- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan: MOAR LOOTING
Down on the Disk (Graverobbing for Fun and Profit in an Original Science-Fantasy Universe)
- Thread starter CuttleFish2.0
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- original open voting
- Location
- St. Petersburg
[X] Plan: Some Technical work
I dearly want access to any personal notes our predecessor could have made. The map alone is invaluable, but perhaps there is more to be found.
And... if they didn't die fast, there is likely a message there, left for whomever finds them. It might help us avoid the same fate, or otherwise suggest a contact who would be interested in buying what we found. It could give us an idea of what to look for.
I dearly want access to any personal notes our predecessor could have made. The map alone is invaluable, but perhaps there is more to be found.
And... if they didn't die fast, there is likely a message there, left for whomever finds them. It might help us avoid the same fate, or otherwise suggest a contact who would be interested in buying what we found. It could give us an idea of what to look for.
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Hmmm, a tie.
Last edited:
[X] Plan: Some Technical work
… oh, how typical.
… oh, how typical.
[X] Plan: Some Technical work
Hopefully someone else doesn't vote for the other choice.
Hopefully someone else doesn't vote for the other choice.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Vote was already closed. Don't worry too much about the tie.
Thought there needed to be a tiebreaker
Day 69 - Lab explorations
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Winner: Tie - Plans: Some Technical work/MOAR LOOTING
Day 69 - Lab explorations
Light plays across bare metal, drawing long shadows on the floor. Dusty glass shards become the towering peaks of mountains against the walls and cabinets become caverns yawning open to swallow whatever might fall into their maws.
There is an eerie lifelessness to the room. A dead quality beyond just the march of centuries, a tomb quietude which echoes from each footfall and every errant brush against a table or cabinet. Your sweaty skin pimples in the cold emptiness.
Behind you Opal-Nine mutters under his breath, "Rivers and stars… carry away lonely ghosts, by swift current and bright embrace."
He moves quickly around you, stepping further into the room and playing his own lamp across the space in precise sweeps.
You are not any manner of religious, Golac was not a world of believers and devotees to anything but the churn of industry and the yearning for the next day's bread, and frankly you hadn't though Opal-Nine was either. But you understand the impulse. This is a dead place, emptied of anything of the living, or even of the barest signs of life and yet you can feel it in the air; an echo of something that breathed and that once beat with the heat of life.
This is not something you've felt before.
Like an echo against your ears. A phantom haze in your vision, barely more than a shower of dust caught in the beam of your lamp.
You can feel the faint remnants of ancient life-energy in the atmosphere.
"They must have done a lot of work here," you say.
Opal-Nine glances back at you, his head bobbing and his antennae moving in a nod.
"From the schematics there must be at least two dozen labs of this size in the outer layer alone. Estimate… perhaps ten- fifteen personnel per lab? You would know better than me what to exp— "
Of course. He can't tell.
You shake your head, "Not really," you grin, "Self-taught, remember? Show me a mechanic's shop or a factory floor and I could give you an idea, but this stuff… labs are outside my wheelhouse too."
"I- I'm actually feeling something, " you continue, sweeping your own lamp across the room and taking in the dim and dusty landscape, "Sort of an echo, or a residue, or something from the work they did here. Leftover bit of life-energy, I think, but like, sort of petrified."
There's almost a taste to it, an acrid tang that tickles the back of your throat, a physicality to it that sticks to your skin like a thin film.
It touches all of your senses at once. And yet at the same time, none of them. Putting it into words is like describing color to the blind, you just don't have the language to account for the sheer difference in reference frames at this point.
You'll need to invest in theory at some point, buy whatever textbooks or tomes or grimoires on Life-Shaping you can or be stuck reinventing the wheel every step of the way. But that's for later.
Right now there's another doorway at the far end of the lab and you think you can see some sort of actual equipment.
"Come on, this way."
It turns out to be the plumbing of a chemical lab; specifically for an emergency shower station. No water comes out when you try pulling on the activator.
All the actual material and equipment has been thoroughly stripped from the chamber and all that is left are the discarded bits and pieces that no one bothered to grab. Broken glassware shoved into corners and equipment so shattered you have difficulty even making out how the parts could ever have fit together. Some errant stains.
You move on.
And on.
Over the next few hours you move from room to room, lab to lab, in a gradual circuit through the outer laboratory decks. Structured in a series of three concentric layers, the first layer — where you were currently — formed a sort of shell open at one end, of densely intertwined expansive labs and passageways, partitioned from the next layer in by a thick wall of actual starship hull, where smaller knots of lab space formed a sort of interlocking series of puzzle pieces separated from one another by yet more hull, all wrapped around the final inner core of lab; a large central chamber connecting directly to the rest of the ship through a heavily reinforced central passage, flanked by two more labs only connected to the main chamber. At least those were the schematics. Many of the routes through the outer layers of labs are closed off, forcing you to navigate the labyrinth of passages and labs. Moving up and down decks as needed, bypassing entire closed off sections, and prying open door after door as you go.
Thankfully the sections of the ship you were in were buried beneath several layers of soil and thus were kept fairly cool. Your efforts still left you sweaty and exhausted, but not steaming in your own clothes.
That, you had plenty of experience with back on Golac in Master Drevh's workshop — fifteen apprentices and journeymen all hammering away on hot metal or wielding soldering torches or running about fetching bits and bobs can make any room a fetid swamp — and no desire to repeat.
Beyond you find yet more sprawling rooms that stretch on and on almost without interruption, floors covered in dust and shattered glass, tables bare and cabinets torn open to reveal empty shelves. You can only barely tell these were ever labs by the structure of the rooms themselves. Any impressions that might have been left in the dust have long since been obscured by further layers of dust.
You find a few spots of ancient, desiccated growths in corners here and there as well as a few carbonized piles of something. All dead. Deader even than the corpses you've found elsewhere.
And you cannot shake the persistent feeling of echo just on the edges of your perception. Some few, faint traces of the hazy life-energy you can trace to the flaking skins of dried mold, or slime, or whatever it was. You're not even entirely sure how, the bits of fossilized life-energy just taste/smell/feel different somehow.
Most though simply persists as a cloud of energy hanging over every space you move through like bubbles caught in amber.
Room after room after room you explore. All the same. Dead. Empty. Useless.
Chemical labs. Those you recognize mostly by plumbing; drains, sinks, and showers. Broken glassware too. And what you think were probably heating elements.
Surgical suites. Small operating rooms — tiled in ceramic, drains set into their sloping floors, metal slabs hanging by ceiling mounted armatures — connected by networks of corridors. Somehow still carrying the faint smell of long vanished antiseptic.
Live-specimen chambers. Glass walled rooms filled with water, sand, soil, and the long decayed remnants of foliage. Varying in size from the size of a brick to larger than your prefab. Skeletal forms hidden in dark corners or laying against the diamond-class walls of their enclosures.
And other more esoteric facilities whose purpose you can't even guess without their equipment.
By the end of the day you'd covered perhaps a third of the outer layer. Not counting the parts you bypassed completely.
You. Are. Beat.
There is no part of your body free from complaint. Unpleasant soreness spreads from your arms to your shoulders, your back aches, every time you try standing up you feel a faint tremble in the back of your legs. You thought that the trip out had prepared you for the sheer effort required, but no.
Tomorrow you'll need to find a better way to get through the doors in your way.
Maybe… if you could get that encounter suit working…
You shake your head. Not without knowing what's actually wrong with it, which would require opening it up and getting a good look at what's inside. Plus appropriate tools and supplies.
And even if you had all of that, who knows how long it could take; a month sounds like a lot of time until you waste a week or two fruitlessly trying to get a thousand year-old piece of equipment to work.
That though is a problem for tomorrow; for tonight you have something more interesting to investigate, you want to start figuring out how to get the basilisk to move without looking like a twitchy corpse. So far you've been going about things in a rather brute force way. Effective but not particularly pretty or useful in the end. Whenever you wanted the body to 'move' you would take a small spark of life-energy and literally insert it into whatever part of the body you wanted moving. It took a bit of playing with the intensity and size of the sparks to produce even the twitchy, spasmodic crawling you'd gotten so far, but you could now do it consistently.
You didn't even have to be that precise.
Getting close enough and the life-energy seemed to find its own way. Mostly.
Clearly though you would need to refine what you were doing. Find some way to make the muscles and tendons move in ways that were more natural, more normal— more like how the thing had moved when it was formerly alive. To do that you would need to see what exactly it was you were doing now.
See where the life-energy was and wasn't going.
You spent most of that first night sending more spark of life-energy into the various nerves of the basilisk's limbs, paying careful attention to what muscles twitched for how long and how much. It was a night of staring at scaled flesh. Looking past it. Watching it shift and move, twisting and stretching, and tracing out the network of nerves that controlled it all. You traced the paths of chemical signals racing down tiny, dendritic branches, seeing them split and propagate across each limb and into individual muscle strands in a cascade of action.
Followed them until they petered out to nothing and then repeating the process again and again and again until you could almost feel each twitch and spasm in yourself. Dark black-green scales shiver and twitch and your own skin pimples in sympathy. Clawed fingers flex, contorting almost at random and your own fingers flinch. You find your heart racing against your chest, a steady beat in your ears as you work steadily; teasing out the pathways in the basilisk's flesh.
By the time you drifted off to sleep, late into the evening, long past when Opal-Nine had smothered the fire, leaving only glowing coals, you dream of a web of pulsing light that commands tides of flesh. It rolls over you. Swallowing you in a constellation of bright stars that cage you in a trap of stringy muscle. You fight against a wall of fat and flesh and are drowned in the sweltering darkness.
Unfortunately the following day does not meet with much more success. Empty, stripped down labs and sealed doors are all you find.
You don't even bother trying to force open the doors and instead simply move on. So by the end of the day you've covered most of the rest of the outer layer and are on the edge of simply forgetting about the rest of the sealed outer labs. Given their state it's unlikely they'll have anything worth taking anyways. But, well, you can't quite yet give up on the mystery of it.
The challenge of it.
If those doors are locked, there could be something behind them. Nevermind that you've already forced open a number of previous doors and found the same load of nothing, you're mind just won't give it up.
Part of it is also that you want to see if you can open them another way. It was an idea that came to you early that morning, as you were cleaning Nosta's feathers.
You've already seen that the ship made extensive use of biological components for intraship systems and connections, though in most of the areas you'd explored earlier they were long since atrophied. But the labs? With the ever present, lingering haze of petrified life-energy? There was at least a chance some of the systems had survived marginally intact.
And so in the afternoon you set about probing the various sealed doors you'd come across.
In practice it was very similar to what you'd done the night before; sending packets of life-energy and seeing where it went. Though the doors and walls didn't ripple and twitch in response to your actions. Mostly not much happened.
The systems you were probing for were mostly too degraded and atrophied by the long centuries that had passed, which wasn't to say that you got nothing. Weak signals could still propagate along the remnants of dried out liquid crystal lining those channels, resonating however briefly before the energy disassociated larger flakes of crystal into individual molecules. It was like watching glitter drifting on the breeze or hearing distant bird calls or like your whole body had gone to sleep, an uneven sort of pressure and intensity.
As best you could tell there must be at least four dozen unique crystalline compounds, an uneven mixture of organic and silicate — you know because the native cacti around Pravj use form silicate 'dew' when smog from the factories gets bad — present in the channels; each acting to carry a different signal strength.
