1????????Soul Bound
1.3??????Making a Splash
1.3.2????An Allotropic Realignment
1.3.2.7? Beadles, about
5:30 am, Sunday June 11th, 2045
3 bells of the forenoon watch
Morday full, 17th day of the month of KrevinBelember, A2F1600
A loading area housed a series of docks and half-filled carts, many painted with the colours of symbols of the various companies that rented access to the foundries for their smiths and other workers. A few names seemed familiar from stalls she’d seen on the road, but the only one that stood out strongly in her memory, blazed across the side of a dozen carts, was “Tridella, Gimet and Mazoni”. That was the company who’d been complaining about a lack of copper, wasn’t it?
Beyond loomed a series of soot-walled warehouse-sized buildings, towering grimly above their heads; with high arched roofs and topped by fuming smoke stacks. They were connected by a maze of slightly raised tracks along which ponies tugged flat metal trolleys, piled high with ores, crates of finished products, or just plain lumps of metal in every conceivable form of rod, sheet, ingot and coil.
Alderney led them confidently alongside one of these tracks and into a noisy building, little different from the others, except perhaps in size. It wasn’t as hot as Kafana had imagined, perhaps because barely a quarter of the furnaces seemed to be in active use, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the lighting. Blocky machines twice the height of a man, presses, extruders, and lethal looking cutters, stood dotted around the floor; the contours of their surfaces made angular and alien by the flickering shadows and dull reflections left by glowing maws of the furnaces and the sprays of eye searing sparks from grinders and crucibles.
One crucible, full of bright molten metal, was being moved from a nearby furnace to a wide casting area, suspended by a thick cabled hoist from one of the gantries half-hidden in the gloom high above. The hoist was being tugged along the gantry by small groups of workers who gamely pulled on ropes and pulleys while trying to balance, without benefit of even a guard rail, upon a series of narrow walkways that criss-crossed above the furnaces. She didn’t envy them the task.
The other jobs didn’t look much safer. The workers tending rolling beds, or moving moulds around with long handled tongs, were protected by heavy leather smocks and sturdy willow klompen on their feet - but the gear was scarred with scorch marks, as were most of the unprotected arms and faces. Even the stokers, whose job shovelling fuel and ash kept them well away from the molten metal end of things, didn’t look unscathed.
At the far end of the building, cordoned off by a ring of battered runestones, was an area with a very different feel to it. Not “holy” precisely, nor “higher quality”. But cleaner, more organised, more focused. Standing just outside it was a clean shaven man with dark curly hair wielding a clipboard, who might have been attractive if he wasn’t scowling quite so disapprovingly at the young girl cowering before him. Kafana could overhear his clipped words, not deeming the approaching party important enough to even acknowledge until he’d finished scolding the apprentice to his own satisfaction.
Ermo: “... and that’s another thing. There is a scheduled break halfway through your shift, for eating and other biological necessities. No other pauses are permitted, without written permission from your shift leader. The rules were clearly stated in the contract you signed when Sir Tridella took you on. If you cannot abide by them, Goffa, you can easily be replaced by any one of the other orphans seeking apprenticeships. Do I make myself clear?”
Goffa squirmed, wiggling her bottom like a puppy who’d made a mess on the floor.
Goffa: “Yes, Beadle Ermo.”
Something about the movement was familiar. Orphans? She spotted the orglife annotation above Goffa’s head, labelling her as “Puppy-chan”, and could scarcely believe her eyes. What had happened to the girl’s long hair? It was now shaped into a very unflattering bowl haircut that stuck out on all sides at a level just above her ears. The friendly confidence she’d displayed when serving gelato to a plaza filled with nobles and adventurers had also disappeared.
Ermo: “Then off with you, and no lollygagging around. A team waiting upon a single member isn’t an efficient team.”
He hissed the word “efficient”, as though he considered inefficiency to be the highest of evils, rating alongside cannibalism and mis-filed paperwork, but considerably higher than murder or making pacts with devils. Goffa ran clumsily for a ladder, her wooden shoes clattering against the floor. Ermo made a precise tick on his clipboard, before turning around to face the wombles.
Ermo: “No admittance.”
Alderney gave a friendly smile: “Oh, hello. High Master Priest-Smith Rudolfo recommended we visit.”
Ermo: “No admittance while forging is in progress. The smith has been very clear on this point, and it''s not my job to question. Procedures must be followed. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to wait.”
He didn’t look at all sorry, and stuck his arm out officiously, just to make it totally clear that there were two types of people in this world, the right sort and the wrong sort, and that in his opinion the wombles were the wrong sort.
Kafana: {Do you want me to blast him with my Aura of Power skill?}
Alderney: {Tempting, but no. Let’s watch for a while. I’m here to learn, not to brag.}You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Alderney nodded, and said in a serious voice: “Very responsible of you, Beadle Ermo. I quite agree. What’s the point of having a good procedure, if apprentices ignore it whenever they choose? That’s more than inefficient. A smith in charge is in charge for a reason, and a hierarchy they can’t rely upon is as bad as metal they can’t rely upon. It can be dangerous and lead to bad craftsmanship. Impurities must be hammered out, Sir. Hammered out, I say.”
This was Alderney, icon of chaotic crafting? Ermo looked a little stunned, as did most of the Wombles. But not all of them.
Alderney then turned to Bulgaria, managing to sound admiring of Ermo: “The smith must trust him highly, to place him in such an important role. I bet he knows a great deal about the people here and what’s going on.”
