Underground Facility
Incandescent tubes line the walls and ceiling of this hangar-like room, yet still struggle to illuminate all of the contents. Huge pieces of broken and partially dismantled machinery sit on platforms, sometimes surrounded by scaffolding as well. At one is a large doorway, while the farther end opens unto a deep, wide shaft. Like spokes on a wheel, similar rooms surround the shaft, going down for several levels until darkness and steam obscure the view.

Little has changed since Zahn's last visit to this place. There hasn't even been time for much fresh dust to settle over the areas he and others disturbed before. With just him and Amelia, however, the cavernous room seems ominously quiet, and anything above a whisper produces an echo.

"Right. Let's see if anything in here remotely resembles Clover's drawings," Zahn comments as he starts flipping through the scribblings and walks slowly through the odd machinery. "And how far do you think we could get down those stairs?"

"There are other rooms at this level," Amy notes. "I'd rather look at those than go further down just yet."

"Well, Clover went down," Zahn points out, "But we can check the rooms up here first." He offers Amelia half of the stack of drawings and asks, "Think you can tell if anything in here matches these?"

Beyond the giant ruined turbine-engine, another piece of machinery looks somewhat familiar from the drawings: it could be the cockpit from the odd 'flying donut' craft with the outer skin removed to reveal the skeleton and some of the control structures. From the way the material is torn near the back, it could easily be crash wreckage.

Amy looks from the drawings to the stuff around the room, and just looks confused. "Uh, you need to teach me how to read these diagrams some time," she finally says. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at or for."

"Ooo, that looks promising," Zahn notes as he makes a beeline for the 'donut' so he can look inside the cockpit area. "Do you really want to learn how to read them, then? I would have thought you wouldn't be interested," he admits.

"Eventually your mom is going to hand me a piece of paper with drawings on it and tell me to do what it says," Amelia points out. "I have to learn it."

"Eh, she might," Zahnrad says as he peers at the wreckage, trying to find, well, where the driver would sit. "But only if she thought you would understand it or could figure it out. You're intelligent, Amelia; what do you think the lines mean?"

The mountings for the pilot seat are still in place, even if the seat itself is missing. There are pedals connected to dangling cables, a box with various wire-filled tubes and a complicated flight stick with several controls attached to it.

"Edges of things, I think," Amelia says. "I just don't know how to… see the thing in my head," Amy notes. "I mean, it's paper. If you could fold the paper along the lines and get a model, I could understand that, but these aren't those sorts of lines."

"Drat, someone took the seat. I could have figured how how big the pilots of these things were if they had left the seat. Maybe they left an instruction manual," Zahnrad complains as he tries to climb into the wreckage. From the wreckage, Zahn calls back, "They are edges. Do you see the numbers near them? The ones between two lines that mark the corners of the line?"

"Yeah… wait… are those lines part of the thingy?" Amy asks. She tries to follow Zahn into the machine, and picks at some of the thin wires coming out the central box. "Hey, these aren't woven… I think they're glass wires."

A series of rods protrude from the box towards the pilot's position. They might have connected to control dials or readouts, but the panel that would have held them is missing.

"No, those lines indicate an edge and the number between states the size of the edge of the item being described in the drawing," Zahn explains as he pops back into view. He peers at the thin wires and says, "Oh, yeah, those look like smaller versions of that glass orb thing Axel found. It directs light. Not sure how, not sure why. Maybe it's like how metal wires can direct electricity that glass wires can direct light. Not sure how do to something with light, though. And you know, I think someone has been salvaging from this machine. They took the seat and the display panel. How dusty are the wires near you? I wonder how long ago this thing was gutted."

After wiping her hands off, Amelia reports: "Pretty dusty." She tries tugging on one of the strands, and one of the rods moves in response. There must be some sort of permanent lubricant at work as well. "Maybe they're just used like regular cables, and made of glass because… because it was handy?" she guesses.

"Glass can be made. Metal can't," Zahn notes with a nod, "So it may be that, yes. And if it's pretty dusty than it's been a while since this was dismantled. What I wouldn't give to see this thing fully built. How depressing; you find your dreams and discover some jerk looted it."