Following the path of the reaction for its short duration is difficult. They react so quickly, tiny pulsing waves of energy forming a diminishing wavefront. Soon becoming obscured by the ever present haze of petrified life-energy permeating the labs
You go searching for another door to try on. This time with a stronger spark of life-energy.
You trace the wavefront's path, through the wall and up towards the ceiling as it begins to fade before suddenly flaring as it hits something new. Something definitely organic. Not crystalline. It becomes a bright line (a searing heat against your face, a sharp note in your ear, a biting sour taste on your tongue) and burns out a second later.
But that short moment is enough for you to see the ghost of the system, a scar of life-energy etched into the universe and to start making some guesses.
You already knew some of the theoretical details from past reading, and your earlier investigations elsewhere on the wreck, and you'd seen the physical structures themselves before in one of the first labs you investigated. But now you could see the actual movement of life-energy through those structures. Or at least the echo of it. Just as the mineralized fire-suppressant had shown you the literal, mechanical construction of the systems, the fossilized life-energy showed you the arcane makeup of it.
How signals had once traveled back and forth up and down the 'semi-fluid neuroplastic' channels along tiny negative space filaments created by sequential collections of crystals impregnated in a conductive liquid towards the main trunk in the ceiling to find the nearly invisible dendrites that lead to the long axons in the center. Where they were then condensed and transformed into other forms of signal and transmitted on. Again and again you see an echo of the whole process occur right in front of you as you go from door to door and repeating the process. It takes hours but by the time night is falling outside you can replicate the sorts of signals the sealed doors are expecting.
And even with most of the mechanisms long rendered inert they respond… eventually.
In fact you think it would actually be harder to try on a still functional system, as the non-biological remnants of the door controls that you've so far worked on only have part of the locking mechanism. They're so broken even just getting close should be good enough.
When you return to your camp that night you're no less exhausted than you were the previous night, if anything you're more tired; still recovering from the physical effort you put in the day before and now both mentally and spiritually drained as well.
Still, over the next several days and nights you continue prodding at the various sealed door ways as you move deeper into the laboratory decks and making the basilisk twitch in increasingly purposeful ways respectively. Though you only manage a relatively small amount of work on the subject of getting the basilisk to move. You're still very much worn out and your continued investigations don't help, though you find it easier as the days go by.
It's not exciting work. There are no moments of stunning insight or revelation, just the slow peeling back of mystery.
The second layer of labs is much like the first, except more so; more desolate and more sealed.
You do in fact run into semi-functional systems on some of the doors. And they are, in fact, harder to fool.
It takes you two whole days to work out the correct sequence of precisely modulated pulse of life-energy before you get the first of those doors to open. Watching the sluggish way the aged biological components (just barely hanging on through a combination of deep torpor and teetering stasis spells) surge to activity is fascinating, seeing the seemingly chaotic surges of signals transform into ordered pulses of data drives home something you'd already begun to suspect.
The largest issue you've encountered so far is the sheer disordered nature of life-energy. You just don't know enough theory to delicately manipulate it in the way you need to, your fumbling modulations just can't get a coherent sequence of muscle contractions that even vaguely resembles natural movement.
But you're willing to cheat a little. More than a little really. If you can't do it on your own, why not borrow someone else's work?
First you tear out some of the channels. There are enough exposed bits of the labs to net you a good eighteen, meter-ish long sections of the flexible metal piping the Brumehad Senate used, though you have to work hard with your hammerpick and one of Opal-Nine's many blades to get it.
Then you're able to cobble together a crude distiller from a pot, a lid, and a tarp. Using the purified water from your distiller you wash out the clotted crystals from the inside of the channels. Boiling off the water continuously leaves you with a very concentrated solution of nearly half a hundred different compounds. Way too many for you to use.
Flooding the solution with life-energy you're able to exert just enough 'pressure' on the mixture that about a third of the crystalline compounds start to come out of solution.
Glittering snow floats up through the suspension. A crusty film crystallizes, a thin hairy iridescent sheet that you scoop off the top. You gain about five grams of crumbly powder that glints faintly in a dozen different colors over the course of the afternoon and evening.
Afterwards you promptly collapse into a dreamless sleep.
Given the tie, I'm just going to take the common points from both plans. That'll be exploring deeper and basilisk locomotion.
Day 69 - Lab explorations
Light plays across bare metal, drawing long shadows on the floor. Dusty glass shards become the towering peaks of mountains against the walls and cabinets become caverns yawning open to swallow whatever might fall into their maws.
There is an eerie lifelessness to the room. A dead quality beyond just the march of centuries, a tomb quietude which echoes from each footfall and every errant brush against a table or cabinet. Your sweaty skin pimples in the cold emptiness.
Behind you Opal-Nine mutters under his breath, "Rivers and stars… carry away lonely ghosts, by swift current and bright embrace."
He moves quickly around you, stepping further into the room and playing his own lamp across the space in precise sweeps.
You are not any manner of religious, Golac was not a world of believers and devotees to anything but the churn of industry and the yearning for the next day's bread, and frankly you hadn't though Opal-Nine was either. But you understand the impulse. This is a dead place, emptied of anything of the living, or even of the barest signs of life and yet you can feel it in the air; an echo of something that breathed and that once beat with the heat of life.
This is not something you've felt before.
Like an echo against your ears. A phantom haze in your vision, barely more than a shower of dust caught in the beam of your lamp.
You can feel the faint remnants of ancient life-energy in the atmosphere.
"They must have done a lot of work here," you say.
Opal-Nine glances back at you, his head bobbing and his antennae moving in a nod.
"From the schematics there must be at least two dozen labs of this size in the outer layer alone. Estimate… perhaps ten- fifteen personnel per lab? You would know better than me what to exp— "
Of course. He can't tell.
You shake your head, "Not really," you grin, "Self-taught, remember? Show me a mechanic's shop or a factory floor and I could give you an idea, but this stuff… labs are outside my wheelhouse too."
"I- I'm actually feeling something, " you continue, sweeping your own lamp across the room and taking in the dim and dusty landscape, "Sort of an echo, or a residue, or something from the work they did here. Leftover bit of life-energy, I think, but like, sort of petrified."
There's almost a taste to it, an acrid tang that tickles the back of your throat, a physicality to it that sticks to your skin like a thin film.
It touches all of your senses at once. And yet at the same time, none of them. Putting it into words is like describing color to the blind, you just don't have the language to account for the sheer difference in reference frames at this point.
You'll need to invest in theory at some point, buy whatever textbooks or tomes or grimoires on Life-Shaping you can or be stuck reinventing the wheel every step of the way. But that's for later.
Right now there's another doorway at the far end of the lab and you think you can see some sort of actual equipment.
"Come on, this way."
It turns out to be the plumbing of a chemical lab; specifically for an emergency shower station. No water comes out when you try pulling on the activator.
All the actual material and equipment has been thoroughly stripped from the chamber and all that is left are the discarded bits and pieces that no one bothered to grab. Broken glassware shoved into corners and equipment so shattered you have difficulty even making out how the parts could ever have fit together. Some errant stains.
You move on.
And on.
Over the next few hours you move from room to room, lab to lab, in a gradual circuit through the outer laboratory decks. Structured in a series of three concentric layers, the first layer — where you were currently — formed a sort of shell open at one end, of densely intertwined expansive labs and passageways, partitioned from the next layer in by a thick wall of actual starship hull, where smaller knots of lab space formed a sort of interlocking series of puzzle pieces separated from one another by yet more hull, all wrapped around the final inner core of lab; a large central chamber connecting directly to the rest of the ship through a heavily reinforced central passage, flanked by two more labs only connected to the main chamber. At least those were the schematics. Many of the routes through the outer layers of labs are closed off, forcing you to navigate the labyrinth of passages and labs. Moving up and down decks as needed, bypassing entire closed off sections, and prying open door after door as you go.
Thankfully the sections of the ship you were in were buried beneath several layers of soil and thus were kept fairly cool. Your efforts still left you sweaty and exhausted, but not steaming in your own clothes.
That, you had plenty of experience with back on Golac in Master Drevh's workshop — fifteen apprentices and journeymen all hammering away on hot metal or wielding soldering torches or running about fetching bits and bobs can make any room a fetid swamp — and no desire to repeat.
Beyond you find yet more sprawling rooms that stretch on and on almost without interruption, floors covered in dust and shattered glass, tables bare and cabinets torn open to reveal empty shelves. You can only barely tell these were ever labs by the structure of the rooms themselves. Any impressions that might have been left in the dust have long since been obscured by further layers of dust.
You find a few spots of ancient, desiccated growths in corners here and there as well as a few carbonized piles of something. All dead. Deader even than the corpses you've found elsewhere.
And you cannot shake the persistent feeling of echo just on the edges of your perception. Some few, faint traces of the hazy life-energy you can trace to the flaking skins of dried mold, or slime, or whatever it was. You're not even entirely sure how, the bits of fossilized life-energy just taste/smell/feel different somehow.
Most though simply persists as a cloud of energy hanging over every space you move through like bubbles caught in amber.
Room after room after room you explore. All the same. Dead. Empty. Useless.
Chemical labs. Those you recognize mostly by plumbing; drains, sinks, and showers. Broken glassware too. And what you think were probably heating elements.
Surgical suites. Small operating rooms — tiled in ceramic, drains set into their sloping floors, metal slabs hanging by ceiling mounted armatures — connected by networks of corridors. Somehow still carrying the faint smell of long vanished antiseptic.
Live-specimen chambers. Glass walled rooms filled with water, sand, soil, and the long decayed remnants of foliage. Varying in size from the size of a brick to larger than your prefab. Skeletal forms hidden in dark corners or laying against the diamond-class walls of their enclosures.
And other more esoteric facilities whose purpose you can't even guess without their equipment.
By the end of the day you'd covered perhaps a third of the outer layer. Not counting the parts you bypassed completely.
You. Are. Beat.
There is no part of your body free from complaint. Unpleasant soreness spreads from your arms to your shoulders, your back aches, every time you try standing up you feel a faint tremble in the back of your legs. You thought that the trip out had prepared you for the sheer effort required, but no.
Tomorrow you'll need to find a better way to get through the doors in your way.
Maybe… if you could get that encounter suit working…
You shake your head. Not without knowing what's actually wrong with it, which would require opening it up and getting a good look at what's inside. Plus appropriate tools and supplies.
And even if you had all of that, who knows how long it could take; a month sounds like a lot of time until you waste a week or two fruitlessly trying to get a thousand year-old piece of equipment to work.
That though is a problem for tomorrow; for tonight you have something more interesting to investigate, you want to start figuring out how to get the basilisk to move without looking like a twitchy corpse. So far you've been going about things in a rather brute force way. Effective but not particularly pretty or useful in the end. Whenever you wanted the body to 'move' you would take a small spark of life-energy and literally insert it into whatever part of the body you wanted moving. It took a bit of playing with the intensity and size of the sparks to produce even the twitchy, spasmodic crawling you'd gotten so far, but you could now do it consistently.
You didn't even have to be that precise.
Getting close enough and the life-energy seemed to find its own way. Mostly.
Clearly though you would need to refine what you were doing. Find some way to make the muscles and tendons move in ways that were more natural, more normal— more like how the thing had moved when it was formerly alive. To do that you would need to see what exactly it was you were doing now.
See where the life-energy was and wasn't going.
