Demesne 104 - Making Better Plumbing (Patreon)

Lori decided to finish the third bath house first before she went about altering the plumbing in the other two already in use.

Making the pipe from the river to the third bath house that would supply the bath water took some time. Fortunately, the area was far enough from the Dungeon that she didn't have to worry about this affecting excavation that would happen in the immediate future. It still took a day, most of it spent excavating the pipe itself. She spent most of that time with her eyes closed, making the pipe with her senses, compressing the sides for strength and doing her best to round it out.

One end was directly behind the bath houses, covered by some stone so that nothing would fall in after she was finished making it. The other end came out near the Dungeon's entrance. While it would have been much shorter to just have the pipe lead towards the closest point of the river, that was slightly downstream of the bath houses and all the other water-using facilities, and she didn't want to risk drawing in water that had already been used.

If she was building as she had been when they had just established her demesne, she'd have just opened the pipe into the river, bound some waterwisps to pull water from it and considered the work done.

However, the demesne was growing, and needed better foundations to stand on.

"So you're building a…" Rian tilted his head. "What, exactly?"

"A centralizing location for drawing all the water the demesne will need," Lori said as she ate her dinner. "This way, it's easier to keep track of where our water is coming from, and to keep it free from impurities. I don't want to make the mistake of getting water from somewhere only for people to start getting sick because it's downriver of our wastewater. After I finish with the third bath house, I will alter the pipes of the other two bath houses to draw water from the same location. "

"All right, that makes sense…" Rian said slowly. "I would think that that best place to put that is the most upriver point of the demesne, but I suppose that's too far away to be practical right now. "

"Perhaps in future," Lori agreed. "But I will need assistance." She reached down beside her and picked up a stone tablet, placing it on the table between her and Rian. She had planned this conversation, and it was important enough that she'd forgone playing sunk with Mikon.

Rian leaned over and studied it. "What exactly am I looking at?"

"My initial thought on how to implement your idea for using wisps bound to movable pipes," Lori said. She pointed. "This pipe is filled with a binding that will draw water from the river, and can be lifted from the water to keep it from doing so. when lowered, it fills this basin, which also has a binding, and that binding will take the water to the third bath house and into a reservoir, from which the basins in the bath house can be fed. This way, someone can be in charge of filling the reservoir without my having to be involved."

Rian was already shaking his head. "Won't work," he said. "With a setup like that, there's nothing to stop anyone from just leaving the pipe in the water and walking away. Sure, it can act as a way to break the flow, but with a river nearby, there's no incentive for people to not simply leave the water flowing. And the switch is to too far away from the bath house. How will they know the reservoir they want to fill is full and stop it?" He must have seen the annoyed look on her face. "The design is effective, but the logistics make it a bit impractical in application."

Lori scowled, but it was easy to see what he meant. Her nice, comfy bed seemed to have blinded her to the base idiotic behaviors of people.

"What about…" Rian said slowly, "instead of pushing water up the tube, you pull it?" He made a sucking noise.

Lori blinked as the idea presented itself. "Yes! If one end of the tube was in water, we could use a binding of airwisps to draw it up," she said. "And if that binding were something that can be removed from the end point, than it would be far easier to know when to uncouple it since the reservoir is full."

Rian was nodding. "And if the tube with the sucking binding was on a weighed arm or something, then it could be designed to uncouple itself from the pipe unless actively moved towards it, so that it will stop if left alone." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Actually, it would be easy to get something like that to move automatically when the reservoir is low…"

"One thing at a time," Lori said firmly. "Water first so people can take baths."

"Right, right. Water first, figuring out how to make work do itself later," Rian agreed. He frowned. "Wait. If it's going to be some kind of tube where air keeps getting sucked through, you need some way to keep people's hands from being sucked into it." He curled one hand as if holding a cup, then slapped his other hand over it. "This is an easy way to get painfully stuck."

Lori made a nauseated expression as she imagined what he was implying. "Good point. Perhaps some sort of grate or cage to prevent hands from going on top of it."

"Maybe some kind of ball around it?" Rian suggested. "Or put it in some kind of sheath that keeps people from being able to put their hand somewhere dangerous. Like… argh, I really should something to draw!"

Lori turned over her stone tablet, slightly softening the still-flat stone on the other side. "Use this."

Rian blinked at it, but once Lori scored a line using her fingernail he understood.

"Right," he said, beginning to draw. "All right, let's say you put the suction binding in a tube…"

"Lord Rian," Mikon interrupted. Rian blinked and looked at the weaver in surprise. So did Lori, for that matter. The pink-haired weaver as sitting on the outside tonight, with Riz between her and Rian. "While I realize this is very important, perhaps you should finish your food first?"

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Rian ate under Umu's almost-parental gaze. As her Lord was too busy eating quickly to speak, Lori decided to go back to her dinner as well. That was the only reason. Mikon's occasional sideways glances at her didn't factor into it at all!

