Blai Artigas is now-
Back at the Worldwound? It's colder, a bit, and there's snow and broken crags of rock all around. A sharp-walled canyon is visible off in one direction, with something large and regular enough in shape to maybe be a structure visible in the distance. High mountains cover two other directions, and what looks like a long slope down to a frozen sea on a fourth.
"Seals. There's a lot of them at a place about... I think forty miles from here, far side of the mountain ridge. They can get through the ice to whatever lives underwater, apparently. We've been careful not to overhunt."
"There's a few things you can forage, plants hardy enough to survive in caves and stuff, but it's a problem. Thus the vegetables and fruits."
"I think they expected me to be, erm, not able to really talk to you all day and now that you can maybe we should go find where everyone's got to."
"-You could fix the loom, and the punch press, and the lathe. I bet that's what they're all off arranging honestly. There's quite a backlog of broken tools. If you fix them all even once before leaving to - do more good elsewhere or whatever, we're still in a better spot. Let's go to the workshop floor?"
"I don't have a way to get to my planet from here. I'm not powerful enough to cast Plane Shift." He follows to the workshop.
"I meant, in New London or somewhere."
The workshop is down a flight of stairs and through some halls. It's a huge place but a huge mess, with random piles of scrap and broken things. There are a dozen people cleaning and arranging things.
"Hello, everyone! Mr- I never got your name. Our guest has more magic now, including for talking. So I'd thought to bring him here."
"He says he is Select Blai Artigas. I think 'Select' is instead of 'Mister'."
"Well, if you're volunteering," one of them says. He oversaw the pump work last night. "We weren't sure how long your patience would last or the precise limits of it so we are in the middle of inventorying. There's also search parties going into the abandoned sections. Maybe we should chat about what's next for a bit before you get to work, Select."
He points. There is a large box with gears sticking out on a workbench. "Mechanical tabulator, 's meant to work with the pumps and furnace and give us a readout where the heat is going. And control them, too. There's a lot of old leaks and we're not sure what's broken, if we're to open up old sections again in a reasonable amount of time it'll come handy."
He points to a stack of cylindrical things. "Those are all steam motors. Figure we can build carriages with them- Sleds, probably. Be a challenge, but with some of the other workshop tools repaired we could do it, and then explore, and get the hell out of here if we find a better place to be. So one set of priorities if we're keeping the wreck, and a different one if we're doing something else, see?"
"I don't know what your priorities here should be. I can cast Mending an unlimited number of times, though, it just takes ten minutes each time."
Max translates again.
"That's handy. As many hours of waking you have and however long your patience lasts, at any rate... We need a village meeting, but we can't do that because fully a third of us are away on a hunt and not expected to return for several days."
"Well, if you're keen to fix things instead of talking, start with this." He points to a thing. "And thank you, again."
"Are you distractible while you're doing that? If you are better to ask at the start than the end. How quiet do we need to be?"
After ten minutes his chant is up. "I need to keep doing that while I'm doing it or I have to start over," he says, "but I can concentrate on a spell through most things that don't leave me convinced that I should drop it."
"It's kind of hard to hear them over the chanting but it's worth a try if you don't mind repeating parts afterward."
"We specialize and optimize. It's fine. Too many cooks in the kitchen over there anyway. Any particular subject preference?"
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