You spent most of that first night sending more spark of life-energy into the various nerves of the basilisk's limbs, paying careful attention to what muscles twitched for how long and how much. It was a night of staring at scaled flesh. Looking past it. Watching it shift and move, twisting and stretching, and tracing out the network of nerves that controlled it all. You traced the paths of chemical signals racing down tiny, dendritic branches, seeing them split and propagate across each limb and into individual muscle strands in a cascade of action.
Followed them until they petered out to nothing and then repeating the process again and again and again until you could almost feel each twitch and spasm in yourself. Dark black-green scales shiver and twitch and your own skin pimples in sympathy. Clawed fingers flex, contorting almost at random and your own fingers flinch. You find your heart racing against your chest, a steady beat in your ears as you work steadily; teasing out the pathways in the basilisk's flesh.
By the time you drifted off to sleep, late into the evening, long past when Opal-Nine had smothered the fire, leaving only glowing coals, you dream of a web of pulsing light that commands tides of flesh. It rolls over you. Swallowing you in a constellation of bright stars that cage you in a trap of stringy muscle. You fight against a wall of fat and flesh and are drowned in the sweltering darkness.
Unfortunately the following day does not meet with much more success. Empty, stripped down labs and sealed doors are all you find.
You don't even bother trying to force open the doors and instead simply move on. So by the end of the day you've covered most of the rest of the outer layer and are on the edge of simply forgetting about the rest of the sealed outer labs. Given their state it's unlikely they'll have anything worth taking anyways. But, well, you can't quite yet give up on the mystery of it.
The challenge of it.
If those doors are locked, there could be something behind them. Nevermind that you've already forced open a number of previous doors and found the same load of nothing, you're mind just won't give it up.
Part of it is also that you want to see if you can open them another way. It was an idea that came to you early that morning, as you were cleaning Nosta's feathers.
You've already seen that the ship made extensive use of biological components for intraship systems and connections, though in most of the areas you'd explored earlier they were long since atrophied. But the labs? With the ever present, lingering haze of petrified life-energy? There was at least a chance some of the systems had survived marginally intact.
And so in the afternoon you set about probing the various sealed doors you'd come across.
In practice it was very similar to what you'd done the night before; sending packets of life-energy and seeing where it went. Though the doors and walls didn't ripple and twitch in response to your actions. Mostly not much happened.
The systems you were probing for were mostly too degraded and atrophied by the long centuries that had passed, which wasn't to say that you got nothing. Weak signals could still propagate along the remnants of dried out liquid crystal lining those channels, resonating however briefly before the energy disassociated larger flakes of crystal into individual molecules. It was like watching glitter drifting on the breeze or hearing distant bird calls or like your whole body had gone to sleep, an uneven sort of pressure and intensity.
As best you could tell there must be at least four dozen unique crystalline compounds, an uneven mixture of organic and silicate — you know because the native cacti around Pravj use form silicate 'dew' when smog from the factories gets bad — present in the channels; each acting to carry a different signal strength.
Following the path of the reaction for its short duration is difficult. They react so quickly, tiny pulsing waves of energy forming a diminishing wavefront. Soon becoming obscured by the ever present haze of petrified life-energy permeating the labs
You go searching for another door to try on. This time with a stronger spark of life-energy.
You trace the wavefront's path, through the wall and up towards the ceiling as it begins to fade before suddenly flaring as it hits something new. Something definitely organic. Not crystalline. It becomes a bright line (a searing heat against your face, a sharp note in your ear, a biting sour taste on your tongue) and burns out a second later.
But that short moment is enough for you to see the ghost of the system, a scar of life-energy etched into the universe and to start making some guesses.
You already knew some of the theoretical details from past reading, and your earlier investigations elsewhere on the wreck, and you'd seen the physical structures themselves before in one of the first labs you investigated. But now you could see the actual movement of life-energy through those structures. Or at least the echo of it. Just as the mineralized fire-suppressant had shown you the literal, mechanical construction of the systems, the fossilized life-energy showed you the arcane makeup of it.
How signals had once traveled back and forth up and down the 'semi-fluid neuroplastic' channels along tiny negative space filaments created by sequential collections of crystals impregnated in a conductive liquid towards the main trunk in the ceiling to find the nearly invisible dendrites that lead to the long axons in the center. Where they were then condensed and transformed into other forms of signal and transmitted on. Again and again you see an echo of the whole process occur right in front of you as you go from door to door and repeating the process. It takes hours but by the time night is falling outside you can replicate the sorts of signals the sealed doors are expecting.
And even with most of the mechanisms long rendered inert they respond… eventually.
In fact you think it would actually be harder to try on a still functional system, as the non-biological remnants of the door controls that you've so far worked on only have part of the locking mechanism. They're so broken even just getting close should be good enough.
When you return to your camp that night you're no less exhausted than you were the previous night, if anything you're more tired; still recovering from the physical effort you put in the day before and now both mentally and spiritually drained as well.
Still, over the next several days and nights you continue prodding at the various sealed door ways as you move deeper into the laboratory decks and making the basilisk twitch in increasingly purposeful ways respectively. Though you only manage a relatively small amount of work on the subject of getting the basilisk to move. You're still very much worn out and your continued investigations don't help, though you find it easier as the days go by.
It's not exciting work. There are no moments of stunning insight or revelation, just the slow peeling back of mystery.
The second layer of labs is much like the first, except more so; more desolate and more sealed.
You do in fact run into semi-functional systems on some of the doors. And they are, in fact, harder to fool.
It takes you two whole days to work out the correct sequence of precisely modulated pulse of life-energy before you get the first of those doors to open. Watching the sluggish way the aged biological components (just barely hanging on through a combination of deep torpor and teetering stasis spells) surge to activity is fascinating, seeing the seemingly chaotic surges of signals transform into ordered pulses of data drives home something you'd already begun to suspect.
The largest issue you've encountered so far is the sheer disordered nature of life-energy. You just don't know enough theory to delicately manipulate it in the way you need to, your fumbling modulations just can't get a coherent sequence of muscle contractions that even vaguely resembles natural movement.
But you're willing to cheat a little. More than a little really. If you can't do it on your own, why not borrow someone else's work?
First you tear out some of the channels. There are enough exposed bits of the labs to net you a good eighteen, meter-ish long sections of the flexible metal piping the Brumehad Senate used, though you have to work hard with your hammerpick and one of Opal-Nine's many blades to get it.
Then you're able to cobble together a crude distiller from a pot, a lid, and a tarp. Using the purified water from your distiller you wash out the clotted crystals from the inside of the channels. Boiling off the water continuously leaves you with a very concentrated solution of nearly half a hundred different compounds. Way too many for you to use.
Flooding the solution with life-energy you're able to exert just enough 'pressure' on the mixture that about a third of the crystalline compounds start to come out of solution.
Glittering snow floats up through the suspension. A crusty film crystallizes, a thin hairy iridescent sheet that you scoop off the top. You gain about five grams of crumbly powder that glints faintly in a dozen different colors over the course of the afternoon and evening.
Afterwards you promptly collapse into a dreamless sleep.
No vote. Second part coming in a few days.
Day 74 - Puppet strings
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Day 74 - Puppet strings
Powder iridesces in the pale morning light filtering through the curtain of vines and ferns and overgrown grass as you tip it slowly into the open end of a syringe. Tiny motes floating in clear water.
Carefully, you set the metal scoop down into the open metal canister with the rest of the powder of crystal compounds you extracted from the solution last night — the closed one next to it contains all the others. You turn back to the syringe and take it gently from Opal-Nine's hands.
"Thank you."
He nods, tucking his mid-limbs back in close to his torso and settles in to watch you work.
Stoppering the syringe with a plunger you flip it over and shake it gently as you slowly squeeze until the tiniest bead of solution appears on the end of the needle. You're not aiming for any veins, but if you screw up you don't want to have to go through the trouble of bringing the basilisk back to life again.
Crouching down by the front right limb you set the tip of the needle just a few centimeters below the shoulder joint. Blowing out a long breath you form a spark of life-energy just beneath the skin, gently working it deeper and deeper into the muscle and fat as you expand it out, massaging it into a wide flowing surface of life-energy.
It clings to the muscle fibers in gummy strands. You have to pull on it, dragging it along in the direction you want, gathering up the tiny little gobs of stuck life-energy that hang on like stubborn burrs. Through fat it glides, slick and swift, diffusing like dye in water, and you have to work constantly to gather it back up; to keep it from simply fading away into a faint glow.
You keep going. By now you've done this more than a hundred times and it truly is starting to get easier. It's almost instinct the way you stop when you feel the sheet of life-energy catch onto something.
Folding the life-energy around that something, you wrap it around and around until the nerve you've found is outlined in a shimmering cocoon of energy that stays put once you consciously let go. You find the main body of the nerve and angle your needle to line the two up. Then press in the syringe until you judge their at the same depth.
Only then do you depress the plunger.
Just a bit. You have to be careful not to accidentally burst the cell. Besides, one nerve doesn't need much.
Pulling the needle back a bit you unwrap a bit of your 'imaging' life-energy and send another, very tiny, spark into the nerve itself. Not even enough to make the muscles twitch. Your life-energy sheath pulse slightly, a wave traveling down from the cell-body through the axon to the dendrites and you let out a sigh of relief. It worked.
At least so far.
One down, you move the syringe very slightly to the left and begin the process again. And again to the right.
Then again.
And again.
Up and down each limb, a handful at each joint, Fifteen at the base of the thick paddle like tail, a dozen where each leg — arm? You're not sure on the correct terminology — meets the body, and another twelve at the point where the muscle groups meet the spine. Seventy-two along the spine itself. Working your sheathes of life-energy through the thick muscles takes time. As does threading your needle through the heavy scales along its back.
You manage it, almost laying the syringe flat against its back at certain points.
Thirty-nine more at the base of the neck, where the spine meets skull. You're extra careful with those and have to repeat the process for a handful of them when you don't quite add enough the first time.
Then you move to the head. One-hundred and two injections on each side of the face and Twenty-seven on the inside of its mouth, more than any other part of the body. Hot breath ghosts across your face as you work and its luridly yellow eyes stare unerringly at you, lacking only their supernatural power to petrify. You can still see the scars from where Nosta attacked it, light pinkish flesh just starting to darken to the dark gray-green of its scales.
Hours pass as you work, refilling your syringe as needed.
It is early afternoon by the time you're done with all of the injections. Your hands are cramped — a dull radiating pain that you take a few minutes to sooth by carefully working life-energy into the tendons and muscles — from clutching the syringe all day, your knees ache from kneeling against the hard plating of the floor for so long, your back complains as it unbends. Half of the work done.
"That it?" asks Opal-Nine, coming to stand beside you, "A few pokes with your needle and now it'll do what you want?"
You examine the basilisk with both your eyes and less mundane senses. Trying to find someone wrong or off.
Well, something, besides the fact that you've puppetted a dead monster back into a macabre sort of half-life.
You don't find anything. It all seems to be going the way you think it should, all the life-energy sheaths are in the right places, your solution seems to respond in the right way when you try triggering it.
"Hardly," you snort.
Satisfied for the moment that you haven't screwed it up yet you stretch and turn away from the body.
"No, this is maybe halfway. Next I have to do the actual enchanting. Work the actual life-energy so that it'll do what I tell it to."
Opal-Nine stares at the basilisk for a moment, his forelimbs twitching anxiously and his antennae stiffening.
"You're resurrecting it then? Beyond just a beating heart and lungs that suck breath?"
