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Tufolehn « Rabenschwinges Cavern blog

Posts Tagged ‘Tufolehn’

New gadget

Yesterday, Tom Woods sent KI-mails to everyone to inform us they had got new underwater cameras, and everyone who needed one should come to Asheten mansion.

Of course, I took one, and already tried it out in my small basin in Lab I.

I put my Tufolehn sea urchins and a conch in, and took some shots.

The quality is comparable to KI-shots – those cameras should do a good job when mounted on our underwater critters.

Our critter in Unknown age 03 has brought a lot of new data. Mostly, it confirmed what we knew already: the green gas is highly corrosive and poisionous, and there are lots of remains of animals in the area we´ve explored yet.
Fortunately, the bones we thought to be of humanoid origins seem to be animal bones as well.

We don´t know anything about the origin yet – is it natural or artificial? Even a weapon? We have no clue. Further research will be necessary.

Goodbye, Critter 2…

Yesterday we lost our first “critter”. If you want to know, what that is, read the previous post :)

I asked Shane (Kennett) to borrow me one of the small guys to explore a crack in a rock wall near my home base in Afelahn. The crack is too narrow for a human to enter it (maybe besides a small child). So Shane and two of our interns (Jack Rowe and Sally LaCroix from Canada) visited me in my age.
We carefully positioned Critter 2 in front of the crack, and Jack, who is an avid model maker, steered it into the dark at slow pace.

The camera worked fine, we could see the image data on a laptop screen. It was a strange feeling… like this robot, that has explored one of the shafts in the Cheops pyramide some years ago, Critter 2 crawled forward on its crawler tracks.

The crack wasn’t all too interesting … mostly rock, and some moss growing on it.
We recorded the data anyway, might have overseen something of interest – maybe our geologists will be satisfied with what we have.

Then it happened. When we arrived – or better, when Critter 2 arrived – at the end of the crack, we decided to turn it around and go back outwards.
The ground there was littered with small pebble stones, and somehow our little friend managed to slide sideways – maybe Jack turned it too fast – and got itself stuck on a small rock ledge.
Jack tried to move forward and backward to break free, but to no avail.
Critter 2 is fully functional still, but it can´t move – we fear, it could be impossible to get it out there.

Shane plans to devise a plan to rescue it – maybe with Critter 3, which has a significantly stronger “engine”, or “more power”, so to speak.
Until then, Critter 2 is gone.

Well, to better news:
The harvesting of the Er’Nirah lichen is going well, we already have a great stock in one of the storage houses in the city. Dr. Haugaard, one of our botanists, says they can be stored for some time and still be edible – maybe we can reactivate one of the industrial plants of the D’ni to dry the lichen, so that they are storable even longer.

Of course, the lichen isn´t the only food we have at our disposal. Fruits from Yagee Mohts, Fish from Shashodahl and even some game from Yateesh.
We surely won´t starve for the next months.

Another project of mine I’m focusing right now is the restoration of Tufolehn – or better, the setup. There are no visible D’ni buildings in this age, so I guess, it wasn´t officially used by them. But I´d like to provide means for our fellow explorers to visit it – the strange, Cambrium or Ordovicium-like fauna really is an eye-catcher.
I plan to connect the two islands with some kind of bridge or catwalk to provide easy access.

A broken promise

I´m sorry, I didn´t find time last weekend to provide the KI-shots I promised. I´ll post them as soon as I can!

Work on Afelahn has been stopped for the moment, until we can sort out the stability issues with Lab II. The big lamp in Lab I worries me a little, too… it is very heavy, and I don´t know, if the ceiling is stable enough to support it. I´ll ask Shane Kennett to do a test on that, too.

Did some research on the Tufolehn sea urchins. They have no spines like our earths sea urchins, but rather microscopical nettles. I suspect, they use the nettles to catch their food and pull it into small, microscopical openings. To call those “mouths” would be greatly exaggerating.

The sea snail, on the other hand, seems to nourish from a) the nettles, or b) the prey the nettles catches, before these can pull it into the sea urchin. Although the nettles are slightly poisonous (and hurt, as I found out), the sea snail seems not to be bothered.
On the other hand, the snails don´t harm the sea urchin, they eat very slowly and not much.
On Tufolehn, I watched some bigger, predatory sea snails trying to eat one of the small, orange ones which I´m researching. When the big snail approached a smaller one, sitting next to a sea urchin, it suddenly buckled, as if feeling pain, and hurried away (well, if you can call 30 cm per minute to “hurry”.)

