(In lieu of a proper post, here is a fragment of Broken Fire Regime. The 'sequel' to DCO.)
The refinery is like a crooked snake. Five long
halls linked together at their ends bending back and forth in an angular way.
From each long hall flues sprout, gouting smoke
and steam all day and night, they never stop or slow but run continually in
shifts, day upon night upon day upon night.
This the Zones only legal smoke and anyone in the
crater can see the direction of the company core by watching the tangling
emission skeins crawling in the sky .
The Blue Blood begins to turn twelve hours after
it is taken from the tree. In fifteen it's worthless. This time factor decides
the operations of the Zone. The 'half a day' rule keeps workers running and the
Zone working.
There are five great halls. Access between them is
heavily controlled. As the product advances from halls one to five the
processes become more precise, the result gains in value and the dangers of its
production change.
Refinery workers occupy a unique space in the
cultures of the company. The process is dangerous and people die. On average
one a day. As a worker is promoted and becomes more expert they gradually move
from hall to hall. Often they are scarred and changed by accidents or time. As
they change they become more and more obsessed and focused on the process and
the sap until eventually they are like stained sap-armoured machines
themselves, moving silently and endlessly between the glass retorts and
cauldrons of brass, testing and observing.
TESTING TABLES
Before the opening to Hall One are the testing
tables where new sap is received and paid for. Here harvesting teams wait in snakelike
queues' overseen by roving Safety teams. Sometimes the queues can get so long
that the time taken waiting can cause part, or all of a harvest to go off and
become worthless.
Arguments, scuffles, politicking, bribery and
begging for a better position are all common in the queues. Queue politics are
their own micro culture and resentments born here can carry over into the rest
the Zone, or the rest of life.
‘Queue Gangs’ are secret unions of Workers who
organise to restrict or control access to and progress through the queues. They
are utterly illegal and must communicate via invisible signals and tacit
movements.
On the edge of a queue workers can be easily
observed and the mutual danger from Safety teams creates a degree of solidarity,
but on the inside the power of the Queue Gangs grows. Stabbings and garrotting’s
often take place near the centre of the queues, but, no matter how fierce the
queue wars grow, everyone involved is careful not to draw the attention of the authorities
or to lose their place in the queue.
It’s rare for anyone to get through a queue
without *something* happening.
1. Someone begs to exchange places with you,
offers future favours, makes guarded threats.
2. Someone claims you queue jumped.
3. A fight breaks out.
4. Someone offers you a better place but expects
favours, plus you just pissed everyone off.
5. Roving safety team singles you out for bad
practice.
6. Safety team singles out nearby group for bad
practice, they appeal to you for aid.
7. Caught between two queue gangs.
8. Told to ‘look the other way’ during queue
shanking.
VALUE – When you get to the tables, one Litre of
good Sap is worth roughly 1gp.
.....
HALL ONE - Processing
Huge cauldrons boiling, the only light is from the
crackling blue tree-frond fires beneath them, caustic hallucinogenic steam and
almost-naked workers dripping with sweat, their mouths covered with piss-soaked
bandanna.
The Sap is decanted and boiled. The rich skim of
the sap is eased off with long brass tools and moved to the next huge cauldron,
then boiled, then moved again.
DANGERS -
The Sap is adhesive and boiling. If a boil is uneven,
thick glops spit out and small children are sent to scrape it off the floor,
dashing between the legs of the hurrying workers. The fallen Cloudblood fronds
that make up the fuel can pop, flare and burn unevenly. A fire can get out of
control.
Tree Dreams are common from the combination of
burning fronds and boiling sap, but reduced somewhat by the huge open doors at
the front of the hall.
A cauldron can tip, spilling boiling adhesive sap
all over the floor. The process cannot be delayed or stopped so clean-up
operations must begin right away. No-one is allowed to leave their post.