"Oh. No," you shake your head, "by telling I mean- trying to control it? With magic. No mind— " you pat its head a bit roughly to demonstrate and the basilisk of course fails to react " —in there, it'll end up more like a puppet."
He clicks his mandibles thoughtfully.
After a bit of rest and a meal you're ready to get back to it.
Thankfully the next bit of work promises to be considerably less physically taxing. Though you fully expect to be drained by the end.
Settling yourself down on your bunched up bedroll you take several, steadying breaths and close your eyes.
What few texts you managed to buy back on Golac, and that you've brought with you, were hardly primers on the subject of Life-Shaping; in fact they were written by a Colonel Rybak for the Join Union Military Command and read mole like a travelog than a serious investigation, which, to be fair, is exactly what they are. Plenty to say on the topic of tactics and the risks it poses in battle, but very light on actual details.
No, you had to make do with an uneducated observer's notions of how Life-Shaping actually functioned. So what you're about to do you've invented essentially wholesale, just like your Life Siphon. You're confident in the theory behind it.
Starting at the tail — relatively simple in comparison, at least in terms of number of nerves — you start carefully drilling small holes down through the sheaths of life-energy. Not through through. But rather more like drawing a needle and thread through fabric, creating a hollow channel that you can 'blow' into a sort of negative life-energy void. Supplied with life-energy this void will produce a specific resonance that will excite a set of crystals in your injected solution
With the right shape and size each void will produce precise change in voltage that will force the neuron to fire.
Link a number of nerves together and you can make a whole sequence of nerves activate. Firing nerves mean contracting muscles and that should produce smoother, more natural movement. Ideally even something that looks intentional.
But that's getting a bit ahead of things.
First you repeat the process at the bottom of the spinal column.
That gives you both ends of the connection. But not the link between them.
For that you spin a gossamer thread of life-energy between each channel that buzzes like a static shock and tastes faintly like blisters on your hand from too long at a piece with your hammer. Criss-crossing from neuron to neuron you form a simplistic and crude mirror to the natural pattern of the basilisk's nerves.
You step back and let out a breath.
Physically nothing has changed with the body and yet… it feels different to you. Almost without conscious thought you reach out and flick at one void. It vibrates and swells.
The effect is instantaneous and obvious. And it isn't a spasm of muscle, jumping about randomly.
No, the tail actually swings left.
Sharply. Mechanically. But definitely controlled.
You could jump for joy, go running and shouting around the field outside until your legs gave out and your voice was hoarse from screaming. You don't. Instead you stand there and grin like a moron for a minute, your entire body practically vibrating, as you punch the air.
Then you take a few gulping breaths and get back to work.
Hours slip past as you carefully drill your channels in each neuron sheath and expand them into the voids and then thread the links between them. You have to stop occasionally, fighting off bouts of dizziness, but some slow breathing and staring off into nothingness are enough to dispel them each time. Around you the afternoon light fades, turning the sky outside first pale lilac that fades to pitch black and the sounds of night puncture the stillness.
Opal-Nine keeps dutiful watch over you as you work. He sharpens blades, cleans cookware, repairs fabric, fills canteens, and does all the other necessary labor of keeping the camp it shipshape.
You can barely spare more than the occasional word for him, you're so consumed with the work.
Even when you're resting you're thinking about the next part. You can see the vast network of links laid over the body, like a skeleton assembled by a particularly idiotic child.
By the time you actually finish linking the last two nerves together it is… well you honestly have no idea what time it actually is, except late.
And even though you've been testing periodically a part of you is still nervous, because this is the moment that you know if you've just wasted hours only to have to tear out half your work or not.
With a shaky breath you flick at one void, near the base of the neck just off the shoulder.
The left front leg lifts and drops. A few centimeters forward.
You grin and flick again.
This time the right back leg lifts and drops. Flick. Middle left.
Flick. Right front. Flick. Back Left. Flick. Middle right.
"Hahahaha."
Again, faster this time. The basilisk waddles forward. Again.
You are practically strumming now, activating nerves in rapid fire sequence. Each void trembles and swells for a fractionary instant, glowing with a bright, brief corona of life-energy. Forming, in your otherworldly senses, a vast, twinkling constellation— sounds like a grand orchestra playing in concert. Clawed limbs move jerkily under your direction and the scaled body of the basilisk staggers forward.
Backward.
Then forward again.
Okay. Some work still to be done; it's not exactly smooth or entirely natural looking. But, still, you've got actual movement rather than a squirming crawl.
You've done it.
Dawn finds you only a few hours later feeling both exhilarated and like you've just XXX.
Bleary eyed you drag yourself out of your bedroll, pausing only to offer Nosta a scratch under her chin. She barely bothers to glance from her meal. Only offers you a low croon from the back of her throat.
Opal-Nine eyes you warily, holding onto a steaming mug of something smelling pungently of… something that sticks to the back of your throat with a coppery tang.
"Blood Sap?"
He gestures to the kettle over the fire steaming with the same fragrance. Is that what's in his mug? You're not sure you want to drink anything with the word 'blood' in its name.
"Er, " you say.
He laughs, antennae rubbing together, "No actual blood involved. Old sylth merc taught it to me when I first arrived on the Disk, helps keep you on your feet after a rough fight. Long nights too. Taste's not bad either."
You take a deep sniff. Now that you're paying attention it doesn't smell too bad.
Sure it makes you feel like you've got a nosebleed leaking down the back of your throat, but it also has a bright sort of freshness to it. A clean sort of scent.
"Okay," you say, grabbing an empty mug and pouring yourself a cup of the — not actually very sappy or bloody — drink.
Opal-Nine waits for you to take your first sip. It surprises you with how sour is, not in an unpleasant way but definitely not in a way you were expecting either.
"Are you still certain about today? Could wait another day."
"No," you shake your head, "Spells need to settle more before I put them through their paces and we've lost enough time already. Your friends will be coming back through in… what, a month and a half? Two maybe. We're heading into more intact sections now, could be security systems still active in there; might take us a week or more to get through."
He sips from his own mug, head tilted. You can feel the raised eyebrow, despite the physical lack, and you just know Natya has been coaching him on 'handling' you.
You sigh.
"I'm not lying," a beat, "I also just really want to see what's down there."
Those sealed labs didn't manage to weather the centuries by luck. They were better protected against the ravages of time from the start, shielded by not only the rest of the wreck but also more powerful enchantments and technology. You might not know who the ship belonged to, or what they were protecting, but you know they wanted it to keep.
He laughs again, antennae squeaking faintly.
You go back to drinking your 'Blood Sap,' rolling the sour liquid across your throat, and note the undertone of savory aftertaste that clings to your tongue, feeling it tingle gently across the roof of your mouth and down your larynx. Almost the second it hits your stomach you swear you can feel it spread out into your body. Soon enough you're blinking away the groggy crust from your eyes and shaking off the fatigue from your body.
Within just a few minutes you feel ready to really take on the day. Opal-Nine makes sure you get some actual food in you before you set off.
For the first hour you stick to the edges of the outer layer, circling around to the fore of the vessel where the shell opened to allow direct access to the core labs. Or would have if the broad passageway hadn't collapsed all the way down to the inner hull, a chasm three meters wide and over forty meters across. You think you might be able to scoot along the right edge of the chasm.
And it would have to be you, there's no way Opal-Nine could manage it; he's simply too large and bulky. Once you are across you could probably toss a line back and set up some sort of simple zip-line like thing.
But… you see a lot of places where the already thin edging of a ledge running along the right wall all but disappears.
You were quite hoping that you could simply walk into the core of the labs. That seems like a lost hope.
If you backtrack a bit, you know you can move into the second layer of the labs and from there you know you can eventually make your way to an access point to the same central corridor. That'll take a few days.
You might find something along the way.
There remain between 49 and 64 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.
[] Try shimmying along the ledge. (Risky. Immediate access to core.)
[] Backtrack and go through the higher-security lab sections to reach the core. (Less risky? Takes some time.)
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
Powder iridesces in the pale morning light filtering through the curtain of vines and ferns and overgrown grass as you tip it slowly into the open end of a syringe. Tiny motes floating in clear water.
Carefully, you set the metal scoop down into the open metal canister with the rest of the powder of crystal compounds you extracted from the solution last night — the closed one next to it contains all the others. You turn back to the syringe and take it gently from Opal-Nine's hands.
"Thank you."
He nods, tucking his mid-limbs back in close to his torso and settles in to watch you work.
Stoppering the syringe with a plunger you flip it over and shake it gently as you slowly squeeze until the tiniest bead of solution appears on the end of the needle. You're not aiming for any veins, but if you screw up you don't want to have to go through the trouble of bringing the basilisk back to life again.
Crouching down by the front right limb you set the tip of the needle just a few centimeters below the shoulder joint. Blowing out a long breath you form a spark of life-energy just beneath the skin, gently working it deeper and deeper into the muscle and fat as you expand it out, massaging it into a wide flowing surface of life-energy.
It clings to the muscle fibers in gummy strands. You have to pull on it, dragging it along in the direction you want, gathering up the tiny little gobs of stuck life-energy that hang on like stubborn burrs. Through fat it glides, slick and swift, diffusing like dye in water, and you have to work constantly to gather it back up; to keep it from simply fading away into a faint glow.
You keep going. By now you've done this more than a hundred times and it truly is starting to get easier. It's almost instinct the way you stop when you feel the sheet of life-energy catch onto something.
Folding the life-energy around that something, you wrap it around and around until the nerve you've found is outlined in a shimmering cocoon of energy that stays put once you consciously let go. You find the main body of the nerve and angle your needle to line the two up. Then press in the syringe until you judge their at the same depth.
Only then do you depress the plunger.
Just a bit. You have to be careful not to accidentally burst the cell. Besides, one nerve doesn't need much.
Pulling the needle back a bit you unwrap a bit of your 'imaging' life-energy and send another, very tiny, spark into the nerve itself. Not even enough to make the muscles twitch. Your life-energy sheath pulse slightly, a wave traveling down from the cell-body through the axon to the dendrites and you let out a sigh of relief. It worked.
At least so far.
One down, you move the syringe very slightly to the left and begin the process again. And again to the right.
Then again.
And again.
Up and down each limb, a handful at each joint, Fifteen at the base of the thick paddle like tail, a dozen where each leg — arm? You're not sure on the correct terminology — meets the body, and another twelve at the point where the muscle groups meet the spine. Seventy-two along the spine itself. Working your sheathes of life-energy through the thick muscles takes time. As does threading your needle through the heavy scales along its back.
You manage it, almost laying the syringe flat against its back at certain points.
Thirty-nine more at the base of the neck, where the spine meets skull. You're extra careful with those and have to repeat the process for a handful of them when you don't quite add enough the first time.
Then you move to the head. One-hundred and two injections on each side of the face and Twenty-seven on the inside of its mouth, more than any other part of the body. Hot breath ghosts across your face as you work and its luridly yellow eyes stare unerringly at you, lacking only their supernatural power to petrify. You can still see the scars from where Nosta attacked it, light pinkish flesh just starting to darken to the dark gray-green of its scales.
Hours pass as you work, refilling your syringe as needed.
It is early afternoon by the time you're done with all of the injections. Your hands are cramped — a dull radiating pain that you take a few minutes to sooth by carefully working life-energy into the tendons and muscles — from clutching the syringe all day, your knees ache from kneeling against the hard plating of the floor for so long, your back complains as it unbends. Half of the work done.
