I honestly don't know enough to say whether things are balanced or not. I think some of the other players (those who are planning to dive the Deep Sea, or construct artifacts) are undervaluing knowledge a bit, though. If I cold, I'd max out int and knowledge, but one needs at least one in body to live, and some stamina to act, so I need those too.
Ozzy, knowledge is a currency not a stat. It gets used up. Putting points into it should be impossible but is at the very least ill advised.
We still got some mutterings and questions and not quite finished sheets but lets at least start showing some stuff off here.
You and the rest of the interviewees have been hastily herded from the offices on 8th and Granite down a narrow stone stairway into circular metal airlock. Waiting for you with her back against the opposite door is a woman. She’s extremely thin and tall, with pale skin, close cropped black hair and blue eyes. She seems to be dressed in fine clothing, but it is oddly plain. Next to her is a hulking specimen of a mole: easily seven feet tall with with a half dozen engines poking out of shaggy black hair. He takes a step forward as you enter the room and clacks his claws together to get your attention.
“Hello assorted rabble. It pleases me greatly to say that you have been chosen as the crew for the 7th Underground Expeditionary Stone Bore. Congratulations! I assume that the selection committee has the details about your next of kin?”
He waits a moment, nose twitching, before continuing.
“Good. Well then, no reason to dawdle! HOLIDAY!” He turns and stomps towards the door as the woman walks to one wall and twists a valve. “My name Suo, that's Head Mechanic Holiday. We’re the ones in charge for this little pleasure fuse.”
“Cruise.” Holiday says, joining up with Suo.
“Pleasure Crews? I think that would send the wrong message about what we do here.”
The airlock doors cycle open and beyond them is a wide stone cavern. The cavern is lit by dozens of spotlights and crisscrossed by catwalks and metal support beams. Men in gray uniforms hurry about, carrying metal crates and lengths of cable, shouting to one another about things you don’t understand. And in the center of the room is the Bore itself. It has an oddly diamond shape; small at both ends and fat in the middle. 4 huge, multi-jointed metal legs hold it up, balanced on the point of a massive conical drill. Six stories up, barely visible from this angle, is the glass dome of the bridge. You can see the shadows of men moving around inside it. One side of the machine sports a pair of sliding metal blast doors, and a metal ramp leads up from the ground to those doors.
“Beaut ain’t she? Decades ahead of the other cities. Stone and sulphur, I bet those bastards in Roa are still digging holes with corpses.” Sou and Holiday lead the way up the ramp and into the Bore. The ramp leads to a hanger, and in the hanger squats an eight legged metal vehicle of some kind. It resembles a beetle, with somewhat shorter legs, each of which ends in a piledriver.
“That’s the Crawler. It crawls floors, walls and ceilings. Insulated, air tight, slow as hell. This is the hanger. Got room for a few vehicles, some Electric Heads, carcasses of any big neat thing you kill, whatever.”
They move on, through the door on the left and into a wide room filled with all manner of metal crates.
“Cargo hold, full of food and water, repair supplies, raw materials, and so on. We got no kitchen in this thing so I hope you like eating rehydrated worm meat. Hey Holiday, why do we have to go through the Cargo bay to get out of the hanger?”
“Material considerations.”
“You mean it would weaken the frame?”
“No. One of the apprentices ordered too many wall sections and not enough doors. Same reason there’s no bathroom.”
“Oh. We fire that one?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“He was the one that miscalculated the drill’s weight and got crushed when the mooring strap broke during installation.”
“Water finds its level.”
They lead the way out of the cargo hold and into passages beyond. Sou stops and points down the halls.
“That over there is the main generator, it gets fuel from the fuel tanks down below. Below the tanks is the main engine, and under that is the drill itself. This ladder here is how you access the lower levels. Over in that direction is the air scrubber. It is what lets this thing be airtight and not kill you all. Oh and there’s a brig over connected to the hanger bay. Air lock too. And right here in the center is the main lift. This takes you up through the rest of the levels.”
It takes two trips to get everyone up to the next level on the elevator, during which time Holiday explains that there’s a ladder running along the inside of the elevator shaft, should it ever stop working.
“This here is the main living area” Sou says, gesturing around expansively in the small area right outside the elevator. “ You got your beds over to the left, your medbay to the right, workshop back there next to the archives. Even got a sanctuary for us diving types. Oh, important thing. Over there is the coms arm. It’s a mechanical arm that lays a hard coms line in as you descend. Radio won’t work except at short range so thats your lifeline. Try not to let it get cut. You can tour that all on your own time, I don’t care.”
He shoves everyone back into the elevator and up past the next floor and up to the final floor on top. “That's the cannon floor below us and up here is the bridge. This is the control center of all this high tech wizardry. These apprentices are just installing the last bits and bobs. Testing the nixies, you know the drill.”
He stops for a moment and then laughs to himself. “Ha! They know the drill! Ya get it Holiday?”
“Regretfully, yes.”
“Ah….anyways, this thing here, this is important. This is the automap. Its gonna track your progress and print out the data about it on these here metal punch plates. Once you have a full one, you put in a blank and bring the finished one to the archives. That way you know where you’re going and when we find the wreckage of this thing, we’ll know where you’ve been.”
He hits a button and a black board on one wall lights up with glowing grid lines. Each tiny box enclosed by the glowing lines is a bulb with a strange double wire internal structure, so as to show both explored land and the location and orientation of the Bore.
“Alright, questions?”
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Topic: DIG: VOTE (Read 140292 times)