Play 2 Wage: Linked

After a hasty and quiet breakfast, plus another promise to Ali that we would go over the details of her new job title when I had the time. I took a short walk through the Hub and stepped through the portal and back into the depths of the Underhome.

The room was now brightly lit by a number of tall and skinny lamps that were aimed at the dark stone walls. The incandescent quicklime elements burned with such intensity that the spotlights they cast reflected off the dark walls was enough to light up the whole space.

Most of the dwarves of my Row looked to be elsewhere, leaving only a handful toiling in the vent room. They filled the cavern with the ringing song of hammer and anvil. Lurbolg was busy swinging a long sledgehammer away at a piece of scaly metal sheeting that Lokralda was holding with a set of tongs and beating with a smaller hammer in a steady rhythm.

I started to walk up to them as they worked, but Kazek spotted and waved me over from where he stood by the greatly expanded map.

“Kaninak, welcome back.” He greeted me, before turning back to the map. “I want you to join team one, digging out the collapsed tunnel.”

I examined the drawing on the floor, scattered with lumps of stone and ore samples. I took a second to look over the whole thing before I followed where he was pointing. The most obvious thing was that the twisting tunnels and caves looked to be entirely mapped out, with the collapsed tunnel being the only feature still not fully outlined.

“Alright, Kazek.” I agreed, still gazing at the map.

“Take the tools the smithing team has finished with you, too.” He rubbed at the scruff that was on the verge of becoming a full beard on his chin as he continued to study the map.

I nodded. “Okay, boss. I’m on it.” I replied as I turned away and strode across to the increasingly less crude workshop centered around the heat spewing vents in the center of the room.

Lokra eyed me as I approached, but did not pause her hammering of the sheeting they were working on. Ceasing the steady beating only after it cooled enough to be thrown back into the kiln. Given a moment to rest, Lurbolg set the head of his hammer onto the ground and leaned heavily against it to catch his breath as Lokra turned to me.

“I hope some rest found you well. We’ve made good progress.” She said.

I avoided answering the question and looked behind her skeptically, wondering what she was working on. “What are you beating out?”

“Iron! We got an electrolysis chamber running for the fire gasses. We plan to have steel within the day.” She attempted a smile as she grabbed something from a makeshift stone table and tossed it to me.

I caught the object, which turned out to be a conical canteen made from copper. The thing was unpolished and heavy in my hand, a little smaller than my forearm and I could feel the weight shift as the contents sloshed within.

“Epic, thanks. Is this H2O?” I asked, unscrewing the lid from the top and sniffing.

“Yep, steamed and collected. I remember hearing you grumbling about it yesterday.” Lokra answered as she flipped over a number of other bits of metal that rested in the heat, looking to see if any had heated enough to continue to work on.

“Thank you.” I shoved the canteen into my satchel and pulled on the strap so it would sit comfortably. “I heard there's a load of tools for team 1? Kazek told me to take them with me.”

Lurbolg answered me this time, waving at a pile of bronze-headed hammers, pry bars, spikes, and a pair of heavy-built pulleys. “That’s it for now, tell em’ we’ll be able to make cable to go with the pulleys soon. There's a lamp for you there too; full turn of the valve then hit it with the sparker until it starts. Should have a couple of hours worth of fuel.”

Lokra spun back around with a yellow hot iron plate held in her set of misshapen tongs and interrupted us by placing it on the already scarred bronze anvil and starting to pound it with her hammer.

“Back to it, good luck out there, Nick.” Lurbolg gave me one of his grins and hefted the sledgehammer once more.

I nodded to him and watched them take a few hammer strokes, seeing how Lokra guided the work with the blows from her smaller hamer. Moving the iron plate around with the tongs and smashing down in a fast and steady turbo-waltz that had Lurbolg bring his heavy sledge down on every third beat.

Turning to the table and the pile of tools, the first thing I grabbed was the small unlit lamp. It looked like something straight out of history, a small bronze or maybe brass tank screwed into the bottom of a hood assembly. It had a clip on the back of it, and a twist valve set to the side of a rounded focusing reflector that guarded a bright white cylinder in front of the little gas spout in the center of the reflector. A small springy squeeze-sparker dangled from a short length of torn robe from the assembly.

I clipped the lamp onto a bunched up section of cloth-strips that I had wrapped across my chest, then bundled the tools together with some more torn cloth strips before heaving the package onto my shoulder and starting for the door. I left one tool outside of the bundle and carried it in my free hand, a 3 kilo bronze headed hammer with a shiny plastic-y feeling handle.