"That it?" asks Opal-Nine, coming to stand beside you, "A few pokes with your needle and now it'll do what you want?"
You examine the basilisk with both your eyes and less mundane senses. Trying to find someone wrong or off.
Well, something, besides the fact that you've puppetted a dead monster back into a macabre sort of half-life.
You don't find anything. It all seems to be going the way you think it should, all the life-energy sheaths are in the right places, your solution seems to respond in the right way when you try triggering it.
"Hardly," you snort.
Satisfied for the moment that you haven't screwed it up yet you stretch and turn away from the body.
"No, this is maybe halfway. Next I have to do the actual enchanting. Work the actual life-energy so that it'll do what I tell it to."
Opal-Nine stares at the basilisk for a moment, his forelimbs twitching anxiously and his antennae stiffening.
"You're resurrecting it then? Beyond just a beating heart and lungs that suck breath?"
"Oh. No," you shake your head, "by telling I mean- trying to control it? With magic. No mind— " you pat its head a bit roughly to demonstrate and the basilisk of course fails to react " —in there, it'll end up more like a puppet."
He clicks his mandibles thoughtfully.
After a bit of rest and a meal you're ready to get back to it.
Thankfully the next bit of work promises to be considerably less physically taxing. Though you fully expect to be drained by the end.
Settling yourself down on your bunched up bedroll you take several, steadying breaths and close your eyes.
What few texts you managed to buy back on Golac, and that you've brought with you, were hardly primers on the subject of Life-Shaping; in fact they were written by a Colonel Rybak for the Join Union Military Command and read mole like a travelog than a serious investigation, which, to be fair, is exactly what they are. Plenty to say on the topic of tactics and the risks it poses in battle, but very light on actual details.
No, you had to make do with an uneducated observer's notions of how Life-Shaping actually functioned. So what you're about to do you've invented essentially wholesale, just like your Life Siphon. You're confident in the theory behind it.
Starting at the tail — relatively simple in comparison, at least in terms of number of nerves — you start carefully drilling small holes down through the sheaths of life-energy. Not through through. But rather more like drawing a needle and thread through fabric, creating a hollow channel that you can 'blow' into a sort of negative life-energy void. Supplied with life-energy this void will produce a specific resonance that will excite a set of crystals in your injected solution
With the right shape and size each void will produce precise change in voltage that will force the neuron to fire.
Link a number of nerves together and you can make a whole sequence of nerves activate. Firing nerves mean contracting muscles and that should produce smoother, more natural movement. Ideally even something that looks intentional.
But that's getting a bit ahead of things.
First you repeat the process at the bottom of the spinal column.
That gives you both ends of the connection. But not the link between them.
For that you spin a gossamer thread of life-energy between each channel that buzzes like a static shock and tastes faintly like blisters on your hand from too long at a piece with your hammer. Criss-crossing from neuron to neuron you form a simplistic and crude mirror to the natural pattern of the basilisk's nerves.
You step back and let out a breath.
Physically nothing has changed with the body and yet… it feels different to you. Almost without conscious thought you reach out and flick at one void. It vibrates and swells.
The effect is instantaneous and obvious. And it isn't a spasm of muscle, jumping about randomly.
No, the tail actually swings left.
Sharply. Mechanically. But definitely controlled.
You could jump for joy, go running and shouting around the field outside until your legs gave out and your voice was hoarse from screaming. You don't. Instead you stand there and grin like a moron for a minute, your entire body practically vibrating, as you punch the air.
Then you take a few gulping breaths and get back to work.
Hours slip past as you carefully drill your channels in each neuron sheath and expand them into the voids and then thread the links between them. You have to stop occasionally, fighting off bouts of dizziness, but some slow breathing and staring off into nothingness are enough to dispel them each time. Around you the afternoon light fades, turning the sky outside first pale lilac that fades to pitch black and the sounds of night puncture the stillness.
Opal-Nine keeps dutiful watch over you as you work. He sharpens blades, cleans cookware, repairs fabric, fills canteens, and does all the other necessary labor of keeping the camp it shipshape.
You can barely spare more than the occasional word for him, you're so consumed with the work.
Even when you're resting you're thinking about the next part. You can see the vast network of links laid over the body, like a skeleton assembled by a particularly idiotic child.
By the time you actually finish linking the last two nerves together it is… well you honestly have no idea what time it actually is, except late.
And even though you've been testing periodically a part of you is still nervous, because this is the moment that you know if you've just wasted hours only to have to tear out half your work or not.
With a shaky breath you flick at one void, near the base of the neck just off the shoulder.
The left front leg lifts and drops. A few centimeters forward.
You grin and flick again.
This time the right back leg lifts and drops. Flick. Middle left.
Flick. Right front. Flick. Back Left. Flick. Middle right.
"Hahahaha."
Again, faster this time. The basilisk waddles forward. Again.
You are practically strumming now, activating nerves in rapid fire sequence. Each void trembles and swells for a fractionary instant, glowing with a bright, brief corona of life-energy. Forming, in your otherworldly senses, a vast, twinkling constellation— sounds like a grand orchestra playing in concert. Clawed limbs move jerkily under your direction and the scaled body of the basilisk staggers forward.
Backward.
Then forward again.
Okay. Some work still to be done; it's not exactly smooth or entirely natural looking. But, still, you've got actual movement rather than a squirming crawl.
You've done it.
Dawn finds you only a few hours later feeling both exhilarated and like you've just XXX.
Bleary eyed you drag yourself out of your bedroll, pausing only to offer Nosta a scratch under her chin. She barely bothers to glance from her meal. Only offers you a low croon from the back of her throat.
Opal-Nine eyes you warily, holding onto a steaming mug of something smelling pungently of… something that sticks to the back of your throat with a coppery tang.
"Blood Sap?"
He gestures to the kettle over the fire steaming with the same fragrance. Is that what's in his mug? You're not sure you want to drink anything with the word 'blood' in its name.
"Er, " you say.
He laughs, antennae rubbing together, "No actual blood involved. Old sylth merc taught it to me when I first arrived on the Disk, helps keep you on your feet after a rough fight. Long nights too. Taste's not bad either."
You take a deep sniff. Now that you're paying attention it doesn't smell too bad.
Sure it makes you feel like you've got a nosebleed leaking down the back of your throat, but it also has a bright sort of freshness to it. A clean sort of scent.
"Okay," you say, grabbing an empty mug and pouring yourself a cup of the — not actually very sappy or bloody — drink.
Opal-Nine waits for you to take your first sip. It surprises you with how sour is, not in an unpleasant way but definitely not in a way you were expecting either.
"Are you still certain about today? Could wait another day."
"No," you shake your head, "Spells need to settle more before I put them through their paces and we've lost enough time already. Your friends will be coming back through in… what, a month and a half? Two maybe. We're heading into more intact sections now, could be security systems still active in there; might take us a week or more to get through."
He sips from his own mug, head tilted. You can feel the raised eyebrow, despite the physical lack, and you just know Natya has been coaching him on 'handling' you.
You sigh.
"I'm not lying," a beat, "I also just really want to see what's down there."
Those sealed labs didn't manage to weather the centuries by luck. They were better protected against the ravages of time from the start, shielded by not only the rest of the wreck but also more powerful enchantments and technology. You might not know who the ship belonged to, or what they were protecting, but you know they wanted it to keep.
He laughs again, antennae squeaking faintly.
You go back to drinking your 'Blood Sap,' rolling the sour liquid across your throat, and note the undertone of savory aftertaste that clings to your tongue, feeling it tingle gently across the roof of your mouth and down your larynx. Almost the second it hits your stomach you swear you can feel it spread out into your body. Soon enough you're blinking away the groggy crust from your eyes and shaking off the fatigue from your body.
Within just a few minutes you feel ready to really take on the day. Opal-Nine makes sure you get some actual food in you before you set off.
For the first hour you stick to the edges of the outer layer, circling around to the fore of the vessel where the shell opened to allow direct access to the core labs. Or would have if the broad passageway hadn't collapsed all the way down to the inner hull, a chasm three meters wide and over forty meters across. You think you might be able to scoot along the right edge of the chasm.
And it would have to be you, there's no way Opal-Nine could manage it; he's simply too large and bulky. Once you are across you could probably toss a line back and set up some sort of simple zip-line like thing.
But… you see a lot of places where the already thin edging of a ledge running along the right wall all but disappears.
You were quite hoping that you could simply walk into the core of the labs. That seems like a lost hope.
If you backtrack a bit, you know you can move into the second layer of the labs and from there you know you can eventually make your way to an access point to the same central corridor. That'll take a few days.
You might find something along the way.
There remain between 49 and 64 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.
[] Try shimmying along the ledge. (Risky. Immediate access to core.)
[] Backtrack and go through the higher-security lab sections to reach the core. (Less risky? Takes some time.)
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Backtrack and go through the higher-security lab sections to reach the core. (Less risky? Takes some time.)
We can spare a few days.
We can spare a few days.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Backtrack and go through the higher-security lab sections to reach the core. (Less risky? Takes some time.)
YUS IT LIIIIIIVVVEEESSS!
Now, if we can loot an animus/biocomputer to do the animating for us and presto! Basilisk goodest boi!
Afterwards, we graft machine guns unto its back.
Pretty cool scene Cuttlefish.
Hmm
Time to make our other disciplines shine!
Also, how good is the Basilisk's Jaw strength?
[] Write-in: Assess the nearby ruins and see which of the detritus around is fit to become workable material to make for a slapstick bridge fit to carry the group's weight. Have the basilisk rip out said salvageable material if it's too entrenched to the ship.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
How intelligent is Nosta? We can likely organize a zip-line if we send her across, the question would be how to make the other end stick.
Can we make something that would solder/glue itself onto the metal upon remote command? Then we can direct Nosta to drop it on the opposite side, and use it as the other end of the line. Once on the other side, we can strrengthen it to hold Opal's weight.
I think a man who just distilled life energy could figure out a glue bomb.
Can we make something that would solder/glue itself onto the metal upon remote command? Then we can direct Nosta to drop it on the opposite side, and use it as the other end of the line. Once on the other side, we can strrengthen it to hold Opal's weight.
I think a man who just distilled life energy could figure out a glue bomb.
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CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Similar to a large crocodile/alligator. You only have a vague idea because you don't have the detailed anatomical knowledge necessary to know; you have a basic knowledge of biology and anatomy, but not an expert one.
You're pretty sure building a bridge capable of supporting yours and Opal-Nine's weight, plus anything you want to bring back would take longer than backtracking.
Nosta is fairly intelligent, smart enough to understand an incredibly diverse array of 'commands' and refuse them if she doesn't feel like it. You think she would readily understand the concept of a zip-line. Problem is indeed, that she doesn't have the dexterity to tie knots securely enough to get even just you across.
As for a glue-bomb of some sort. You don't think you can do anything like that with what you have on hand or can find in the ship itself. But... Opal-Nine pointed out some 'lath milk' trees with sap that can apparently be used to make rubber. You might be able to do something with that. Or some other sap or other plant product you might find.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
[x] Create a makeshift glue bomb from the local tree sap, tie it to a rope that can hold your weight, and have Nosta carry and drop it to the other side. Detonate the bomb to create a zip-line or a safety line for you to use while on the ledge.
I want to get inside the core ASAP. We may want to reschedule our tasks depending on wht we find there.
I want to get inside the core ASAP. We may want to reschedule our tasks depending on wht we find there.
