Demesne 94 - Lori Does Carpentry (Patreon)

The planning meeting didn't finish until mid-afternoon. The smiths had bowed out of any actual building, as everyone silently agreed this wasn't important enough to use their precious metal on, but had remained in an advisory capacity, being familiar with mechanical systems and their construction. It was only when they finally had a plan for something that the woodworkers felt they could build did they adjourn to begin building.

In general, the carpenters didn't have their own specific work area, instead setting up their equipment next to where the work was, which in this case was close to the long row of houses getting roofed. Many looked quite finished to Lori, though the wood looked pale and a little rough around the edges.

The lathe the carpenters had built was smaller than the ones she was used to seeing in her workplaces. Instead of being powered by a bound tool or a steam driver, it was connected to a treadle which turned a large wheel. It was also smaller, and was made completely of wood. It had wooden screws to secure parts so they wouldn't move and wooden wing nuts to tighten them, all almost comically oversized. It was also mounted on wheels so it could be easily stored in one of the storage sheds that had grown around the sawpit.

"When I build a permanent carpentry workshop building," Lori commented when she saw the lathe, "we'll need to build a bigger one of those and see if we can connect it to another waterwheel. A bigger one, since we won't have any size or time limitations."

The carpenters all perked up at this announcement, looking hopeful. "That would be wonderful, your Bindership," one of them said. Which one, which one… Onezto? Possibly. He wasn't Tackir, and he wasn't Sani…

"Well, let's get this built for her Bindership first," Tackir said matter-of-factly. "We'll get the wooden parts ready your Bindership."

Lori waved him away absently as she dragged the stone the stone she'd be using to build the watercutting tank to an empty, level spot. It wouldn't be permanent—she'd dismantle it when she was done—but right now it was needful so she could do this safely. The watercutting tank was a pool of water that served two purposes: it was a source of water to cut with, and it acted as a backstop for the cutting stream so it wouldn't go through walls or the ground or anything like that.

The water in the tank didn't have to be deep, just deep in the area beneath the cutting stream. That was simply enough to. Lori just made a simple depression in the middle of the stone cistern she had made, where the water would be deeper and able to blunt the force of the stream. Then she simply filled it with water, which was also quite simple, since the basin of the aqueduct was nearby.

Normally, a Whisperer hired to do watercutting would have a steel nozzle on the end of a hose for her to use, with water coming through that hose from a tank (which had also been her job to fill). The nozzle would have been stationary, and she'd have used a metal conducting wire that ran through the hose to control the waterwisps so that they came out in a powerful, coherent stream. The work would have needed to be done slowly, in controlled bursts, with the nozzle being moved carefully along guiderails that was thankfully someone else's job to control.

They didn't have all that, so Lori had improvised. A raised platform of stone half a pace above the tank, with wood reinforcement inside since they had the wood anyway, that supported a stone reservoir with one very, very narrow hole. The idea was that Lori would fill the tank with water, use gravity to make the water go straight down in a line, and from there they'd have a reliable straight cut that would only need topping up of the water in the tank. They'd mixed in some fine clay from the claypit into the water as an abrasive, since they didn't have the sort of abrasive they used in the shop. Lori felt they didn't need it, since she could now put substantially more power into her water jet, but fine.

Lori wished she could skip all this, but without something to guide her, she wouldn't be able to properly align her water stream to cut straight, and she definitely wouldn't be able to hold the stream properly stationary. She'd learned that a long time ago. People made tools for a reason, and those reasons were precision, accuracy, and repeatability. This way she'd be able to make a cut that was straight and consistent.

The first test… sprayed. So did the second test. And a few more after that.  It stopped spraying as Lori finally made a pointed stone nozzle to keep the water from being inclined to go sideways.

She supposed the nozzle being pointed had a use after all.

While she'd been doing that, the carpenters had been devising rollers, shaved out on the lathe. They didn't intend to cut any complicated shapes out of the wood—the wooden gears were being made by hand, and indeed, had already been finished by the person doing them, someone whose name she didn't know—so just having rollers to move things under the stream would be sufficient to their needs.

Lori tested the new nozzle, with its now non-spraying stream, by passing a branch through it. Besides a quick jerk under her hand, there was no resistance, and the cut was smooth. Wet, but smooth.

Unfortunately, that was all the time they had for that day. They had spent a lot of time at the dining hall planning the design of the wheel, how to property counterweight it, the bearings to be used, whether stone bearings could take the weight…

It had almost been like one of her old jobs, except she wasn't being paid because she was the boss, but she had to make sure everyone had what they needed, and compensate them for pulling them out of their duties…

At least Lori had little she needed to clean up. The pile of unused rock was left there in case she had to add anything the next day and she didn't feel like needing to drag up any more. She'd also idly noted a spot where she could put up the carpentry workshop building.

Still, she felt unsatisfied as the sun fell towards the horizon and she headed for her room to clean up.

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"This is taking too long," Lori declared as she sat at her table.

"It's the first day," Rian said, letting out a sigh as he took his own seat. She… wasn't quite sure what he'd been doing while she'd been building the improvised cutting rig, but it had involved holding one of the tablets that had been softened a little so the workmen could make sketches on it with their thumbnails and talking to people. "Of course it looks like it's taking too long, it's mostly been setting up and getting ready to do actual building. Besides, they only had… what, half the day to work on it, and half of that was spent drawing and planning. As projects go, I think we're making good time."

