"There are no secrets that time does not reveal." – Jean Racine.

She still seemed a bit uneasy in my presence, but Hakdrilda was clearly making an effort to get past that reaction, and I was trying to be careful not to trigger any particular concerning notes.

"Good afternoon, Vay. I thought I'd try to help repay your help a bit more by offering up some simple things one can do with compressed air; I'd guess you could turn some of them into interesting traps."

I wasn't really sure she could come up with anything I hadn't already – between my otherworlder's knowledge of air compressors and the book I'd been gifted on Dungeon Air Magic – but I was happy to let her try, and I wasn't going to tell her if it wasn't all that helpful. Frankly, if it helped settle her down, that would be enough; I'd always found it stressful to deal with people who were, themselves, stressed out.

Her first effort was something I'd heard about, but never actually seen in operation – an air hammer, sometimes called a pneumatic hammer. "I don't actually have one with me, but I have roughed out a blueprint from memory; conceptually, they're pretty simple, though you need a fairly strong airmage to power them. Basically, you have compressed air driving a piston that delivers a repeated impact to whatever surface you're applying it to. They're great for mining and demolition work, if you don't happen to have an earthmage on staff. I don't expect you'd need one for those functions yourself, but I could see you using them to break armor, or hands or something."

Blueprint acquired: Dwarven air hammer

Well, she wasn't wrong, though that seemed like a noisy and inefficient way to go about it. I suppose the noise could be part of the point in the right scenario.

**GREEN**

She seemed to feel I was insufficiently impressed with that, so her next blueprint was for something called a vortex tube. This wasn't something I'd heard of before, and I think my interest came through better. It did take her a while to sketch out the vortex spin chamber in a format I could use to secure the blueprint, as well as to understand enough about how it worked. Apparently, they used it in HVAC functions in dwarven cities at a variety of scales as it basically took a stream of compressed air and turned it into two streams – one of cold air and one of hot air.

Blueprint acquired: Vortex Tube

It was really interesting but, of course, given my granular control of temperature within my domain, I wasn't really sure why I'd want to use it. I could, presumably, use it to handle temperature without active mana input, but that wasn't really a big part of my mana expenditures, typically. It wasn't something the dwarves used all that often either, largely because it required a substantial investment in mana crystals and durable enchantments to create a source of compressed air powerful enough, making it a rather expensive approach.

"Okay Vay, one last blueprint before we start in on experiments. This one I think you're going to love! It's got the same problems as the last one on an even larger scale, in that a durable source of compressed air is expensive, but I've seen at least one prototype and since you're capable of powering them externally, you can skip a lot of the issues that team ran into."

Blueprint acquired: Daekaran Compressed Air Aircraft

That was, well... fascinating. Totally impractical without magic, since the amount and weight of the compressed air would mean very short flights with very small craft, but I could, almost certainly, create powered flight, at least within my own domain where I could simply provide compressed air directly to drive the propellor. That said, within my domain, I could simply move the air around to push a standard glider whichever way I wanted, so not really that helpful, although that would require much greater attention on my part. It wasn't likely to revolutionize skyship production, in my opinion, and the blueprint for a skyship flight core was going to be more important to me. Still, some of the ways in which they'd opted to reduce weight might be transferrable, and at some point, I'd have to come up with my own design for a flying craft.

I think Hakdrilda sensed my bemusement and took that as a win. It might not be particularly practical, but it WAS interesting.

After that, we went back to our regularly scheduled round of experimentation, which mostly involved me pushing air through a variety of standard model ventilation circuits and seeing how shifts in temperature and pressure affected them – particularly in terms of point stresses at key points in the system. It seemed pretty boring to me, but she seemed happy with the data she was receiving, so I called it a win. Her promises to add in fluctuations in humidity later in the week weren't exactly winning me over to the project, either.

Still, by dinner time, she was willing to let me go and had largely relaxed as she got caught up in the work. She was still poring over her results when I shifted focus, a beer in one hand and a loaf of crusty bread in the other. I assumed she'd have something other than carbs at some point, but I made a point of leaving her some apples and cheese on the table where she sat before moving on. She acknowledged the gift with a distracted grunt and a wave of her beer stein to my vague amusement.

**************************************************

I decided to return to the gnomish library to see what I could find. At this point, I'd really only gotten as far as the exterior facade and the main lobby area, and I wanted to make sure I was interpreting the building correctly.

It didn't turn out to be difficult to verify, as once I pushed my domain into the first flanking hall, I encountered rows and rows of stone shelves, both built into the walls and freestanding, extending from floor to ceiling and presumably helping buttress the weight on the building. As expected, they were stripped bare, without even dust to suggest books had been left behind when the gnomes departed. The ceiling was just high enough that I wouldn't expect a gnome to feel claustrophobic, and I could see where mana lights inset might have once lit up the space with an even glow. The nice thing I was discovering about subterranean civilizations was that almost any permanent fixtures were going to be made out of stone – wood and other such perishable items being presumably much less convenient. The shelves bore all the hallmarks of having been shaped into place, and my explorations below floor level revealed not just incredibly thick stone floors but that the shelves extended directly into a basement level before merging with the subfloor layer. Small restrooms were built into the walls between the lobby and the hall.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

I hadn't found an entrance to the basement as yet, so I was curious as to where that might be located. Still, before leaving this level, I wanted to absorb the full space into my domain. The hall on the other side of the lobby might as well have been a mirror image, turning out to be nearly identical to the first, right down to the number of bookcases standing empty vigil over the abandoned structure. I didn't actually locate the entry to the basement level until I'd returned to the lobby space and performed a closer examination of the wall to either side of the central staircase. Concealed behind standing counters that flanked the approach to the stairs, there were small, secret doors built in on either side – each apparently leading to a chamber beneath the two main halls, and separated by a substantial block of solid stone. I wasn't sure if they were supposed to be entirely secret or merely very discreet, but clearly access to those spaces was restricted. It made me excited to explore, but I decided I should do my due diligence first and investigate the upper floor.