The worst fate known is falling in a cauldron as
it boils. Death is relatively slow but it’s impossible to get somebody out
before the sap cools. Rumours claim the resin’d bodies of accident victims are
sold or used as special products, but no proof of this has ever been found.
PRODUCT -
When a cauldron 'gives out' and becomes too caked
with purple resin to be of any use then it is moved to a cleaning station and
the resin carved off in chunks. Dangerous, since patches of the resin can remain
hot and unstable.
The bruise-like dark purple resin is collected and
sold to 'waste disposal' gentlemen. Independent men not directly employed by
the company. These men are drug dealers. The resin goes back into the Zone as a
drug, some is exported to other places
VALUE : In the Zone the drug is about the same
value, weight for weight, as the tree sap at the point of sale. Roughly 1gp per
kilo. Elsewhere it can be much more valuable. This waste product alone puts the
refinery in the black. If it produced nothing else it would still be a
near-profitable business.
.....
HALL TWO - Distilling
This room is divided into two, full of strange
lights, silence and murmuring sound. The roof is full of spiralling glass pipes
and caged children lit by wandering fireflies.
One side busy with women and children, the other dark with silent men who carefully patrol.
Down the centre run the tall brass and glass towers of the distilling columns.
The sap from room one is brought through and added very carefully by tubes.
On one side workers draw off the glutinous
near-paste from the bottom of the column.
Nearby, cages of fireflies are brought through and
small children given the job of snatching individual flies from the cage and
plucking off their glowing tails. Small fireflies are always escaping so the
roof is full of small groups of the circling insects. Allowing a firefly to
escape means a single whip from a supervisors stick.
The firefly tails are cracked and sieved. The
fluid is mixed straight away with the near-paste from the bottom of the stills
and carefully ground in with pestle and mortar.
This product is then set to cool in ceramic trays
where it forms long tubes. Workers with ceramic knives sliver it carefully into
single even discs. As the cutters slice into the cooling tubes, they light up
very slightly at the point of the slice so each movement is accompanied by
spots of light.
...
On the dark side workers, almost exclusively men,
walk silently up and down, examining the fractionating columns and the
distilled result of the sap as it drips very slowly into its receiving jars.
They carry safety lanterns full of fireflies and the pools of light move
continually from point to point.
They rarely speak. When a jar nears its fill point
a signal is made, it is quickly replaced and the full jar carried through to
Hall Three
...
Each distilling tower has a tiny and well secured
furnace at its base to provide the necessary heat. The danger of the process is
so great (it’s more true to say that the cost of replacing the distilling
machinery is so great) that Cloudblood fronds are not burnt here. Only checked
wood of other trees, usually from outside the Zone, is allowed, to ensure a
clean, even drug-free burn.
The cooling tubes for the stills spiral into the
roof of the hall. To check for leaks, very small children are hoisted up into the
roof in brass cages held in place by chains. Old men and old women hang onto
the chains and stare at the children from below. If gas escapes, the children
nearby will suffer Tree Dreams and the location of the leak will be found.
DANGERS -
Escaped Gas. A full explosion in the distillery
could effectively take out the hall and possibly even part of the company core.
Falling Children.
Cracked Towers. Hot high grade sap could spill and
spread.
PRODUCT ONE
Once cooled, spaced and sliced, each disc of sap
is a coin of violet glass-like resin with the texture of amber. If snapped in
two, each half of the disc will produce a beautiful golden lantern-strength
light for roughly 1 hour.
These discs are never sold in the Zone but only
exported.
VALUE -
Each disc costs 1gp at its point of sale.
.....
HALL THREE - Alcohol Crystallisation
This room is full of steam and the screaming sound
of tortured valves.
The jars of distilled and purified Sap from Hall
Two are mixed with pure alcohol in small bound valved brass spheres over a
small and tightly-controlled fire. The valves allow the steam of the reaction
to escape but allow in no oxygen (or 'bare air' in the language of the refinery)
to enter.