Amy has a thought, and climbs down underneath the wreckage. "Aha!" she calls. "There aren't any piles of sawdust or rotted wood down here. So maybe they didn't use wood either?" Most of the structure appears to be some sort of cast resin, just translucent enough to see that it has filaments inside it.

"Probably not. Wood decays, glass and such doesn't. Much more durable. But making stuff like this would require equipment we don't have," Zahnrad grumbles. "Pick a small section and hit it hard with something. See if it cracks? I wonder what the shear strength of this stuff is."

Crawling out, Amy finds plenty of broken and cracked parts at the rear end, where it presumably broke off from the rest of the airship. She tries breaking off some of those pieces, and has to use the cudgel on her halberd to finally knock a bit off. "It's full of those glass wires," she reports. "And what did you mean about Clover being down here? We found her in natural tunnels."

"Well, not in here," Zahn says, "but she was definitely around similar materials such as this. This machine, for instance, matches up with one of her drawings." There's this pause … then Zahn yells, "I'm a MORON! I got it!"

Amelia nearly jumps at the exclamation, and ends up tossing the little bit of resin she's managed to knock free. "What? What?" she asks, spinning around to look for a threat.

The walls predictably echo back: Moron… moron… mor…

Zahn clambers out of the machine and looks for the tossed bit of resin. "I see why they built it this way. Geez, duh. It's just like amber. Ever let some glue harden on something into a sheet?" he asks.

"I spilled some once, yeah," Amelia says. "I had to go to the Tanners to get something to dissolve it again."

"Yeah, but I bet you could still break it if it was just glue. Now, if you mixed in a bunch of fibers, whatever they are. Cloth, glass, etc, I bet you couldn't. Because; the fibers transmit the force all throughout the material. Instead of the shear being isolated to one spot it distributes, making it really hard to break!" Zahnrad babbles as he starts pacing. "So, I wonder if you built something out of layers of glue and fabric … it would be really strong and hard to damage! Not to mention you could mold it with your hands. Once hard, I  bet it could be cut like wood, too."

"So, fake chitin, made of… uh… hair and tree snot?" Amelia asks.

"Putting it crudely, yes!" Zahn says, "I bet I could build a ship hull out of it too. And it would be waterproof. Okay, new project to start when I get home; mold a boat!"

"You mean the little boat we use in the canals is made of this stuff too?" Amy asks, giving the wreckage an uncertain look.

Brain switching gears again, Zahn says, "Let's check the other rooms up here." As he starts to wander off, he says, "No, this stuff is not normal glue. But I don't know how to make this stuff. I'll have to experiment with what we have on hand and what we could trade for through that, uh, Inaya person."

Amy catches up, heading towards the big air shaft. "Which way to do we go, right or left?" she asks as they get near the circular walkway.

Zahnrad reaches over to Amelia, dips her, then snogs her. He pays particular attention to which direction her tail points when he does so.

Amy's tail shoots out to the right. "Whoa," she says afterwards. "What was that for?"

Zahn grins and notes, "A more enjoyable way to pick a direction other than flipping a coin. We go right." Apparently there might be a few lingering effects from the Buffy encounter. And to the right he goes.

Then room coming off of the shaft to the right is the same size and shape as the first one, with a few exceptions. There's no sign of a door at the far end, for one. For another, it's filled to the brim with stuff. The center is taken up by a row of tables, all covered with parts or pieces of mechanical things. The walls are lined with storage bins and racks holding spools of cable or fabric. Breaks between the tables divide the area into sections, and there are a few large complicated machines further back as well.

"Uh-oh," Amy comments as soon as she sees the room and its contents.

