“I think we're clear,” Grandmother said ten minutes after the last rat died and no more turned up. “Congratulations, Alex.” Grandmother reached out and touched the remains of the machine. An impressive pile of coins and scrap appeared next to it. A coin or two appeared next to different rats, along with the occasional chunk of prize meat, hide or claws. Grandmother could only see her share. She never figured out how the split was calculated. It was some combination of the fighter's contribution and risk. A fighter facing a higher tier animal making a smaller contribution, would end up with a similar reward to a fighter facing an animal of lower tier than themselves with a larger contribution. What Grandmother received was a healthy reward and was a good start to solving her coin shortage. She made the ‘pick up all' gesture that stored everything in sight into her inventory.
“What did you do there at the end?” Todd asked Alex, after the group finished congratulating him.
“I noticed that some of those wires seemed to have more effect than others,” Alex explained, “so I cast nimble first, hoping the spell would know which ones to target.”
“Why did you not sing it?” Companion asked.
“I experimented with it in the yard, I found it easier to tap out than to sing it,” Alex explained. “I don’t have the lung capacity you do, Companion. It took a really long time to learn to cast it with taps after I already learned how to do it with song. We should add that to the User Manual. I would have given up if I hadn’t seen the rest of you do it.”
“Huh,” Grandmother said. “It sounds like you earned your tier.” She pushed off from the wall where she was watching for rats. “If those wheels are components, I want them,” Grandmother declared.
“Oh, no fair,” Alex whined. They started going through the debris. Todd and Companion maintained the watch.
The cart’s sides were dented and ripped where they came in contact with the stone walls. Rocks very similar to the pile at the mouth of the mine spilled out of it. Ellen and Sarah started inspecting and sorting the stones. A larger portion of them were solid in this set than the ones at the entrance. The undercarriage of the cart wasn’t damaged. Using her staff as a lever Grandmother was able to rotate it back onto its wheels and eventually onto the track. In place on the track it rolled easily. There was no sign of what powered it.
Alex gathered up all the pieces of the machine. He was trying to piece it back together in an effort to figure out its weaknesses. He found the remnants of Todd’s spear in the wreckage.
“Looks like your spear didn’t make it,” Alex said to Todd.
“That’s alright,” Todd responded. “It stopped the top from turning, making it step to swing at us.”
“If it was spinning like a top we wouldn’t have been able to get close to it,” Alex commented.
“What is a ‘top’?” Companion asked.
“It’s a child's toy. You spin it on a point and momentum keeps it standing,” Alex explained.
“You need to show this to me,” Companion declared. Alex found the machine's light eye. It looked undamaged to him even though the plate the light was affixed to was a torn twisted mess at the edges.
“Grandmother, can you dispel the night vision, I want to try something,” Alex asked.
“Alert everyone,” Grandmother called, as she dismissed the spell.
After just a moment of darkness a round light appeared on the ground. Alex turned it on using light. The beam of light bounced off the ceiling and illuminated the area unevenly. Alex was about to turn it off again, when Ellen asked him to bring it over to the rock pile. She caught sight of something in the flicking light. Some of the rocks in the sorted pile glowed softly under the light. Ellen quickly put the rocks that didn’t glow into their own pile.
“Is it the stones or the light?” Sarah asked. Ellen tried illuminating the pile with light blade. Under just the light of the blade she could detect no glow. Sarah thought about the Narrative. She started talking her way through it, like Grandmother did sometimes.
“So we have a machine, running along on its road. It has a big load of rock with it,” Sarah looked down at the machine’s big shovel hands. The claws on the end of the flat section were set about two inches apart. Looking at the walls, ceiling and even floor, Sarah could see the same scratch pattern everywhere. “It dug this tunnel,” Sarah observed. “If we shine the light on the walls do they glow?” They didn’t.
“So it dug this tunnel, but the rock didn’t come from here,” Sarah commented.
“This is a mine,” Grandmother observed, but she didn’t say more. She wanted to see how far Sarah could go with her story.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “If you're a ‘miner’ and you're digging tons of rock, how can you decide what is just rock and what is ore?”
“You have a magic light,” Alex suggested.
“Yes!” Sarah said. “So the glowing rocks are ore of some kind.”
“If you can tell which rocks are ore, why are there other rocks in the bin?” Ellen asked.
“You have really big hands?” Alex said, lifting one of the shovel hands. “And you can’t really sort the small pieces? This hand is really heavy,” Alex observed. “Do you think we could turn it into ingots?”
“I don’t think that would fit into even the improved smelter the crafting upgrade gave us,” Todd commented. “Some of those other pieces might fit.”
“The solid rocks are also useful,” Sarah said. “Could it be like when Grandmother picks up crafting tools when we are looking for scrap?” Grandmother decided it was time to give some input.
“The digger didn’t actually fill that cart. It was created that way. The percentage of rock, ore and crumbles were randomly generated or pulled out of a table listing somewhere. It might just be a fill material in order to limit the amount of ore you get,” Grandmother explained.
