. Inside, Vesta, Ramiris, Treyni, and Beretta were testing the efficiency of magicule-powered cars in different terrain. From what I understood, they were building up to trains and planes, but those took longer to design, so they were currently just using a basic car design to save time. After all, all they were testing was the magi-engine's propulsion ability… but their findings so far were-
PAH! As soon as we entered the lab, their current subject made a pathetic sound (for an explosion) and exploded.
"You know your magi-engine's imploding due to air intake issues, right?" I asked.
Vesta answered me with crossed arms as Treyni diligently wrote down the results of the experiment, "We're analyzing the exact ratios right now. At least it didn't massively blow up in our faces this time around."
"The first one nearly knocked me unconscious!" Ramiris announced proudly, though that didn't feel like something to actually be proud of, "So at least we're making progress!"
"So incredible, Lady Ramiris!"
"You're so cool, Lady Ramiris!"
"...Delta, aren't you supposed to be on Jura monitoring duty?!" I asked the dryad that'd just happened to appear outside the room.
"...!" Delta's partially-invisible body vanished from view, caught. Althea gave a little snort, used to this kind of thing from those usually-reliable tree spirits that always became super fickle around Ramiris.
As soon as I looked at her, though, her face went impassive again and she straightened her gaze, put-together as always.
"So, why did you come over here, Risa? It wasn't just to say hi or tell us what was wrong with our magi-engine, huh? I know you! You want something. You wanna do something crazy, huh?!" Ramiris called me out smugly.
"..." I stared, completely defeated. She knew me so well.
"Well NEEH! I won't help you! No way, not after you broke your promise to give all of my lovely subordinates their own bodies! You said you'd do it, and you haven't, so I won't do a thing for you!"
"..." I stared again, as the little fairy stuck her tongue out in my face. Darn it. She really knew me too well.
Oh, well. "...If I make bodies for all of them right now, will you help me?" I asked, getting straight to the point. While it was tedious work that I'd wanted to put off, it had to be done (by me) eventually. Might as well do it sooner, rather than later.
"That depends on what you want!" She turned her nose up at me, pretending to be all snobby.
"Aww!" Treyni tried to quiet herself, but Ramiris's cuteness factor when she acted all snobbily like that was simply too high. Unfortunately, it was an epic fail. The tiny fairy with so much power that Aether had to restrict it before it'd even allow her into the network (something that only her and Milim had managed so far) was simply too approachable. In that instant, I knew that as long as I sucked it up and made the bodies, Ramiris would help me with what I needed to do.