I'm not sure if there will be an epilogue for this one, due to the way the ending occurs. Although, the humans should show up again after the tank battle.
And Armok, one possible solution to that paradox would be me being an entity resting outside of the universe, looking in. Then again, the questions involving dimensionality that would arise would make things a lot more complicated than that :p
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Blitukus found this thought hovering over him. He took up his pickaxe and walked down the tunnel. He passed his statue, passed over the bridge by the aqueduct, and walked into the already partially excavated hematite vein. He dug into the vein, finding that his skill in exploiting the stone not only yielded a much higher digging speed, but also, he found that by exploiting defects in the rock that were not present in the hematite lumps, the occasions where he would ruin a lump of hematite were becoming more and more rare. He dug until he had 8 hematite resting upon the ground, then walked to the adjacent copper vein and dug into that until the vein was exhausted. 8 lumps rested on the floor, and he needed two more. He looked around. The rest of the copper rock nearby was the only thing keeping magma from spilling into his tunnels and flooding his fortress. Then, searching his memory, he remembered the malachite and hematite near his coal mine. He walked back down the tunnel, to the coal mine, and dug out two more malachite. Now, cassiterite was needed. As he walked back toward the main tunnel, he crossed the bridge over the magma channel. He looked down the bottom end of the magma tunnel, through the open floodgate, and straight out into hells moat. A dark train of thought condensed like rain clouds. He forced himself to continue. He reached an open cassiterite vein, and dug into it. He found his heart was cautioning him, and it made him feel slightly sick. This war... was he doing something evil?
He disregarded the warning. They were the ones who had committed atrocities, slaughtered innocents. He was avenging those innocents. He finished digging out sufficient cassiterite, and begun bringing it and the malachite back to the smelter, letting the metals pool. Every time he hauled back three of each, he adjusted the metals, dumped out the slag, and poured 6 stacks of bars. He stopped to eat, but found that as he ate, it seemed less a friendly gift from nature, and more a simple rationing of food, a commodity. He convinced his mood to change, and once again enjoyed his meal.
Autumn has come.
Once again, the temperature was reaching a rather nasty cold outside as the suns rays glanced the surface at a shallower angle. He was beginning to feel drowsy. He wished to continue on anyway, but forced himself to find a stopping point in his work and go to bed. If his exhaustion led to an error, it could ruin an entire batch of bar stacks. He kept his dark thoughts out of the way by continuing his reading of Glass Optics. He focused on it, analyzing every detail, until he fell asleep out of simple drowsiness. That day, he had what seemed like a nightmare. He was standing in the ruins of the once glorious utopias metropolis. He found the ruins were sparsely maintained, and populated by people. The people were in a horrid state, deformed, limbs missing, extra limbs growing where there was never any natural reason for that to be. The sky was blood red, and the land was ash and rubble, no sign of vegetation except for dead trees, mostly rotted away, having lost their leaved decades before. The citys streets harbored spiked vehicles that mowed down the people, cruel and sick perversions of technology. The people were suffering, but were oblivious to their own suffering. Their eyes had foggy pupils as if they were all blind, and they milled about slowly in their horrid state, put into a false sense of happiness by blind stupor, oblivious to the true horror of the world around them. The air stank, and it was hard to breathe. He saw visions. The world in flames, a war which engulfed the world, the ocean plowing into coastal cities, washing the inhabitants away, the people... blissfully indulging in their blind stupor as they strolled the depths of hell. Above, demons laughed, their enormous form watching down, watching everyone, every move, managing every aspect of everyones life, as if it were one big game, where the people, with lives and family, were simple pawns to be expended for the sake of their demonic pleasures.
When he awoke, the book was still resting on him. He stood up, stretched, and walked to the river to get a drink. He felt a sense of gloom within. It wasn't an impending gloom, it was a gloom ever distant yet ever powerful. Technology becomes nothing but a curse in corrupt, evil hands. What he was doing may be to an extent evil, but by doing this... he very well may be preventing evils far in excess of anything he could ever do. The sense of gloom faded, seemingly far into the distance in a direction unknown. He collected his senses and got back to work. The river gushed as the seasonal cycling of the glacier forced water down it.
I once thought technology was capable of immense evils and miraculous benevolence... I had underestimated it. It might be the key to turning the mortal plane into the next heaven... or the next hell... some day, far in advance of this. When this day will land cannot be determined, but I sense it will fall far after I have withered and perished. May Armok defend the future in my absence...
