In the years leading up to the bicentenial of the city, the Diplomat began to lay the seeds of an idea. A massive expansion of the city, fueled by preceeding years of research and development. The groundwork took decades to lay down, but they were young then, young still, and had time to spend on such ventures.
The Academy had seen increased patronage from the dwarves. The Diplomat often worked to funnel funding their way, increase their apprenticeship limits year by year. Beyond that, the Weaver, the dwarves' primier researcher and scientist, became increasingly involved in the Spire academy. In the 150th year they even deigned to gain citizenship, completing the apprenticeship and subsequent layman exams in a single rush (though rumors abounded that the Diplomat fed them answers for the general education components), to ease the breurocracy around their academic involvement.
They met their research quotas within a couple years, spoon feeding Spire breakthroughs in physics and mechanics that the dwarves had been sitting on for generations, and then proposed a series of crossdisciplimary masterworks which saw the academy's understanding of universal gates expand tenfold. By the 170s, every aristocratic asshole in the city had fancy gates set up in their home, property on multiple planets wrapped up cleanly into one cohesive house. Livingroom and kitchen windows that look out onto different worlds. Great warded experiments conducted in the autumn and winter wilds, circles of mages chanting stabalization wards while in the center, eager pupils under the Weaver's watchful eye ripped trembling holes in spacetime and then tried to darn the fabric whole again.
Meanwhile the construction crews never slept. There were always buildings being demolished, taller ones built in their place. Denser housing, room for more people. Everyone wanted to live in Spire, and there was work to be done, but the city could not offer citizenship to more bodies than it could house or more mouths than it could feed, and right now, the housing was the tighter bottleneck.
The trolls were strict about the first city skyline, as were the humans. The orcs held no such reservations until the skyscrapers began to reach the glass dome above, and the ambient temperatures meant that only orcs could reasonably hope to live in the appartments being produced. Even that didn't stop construction, only slowed it marginally, as the breurocrats in city planning calculated how many orcs could be politely convinced to relocate into the new housing and free up space elsewhere.
Ultimately, not a terribly appealing offer, in a city built on intercommunity connections. A penthouse in the skies is a penthouse you can never have friends over to.
The third world saw no such downsides. Indeed, the support of the fae saw buildings erupt that seemed to defy gravity. Dwarven elevators made of troll materials could bring you to the 100th floor in moments. Sky bridges dotted the skyline, spreading like spider's silk through the skies. Luxury restraunts boasted views from the 300th floor, dizzying heights where the air on the balcony felt thin and the whole world creaked when the wind hit. But oh, the views you got there, overlooking the endless fae wilds. They were breathtaking - sometimes literally, nearer to the city's edge.
The city streets became a shadowy haze, pools of darkness crisscrossed by refracted rainbow shards from the sunlight hitting glass high above.
And in the 5th city, where the buildings were all stalagtite and stalagmite already, hollowed out stone pillars in the giant cavern at the center of the world, the Diplomat's musings first began to spread of expansion. They could only add so many buildings, after all, before the ventalation became unsustainable. Even the air purifiers could only handle so much population.
Increasingly, throughout the years 187 and 188, the Diplomat brought other dwarves to show them sections of the city. The Weaver was already well integrated in the local academy. The Warrior was well established on the 4th world. The Builder, though, was a new and startling sight to Spire onlookers. Their bodies were arranged oddly, flat bodies fit for slipping through crevases with powerful limbs that could lift and carry and tear. Beedy eyes were scattered across their small heads, overwhelmed by the daylight. They skittered besides their more bipedal sibling, a small hoard of clicking bugs wreathed in layers of diaphenous silk. Like most Dwarves first visiting the city, their clothes were not prepared with wind in mind, and many Spire residents in those years would find a loose wrap or scarf snagged in a tree or on their railing, a gift from the universe of the most precious fabric they might ever touch.
In the year 192 the Builder even helped with some massive construction, expanding the habitable space in the 5th city with a swath of new stalagtite-esque towers and new high-density ventilation tubes. Eventually though, they hit the limits of the city's diameter and habitable zone, got bored or frustrated or some unknown dwarven emotion, and disappeared into their tunnels again.
