casimir_ruchana It's circular. 'It' meaning all of it. The destruction of the phreatic table affects inflow to other water sources. The clock in the back of your mind ticks ruthlessly on as you conduct your survey of the situation. It's simple computation: nothing is infinite. Water runs off in every conceivable way. You can't repurpose the outflow to make its own origin. Creation and creator are not a reversible equation. How can you ever repay your source? How can you ever make good on that infinite promise that made you to begin with? Okay. Focus. Okay.

What else is there?

Mineral shortage. You could cut a bargain, and you may well need to do that, eventually, nothing can be counted out entirely, but you can't survive on someone else's cut corners forever. They'll pull out or run out and you'll be back to square one. Finding a permanent source would take centuries, though. You don't have the time to be that persuasive before people start dropping dead. You'll be asleep before you can cut a deal that longstanding and if not you'll be asleep before it bears enough fruit that you can stop tilling with your own four hands, metaphorically speaking, the soil, less metaphorical. The clock ticks. Temporary, at least for now, will have to do.

First, and with urgency, local needs. You send reservoir water, cleansed of infection like a folded sheet of paper pressed hard on its creases but in the opposite direction, to the Lyssil desert. Not potable, as you correctly glean, are the fissure waters, but you press equally hard on those and they pass through the plant before being duly purified for use. The desert is supplied. The clock ticks. In the next handful of months you count fewer deaths from dehydration than the most generous estimations.

Next, and without flinching, you look the irreversible reaction in the eye and break its neck. You de-constitute your own creation to re-supply the phreatic table with what you took. It's a plaster over a wound that swears a solemn promise to bleed itself dry, but you make it as hard as you possibly can. Coloured speckles make glistening trails in the surface for your Eye, alone gifted with the ability to see the surface of something otherwise buried layers under the soil. The clock ticks. You lay topsoil back like a blanket.

Third, re-assessment. The clock ticks like a vein jumping under your eyelid. You force yourself to draw back from your own creation and watch it breathe the few breaths you can promise to oversee. Food, disinfected, is loaded onto your airship all the while, ready to pass down the path you've created for its supply to Hevco. The first of many supply runs, that continual path, just like the life of your newly reborn aquifer, that you have also promised for some indefinite stretch of time. Some few of the infinite vertices that form a circle are missing and they sit somewhere beyond even your wide reach, your expansive gaze, taunting you with their necessity and their unreachability all the while. The cycle is incomplete and, though not as much land is left dry and deserted as would have been without your intervention, no place on Mythhaler itself has the resources left for a transfer to have any prolonged value. You need to look elsewhere. Later.

But for now.

All you can do is start the ball rolling and hope to hell that it doesn't waver. {[]}