Exotic Gardening, Day Only

Yeah, this Age really isn't big enough to merit another full day of exploration at this point. I'm really only still here because it's such a nice, relaxing space, though 200 years of neglect has made it grow a bit wild. Nothing is even remotely interested in being contained by the boxes, fences, flower beds, and formerly-sculpted topiaries. I imagine it used to resemble a bizarre formal English garden back in the day, but right now it's closer in appearance to some sort of crazy alien jungle. I think it's clear that this was a private garden Age for a wealthy member of D'ni society who either had a green thumb themselves, or paid a number of others who did to enable him to enjoy the fruits of their labor. It's got a very different feeling from the more unbridled and open "garden Ages" of Eder Kemo, Gira, Delin, or Tsogahl, all of which feel more like parks than gardens.

The whole Age – which my KI tells me is Eder Deeahno – seems to consist of an island with some pretty clear signs of heavy D'ni-made efforts to sculpt its final appearance away from a purely natural design. There are terraced rows of plants in one area, and a long-overgrown waterway wide enough for a small one- or two-person gondola cuts its way through the landscape at hard angles, now softened by years of growth and decay. The gondola itself is a small pile of rotten timber at this point. There's a hedge maze (for lack of a better word for it) that has almost completely choked itself shut. The waterway leads into it, and from the faint glimpses I've gotten through the slightly thinner hedge overgrowth around the entry point, there seems to be a fountain of some kind inside, with small stone bridges criss-crossing the waterway which are presumably retractible in some manner.

Other features include a small orchard of citrus-like fruit trees – which is good news and means I'll have some fresh, seasonal fruity additions to my collection of MREs, beef jerky, and canned goods. Elsewhere a waterfall that runs down the steep side of the island and into a series of stone waterways that at one time seem to have featured mechanisms for making sound and moving small art sculptures around, but the mechanisms have been totally frozen by rust. A wide stone walkway arcs out at a downward slope to sweep through the air around this installation, providing what I imagine are some really nice views. I opted not to tempt fate by walking out onto it without some closer structural inspection. The walkway then carves into the terrain, providing a colonnaded walk around the backside of the waterfall. This continuing downward spiral finally terminates in a small balcony at the base of the artwork that is built into the falls.

I can tell there used to be a Linking Book in a gazebo not too far from the link-in point, but it's mostly been decayed down to the binding at this point. Luckily, in addition to the Linking Book I brought with me, the DRC saw fit to put a Nexus Book on a second, covered pedestal to shelter it from the elements.

The weather here is pleasantly mild, and the sky has been relatively clear of clouds so far. The sun set a couple of hours ago, and the fireflies have come out to play since then. For as overgrown and wild as it is, it's still a nice place. I can see myself coming back and probably trying to re-tend the various gardens as a side project. Tending plants is a lot easier than shoring up buildings when you're all by yourself. I do think it would make a nice retreat, and I can see putting links to it in a public space once it's been cleaned up a bit for folks to visit and relax.

I don't think I'll be spending the night here though. It's too open to the elements, and I don't have my tent with me because the sand in Er'tsuda beat the crap out of its weatherproofing.

Exotic Gardening Prologue

Today I take off on my trip to explore the garden Age I found in the DRC tent all those months ago. I don't expect this expedition to last more than a day or two. I'll be posting back-dated daily reports once I get back to the City. Hopefully nothing there will kill me, since I still haven't found a link to Gahreesen that I can use to "borrow" a Maintainer's suit for this purpose.

Updates later!

Resurfacing

Mid-day update today.

It turns out that the guy who's been working in the DRC office is in fact a native Carlsbad resident, so I don't really have to worry about him vanishing on me in the future. I think he's gone on to other employment at this point though, because the DRC surely don't have the money to keep paying him. In any case, I'm glad he's willing to help drive me back and forth for a supply run. I've got enough funds for another couple of months, but I'm seriously approaching the point where I may have to take up a job in town to cover expenses. I really don't want to have to do that, because it'll slow my plans down considerably, but life being what it is, I probably don't have a choice.

