48 A.L.: ELLEN AND TODD
It was late by the time they returned to the gallery. Todd cooked up the badger in a traditional dish they all enjoyed. He also prepared one of the porcupines. The humans all thought the porcupine possessed an odd flavor. Companion loved it.
After the meal Companion soaked in the water pool in the sanitary facilities for an hour. Todd was wondering if they were going to spend the night in the water, when they emerged to settle onto a section of the sand garden. Grandmother was on her sofa with her eyes locked on the inscription. She didn’t even twitch when the player's large body settled into the stones. Companion was soon deeply asleep.
Sarah picked up the breastplate from where Companion dropped it beside the bathing pool. She cleared the existing enchantment on it and started working on a new longer lasting one.
Ellen spread out all the collected crafting equipment. She paired up the large items with the matching smaller tools. She was hoping to use this display to convey to Companion that they were interested in finding the smaller tools for stone sculpting. She collected Companion’s ax from where it was laying on the floor next to the sand garden. She carried it back to her blacksmithing collection.
Her tool display was set up on one of the ends of the gallery next to the doors. She hoped she was far enough from Grandmother to not disturb her. When Ellen returned with the ax she found Todd relaxing on the sofa in the furniture cluster. His spear was resting against the armrest in easy reach.
Ellen laid the ax head on top of the anvil and allowed the handle to angle down and rest on the floor. The ax was extremely heavy. The long two handed handle was ornamented with an inlay of stones just below the doubled sided blade. At first Ellen thought the grip was wrapped in leather, on closer inspection Ellen could see it was not. She wasn’t certain what the material was. Luckily the handle showed no damage so she wouldn’t need to repair it.
The blade was made of bronze, this was a material Ellen knew how to fix. There was a large notch in one of the blades. There was a trace of aluminum dust in the notch. Ellen thought the damage was probably caused by cutting through a bear breastplate. It was difficult to predict what material would win in a contest inside the structure. A lot of the strength of a weapon came from the tier level of the wielder and the spells that were cast on it.
Repairing something like this on the Speedwell would mean adding in material using some kind of welding method. Followed by grinding or filing off of the extra material before polishing the surface to match. It would take hours. Ellen was going to use magic.
“I didn’t know you knew any blacksmithing,” Todd observed.
“What do you mean?” Ellen asked. “You have seen me repair your brigandine.” Ellen tapped a spell onto the side of the anvil and tapped the ax head with the hammer in her hand. The notch visibly grew smaller. She studied the result.
Todd rubbed the cloth of his armor. His hand ran over the spot on his shoulder where she made the last repair. “True,” Todd responded. “I guess since I’ve seen it beyond the structure I don’t think of it as metal anymore.”
“Control thinks it is. I can do simple repairs like this,” Ellen said. “Higher tier products always involve multiple crafts. It is possible to get multiple crafters to work together, but there are benefits for doing it yourself.”
“What kind of benefits?” Todd asked.
“For the simple stuff it is easier to do it all by yourself than trying to coordinate,” Ellen explained. She tapped another spell into the anvil. She flexed her grip, tightening her fingers in the order of a spell. She lightly hit the ax again. Magical repair wasn’t about strength or technique. It was about knowing which spell to cast when. Really it was almost identical to being a wizard. A wizard didn’t have to aim their throws or draw from their mana, they just needed to know what spell to cast when.
The ax head under her fingers wasn’t really bronze, it only looked like it inside the structure. Removed from the structure, weapons became a flat gray that looked like heavy plastic. Tests run on them in the Speedwell showed they weren’t plastic, but a complex mix of elements. Grandmother thought they might be pure nanobots packed tight together. Or a mix of nanobots and filler for strength. Flexible items, like clothing turned white. They became stiffer but still possessed some give to them. It was the difference in these two responses that gave rise to the filler theory.
“Also as you learn crafting spells different patterns become available. You still need to master the patterns, but there are a lot you won’t even see unless you have the base skill,” Ellen explained.
“Is that why you and Grandmother were so excited over that stone polisher?” Todd asked.