Zahnrad vibrates. He literally vibrates. "I'm in paradise!" he declares and takes off like a rocket through the room, zipping from table to table to quickly look over their contents, as well as to the walls and their storage bins. Slowly but surely, he's making towards the machines at the end…

Even in passing, it isn't hard for Zahn to recognize some of the items on the tables, usually in half-assembled states. There are the water (or steam) powered compressor-motors from the walls of the apartments. Another table has heating and cooling elements from the kitchen appliances. There are covered tubs of greenish goo next to the tables as well - the mysterious 'permanent' lubricant from the way it's used in the open motor casings. There are small ceramic turbine units, pistons and valves. Gears of every shape and size. Spools of the glass-wire, even glass-wire woven fabric! Bins of some sort of powdered substance. A huge collection of rubber gaskets… all crumbling to dust. Tools for working with all of it. The room is an assembly line for machines.

And at the end is a machine with a big vat and some sort of articulated armature, with nozzles for spraying stuff and mixing chambers for mixing stuff. A stack of resin-and-spun-glass pressure tanks next to it hints at what it was used to make.

"So, uh, think people would complain if I moved in here?" Zahnrad yells. "I could build some of the diagrams with this stuff! It's all the right tolerances! Maybe I could tunnel down from my workshop to here… This place is mine."

"I don't see anything from the drawings here," Amy states, even though she's standing next to a compressed-air motor assembly table.

"Right next to you! Those are exact parts for the compressed air engine!" Zahn yells.

"Air?" Amy asks, as she looks at the table in question. "Umm, you really don't want to move down here. I mean… the bins of parts will run out eventually, right? And… uh… you want to know how to make the parts, don't you?" she says, grasping at anything to keep Zahn from going into state of full-blown Wingnut-fever.

"Sure, they would eventually run out, but not before I'm long dead!" Zahnrad rationalizes. "And if I can fix the machines over here I can make the resin-bodies, too! Hey, I wonder if I could build a couple of air engines to take back with me while I'm down here … they could power a tunnel drilling machine." Zip-zip-zip he goes, still bouncing from bin to bin.

"But… but… " Amy sputters. "How will you keep it a secret?" she finally asks. "If you take anything to the surface, how will you explain it? Gunther will find out for sure."

"I can build my ship and fly out of here before anyone finds out!" Zahn insists. "It's not like anyone comes near the Wingnut territory except for the otters, anyway! I'll just have to make my traps more, uh, lethal." Okay, the Kadie seems to be deflating a bit.

"Fly it out… but how will you make more?" the girl asks. "What good is one ship you can't make a copy of? And… " She hesitates a moment, and then blurts out: "it's grave-robbing!"

"It is not! This is not a tomb," Zahnrad asserts as he makes his way back over to Amelia. "Not a single body in here."

"It still belonged to someone," Amelia says, on the verge of tears now. "Besides… it's just not right. This isn't how you're supposed to get your airship. Not by just… putting together a bunch of stuff you didn't make yourself!"

Zahnrad stops and completely deflates. "It's not about the stuff, is it?" he asks. "You're afraid I'll just leave."

"It's not that!" Amelia says. "It's deeper! It's you. I mean, if you showed me how, I could put together one of these motors from the parts here, right? So could Olivia. So could anybody. I thought… I believed… that you could get your dream all on your own, doing what nobody else could do."

"Assembling it isn't the same as understanding it. I mean, I understand how the machine is supposed to work. I just … I can't fabricate the parts. Not to these tolerances at least. With what I have, everything I make is just so … crude," Zahnrad says, looking thoroughly deflated now. "It's so incredibly frustrating to see in your mind what you want to build and just can't because we don't have the right stuff for it. And here it is … all made. Waiting. I mean, I could use these as models, maybe, to try and figure out a way to craft something similar with what we have, I guess."

"That would be a real achievement, wouldn't it?" Amy asks. "Something to be proud of? I mean, you're an engineer, not a mechanic. It's the difference between… between my halberd and Gunther's crossbow."

"To a lot in this town I'm just a mechanic, you know," Zahnrad notes, still tying to argue a losing battle. "But, yeah, I guess. If I make it, it's mine. It's part of me. This stuff isn't, no matter how much I want it to be."

"It's okay if you use them as tools to… celebrate… err… whatever it is that means making sure stuff fits right," Amelia says. "For the stuff you make." She nudges the motor on the table, and says, "It's not as good as the engine you're making in your workshop, is it?"