I'll re-evaluate in the new year; my supplies should last me until then.

Anyway, I'm writing this while I wait at the edge of Zandi's property for my ride to get here. I still haven't made an excursion into the garden Age; I've spent most of my time since my last update trying to figure out what I need and how much it'll cost. I ultimately decided to save the trip until I get back to D'ni tomorrow so it's not rushed.

Colonizing

Oy, quick update before I collapse.

It's been a hectic three days since I got back from my hike in Er'tsuda. The trip exhausted a large portion of my supplies without really getting me much of anything in return, so I've been re-rationing the remaining gear until I can make a return trip to the Surface and do some more shopping in Carlsbad. Should be able to make that happen in a few days; coordinating anything with the last straggling employees of a virtually non-existent organization is really difficult (in less bizarre terms, I have to get a hold of a DRC lackey who can come pick me up at the Cleft). Aside from that, I've been pouring over both the DRC's notes and my own looking for information about the DRC-stamped garden Age I found a while back at the research tent. Other concerns and my then-plentiful supplies made the Age a low priority on my list, but now it's moved up the ranks a bit, as my supply of cash has been getting low, and coordinating these Surface trips gets more and more difficult each time they're necessary. I think this will be the last for a while, and will refresh my stores of non-perishables like canned goods and jerky, which I can supplement with fresh food from the garden Age if all goes well.

I still need to locate another spare Nexus Book to take with me, in case the DRC's own way back was again lost in the intervening years since their last expedition. I've been contemplating trying to find a Gahreesen Book as well, so I can steal a Maintainer's Suit for these initial trips just to make sure nothing nasty happens to me. Bacteria, viruses, chemicals, and even plants and animals can all be potentially deadly out in the Ages. Having an extra layer of protection is always a good idea, I think. The trick is just getting a hold of one. I guess I'll burn that bridge while I'm crossing it, as Dr. Watson was fond of saying.

In other news, the tavern is looking more and more like home now. I've probably reorganized the main dining area five times since I first moved in and got it all straightened up, trying to keep my growing piles of paperwork – as well as the copious volumes of material I've found from the DRC – properly categorized and uncluttered. I think I've finally hit upon a layout that does so without breaking up the flow of the room itself, so it's still easy to get around. In the past couple of days I've also been tinkering with one of the wall-mounted holographic projectors to see if I can get it working again. Nothing so far but a few unpleasant shocks from the circuitry, unfortunately. Did I mention that I'm better at orienteering than engineering? I don't think "Restoration Engineer" was ever really a very good summary of my talents, heh. I'm usually pretty good with electronics, though, but working without schematics or even a frame of reference, it's really rough going.

Okay, it's late and I'm exhausted. Hopefully I'll have more exploration-oriented updates in the next few days.

Er'tsuda Expedition, Day 14

Wow, what a hike.

The past eight days have been long and largely dull, though I did cover a lot of ground and get a much better handle on how the whole harvesting operation must have worked back in D'ni's heyday.

About 20 minutes from the factory, the canyon split into four sub-canyons, with a harvester track leading into each. Determined to get an idea of what to expect if my harvester ever starts working again, I continued to follow its track into the unknown. Beside me, the irrigation canal forged an angular path along the base of the canyon.

Eventually, the walls of the canyon widened a bit, and I entered what can only be described as a forest. Plants not dissimilar to those in Er'cana towered above me, thick as a pine tree forest back on Earth and in some cases just as tall. The irrigation canal apparently still functioned well enough to provide a regular flow of water to these plants, and they thrived after the Fall. Some seem to have infiltrated the canal itself, so some repair work will no doubt be necessary once this initial overgrowth is dealt with. Assuming the harvester blades are capable of cutting through growth this substantial, it might be a good idea to clearcut some of this for future use and replant it with seeds or spores (or whatever) from these now-ancient specimens.