And expansion, of course, was impossible. In the 3rd city, easy -- there was always some small court willing to sell their remaining turf to the city, and the factors were all right there, most anyone could live long term in that air. But the other layers were harder to build into. The diplomat could not live for long in the first city without their connection fraying, their bodies dropping one by one from their consciousness. Oh, they could be mindful of the time. They could time them out, rotate them through, be careful no limb ever sat too long under that sun. But the humans couldn't, and the mutations they sustained just from walking around in the trolls' city were small and strange and random and added up to a much bigger risk, and eventually much more loss of life, than if they'd stayed at home and only collected the mutations that their own spells brought them. After all, casting botany spells for a couple decades would make someone a bit dreamy and whistful and green, see leaves cluster around their joints, see their faces turn hungrily to the sun, compound the parts of their personality that lead them to that career in the first place. But a human stuck at the edges of the troll's city would see themself changed randomly, their body and personality twisted together, and sometimes their memories too.
And on the other end, a troll who crawled out into the tunnels beyond the 5th city would find that their body actually couldn't function without magic, and would be found a festering mess by the cleanup crews a few days or weeks later.
Usually days. The dwarves were festidious about their tunnel cleanliness. That did not mean they would find every runaway in time.
Nearer to the spire, the great conjoined tower(s) at the heart of the city of Spire, reality was all bleeding out onto each other and the factors all balanced out and nobody really had to risk anything at all. The habital zone extended for miles from the spire and made for five pleasant bubbles on five varried worlds. But it had been 192 years now since they came together, 187 since the initial bloodshed of first contact ended, and those five bubbles were full to bursting.
So all in all, expansion was a known impossibility. It was just too dangerous to have the city's streets extending beyond the point where most citizens or visitors could actually survive visiting. But oh, it was tempting. A bigger city would mean they could support more apprentices, more laymen, train up more massters in every field. I could house and entertain more tourists each year. Support more merchants, and tax them as they came in. It would see the wealthy made wealthier, true. Nobody denied that this was the case, and nobody dared speak support of it, except perhaps the old Orcish monarch who was so fabulously wealthy that to deny its motives would have been laughable. But by this point it was the 180s and it was the monarch's heir who sat on the council in Spire, and the heir was savvy enough to the ways of the people it governed to at least pay lip service to "the unfortunate tragedy of the wealthy's growing hoards" when needed. So it was known that it would make the rich richer. But it was also well understood that it would make the middle class larger, because the citizenship pool would be larger, and Spire citizens had perhaps the highest quality of life that the vast universe could support. This, too, was well known.
Maybe expansion would give the humans a bit more security, sheltering on the other side of the gates from the enemy without who had silently watched them for so long. Maybe it would allow Spire to start farming more of its own food, and lower the prices there. Maybe it would do a million different things for a million different people, each one perfect and unique and undeniably desirable.
The Diplomat was never pushy, but if the subject came up they were firmly in support. And, really, they were awkward, but they could be quite convincing when they needed to be. The courts, especially, they played against each other with an ease that would make any fae proud.
Oh dear Summer, you've already sold us so much wonderful land. If we expanded the city's radius you would have the least displacement, the least migration, and your enemies would be thrown into dissaray.
Oh Spring, imagine the visitors, imagine the tourists flooding through, imagine the shows you could produce and the attention you could farm.
Oh Winter, you've already sold us the least amount of land. If this sale went through you would earn the largest payout of all the courts, and would be made wealthier than them all.
Oh Autumn, imagine the crowds, and imagine how you could hide within them. Imagine housing less dense. Imagine sprawling neighborhoods, room to run, to hide, to fly. To hunt, they never quite said, but it was easy to imagine and easy to see an amused glint in the Diplomat's faceted eyes.
In the 195 the final scientific breakthroughs were sufficiently verified, and in 196 the Diplomat first officially pitched the expansion project to the council, formatted as their own masterwork project (not the first they'd pitched, not evene the only one they were actively working on at that time, but the frist big enough to pitch directly to the council from the get go and bypass the typical agency chain of command). Five massive gates, or 25 depending on how you counted it, would be arrayed in each of the 5 cities, overlayed over each other in a large ring around the central spire. They would need to be just inside the 4th world wall, because that was the furthest out they could go there, and they needed to be overlayed over each other. So first, 5 (really 25) massive gates to construct.
Phase 2, which would overlap significantly, a series of weather wards to try to control the flow of air and moisture and polen and everything else that likes to drift through big gates between disconnected environments. The pressure differentials would be crazy otherwise, and the city was already known for powerful winds emmenating from (or flowing to) the spire.
Phase 3, which could overlap both phase 1 and 2 realistically but couldn't Really get going until the gates were open, would be the public transit infrastructure. A massvie rail line running in a great spiraling loop between the 25 new gates. Because that was the wildest thing that the Diplomat was promising (supported by a dry and rambling lecture by the Weaver on recent developments in the labs). Opening these gates would allow the stable zone, the area where you're close enough to the spire to walk around healthy and happy regardless of which city you're in or which one you're from, to expand at last.