“Partly,” Ellen responded. She gestured to the stone inlay on the top of the ax handle. “See that inlay work? It is possible that some of our blacksmiths might see this pattern, since that is a minor part of it. This piece might be something meant to teach crafters about stone sculpting. Even if they have the pattern, our blacksmiths can’t make this blade because we don’t have those stones.” She tapped the blade again. The notch was nearly gone now. With effort she flipped the heavy blade over so she could see the other side.
“If you see the finished item that can allow you to see the pattern sometimes. If the pattern is fairly close to something you do know,” Ellen continued as she studied the other side of the blade.
“Close as in similar?” Todd asked.
“No,” Ellen responded. “All the patterns are tied together in a kind of giant map. By close I mean close together on that map. Repairing this ax gives me a better chance of seeing the pattern, even if it is farther away from things I already know. This is why crafters don’t consider cooking a craft, because there isn’t a recipe map that goes with it.”
“Cooking is a skill,” Todd declared. He was proud of his abilities preparing food.
“Yes, it is,” Ellen agreed. She tapped out another spell on the anvil and hit the ax with the hammer. “Most of the starter crafting tools can be purchased from the vendor,” Ellen said out loud. “The higher tier tools have to be purchased. The polisher is so surprising because our vendor doesn’t offer it. I wonder if it is like the patterns, we won’t be offered it for purchase until we at least see it elsewhere, or we have the spells to use it. That opens up all kinds of possibilities for other fields of crafting.”
“Have you asked Grandmother if that is how it worked with the other tools?” Todd asked.
“Not yet, but I will. She told me once that she wasn’t in the first groups that entered the structure. It could be that they already unlocked those items for purchase before she arrived,” Ellen commented. The notch was gone, but the finish wasn’t quite a perfect match yet. Ellen set down the heavy blacksmith hammer and pulled the lighter hammer she carried in her repair kit. Casting another spell on the anvil and a different one on the new hammer, she started matching the finish.
“Crafting sounds a lot more complex than I realized,” Todd observed.
“Oh it is,” Ellen agreed. “I haven’t even explained how you master the patterns. It is similar to learning a spell, there are a lot of failures along the way.” Ellen flipped the blade again, checking the other side. The repair was nearly finished. She exchanged her light hammer for a file. This time she tapped out the needed spell on the blade itself while running the file across the edge. Once that side was sharp, Ellen took a moment to sharpen the other blade to match.
“Can you carry this back for me?” Ellen asked Todd. Todd lifted the weapon. He carried the ax easier than Ellen did, but it was clear he also found it heavy. Todd left the ax by the sleeping player. He returned to Ellen’s sofa. Ellen was still fiddling with her tools.
“Companion will be pleased,” Todd said as he settled in.
“I hope so,” Ellen replied. “I would like to repair Companions silks. Do we have anything they could change into?” Todd thought about it.
“I don’t think so,” Todd responded. “I don’t think even integrated pants would adjust enough to fit his anatomy. I don’t know if anyone has silks.”
“I will check with Grandmother, but I don’t think she carries any,” Ellen said. She sat down next to Todd on the sofa. She looked over the assortment of crafting tools that were spread out. “With a sewing machine I could make the simplest set,” Ellen observed.
“You could sew something by hand, like how Grandmother makes her leathers,” Todd suggested.
“I could,” Ellen responded, “but the finished product would not be integrated and so it couldn’t be repaired.”
“I don’t think Grandmother will let us leave until we have swept this entire area,” Todd commented. “Maybe we will find a sewing machine.”
“That is a possibility,” Ellen replied. “I could make the cloth now and wait to see if we find one. It would give me the opportunity to teach Sarah how to dye cloth… which reminds me,” Ellen said, turning to look at the warrior. “Where did you put that red gathering bag?”
GRANDMOTHER
Grandmother finished decoding the inscription. The dense Egyptian script transformed into a tree. A single trunk in the center spread out into branches above and roots below. Each branch and root was a straight line branching into three. She tilted her head and looked at it again. Maybe it wasn’t a tree, she thought. People didn’t usually draw the roots on a tree. She didn’t get any other inspiration.
