Awoke expected time. Ceiling unlit looked like the pit of a narrow clay pottery. Blinding white lights of the Rolan walls in unimpeded sunlight now. Clouds had cleared, factories were at rest. A perfect day to observe and chronicle. Neh, naught behd.
Isrlinea wore ivrosian plates over her shins - a safeguard perhaps for the steeper bits of the day’s East Edge climb. She wore the same white vest from night before - neh, of course, not carrying luggage or the like. She carried a small water bottle with her which she used to wash the residuals of yesterday’s iris dying before we departed into the white light.
Meh clothes had dried into their regular juicy Eisen leather form after hanging em in the humidor closet for the seven hures or so.
The walkout to the ambulatories: terraces were filled with “creed”-ens throwing soaps or ceremonial pits dug into segments of the walkways; each by necessity assigned an insignia signifying an individual owner, a creed master; some stripped naked, or in pants bathing in ceremonial sodas or beer to wash aways yesterday’s efrassian to be covered again with a thin layer of the pollen dusted into the air of intersecting courtyard mazes.
Gsorn met us for breakfast, a few shots of Fgordian licorice milk, canned. Enough energy to continue at an only subtly rising pace across the connected row of ambulatories, through long sunlit alleyways, across a few narrow railed pedestrian bridges or wide buttresses paved atop with a frictional spattering of crushed shell and chunks of ivrosian rock.
Turns out Islrinea had miscalculated or plans had changed. A few troks before the main wall of East Edge slid into open view.
(In this early part of the day’s trek, I discerned a now a more interesting feature of Rsolan’s ambulatories and how they’ve devised the lifting “hills” while maximizing distribution of sunlight into the city’s gut. Hexagonal pieces of the walkways literally peeled up, like dried snake skin being shed from the city; then clumped in groups of five, I’d assume. I noticed this directly as we passed through the triangular hole between two of them to meet Gsorn and only walked a mere few feet less of a trok before escaping a deep penumbra of shadow into blazing white light again - just as the rest of Rsola was. I noticed above me the risen ambulatories with harmonically diverging paths, spreading apart and providing buttress to the massive trunk of East Edge. A giant frond of some majestic fern sprouting from Rsola’s core. The sides, flanks of apartments and drinking spots of the rising passageways and courtyards were covered in large angled ivrosian plates and sparkled fiercely like the girdle of some carved white gem. The structure was supported only by translucent metal sheets, clear but warped in twirls as to make Rsola’s sections of relative yonder appear a blurring mass, details obscured by turbulent heat - one might even wrongly guess.)
We had returned to the triangle’s mouth and walked close to halfway when the main wall of east edge appeared. Gsorn’s friends (two of them) had met us and as I stated Isrlinea had miscalculated; one was not the fellow from the drinking spot night before. The two yet unacquainted had separate, more important agendas carrying on about the day’s tunings and tests in Rsolan. Perhaps they assumed I wasn’t capable of eavesdropping, not that it mattered much in these circumstances.
The last segment of the buttress cum ambulatory stretch ended now near the end of East Edge’s juggernautian base. We rested for an mid morn’s dinner of dried sprouts and hot milk with some kind of thick red pollen mixed in. They all seemed to laugh at my loose fitting leather garb and continent-man’s Eisen skinned canteen. They of course wore specially crafted climbing gear, blue rubber grip sandals fitting like gloves to unsocked feet and waist harnesses attached to narrow rucksacks hugging their bare backs closely. They were shirtless, covered in a power sparkling blue, red or orange to yellow depending on the angle of the sun when it hit them. They wore slender black pants approaching the knees and meeting the ivrosian shin plates at their tops. Rsolans dressed synchronously for any planned event. I imagined Isrlinea kept her vest on as some odd form of humility before a visitor who usually misinterprets the Rsolan customs. Rsolans are perhaps the most peculiar folk of the continent; maybe with exclusion of the Kforretc chiefs, of course.
We filled our sacks with ovralian stones, headed up the flights of stairs following the lower half of the mid section. We rested for a few minutes midway and dumped the shining black stones across the white boards of the lift point’s terrace floor. The ringed section cut a groove into the tower’s belly. We sat their in the shade drinking water and then got ready to lift and pulley the large nets filled with ovralian and feed them in to the cauldron ingress conveyors dividing the terrace into warped trapezoids. It took us seven decums to lift the last two of which I took some time to fulfill my chronologist duties and monitor the feeding of rocks into the cauldron drop pipe. They fell down the long thick pipe forming the towers core and spattered into smaller shards as they fell into the reservoir container. Every six duns this would be half full, enough for a release if emergency dictated, after which it would then be ready for simulating burning for other contingencies or a complete drop into the system constructed under the dead caldera resting beneath the city, their centers concentric.The initial drop was somewhat impressive, the rocks began glowing yellow halfway down. The pipe was laced with replenishing coats of Opser oil to trigger the chemical reactions maximizing the break up of the hard stones as they crashed into the mountainous reservoir below.
Rsolan engineering is quite impressive. Bot how they really accomplish this fecking tower is soch a short teme, neh?
The rest of mid tower was ladders, these would be converted to pullers in several days, but weren’t completed, perhaps out of convenience (neh?), in time for my visit. I was honestly near exhaustion. Lucky we didn’t have to pull more rocks. Isrlinea said some less fit Rsolans might take two the three duns to reach the top, so making the trek for little over half of dunlight would be a feat.
The high section was the most challenging. Ladder installations hadn’t even begun, so we had to climb up the wall plates. I indeed felt under-equipped for the climb, clutching on to the narrow ledges of ivrosian plate walls, crimping toes now bared on any available foot hold: the tops of transmission discs, handles on repair cabinet doors, another ledge, whatever. The peek felt particularly precarious as I glanced down, now thousands of feet above the humming cycles at the floor of the cities. Human beings and bikes were no more discernible than flickers of light in efrassian dust. The tracks had not been connected either. I felt like we were sitting in some distant isolated cave with clear walls built in a mountain of sky. I observed Gsorn and his two grundas pulling Rsolan-made instruments from their capes now untied; they had laced them closed and tied long, thin ropes to rings in the bottom of their pant legs; then pulled them up when we reached the top. I was the last to pull my torso up onto the crown’s surface to bask in the unshaded sunlight glowing from above; now a deep yellow bud of fire.
The ejector pad was nice piece of work. The buffer car carrier hadn’t been built out yet. But I noted the large screw holes on the west of the platform which made the trajectory of the tracks to the east. I looked down and the nearest hight tower, ninety troks and forty feet, roughly. The top was surfaced and nearing completion like the current one. Just below the peek of East Edge’s mid section I noticed a buttress connecting the two. We would use that to continue the trek and observe each tower along the periphery of the telldron spiral and end at the west of Rsola.
Powers fading, feck. End transmission.
