"The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject." -- Seneca

It wasn't particularly difficulty to reassure the Redcrests that the new constructions weren't anything to worry about. Between some basic consultations with Orentha and a quick tour of the large empty rooms, whatever fears they'd had about the mysterious doors opening overnight dissipated fairly quickly and were replaced with some chattering discussions of how to arrange and furnish the spaces effectively. The ranges were the simple part, mostly just involving adding some stalls to establish firing lanes, adjusting the backstop to prevent ricochets or unnecessary damage to arrows, and some storage and a desk for whoever was supervising. They weren't a large enough group that there was going to be a full-time range officer, but someone was going to have to take a leadership role if the training was to be worthwhile.

Apparently, an ideal magic range would have targets and backstops that were constructed of specific magic (or at least elementally) resistant materials, but I'd just have to make do with granite and steel for the backstop and a range of materials for the targets. Apparently the default patterns for targets were fairly similar to my old world, with concentric circle targets mounted in a variety of ways, but with humanoid targets patterned on what I'd come to recognize as goblinoid structure – shorter of stature, slighter of build, with longer arms and shorter legs.

The crafting area was trickier, and there were more arguments about the ideal layout of the workspaces. It seemed likely I'd need to tweak them for the individual craftspeople, but the only thing they really agreed on was the need for extensive storage and sturdy work tables. The form and size of those things was apparently going to be quite variable – the featherworkers needed smaller storage spaces, but lots of them, while wood carvers and potters, for example, needed space for larger resources, but also spaces for their smaller and more delicate tools and finishing elements. I did some of that, but mostly only some basic storage spaces and tables, at least until the craftspeople began to actually arrive.

Having done about as much of that as I intended to before the main migration wave, I had them join me on the surface to lay out spaces for a smithy and some limited leatherworking. I got the sense they didn't intend to do any large-scale tanning, which should help keep the smell from being an issue, but it was still set off to one side. We placed their surface footprint to the south of the main surface zone along the cliff – mostly to keep them apart from the now standard landing zone.

I didn't have a lot of time to work on their surface buildings, but I laid out at least the footings of the structures and threw up simple stone walls with wooden roofs. I didn't go as far as adding a furnace or dye pits, figuring that would best wait for the crafters to arrive. I asked about what they would need for flight training, but it seemed like that would mostly just take place in the open air, though I'd be asked to provide things like movable rings and gates at some later date, and I had my own plans for more creative obstacles involving sudden gusts, turbulent air, and the like. I'd have to ponder that, though, as I was reasonably sure they'd be easier to manage in an enclosed space.

It appeared that most of the rest of the Redcrests were doing some preliminary assigning of tribe members to the various structures, and once we returned to the living area, they had a few adjustments to request. Nothing onerous, though, mostly just some interior walls and movable partitions. As they settled into their lunch, I shifted my focus over to Hakdrilda.

"Ah, Vay! I was hoping to get an earlier start, but I understand you have a number of other concerns at the moment. Thanks for coming." She sounded like she was trying not to sound annoyed, but I wasn't all that concerned – she had to know I had my own priorities, even if she didn't like them all that much.

**GREEN**

"Let's start with the door to the test chamber, if you don't mind. Ideally, we'll want as tight a seal as we can get so that we can isolate the space as much as possible. Granite's not too bad, though it can release gases naturally. I'm guessing that if you try, you can eliminate any natural pockets of decay gases and seal off any natural flaws in the stone."

**GREEN**

"Excellent. Do you need to do that now? Or have you done it already? Ach, sorry. Yes or no questions... Has the stone already been adapted for this purpose?

**GREEN**

"Very good. Depending on our results, we might need to sheathe the chamber in steel, but this should be fine for now. I have a door design ready to go, but I'm not quite sure what the best way to seal it is. It doesn't do us much good if the chamber isn't pretty airtight. I don't suppose you have access to any sealants, do you?"

**RED**

Our discussion, one-sided as it mostly was, went on for a good while as we tried to establish some basic parameters. It seemed as though Hakdrilda wanted something that would function as not just an air flow chamber but also something of an environmental chamber that could control not just temperature and humidity but also pressure and ambient mana. I wasn't really sure how much of that we could arrange mechanically, but at least some of it I could manage through direct manipulation of the dungeon. Frankly, that level of control would require constant focus and effort on my part, except that she had brought along some useful magic tools that could carry part of the load, alongside some reasonably precise measurement tools (mostly also involving some magic. We'd need to negotiate which of those things she wanted to risk me absorbing, but for the moment we focused on the door to the chamber. As it happened, we settled on a circular steel door (built much like a bank vault door in some ways) with an O-ring groove design in order to get a good seal. I could build the tolerances as closely as I wanted, in a total cheat kind of way, but getting a good seal that would hold up to repeated use without my constant intervention was tricky. In the end, she passed over a couple of spare items that would help with that.

Blueprint Received: Nitrile Slime O-ring

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Blueprint Received: Sealant Slime Grease

Both the O-rings and the sealant grease were byproducts of an industry focused on uses for various kinds of slimes. I wasn't sure if they were made from the slimes themselves, or from their excretions, but in any event, they required enough processing that I didn't get any new blueprints for the slimes themselves.

We spent some time fiddling with the hinges and the locking mechanism as well. I was a bit concerned that I hadn't received any new blueprints associated with the project, but I had a sense that one might come once the chamber was completed.