The 4th and final phase, which the Diplomat expressed much less direct enthusiasm for, was to actually build up the five cities once the survivable radius was expanded and the land purchased. They were never much of one for architecture, but they thought they could probably convince the Builder to help with that phase once the time arrived.
It was contentious. Not because anyone was against it, per se, but because everyone saw how much proffit there was to be had and wanted to reposition more of it within reach of their own people. The humans especially felt the sting of a project that helps everyone, but you least of all. After all, even with the gates in place, the humans could not expand. Their city was locked behind a wall, and beyond it by a field of mines and snipers and cold war. There was talk early on of leaving them out of the project entirely, so the looming armies would have no easy way to break into the other cities should the worst happen. This went on passionately until the Weaver calmly explained that the whole thing simply wouldn't function at all unless all 5 cities were connected, and the more paranoid voices of the Orcish heir and Winter king were forced to refocus on ways to design an open border to be secured at a moment's notice.
The human delegate at the time was a Doreen Wilscott, a powerful wizard with a focus on ecology and food production and a keen understanding of how an ecosystem can be suffocated. She'd spent most of her career in the farms and gardens of the city and surrounding landscapes, developing crops and growing techniques to subsidise the immense costs that Spire spent importing foodstuffs each year, before pivoting into politics. She saw the danger this project put her people in, how easily they could be pushed further to the margins of their city and locked away from public life. She also saw the power she held, because a project of this scope could only be approved unanamously, which meant massive concessions could be gained elsewhere for the city's human population. She, more than anyone, could afford to say no until her demands were met.
Wilscott's demands set the rest of the city into a frenzy. 200 new apprenticeship seats for the botany sorcery programs, a vocation that only humans and the extremely rare fae could perform. 500 new apprenticeship seats in sorcerious warding and securities, which again would be almost entirely human roles, though warding tracks did tend more fae in aggrigate. The others simply could not do sorcery in the ways the humans could, and uniformity of enchantment was an important factor in infrastructure-scale magics.
The hospitals would expand their support for mutation-based ailments for human magic workers. The restrictions on fae feeding would be strengthened.
When talks began of managing the 3rd world fae who would be displaced, and ways to integrate them into the apprenticeship program, Wilscott demanded equal outreach for humans who had lost citizenship in prior generations. When talks began of construction crews, water treatment, bus route planning, and electrical grids, she shoehorned in sorcerous tracks into each apprenticeship package.
Wilscott imagined that her people would sing songs about her for a hundred years, an honor that few politicians or breurocrats ever receive.
The troll delegate was one Grandfather Malden, a spry and trusted standin for Great Great Great Grandfather Malden who ostensibly ran things in the 1st city but who was rarely seen out of bed these days. Grandfather Malden held firm on the sanctity of the trolls' city wall, but the Weaver's calculations showed the habital zone would barely reach that far anyway, so the trolls were left with very little to lose and a lot to gain from both the land sales and the increased market activity.
The orcish heir made a big show of resisting but ultimately was more dramatic than it was convincing. Everyone knew it would benefit personally from the influx of citizens. The orcs would build out the great shield wall and then construction could commense.
The fae were ultimately the largest holdouts and the largest challenge that the Diplomat had to overcome. They'd benefitted greatly over the previous century from the survivability of their lands and the tendency that gave others to bleed out into them. It meant that their land sales to Spire were always highly priced, and it meant that peoples from the other worlds would often find themselves lost out in the wilds in ways that the fae could blatantly benefit from. The expansion would make a massive amount of newly habitable land beyond their reach, which would tank their property values for a long time (albeit with a hefty sale at the start of the venture). This was a problem. No court would stand for being slighted. They closed ranks quickly with the humans (a common enough occurance in those council halls) to push back against the project, until the orc heir suggested extending the train line out deep into the wilds, and the fae resolve began to waver. The city need only own the mile or so around each track line to justify their construction, after all, creating huge swaths of the wild that would be open and accessable for any city visitor, land easily sold to the city but beyond the city's laws until then.
Of course this would bring a lot of new vitality and industry to the city, something that the Winter King in particular was not fond of.
The next year, when the Spring Queen took over the fae seat on the council, the Endeavor was approved within weeks.
"You've all done something excelent today," assured the Diplomat. "If we begin construction swiftly, I believe we may be able to open the gates in time for the city's bicentennial."
And wouldn't that be grand?