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).