Bulgaria sounded skeptical: “He doesn’t look knowledgeable about crafting to me. He isn’t even wearing a smock. Two silver says he can’t tell you who each of those people are and what they do. Not properly - not in the detail you couldn’t guess just from watching.”
He waved to the ring behind Ermo and the people busy inside it, while holding up a pair of shiny ducato coins.
Alderney: “Done!” and she matched the stake, handing two coins to Wellington who held his palms out like a table. Bulgaria did the same, and then Alderney turned back to Ermo.
Alderney: “Beadle Ermo, of your kindness, and only if it won’t distract too much, please could you demonstrate to this lout that administrators are important, and that they hold their position because of their knowledge and skills, not from favouritism or inability to understand crafting.”
Was Alderney laying it on too thickly? Apparently not. Ermo blossomed at her words, like a desert flower long starved of water that finally receives the sweet touch of rain.
Ermo: “You see the two on the far side, beneath the juggernaut?”
A thick stone flywheel, three stories high and looking like it weighed about the same as a small herd of elephants, was positioned vertically against the wall of the building upon an A-frame constructed from tree-trunk sized metal girders. It rotated slowly but with unstoppable force, and a series of wide-toothed gears spaced along a branching beam transferred that motion to several smaller gear wheels at the end of the different branches.
Beneath it, standing by a set of long levers sicking vertically up from a frame set into the floor, was a paunchy man with a soft fluffy beard, speaking in a jovial tone of voice to a younger man crouching beside him, who listened intently but didn’t make a sound except for an occasional hacking cough.
Ermo: “That’s Master Maci and Journeyman Affi. You can see that today they’re operating the catch handles used to engage and disengage the power train, but only an administrator such as myself could tell you that they have rare professions evolved due to their expertise in furnace control, grinding and sharpening. You won’t encounter that in towns or villages - division of labour this fine is only possible when you’ve a business with enough orders to keep twenty stations going at the same time, so everyone has something to do, even if their speciality doesn’t apply to all products or to all stages of production.”
Alderney nodded encouragingly, while Bulgaria displayed a worried face, as if concerned about losing the bet.
Ermo: “For example, you see those three at the work benches?”
A young man, face red with blotches left by flaking skin, was standing at a bench next to some large barrels. The bench was covered in alchemical equipment and jars of strange substances; he was currently using a dark stone pestle and mortar to grind up blue crystals from a geode and stuffing the resulting powder into a complex apparatus of swinging arms, lenses, lanterns and hoops that held membranes stretched paper thin.
Next to him was a curvy woman in her early 30s, skin glowing with sweat despite wearing nothing on her top half under her leather smock. Her shoulder-length hair was so thick it covered half her face, and had a vitality and greenish tinge that made it appear almost alive. She was working on the scrimshawed bone handle of a knife, using a sharp metal tool that shone with mana, but seemed to mainly be preoccupied with teasing the man by the barrels.
The third figure towered over the other two but, unlike Rudolfo, he was lanky rather than muscled, with a peaceful expression on his boney face. His hair was concealed by the colourful tasselled hood of his robes, a mix of monkish scapular and bedouin thawb that she’d come to associate with Sassari; but Kafana guessed from his worn looks that he was at least a decade older than the woman. He hummed to himself as he fitted leather straps to a breastplate that lay on his bench, too engrossed in his work to even notice the other two.
Ermo: “Master Trolezzo started off as a general mage and crafter but, thanks to the opportunity to concentrate upon using her runic magic during the engraving and polishing stages, she’s now an enchantress. Ingto is currently an alchemist with an aptitude for mechanical devices, but by the time he’s finished his journeymanship improving the quenching stage, I have confidence he’ll have become a valuable asset that repays the investment we’ve made in his training. Master Giare is a skilled armourer in his own right, with first hand experience as a warrior. He could support himself, but by accepting a contract to work here he’s been able to concentrate on the design and fitting aspects, while leaving the actual forging to others.”
Bulgaria sounded suspicious: {What are XperiSense playing at? This sounds like the start of an industrial revolution, but the first factory wasn’t built in England until the 1720s, when John Lombe stole machine designs from the Italians. It’s out of period!}
Wellington: {No more so than some parts of their financial system. It doesn’t take any technology they didn’t have and it is more efficient. Maybe it just emerged naturally as they ran the simulation, as an unanticipated effect of magic being present too, and they just decided to go with it?}
Bungo: {I don’t know. The guilds seem to be pretty strong. Wouldn’t they object to power being moved from professionals to business owners? Something would need to be fighting the hold they have.}
Tomsk: {Is it more efficient? If you spend years helping one of your workers gain a rare specialised profession which you then come to rely upon, what happens when they get hired by a competitor? It sounds risky to me.}
Wellington: {Risk is acceptable when the expected rewards are high enough. The key must be the contract document. I’ve now studied the ones Beltrame developed, and I’m certain it would be possible to write a contract that magically notices if an employee breaks the agreed terms, and records evidence of the violations.}
Kafana left them to their argument, and turned her attention back to Ermo and Alderney. She could have used her Multitask skill but she’d rather not unless she had to. There were only two people left in the circle that Ermo hadn’t described. One, a willowy blonde with glasses and not a hair out of place, seemed to be a secretary of some sort. She was listening to an impressive looking man, well dressed and in his 50s, standing behind a complex console with an air of confident mastery despite his missing left hand.
Ermo: “...finally there’s Master Antegnati, whose promising career as an organist was cut short by a duel of honour, but who then went on to become Torello’s leading expert in organ programming. The smith saw potential in his work, and together they are developing what I can confidently predict will be… Ah, hush now, they’re about to start.”