The city processed the substation request in six days.
Hunter had not expected six days. He had expected weeks of administrative delay and a queue of review bodies and the specific friction of a municipal system encountering a request it did not have a template for. He had prepared for that friction with a twenty-page proposal that Ren had formatted to the city's property transfer documentation standards and Sable had annotated with the legal basis for each element.
Six days. The city's decommissioned property office reviewed the proposal, confirmed the substation had no active development designation, and issued a provisional occupancy agreement pending a structural survey.
The structural survey took two more days. The surveyor confirmed the building was sound — concrete and steel cons