Interestingly, the walls of the canyon themselves gave me a pretty solid idea of just how overgrown the plantlife here had gotten. In some of the naturally narrower parts of the canyon, the walls had been widened at the height where the harvester blades once passed, creating an odd and distinctive shape that served as a handy benchmark for roughly how tall the plants needed to be to be harvested efficiently. This benchmark was easily forty feet over my head, and in some cases the plants stretched thirty feet above that. Hardly what I would call optimal harvesting conditions now.

It would also seem that at least some of these plants had seen the last days of the D'ni empire, as the growth above the harvest line was considerably thinner than that below it, indicating that the plants can be cropped off at the top and still continue to grow. To what extent this may still be true in this now-forested mess is unclear. I'll have to remember to get a hold of a botanist at some point now as well to try and get some answers.

After walking for eight days through dense, inhospitable forestry to find little of ultimate interest besides the fact that the harvester tracks are at least fundamentally intact for several miles despite the overgrowth of the plants, I'm ready to get back to the cavern and do some more exploring in the city. Funny how fast my interests can change, but I've had enough of this dry and dusty place for now. Hopefully I can come back in the future with more assistance and get this place up and running again. It'll take more than what I have at my disposal right now to make that happen though, so for now, it's back to D'ni.

Er'tsuda Expedition, Day 6

Early update today. Still no success getting the harvester going. I think that it, along with most of the rest of the machinery in this Age, will need to wait until I can get a few more folks "down here" to assist me, since mechanical engineering is not my forte; I'm more into orienteering. On the bright side, I have plenty of documents and manuals to show to whatever linguists and mechanics I eventually manage to con into taking over for the DRC...

Rather than spin my wheels – no pun intended – any longer I've decided to pack up and hike along the track for this harvester to see if I can get a better lay of the land outside of the factory. I spent most of the morning breaking down camp and assessing my supplies. I figure I can be gone for 10 days at the most if I take it easy and ration my food and water well. The weather has so far been fairly favorable, so hydration shouldn't be a huge problem, even in a desert-ish environment like this one.

Assuming the rest of this Age is anything like Er'cana, I have a reasonable idea of what to expect along my hike, but I'm still likely to be surprised along the way. Will probably not have an update until I get back from the hike, though since these entries are all being back-dated anyway, it won't really matter in the long run.

Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 5

I've got a rudimentary shelter built in the shanty town for the Nexus Book. While I was salvaging materials from some of the collapsed shacks, I came across a few bleached skeletons. I wouldn't be surprised if Veovis and A'Gaeris linked a plague-ridden body into this Age, landing it smack in the middle of town. Nobody who lived here would have stood a chance, and anyone who fled back to D'ni would have been equally doomed. I found a place off to one corner of the village where the ground was soft enough to dig, and gave them as proper a burial as I could manage before returning to the task at hand. Within a couple of hours, I had a lean-to and a basic pedestal put together to shelter the Book from the wind and dust blowing around.

I returned to the factory afterwards and continued to rifle through stacks of moldy or disintegrating papers to see if I could find anything that might help me get the harvester back online, or even just have it start. I think the thing runs on powermarbles, much like the ones Gehn used on Riven to power his firemarble domes, but with a lower yield and a more controlled output. There are still a few boxes in the maintenance room I uncovered with cautionary labels on them that look like they might be what I'm after, so now all I need is a diagram of what the engine is supposed to look like so I can make sure it matches. Little success on that score, though there are a couple of hard-bound books with voluminous amounts of D'ni text in them. God help me if that's the only user manual the thing came with...

If I can't get anything accomplished with this thing within a couple of hours tomorrow, I'm going to leave it for later when I have more skilled hands at my disposal, and go on a hike to see what lies along one of the irrigation canals. I'll probably follow the one that runs beneath the track my broken harvester is sitting on, so that if it ever does start working again, I'll have some idea of what to expect when I take it for a spin.

Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 4

I'm honestly starting to get a little frustrated by how inoperative a lot of this equipment is. I don't know if any of the factory machinery still works, and it's going to take a long time with a haz-mat suit to clean out the crap that's grown in the harvester hoppers. On top of that, there's the one inoperable harvester in the factory, and the seven other harvesters that are lost out in the fields somewhere, which could very well be totally unsalvageable.

On a bright note, I did finally find the Linking Book back to D'ni. Unsurprisingly, it goes somewhere that the DRC probably haven't investigated, as there is no stamp on the Book. I suspect their original expedition to this Age used a Nexus Book to get back to the known areas of D'ni, and it's been blown away or buried or something else. It looks like I'm going to need to build a shelter of some kind up in the shanty town and make sure that the Nexus Book I brought with me is well protected so that I don't need to worry about losing it in the future.

No further progress on finding spare parts or replacement lube for the harvester engine. I'm not a mechanic, unfortunately, so I really have no idea what's going on in there. It seems relatively straightforward, as most D'ni machinery is (their electronics are a different story, but machines are all pretty basic), but lacking even so much as a blueprint, I'm not sure where to begin with tinkering. Let it be known that the D'ni built everything to last, but they did so with the assumption that they'd be there to maintain it. Grr...

Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 3

A bit of an early update today...

I've found a way out onto the canyon floor from the factory. There is a small service passage at the outermost end of the harvester receiving area. This leads to a narrow flight of stairs, some ladders, and a claustrophobically thin hallway before finally ending in a door. The door took me outside, where I followed a very weather-worn path down to ground level. The enormous arc of the pellet factory swept up and away from me across the breadth of the canyon, backlit by the light of the morning sun; a sight so incredible I nearly fell over trying to take it all in.

I planted a stick in the ground, marked the position of its shadow, and set up some equipment to record the passage of time here. I have a time-lapse camera and a stopwatch attached to a tripod and trained on the stick. Some time tomorrow, I'll come back and check on the stick to see how long it took the planet to make a full revolution. The science of exploring these worlds is arguably my favorite part... I could take or leave the heavy manual labor of fixing everything, I just want to look at stuff and see how it works.

I also set up a more permanent camp down here near the bottom of the canyon. Like Er'cana, it's a wide basin rather than a more precipitous chasm like most of the Grand Canyon, so my concerns about a storm potentially flooding my base of operations require less drastic precautions... it takes a lot more water to fill up a broad, flat canyon than it does to fill up a narrow one. I'm set up about 15 feet from the bottom right now, on one of the widest parts of the access path.

Cursory efforts to get the docked harvester up and running have proven unsuccessful. I'm not exactly surprised, though. As I said yesterday, the thing's been sitting for at least 200 years now. Any lubricant and fuel that could possibly have been in the thing is gone now. I'm going to do some more searching around the crawl spaces in the factory this evening and see if I can find any useful replacement materials that might have survived (I doubt it... might need to make an excursion to the Surface again for some engine repair stuff).

Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 2

Today I got down to the nitty gritty of exploring the factory. Given the heavy, industrial requirements of the architecture, and the lack of any environmental signs of instability such as earthquakes or other damaging conditions, I feel a lot more certain about the factory's inherent stability than I do about most of the structures in the City Proper back in the Cavern. That's not to say I've let my guard down any, but I think this building is inherently far less likely to collapse on my head, or I wouldn't even be going into it.

The interior spaces of the factory are incredible. I started at the top floor and worked my way down, as that was the only way I could approach given my starting point. On the way down I came across numerous hallways filled with machinery for manufacturing considerable quantities of pellets to be fed into the Lake. Each floor seems to be dedicated to a single phase of pellet production and distribution. The top-most floor is a long central walkway with alcoves containing pellet dispensing machines. Beside each machine is a Linking Book leading to what looks like a drop point in D'ni. Given that I was already pressing my luck with getting stuck in a bad part of the Multiverse, I opted not to try using any of those Books until I had thoroughly investigated the rest of the factory and found a link back to the Cavern, or at least back to the Nexus.

