Preening prettily, Ttipcomv sets to speak with the scholars and sages to see if any can help with drawing up plans for a temple building made of stone and clay. Likewise she will need her glassworkers to make glass from the sand from the desert brought along for that purpose.(as the needed material should at least be there for 1 project) May need to scavenge from the castle, so need to speak with Howldyne.
A basic plan is drawn up and written on a tablet polished from the local ash.
Work begins, and almost immediately runs into strange problems.
Quarrying is easy enough; the ash behaves somewhat like wet sand as far as dredging it out, but remains sturdy to walk on and handle. The miners go so far as to include fancy ramps to haul materials out of, but they're hardly necessary.
Processing is where things get strange. Despite its situational softness, it seems to resist proper molding, and for the most part has to be planed down rather than shaped. The good news here is that it takes on flat surfaces bizarrely well, forming perfectly smooth faces even in the hands of unskilled workers. Getting the measurements right proves to be the most difficult part of this phase, but most of the artisans are accustomed to precise dimensions and following templates.
Pressing said bricks makes things strange again. The smoothed, now shiny surfaces resist any attempts to condense them, and the most determined efforts actually shatter the once-soft ash into glossy stonelike shards. Interestingly, only a cubic shell around the ash appears to be solid, with the inside apparently remaining as untreated ash.
The other anomaly regarding ashbricks is that tools are of questionable utility. They mostly operate as you'd expect, as evidenced by the miner's picks dredging chunks of them without incident, but particularly for the smoothing process bare hands seem to often have a similar and more precise impact. Most workers end up alternating between tools and fingers as the shape of either, rather than their strength, proves useful.
Meanwhile, ashclay proves to be a total failure. Despite being somewhat pliable in its native state, it seems to break apart and refuse to meld back together when serious mixing attempts are made. You end up with as fine a dust as the workers are willing to make, but no mortar. A few workers even experiment with adding water or wine, but it doesn't so much as dirty either, apparently remaining totally separate. They avoid drinking it anyway, just to be safe.
With no mortar, you decide to at least try out an ashbrick planter. The blocks fit together with remarkable precision, apparently being perfectly straight and flush with each other, though this does make the minute differences in size incredibly noticeable. Nonetheless, you assemble them into a massive planter, fill this planter with Evergreen soil, and fill this soil with rows of arid and staple crop saplings.
You are unsure how to tell if they're growing... a dilemma made stranger by the bizarre lack of time out here.
The temple is stymied by a different sort of problem- most of the scholars are kin to Thakk Kal, who has tasked them with figuring out how to prevent the blowing away of Ambrosia and souls. They ignore calls to design a temple instead, despite being an obvious solution.
The remaining learned folk produce a temple design, but it's an odd, unsettlingly organic design calling for rounded shapes. A quick test shows the ash responds as well to attempts to round it as it does to flatten it, but you'll still have to decide if the complexity is worth the effort.
Finally, your glassworkers are left with an unsettling truth: You didn't bring any sand. It's such a ubiquitous material you assumed there'd be some on hand, if not in the ground then stashed away in some room somewhere on the castle, but there's nothing to be found. The only good news is that the glassworkers appear able to work the ash in a vaguely similar manner, so their talents certainly won't go to waste even without it. As it stands now, however, they're stuck making bricks with the rest of the crafters.
Re: the idiot brother: "Brother, an interesting discovery. Now, why don't you drill the troops while we figure a way out of this mess? We may have need of them son."
Re: Mr Stars: "Mr. Stars, how long have we known each other? Why did you not tell me you were making Ash Soup? I WANT the soup and I WILL have it. Now let's see what it tastes like. As for the dead...well I'll take a raincheck on that."
Orders:
My men are to do regular patrols AROUND the castle. They are also encouraged to mingle with the other warriors.
You set your patrols to the perimeter of the castle, your brother to training the troops right next to the castle, and then settle in for some fine dining.
...it proves harder than it looks. While Mr. Stars has succeeded in forming a thick gruel made of what smells like nuts and chert, the ash is left as gooey chunks that must be willed down by the imbiber. Unlike normal soup, which just sort of slides down your throat when you swallow it, these chunks require sustained focus to dissolve and swallow, and you find yourself stumbling more than once.
In the end, you get about half the chunks down before running out of lubricating broth. You're also mentally fatigued and your stomach feels strangely heavy, so you'll mark this down as a partial victory.
As for taste, the broth is much as it smells, while the ash tastes... unique, certainly. Mineral, if you had to guess, but there's a peculiar... lack. Not quite tasting like nothing, so much as the difference between a bubble of air and water of varying temperatures. This is most noticeable in the transition between semisolid chunk and fluid you intend to swallow, and less obvious otherwise.
Author
Topic: The Last Ember [Turn 0: The Ashen Wastes] (Read 4978 times)