[A Day in the Life of Aelryinth] - 1000 Hours

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Outer Montreal, Quebec

            When I arrived via Teleportation for free from the Great Seal, my Pyramid team had already been hard at work for a couple of hours.

            Pyramid construction was a long, boring, grindy process. It meant hours and hours of focus and concentration, Shaping stone into unbelievably high quality and extremely complex forms with absolutely no room for error, all for the purpose of defending and protecting OTHER people.

            It was the absolute antithesis of the kind of activity adventurers and gamers loved to undertake, something more suitable for autistic folk or others with mental conditions that allowed them to focus on mundanities for extremely long periods of time.

            Being able to Shape Stone to the level of a Pyramid at a very minimum required being a Ten Caster, needed Cleric Levels to power the Channeling necessary for Dawnstopping a spell, and Mastery of Area and Shape Stone itself to gain the 1000 cubic feet needed to make a 10-foot cube. 

            Except we used 20-foot cubes if we wanted the double-radius effect.

            Elemental Mastery of Earth. Sculptor or Stonecarving Ranks and Masteries, preferably both, maxed out. Concentration to stay on task that long, with all the Masteries attendant upon it.

            As an absolute minimum, they had to hit a 55 Quality Level check, a terrifying +45 modifier to a skill, and furthermore be able to sustain a 50 Concentration check to stay focused for the duration of our work.

            There were maybe a dozen people in the whole world who could meet the combination required. Argos and Weirdboy both could, as could Mulcaster. Flechette potentially could, but her bias towards Air actually penalized her for that purpose, and her job as The Warcaster of The Steel was to always, always be available for terrific levels of violence first if needed, not working on Pyramids.

            A few other people could do so, but they were far more concerned about using Mass Shape Stone for buildings and roads and walls for their own Allegiances, rather than making Pyramids for other people and areas, and so they kept their efforts at home.

Boneriver, Remus, and Ash Dorrel had actually progressively built themselves up to the point where they could directly help me with Shaping the Blocks. For a long time all they’d been able to do was prepare Blocks to the correct size and get them into position so I could move from one to the next rapidly.

            Doing so had enabled them to reach Eleven. Tellingly, the other Shapers outside my Allegiance were still Tens despite having the ability to Shape Stone all day. They didn’t realize that just being able to Shape wasn’t the key portion of the ability. The willingness to share it with others and protect them was a massive time investment and the highest Good, since there was no way anyone could actually pay us for the time and energy being spent on this.

            It wasn’t hard to break Eleven with such a higher cause propelling us ahead. We earned a LOT of Karma for completing Pyramids.

            The key portion of all of this was that I had to check all the work, and upgrade their work from 55 to 75 for the Pyramid to be fully functional.

            The full procedure was as follows:

Excavate a 20-foot Block of stone, generally by Shaping it out of a greater mass of stone.

Purify the entirety of the stone, removing all flaws, cracks, impurities, and other non-ideal portions of it.

Make it a 20-foot cube to QL 55, almost geometrically correct.

Carve each face, one by one, to a QL 55 standard, and carve the internal connections to a QL 55 Standard.

Send it to me. Check the internal purity/composition and measurements to QL 75.

Check the faces for errors and improve them to QL 75. 

Check the internal Runic arrays for errors and improve them to QL 75.

            I could excavate and make the block in one step, purify it, then do each face separately, then the internals. Six seconds of open time to correct and review, and so basically I made one 20’ Block a minute, sixty an hour, 480 a day.

            A standard 40-stepper required 20,540 Blocks to make, minus any left out for internal passageways, rooms, and corridors, which might knock off up to a quarter or so of the raw volume, but often had to be worked into and set up in more complex forms. After all, a 20’ Block was basically two floors by itself, so making parallel rooms and corridors was pretty much a given, and the Runic structure of the Pyramid had to compensate for that, even if the internal designs conducting energy weren’t very complex.

            They still had to be at nigh-atomic levels of quality, however, or they didn’t self-levitate. So the time requirements for the outsides of those Blocks never changed, even if they were mostly hollow and only layered over the Runes on neighboring Blocks.

It basically meant a month of work minimum on any real Pyramid with a sizable Pyramid Power Field if I was alone.

            BUT… if I only had to do three functions, instead of nine, suddenly the time per Block dropped to 18 seconds, and in eight hours we could pound out 1200 of the things! We could get a Pyramid done in two to three weeks, easily!

            So, that’s what my team did. Before I arrived, they got there earlier than I did, pulling out all 1200 Blocks for the day from the stone and rock under the construction site. Then they divided the Shaping of the Blocks between them, cranking out what was needed in eighteen seconds by splitting the jobs before passing them over to me. I finished up what they had done to the higher level needed, and sent the Block off inline.

            I shook hands all around after I arrived, including Garm, whose Hellhound Allegiance was in charge of site security for the duration of the Pyramid being built here. He was not the Allegiance that would choose to settle here on a permanent basis, the Pyramids being an ideal Hardpoint for any Allegiance to use, but he’d make sure there were no surprises as we did our work, and his people would take brutal care of anything that wanted to disturb us while we were building.

            I snapped into Arcane Focus, sent my primary thoughtstreams to work, and we got to it.

It would be eight long hours of work for me, while my trio finished up a bit earlier and then hied off to home ahead of me. That was totally fine by me, as I started on the Blocks they’d already done their bit on and started going through them.

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