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.