Julia breathed in the smell of grass and wildflowers as she strolled down the dirt path. Pastures extended around her filled with cows and sheep grazing peacefully. Along with the barns and homesteads, the rolling plains were dotted with windmills. They were identical five story buildings, cream-colored walls and with a purple dome of solar panels for a roof and four pink blades designed to imitate petals of giant flowers turning in unison.

Though, calling them windmills was a bit of a misnomer. They did not capture the wind to do work within them, but drove their blades with motors to generate the wind. It was one of a couple thousand across the Windmill Kingdom that set the wind patterns of the Wonder Planet.

At the end of the dirt path was one of these windmills, specifically her Windmill. She could feel the breeze generated by its blades specifically rather than the general flow of air as she approached. As she reached the door, it opened for her to step through without breaking her stride. She turned to the lesser Doggle holding the door as she crossed the threshold. He took his wide-brimmed hat from his head to hold against his chest. "Welcome back, Baroness. How was your week?" he asked as he pushed the door closed behind her.

"Relaxing, but I'm ready to get back on the wheel," Julia answered. For one thing, being called "Baroness" took some getting used to after being just a normal citizen while off shift.

Her first order of business was to drop off her luggage in her quarters. She climbed the spiral staircase in the center of the windmill to the third floor and dropped her suit cases on the bed of her quarters. She could unpack later. The quarters were comfortable if basic with just a bed, dresser, and desk. The light through the window pulsated as the blades passed in front of them.

Next to her room was the main rec room with the other main window of the windmill. Several Doggles—mostly the smaller, cyan to sky blue lesser kind but a couple Human-sized, blond greater Doggles—a half-Doggle woman sat transfixed on a big screen TV. They jumped and cheered as a prolonged "SCORE" roared from the speakers as well as a blast of a horn.

"Go ahead?" Julia asked.

They all turned to her. "Less than a minute to go," one of them cheered.

She smiled and gave them a thumbs up. She did not follow sports, but it was release for crews having to stay here away from their families for days at a time. Encouraging them in their recreation improved their productivity. "Where's Georges?"

One of them pointed towards the ceiling. "The Baronet's up in the motor room."

"Why would I expect anywhere else?" Julia was headed up there anyway.

The spiral staircase ended with the second highest floor where the batteries and other utility equipment were kept with the staircase to the motor room off to the side. This was because of the giant reluctance motor that took up most of the motor room. Its cylindrical housing sat on its side in its braces with a drive shaft extending from it through the wall where it connected with the hub turning the blades outside. The dome shape to the large, open room matched the structure on the outside.

Along with a couple workers sitting at the computer stations to the side, Georges was leaning against the housing, his long, pendulous ear laying up against the metal as he pressed his head against it. She walked up to the half-Doggle who was so preoccupied with his listening to not notice her.

"What are you listening for, Georges?" Julia asked.

Georges pulled his head from the housing and swung to her with a start. He drew in a breath heaved a sigh. "Oh, Baroness Julia, you're in already? I thought you weren't coming until later this afternoon."

Julia gave a shrug. "I didn't feel like waiting around. Surprised you're not down with the others watching the soccer game." She knotted her brow as that could not be right. "Or was it hockey? Which one is on ice?"

"Hockey," Georges answered.

"Keep it against the boards!" someone shouted. Julia and Georges turned to the two Doggles at the computer stations huddled together with a handheld TV between them. "No! They kicked it free!" one of them moaned.

"Wait," the other said tensely. "They cleared it and…"

"EMPTY NETTER!" the two shouted together and pumped their fist in the air.

"I've also been getting a good play-by-play up here," Georges said.

Julia was clueless to what had just happened. "You can tell I was a shop class girl, not a gym class one," she said. Speaking of which, she wanted to get back to what he was doing. "Anyway, what were you listening for?"

Georges turned back to the cylinder. "Oh. There was a minor variance in the magnetic field when we had it running fast a couple days ago. It seems to be running smoothly now that we're back down to normal speed."

"Still, something to keep our eyes and ears on," Julia replied. "So, looking forward to going home?"

Georges smiled. "It'll be nice to sleep in my own bed. And we'll be celebrating the triplets' birthday the day after tomorrow."

"Sorry I can't make the party, but I left my presents on the way here," Julia said. "Boy, they're getting big. It can't be that long ago they were little balls of fuzz wrapped in their mother's ears."

"Nine years," Georges said.

Julia exhaled a loud sigh she let it sink in. "Next thing you know, you'll be shipping them off to college."

"Or watching them put on this uniform," Georges added, straightening his jacket.

"Well enjoy these moments while you still have them." Julia's kids were already fully grown and her oldest and his wife were in the process of making her a grandmother. "You're relieved, Baronet. Have a good week."

"Then I will take my leave, Baroness," Georges said as he walked to the staircase. "Have a good week yourself."

Julia turned from Georges as he disappeared down the staircase and returned her attention to the motor. The very heart of every windmill and therefore the driving force for the Wonder Planet's winds. She sat down at her station to review the previous week's readouts, particularly looking for that variance.