“Even if the crumbles are there to reduce the value of the loot, it doesn’t mean they have no value,” Ellen said. She broke one of the crumbling rocks apart and was quickly reducing it to a pile of dust. “Jeweler told me that gemstones can be found inside other rocks. I wonder if this was what he was talking about.” Ellen picked up another rock and started breaking it apart.
“If we are going to break the whole load,” Grandmother observed. “We need to come up with a method.” The glowing ore and solid stones were set aside. Grandmother and Alex deconstructed the digger. Its structure was put together from bronze components. There were new components neither Grandmother nor Alex saw before used for the joints. The machine's heart, which Grandmother thought was shaped to look like a hydraulic pump, was located low in the body and was a solid dark glass. What Grandmother thought of as hydraulic lines and wiring were made out of bright copper. They were flexible during the battle, but were now stiff. The actuators were made out of the same dark glass as the heart. They found a cube of white ceramic, which they thought might represent the digger's brain. It was loose on the floor, so it was hard to say where it had been in the body. Grandmother slipped it into her gathering bag for later study.
Many of the components were broken during the final explosion. There were enough long pieces left to make a crude screen. They dumped the crumbles onto this grill and crushed them with the flat of a one shovel hand.
Everyone rotated through loading the stone on the grill, crushing it with the shovel, scraping out the dust underneath searching for solid stones and standing watch. Companion found the first gemstone. It was a rough shape and coated with dust. Ellen washed it off with water from her flask and held it up in front of the machine eye light. It was a translucent blue. She slipped the stone into her gathering bag. She tried to clean the mud from her hands, using the cloth of the bag.
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“This is clay,” Ellen observed.
“Clay?” Sarah asked, “all of it?”
“I think so,” Ellen responded.
“There’s too much of it to haul back,” Grandmother observed. “If this is clay, the pile at the entrance might be too, and that is a lot closer to the gallery. Let's finish up crushing this load so we have a measure of how many gemstones we might find on each digger. Let's crush some of the pile at the entrance and compare the yield. We can load up a bag or two of the dust and take it to the Seagrass potter to confirm if it is clay or not.” Seagrass was a quick trip away, unlike Home Square.
“We should take a bag from here too,” Ellen commented, “just to confirm it is the same stuff.” Grandmother agreed.
In the end they found fifteen gems, two greens, four blues, eight reds and an orange. When they found the orange one, Grandmother suspected that even if they were real stones, this assortment of gemstones would never naturally be found in the same deposit. The stones barely made a bulge in the bottom of Ellen’s bag.
“It doesn’t seem like they were worth all that work,” Todd observed.
“The vendor in the food preparation area will buy scrap. See if it will buy the stones. The price it offers should give us a better idea of whether it is worth it or not.” Grandmother commented.
“Are we heading back to the gallery?” Todd asked.
“Yes,” Grandmother said. “We need to replace your spear. I also want to process as much of this material as we can, so we can figure out what is worth doing in the future. Put all the ore, rock and machine parts back into the cart for now. We will roll it back to the entrance and carry it from there. I still want to see if I can get the cart apart, but we can do that at the entrance too.”
The smaller amount of materials fit into the damaged cart easily. A rope tied through a hole in the side wall, allowed them to drag it behind them. As they approached the first split in the tunnel, Grandmother was worried they would need to figure out how to switch the rails, but the intersection was set up so that moving in the return direction a cart on either branch would continue on to the tunnel entrance. The reverse was not true. The switch was set so that moving into the mine, a cart would always take the right. She checked each intersection as they retraced their steps and found the switches were randomly set to right or left. Grandmother could see no way to change them. Next time out, she would follow the switches and find out where it led.
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“I priced the gemstones. It is a lot of coins. I think I know why no one ever buys anything in Jeweler’s shop,” Ellen commented. They were back in the rest, in their upgraded crafting room. Grandmother was just finishing breaking the larger pieces of glass from the machine into smaller pieces. Todd was feeding the smaller pieces into the furnace to produce ingots. Companion was feeding the broken pieces of the digger's frame into the smelter to get bronze ingots.
They spent the first few days in the gallery sweeping the surrounding office rooms and using the components they found there to improve the gallery. When they added shelving and work surfaces to the crafting workshop, the room upgrade rewarded them with larger tools. The small portable glass furnace upgraded to a larger shop version. Bigger chunks of glass could be fed into it without breaking them. The heart of the machine and some of its larger power actuators, were still too large to fit.
The shop version of the smelter upgraded to something that Grandmother called an industrial unit. Ellen hadn't seen a tool so large before. Even the largest broken pieces of the digger’s frame fit into it. They were holding on to the unbroken components for now. Grandmother wanted to build a portable crusher-sifter. She gave Alex a rough description and left him in the new storage room they also added, working on it. Alex was excited about the possibility of hinged doors and lids.
“Hold on to them for now,” Grandmother said. “I suspect some of the jewelry pieces are worth the cost. Think about how much the merchants that paid Companion to translate for them would pay for Jeweler’s translation ring. I would rather sell the items we can get in bulk, like that pile of clay.”
