Rabenschwinges Cavern blog » maintainer

Unknown Age 07

Rabenschwinge — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:45:01 +0000

That´s how we´ve named the age I mentioned in my last post. We don´t know its name, only that it was written by a D’ni.
Because we found it near Asheten mansion, it could have been Asheten himself, who wrote it – but that´s only assumption yet.

We managed to clear the rubble in the first room, revealing a doorway to another, bigger room. Found remains of at least two D’ni in this. Tom Woods says, he thinks, the cave-in had happened just some years ago, so the two must have been killed earlier, maybe at the time of the Fall.
Found some kind of weapons near the bodies. Were they maintainers on some mission? City guards? Or criminials? We don´t know yet.

Soundings showed that there is at least one more room, even bigger. The door that leads there is huge and heavy, and jammed. Will have to bring some heavy tools to open it but first we´ll have to inspect the integrity of the surrounding rock.

No news of Quaxo as of yet… I hope, he is allright? For those who didn´t see the post: We have been planning an expedition to Nifehrehn to do research on lifeforms there. You can find the thread at the D’ni Zoologist Society forum, here.

Maintainer work

Rabenschwinge — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:20:11 +0000

Today Tom Woods showed me the maintainer outpost we had visited months ago and what work they have done while I was away. They´ve managed to get most of the systems working again. Two heavy suits, around a dozen medium suits and over 30 light suits are ready to use.

The expedition has made three visits to ages of unknown security status (read: ages without a maintainer stamp), and so far everything went fine.
They followed security protocols set up by the original maintainers (which were quite cautious) and managed to define the status of the three ages they visited to “relatively safe”.

One of the ages is especially interesting: the linking book seems to link to the bottom of a sea, so visiting it without the most hardy suits would be suicide. These are able to resist the immense pressure of that environment.

We aren´t sure if these bulky, heavy suits are made of Nara, Deretheni or some other durable kind of D’ni stone, personally, I suspect it to be Deretheni (Nara would be too heavy, I suppose.)

If you have no idea what I´m talking about: You can find more information about the different D’ni stones at the guild of archivists website: http://www.dpwr.net.

Of course, there is a lot more information at this site, I recommend to everyone to read the excellent articles there!

Nifehren research

Rabenschwinge — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:53:22 +0000

The last two weeks were really busy. Despite the newly recruited staff, we have a lot more work than we actually can handle at a time, so we concentrate on the most promising tasks.

One of my favorite works was the research on Nifehrens archives. I learned a lot about the fauna and flora of that barren, frozen wasteland. Dr. Shingler, our zoologist, and his assistant Jessie found information about a creature the D’ni called “Rehnuradoy”, a strange animal, roughly similar to a small reptile, with body fluids, that act as non-freeze liquids. This is a trait that it shares with a lot of other lifeforms of the age, but in its case the fluids are so potent, that it can live even in the harshest, coldest places of Nifehren. It is approximately a half foot long and nourishes on lichens. The most apparent feature of the creature are its “eye stripes” – instead of eyes like we know them from earth, they have two, deep blue stripes, from their heads to their hind feet, that are photosensitive, and with which they can see, even in the dark, cold Nifehren nights.

I also started to help out the new maintainers, with doing inspections on explorer written ages and restored areas. It is something I had wanted to do since a long time, and finally, after reading a call in their forums (Link: http://www.guildofmaintainers.org), I decided to do something.

Respondences were really positive, which is really motivating for me, and I´m planning to do at least one inspection for each age and area that is available right now. I won´t post any of them here in my blog – unless the writers want me to. Some of the ages are not yet opened for the public, and I clearly will respect the wishes of the ages writers.

High expectations

Rabenschwinge — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:38:57 +0000

As I wrote on my last entry, I had the honorable task of introducing the “newbies” to the expedition. B.P. had talked of a dozen people – in fact, there were more than twenty who came to Zandis property, up there in New Mexico. We let them sign a NDA (just to be on the safer side) and then introduced them. Alex was with me, which was greatly relieving for me. I´m not comfortable with speaking to a large group all by myself.

There were some interesting people there – scientists, students, explorers, interns…
We gave them a tour through some major parts of D’ni – Ae’Gura, Great Tree Pub, some hoods… and then led them to Risoahl (which is quite tidied up now.)

It was entertaining to watch how they reacted to all that stuff… I can very well remember how it was for me, linking for the first time, standing there, watching in awe about all those wonders…

B.P. took over after that, and explained to them, what kind of help we need, what tasks there are to do, and so on.

So, after this, our staff has increased greatly – and the work on the new ages and areas we found can finally begin!

The other day, in our spare time, Tom Woods, Shane Kennett and myself visited an old maintainer facility in one of the outlying districts. It was in good shape, and there was plenty of interesting equipment there. The most interesting parts were the maintainer suits. Not only the newest ones, like in Gahreesen, but also some older models – some looking like a kind of insect, and some – the oldest ones – huge and bulky, and extremly tough looking. I guess, these would be suitable even for the harshest ages.

Shane said, he thought about using this maintainer outpost for the same purpose it was used back then, by the D’ni – as a starting point for expeditions to new ages. With all the new areas, we could make good use of all that equipment.