Incase you didn’t notice, it’s actually
cast ice. I intended it to be an ice mining facility, but crappy design meant that the device only casted ice floors, not walls, which don’t yield any ice boulders. Alas, my ice castle dreams have been dashed on the rocks.
Lord Brassroast, I hope you don't mind me using your character for RP; if you do, just shoot me a message and I'll rename it to some other mechanic guy.
Lord Brassroast’s ScribblesThe cat is ready, she have many one-way movement apparatus (down staircase)Water source resupply no worries hmmIn in it goes into the catRising water enter surface must have dual-way movement apparatus (up/down staircase)iceiceiceiceiceNice people clean dirty ice to make clean iceIce Cat Rink !Mister da Vinci will be so proud by himself.
Project Log26th LimestoneIt was time. At last, the swimming pool shall be cleansed with the fires of magma – once we figure out how to turn on the pumpstack, that is.
…
“Did anything happen?” I asked, looking around.
Lord Brassroast peeked over from towerside. “Nomagma.”
“Hoold up hooold up. Let me get Shipcat’s overseer logs for a second.” It took me about ten minutes to run down to the Queen’s library, which, among other things, contained copies of all logs written in the tower so far. Unfortunately, Shipcat’s notes were some of the most detailed of them all, written in a distinct, orderly fashion with hundreds of little addendums tacked onto its sides. I pored over them for the next twenty minutes, but any mention of the lever controls eluded me, and I returned to Z-Eleven a defeated reader.
“Uhh… try and pull the next one?”
Brassroast tugged on the next lever, this time granite in design. He shook his head sadly.
“… Nope.” I sighed. “Alright, turn them all off.”
“AskaskasktheCat?”
“Shipcat? She’s gonna give me the evil eye if I ask her. You’re going to have to link it up manually.” I piled him up with a bunch of mechanisms, and Brassroast tottered off towards the main power supply.
This
controls this.
The freshly-installed lever creaked under my pull, and the massive pump stack slowly groaned to life like some sort of Frankensteinian abomination. Magma sputtered up the hundred-or-so tubes tunnelling all the way to the base of the magma sea, before rushing forth in a cascade as it reached the surface.
Shit! A worker somehow caught on fire as the trench was being refilled! We don’t know who it is, because there’s smoke goddamn everywhere. The acrid smell of melted flesh hangs in the air, as lava floods through the tube, uncaring and unstoppable.
At last it reaches the end of its journey, exploding through the fortifications like some unchained creature. Huge clouds of steam hissed forth from the swimming pool as it begins to resemble a very large kettle. And where the blazing sticky lava comes into contact with the ice-cold water, the black stone razor of Armok, obsidian, is born.
The dwarves held their breath, praying that the barrier would hold. Even the slightest spillage of magma would wreak havoc on the tower base, which, they reminded themselves on a constant basis, was made entirely of ice.
Ice + Magma = !!FUN!!
Fortunately, it holds. Constructivory was now the only place in the world that could be said to have a magma swimming pool, at least in the brief period before the second casting was scheduled to begin. “Anyone up for a swim?” joked Michael Phelps, and the crowd laughed with good nature. I turned my focus away from the site. Everything was going so swimmingly, wasn’t it…
Someone screamed.
Damn. Damn. Damn. I jinxed it.
Over at the clay collection tracks, the body of Zan Gemorb lay splayed on the ground, brutally crushed beneath a tunnel tube minecart. The workers bore expressions of shock on their face. “S-s-she j-just got distracted overseer, and slipped backwards, then the minecart... It all happened so fast…” one of them stammered. Again, the burden of expectations for a mistake that was not mine weighed heavily upon my shoulders.
“Stopstoptrackstops,” muttered Brassroast from behind me.
“Will that help?” My tone was curious at best, but Brassroast gave me a half-hearted shrug. “m’ybe.” I nodded my approval, and he ran off to scour for the necessary materials. The onlookers seemed mostly satisfied with my actions, but I don’t doubt there are some amongst them who’d like to see the whole cart system closed down altogether. Constructivory had a... difficult past with minecarts.
The second casting took place at evening. Brassroast’s piping held up well, and water flooded across the magma layer, again throwing up another billow of steam. This time there were fewer viewers hanging around.
It was a bio-environmental quirk, Brassroast had explained to me. Overseer Japa had built the swimming pool exactly on the point of a freeze fault. Thus, the flowing water would naturally cast its own walls upon reaching the pool limits, preventing spillage into the main area. This all seemed rather far-fetched to me when I first heard about it, but watching it work with my own eyes was eye-opening. I cannot help but wonder how Japa stumbled across such a phenomenon.
By nightfall, the casting was complete. The ice glittered in the moonlight; and like most things in this wasteland, it possessed a stark beauty of its own.
“Now can we dig?”
“Jaja. Diggity-diggity-hole.”
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Topic: // Fall of the Succession Tower: Constructivory \\ (Read 278745 times)