Play 2 Wage: Linked

What was once an empty room centered on three glowing vents, was now a hive of activity. Two dozen pits had been carved into the basalt floor, some of which had been covered with domed shells of quick-drying cement that the dwarves could create by melting stone with their saliva, others had open or closed channels that connected them in series.

Two of the vents had been entirely covered with stacked low density quartz fire bricks, one of the first things the dwarves had started crafting almost immediately. One kiln set to roasting ores and the other set to melting down our first batch of copper. There was a short argument between Bomilik and Lokralda over which vents to use for what, and I learned that each of the three had different properties.

The brightest of them, the one giving off the light that cast flickering shadows around the room, was lined with a scaly bright yellow-hot metal and spewed a blistering mix of helium and argon that Lokralda claimed must be over 2500 imperial degrees. The second was unlined and simply carved through the basalt floor of the cavern, and was venting carbon dioxide at about 800 degrees. While the third sulfur encrusted hell-hole spat out a mix of steam and sulfur oxides at a cooler 650.

The heat, sweat, and sulfurous smell of the room was starting to become my new normal, after spending a few hours waiting around and helping with whatever small tasks needed an extra set of hands. All of the dwarves had stripped off and ripped up their initiates robes, and we looked like a group of ragged beggars covered in bandages, soot, and sweat as we toiled in the dimly lit chamber.

I watched from my doorway as Lokralda carefully poured out the first of the purified copper into a ingot mold, which hissed and spit before cracking down the middle and leaking some of the metal onto the ground around it. She cursed and placed the crudely crafted graphite crucible back into the sagging high-temp kiln and shook out the flaming mittens she had crafted from most of her robes to grip it with.

I walked over, stunned that she had managed to hold the thing for so long. “Can I help pour that?” I held up my heat proof gauntlets.

She frowned up at me from where she crouched, and while her frown turned into scowl, she also nodded. “Yeah, yeah, good idea. I forgot you had those mitts.”

I waited for the metal to heat back up within the crucible while she laid out some more of the hastily made ingot molds, testing their soundness by flicking them with a finger and listening to the noise it made. She pushed one of the molds closer to me and pointed at it.

“That one first, then move to the others.” She continued to test and line up more of the molds while we waited.

I nodded and edged my way back up to the crucible again, peeking through the intense heat coming off of the kiln for a moment before retreating and shaking my head. I blinked my eyes rapidly and took a breath of the cleaner air that rushed in from the entrances before the heat dragged it up to the huge hole in the ceiling.

“Not yet, it’s still red.” I told her.

She grunted and looked around aimlessly, then sat down heavily on the floor and started unwinding the layers of cloth from her hands. I cringed when I saw the cracked and burnt state of her fingers.

“Is it worth messing up your hands like that so early?” I asked.

She gave me a confused look, then shrugged. “It’ll flake off soon enough, we need proper metal as soon as possible, and they’re still functional.” She held up her blackened hands and wiggled her fingers for me to see.

“The translator is mangling this whole conversation. She used her front legs to grab the crucible, not her feelers. The ends are super tough and will grow back next time she molts. She doesn't even have hands, none of them do.”

Thanks, Max, I thought, grateful for once of his reminders that these things were actually huge bugs. I had been under the impression that the dwarves used the series of long antenna-like feelers that sprung from the back of their head for any sort of fine manipulations like gripping. The thought of them using their thickly carapaced legs as graspers had not occurred to me.

“Absolutely, sir. Just doing my job, heh.”

Ignoring Max’s reply, I smiled at Lokralda. “Good, I thought you were sacrificing your hands for the team. Does it hurt?”

She shrugged, “A little, but I can handle it.”

Sensing that she wanted to move on from that line of questioning, I smiled again before turning back to the kiln. I darted in and checked the temp of the molten copper in the crucible, and seeing it had heated back up to a blazing yellow puddle, I nodded to Lokralda and grabbed the paint-can sized vessel.

Reaching into the glowing interior of the kiln instantly burnt off all of the hair on my arms, and while I winced, I still managed to grab the crucible and pull it from the heat without dropping it. Huffing and puffing, I carefully carried it over to the lined up ingot molds and started to pour.