He sighed through his nose, and continued his work. He had a chance to effect the future, now. He thought about the workings of cause and effect, how one action triggers another. Another feeling filled his soul, he felt as if this were a thought train worth pursuing. Cause and effect... one cause can have multiple effects, which in turn would have multiple effects. A cascade, each cycle increasing the magnitude but spreading the original event thinner. Water splashed about as the cave river flooded into the upper tunnels. One cause could result in many effects. As he poured the second set of 6 stacks, the shop began to become rather cluttered, bronze bars littering the tables. He began moving them to the storage. He thought about the cave river. One snow flake, landing somewhere on the glacier... with its brethren, sets a snowball overweight. The overweight snowball becomes dislodged, rolling down a hill, gaining mass, and smashes into the glacier on the bottom, cracking the ice. Over the next several hours, the crack would become a fissure, and a section of the glacier would sink, sending waves of water throughout the bottom of the glacier. These waves would send shockwaves throughout the ice, sinking larger and larger portions in a cascade of ice shattering throughout the weakened portions of the glacier. These waves would pile into the tunnels in the mountain, causing floods throughout the entire region. These floods could change the temperature of the mountain, and through that, change the air temperature, shifting weather patterns for the entire biome. The floods also would pass through his tunnels, the water soaking into the tunnel floor, freeing the small particles of mud that stuck to his feet. All because of one snowflake... Then, the masses of ice would freeze together again, the mud would dry, and months later, it would all be forgotten. The question was... what was the odds of this happening? Such cascading effects could have numerous different results from essentially the same cause. It all depended on what was likely to happen. Nature no longer seemed quite the ordered system. In fact, life itself seemed rather a gambling game. Blitukus laughed at the sheer notion of how deceptively chaotic the universe was. He had no means of proving this idea, but he sensed it was evident, as if the universe had informed him in person. He felt almost a sort of kinship with the universe that in many ways was reminding him of himself. The idea was a strange concept that felt as if it had profound implications... but he couldn't find a use for this knowledge. Maybe it would have a use in the future? The future... it seemed a miraculous place, full of limitless possibilities to be determined as the universe cast its dice. He finished clearing out the bronze, and went back to smelting. He found that as miraculous as the future could be, his past was more important to him. Unlike the future... the past was set in stone. He felt the excitement of his insights dimming down, but refused to let himself fall into the pit of sadness.
He found that walking up and down the tunnels was making the process take far longer than it needed to. It was one disadvantage of working alone, but Dracha had her own problems to tend to. He stopped to eat again, then continued his work. Blitukus finished smelting the last of the bronze, and moved it to the stockpile, one stack at a time, stopping for a drink as he did so. Another thought occurred to him. Maybe Dracha could interpret his dreams, seeing as she had 3000 years worth of wisdom? Maybe she would find more to make of the dreams than he could. Now was the hard part... steel making. Yet, the fruits of this labor were much richer than making bronze. After finishing hauling, he found himself exhausted once more. He had spent all night making the bronze, and it was time to sleep again. He went back to bed, and lay in it, thinking of the implications of his latest insights until eventually he drifted off to sleep. That day he drempt of something much different. He was in his armored vehicle, cannon ready. He fired the cannon, leveling buildings, and mowed down troops with the automatic crossbow, yet, he felt no sense of his vengeance coming to be, no sense of vengeance or sadness or anger at all. He felt as cold and mechanical, just like the machine he was using. When he awoke, he felt little of the dream. Maybe this war was evil... but was it corrupting him also? It was irrelevant. It had to be done. Blitukus grunted, and rose from bed. Immediately he took up his pickaxe and walked down the tunnels, digging out sufficient coal at his coal mine, then bringing it back to the smelter, processing it into coke bars. He stopped for a drink, and continued, realizing... his chaotic ways were causing inefficiencies. He had not designated any sort of stockpile for the products of the smelter, and instead piled them haphazardly on the smelters tables, causing clutter. Then again, the very act of moving needed materials to a far away stockpile was highly inefficient.
He found he had a lot of time to think while he hauled and processed. He stopped to eat, and pondered. He felt the universe had given him a quest to fulfill outside of his own or whatever Armok might expect of him. Yet, so far, all the universe has done is give him trains of thought that are extraordinary but generally without any value at the moment, then let him think about it, process the trains of thought. Such odd insights are always great to think about, but what did the universe really want? He would fulfill this quest after he finished his own. He had people to avenge. He also had his mother to speak to, eventually... somehow. He remembered, he had tried to venture to heaven and failed, but now planned to speak to the heavens in a voice spoken in the medium of pure energy... energy which he didn't have, and knew nothing of how to harness... energy which the dwarves fried his comrades with. He growled under his breath, but then realized, by defeating the dwarves, he would gain access to this energy, and through that, gain access to the knowledge with which to build his communication machine. His feelings immediately shifted, and he grinned. He would tear this technology from the cold, dead hands of his foes, and use it to speak with his mother. One goal being accomplished was merely a step in furthering the other. First, he couldn't tear the technology from his enemys cold dead hands without their hands being cold and dead first. He needed his armored vehicle, his weapons. He finished processing the coal, and found the workshop was already becoming cluttered. He brought back one lump of hematite and melted it down into metal to make it an even 7 stacks of bars worth of iron available. He then dumped 5 stacks of iron bars into the pool of molten metal, and left to dig out limestone while it melted, passing through a cave spiders web on the way, another while he worked. After he dug out 7 limestone chunks, he brought them back, and using the coke as a carbon source, infused carbon into the iron, turning it into pig iron. He stopped for a drink as the metal simmered. When it had been done, he added the 7th stack of bars into the metal, and began pouring pig iron bars as the metal convectively churned. He poured 4 stacks of pig iron bars that would be reintroduced later, leaving the other 3 stacks worth of metal to simmer in the smelter. Now he was going to turn it into steel. He dug out 7 more chunks of limestone, and brought it back to the smelter, then leaving again to retrieve hematite. He loaded in the hematite and flux and used the smelting reaction to fine tune the amount of carbon in the metal to a proper amount. When smelted together with the hematite, erroneous slag dumped into the magma, the 3 stacks of bars worth of pig iron yielded 6 stacks of steel bars when poured.