“The vendor won’t buy the clay,” Ellen reported. “It must be the real thing and not integrated.”
“I thought it was,” Grandmother admitted. “I tried to pack it into a bag, but I didn’t get any more into the bag than you might expect. We need to verify with a selkie potter that it is clay. After that we can try selling it in the market there.”
“The vendor is offering a lot of money for the ore,” Ellen said. “Of course from the icon I can’t tell what metal it is.” Ellen tried earlier to smelt the ore using the same spells used for iron and copper. The smelter refused to function as long as the chunk of ore was in it. She was forced to fish it out.
“That means that the ore is integrated,” Grandmother commented. After her failure with the clay, she didn't try the ore. They left a lot of it at the entrance. They would have make a couple more trips to get it all. “That is interesting. I suppose it has to be to get that glow effect. It is good to know. That means I can pack it tightly into bags.” In a really odd twist, Grandmother found that the intact components from the machine would pack tightly into bags, but the broken ones they were now changing into ingots wouldn’t. She wasn’t certain of the logic of that one.
Grandmother finished up with the glass, and moved the broken bits into Todd’s input bin which was one of the large shovel hands from the digger. The railcar turned out to be a unique item, which they could not break down into components. The torn and warped sides resisted their efforts to straighten them. Grandmother suspected that like the once flexible tubing on the machine, the cart transformed to a more fixed version at the machine’s destruction.
Grandmother went to find Alex to see how he was doing on building a portable crusher-sifter.
“Can you make me a replacement spear?” Todd asked Ellen after Grandmother’s exit.
“I don’t have the skill in woodworking to replace it,” Ellen admitted.
“I was thinking about a cheaper all iron spear,” Todd said. “Can you craft that?”
“Yes,” Ellen said. “I can make the starter spear in iron, steel and bronze. I’ve never tried copper, but I will probably get mastery of the pattern quickly, since I already know it in the other materials.”
“I want to stick to iron,” Todd said, “so that it is cheap.”
“Well it would be cheap, but it will be heavier than your old spear and weaker,” Ellen explained. The spear Todd just lost was wood handled with a bronze spear point. In the structure wood was lighter and stronger than iron. Structure materials were different. The ‘material’ that items appeared to be was actually just an augmented reality overlay. Integrated items were all made out of a nanobot matrix. They performed based on the tier of the item and the tier of the wielder. The tier of a crafted item was the result of the tier of the crafter, their skill level in that craft, their mastery of the pattern, the tier of the pattern and the tier of the material. Iron was considered a weaker material than wood because wood was a higher tier material. Additionally the pattern for an all iron spear was a lower tier than the multiple craft wood and bronze spear pattern.
“If you make the spear shorter, more like a javelin, that should help with the weight. I can cast reinforce on the finished product to increase its strength. Reinforce lasts about an hour at my tier. I can cast it on the spear as we walk and not have to worry about it in combat,” Todd explained. “I’d like them to be cheap so they are easily replaceable. If you could make a big stack of them, we can get Grandmother to pack them into a bag and pull out a replacement whenever it is needed.”
“We can ask Sarah to enchant them to lighten the weight,” Ellen suggested. “If we are treating the spears as disposable she could do short-lived enchantments. Those are fast to do.”
“Can you make them shorter?” Todd asked. He didn’t think Ellen answered that question yet.
“Yes, there is a certain amount of flex in every pattern,” Ellen replied. She looked around at the pile of ingots scattered around the smelter for one made out of iron. She didn’t see one. “Let me pull some iron ingots out of inventory. I’ll make a couple short spears and you can try them out before I make more.”
Todd agreed to that plan. Ellen picked up a stack of bronze ingots to put into the association’s inventory since she was making the trip out to the inventory access anyway. Todd went over to see how Companion was doing on smelting bronze. The selkie was almost finished.
“I'll do the new ore next,” Companion said, with a wave at the pile of ore. This was a change of attitude for Companion. The selkie hated heat. He was reluctant to learn how to use the equipment. Companion almost seemed to be enjoying himself now. The smelter was more hands off than the glass furnace. The ingots flowed out the bottom instead of requiring the user to fish them out with the blowing tube.
Todd almost commented that Ellen tried to smelt the ore when they first got back and it didn’t work, when he had an idea. He remembered Grandmother telling him once that aluminum was smelted on Earth using electricity. They were discussing how Companion needed to use more magic from the three, four and five trees. All the metal smelting used the five or fire tree, which couldn’t hurt. Lightning was the four tree.
“When you do the ore replace the five in the smelter spells with four,” Todd suggested.
“Alright,” Companion responded. “It doesn’t take too long to learn new spells on these tools,” he observed. Todd agreed, although he suspected that was only because the non-crafters in the group were only learning the most basic of the crafting spells.
Todd went back to his glass furnace. He’d keep an eye on Companion and see if his suggestion worked. Todd didn't think the low tier smelting spells could do much damage to Companion at tier three. Companion was wearing his aluminum breastplate which would add protection. If Todd was wrong and the new spell did something bad, he would heal the selkie.