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...

Happy Birthday to Me

Today was my birthday, and I'm now 24 years old. In celebration, I took the day off from the tedium of cataloging and reading the voluminous DRC meeting notes and research notebooks I found in the abandoned base camp earlier this year. I've been at it since I got back from Mysterium, since I've hit the limit of where I can go safely and easily around the harbor. I don't want to make another multi-day expedition like the one I made to check the source of my water supply, because that requires a fair amount of planning ahead, and I feel like I need to get a better idea of the lay of the land around here before I go doing that again. So since Mysterium, I've been going over everything I can find in the DRC tent, making my own notes and incorporating the findings from my own explorations as I go. I'm about two-thirds of the way through all this stuff, so I don't expect to have any really exciting updates any time in the near future. Sorry.

In other news, I've got the courtyard outside my tavern lit up like the 4th of July now, and in my spare time am tinkering with the internals of one of the imagers from the building next door, which I think was some kind of news stand run by the D'ni Guild of Messengers.

Mysterium...

... was a lot of fun. We should do it again next year ;).

Boarding my return flight to New Mexico in a few minutes. Will update again when I'm back in the City.

Once More Into the Breach

Well, it's been more than a week, but I'm finally heading back to D'ni. I've made plans to attend Mysterium this year at the end of July, now that I know I can actually get there, so there's one more week-long hiatus definitely planned for this year, but beyond that, I don't think there's any plans to spend a considerable amount of time on the Surface before the end of the year (Christmas seems like a good time to be with my family, at the very least...).

I'm finding it difficult to really keep an interesting blog of the stuff I'm doing in D'ni, so updates may be fewer and more far-between for a while. I'm also running into the limits of what I feel comfortable doing on my own right now, because I'm not a structural engineer, and I don't have access to a lot of the DRC's equipment for shoring things up and securing them before doing extensive restoration work, or even just looking around. This is as much disaster recovery as it is archaeology, and I'm only marginally more well-equipped for the latter (still can't find a really good bull whip...).

Hopefully a lot more info will be forthcoming once I manage to stabilize the data connection between the Surface and D'ni so that I can send more than just text along the uplink. Photos and drawings are definitely things I want to include in my posts, but for now, the written word is all my crummy connection can handle. The DRC did some crazy wizardry with the KI network several years ago to allow them to make posts on their old forum from their KI, and I've managed to hook into that to send these updates to Blogger, but sending an image stream is a lot more complicated, and without actual internet access in the Cavern, this is the best I can do at the moment.

Holy Crap, My KI is Working!

I apologize for not writing in a while... I've been doing more thorough studies of the stuff left in the DRC base camp, and none of it makes for terribly compelling blog posts. However, my KI had been acting weird over the past couple of weeks, and I think it's about time I mentioned it, just for the sake of keeping an accurate record.

I haven't really been wearing my KI lately, because it's largely useless with the Lattice all mucked up. Around the 27th, it started making odd beeping noises every once in a while, which did wonders for keeping me awake at all hours, but little else. A few days later, I noticed the hologram emitter started turning itself on and off every few seconds, causing the heads-up display interface to flicker annoyingly out of the corner of my eye. I initially just chalked it up to further Lattice destabilization and stuffed the thing in a drawer wrapped in a blanket where I wouldn't have to see or listen to it anymore, but today I noticed during a morning walk to the DRC camp that I could see the trail of Markers I'd dropped during my initial exploration of the area. As I reached out to trigger one of the holographic spheres, the entire set blinked and then vanished.

Needless to say, I rushed back to the tavern and pulled my KI out of its drawer to see what was going on. In the chat interface were several status messages from the Lattice, which read roughly as follows (I've cut out a lot of redundant messages):

System: Unable to repair damaged Lattice branches. Data is unrecoverable. Attempting to restore to secondary tree.

System: Restoration Success. Some data lost during restoration to secondary tree. Polling field units for additional information.

System: Field unit 6409780 Discovered. Time: 4/28/08 9:57:05

System: Attempting to synchronize with field unit 6409780. Awaiting unit response...

System: Field unit 6409780 Discovered. Time: 5/13/08 13:54:27

System: Attempting to synchronize with field unit 6409780. Awaiting unit response...

Elated that the Lattice may have been able to repair itself (Laxman was a busy man before he left!), I quickly activated my KI and dropped a Marker to try and synchronize it with the Lattice network. The following message appeared in my chat interface:

System: Response from field unit 6409780. Synchronization successful. WARNING: Some data may have been lost due to Lattice corruption. Verify data is intact before use.

Getting happier by the minute, I checked my files and marker missions, and with few exceptions, they were all intact and readable by my KI. All of the Ages I had visited were also still listed in the device as well, though obviously I was unable to reach any of them because of having lost my Relto Book.

I decided to take advantage of my former Restoration Engineer status to try and poll the Nexus to see if it was working. I entered a custom command into the chat interface and received the following response:

System: Nexus access granted. Welcome ResEng G. Buddell. Nexus status code: 0001.

This was fantastic news. A status code of 0001 meant that the Nexus was fully functional, and I wasn't going to get trapped there if I linked in. Whether I'd be able to access any of my previously-registered Nexus Terminal links was another question entirely, so I made sure to register the nearest terminal before linking back to the Nexus for the first time in over a month.

The familiar clatter of the Nexus machinery welcomed me back to the access room, and the Book Machine happily accepted my KI signature when I placed my hand in the registry slot. A quick look at my available links confirmed at least some of my fears: most of the links I had registered were missing, prticularly the older ones that gave me direct access to Ae'Gura. However, the links I had registered on the way down the Descent were all still intact. Almost literally bouncing with glee, I touched the line that read "Great Shaft - Top", waited impatiently for the machine to vend the Book, and linked back to the eder tomahn at the top of the Great Shaft. A quick jog back up the path to the Surface confirmed that it was still clear all the way back to the Volcano's caldera (I was concerned that some of the tremors I'd felt while descending may have caused further collapses in the cave system), meaning I now had almost immediate access back to the Surface, and any supplies I might need, without needing to spend the better part of a week going back and forth.

As dedicated as I am to restoring D'ni and keeping it alive, I think I'm going to take a week or so on the Surface to get some more things, rest, relax, and sleep in a bed that's bound to be better than the sleeping-bag-on-a-cot arrangement I've got in the tavern. D'ni is great, but I occasionally need to see the sun. I'll post again before I head back down.