The first stream of yellow-hot liquid splashed against the floor and started to bubble, so I quickly corrected my aim and increased the angle to pour it faster. This time, the mold did not crack as the glowing metal filled the shape. I managed to fill up another of the molds before the metal cooled back down to orange and I returned it to the heat.

“Not bad, human.” Lokralda said with an approving nod.

I grinned back at her and pulled my gauntlets off to check over my forearms for burns. “Thanks, Lokra.” I said, trying out the nickname I had heard Sallis call her by earlier.

She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head slightly as she looked back at me, then she sighed. “Okay, I guess you're alright. Just don’t make it creepy, I’ve heard some stories about you humans.”

I crouched down next to the cooling ingot molds, watching the colors shift as the heat slowly drained away. “What sort of stories?”

She turned away and made an effort to rearrange the rags she wore. “You know, you're a bunch’a horny bastards. I heard you even have a rule for it, you’ll turn anything into something perverted.”

I turned to her, setting one knee down to the ground and giving her a confused look. “I’m not sure what rule you’re talking about, but that's not me.” I looked back to the cooling ingot before continuing. “I’ve seen what you dwarves look like under your bearded illusions. Trust me, I’m not interested, no matter what the rumors say.”

“Hah” She let out a harsh bark of laughter, drawing my attention back to her. I caught a glimpse of the first true smile I had seen grace her serious features. “Glad to hear we are in agreement.”

We continued on like that for hours, filling fresh crucibles and pouring ingots of mostly copper and tin while we roasted nickel ore over the cooler vent. We talked about ways to increase the heat so we could start to refine iron and steel, as the temperature of the hottest vents was just shy of the needed heat, but could not realistically come up with anything short of finding a vein of coal to create coke with.

I stopped paying attention to the clock as we worked, and we fell into a comfortable rhythm for our labor. After we had built up a stock of wavy unpolished ingots of copper and tin we tore down the kiln and built a new one out of slightly better materials. Bomilik brought up a crude bowl of concentrated zinc ore he had been working on with a blowpipe and a pit of regurgitated acid near the edge of the room, and we set to work roasting that in preparation to create a number of bronze alloys as our first actual metal.

Early the next morning, after working through the night and approaching a full 24 hours since the opening ceremony, the whole Row gathered around as Lokra and I picked up either end of a huge crucible. We carefully carried it over to a soapstone mold that Kikkelin had spent the last few hours carving out. Everyone silently watched us as we poured the vat of molten bronze into the beveled hole at the top of the mold, which was evidently called the downgate. The metal hissed, sizzled, and smoked as it disappeared into the split, carved, and rejoined block of stone.

We stopped as soon as the mold was filled and started spilling out from the second vent opening and flowing over the sides. We waddled back over to the kiln with our much lighter burden and replaced the crucible back into the heat, before stepping away from the furnace and collapsing onto the warm stone floor to recover. I pulled the crude wetted cloth mask from my face and pulled off my gauntlets, flexing my hands.

I looked down at my wrapped arms and laughed slightly, thinking I must look like some kind of scorched mummy. I had used most of the cloth strips from my robe to wrap my exposed skin as a basic protection from the heat of the fire, and it had slowly blackened and collected small burn holes throughout the night.

“We can start making some actual tools after this cools now, right?” I asked Lokra, who as our chief metallurgist had kept me around as a helper.

She nodded, declining to speak a reply out loud as she hurriedly scratched some calculations into the stone floor. I was starting to feel a little loopy from sleep deprivation, and continued to run my mouth despite her lack of attention.

“Handles will be nice. Tongs, hammers, chisels and drills. Oh, and we can hammer out some sheeting too, I need a way to carry water.”

She glanced over at me and gave me a look I couldn’t quite read through the soot on her face. “Sheet from what, copper? We’ve only hit the first milestone, we have a long way to go before…” She then turned back to her scratching of ratios and stock tallies.

“Sure, I need a canteen and copper would be perfect. I don’t mind a little green in my canteen.” I laughed at my own rhyme.

Lokralda scoffed and shook her head, replying without looking back at me. “You’re making less and less sense. You should take a rest cycle.”

“No, I’m good. You all are going strong, I can’t tap out yet.”