"The engineer honesty in me would say it might be. But I can't really answer that one way or another without finishing both and comparing," Zahnrad admits. "What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily work in the real world."

"Yeah, their flying thing still crashed, didn't it, even it was made with better stuff than you have?" Amelia says. "So maybe it's not quality that matters. The finest clock in Chronotopia still doesn't tell time any better than a well made hourglass would."

"Oh, quality matters. But so does creativity," Zahnrad points out, "A Chronotopian watch can also do a lot of things an hourglass can't. It's all about what you want machines to do."

"And let's go check the other room before my brain breaks, okay. I can barely stand still in here," Zahn says. His tail certainly can't stand still, that's for sure.

"I'm all for that," Amy says. "This place feels like bait to me."

"That's silly. Why would anyone use this stuff as bait?" Zahn asks.

"It's out of place," Amy notes, heading for the shaft. "I mean, the apartments where stripped bare. The other room just had junk in it that was too big or useless to move. But this room? All sorts of useful stuff just laying around, undisturbed. It doesn't fit."

"So? Who would this bait? It's … hmm," Zahn says and pauses. He goes back and starts looking for dust on the parts.

There's dust, but it doesn't seem as thick as in the other room. "It's the cables that give it away," Amy says. "Those wouldn't be left behind, even if all this other stuff wouldn't have been useful. Or the bins of powder – I bet that's the resin stuff. Too useful to just leave."

"It's also not as dusty," Zahnrad says, grudgingly having to agree. "The question is why? And for who is it trying to bait? And sorry, I have to… " Zahn finds himself a makeshift container and takes a sample of the powder. "I want someone to figure out what this is made of. Maybe Morgan could. Or Isolde."

"Roy knows about resins and chemicals," Amelia offers.

"Good enough. And the glass fiber is good, but I bet cloth fiber could be substituted and be about as good; if it's all structural, anyway," Zahn says he collects some material in an oblong shaped tube with a narrow nozzle. He leaves back towards the shaft again. "You worry a lot about me."

Amelia goes over to one of the big spools, with the woven 'glass' fabric. She unrolls it until she has a few yards worth, then use the built-in sliding cutter to snip it off. She folds it up into an easy to carry bundle. "I worry a lot about you, yes," she admits. "Because I have to worry double to make up for your lack of worry," she adds with a grin.

"Maybe it's unnecessary worry?" Zahnrad offers as the two head towards the next room. "And you might want to be careful of that glass stuff, it looks itchy."

"I folded the frayed ends inward," Amy says. The next room to the right is opposite the main room, and looks even bigger – but that could be due to its relative emptiness and sporadic lighting. There are rails build into the ceiling and floor, and scuff marks under the heavy dust on the floor.

"There's something I should possibly tell you," Zahnrad says as he looks around the empty room. "That makes your comment about that room being bait as, well, creepy."

"What?" Amelia says, turning towards Zahn from the scuff mark she was looking at.

"Clover made a comment when she was raving about how the stuff in her head was 'meant for me'. I figured she was just crazy, but … with the comment about bait, it's making me wonder," Zahnrad says and he goes over near Amelia to clear away the dust to see the mark.

There's a nasty gouge in the poured-stone floor. "Whatever was in here was probably big and heavy," Amy guesses, then points up to the rails in the ceiling. They continue on into the center of the shaft ceiling, where a long mobile crane structure sits, its cables long gone.

"Maybe the creatures need a creative brain to dump all that data in and make something useful out of it. They tried to use Clover instead of someone more suitable for understanding it," Zahnrad reasons out as he measures the depth of the gouge. "Like enslaving someone's brain to just work out problems for them because they've forgotten how, or something. But, that's a silly idea, right?"

"All of these machines," Amy mutters. "Maybe they're easier to work, or easy to put together like in the last room. Maybe they're hard to fix though? If you made something that would run for a hundred years, long after you were dead, would anyone know how to fix it when it finally wore out?"