Claiming the spiraling staircase to the second floor, I found a landing that opened into two hallways that extended above each of the halls below. These were flanked by smaller rooms, now largely bare. What appeared to have possibly been classrooms took up all of the rooms on the front side of the hallways, and part of the backside. I assumed they were classrooms or meeting spaces of some sort as they seemed sized to hold about 15-20 gnomes, with a large slate tacked to one wall of the room. Those were affixed to the wall mechanically but apparently hadn't been worth trying to remove when the building was vacated.

The remainder of the rooms along these hallways seemed more like smaller, individual offices, though, again, nothing really remained to demonstrate that. They were smaller, more cubical, and that just seemed like the most likely interpretation. There were also additional restrooms on this floor, placed directly above the ground floor ones, presumably for ease of plumbing.

There were, again, shelves built into the walls of each room, save the restrooms, but these were smaller, more modest affairs – and again, stripped bare. By the time I had fully claimed the upper floor – even sending exploratory probes into the ceiling and finding nothing of note – it was past midnight by a couple of hours.

I'd finished my self-set obligations and was ready to explore the more restricted basement levels. I began by simply pushing my domain down the left set of stairs (as you entered from the front, that is). These were a narrow (even for gnomes) spiraling affair that left me in an open space less than half the size of one of the larger halls above. That struck me immediately, since from my original first floor investigations I knew that there was open space beyond the wall I found blocking the way. In any event, this first chamber still seemed like it had housed books – there were shelves lining the walls, after all, but these seemed more like display cases than standard bookshelves and they were on a grander scale, suggesting at least a couple of non-gnomish texts may have originally been present. Sadly, they were empty like the rest, though on closer examination I could see where mana lights had been mounted to illuminate and draw attention to them. A few of the cases appeared to have been under lock and key, with individual works chained to the case and the case having a locked set of fine metal grating to prevent easy access. The metal looked rather distinctive somehow, red-orange in color, and absorbing it for its blueprints was significantly harder than usual. It turned out that a fairly standard steel had been plated in a rather more durable metal, apparently with mana-resistant properties. I was guessing that whatever works had been there, they didn't want anyone to simply shape the stone case and remove them.

Blueprint Acquired: Hihi'irokane

I could tell instantly that it was going to be quite a while before I could create more than a couple of grams of the stuff, and that it would likely be a bad idea to show it to anyone. I was, frankly, shocked that they'd left any of the stuff behind. I supposed it was possible that whoever was in charge of stripping the place simply hadn't realized what it was or was unable to remove it.

The center of the room was taken up by a long, low stone table, though any chairs had long since been removed. One end of the table was dominated by a stone lectern built directly into the tabletop. I was guessing that only selected people were brought here, but there was still an educational component. I didn't know if it was simply proprietary work, or if something more sinister had taken place here.

Unlike the ground floor, which had adopted a largely unadorned aesthetic, there were carvings circling the room in a band just below the ceiling, largely depicting symbols I couldn't entirely identify given their stylized appearance. I thought at least one section represented symbols of various elemental forms of magic (in a classic sense, not a chemical one) - I saw a flame, some waves, what might have been a puff of air, and so forth. Most were too stylized for me to identify, and I wasn't all that secure in any of my interpretations in any event.

Still, until a better interpretation was provided, I was going to tentatively assume that this represented a magic library where books that possessed magical power, or simply taught forms of magic were held in a state of restricted access. There weren't any remaining works here, but just the new magic metal blueprint made this a win.

I started sinking my domain into the far wall, and it wasn't long before I'd located the secret door to the part below the far end of the first floor hall. I had no real need to determine how it worked, since I could simply move beyond it or trigger its locking mechanism manually. This was a purely mechanical lock, though, and one incorporating a bit more of the same magic metal – presumably assuming that anyone desperate to get into the even more secure room would have access to magic. As it turned out, the lock was triggered by a button concealed on the underside of the lectern that would need to be held down while the door was opened with earth magic pulsed in a specific sequence in both places. Almost certainly a two-person task, and presumably intended to prevent people from entering unnoticed. Magicians and their secrets...

The room behind the door was a disappointment at first inspection. It seemed much like a smaller, more private version of the room I'd just left. The table was smaller and there was no lectern, but the secured shelves/bookcases were identical. The iconography along the ceiling was darker and more ominous somehow – there was a wolf swallowing what I assumed was a moon, something that looked vaguely cephalopod but with too many tentacles and no eyes, even a literal skull and crossbones. I was guessing that whatever they studied here was more dangerous and likely less socially acceptable – at least I hoped so. There was a somewhat creepy aura, but in my mana sight the place was dead and cold – anything bad that might have happened here was millennia in the past, and long enough ago for even the most tenacious spirit to give up the ghost, if you'll pardon the expression.

Out of suspicion and a persistent mindset, I set myself to absorbing not just the room and its furnishings but a chunk of the surrounding stone on all sides. That resulted in the discover of three additional hidden spaces, each sized for just a few books, or possibly just one, if it were larger than gnome standard.

Two of them, one in each side wall, were bare, just like the rest of the library. The third, however, built into the ceiling, was not...

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.