Winter is upon you.
The temperature outside became a bitter, deathly cold, the ice becoming as solid as true stone during the winter night. The inside of the caves remained comfortably warm. Still, the dwarves were guaranteed to have made a lot of progress in recovering from their losses, and were bound to strike again, if that were their goal. One question remained unanswered.... why did they build the super-weapon... why did they want his mother dead? Why did they attack Anthath Sizet? He poured the steel, and gazed into the metal as it cool... shortly afterwards continuing with his work. It was odd that a part gnomish kobold would master steel yet not these energies, and a dwarven civilization would master pure energy, but not steel. Maybe they were just being cheap. Blitukus knew nothing of what he was up against, only it was extremely powerful and involved a lot of raw energy. Blitukus finished the next 6 stacks of steel bars, and called that a night. The day after, he would finish his steel production and begin construction of his armored vehicle. He set the bars aside to cool, and shut down the smelter, leaving to go to bed again. While in bed, he compared the materials listing he had with some of the descriptions and equations mentioned in Glass Optics, thinking of what he could build in the future, and if it would be useful. He thought about the concept behind the telescope, and realized that a much clearer picture could be attained not through the use of lenses, but through the use of mirrors. He thought about the benefits and costs of such a device, but realized that to be truly effective it would have to be rather large. He concluded his train of thoughts,set the book down, put his goggles aside, and let himself drift to sleep. Within his dream that day, he had access to his armored vehicle, a limitless supply of metal, and nothing around but flat, grey, seemingly gridded land. He tinkered around with the armored vehicle, looking for ways to improve it and devices to add onto it. He realized while within the dream that it was simply a dream, and found himself able to summon any tool and metal he desired within the dream. He snickered as he realized he was half-consciously finalizing his design in his sleep. When he woke, he took note of what he had drempt up. Little of value arose from the dream, except for an odd device. In tinkering with metals and magma loops, he discovered that steel and bronze tend to expand differently under heat. In his dream, he used this idea to build a device to measure temperature, the differently expanding metals causing a spiral-shaped curve made of them to either coil tighter or unravel, allowing a needle attached to the tip of the spiral to move with the temperature. He took a drink from the cold river, and ate a meal in the comfortably warm space of his room. He activated the smelter once more and waited for the pig iron and flux to melt back to its previous state, stopping to refine the design for the thermometer. When the metal had heated, he finished making the steel, poured the last of the stacks of bars, then started to move it down to the storage. This was more material than the flying machine had needed, so piles of metal overflowed the rear of the room. Blitukus arranged the metal to make sure it stayed out of the way unless it was needed. The flying machine had relatively thin plating and wings that spread over a large area. The armored vehicle would have thick, compact plating, and the entire vehicle would be smaller than the flying machine despite the material cost. A snow storm blew outside, the howling winds driving the bitter cold into the storage room and slightly through the tunnels. Occasionally it seemed as if the bitter cold of the glacier and the fiery heat of the magma were at competition with one another, at opposite ends of Blitukus' tunnel. He stopped for a drink, and then continued hauling the steel. He looked at it, and could never cease to feel proud of himself for making it, no matter his former mood. He soon after finished hauling the steel, and stood there, admiring the sheer volume of material he had produced.
It was unfortunate that it would have to go into building a machine of destruction... but maybe if his machine returned in one piece, he could find a more productive use for it. Others may make warfare into nothing but waste and tragedy, but Blitukus wouldn't stand to see that come of his work. He had other goals to reach, and while he still felt a very deep and powerful anger towards those who killed his mother, he would not allow it to blind him to the larger events taking place.
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Spell checker fished up a ton of typos this time. Sorry if there are a bunch of other flaws too. I try to avoid doing that the best I can though.
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Topic: A Kobold's Quest II (Read 76122 times)