[x] Create a makeshift glue bomb from the local tree sap, tie it to a rope that can hold your weight, and have Nosta carry and drop it to the other side. Detonate the bomb to create a zip-line or a safety line for you to use while on the ledge. Instruct Opal-Nine to contine to build up a better bridge with the surrounding scraps and glue to secure our loot added weight with a faster escape route if need be.
Nevill's plan but with added instructions to get us out of the core fast as needed.
Nevill's plan but with added instructions to get us out of the core fast as needed.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
I don't think the bridge is feasible (the rift is 40 meters across), and it would take Opal out of the equation for a week, if not more. But I don't mind it if that's what people want to do.
A rope/cable conveyor remains the fastest way to transport goods, or even people, and we can set one up fairly trivially once we get across.
A rope/cable conveyor remains the fastest way to transport goods, or even people, and we can set one up fairly trivially once we get across.
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CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Vote will stay open until at least Wednesday.
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
That's another tie. I'll roll a die or something to break it.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
[x] Create a makeshift glue bomb from the local tree sap, tie it to a rope that can hold your weight, and have Nosta carry and drop it to the other side. Detonate the bomb to create a zip-line or a safety line for you to use while on the ledge.
I'll vote for mad science, sure
I'll vote for mad science, sure
Day 75 - Gluebombs
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Winner: Tie. Broken by dice roll for; Create a makeshift glue bomb from the local tree sap, tie it to a rope that can hold your weight, and have Nosta carry and drop it to the other side. Detonate the bomb to create a zip-line or a safety line for you to use while on the ledge.
Day 75 - Gluebombs
You stare at the chasm before you.
And stare.
And stare some more.
"I have an idea," you say.
Opal-Nine's antennae twitch, one of his forelimbs gestures open in question.
" 'Lath milk' can be used to make rubber, right?" He nods.
You continue with a grin, "Nosta can carry the weight of some rope no problem, but tying it off— well, no dexterity," you wiggle your fingers demonstratively, "But if I can make some sort of adhesive, something quick setting that'll bind to this stuff, " you slap the wall, "Well, that's problem solved, yeah?"
His mandibles click thoughtfully, Opal-Nine settles back against the wall behind him, resting the pointed tips of his forelimbs against the floor and stroking their serrated back edges with his mid-limb hands.
"You think such a… concoction will be able to hold our weight?"
"Doesn't strictly need to, spread it out over a large enough area and the polymer chains can— " his head tilts sharply, you shake your head, "I'll test that. If I can't get it strong enough, well then we've only lost a couple of days."
"Good. What do you need?"
Back on Golac there's a species of cactus that lives down near the equator, just on the outskirts of the wetter temperate band where actual forests grow in some of the wider canyons and valleys, that is farmed in huge rubber plantations. Thousands of kilometers of carefully irrigated hard scrabble scrubland that grow nothing but these cacti. You've worked with it in the past, though not in its raw form, and it got into everything and stuck like a rocktick on a miner's ass.
Couldn't get it out from behind your ears for months and kept finding bits of it stuck to your hair for weeks.
"Huh?"
Opal-Nine stares at you expectantly.
"Oh, uh… just the 'lath milk,' and I- I think they use pine resin back home, to make it sticky."
He pauses, then leans slowly in towards you until his antennae are nearly touching the top of your head.
"You have not done this before?"
"Nope," you say cheerfully, "Should be fun."
You spent the rest of the day hiking through the forest. Watching small darting forms racing along and between branches. Listening to birdsong echo in the distance, their tinny fluting tunes reverberating through the shadow-drenched and vaulted halls of the forest. You walked between towering broad leafed giants and small striplings bowing under the weight of a few leaves; your eyes sharply peeled for black barked dwarfs amidst the sea of green and gray and brown.
Well.
Opal-Nine did most of the looking. He at least had some idea of what the 'lath milk' trees look like.
Nosta soared overhead, stretching her wings in an elongated spiral. Occasionally you saw her dive through the dense foliage and pluck something small from the branches, doing much better than you would have expected of her. Not many forests around Pravj.
But then again you have been in Demarch for almost two months. Plenty of time for her to adapt.
Finally, around the time the sun was starting to dip below the Disk you finally found a 'lath milk' tree. Over three meters tall with a straight trunk and smooth, waxy black bark it was only a 'dwarf' in comparison to the rest of the forest. Back home it would have been at home nestled at the center of some rich guild master's compound. Thick, dark green leaves hung heavily from thin, drooping branches, dragged down by fuzzy, light-green fruit that almost looked like an apple.
You ran your hands along the trunk, feeling the smooth, pebbly surface.
Another lay about fifteen meters away, bent long and low next to a gaping crater. Leading away a trail of churned earth led your eyes to the discarded corpse of the giant oak which had once stood in that spot, its torn roots still clinging to clumps of soil. There were no other signs of violence.
Not even crushed grass or snapped branches.
Whatever had done it, had only apparently taken issue with the one tree.
And seemed to be long gone, when you asked Nosta to look for anything large enough to do that.
You only had a little time to investigate how to get the sap — the titular 'lath milk' — briefly before the light began to fade. Opal-Nine could identify the tree easily enough, but knew nothing of how the actual harvesting was done and you had only a vague schoolkid's understanding of how it was done back on Golac with the cacti. Clearly you had to get the sap out. After scratching at the bark for a little while you were fairly certain it was in the trunk, rather than in the young branches or fruit.
On the second day you began figuring out how to extract it.
It was a laborious process to do alone, but Opal-Nine had begged off and stayed back at camp, taking care of things there. And so with a collection of pans, knives, and canteens you set to work.
First you cut away a portion of the bark. Just a few centimeters deep. Bored holes out. Any deeper than the bark and out seeped a pungent, clearish liquid that quickly set the sap into a hard, unyielding scab. Long and angled too, to let the sap run down otherwise the flow was too little. Short cuts barely produced a thimble full after more than a couple of hours.
Getting it from the trunk into your containers was its own issue. Just setting the pans and canteens against the bark meant that only about a third actually ended up where you wanted it, with the rest ending up on the forest floor, mixed into the dirt, or stuck to your own hands and clothes. You sacrificed one of your canteens to create several crude spigots that you could jam into the bark just below the end of the cut you made which served to collect the sap and direct it to falling away from the trunk. That way you were able to collect most of the sap in your pans and canteen.
By the time you've worked all of that out it's late afternoon and both trees are only producing a bare trickle of sap. You decide to find some new trees to harvest from.
That takes you the rest of the afternoon and you're only able to actually properly harvest the new tree you find the day after. All in all you end up with a little under two cups of sap in one of your pans, about a quarter of that as a ring of coagulated stuff at the edge.
You were not able to find anything to make it stickier, largely because you didn't really have any idea of how to do that; you had some vague notion of using resin, but you quickly realize you don't actually know how to find resin. Though you're pretty sure it comes from trees. But what trees and what part? That part you have no real idea.
Growing up in Pravj you didn't really learn that sort of thing and your apprenticeship didn't really cover it either.
Still you think you have what you need to make something that will do the job.
You stare at the congealed lump in front of you.
Not so much with your eyes, though they remain fixed on the congealed mass of rubber, but with your— well you don't really have a name for the sense, but whatever it is that lets you sense life-energy that's what you're 'staring' with. Though at times it also feels like holding something in your hand, or taking a long deep breath.
Or like a limb that went to sleep.
It's not something you have a good explanation for. But you use it nonetheless.
Right now you're trying to get a deeper sense of how the polymer chains in the rubber are organized. You're also comparing them to how they were when you briefly felt the liquid before you went to bed. So far it's been very… fuzzy.
Like trying to grab dry sand in your hand, feeling it lose shape and flow through the cracks in your fingers, or like trying to push through a crowded market, being pressed against a dozen sticky bodies and jostled on all sides.
Now it feels like being held at the end of a long rope, pulled in different directions by equal and opposite forces.
The life-energy in the rubber flows sluggishly back and forth along twisting lines that swirl and curl and sweep back in on themselves around and around and around. Reaching out to pull experimentally on a part. Those lines unbend and straighten in tandem with the deformation of the material, almost flowing like water into their new shape and forming a tightly layered mat of interlocked threads. You let go. In an instant they snap back and resume their chaotic tangle.
Hmm.
Opal-Nine has gone into the wreck and Nosta is off hunting or flying, amusing herself as usual, so you are alone.
You stare at the lump of rubber.
Heat did not return it to last night's liquid state, it merely loosened the tangles and allowed the polymer chains to flow freely around each other. Once cooled they quickly re-tangled themselves, solidifying much faster than yesterday. Not surprising. You already knew there was some sort of chemical change going on for the initial transition, you're just not sure what that chemical change is and how to reverse it.
So you go back to the feeling of it last night and compare it again to how it feels now, to how it felt when it was melted — like oil slick skin on glass.
Melted; the polymers slipped against each other, but they remained long-chains.
Solid; the polymers are a mass of tangles all woven together until they're all but impossible to separate. Pulling stretches the chains almost parallel with each other.
Liquid; you could feel small bits of polymer bumping up against each other, no less tightly packed, but somehow distinct bits of stuff. Separate. Self-contained. Little bundles of chains wrapped up in some sort of packet.
You can imagine it, knots of thread wrapped in a sheathing of protein cordoning off polymer chains so they don't bind together into vast mats of interlinked polymer.
That's the state you need to get the rubber back to.
Reconstituting the natural protein packaging is a little beyond what you think you can accomplish with both your current skills and resources, so instead you'll have to go with a more intensive method using life-energy itself. That will end up making it easier to activate once the 'bomb' is in place. You'll just pay a bigger upfront cost in terms of how drained it'll leave you.
Of course, your biggest initial hurdle is actually separating the solidified rubber into smaller bits of polymer that you can wrap up. Ideally you think some sort of acid would be best. You don't have any acid on hand though.
Heat'll do. Obviously.
But…
You have something of an idea.
Life-energy flows and congregates around living things, but how it determines what 'living' means is — you understand — something of a debated topic. Prosthetic limbs attached to a person can qualify apparently. As can certain kinds of automata.
You imagine there's some sort of intensely complicated and important mystical mechanics at work in that, details which are unfortunately unknown to you right now, but the important bit is that life-energy imparts a certain malleability onto otherwise static material in sufficient concentration. So what if you simply flood the rubber with life-energy? Could it act as a sort of acid? Allow you to disassociate the rubber into smaller bits? It seems like a reasonable theory and one that you don't really see a better time to test out than right now.
Walking to the edge of the hangar you set the pan in a path of tall grass, beside several thick hanging vines. Then you sit down in front of it, close your eyes, and take several deep breaths as you extend your sense of life-energy out.
And out and out until you start to feel the strain of it.
Like a limb stretched out to its limits. Burning just on the edge of pain.
You breathe in, drawing every loose scrap of life-energy you can capture in. Dragging them back and back and back until your lungs ache.
When you breathe out again you pour all that life-energy into the pot.
It roils and bubbles. Seeping through the metal and air in tiny creeping tendrils that you have to fight back into the pot, folding them back in on themselves continuously until they start to sink, slowly oh so slowly, into the rubber. You can feel the sweat beading on your forehead, your heart beating thickly against your chest.
Drop by drop and sliver by sliver the energy goes into the mass in the pan.
You know it's not going to be enough.
So you breathe out again until you feel the burning again, and then in, and then out. Repeating the whole process over, folding in the life-energy.