The valves whistle continually. Workers move up
and down the lines of small cauldrons listening carefully to the endless
high-pitched monotone droning of the valves. If the sound of a valve shifts in
its nature, even to a small degree it must be rapidly adjusted.
Too high a sound means steam is escaping too
quickly, meaning the heat could be unevenly distributed within a sphere.
Too low means that air may be seeping into the
sphere, if too much 'bare air' is allowed in then it may mix with the alcohol
and sap and ignite causing the sphere to weep blue fire and spin madly like a
gyroscope.
Even without these difficulties, the steam gouting
from the brass spheres is extremely hot and highly hallucinogenic
At this purity and temperature, the Tree Dreams
produced by escaping gas, affect everyone relentlessly, yet with a curious
uniformity. Instead of the phanstasmorgal visions usually bestowed, the visions
are always of fire.
These visions hang around the outlet valves of the
screaming spheres, making it very difficult to tell whether an accident is
actually taking place.
The workers in this section are mainly very old
Zone-Marked types who do not fear the visions, blind people, or those with
Slumber-Monkey narcolepsy. (The narcolepsy does introduce an element of danger,
but also makes the sufferer mainly immune to tree dreams.) They walk up and
down between the screaming burning spheres, usually with their eyes closed,
tapping back and forth with long canes, blowing on specially made silver
whistles. The whistles are tuned to produce exactly that tone that matches the
correct noise of a sphere-valve. The sound of the whistle should blend into the
ambient sound without any clear distinction. Workers know that if they can hear
the distinct sound of their own whistle then something is wrong.
When a burn is complete, a sphere is picked up
with iron rods put through the loops to either side, two sets of two workers
form a cross around it. They carry it over to the decanting trays where the
sphere is unbound and the crystal inside scraped out.
Half is ground down in huge pestles as Product
Two. The other half goes to Hall Four.
DANGERS -
Escaped and rapidly spinning boiling-hot brass
sphere gouting hallucinogenic steam.
Tree-dreams combined with hot equipment.
Steam build-up can cause heat-stroke and
collapses.
Pressure build-up and ‘bare-air’ can result in
sphere-explosion.
PRODUCT TWO
The ground crystal is a sky-blue powder. When
mixed with water it becomes a painless and rapid antiseptic wound closer. It
applied directly to a wound it gives all the benefits of rapid cauterisation
with no risk of infection and tissue damage and no pain.
If accidentally breathed in it can scar the lungs
permanently and kill.
VALUE -
Each 'use' of Product Two is valued at 20 gold
pieces.
.....
HALL FOUR - Ultra-slow melting
This room is calm and quiet and relatively safe.
The main danger is from security checks and searches, which are random and
continual. It is full of glass towers and sorting tables where workers with eye
lenses carefully tweezer out the rare clear crystals from Cloudblood fronds.
There is no fire in this room, instead,
worker-cranked belt-driven fans are kept turning continually and the temperature
constantly checked to maintain it at a mild chill.
The crystal from Hall Three is placed in tall
glass tubes full of distilled water and mixed with trace amounts of *only* the *clear*
crystals from cloudgrave fronds. In this solution it slowly melts, separating
into bands of blue, with the bottom being a very dark blue-black and the top
being almost-white azure.
Beside each tube is a fresh trefoil orchid held in
a pot. The Orchid is held against the tube until the exact colour blue is
matched by one of the bands in the centre of the tube. This flower both lives
and dies quite quickly and a continual supply is requested from the zone.
Despite every attempt to make the process more
efficient, no other method of contrast-comparison can highlight a layer of the correct
colour. All attempts with paint strips or pigments have resulted in degraded
product.
Workers with huge syringes carefully extract this
band of fluid.
DANGERS -
There is some danger of Tree Dreams from the front
picking process but this hall is generally relatively safe.
PRODUCT THREE
Cast on ultra-clean ceramic moulds, it darkens,
producing a midnight-blue-black pane of
half-inch thick semi flexible material.
