This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
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Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
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His kit remained where he had left it earlier, and when he returned to the ground of the former airship, with its repurposed skin, he had just enough time before supper, to do a cursory search of the rest of the place.
The number of rooms and ad hoc corridors impressed him to some extent. The occupants had clearly been here a while and had been numerous enough that Pool could see signs of personalization here and there. Some rooms were arranged for individual occupancy, even having beds apparently scavenged from the airship (and given what remains of the airship, nearly everything had been). Other chambers reflected more of a barracks with stacked bunks. Tables and chairs had been placed in functional locations.
After passing by a cafeteria of sorts–it had a cookstove complete with chimney and tables with chairs, and a cabinet with stacks of plates and bowls and the like as–he found another chamber.
This one had its own stove, a black iron round thing, shaped like an egg with a pipe snaking up and out through the rather low hanging tarp ceiling. Next to the bed was a table and chair. An oil lamp sat on the table, but there were also hanging light-tubes passing through, just above Pool’s hat at their lowest.
A stack of books of various shapes and sizes stood on the top of a two meter cabinet, which itself held a small collection of clothes. Pool made the assumption that this had been the captain’s own chamber, an assumption which was mostly confirmed by his discovery that several of the stacked books from the top of the cabinet where the log books of the airship Tehuti’s Revenge. He moved the stack of books to the table, resolving to return, possibly in the morning.
In another room, near enough to the cafeteria, he found a store room. Shelves had been constructed in three parallel rows. On the the shelves, where hundreds of jars of all manner of pickled things. There were also olives in oil (which had solidified from the cold) and dangling nets of dusty dried hams.
The tins of flour and beans were mostly depleted and filled with the desiccated bodies of bugs and maggots. Pickles and olives for supper, I suppose. The were a few bottles of what would turn out to be beer, which had survived the freeze-thaw cycle, and had not burst like the majority of them.
Along the edge of the storeroom, were low stacks of thin logs, apparently all birch from down below the tree line. From the litter of bark and fragments on the floors, he could see that there had been at one point several times as much wood in store–surviving the cold winter would require a lot of wood, and Pool wondered how much time had been spent with the crew trekking up and down the mountain with nothing but wood.
Perhaps the most intriguing discovery of the evening, second to the mechanism itself, was the finding of the clockwork anthropomorphic mechanism.
A chamber, actually close to the engine and computational mechanism, between it and the outside walls of the tent, contained a bank of electrical batteries, connected to, but disconnected at the moment by means of a fork-like breaker, the tent’s electrical supply.
A two meter tall, human-shaped…thing…stood adjacent to one of the batteries. It was brass and steel and hundreds of tiny gears and sheets of that white false-ivory material occupied the chest area.
Its skeleton resembled that of a human, with its bones consisting of lengths of steel, cut and hammered into shape and likely scavenged from the bones of Tehuti outside. The arms and legs and hands and feet were articulated to an extent to make them useful.
A pair of lenses sat on either side of the head which appeared to have the capacity to turn from side to side and move up and down.
It also appeared to have a smaller battery pack occupying its lower back.
It appeared to be inert. Perhaps its charge had been depleted. Pool saw that a layer of dust had covered it, like everything else here that had been undisturbed for years.
There were spaces for as many as three other mechanized men in the room given the arrangements of the batteries.
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Ion Fyr 