Then again. Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six times. Hours have passed, the sun is starting to drop back down in the sky. That's how long it takes before the polymer chains finally start to shiver and twitch in their little bundles.
It is fascinating to watch the rubber bubble and sag, partway between solid and liquid, as trapped life-energy seeps into the voids between chains and wraps itself around in intricately gnarled webs. You aren't done yet though.
Seven, eight, nine. Three more times you repeat the process before finally the rubbery collapses in on itself, all at once, sloughing off the edges of the pan like the sides of a rivery canyon giving way, to gather in the center of the pan into a rippling pill of rubber. Not quite liquid or solid, not flowing or static. Caught on the edge of bubbling, thin veins pulsing up out of the mass of rubber as the infused life-energy roils and tries to escape.
You get to work. Fast.
Taking bits of that churning, boiling life-energy you bend and weave it into tiny patches that you then wrap around small bundles of polymer. First in ones and twos. Then in whole sheets.
Faster and faster you work, trying desperately to keep hold of the boiling swirl of life-energy. Every moment a test as it pushes against the bounds of the rubber, of your grip, seeking to slip free like a caged beasts; your mouth is dry like the high deserts of Golac, a barren wasteless of packed earth and rock, there is a vice behind your eyes, squeezing hard and hot. Sweat rolls down your neck and back, skin sticks together.
You cannot stop, cannot let go.
It is all you can do to keep making your packets of polymers, to keep taking life-energy and wrapping it around bundles of chains. They bounce off one another, long thin strands of life-energy stretching between them, thinning into spider silk threads that snap and fray into nothingness.
Long shadows stretch across the grasslands. You breathe steadily and keep your focus tightly on those thousands, millions, of tiny bundles of polymers, the uncountable filaments of life-energy reaching out too—
Something snaps. Energy recoils and rebounds, patterns etching and unraveling themselves in seconds in a cascade of lightless fire that tastes like sour and slick blood.
Many different things in quick succession.
You can see them perfectly, though your eyes are blinded by a flash of verdant red-blue light; first your crude spell frays and disintegrates like spun-sugar in hot water and the strands of life-energy twist themselves into a cyclone. Something like a heat-haze fuzzes at the edge of the cyclone, a wavering boundary where life-energy becomes something else. Next, bits of polymer at the edge of the mass of rubber are abruptly dropped from the mix of life-energy and polymer, rabidly crystallizing as they cross the transition boundary. Then the vortex of life-energy collapses in on itself, spinning through more and more of the rubber and spitting out chalky white bits. And finally, it explodes a fraction of a second later.
Heat bites your face and arms. Bits of crystallizing rubber splatter all across you.
You rock back.
Seconds later you are still blinking away the after images, working your jaw to try and get your ears to pop.Your head feels like someone has been jumping on it.
Finally after a good forty seconds you are able to think a straight though. The first thing you do is look in the pan, where a white, rubbery looking ball sits at the bottom, surrounded by flecks of something that crumbled into a fine powder the second you touch them. You can feel more on your skin, cracking and disintegrating every time you move.
You reach for the ball, it squishes under your fingers as you grip it. Of the nearly six-hundred grams of rubber you had before, maybe a fifth of that remains, a ball smaller than your fist.
Solid.
Not the outcome you were hoping for. You frown, closing your fist on the ball, and nearly jump out of your skin as it promptly bursts in your hand, spurting out between your fingers to drip down in long strands.
You blink.
That… is not normal.
Picking up one of the strands with a finger you wiggle it back and forth. It seems solid enough.
Dropping into your palm you see it again splatter like water.
This is how Opal-Nine finds you when he comes back an hour later, testing the limits of what you have accidentally created. Apparently you've managed to make something that is solid at rest, but with pressure behaves like a liquid. Literally the exact opposite of your intended result.
He peers at your experiment thoughtfully, "That is not what you intended."
"No, " you laugh, "I'kll have to go out tomorrow and get more rubber. Try again. I think I know what went wrong."
Well, you know several things that went wrong. You're not sure if that means you can fix it, but you're going to try.
"I have found a route through," Opal-Nine says, interrupting your thoughts.
You shake your head, turning to blink up at him.
He stares back. You think. Multifaceted eyes make it difficult to tell.
"What?"
"Many of the high-security labs are sealed, but not all. There's an open path through most of the section, leaves us just a few dozen meters off the main connection to the central labs."
"That what you were doing? While I was— " you gesture to the remains of your experiment.
He nods. You frown, that's upsetting.
"Well," you say, swallowing the lump of disappointment in your throat, "Seems like that was the right call, given everything. We can start early tomorrow morning, who knows maybe we'll— "
Opal-Nine stops you with a hand on your shoulder, leaning down to put himself level with you.
"I have seen many geniuses spend fruitless days on brilliant solutions that never hatch."
You nod, but a question burns at the back of your throat, "Why'd you let me waste time on this?"
His antennae twitch in laughter, "Because… sometimes they work."
Early next morning you two set out and Opal-Nine leads you through a twisting maze of half open doors, partially collapsed passageways, collapsed walls, and labs. You're not surprised it took him days to wind his way through this mess.
Several times you think you know what direction you're going in next only for him to lead you in the complete opposite direction, seemingly backtracking for several long minutes before you turn another corner or slide through another gap in a wall and turn right around again. Each step increases the intensity of the hazy, fossilized life-energy in the air. Even these brief passing glimpses of the higher security labs are giving you a better picture of how this entire facility was used. Though all of the actual equipment and materials has been taken, you can tell from the configuration of rooms and furniture that these labs would have been more specialized.
Less generic and more purpose built.
And definitely involving experimentation of live specimens from the hundreds of empty enclosures you pass, some still containing the charred remains of their long dead inhabitants. These labs were very carefully sterilized after everything useful was taken out.
You're also seeing more operating suites. Though these lack the viewing galleries the ones in the outer labs had.
From everything you've seen you're fairly certain that this ship specialized in live-specimen augmentation and creation.
It takes roughly an hour to reach the end of Opal-Nine's path through most of the lab section. You end up standing at the end of a long row of glass walled enclosures of varying sizes before a sealed door.
He taps a crystal panel beside the door after a moment and for a brief second there is a whine in the walls and a flicker of light the strobes across the panel.
"We could go a bit further in, but this actually seems to have some power still. Might still be something this way."
How do you want to proceed?
There remain between 43 and 58 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.
[] Pry open the door manually. (Faster?)
[] Try to 'hack' the door open with your Life-Shaping. (???)
[] Go the other route. (Safer?)
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
Day 75 - Gluebombs
You stare at the chasm before you.
And stare.
And stare some more.
"I have an idea," you say.
Opal-Nine's antennae twitch, one of his forelimbs gestures open in question.
" 'Lath milk' can be used to make rubber, right?" He nods.
You continue with a grin, "Nosta can carry the weight of some rope no problem, but tying it off— well, no dexterity," you wiggle your fingers demonstratively, "But if I can make some sort of adhesive, something quick setting that'll bind to this stuff, " you slap the wall, "Well, that's problem solved, yeah?"
His mandibles click thoughtfully, Opal-Nine settles back against the wall behind him, resting the pointed tips of his forelimbs against the floor and stroking their serrated back edges with his mid-limb hands.
"You think such a… concoction will be able to hold our weight?"
"Doesn't strictly need to, spread it out over a large enough area and the polymer chains can— " his head tilts sharply, you shake your head, "I'll test that. If I can't get it strong enough, well then we've only lost a couple of days."
"Good. What do you need?"
Back on Golac there's a species of cactus that lives down near the equator, just on the outskirts of the wetter temperate band where actual forests grow in some of the wider canyons and valleys, that is farmed in huge rubber plantations. Thousands of kilometers of carefully irrigated hard scrabble scrubland that grow nothing but these cacti. You've worked with it in the past, though not in its raw form, and it got into everything and stuck like a rocktick on a miner's ass.
Couldn't get it out from behind your ears for months and kept finding bits of it stuck to your hair for weeks.
"Huh?"
Opal-Nine stares at you expectantly.
"Oh, uh… just the 'lath milk,' and I- I think they use pine resin back home, to make it sticky."
He pauses, then leans slowly in towards you until his antennae are nearly touching the top of your head.
"You have not done this before?"
"Nope," you say cheerfully, "Should be fun."
You spent the rest of the day hiking through the forest. Watching small darting forms racing along and between branches. Listening to birdsong echo in the distance, their tinny fluting tunes reverberating through the shadow-drenched and vaulted halls of the forest. You walked between towering broad leafed giants and small striplings bowing under the weight of a few leaves; your eyes sharply peeled for black barked dwarfs amidst the sea of green and gray and brown.
Well.
Opal-Nine did most of the looking. He at least had some idea of what the 'lath milk' trees look like.
Nosta soared overhead, stretching her wings in an elongated spiral. Occasionally you saw her dive through the dense foliage and pluck something small from the branches, doing much better than you would have expected of her. Not many forests around Pravj.
But then again you have been in Demarch for almost two months. Plenty of time for her to adapt.
Finally, around the time the sun was starting to dip below the Disk you finally found a 'lath milk' tree. Over three meters tall with a straight trunk and smooth, waxy black bark it was only a 'dwarf' in comparison to the rest of the forest. Back home it would have been at home nestled at the center of some rich guild master's compound. Thick, dark green leaves hung heavily from thin, drooping branches, dragged down by fuzzy, light-green fruit that almost looked like an apple.
You ran your hands along the trunk, feeling the smooth, pebbly surface.
Another lay about fifteen meters away, bent long and low next to a gaping crater. Leading away a trail of churned earth led your eyes to the discarded corpse of the giant oak which had once stood in that spot, its torn roots still clinging to clumps of soil. There were no other signs of violence.
Not even crushed grass or snapped branches.
Whatever had done it, had only apparently taken issue with the one tree.
And seemed to be long gone, when you asked Nosta to look for anything large enough to do that.
You only had a little time to investigate how to get the sap — the titular 'lath milk' — briefly before the light began to fade. Opal-Nine could identify the tree easily enough, but knew nothing of how the actual harvesting was done and you had only a vague schoolkid's understanding of how it was done back on Golac with the cacti. Clearly you had to get the sap out. After scratching at the bark for a little while you were fairly certain it was in the trunk, rather than in the young branches or fruit.
On the second day you began figuring out how to extract it.
It was a laborious process to do alone, but Opal-Nine had begged off and stayed back at camp, taking care of things there. And so with a collection of pans, knives, and canteens you set to work.
First you cut away a portion of the bark. Just a few centimeters deep. Bored holes out. Any deeper than the bark and out seeped a pungent, clearish liquid that quickly set the sap into a hard, unyielding scab. Long and angled too, to let the sap run down otherwise the flow was too little. Short cuts barely produced a thimble full after more than a couple of hours.
Getting it from the trunk into your containers was its own issue. Just setting the pans and canteens against the bark meant that only about a third actually ended up where you wanted it, with the rest ending up on the forest floor, mixed into the dirt, or stuck to your own hands and clothes. You sacrificed one of your canteens to create several crude spigots that you could jam into the bark just below the end of the cut you made which served to collect the sap and direct it to falling away from the trunk. That way you were able to collect most of the sap in your pans and canteen.
By the time you've worked all of that out it's late afternoon and both trees are only producing a bare trickle of sap. You decide to find some new trees to harvest from.