Once I was into the dark tunnel just outside of the vent room, I sparked the lamp to life. I turned the valve and squeezed the sparker near it a few times, sending an avalanche of bright sparks to rain down in front of the softly hissing gas nozzle. A tiny flame flared to life on the third spark and started to heat up the quicklime element to a blinding white. The lamp cast a bright beam that lit the whole tunnel before me as I started to jog down it, using my mini-map to trace the remembered path to where Kazek had pointed on his carved floor plan.

It took me about 45 minutes to reach the mining team, mostly because I took a couple of detours to fill out my map and stopped to gather some interesting stones for their chemical ingredients to fill out my stock. By the time I reached the excavation site, I had enough chems to create my stone-cutting acids and neutralizers. I was still missing the key ingredients to create the glow-blobs, and some of the more exotic incendiary mixes I had thought to use for self defense in the past, but was feeling much more confident in my ability to actually help out the group effort as I arrived.

The sound of grinding stone and labored breathing was my first hint that I was getting close. I entered a midsized room and found Jozoic and Sallis as they worked together to push a mini-fridge sized boulder out from the next passage's entrance.

Without a thought, I set my bundle of tools down, unclipped the lamp and set it down next to them, and jumped in to add my own strength to the effort. Together, we slid the heavy rock to the side of the room against a growing pile of other similar stones.

Once the work was done, I pointed at the tools as we caught our breath. “I brought some equipment.”

They both looked over and nodded, Sallis grunted in response as Bomilik stepped over and unbound the bundle. He picked up a couple of the hammers and the two long pry-bars and left the rest in a heap on the ground.

“Good, these will speed us up a little. Did they say anything about rope to go with the pulleys? That’s what we really need. It takes two or three of us to move these rocks out of the way, we need a force multiplier.”

I nodded, “They said they are working on getting cable made, as well as steel. Lokra said it would be on the way later today.”

Bomilik frowned, then nodded and headed back into the dim tunnel. “Nothing to do about it, we carry on.”

I glanced at Sallis, who rolled her eyes in response, before we both followed him into the tunnel.

The dark hole we were calling the collapsed tunnel was a 15 foot wide circular passage with a fairly steep downward angle. We found Korfook and another of the dwarves I did not know by name partway down as they worked to move the next huge boulder out of the work area. The rounded floor of the cave made moving the stones even more difficult, as the sides of each block would dig into the softer stone of the floor, and catch in places on the rough walls, forcing them to roll the blocky rock over and over up the sloping corridor.

Sallis joined Korfooks team and waved me on ahead. “We can handle this, you should be at the front. Ya’ might be able to squeeze through before any of the rest of us.”

I laughed. “Hah, yeah, because I’m so petite compared to you all.” I swung my arms out to either side in a joking gesture while I walked backwards away from them, before picking up my lamp and skirting past them back down the tunnel.

While I was fairly tall and not small by any human metric, I was not nearly as broad as any of the dwarves. Even with their Masks, the smallest of them were nearly four feet wide at the shoulders. Accepting that I would have to be the tunnel rat, and happy enough to skip out on the dull labor of rolling rocks up a hill, I continued on for about a hundred feet before finding Bomilik and the rest of the group as they picked from the various tools I had brought.

Scanning over the tangle of huge rocks that choked the wide passage off, I walked up to the group and looked at each of the dwarves.

“So, where do you want me?” I asked, mostly directing the question to Bomilik.

Bo hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the pile, “See if you can squeeze through, we’ll hold off on moving anything if you can get in somewhere.”

I nodded my assent and picked my way around the group, having to duck around the edge of the round tunnel to get past the group.

The tangle of large angular boulders was interesting, unlike any rock pile I had seen outside of the huge concrete wave breaking blocks you sometimes found along the oceans coast. The mess was entirely made up of the huge blocks, with no smaller or medium sized stones to fill in the dark gaps. I climbed up the sloping side of the jumble and peeked into a few of the cracks, using the lamp in my hand to look deeper into the pile to check for any voids I might be able to slip through.

Eventually, after climbing around on the pile for a few moments, I found a gap near the bottom of the pile that looked like I could fit through, and had a promising open space behind it that might lead deeper. I turned to warn the group I was going to try to make my way through, and found them all standing a few feet back and watching me.

“I think I can get in through here, I’ll see if it leads any deeper.”

Bomilik grunted and shrugged, giving me the impression that he did not think it likely but to go ahead anyway.

Without letting myself think about what I was doing, I crawled into the gap between the three stones. I had to angle my shoulders through one at a time, but was able to pull myself forward after I set my little lamp down on the floor of the narrow passage. After worming my torso through, I moved my lamp forward a little more and had to slide myself under the first large stone by pushing with my toes and using my elbows to propel myself through.

Behind the first stone was a slightly larger opening that allowed me to crane my head around and get a good look at the interior of the tangle of blocks. I scanned around and saw that there was another gap, this one leading up and at an angle.

