The Copper Rose

by David Lingard

  T

  he storehouse had positively flown up while I’d been away. To look at it I would’ve said it was finished by the end of the day, but I knew that until I received either a notification or a tap on my back from Rok, it definitely wasn’t ready for use.

  After dinner, it was finally time for me to have a little sit-down and see what I could do about making that pot that seemed to be sliding its way down my internal to-do list at every opportunity. I’d purposely waited for my clan to go to bed before I started my work so that there would be no chance of any interruptions. I sat on the water’s edge and took a moment to appreciate both the silence and the way that the moon reflected off of the still waters. Had it have been any cooler or warmer I might’ve noticed the temperature differential, but as it was the climate was just perfect. Everything seemed so tranquil and so right – the perfect night to learn a new skill.

  I pulled out a single bar of copper that Puk had furnished me with after he’d stopped whining about the pizza oven again – at least tomorrow the storehouse would be complete and Rok would be able to start working on that forge for him. After that, I thought about maybe making a kitchen for Snafu to work in.

  The copper bar was shiny, and heavy in my hands. I examined it thoroughly, tapped it, smelled it, licked it and even used my analyse skill on it. I wanted to make sure that there was nothing I didn’t know about this bar of metal before I started doing anything to it. Once I was entirely comfortable that I could place the bar down on the ground, close my eyes and visualise it entirely and perfectly I knew that I was ready to start messing with it.

  With my eyes closed, I imagined taking a rolling pin to the metal bar and that in response to the pressure of my rolling it flattened into a wide sheet, as though it was a lump of clay. I then imagined folding the sides all the way up as though I was using it to gift wrap a teddy bear with. The creation in my mind’s eye was smooth and curved like a large vase, not much like a cooking pot so I imagined pressure pressing down on its top in order to make its sides bow outwards and its height reduced in response. It definitely started to look like a pot now, the only thing left to do was to, well actually make the damned thing.

  I picked up my small hammer and started pounding on the metal bar. The sounds of stone on metal rang out and echoed against the silence of the lake but I didn’t mind and it didn’t seem as though anyone else did either.

  Ting. I swung my hammer. Ting. I swung it again and again. Ting, Ting. Eventually I managed to force the steel into the flat sheet that I’d imagined, even though it had taken me so, so long and was more mottled and lumpy than flat and shiny. The next step was to fold the sides up like origami, but no matter how hard I tried the metal was just too strong for me to bend by hand. I looked around myself searching for an idea until my gaze came across one of the tree stumps that my previous endeavours had left behind. I picked up the sheet of copper, placed it on top of the stump and hammered the edges tightly against it. It worked…well eventually. It took forever to form the sheet around the round stump while still making sure that the base was flat so that the pot would be able to be supported over a fire, but in the end it was worth it. I took the pot off of the stump, turned it over to stand it up and took a good, hard look at my creation.

  You have gained the skill Crafting.

  Through determination, perseverance and sheer willpower, you have gained the skill Crafting. With this skill, you are able to visualise the advanced uses of base materials to turn them into something more useful. The quality and accuracy of the finished item is based upon your Crafting Level and the suitability of the type of material that you are using to craft the item. Some items may not be available to craft until further crafting levels.

  Cooking Pot

  Quality: Terrible

  Durability: 2/2

  Crafted by: Tandy

  This is a terrible quality item. It will just about pass for use in its intended purpose, however it is not likely to stand the test of time.

  ‘Brilliant’ I thought to myself sarcastically. ‘Isn’t that just a huge pile of shit.’ I looked at my pot for a long while before I came to the conclusion that even if it was terrible quality and was likely to fall apart after a few uses, it was still a cooking pot and it was probably still better than the current cooking utensil – i.e. nothing. It did still feel like a bit of a slap in the face though. Sure it wasn’t pretty but it was god damn heavy, which I discovered when I decided to place it over the fire pit in order to surprise Snafu when she woke the next day.

  I made sure I was awake before Snafu so that I could watch her reaction to my gift, and I couldn’t help but think that there was something different about her that I just couldn’t place my finger on when she emerged from the longhouse…until I finally realised, she wasn’t pregnant any more. Her stomach was as flat as the day that I had met her.

  Before I even had the chance to run up to her and ask her what happened, I saw Ushuk follow her out just a few paces behind with a little baby goblin strapped to his back. With its huge eyes and long ears it looked very much like a little green rabbit.

  “Snafu! Congratulations!” I announced as I bounded up to my cook, to which she replied “what you mean ‘cos of pot? I didn’t make!” She seemed to protest. She had gotten the wrong end of the stick.

  “No about your baby!” I said happily trying to point her in the right direction.

  Snafu grunted “oh, that not celebrate. Happen lots.” And I couldn’t help but agree with her statement– the ceremony around childbirth did seem a little over the top now that I thought about it plus goblin gestation didn’t seem to be that long or painful like it was in the real world.