Lenny's wooden clogs hit the grated floor with hollow clunks. Before it could be turned into clouds, the seawater they brought in had to be filtered for solid particulates and the dissolved salts, conditioned for pH and temperature, and then could finally be agitated into droplets to be released into the atmosphere.

He walked down the filtering process: the spherical multimedia filters and cylindrical cartridge filters fed into pipes more than a story tall. The pipes were clear, allowing a view of the giant Archimedes' screws turning inside them, driven by massive motors. Amazingly, their gentle turning produced enough of a current to pull in water from the intakes several kilometers offshore and through the filters ahead of it. Though, being six meters across, even their gentle rate of rotation moved vast volumes of water.

The pipes passed by the motors to the reverse-osmosis banks: perhaps the single most resource, energy, and labor-intensive step in the process. Lenny climbed the stairs to the rows of banks of pressure vessels. While the screws, pipes, and filters before were amazing for their size, the reverse osmosis system inspired awe by its numbers. Six rows of eight banks each, each bank made up of 360 pressure vessels arranged into stages of 216, 90, and 54. He had gone over the setup so many times in his career he could recite it by command.

He came to a bank where a few engineers were working to remove large membranes from pressure vessels or working them into the long tubes. Of the dozen, six were lesser Beavers, one was a Triton, two were half-Beavers, and three were greater Beavers like him. His adjutant, Katia, was connecting a membrane to the end of another and pushed it partially into the pressure vessel to grab another. The half-Beaver woman stopped as Lenny came near.

"We're making good progress replacing the membranes," Katia reported. "Though, we found a failed seal on one of the feed pipes, so it will have to be replaced."

Lenny was about to open his mouth, but Katia continued, "Not to worry, Chief, it will be ready for when it goes back into rotation." She resumed attaching membranes together.

"I was about to ask if you've taken your lunch yet," Lenny said.

Katia shoved the train of membranes into the pressure vessel completely. She picked up a radio. "Attach your end."

She put the radio down. "I'll get a bite once I'm done here."

Her stomach growled, as if reminded it was supposed to have food in it by now. Paying attention to her, he could also see the dark circles under her eyes and her stance suggested her body was not well rested as it slouched slightly.

"You've also been working a lot of overtime," Lenny added.

Katia picked up the cap, hanging by its hose from the pipe running above the row of pressure vessels. "There's a lot of work to be done." She lined up its nozzle with hole in the center of the last membrane and worked it in. She twisted it a bit and picked up a half moon–shaped plate to set in an indent in the cap.

"Katia, if you're trying to impress me now that you're my adjutant," Lenny said, "you already have it. That's why you have the job."

Katia twisted a bolt into a hole a couple times by hand before using an Allen key to do the main job.

"And if you think being an adjutant means working yourself to the bone," Lenny continued, "I'll tell you adjutants who burn themselves out have short careers in that position."

Katia grimaced as she tried to turn the Allen key further only for it to hold firm. "I'm just a hard worker, Chief."

Lenny knotted his brow and glowered at Katia. "There's hard working, and then there's abusing yourself. You want to be as helpful as possible; I get that. However, that includes taking care of yourself."

He took the next bolt and the Allen key from her. "Because you do no one any good if you're starving and exhausted."

Katia was silent, holding her hands together in front of her.

"Go get a bite to eat and then call it a shift," Lenny said. "You already have your forty for the week and then some. Get a good night's sleep, relax for the weekend, and I'll see you on Monday."

"Is that an order, Chief?" Katia asked. Her stomach growled to agree with him.

Lenny motioned back with his head. "Get out of here. I can handle replacing some membranes."

"And a feed pipe," Katia added as she walked past him.

"Right," Lenny said.

The other engineers watched Katia walk for the back wall. Lenny cleared his throat. "You all, on the other hand, are still on shift!" he snapped. "Get back to work!"

They returned to either taking out old membranes or putting new ones in.

Lenny twisted the bolt into the other hole in the plate and used the Allen wrench to tighten it. Katia was not the first newly promoted worker to confuse quantity of work with quality, but she would learn with experience.

While this particular bank was offline for repairs and maintenance, the water passing through others in operation would eventually make their way into the atmosphere as droplets in cumulus humilis clouds. The same happened at the three hundred other cloud towers. The clouds coming from the Drop Kingdom's cloud towers traveled on the winds generated by the Windmill Kingdom's windmills. That was how the two kingdoms worked together to distribute fresh water across the hollow interior of the Wonder Planet in the form of precipitation.

And it was all made possible by the highly skilled engineers overseeing and maintaining those cloud towers and windmills. While selected for being brighter and showing more ingenuity than most, they were ordinary people at heart. They would go home to families, enjoy sports—or some other form of entertainment, had aspirations for the future, indulged naïve presumptions, and delivered hard-earned wisdom. If not for their peculiar product, they could workers in any kind of factory.

Their work was given little thought by the general public of the Wonder Planet—this odd little world where its people live inside its hollow shell—though. When watching the wind rustle the leaves of trees and make waves on a lake or clouds passing overhead and dropping rain or snow, people rarely thought of the workers who made it possible.

About the only time anyone cared the Wonder Planet's weather was a product of industry and not nature was when something went wrong.