I was getting a bit antsy to go back to exploring the gnomish city, and by mid-afternoon, as Hakdrilda was wrestling with setting up her various magic tools and sensors and getting them calibrated to her satisfaction, I slipped off to do my own thing. I expect she sensed the difference fairly quickly, but, if so, I was no longer paying attention by the time she realized. I'd check in with her again tomorrow, as I expected she'd want me to absorb blueprints for some of her samples and at least the less critical and complicated devices in her experimental setup. She might even be ready to run some tests, though I expected she'd be establishing some baseline measurements in the chamber for a few days yet.

Having discharged my self-appointed duties to my visitors, I refocused on my exploration of the gnomish city. I began by expanding my domain to include the entirety of the central plaza up to the edge of the surrounding buildings. The plaque embedded at the base of the statue gave me my first written text associated with the gnomish city, and I could feel my epigraphy skill kicking into overdrive. It was a fairly lengthy text and in what appeared to be two distinct languages and writing systems. It seemed likely that both inscriptions provided the same text, and that was likely to be helpful at some point. Unfortunately, neither was a match for the texts I'd already learned, though there were similarities between one set and the written form of "Common" that most of the books Norfoth and Orn had provided used. I'd have to work on the translation, and more texts would help with that, but it was enough to suggest that the statue depicted an individual credited both with a variety of acts of heroism and the founding of this particular city. The founding date given placed it about 250 years earlier than the oldest coin I'd found the other day, but again, the dates didn't seem to match up to the calendars in current usage.

The gate-shaped formations didn't turn out to be anything directly useful to me. Despite my fervent wishes, there was no indication of magic or enchantments on them, and they didn't seem to be functioning as teleportation hubs or anything like that. My best guess was that they served some sort of ritual function, but that wasn't an interpretation I felt strongly about. Archaeologists have a long history of assuming that any artifact without an obvious function served a ritual purpose – and our track record showed that was wrong at least as often as it was correct. I had no audience here to second guess me, but I still just chalked those up to "purpose unknown," at least for the time being.

Differential wear patterns in the flagstones paving the area suggested that foot traffic mostly was confined to areas immediately in front of the surrounding buildings. Whatever the central space around the statue was used for, it saw less traffic (or perhaps was more consistently maintained). That said, the area wasn't entirely empty, and I added to my list of random artifacts with some regularity during the process. Mostly those fell in the category of residential debris – ranging from stoneware bottle fragments to bits of ceramic in a variety of types to the occasional bit of metal (usually in the form of highly corroded nails).

The continuing lack of organic material was becoming suspicious at this point, and I was guessing the site was old enough that I just wasn't going to find much like that. The one exception I found was a fully carbonized fragment of some kind of squash seed. It was still clinging to a ceramic sherd that had presumably been involved in burning it. Attempting to assess it with my radiometric dating skill worked, but didn't seem to return a hugely accurate response, telling me the seed had been a living thing 50,000 years ago, give or take 2,000 years. That gave me serious pause, as 50,000 years ago in my old world we'd had anatomically modern humans, but they were still living as simple hunter-gatherers (ignoring your wilder theorists, anyways). And assuming these gnomes weren't the creators of the island, then the original residents were even older than that.

If the sky island really had been occupied for over 50,000 years, I had an awful lot of timeline to fill in. On the one hand, that was kind of reassuring, suggesting I could be finding new archaeological remains for a long time yet. On the other hand, the sheer number of things I didn't know just seemed to get substantially larger.

Of course, that was a lot to base on a single burned seed, so I continued my explorations. I did pause momentarily to see just how far back the historical works I'd been given extended. None of the works I possessed really attempted to trace back anywhere near that far, and it seemed like periodic catastrophes and cultural collapses had limited this time frame to one of distant legend. Certainly, it was possible that more complete records existed in the hands of longer-lived races, but if so they didn't seem to be common knowledge. Working in a dry, cave-like environment did have some advantages, in terms of preservation, though there was apparently enough humidity in the air to prevent mummification from being a common result. I supposed that the other reason the city was in such a good condition, given its age, was that for simple reasons of scale it would have been easy to overlook by more recent residents and of no immediate use if they HAD found it. It's possible that the city had developed here to take advantage of some specific resources that others would covet, but I hadn't found any evidence of what that might be as yet.

I shook off my musings about the age and preservation of the city in favor of actually collecting some data. Two sides of the plaza seemed likely to represent commercial establishments, with a decorative arcade on each side interrupted every few meters by doors, with large (relatively speaking) windows (mostly long broken) making up the space between. The other two sides of the plaza seemed likely to comprise administrative buildings on the one side, with a large religious structure (judging by the dramatic architecture and increased density of iconography) opposite the rather more functional looking block of offices that practically screamed bureaucracy to my jaded eye.

Keeping in mind my intentions to advance my divine quest, I spent the evening and overnight hours ploddingly expanding my domain through the administrative building, searching for some hint as to the location of the mana gathering arrays or information on the original builders of the sky island, or even what had caused the gnomes to evacuate their city. All indications suggested a fairly orderly withdrawal from the sky island, though one requiring the abandonment of at least some larger fixtures.

That pattern at least held true for the administrative offices, as stone desks remained in most offices. The main entry hall featured a nice inlaid mosaic floor which seemed to represent a coat of arms or some similar symbolic representation of the government – in this case taking the form of crossed spanners below what looked like some kind of golden zeppelin. That was all kinds of suggestive, and I maintained a distant hope of finding blueprints I could use for making skyships of one sort or another. The other key find was in one of the larger offices not far off the main hall, where a map of the city appeared to have been inlaid into the wall – possibly an urban planning office. There was no obvious legend and no street names, but it gave a sense of the full extent of the city, as well as indicating some roads that seemed to extend out of town, presumably to other key settlement points. That would give me at least some direction for further explorations.

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