  “And I made that pot for you!” I said revisiting her previous statement. It didn’t seem like such a grand gesture anymore though, as the air of celebration had seemed to wain away.

  Snafu examined the pot, touching it, tapping, kicking it and even biting it once. I wanted to tell her to stop in case the darned thing fell apart but my worries did not come to fruition. Eventually Snafu stopped her thorough inspection.

  “It not great. But it do.” She announced. I felt like a contestant on Masterchef – waiting for the either positive or negative summary of my work and I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Still no kitchen though.” She added and my mental task list seemed to tingle again. I wondered if my clan would ever be content with what they had, or if they were programmed in this way on purpose in order to keep me working towards some far off goal. Either way, I didn’t really mind because I found it rather liberating to have short, medium, and long-term goals to work towards – it kind of made life seem a little less complicated.

  Snafu didn’t use the pot right away to make breakfast, as in her words it “took little while to get going.” Which I understood meant that there was some additional process that I was missing – like heating up a huge volume of soup or stew which would no doubt take quite a while.

  Breakfast of fish and beetle steak however did once again refill my ‘well fed’ buff, and that always seemed to make me happy. It was like putting on an extra coat of armour that made me feel warm and safe.

  After stuffing my face to the point of bursting I took a moment to watch the activity that my settlement was now buzzing with. Goblins looked as though they were happy to go about their days’ work, bounding tirelessly between whatever it was that they seemed to be doing. I could count, including the ones that I couldn’t see but knew where they were, about twenty-two members of my clan. Not bad considering I’d started from nothing and nowhere. Buildings were springing up to make the camp much more than just a plain old muddy settlement, and not just small shacks and huts. The longhouse was a marvel in itself but was still dwarfed by the magnificence of the barracks. I couldn’t have been happier with the progress that by ever-faithful minions were making. The construction yard and the storehouse both seemed to be full to bursting with wood, stone and food stuffs, the high positive balances of which fil
led me with happiness. It was always the way for me, always work hard to stockpile as many resources as possible so that building new things would never put a strain on what could be a very fragile economy.

  I hardly needed to engage in woodworking now. The pile of logs seemed like it was sustainable even if I came along with a particularly large construction project. Plus I could see Isk sat on the ground beside the pile working non stop with a little knife scoring lines into the logs. He must have been reworking them into the four planks that Rok had told me about.

  I watched for a good ten minutes as Isk scored and scored with his knife making only the smallest cuts that I’d ever seen. It must have taken positively days to turn a log into four planks, and I was pretty sure that it was because he didn’t have a saw. A plan started brewing in my mind as I searched my memory for the specifics of a contraption that I’d once seen on the history channel.

  It was called the Hierapolis sawmill. I remembered because I’d called it a hieroglyph sawmill in my mind a few times afterwards. Essentially it connected a standard watermill to a crank and a set of cams that in turn moved saw blade side to side, kind of like putting a cam and piston on a modern day hand saw. If memory served it was the earliest example of an automated sawmill in history. The only problem that I could see with it was that the contraption relied upon moving water to turn a watermill, which of course we didn’t have. My options, therefore, were to either halve goblins manually turn the crank – which didn’t seem like a very productive use of their time, create a moving body of water on my own somehow, or come up with an alternative method of power. After all I had the advantage of centuries of engineering invention to draw upon after the sawmill had been conceived.

  Computers were too difficult, as were motors or engines that ran on fuel. It was easy to rule them out right away. I thought long and hard about how early automation worked and finally came to the conclusion that steam power was probably the way to go for me, given that I had the ability to make and stoke fires until the cows came home.

  My mistakes so far generally arose because I thought I knew how to do something, went and did it and later learned that this wasn’t the way things were done in Freedom Online, and this was one project that I didn’t want to pour my time into only to find out it had been a huge waste later on. My best bet was to talk to Rok first, and perhaps Ushuk and Isk to see what they thought of my idea. Ushuk wasn’t really specialised in building or woodworking but I guessed that his advanced intellect may have helped to get my point across if I came up against a brick wall of ignorance.

  I started firstly with how wood is processed into planks, i.e. that saws would move backwards and forward to make their cuts. All of the goblins nodded their heads in acceptance of the idea. I then implanted the idea that if the saws could move backwards and forwards on their own, it would make cutting wood easier – to which they all nodded again.

  Then came the sticky part – trying to explain how a cam worked. The best example I had in my arsenal was bicycle pedals – but they didn’t seem to get that one, so I picked up a long stick, held it at one end and moved my arm in a circular motion. It took nearly half an hour of explaining the process over and over again until Ushuk understood, and broke it down for the other two goblins. It seemed that they weren’t unfamiliar with oars on a boat, so he simply said it was like that – you move the oars in a circle and the boat goes in a straight line. I should have thought of that one.

  I had the barebones of my idea laid out now but I thought that the power source might not have been something I could talk them through. How would you explain steam locomotion to a five year old? In truth, the answer was that you don’t. There was no example that I could think of that would convey my meaning entirely to the goblins, so after a short while I gave up. In any case if I put together the engine, the others could concentrate on the mill – and I could simply join the two together.