Lori frowned. It sounded like an excuse. Though, given the time… "Fine," she grumbled. "But I expect more progress tomorrow."

"You'll probably get it," Rian said as Riz came up behind him and tiredly sat down next to him, carefully keeping her head down, avoiding Lori's gaze. "Shaping the beam for the axle seems to be the most time-consuming part. I don't know if you saw, but they've already managed to build most of the wheel, they just need to mount it to the axle. And since you asked for it earlier, the fan's already almost done, they just need to mount that to an axle too."

Lori sighed again, remembering she still had to make ball bearings for those. "Don't forget to talk to the chandler so we can get some fat for lubricant," she reminded him.

"Might be easier if you just catch a seel yourself," he suggested. "We'd get more fat that way."

That prompted another sigh. "You would think we'd have all that we'd need already."

"Technically we do," Rian said. "It's just that it's all already been allocated for something else, like soap. So we need to get a bit more of it so we don't interfere with what little industry we have."

She sighed again. "Fine, I'll catch a seel."

"Our food stores thank you," Rain said cheerfully. "Are you all right? You've been sighing a lot. Maybe you need more sleep."

Her back pre-emptively protested. "I'm fine," she said. "Just tired."

"Hence why I suggested more sleep."

"I sleep just fine, it's the day that's been tiring," Lori retorted.

"Then may I recommend you go straight upstairs after eating and have some of that fruit you've been hording?" Rian suggested. "Might as well eat it, or else it'll go bad, cold room or no."

Lori brightened at the reminder of her loot. "I think I will," she agreed. "Where's the food?"

"They were just finishing it up when I came in," Rian said. He looked displeased for some reason. "Someone found more gourd."

"If you don't think you deserve the food, you don't deserve to complain about what's in it," Lori said flatly.

It was Rian's turn to sigh as Riz gave him a curious look. "I suppose. Really looking forward to next year when we have more variety in the food. We should have our own flour by then, right?"

"We can hope," Lori said, thinking of the little bag of grain in her room. If she got really bored or desperate, maybe she'd find out how you turned it into flour this winter…

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After a dinner of no particular note, Lori headed up to her room.

First, she got some golden buds from her cold room, and spent a pleasant little while going through three, enjoying the simultaneously sweet and sharp taste of the bright yellow fruit.

Then she got to work.

She took the mold she had made for making stone ball bearings and began using it for just that, dropping the finished stone ball into the bowls of her sunk board, since it was convenient. It was boring, repetitive, needful work, and not for the first time she chided herself for not having done this earlier on some of the nights she'd had nothing to do, so she would have a ready supply of bearings. But then, it wasn't like she was being paid to do this. Quite the opposite, actually…

It was while she was doing this that the thought occurred to her that perhaps the people formerly from River's Fork had a spare bedroll or two. After all, they'd lost a lot of people when the dragon came, right? Surely that meant there were bedrolls not being used? Or whatever it was they used for sleeping on. Surely they didn't sleep right on the ground…

She had to redo a few bearings as she got distracted by wondering how she was supposed to acquire one of those bedrolls for her own use. Maybe two so she'd have something to use for padding on a chair or couch…

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The next morning, after breakfast, it was back to the where the carpenters had set up. While Lori would have loved to get started right away so it would all be done by midday, leaving her with more time for something else, unfortunately there were safety checks to do, cleaning of the nozzle, testing if it cut properly on expendable pieces of wood that would probably be used for firewood, and making a new nozzle once she realized the force of the water was wearing out the less durable stone.

As this was happening, the carpenters had rigged up more rollers to either side of where the stream would cut, so that there would be no bend in the wood to affect the cut. Thankfully, she didn't have to worry about the actual maneuvering of the wood through the cutting stream, beyond keeping watch for anyone whose hand was getting too close…

"Maybe you can have light or darkness as a stand-in for where the stream would be?" Rian suggested, "and maybe use light to color the stream when you're actually cutting, so people get a better sense of where it is?"

Lori spend a rather enjoyable few moments working out how to bind lightwisps to the stream of waterwisps so the stream would glow a bright, noticeable color to discourage people from losing extremities to it.

When they finally did get around to cutting the wood into beams, it was using a glowing stream of water that was far too coherent and narrow to be natural. Lori stayed out of it, keeping her attention on reinforcing the stone nozzle, pressurizing the stream, keeping it coherent while at the same time trying not to affect it such that it remained straight, coloring the stream with lightwisps, and constantly drawing water from the tank back up to the reservoir behind the nozzle so that the stream was constant. It was a constant expenditure of power she wouldn't have been able to afford before she had become a Dungeon Binder, at least not without consuming a wisp bead.

As the large bits of dead tree were passed through the stream, however, and came out the other end wet but neatly cut all the way through in a fraction of the time it would have taken the sawpit to do it, she couldn't help the feeling of silent satisfaction at a job well done washing over her.

It was a satisfaction that was a bit hard to maintain over the multiple passes needed to cut the wood down to the side and shape they wanted, but that was the nature of work.