There were five different types of machines in the mine. Along with the digger was a small machine that dug the little tunnels the rats were in. They fought with sound and fire. They were quick and hard to hit. When defeated they cracked open to reveal gemstones. The team named them sniffers.
There was a larger snake that would push its way out of random rat tunnels at unexpected moments. They were armed with sound and electricity. Their job was to enlarge the tunnels just big enough for a digger and lay down rails. Defeating one of them yielded a large amount of scrap that would deposit directly into their inventories.
The large dumpers, that carried waste rocks, were all momentum. They were the easiest to defeat. Their heavy loads of stone were good for stone sculpting, but were the hardest to transport. They rumbled down the rails in total darkness. It was possible to hide against a tunnel wall under a cloaking spell and just let them pass.
The last machine they called a hunter. Its job was vermin control. They traveled the rails killing rats with fire. After all the rats were dead, they would douse the area with water. There was no other source of water anywhere in the mine. Luckily the group's enchanted flasks continued to fill, although they worked faster when a hunter was near.
All the machines yielded components and bulk materials that could be taken back to the gallery and processed into ingots. Each one also contained a single white porcelain cube. Grandmother collected all of them.
They were loading up for the return to Home Square. The storage room they added to the gallery allowed items to remain in the gallery without disappearing. The items weren’t secure. Anyone who entered the gallery could take them. Just like anyone who entered the crafting room could use the tools there. South gallery also possessed a set of secure shelving. For a fee, items left on the shelves were sealed in. They could not be pulled out except by the person who stored them. The shelves also retarded the degradation of items, including organic items like apples and meat.
Grandmother set the cubes out on the table and inspected them. They were all identical with each other. She cast a spell to enhance her vision, searching for symbols on the surface. She was hoping for more examples of code. There was nothing. A close examination of the surface made her rethink her designation of them being constructed from porcelain. The series of pores randomly across the surface reminded her of something more organic like bone. It wasn’t exactly bone either. It seemed too solid for that.
She could put them into her inventory, so technically it wasn’t porcelain, bone or stone for that matter. It was a nanobot matrix. What the augmented overlay on the matrix appeared as was often a hint on what the item could be used for. Grandmother didn't understand what this one was trying to tell her.
“Have you figured them out yet?” Todd asked as he sat down next to her in one of the stuffed chairs in the central section of the gallery. He set a large leather bag of porcupine meat down on the floor next to his chair.
“Nope,” Grandmother responded.
“They are about the size of a block in an alphabet set I had as a child,” Todd commented.
“We don’t have enough for an alphabet set yet, but I will keep that in mind,” Grandmother replied.
“What is an alphabet set?” Companion asked. He was laying in the round rock gavel at the base of the inscription wall. It was his favorite resting spot. Grandmother was so used to him laying there, she hadn’t actually noticed him.
“It's a set of blocks with a letter carved into one face. My set had pictures of items or animals whose name started with that letter on the other faces. They are used to help children learn to read. You should make a set with selkie letters on it,” Todd told Companion.
“All the ones I’ve seen here in the structure are dull. On the Speedwell they were brightly colored,” Grandmother added. “Children like bright colors.”
“There are a lot of symbols in selkie,” Companion murmured.
“Enchanter must have taught you a smaller set first,” Todd commented. “You could use that one.”
“Shouldn’t you be packing?” Grandmother asked.
“All ready to go,” Companion replied. “I don’t travel heavy like Alex.” None of them traveled as heavy as Alex. The furniture shopkeeper was in the storage room deciding what components he wanted to take back for sale. When he made his final choices Grandmother would go and pack them into the special bags he brought along just for that purpose. He promised Grandmother a sixth of all sales for the service.
Alex was selling so much furniture Grandmother was certain he was going to run out of customers in the square soon, just as she did with her own shop years ago. The only thing that might keep him in customers was the selkie. Grandmother packed several selkie beds for Alex to sell to visitors during the last Challenge day. He charged the selkie a packing fee, passing the fee, minus the cost of the bags, on to Grandmother.
Grandmother thought that Alex running out of customers because he saturated the square with furniture would not be that bad of a thing. When it happened to Grandmother she closed the shop and walked away. Her reaction was partly fueled by other events in her life. Alex would continue to run the shop during the dry spell as he waited for the furniture he already sold to wear out. Hopefully he would learn a lesson about pricing. He was much more dedicated to Home Square than Grandmother was to Londontown.
Thinking about it, Grandmother wondered if she should go back to Londontown and reopen the shop. She could hire someone local to run it. No one needed to know she owned it, including her family. Todd and her snuck into Londontown near the end of last season to pick up the bed that was in stock there. The rest of the shop’s inventory was just sitting there. The protection crystal in Londontown was failing, but it would last for another twenty years or longer, if no one did anything to cause it to actively shrink. That was time the square could use to complete a quest that would grow the crystal.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
She would think about it. The group’s shops in Home Square were proving to be a powerful way to spread knowledge. Perhaps she could use her shop in Londontown to inform the residents of their options if the crystal failed and the known methods for increasing a crystal's size. She needed to make sure they knew what caused a crystal to shrink too. Maybe then they would stop doing those things.
“What are you thinking about?” Todd asked. Grandmother realized she had been lost in her thoughts for a while.
“Londontown,” Grandmother admitted.
“Do you want to reconnect with your family there?” Todd asked. He wouldn’t have considered Grandmother doing that before meeting her brother in the villages, but now he wondered.