"If you left all the diagrams and made sure each generation really learned how it worked, sure," Zahnrad says, "That's why the Wingnuts keep an archive and detailed notes on each device so later generations can understand the design ideas."

"What if the Wingnuts left and took that with them, though?" Amelia suggests. "What if the only people left are otters?"

"Then you would all be in trouble," Zahnrad says. "It wouldn't get fixed."

"Let's check the last room and then get out of here," Amelia says.

"I don't really feel like the people who still live down here are dangerous, though. Desperate, maybe, but they haven't tried to kill anyone," Zahn says as he heads back to the central shaft.

The fourth spoke is some sort of storage room. Lighting only comes from the ceiling, as the walls are covered in closed bins – several rows of them. There are wheeled ladders and larger platforms with stairs, and a few other rolling structures that might be used for raising, lowering and moving the bins themselves. All of the bins have a patch on the front that is heavily scratched to obscure whatever markings where once there. The only markings now are crude drawings of what might be a fist holding a dripping rock (or possibly a potato). The drawings are rusty-brown, as if done in blood.

"Okay, this is a bit disturbing. Let's see what's in one of the bins," Zahnrad notes as he slowly heads towards one. "Do you remember what was written in that one room we found? That home?"

"Um, something like 'bow not before the master' is what Dr. Pike said," Amelia recalls. She eyes the bins warily. "What do you think the drawing means?" she asks.

"Owner marking, I would guess. Tribe mark, perhaps," Zahn suggests as he looks for a latch on the bin.

The latches are simple, and while there is a place for a lock to connect, the one Zahn goes to doesn't appear to have one.

"If there are bones in here… " Zahn says as he slowly undoes the latch and opens the bin…

There are bones in the bin. And mummified flesh as well. It isn't clear if the Skeeks were dead before they were crammed into the box or not. The bodies are so tightly packed that some sort of press may have been involved.

"What did you find?" Amelia asks, coming up behind Zahn to have a look.

"Remember when I said there weren't any bodies? I was wrong," Zahnrad says grimly. "This might be a tomb afterall." He steps away from that bin and goes to check another.

"I don't think these bodies were exactly laid to rest," Amelia says, covering her nose and mouth with a hand. "They're… crushed."

The next bin is almost the same as the first, only this time Zahn can see scratch marks on the inside.

"The question is why," Zahnrad notes, "It doesn't make sense unless they were trying to squeeze something out of them. And, well, some were alive when it happened. There are scratches on the inside of this one." He leans in to examine the scratches.

The scratches are consistent with a Skeek's claws, and the brown stains around them are probably from blood.

"Storage. Food?" Amy suggests after closing the first bin's lid. "Trolls eat carrion, not… fresh… meat."

Zahnrad closes that bin and decides to check one more. "Can you see if there are any holes in the crate, like a drain hole?" Zahn asks Amelia.

Crouching down, Amelia tries to examine the lower parts of the bin. It isn't flush to the floor, since there are extensions underneath that probably match up to parts of the bin-carrier. "I can't see anything," she reports. The next bin Zahn opens is more of the same, only the Skeeks in it are smaller.

Zahn closes the bin quickly. "They did it to children too," he notes quietly. "Remember what you said about bait? What if they used it to lure people in, then caught and stored them for food. Do any look, uh, more recently used to you?" Zahn starts looking around quickly for evidence of recent use.

"I don't see any dust on the bins," Amy notes. "But the corpses don't look fresh or even… chewed on. Old and dried up, like jerky. So unless there is a big drying oven that these go through, I don't think they're recent."

"Okay. Well, let's get out of here. I don't feel comfortable being in here without better weapons," Zahn admits as he heads back towards the entrance. "I don't think anyone comes in here anymore but us, but still."

"Someone was down in the lower levels though, last time," Amelia notes and doesn't hesitate to leave for the room full of wreckage, and the door to the canals.

"I do want to go down to the lower levels sometime. We need to figure out what happened to Clover. Unless your mage friends can help get her to remember, we'll just have to go," Zahn notes. "These creatures … some have helped. They've also burrowed into the Kettenrad territory, so I have to know what they are for our safety anyway."