Jaina ProudmooreCrossover origin story

Act I — A cold problem with warm profits

The town’s new cold-storage plant stood behind the fish market. Its owner had promised to keep the catch fresh through summer. The plant had been operating for one week. During that week, the harbor’s old ice merchants had gone out of business, the fishing fleet had received discounted storage and the owner had begun describing himself as a visionary.

Jaina asked to see the machinery. The owner offered a brochure. She asked again. He explained that the process was proprietary. A cracking sound came from the quay, followed by the harbor master shouting something unsuitable for the brochure.

The machine used a crystal pulled from a flooded ruin. Nobody had established what the crystal actually did. It had produced cold when struck, so the owner had arranged a mechanical hammer to strike it repeatedly. His approach to innovation consisted largely of increasing the hammer’s speed.

Jaina inspected the crystal’s mounting. Each impact sent the cooling effect through the building’s foundations and into the harbor. The plant was not keeping a storehouse cold. It was slowly turning the waterfront into an extension of the storehouse.

The owner asked whether the situation could be described as an expansion. Jaina gave him a look that removed the commercial possibilities from the word.

Act II — Breaking the wrong thing

Stopping the hammer did not immediately stop the ice. The crystal had accumulated energy, and the stone foundations carried it outward in steady pulses. Breaking the mounting risked releasing the entire charge at once. The harbor master suggested doing it from a safe distance. Jaina asked him where he intended to put the town during the attempt.

The fishermen needed their boats freed before the changing tide pressed the ice against the piers. The warehouse workers needed a route out of the lower rooms. The owner needed to stop explaining that the equipment had worked perfectly during the demonstration.

Jaina divided the problem. The workers cleared the connecting passages. The fishermen marked the trapped hulls. She studied the pulse pattern and used the gaps between them to open narrow channels through the ice. It was slow, careful work, made more difficult by a crowd that kept suggesting she solve it faster.

Her first channel closed behind her. The crystal adjusted to the new path, feeding cold into the opening. For a moment, the entire harbor saw her elegant solution fail. The owner began to speak. The harbor master, learning quickly, told him not to.

Jaina changed the plan. Instead of fighting the effect everywhere, she gave it a place to go: an empty stone basin above the tide line, once used to hold water for the old mill. The workers opened the connecting sluice. She guided the next pulse toward it.

The basin froze solid. The harbor did not.

Act III — A less impressive monument

The trapped boats came free one at a time. Ropes creaked, crews shouted and the gulls returned to their principal concern, which was stealing anything left unattended during the rescue.

The crystal remained in the sealed basin under guard until people qualified to examine it could arrive. The cold-storage plant closed. The owner offered to name the basin after Jaina. She suggested naming it after the mistake, so nobody would forget why it existed.

By evening, the town had settled on the Visionary’s Icebox.

The harbor master apologized for blaming her. His apology contained several references to the confusing circumstances. Jaina accepted it before he could make it less generous through further explanation. She had spent enough of the day watching people produce frost where none was required.

The fishermen brought hot food to the quay. For the first time since arriving, she sat down without someone asking whether the weather was her responsibility. A small child pointed to the frozen basin and asked whether it was a monument.

“In a way,” Jaina said.

“To what?”

She watched the plant’s owner trying to remove his name from the brochure display.

“To asking a second question before buying a larger hammer.”