“Oh, no,” Grandmother responded. “That ship has launched. I was thinking about my shop and hiring someone to run it again.”
“You’d have to compete with Alex for the components,” Todd warned.
“We collected enough components from those mining machines to supply furniture to two squares for a year,” Grandmother commented. “We are short the flat pieces for the table tops, seats and shelves,” she admitted. “It feels like sofas and chairs were more common around Londontown. I might end up with a better inventory just sweeping the area around the square once a month.” That comment sounded to Todd more like a plan than just a random thought. “The hard part will be finding someone to run it. I haven't spent time in Londontown in years. I’ve lost track of who all the players are.”
Sarah arrived carrying a large leather bag packed with stoneware clay dust. The potter in Seagrass confirmed it was clay. The clay from the entrance of the mine was stoneware clay. The clay from inside the mine was a fine white porcelain clay. He bought his clay from selkie pods scavenging the industrial region. When they asked Companion about it he said his former pod did bring back stones, but he didn’t pay attention to which kind. Sarah was taking the bag back to the book shop where they planned to bundle it with pottery crafting spells. Ellen was carrying back a big bag of stone. Ellen crafted the simple leather bags out of skins from the animals they cleared. Sarah enchanted them with quick weight reduction spells that wouldn’t last more than a week.
“Ellen is bundling the skins. She just had the thought that since we used magic to tan them they may be integrated items now. She asked me to send you over to see if you can get them bundled tighter,” Sarah told Grandmother.
“Sure,” Grandmother said. She rose from her feet and stuffed all the cubes into her bag before heading back to the workroom.
“Has Ellen forgiven me yet?” Todd asked Sarah.
“No, not yet,” Sarah responded. “But she will. She admitted to me that by making all those short spears she opened a pattern for javelins.”
“It’s not my fault,” Companion sang into the gravel. Ellen was shocked when she discovered Companion was smelting the new ore into silvery ingots. The ore was aluminum. She was distracted making Todd’s first throwing spear during the time needed for Companion to learn the new lightning based smelting spells. Ellen was offended Todd told Companion how to do it and not her, their primary crafter. He tried to tell her it was only a hunch, but she wasn’t listening to him.
Todd touched the leather bag with the meat in it. Ellen made it for him when she made the others. Grandmother said something about large cheap bags that gave her the idea. When Sarah passed the leather bag onto him, he knew Ellen wasn’t that angry.
Ellen came back carrying a bundle of leathers. The bundle was weirdly small. Little tufts of the skins within stuck out at the corners, indicating the number of hides within. The tufts were larger than the body of the bundle. Ellen was struggling to carry it. When she dropped it on the floor by the sofa, they could hear and feel the thud it made.
“Grandmother said she’d carry them,” Ellen announced.
“Do you need help carrying the others?” Sarah asked.
“That is all of them,” Ellen admitted. “When we realized she could over compress them by pulling the straps, we put all the stacks together.”
“If they are integrated, can you put them into inventory?” Todd asked. Prize skins were an integrated material. They could be put in and out of inventory. Until recently all tanning was done manually. A manually produced piece of leather, whether from the skin cut from an animal or a prize hide pulled from inventory, was not an integrated item and could not be put in inventory. The label ‘integrated’ arose from the ability to store something digitally in inventory. The item was integrated into the system.
Ellen looked at the bundle, then looked at Todd. “I am not speaking to you,” she said. Which was her way of admitting she didn’t think of that and hadn’t tried. Ellen looked at the bundle like she was considering trying it now. “Components won’t go into inventory,” she commented, “and they are integrated enough for Grandmother to compress. I’ll give it a try next time.” She went off to get her bag of stones.
Alex arrived with two bags, before he headed back into the storage room. These bags were quality. Designed specifically to carry shop sized tools through the transportation system and halls. The way they strained at the seams indicated they were fully packed. Todd wondered how much of Grandmother’s year supply he was taking.
Ellen returned with her leather bag of rock. The big leather bags were equipped with a single body strap to hold them through the transport. The design was an enlarged, streamlined version of the bag Kai owned when they recruited him in Chicago.
Alex and Grandmother were both carrying two bags when they emerged. Grandmother’s bags were calm in her hands, while the ones in Alex’s hands churned unhappily. Their tops were carefully secured, keeping them from expelling their contents in their discontent at being away from Grandmother. Todd looked back at the leather bundle. It was laying there perfectly happy. Ellen had carried it in, shouldn’t it be unhappy too? Todd wondered.
These last bags were distributed between Todd, Grandmother and Companion, before they all loaded up.
“Do you think Jeweler will be in Home Square?” Ellen asked. When they made the trip to Seagrass to get a potter’s opinion on the clay, Ellen was surprised to find the Jewelry shop closed. Ellen liked Valin. In his role of selkie master jeweler, she was his apprentice. Todd was worried she might be trusting him too much, after Grandmother’s warning, until Ellen declared that she thought he was a spy or thief, and you couldn’t really trust either of those.
“He told me he’d come with us on the training tour,” Grandmother reassured her. “If he isn’t there when we arrive I am sure he will turn up shortly.” She picked up the bundle of leather like it didn’t weigh any more than a water flask did. “Are we all ready then?” she asked.
Everyone double checked their loads. Making sure that in the rush to carry the loot from their scavenging they hadn’t forgotten their everyday equipment and weapons. When everyone agreed they were ready, Grandmother led the way into the transportation room.