After they finished eating, Rian picked up from where he left off, narrating as he drew with the nail of his forefinger. "Right, so the tub with the suction binding should be wide. Wider than a hand or a head, because you just know some idiot will try to stick his head in. A wooden panel down the middle so that even if someone did try to reach in, they don't block the whole tube and get stuck. You also need these protrusions so they don't accidentally get pushed against a wall and get stuck because of suction."

Lori nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, I see what you mean. But how to you propose for it to work?"

"Well, the mouth of the pipe where the water will be coming from needs to be smaller than the mouth of the suction tube," Rian said, beginning another sketch. "And the pipe needs to be beveled, like this, so that the two halves can form a seal even without being perfectly fitted together. This also keeps the tube from getting stuck. You just need to pull it sideways to break the seal so the suction isn't keeping the tube stuck to the pipe."

Lori nodded. "Yes, I can see how this could work… I might even be able to build it myself, though I'll need wood to act as reinforcement and for the central partition." She frowned. "This might be better if it was on some sort of roller, so it can only be move back and forth."

Rian tilted his head, looked at the sketch. "You've right. If it was on some sort of recessed groove with rollers beneath it, and something or maybe stone walls to keep it on track… they push it towards the pipe, the beveled lip acts as a decent seal, the binding sucks up the water, and then to shut it off we have… " he drew, "some kind of lever here to push the suction tube away from the lip and some sort of block that acts to keep them separate, so that the suction can't pull it back towards the pipe unless they want it to."

Lori looked down at it contemplatively. If she hadn't been narrated at, the resulting drawing would have made no sense to her. "It might work," she allowed. "And if it doesn't, we can still use the baths by using waterwisps to push the water up the pipe." She hummed thoughtfully. "I can finish the reservoir and fuse the basins into one to simplifying things. That means making the reservoir bigger, since it needs to have enough to fill both basins twice over…"

"Is the reservoir covered?" Rian asked. "To keep dust and flying bugs out?"

Lori scowled. "It will be now," she said, then sighed. "I'll need more stone…"

"Not necessarily," Rian said thoughtfully. "There's something I think you can try. Something you can use besides stone. Or at least, something to use until you can get enough stone."

She frowned at him. "What?"

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The next day, Lori build the water shed, for lack of a better term. She raised a stone wall out of the river's bedrock to isolate an area, then raised pillars of stone to act to bar entry to any seels that might be curious. It had yet to happen—they usually didn't loiter at the area of the river directly fronting the town—but better to be safe. In this mildly segregated portion, she opened up the end of the pipe, with a binding that circulated the water in the vicinity of the opening to discourage small animals and plants from making a home there.

That done, Lori fused the basins running down the center of each side into one so that each bath had a long basin of water running down the middle. The basins touched the back wall of the bath house, which had a small opening though which water could splash down into the basin to fill it. The opening was meant to be closed by a simple wooden sluice, which one of the carpenters was asked to fit in so that it would both move smoothly and be reasonably water tight.

The carpenter who did so was neither Tackir or Deil, but he looked vaguely familiar, so Lori gave him a nod of acknowledgement before going back to work.

That done, she expanded the water reservoir for the baths. The problem of stone for the reservoir was solved by sinking it into the ground, letting her use the displaced bedrock for more building material. When the reservoir was filled, a binding would draw water up a tube to a smaller basin directly behind the sluices. If the sluices were closed, the basin would overflow back into the reservoir, meaning no water was wasted and the water was kept moving to prevent it from going stagnant.

After that Lori decided to try Rian's suggestion out of morbid curiosity.

She build low stone walls using the bedrock stone as an extension of the bath house's basis structure to start with, but they only came up to about her waist. Then she bound waterwisps at the river end of the pipe and began to draw water to the reservoir. She actually had to wait a bit before the water reached her, but when it did she had to make another binding to curve it down into the reservoir instead of continuing forward and blasting the opposite wall. The reservoir filled very quickly, and soon she had a lot of water to do as had Rian suggested.

First, she made sure the water in the reservoir was free of impurities, which meant all the earthwisps were pushed together into a small rock that she threw over her shoulder, and all the airwisps were all pulled out so that there would be no air dissolved into the water. Then she carefully bound the water, and compressed its substance together to form ice. There was a sudden wave of warmth as all the heat was pushed out of the water as it solidified, parts of it bulging upwards as it expanded in the confines of the reservoir. The ice was completely clear, with no bubbles to mar its transparency.

Carefully, reshaping the ice so that it flowed while at the same time making sure it remained a solid, Lori began making a high, arching roof over the reservoir, using it the way she had used stone. The ice needed to be bound to stay ice and heavily imbued to last a long time, but those of those things were utter simple now compared to imbuing the water wheel in another demesne.

She had to admit, when she was done, the effect of being under a glass-clear roof was quite striking.

Then she went to find a big stick to hit it with and test to see if it broke.