She pulled up her map. She checked it to see if anything looked newly updated or if an area she never visited was revealed. The dark stretches beyond where she traveled remained dark. Usually she very rarely used the map, since it couldn’t be trusted. But she was using it recently to follow the inscriptions. She was fairly certain nothing in the current area was different from the last time she looked. She couldn’t say the same about the human areas far to the north. Nothing stood out to her. If Control wanted her to go there it seemed like the change would stand out.
Grandmother was tired. She rubbed her eyes, closing her interface. She found herself in the dark. Companion was laid out in the sand garden fast asleep. They looked so comfortable. Grandmother wondered if Control placed it there just for them.
Grandmother rose to her feet and stretched. Unlike the halls which were completely dark at night, small lights danced around the inscription wall giving enough illumination to move around. Alex and Sarah were sleeping on sofas in different furniture clusters to Grandmother’s right, while Ellen and Todd were on sofas to the left. The bright red of Todd’s clothing made Grandmother smile. It would appear Ellen caught up to him. She was so annoyed at him when she discovered the red gathering bag.
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Grandmother looked down at her own clothing, the darkness leached the last trace of purple from the cloth leaving it black. I can live with that, she thought to herself. She wondered if she raised her tier again if her magic color would be black. It seemed likely. She decided that might be motivation enough to try to reach tier seven.
At the same time she knew it was very unlikely there was a tier seven. All the symbols in the structure were numbers. There were different fonts, but it all boiled down to zero through six. That combination of seven choices appeared over and over. A newborn was tier zero. When a person earned their magic color they were tier one. Grandmother was tier six, the top of the tree.
She headed to the sanitary facilities, refusing to look behind her at the couch. She moved quietly so she wouldn’t wake anyone. She felt refreshed after cleaning up, but she was still tired. She made her way back to her couch to go to bed. She was looking forward to a night on a soft surface. She admitted that sleeping in integrated clothing was a lot more comfortable than sleeping in true leathers. The structure was not the type of place you put pajamas on. Although with a protection crystal near it was mostly safe to do so. Even the sanitary facilities in the wild didn’t guarantee your safety. Grandmother once came out of one of the back cubicles to find a boar drinking out of the bathing pond. That event was why she insisted on keeping a watch when they used them.
As she headed back to her sofa she kept her eyes high so she could ignore whatever tapestry image appeared on it. She didn’t want to start puzzling out the meaning of something else when she still didn’t know what the tree meant.
She froze. In the wall behind the sofa was a door. It was not there before. Since she didn’t look behind her before going to the sanitary facilities she didn’t know exactly when it appeared. She suspected it appeared when she finished decrypting the inscription because etched into the opaque glass was a perfect copy of the tree.
She reached down into her pack and retrieved a wedge. She picked up her walking staff and walked over to the door. She ran her hand across the etching. The glass was perfectly smooth beneath her hand. The etching didn’t actually exist. It was a ghost added into her vision by the nanobots in her corneas. She checked the brass push plate and found that it was the same. The door was actually a solid sheet of glass. Without the tree and push plate visual cues she would never have suspected it wasn't a solid wall. She wondered if she tried to push it open before decrypting the inscription if it would have opened. The idea made her wonder if she should start randomly pushing on door sized panes of glass just in case.
She pushed the door open, on alert for any danger within. She thought this would be considered part of the secure gallery, but she wasn’t certain. Glass doors could indicate a border around safe zones. The room beyond was empty. Not taking any chances, Grandmother pushed the wedge into place under the door to hold it open.
Beyond the door was a small room with stone walls and floors. There were no tiles on the floor, instead it was a single slab of stone. The two side walls both bore the outline of a doorway carved into them, but instead of a door the openings were filled with more stone.
The far wall held the elaborate carving of a prize altar or vendor. Its details were lost in the darkness. Grandmother cast night vision on herself. She didn’t want to wake the rest of her party members. With the door jammed open any light in here would spill out into the main room. With night vision the carving on the far wall came into focus. The carving was different from the other examples, but it was definitely a relative.
A geometric pattern was carved around a large flat section of stone that resembled a view screen. Both a prize altar and a vendor would have a small table protruding from the wall where you set items you wanted to add to your inventory or sell to the vendor. Items purchased or taken out of inventory would appear there. Really large purchased items, like some of the higher end crafting tools would seem to emerge directly from the stone beneath the table top. No one ever figured out how to get those big items into inventory or sell them back to the vendor.
