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f57349.jpg
Ribbon Candy
f57349
>>1065560
>Who owns what's inside?
>rolled 10
That's a surprisingly tricky question. Last time it came up, Noemi explained that the master jeweler personally owns about 60% of the tools, raw material stocks, and items built on spec. First Bank of Ephremon, headquartered some 150 miles to the southeast, claims another 20% stake and serves as counterparty for escrow and commodity-futures contracts. A few journeymen jewelers also have shares. Completed commission work belongs to the commissioner, obviously, but is considered to be held in trust until they actually pick it up. Once, when a really major commission got lost or stolen while half-complete, an insurance adjuster from Ephremon and an aeon priest from far away over the mountains spent six months getting in screaming arguments with everyone else involved, and at least part of the final settlement had to be kept secret.
There's also an azure-steel box full of items left as collateral for loans, along with related documents, but that's sealed much tighter and you shouldn't need to mess with it to make use of the workshop.
>Is the jeweler, or whoever usually supervises this workshop, here?
>rolled 13
Locked up and headed home for lunch just before the sinkhole opened. Didn't see 'em in the crowd outside - may have decided to take the rest of the day off.
>attempt to track the intake
>rolled 17
There's an absurdly huge tunnel, wide enough that the hall could fall into it like a cork pushed too far into a winebottle. If you fired off your infiltrator cypher, it might not be able to map both floor and ceiling in one pass. Air seems to be coming from the relatively horizontal portion of tunnel, to the west-south-west. If those scattered snowflakes are anything to go by, far end - or at least a major surface access - must be miles away up in the mountains.
>>1065574
>properly reinforce the tunnel. Spending Intellect effort on this.
>trained in geology
>rolled 7
Not your best work, but definitely safer than a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs would've managed on their own.
>Center of the big room's ceiling, where the arches cross ...
>Sepurcius will try to go about engineering all of this. Once again expending Intellect effort.
>rolled 11, 10
Key joints successfully reinforced, just missing a suitable slab of armor for the focal point. Vault in the jeweler's workshop would almost certainly be sturdy enough, but even if you were able and willing to move it, wouldn't want to bet your life on all this improvised scaffolding ( https://xkcd.com/2375 ) supporting that much weight so high off the floor. Could try duplicating the vault with mimetic gel, and then slice up the copy into more convenient-sized pieces, but... apart from the more obvious problems with that plan, you'd need either a larger container, or some way to temporarily shrink the vault so it fits inside a 55-gallon drum. Also if the process was mishandled, the original vault would be destroyed, contents seriously damaged, mimetic gel expended, and an explosive reaction would likely cause serious injury or death for anyone unlucky enough to be in the same room without wearing artifact armor - which, if you had any, would make the whole experiment unnecessary.
More sensible approach might be to try scrounging up some azure steel not already in use, either from the workshop supplies or attic junk, then weld the scraps together.
>take over for Saharnya
>rolled 18, 1, 16
Fourth hour of digging sees two more cubic meters of progress at a cost of 5 Might, assuming you're willing to spend Effort. Then Sepurcius sprains a muscle, turns back to let somebody else take over, ends up falling into that gap between escape tunnel and buried hall's front door.
First few meters are more scramble than plummet. Mattock hooks on the doorframe. Guy running the wheelbarrow drops it, kneels, reaches into the chasm to try and grab. "Rope! Bring a rope," somebody shouts. Fingertips touch, grip fails. Rocks and drit crumble off the dull green shapestone of the hall's exposed foundation.
Further down, fluffy pink insulation material seems to have formed a series of shelves or canopies, or perhaps a single sheet in a spiraling pattern. Not nearly strong enough to walk on, but punching through them like sailcloth awnings slows Sepurcius down enough to not be injured when he lands, though the subsequent tumble down three or four hundred feet of scree-strewn slope leaves him bundled in an itchy cocoon.
>Sepurcius will try to assist by using Scan on the incoming airflows that Alaiya and her cyber-fairy find.
Scan results are piped to display on the face of Sepurcius's pocketwatch, dim orange glow of which is the only readily available light source. No significant noxious gasses. Easy enough to report that back to Alaiya by shouting.
Other interesting details: floor is mostly a mix of cold mud and aggregate, presumably displaced material from the sinkhole, but there's a chair-sized tetrahedral chunk of something denser and harder to identify pressed against the small of Sepurcius's back. Walls and ceiling of the tunnel seem consistent with having been cut by some sort of level 7 cylindrical boring machine within past few days. Intermittent grinding noises echo like distant thunder from the... north-ish? Magnetism's a bit wobbly.
>trained in geology
>trained in understanding numenera
>rolled 15
Founder's Mattock - left behind up above - projects a field which reshapes and repels stone. Most visible on the pointy parts, but actually extends all the way down the handle. Sepurcius could feel it pushing on shards and pebbles up against his palm, bones inside his fingers. If someone wrapped, say, a hand-shaped piece of marble around there while it was powered down, then reactivated the field, resultant unfurling motion wouldn't require any miracles to explain.
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