She looked up at me, and now that I had spent some time working closely with her I recognized the concern in her eyes. “You may be my clan brother, but you are not a dwarv. We all took our sleep cycles during the day of rest, and will not need another until after the trials and celebrations.”

I blinked in surprise at her. “You all are going to stay awake for more than a week? Wow.”

She shrugged and leaned back from her sprawling mess of information across the floor. “That is our way, we sleep for longer than you humans but have a much longer time between. Same with our nutritional intake, we eat even less often than we sleep.”

I scratched at my beard, noticing blackened flakes of soot drift down to the floor as I dislodged it from my face. “That’s pretty wild. Don’t you all like to drink though? I saw the alcohol display at the S-mart in Teurniting and all the tankards in the crowds along the way here. Even Chane seems to love his liquor.”

“Ah, yes. We do like our drink, that is something we are more in line with. We drink daily, but only eat roughly once per cycle, and sleep maybe twice a cycle. I’ve heard the older we get, the less sleep we need. It's rumored that Patriarch Duirtak has not slept since we arrived in Eora.”

I opened my mouth to reply, and then what she had said caught up with my mind. He had not slept in years? There was no way that could be true. I made a mental note to look into that when I had the time.

“While I can't confirm the rumor about Duirtak, she is telling you the truth. They don’t get their energy from mitochondria breaking down sugars like you humans. They power themselves through a sort of internal fission reaction, that's why they trade in uranium and drink so often.”

Blinking at the wild notion of nuclear powered beetles, I must have made a face or something because Lokra pressed the issue.

“You should take a rest, Nick. Link-out for a few hours, get some food and some sleep and return with a clear mind. It will be a quarter-day before we can crack the mold and start forging for real.”

I looked away, knowing that it would do me some good to get some food and sleep. I could feel the fuzzy weight and slight dissociation of having spent too long pushing too hard. Yet I struggled to admit it, even to myself. I couldn’t just abandon my Row in the middle of the trial we had worked so hard to prepare for.

Seeing that I was hesitant to agree, Lokra took the choice out of my hands and called out. “Kazek! Come order Nick to Link out and get some rest, he's gettin’ loopy on me.”

Our dour leader walked over to us from the slowly expanding map he had continued to add to and strategize over throughout the night and loomed over me, just a little taller than myself as I sat. He spent a moment staring at me before finally speaking.

“She’s right, I am aware of your special needs as a human. Take six hours and make sure you spend most of it sleeping, get a meal and return. That’s an order.” Without waiting for a reply, he walked back over to the map and started marking out a new section as the reports from the gathering and scouting teams continued to roll in.

I rose and started to follow him over to argue that I could hold out for longer, but I tripped over my own feet and face planted onto the warm stone floor after a single step. Groaning and admitting defeat, I realized he was right. I was already lacking sleep going into the trials to begin with, and even with Max’s help by adjusting my body chemistry, I was like to start doing more damage to our cause than good.

I turned my head as I lay on the floor and looked at Lokra, who was expertly containing her laughter. “Fine, fine. I’ll go. Send me a message if anything crazy happens, would ya?”

She broke into a big awkward smile and nodded. “Of course, go get some sleep. We can hold it down until ya get back.”

I sighed and stood up, moving to the end of the room to start a portal back to the Hub. A blurry few minutes later I was peeling out of the sweaty Link rig back in my apartment and disentangling myself from the waste collection system. I hobbled over to the doorway, not even bothering to grab my exported equipment from the impex along the way.

I hobbled up the short flight of steps and into the hallway, walking down to the kitchen to root through the refrigerator for anything immediately edible. After a few minutes of eating cold leftovers directly from the fridge I made my way back to my room, munching on a whole grilled piece of chicken left over from the previous day.

It did not even occur to me that Ali had broken her habit of waiting for me outside of the Link, or that she had not appeared when I entered the kitchen and raided the fridge. I was completely caught off guard when I found her in my room standing at the foot of the bed.

Her eyes were hard, as if she was about to charge into battle. Her mouth pulled into a strained smile as she greeted me with hesitant words while wearing only a few tiny patches of lacey black lingerie, her body contorted into a pose that made her toned athletic curves stand out obviously.

“Welcome home, Nick, sir. Please, let me help you relax.”