The floor below is a similar single hallway with alcoves on either side. These alcoves hold control interfaces for the ovens that feed pellets into the dispensers above. Below that is a wider hall with water troughs open to the outside for rainwater collection and vats for mixing the ingredients to be fed into the ovens. Finally, on the bottom floor, are eight separate harvester docking stations (meaning that my theory yesterday about the tracks being large circuits is bunk), with considerable amounts of dangerous-looking machinery arrayed around them, presumably for collecting the harvested material and processing it before sending it into the storage silos that line the inner walls of this floor.

As luck would have it, there is a single harvester left in the factory; the others are probably out in the fields somewhere, and probably in need of some serious repairs. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to get the one I've found up and running without any problems, but I suspect not. 200 years is a long time for an engine to sit, and I don't even know where the dip stick is. I'll probably fiddle with it more tomorrow. Right now I'm mostly focused on finishing my survey of the factory before the daylight fades (the sun in this Age seems to be offset a bit from Mountain Standard Time... and I haven't yet managed to calculate the planet's rotational period).

Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 1

I spent the better part of yesterday making sure I had everything in place for this trip. I absconded with a Nexus Book from one of the harbor pedestals, just in case I found myself stuck in an Age with no return access (unlikely, given that the DRC have already stamped this Book with their seal of approval, and this was done well before anybody on their staff had a Relto Book). My backpack is loaded with gear and supplies, and I made sure to pack the tent I bought on my recuperative trip to the Surface earlier this year, since there wasn't much available information on the Age's climate or terrain beyond what little I could make out in the Gateway Image.

Today I took my first step toward the larger project of exploring, cataloging, and eventually restoring the remaining Ages of the D'ni empire, though to be honest this Age feels a lot like ground I've already covered before.

I'm amazed at how similar this Age is to Er'cana, in both climate and structure. I suspect the D'ni knew a good thing when they saw one, and rather than continue to experiment with other ways of feeding the Lake algae, they stuck with the first thing that worked and endlessly iterated that idea into a more and more efficient industry.

The link-in point was in the middle of a long-abandoned shanty town in a small offshoot from a major canyon. Wind gusts blasted through the settlement and rattled the few buildings that still stood, and the dust it kicked up stung my eyes. It seems like I'll be getting plenty of use out of the D'ni goggles I found in the Cleft. I'd hoped to be able to set up camp here, but I think I'll look for a less blustery location.

After documenting the layout of the shanty town (I suspect whatever workers the D'ni "employed" here used this village as their home), I made my way out into the main canyon. The offshoot containing the settlement is actually about 200 feet from the canyon floor, and long catwalks connect it to a large factory-looking structure that straddles the walls, almost looking more like a bridge than a building. No part of it actually touches the bottom of the canyon; instead it arcs gracefully but powerfully across the chasm, anchored to either side in a brutal mass of stonework. Tall, slender water reservoirs line the walls of the canyon on either side, and empty into irrigation canals that lead off downstream to parts unknown. The architectural differences between this Age and Er'cana are striking, while at the same time there is a similarity that underscores the common purpose of these two Ages.

Eight sets of familiar-looking elevated tracks feed into the bottom-most level of the factory, four to a side. Given that the irrigation canals only run out from one side, I'd venture to guess that either these tracks run in huge loops, or that there is some other irrigation platform further upstream that irrigates harvesting grounds in that direction. Hopefully I'll be able to find out.

I've spent most of the day today going over the area around the link-in point. Lacking any real survey equipment, my measurements and maps are probably far less accurate than I'd like, but they'll have to do for now. I'm going to take one of the catwalks down to the factory tonight and set up camp for the night in its more sheltered environment. More tomorrow, I hope...