This carving didn’t have a table, instead the screen was larger reaching down below the level of the usual table. The geometric pattern was different as well. The pattern on all altars matched each other. They didn’t match the pattern on the vendors, which also matched each other. Grandmother never found any other inscriptions in the font. Even the computers on the Speedwell were unable to puzzle out any meaning from them, especially with so few examples. She would try to record this with her camera tomorrow. Another example might help in the decryption. Grandmother really hoped her camera was still working.
Grandmother reached out and touched the wall. In the center of the stone screen the image of a dark, dark violet crystal appeared. The edges of it were clear and sharp. Even though the color was dark, the crystal seemed to glow from within. Around the crystal was a set of fuzzy lines. It only took Grandmother a moment or two to recognize the same outlines that were on her map. Only this map lacked detail. Not only were the lines fuzzy, many of them were missing. She was left with just the impression of the small rooms around them.
Since it looked like the map she decided to try controlling it with the same finger movements that worked on her personal map. As soon as she lifted her hand from the stone, the crystal and map vanished. She found that if she kept contact with the stone the finger controls worked. She scrolled to the south. The map ended quickly. In all their wandering they didn’t make it any farther south. The east was also dark. To the west, Grandmother found the trail of their journey to the water green. Their turn around at the water green was a distinctive pattern Grandmother recognized even through the blur.
She gave the return to her location signal. The map recentered on the dark crystal. This time she looked north. Farther than she remembered traveling, Grandmother started finding the unclaimed territory they traveled through at the beginning of their journey. North, east and higher in the structure she found the green that was attached to their home square. There it was, their home square and centered in the area was another dark, dark violet crystal. A quick flick and she expanded the area shown on the map by zooming out. A ghost image of another dark violet crystal lay to the east. Grandmother scrolled up through the floors, the crystal solidified and the outlines of a secure gallery came into view.
When Grandmother saw that first dark violet crystal she thought it was marking her location. After three confirmations she was certain it was marking the color of the crystal’s owner. There was no sign of the small crystals found in the rest areas. Grandmother didn’t claim any of them in ages, letting her companions rotate through touching them so they could get the discovery bonus. She wished now she would have at least taken a turn in the rotation so she could see if they would appear here if she did touch them. She claimed rest crystals before this group formed, but that was pretty long ago now and there could be a time out. Rests themselves tended to move, appear and disappear. It was possible all the rests she claimed in the past were gone now.
Curious, she moved the map to inspect the northern reaches. A scattering of crystals appeared. They were mostly colored red and blue with one green standing out. Most of the crystals bore the solid default coloring of a tier three, except for the green, which was the darker shade of a tier four. Not all the human settlements were represented. Chicago wasn’t in a square, so there was no large crystal there. Instead the settlement was in wild space oriented around a scattering of claimed tier zero rests and one wild gallery. Chicago wasn’t the only settlement missing. Grandmother knew of at least three additional squares. Interestingly a broken clear crystal showed on the site of Melbourne, the square wiped out by that unknown force.
Grandmother considered the squares that showed and the ones that didn’t. She couldn’t see what made the missing ones unique. She heard rumors of more occupied squares far to the northwest, but she never went to them. That area of the map was dark. She traveled to every square where a crystal was shown. She visited at least three more that were not shown, but she was certain they existed. The maps were revealed in the regions that held the missing squares. If she zoomed in and squinted she could make out the square structure in the fuzzy drawing. So it wasn’t that the square was missing, it was just the crystal.
That broken crystal at Melbourne confused her. She visited Melbourne when it was an occupied square and saw the original crystal. She returned after the wipe. Friends of hers once lived there. When she heard the rumors she went herself to verify that the square was empty and the crystal was gone. It wasn’t broken, it was gone.
She scrolled back east and south, looking at each of the crystals and trying to remember something about the squares they were in. She reached the crystal representing Londontown. It was a faded blue, the owner must only be tier two. She wondered what happened to the ownership of a crystal when the owner died. Did the crystal know the owner was dead? Did the crystal ownership default to the next person who touched it? She only ever touched the crystal in Londontown once. The color of her magic was so faint she could barely detect it.
