Year four, according to Mûthkat Ardesbomrek, suddenly the best damn armorer in this civilization for some fucking reason noone really understands but hey, whatever, it's not like I've worked all my life to improve the quality of my work until she suddenly swept in with her silver and took over, I hope her children get eaten by groundhogs the fu- oh right
The winter of 53 ended in disaster. While Cog was rushing around giving digging orders and demanding silver corkscrews, we lost three to horrible, sober deaths. The others were ordered to stand on duty indefinitely, to avoid further sparring accidents. Of course, the guards can't muster up half a brain between them and went on as usual, with completely obvious results.
By spring we had our first prototype of the perpetuum mobile up and running. The plan was rather simple, as can be expected from a cognitive trainwreck like Cog.
Some magma was pumped up into a pocket just beneath the glacier, with enough heat to make the melted ice run into a water deposit in the relatively warm mountain. On top of that, a waterwheel was built and connected to a screw pump. The screw pump created a flow that actually managed to drive both the waterwheel and the pump itself, with excess energy to spare! This of course defies all science as we know it, and I hear that it created quite the stir in the mountainhome.
Since my mood, everyone's doing it. Fuck them, I was there before it was mainstream. Back when I was young, we had to crawl five miles through a snowstorm to get a turtle shell, up-hill both ways, naked with troglodytes eating us alive and with no feet nor hands.
Although one has to give him credit for managing to carve out an entire trap from a gem as large as my thumbnail.
Our prayers were answered at the end of spring, when the miners found copper in the soon-to-be-magma room. It enables me to finally start making some real armor. Of course, to balance everything out, our worst nightmares came true when the mountainhome sent an immigration party led by a noble.
Stukos, they call him. Famous for making the crappiest fucking metal mugs in the known universe, and known for spending
way too much time with animals that could potentially eat his family in their sleep. In his ordinary amiable way he greeted us all with a friendly "WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY ROOMS?"
As summer came around, we ran out of wood. The elves brought a small supply, but not enough to build axles all the way to the magma pipe, so with nothing else to do, we actually made some rooms for Stukos.
He finally stopped kicking babies down stairs.
The humans came around with wagonloads of wood, probably saving our lives, and the rest of summer was spent building pumps and axles, with only two major interruptions.
The first one was handled so well by Kogan that she was declared good enough to actually use my silver armor.
The other one turned Reg into a hero.
Together with Atír, he's turning our piles of worthless silver into the stuff of legends.
Now, the perpetual motion device had several problems. The first one was that the flow of water was too uneven. It turned out that with the ambitious magma pumping Cog had in mind, we needed no less than 300 power. The water flow created by the screw pump only managed to create the right flow for three water wheels to be powered simultaneously about 50% of the time, and thus it was impossible to make the wheels power the pump. So the pump was eventually moved to the side to be handled manually. It's no longer a perpetual motion device, but it's still a fucking beast.
As autumn came around, the liaison arrived to find Cog maniacally manhandling the pump, screaming with joy. It actually worked. It actually
worked. Thirty logs worth of axles, more silver corkscrews than I want to count and only a puddle of water combined with a woman too stupid to see how fucked up her ideas are. That's all you need to pump magma from the depths of the mountain up to an unsuspecting, innocent glacier.
I don't want to, but I love her.
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Topic: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zombie Troll (Read 67124 times)