Refusing to stop and think over all of the risks, I pushed on and burrowed my way through that gap only to be met with a sharp bend. I worked my way as deeply as I could into the crevice, trying to get a view of what was ahead but was unable to get far enough into the gap to see around the corner.

Defeated, I crawled backwards back into the opening I had come from and managed to turn around before working my way back out from the pile of stone to rejoin the waiting dwarves. I turned off my lamp to conserve the fuel and waited a moment for my eyes to readjust to the dim glow-goo lights spat around the work area.

I shook my head. “No luck, it’s at least another 15 feet of this too.”

With a collective huff, the dwarves hefted their tools and started pulling and prying at the large boulders once more. It was not a terribly complex process, but was hard work nonetheless. Pry at the stones until you could get one to move, then wiggle it out of place and carefully flop it down the slope to the hauling teams at the base.

I found myself sent up to the top of the slope with Jozoic, him being the strongest of the dwarves and myself having the longest legs meant that I had the easiest time picking through the treacherous angles underfoot. He would rock the stones loose and provide the strength to control their descent, while I scrambled around and called out which way we should roll them and helped hold the stones back where I could.

“This’ll take ages. There better be something good on the other side. We should be making armor and weapons, I’m sure the other Rows will be finished with that by now.” complained Jozoic.

“Why do we need weapons anyways? There wasn't anything all that dangerous down here.” I asked while we both worked to control the fall of one of the large boulders.

The stone shifted and settled into place most of the way down, and we started to rock it back and forth to build enough momentum to get it to roll down the slope one last time to the bottom.

Jozoic eyed me over the top of the boulder, giving me a hard to read look. “This is a competition, and while we are to work as a Row, there are no rules that we are to act as Clan during the trials.” He turned his head to look at where we were aiming to land the rock and we both grunted and pushed one last time, getting the boulder to rock out of its home and roll down to the marred floor.

Jozoic frowned down at the boulder and spat off to the side. “We cannot look weak in the face of the other Houses. I would not put it past the clippers of House Bassaldourn to seek to raid any they discovered to be defenseless.”

I looked at him, only partially surprised at the disdain in his voice. “Are they really that bad? They’re still our brothers at the end of the cycle.” I replied.

He scoffed and we started to pick our way back up the pile, letting the other dwarves take over the process of clearing the block away from the bottom of the pile and dragging it away.

“Amongst any group, there are always frictions, big and small. We are honor bound together, but our Houses have our differences, big and small.” He nodded, like that explained everything.

I sighed, and decided to drop the question. I had not really seen much interaction between the great Houses yet, having been isolated to the Galidurn slice of the mountain, but the few times I had ventured into the public areas I had seen at least one fist fight and all sorts of chaos in the mix of dwarves that swarmed the streets.

I lost myself in that thought for a moment. I had been isolated for pretty much my entire career in the Links; moving from the safety of the Hub, to the capital city of my faction, then Rosso’s island, and now I was safely tucked away under the mountain with the dwarves. I’d yet to step foot outside of an area of relative order and control the whole time I had been Linked up, and felt a little anxious about what would happen when I finished my trials and had the opportunity to start to venture into the wilds.

I still did not quite know what my plan was for after the trials. Presumably I would have the chance to try out for a few different specialties, but I still had not considered which I would choose. Hell, the whole dusted point of my joining with the dwarves was still quietly sitting on the back-burner. I’d talked Kazek into giving me two basic lessons in gem-cutting, if you could call them that. Otherwise I had found my progress stymied as I worked my way through the dwarves intensive initiation process.

I should really give it some more thought beyond “cut gems - ??? - profit”. Unfortunately I just never seemed to have the time, and was constantly reacting to the circumstances I'd thrown myself into, trusting the crazed AI invader installed somewhere in my body to keep the bigger picture in mind.

After a couple of hours of moving rocks and introspection, as well as a number of failed attempts to crawl through the pile of blocks, we finally unearthed a gap near the top of the slope that gave me a glimpse into a deep dark void on the far side of the tangle. I held my lamp up and shined it through the gab, and noticed the beam of light stood out in a damp mildewy haze that hung in the air.

I called back from where I lay, wedged into the pile of stones after having crawled nearly 20 feet through cracks I could barely fit though. “We made it! I see the other side.”

I heard a muffled celebratory chorus of “Rock and stone!” from behind me, before Bomilik’s clear voice rang through the crevice I had followed. “Push forward! Scout the area while we clear the way. Stay wary!”

“Got it, it looks hazy!” I shouted back through the narrow channel, before clawing my way out of the pile of rocks on the far side and sweeping my lamp across the new section of tunnel.