"Finally!" Weird breathed. All 300 articulating body plates were completed. He had to settle with aluminum bronze coatings instead of the 2025 alloy he had wanted. Clearly the fortress hadnlt quite gotten the electrical processing system going for heavy aluminum production yet, as the only bars in the fortress had been made from raw native aluminum. He had exhausted the whole supply cooking up the bronze, alloying heavily with copper to have enough for the task. Glittering and brass coated, the plates gleamed beautifully in the wheelbarrow.
He wasn't gonna rest on his laurels though. So much more work to do!
He had salt... he needed some more reagents though, and he huffed and puffed (and ached) as he pushed the handcart around the fortress, a small mountain of materials piling up as he grabbed unclaimed items and raw materials.
A barrel of rocknut oil.
A mountain of teeth and bones for the phosphates...
Mopped up blood in a glass pot for making hydrocyanic acid in a sealed crucible...
A boulder of brimstone conveniently excavated from the now ruined pumpstack galleries..
Several empty glass pots
And much more.
Smiling to himself with grim determination, he pushed the cart down the halls, and through the door of his room.
Science always felt good.
In short order, a dozen or more vessels were on the burners, different refinement and extraction processes going in each, as the slow synthesis pathway from rocknut oil to PVC rubber progressed incrementally. Nitric acid reacted with brimstone nuggets, the gas burned in a reaction chamber, and the final product bubbled through distilled water in a glass barrel to synthesize sulfuric acid, itself to be used to turn the collected sea salts into hydrochloric acid for the next step in the plastic synthesis.
He had settled down to smash and calcinate the collected bones and teeth he had collected in the hall from crushed zombie kittens and kobolds when there was a knock on the door.
It was Hugo. The REAL hugo.
Glad for a little company, even if he was big and scaly, he put the porphyry down, and opened the door.