This material is almost frictionless and is in use
in complex processes in cities all over the world. It is said a Pirate Queen of
the Southern Seas has the hull of her vessel plated with it. Its use as currency
and jewellery is almost more common than its material use. It is a very hard
trading currency and most banks and trading houses carry part of their
liquidity in it.
VALUE - One pane is worth 300 gp.
.....
HALL FIVE - Acid Crystallisation
This room is well lit by glass panes in the roof,
at night Product One is used in small amounts to provide a clear sight of the
process. There are glass girls are kept in cushioned corrals. Gantries over the
roof hold a team of Security Contractors who continually overlook the process. It
is never not guarded. Most workers here are missing limbs, fingers or have
suffered sever resin-ation. They rarely speak and are focused entirely on their
work.
Here the Glass Girls are decapitated with ceramic
hammers. A dangerous process.
They are lead to cauldrons and leant over them,
their heads smashed off and the acid allowed to gout into the bubbling broil.
The fluid from Hall Four is brought in and
carefully poached in the boiling acid. This is a highly skilled and incredibly
dangerous job. Workers with glass staves swirl the boiling acid into a vortex.
Secondary workers gently ladle the product from Hall Four into the centre of
the swirl.
If the swirler is skilled and if the vortex is continuous
and even, the product will form a cloudlike mass in the centre of the swirl. The
acid will be allowed to cool and the sap will crystallise, slowly falling to
the bottom.
DANGERS –
Being dissolved by boiling acid or covered with
the altered resin.
Glass Girls going missing or acting oddly. They
are too dangerous to be violent with and too expensive to waste.
PRODUCT FOUR
Small fingertip sized gems like three-dimensional
snowflakes that collect light and seem to shine and glimmer like blue stars
under any natural illumination, each one different. Each vortex results in only
one 'gem'. They are delicate and as soon as they dry they are encased in glass
settings which are rapidly frosted by ice, they are extremely endothermic.
Depending on the number of its points or angles,
each gem will absorb and nullify a certain number of levels of magical effect.
The average is around twenty, but they can be higher or lower depending on the
purity of the process.
VALUE - 1000 gp per point or angle.
"As a worker is promoted and becomes more expert they gradually move from hall to hall. Often they are scarred and changed by accidents or time. As they change they become more and more obsessed and focused on the process and the sap until eventually they are like stained sap-armoured machines themselves, moving silently and endlessly between the glass retorts and cauldrons of brass, testing and observing."
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that their minds grow equally calloused and corrupted, neurons jury-rigged together with hallucinatory micro-iciles of sap. covered, hard unfeeling to the point that they would mistreat their workers mercilessly, yet at the same time be held as demi-Gods. they would probably also be prone to random outbursts of violent rage. I would imagine they would occupy a warrior-chieftain role amongst their subordinates - higher in status, held somewhat in awe.
"Safety teams creates a degree of solidarity,"
i imagine these guys wearing a cross between a HAZMAT suit, turnout gear and ceramic riot armor
"The workers in this section are mainly very old Zone-Marked types who do not fear the visions, blind people, or those with Slumber-Monkey narcolepsy. (The narcolepsy does introduce an element of danger, but also makes the sufferer mainly immune to tree dreams.) They walk up and down between the screaming burning spheres, usually with their eyes closed, tapping back and forth with long canes, blowing on specially made silver whistles. The whistles are tuned to produce exactly that tone that matches the correct noise of a sphere-valve. The sound of the whistle should blend into the ambient sound without any clear distinction. Workers know that if they can hear the distinct sound of their own whistle then something is wrong."
Again, I think these beings would be accorded great respect and would routinely whack lax disciples of the Cacophony when sensing inattention to whistles. the operations may take on the aspect of a devotional ritual, with orbs and machinery being eucharist and tabernacle. there is the possibility of a Zen-like psychotic fire-worshiping fringe cult developing