Grandmother realized what all the crystals that were visible had in common. She touched them all, even the vanished crystal in Melbourne. Although she visited all the squares on the map, for various reasons she didn’t touch the crystals in the missing ones.
Grandmother lost herself for a moment in the memory of those early days. Her free hand reached out to touch the crystal representing Londontown. A pile of shadow coins appeared. They were drawn like they were laying on a floor, except the orientation was rotated so that they lay on the wall. This was how the rent on an apartment in a square was shown.
The wall was requesting an oxidized bronze and twenty silver. That was the equivalent of 2016 dark iron coins. It was a lot of money. It was only 108 dark iron coins for 36 days of rent on an apartment. She could stay in a square for 648 days for this amount and she didn’t even know what she was buying.
She could afford it. The prize money she got for claiming the gallery was paid in bright copper. A single bright copper was worth 46,656 dark iron, over twenty times this fee, and Grandmother received a pile of them. That comparison was more about the enormous size of the finders fee for the gallery than it was about the affordability of this charge. 95% of the humans in the structure did not possess enough coins to pay this fee.
Grandmother touched the crystal again, dismissing the fee. Curious, she touched a few more of the crystals. The amount of coins that appeared varied. Londontown was one of the more expensive, but there were also towns far to the north she visited more recently that were just as high priced.
When she touched the crystal for the secure gallery near their home square, no coins appeared. Instead, phantom light filled the small room, blinding Grandmother. She was forced to dismiss her dark vision spell. Plunged back into darkness she turned to look for the source. The light was coming from the stone door on the left of the entrance or the right of the wall controls. The solid stone ‘door’ was transformed into a sheet of shimmering light.
She tentatively touched the light, her hand plunged through it with no resistance. There was an empty space beyond. She jerked her hand back. The map display turned off as soon as her hand lost contact with it. The light sheet over the door was composed of magic, which meant it was projected onto her eyes from her corneas. The result was it did not illuminate the room, yet it still blinded her. Night vision was proof that the designers could have made magic light appear to illuminate its surroundings. It was a design choice that the light didn’t.
In the darkness she couldn’t even see the map wall. She felt her way back over to it. As soon as her hand brushed against it the map reappeared. It was still centered on the crystal she last touched. She touched it again and the light sheet went dark.
She recast night vision and inspected the stone door more closely. It was absolutely solid now. The stone must slide or rotate out of the way under the cover of the light show. Grandmother contemplated what would be beyond that light. She considered the map of crystals, the door motif on the walls and the tree drawing on the door.
She picked up her walking staff and stepped out of the room. She removed the wedge from the door on her way through. The door closed as she settled onto her sofa. The technology in the structure was a lot like the technology on the Speedwell. The Speedwell was built to travel between stars for centuries without resupply. Parts of it used the absolute cutting edge of human technology that existed at the time of its construction. It was required in order to carry its passengers to a new world. Most of it was much lower tech.
The ship was designed to last as long as possible with a minimum of maintenance and a near zero need for replacement parts. The ship did carry some spares. It was also equipped with a small manufacturing ability. Almost all raw materials came from recycling the worn out parts. Recycling and manufacturing consumed energy, so even that option was minimized. The lowest complexity, most durable or repairable option was used whenever possible.
The structure appeared to be designed under similar constraints. The high technology nanobots were used mostly to create illusions that covered up the low technology equipment. They could make a trap door look like something magical. The sheet of light in the small room was probably just covering up a sliding door, but what was in the room beyond was hard to predict. Although most of the functionality of the structure was technology she could understand, it wasn’t always.
Grandmother thought the room was a means of fast travel. She didn’t know if that meant something like an elevator or a machine that converted matter to energy and back again. The second method wasn’t possible in human science, but that didn’t stop the structure before. If a wizard healed someone with the same color magic it resulted in a powerful addiction that was just short of mind control. Grandmother suspected that overpowered response might be the result of a mismatch in human physiology from the original players. A similar mismatch could make even an elevator deadly, let alone some high technology option she could not even imagine. Grandmother fell asleep still considering if the risk was worth the benefit.