That takes you the rest of the afternoon and you're only able to actually properly harvest the new tree you find the day after. All in all you end up with a little under two cups of sap in one of your pans, about a quarter of that as a ring of coagulated stuff at the edge.
You were not able to find anything to make it stickier, largely because you didn't really have any idea of how to do that; you had some vague notion of using resin, but you quickly realize you don't actually know how to find resin. Though you're pretty sure it comes from trees. But what trees and what part? That part you have no real idea.
Growing up in Pravj you didn't really learn that sort of thing and your apprenticeship didn't really cover it either.
Still you think you have what you need to make something that will do the job.
You stare at the congealed lump in front of you.
Not so much with your eyes, though they remain fixed on the congealed mass of rubber, but with your— well you don't really have a name for the sense, but whatever it is that lets you sense life-energy that's what you're 'staring' with. Though at times it also feels like holding something in your hand, or taking a long deep breath.
Or like a limb that went to sleep.
It's not something you have a good explanation for. But you use it nonetheless.
Right now you're trying to get a deeper sense of how the polymer chains in the rubber are organized. You're also comparing them to how they were when you briefly felt the liquid before you went to bed. So far it's been very… fuzzy.
Like trying to grab dry sand in your hand, feeling it lose shape and flow through the cracks in your fingers, or like trying to push through a crowded market, being pressed against a dozen sticky bodies and jostled on all sides.
Now it feels like being held at the end of a long rope, pulled in different directions by equal and opposite forces.
The life-energy in the rubber flows sluggishly back and forth along twisting lines that swirl and curl and sweep back in on themselves around and around and around. Reaching out to pull experimentally on a part. Those lines unbend and straighten in tandem with the deformation of the material, almost flowing like water into their new shape and forming a tightly layered mat of interlocked threads. You let go. In an instant they snap back and resume their chaotic tangle.
Hmm.
Opal-Nine has gone into the wreck and Nosta is off hunting or flying, amusing herself as usual, so you are alone.
You stare at the lump of rubber.
Heat did not return it to last night's liquid state, it merely loosened the tangles and allowed the polymer chains to flow freely around each other. Once cooled they quickly re-tangled themselves, solidifying much faster than yesterday. Not surprising. You already knew there was some sort of chemical change going on for the initial transition, you're just not sure what that chemical change is and how to reverse it.
So you go back to the feeling of it last night and compare it again to how it feels now, to how it felt when it was melted — like oil slick skin on glass.
Melted; the polymers slipped against each other, but they remained long-chains.
Solid; the polymers are a mass of tangles all woven together until they're all but impossible to separate. Pulling stretches the chains almost parallel with each other.
Liquid; you could feel small bits of polymer bumping up against each other, no less tightly packed, but somehow distinct bits of stuff. Separate. Self-contained. Little bundles of chains wrapped up in some sort of packet.
You can imagine it, knots of thread wrapped in a sheathing of protein cordoning off polymer chains so they don't bind together into vast mats of interlinked polymer.
That's the state you need to get the rubber back to.
Reconstituting the natural protein packaging is a little beyond what you think you can accomplish with both your current skills and resources, so instead you'll have to go with a more intensive method using life-energy itself. That will end up making it easier to activate once the 'bomb' is in place. You'll just pay a bigger upfront cost in terms of how drained it'll leave you.
Of course, your biggest initial hurdle is actually separating the solidified rubber into smaller bits of polymer that you can wrap up. Ideally you think some sort of acid would be best. You don't have any acid on hand though.
Heat'll do. Obviously.
But…
You have something of an idea.
Life-energy flows and congregates around living things, but how it determines what 'living' means is — you understand — something of a debated topic. Prosthetic limbs attached to a person can qualify apparently. As can certain kinds of automata.
You imagine there's some sort of intensely complicated and important mystical mechanics at work in that, details which are unfortunately unknown to you right now, but the important bit is that life-energy imparts a certain malleability onto otherwise static material in sufficient concentration. So what if you simply flood the rubber with life-energy? Could it act as a sort of acid? Allow you to disassociate the rubber into smaller bits? It seems like a reasonable theory and one that you don't really see a better time to test out than right now.
Walking to the edge of the hangar you set the pan in a path of tall grass, beside several thick hanging vines. Then you sit down in front of it, close your eyes, and take several deep breaths as you extend your sense of life-energy out.
And out and out until you start to feel the strain of it.
Like a limb stretched out to its limits. Burning just on the edge of pain.
You breathe in, drawing every loose scrap of life-energy you can capture in. Dragging them back and back and back until your lungs ache.
When you breathe out again you pour all that life-energy into the pot.
It roils and bubbles. Seeping through the metal and air in tiny creeping tendrils that you have to fight back into the pot, folding them back in on themselves continuously until they start to sink, slowly oh so slowly, into the rubber. You can feel the sweat beading on your forehead, your heart beating thickly against your chest.
Drop by drop and sliver by sliver the energy goes into the mass in the pan.
You know it's not going to be enough.
So you breathe out again until you feel the burning again, and then in, and then out. Repeating the whole process over, folding in the life-energy.
Then again. Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six times. Hours have passed, the sun is starting to drop back down in the sky. That's how long it takes before the polymer chains finally start to shiver and twitch in their little bundles.
It is fascinating to watch the rubber bubble and sag, partway between solid and liquid, as trapped life-energy seeps into the voids between chains and wraps itself around in intricately gnarled webs. You aren't done yet though.
Seven, eight, nine. Three more times you repeat the process before finally the rubbery collapses in on itself, all at once, sloughing off the edges of the pan like the sides of a rivery canyon giving way, to gather in the center of the pan into a rippling pill of rubber. Not quite liquid or solid, not flowing or static. Caught on the edge of bubbling, thin veins pulsing up out of the mass of rubber as the infused life-energy roils and tries to escape.
You get to work. Fast.
Taking bits of that churning, boiling life-energy you bend and weave it into tiny patches that you then wrap around small bundles of polymer. First in ones and twos. Then in whole sheets.
Faster and faster you work, trying desperately to keep hold of the boiling swirl of life-energy. Every moment a test as it pushes against the bounds of the rubber, of your grip, seeking to slip free like a caged beasts; your mouth is dry like the high deserts of Golac, a barren wasteless of packed earth and rock, there is a vice behind your eyes, squeezing hard and hot. Sweat rolls down your neck and back, skin sticks together.
You cannot stop, cannot let go.
It is all you can do to keep making your packets of polymers, to keep taking life-energy and wrapping it around bundles of chains. They bounce off one another, long thin strands of life-energy stretching between them, thinning into spider silk threads that snap and fray into nothingness.
Long shadows stretch across the grasslands. You breathe steadily and keep your focus tightly on those thousands, millions, of tiny bundles of polymers, the uncountable filaments of life-energy reaching out too—
Something snaps. Energy recoils and rebounds, patterns etching and unraveling themselves in seconds in a cascade of lightless fire that tastes like sour and slick blood.
Many different things in quick succession.
You can see them perfectly, though your eyes are blinded by a flash of verdant red-blue light; first your crude spell frays and disintegrates like spun-sugar in hot water and the strands of life-energy twist themselves into a cyclone. Something like a heat-haze fuzzes at the edge of the cyclone, a wavering boundary where life-energy becomes something else. Next, bits of polymer at the edge of the mass of rubber are abruptly dropped from the mix of life-energy and polymer, rabidly crystallizing as they cross the transition boundary. Then the vortex of life-energy collapses in on itself, spinning through more and more of the rubber and spitting out chalky white bits. And finally, it explodes a fraction of a second later.
Heat bites your face and arms. Bits of crystallizing rubber splatter all across you.
You rock back.
Seconds later you are still blinking away the after images, working your jaw to try and get your ears to pop.Your head feels like someone has been jumping on it.
Finally after a good forty seconds you are able to think a straight though. The first thing you do is look in the pan, where a white, rubbery looking ball sits at the bottom, surrounded by flecks of something that crumbled into a fine powder the second you touch them. You can feel more on your skin, cracking and disintegrating every time you move.
You reach for the ball, it squishes under your fingers as you grip it. Of the nearly six-hundred grams of rubber you had before, maybe a fifth of that remains, a ball smaller than your fist.
Solid.
Not the outcome you were hoping for. You frown, closing your fist on the ball, and nearly jump out of your skin as it promptly bursts in your hand, spurting out between your fingers to drip down in long strands.
You blink.
That… is not normal.
Picking up one of the strands with a finger you wiggle it back and forth. It seems solid enough.
Dropping into your palm you see it again splatter like water.
This is how Opal-Nine finds you when he comes back an hour later, testing the limits of what you have accidentally created. Apparently you've managed to make something that is solid at rest, but with pressure behaves like a liquid. Literally the exact opposite of your intended result.
He peers at your experiment thoughtfully, "That is not what you intended."
"No, " you laugh, "I'kll have to go out tomorrow and get more rubber. Try again. I think I know what went wrong."
Well, you know several things that went wrong. You're not sure if that means you can fix it, but you're going to try.
"I have found a route through," Opal-Nine says, interrupting your thoughts.
You shake your head, turning to blink up at him.
He stares back. You think. Multifaceted eyes make it difficult to tell.
"What?"
"Many of the high-security labs are sealed, but not all. There's an open path through most of the section, leaves us just a few dozen meters off the main connection to the central labs."
"That what you were doing? While I was— " you gesture to the remains of your experiment.
He nods. You frown, that's upsetting.
"Well," you say, swallowing the lump of disappointment in your throat, "Seems like that was the right call, given everything. We can start early tomorrow morning, who knows maybe we'll— "
Opal-Nine stops you with a hand on your shoulder, leaning down to put himself level with you.
"I have seen many geniuses spend fruitless days on brilliant solutions that never hatch."
You nod, but a question burns at the back of your throat, "Why'd you let me waste time on this?"
His antennae twitch in laughter, "Because… sometimes they work."
Early next morning you two set out and Opal-Nine leads you through a twisting maze of half open doors, partially collapsed passageways, collapsed walls, and labs. You're not surprised it took him days to wind his way through this mess.
Several times you think you know what direction you're going in next only for him to lead you in the complete opposite direction, seemingly backtracking for several long minutes before you turn another corner or slide through another gap in a wall and turn right around again. Each step increases the intensity of the hazy, fossilized life-energy in the air. Even these brief passing glimpses of the higher security labs are giving you a better picture of how this entire facility was used. Though all of the actual equipment and materials has been taken, you can tell from the configuration of rooms and furniture that these labs would have been more specialized.
Less generic and more purpose built.
And definitely involving experimentation of live specimens from the hundreds of empty enclosures you pass, some still containing the charred remains of their long dead inhabitants. These labs were very carefully sterilized after everything useful was taken out.
You're also seeing more operating suites. Though these lack the viewing galleries the ones in the outer labs had.
From everything you've seen you're fairly certain that this ship specialized in live-specimen augmentation and creation.
It takes roughly an hour to reach the end of Opal-Nine's path through most of the lab section. You end up standing at the end of a long row of glass walled enclosures of varying sizes before a sealed door.
He taps a crystal panel beside the door after a moment and for a brief second there is a whine in the walls and a flicker of light the strobes across the panel.
"We could go a bit further in, but this actually seems to have some power still. Might still be something this way."
How do you want to proceed?
There remain between 43 and 58 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.
[] Pry open the door manually. (Faster?)
[] Try to 'hack' the door open with your Life-Shaping. (???)
[] Go the other route. (Safer?)
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
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