  That is exactly what I went off to do. I left the goblins and told them to get back to work once they’d confirmed their lack of objections to the plan. I was wondering if one of them might have said “Oh that’s a…” and say something like it already existed and that they could go off and make it right away but I wasn’t so lucky, this time at least.

  Replicating my crafting process from the cooking pot, I made a large copper bell to sit over a fire pit. It was watertight as I knew it would eventually be filled with water, and I left a much smaller opening at the top for my steam pipe to eventually be connected to. When it was done it looked like a huge copper onion. It did take a long time, but I’d already essentially done it once before so this time I had to spend much less time stopping to think about how I was going to do things.

  The pipe for the top of the onion was not as easy as I was expecting it to be, as with simply a hammer to work with, making a round pipe with a ninety-degree bend was terribly difficult. I ended up using a thin log as my hammering template, overlapping the copper sheet to minimise any holes for the steam to escape from, and elected to hammer in the bend once the tube itself was complete. The tube I hammered onto the top of my copper onion and angled it down so that it met the ground. It was definitely starting to look like a medieval chemistry set made by someone who hadn’t had any experience in working with sheet metal before, or at least someone who didn’t have any of the correct tools whatsoever.

  It was a bit of an afterthought, but I took the time to cover the whole contraption with earth. Once some of the other goblins saw what I was doing, they all ran to help me and in no time we had covered the whole thing, less an entry port for the onion to be filled with water when it needed it. My theory was that if any of my seams weren’t as airtight as I’d liked, the coverings would help prevent some of the steam escaping. I wasn’t sure if it would work but why the hell not.

  By day three of my rather ambitious project, I had the basic workings of a steam engine prepared and a quick test did indeed display a strong jet of steam coming from the outlet pipe once the whole thing had reached it’s working temperature. At least mechanical principles weren’t up for debate within Freedom Online.

  I watched the steam billowing from the pipe when a better idea occurred to me. Why go through the rigmarole or building cams and gears to push saws back and forward in the traditional way, when it would be much easier to simply use my jet of steam to power a steam turbine that would spin a circular saw. I almost facepalmed.

  It took a long while to figure out how to make a circular saw blade using just a hammer and the most basic of stone tools, but thankfully as copper was a relatively soft metal I was able to make a relatively good shot at it, notching out grooves from the outer edge of the circle to act as cutting teeth. I also punched out a hole in the centre for the attachment of a central axle to allow the blade to spin.

  As if by magic, once I placed the blade in line with the steam pipe, I was greeted with a message that would no doubt change my gaming life forever.

  You have gained the skill Construction.

  Through determination, perseverance and sheer willpower, you have gained the skill Construction. With this skill, you are able to visualise advanced structures and create them with a little hard work. The buildings that are available to you are based upon your own knowledge and your Construction Level. Some buildings may not be available to build until further construction levels.

  It did stand to reason that if I didn’t know what I was building, then I wouldn’t be able to simply build it and get some random masterpiece for my efforts. As I took a step back from my sawmill, I was interrupted with yet another system message.

  You are attempting to construct a Sawmill.

  It appears that the design of this construction is in an effort to process wooden logs into planks. This is a standard process within Freedom Online, and a such you are able to allocate the property Sawmill to it.

  Would you like to allocate the property Sawmill to this building? Yes/No

  I threw myself at the ‘yes’ button and before
my eyes my backyard boiling pot transformed into a construction site. Logs littered the ground and to my horror everything I had constructed seemed to have disappeared.

  I panicked and quickly analysed the construction site to see if I could uncover any information about my building. It came as a bit of a shock that the building was listed as a ‘Sawmill’ at five percent construction, and it looked as though it needed one hundred wood and thirty stone to be completed. It sounded like a lot as I remembered that the other buildings I’d had made only cost a fraction of that. I thought that perhaps the advanced nature of this building warranted the higher cost.

  Within moments of my analysis of the building, a few goblin workers had started ferrying materials from the construction yard to my new site and judging by how my stockpiles were falling I could tell that I would probably end up using most if not all of the resources I’d been so proud of not so long ago.

  The last thing I needed to figure out was how to actually work on the building now that it was some kind of game object rather than the fruit of my hard work. Something inside of me knew what the answer was though and picking up my hammer I started to hit the pile of logs that was starting to grow in the centre of the site.

  Not much was happening, but the pleasant feeling I was getting from hitting the logs wasn’t unlike the feeling I got from using my lumberjack skill so I didn’t want to stop, and after about two hours I took a moment to stop and analyse the building again to see if I had made any difference. I had. The construction level was now at six percent.

  ‘Holy shit this is going to take forever,’ I screamed internally but answered ‘well actually it’s going to take about eight days of solid work,’ that was of course if my mental arithmetic was still up to scratch. I didn’t particularly want to take eight days to do anything though!