The order Bones had brought with her was enormous.
A joint purchase from more than twenty Ministries, valued in excess of two million Galleons. Complete it, and the profit would close the distance to his five-hundred-thousand target to within a single stride.
Tom frowned slightly. "I haven't even delivered the last order yet. Why is this coming through now?"
Bones smiled and said nothing, merely noting: "Delivery can be pushed back, but not by more than four months. They're worried."
Tom understood immediately.
They were trying to saturate his production capacity. If they had his entire output on contract, there would be nothing left to sell anyone else, Grindelwald included. Once he had worked through their logic, he found himself quietly amused.
They wanted to sweep his shelves clean?
Perfectly possible before. Still perfectly possible now. Whether it would stay that way much longer was a different question.
Tom spent two thoroughly enjoyable days letting the girls drag him around London, working through the Christmas markets and every place of any interest they could find, and then he went home and began production.
The dream sequence for the alchemical creatures was essentially finished. What remained were the extraction of intent-threads and a few revisions to the magical circuitry. He incorporated his own custom communication array into the design so the creatures could exchange information efficiently once active.
While he was at it, a thought struck him: two alchemical creatures capable of communicating with each other would effectively be a telephone. A different world's version of the old speaking-tube insects, essentially. The technical difficulty was manageable, but the raw materials were another matter entirely.
The critical bottleneck was intent-threads. He had very little of the substance on hand, nowhere near enough to scale up production to any meaningful degree.
The problem was fundamental. Every thinking creature generated a continuous flow of intent and thought at every waking moment, and in theory it could be extracted without damage to the source. In practice, Tom's technique was not yet there. He was limited to the crude method, grinding and refining through something more like compression than collection, and each extraction yielded a pitifully small amount for the effort involved.
Still, he wrote down the idea and every relevant line of thinking. It would be useful someday.
He had not forgotten the system's requirement to keep developing and improving the platform. Even at full global adoption, the current version would not get him to a hundred percent on that task. There was still a long road ahead.
Tom stayed in the workshop doing final calibrations while the house around him sat as quiet as though no one had returned home at all. Out in the world, meanwhile, the European continent was becoming something much less quiet.
Grindelwald had changed tactics without warning. He set aside the practice of simply brutalising his opponents and releasing them, and had begun taking prisoners instead. Within just a few days, he had captured more than ten wizards, the majority of them International Aurors. Babajide was sufficiently alarmed that he went directly to Hogwarts and personally appealed for Dumbledore to come out.
The two of them converged on a chaotic engagement in Austria, where more than fifty acolytes and Aurors had become entangled in a running battle. Dumbledore and Grindelwald traded blows in the middle of it, and the result, as it had been every time before, was inconclusive. They could only watch as Grindelwald covered his people's retreat and walked away untouched.
"Babajide. This cannot continue."
Dumbledore's voice was measured, but the gravity in it was plain. "Sustained attrition is only draining both sides. We gain nothing from it. I cannot hold Grindelwald. As long as he maintains his current territorial position, the combined strength of the acolytes and the German Ministry is more than sufficient to hold what they have."
Babajide put forward his idea. "Could you keep Grindelwald occupied long enough for us to concentrate our forces and destroy his network? Eliminate his people around him?"
Dumbledore shook his head and asked a single question: "And then?"
Babajide blinked. "Then?"
"Then Grindelwald is isolated again. No allies, no attachments, no fixed position. We are back to exactly where we were before his network existed. He moves like smoke, without pattern, without warning. No one can predict where he will surface, or who he will go after. At that point he becomes a spectre hanging over the entire world, and every person in it lives in fear of the next time he decides to appear."
Babajide stared at him.
Was Dumbledore actually suggesting that Grindelwald building a power base was, in some sense, preferable?
"Then what is your actual proposal?"
"Contain the expansion. Prevent the acolytes from extending further. That is the only useful advice I can offer right now."
Dumbledore let out a long sigh. "I have no brilliant solution for breaking the stalemate. Strength is the only currency that matters, and unless there is a second wizard capable of fighting alongside me and guaranteeing we can defeat Grindelwald outright, further probing attacks are not worth the cost."
Babajide did not like it, but he had nothing better to put forward. In the end, he did as Dumbledore suggested, pulling back the bulk of their forces and coordinating with several nations to establish defensive lines along the borders. It at least meant people could go home for Christmas.
Grindelwald, for his part, had no interest in expanding further just now. He was busy tormenting goblins, squeezing Gringotts for every additional Galleon he could extract on Tom's behalf.
On the eve of Tom's departure to North America, after two and a half days that had erased any meaningful distinction between night and day, he finally emerged from his underground workshop and brought his results out to the back garden.
Seven round-headed, large-eyed alchemical dolls were lined up neatly on the lawn. Each one stood roughly sixty centimetres tall, with eyes as wide and glassy as light bulbs, and four arms arranged in pairs. There was something about them that sat slightly outside the comfortable range of ordinary appearances.
Tom channelled the extracted intent-threads into each one. The magical circuitry came alive, and the intent began metabolising the dream sequences at speed, feeding on the dream material like roots drinking water. Digestion would take time regardless. Tom found a deck chair, cut himself a plate of beef, and ate while he waited.
Approximately one hour later, the first doll stirred out of its dream.
Its enormous eyes blinked open, still hazy and soft with the remnants of something it had lived through and now could not quite separate from memory.
"Master..."