I spent some time on Alitnee, as well. Before our teams arrived, the birds there had nests not only on the rocks, but also on the metallic platforms the D’ni built to watch them. After we came there, most of these close nests have been abandoned, and the eggs sadly decayed. I plan to gather some of the eggs, empty them from their ruined content, and study their different sizes and colors.

Stability issues

While I was adding furniture and lamps to the existing rooms in Afelahn, Tom Woods and his team worked on Lab II, the big room adjacent to the “garage”. When they caved out more space to make the room higher, parts of the roof suddenly collapsed. No one was hurt, fortunately, but we decided to close access to the room for the moment until we can secure it more properly.
It raises questions about the whole place – how safe is it? I´ve read reports of other explorers, who have repeatedly lost whole complexes because of geological instabilities… don´t want that to happen in Afelahn! We´ve spent so much work… it would be a shame to loose it.

Maybe it would be a bit of a distraction to do some work on other ages…

Oh, and by the way: I started researching two of the strange species of Tufolehn: the already mentioned “sea urchin”, and one of the various sea snail-species. I brought a sea snail and two living sea urchins, and also some dead ones as well.

I guess, it´s about time to post some KI-shots here on the blog. I plan to do that this weekend.

Interior decoration

The last days, we began to bring equipment to the rooms in Afelahn. Shane and Tom Woods helped me to install a small water basin for experiments (I´m thinking of the creatures in Tufolehn). Besides a couple of shelves made of wood we brought to the age, I used a machine found in one of the Resehren-ages to mold a stone table, and another table with a different design and a cavity for plant experiments.

I saw the lobsterpede again, crawling under the same rock as before. Now I´m convinced it has a nest there. Maybe I should watch the place for some time and write down my observations?
I´m not even sure if it is a crustacean or an insect, or maybe a arachnoid-like creature… it has characteristics of all of these.

To relax a little, I made visits to some of the ages we got from the DRC. Spent an hour or so in Negilahn. The reepahs are shouting again (at least I think it´s them), but besides a swarm of kiri I didn´t see any creatures there. I wonder, if the animals of “rehziksehv” have recovered from the unfortunate events back at the beginning of the Bahro incidents…

In the next days, I plan to intensify my work in Afelahn, and maybe making some preparations in Ahnoto and Tufolehn, as well. Now that the cavern is getting more and more active and populated, it would be nice to have something to contribute. But no promises or actual dates yet, sorry.

Breakthrough

We did a lot of work on Afelahn during the last days. With the help of a Toosha (I´m calling him “Tubby”) we managed to link a medium excavator into Afelahn and started to excavate (surprise, surprise) first a rectangular opening which will become a door – I´m planning to use a big, stable gate – and then a big, rectangular room, an entry room into my future home base so to speak. I think, I´ll call it “the garage”.

With the help of Tom Woods, I planned the overall layout of my home base – complete with an office, labors, storage rooms… and of course a “link in room” for visitors comfort.

I don´t plan any recreational facilities yet – it will solely be a working space, maybe with presentation of my findings from various ages to give visitors an overview.

While we were working with the excavator, I saw the “lobsterpede” again (from “lobster” and “centipede”). It was as ugly as ever, and as dumb as ever: it hid under the same rock as last time.
Maybe it has a nest there?

I visited Tufolehn again, and took a boat with me this time. I couldn´t resist my curiosity – the second island is only a few meters away, and so I row there.
It surely was worth it. The second island is approximately double the size of the first, and there is much more to see: on the beach, beyond some medium sized rocks, there are some strange organisms growing on some smaller rocks, above the water line. They belong to different species – most of them are quite colorful. I don´t even know, if they are plants or animals (or something else(tm)), but I really like watching them. Between the motionless ones, there are some creatures creeping and slithering around – I guess, they could be some kind of sea cucumber or conches. Will have to ask Peter Chang.

I watched them for a while (from a safe distance, beyond the medium rocks) and decided to take some KI-shots (I tend to forget to do this, so I haven´t got a lot of them yet.)
Before I post them publicly, I want to do some research. (And let some other guys from the expedition do some research for me :) )

Afelahn research

We did some more research on Afelahn the last days. It seems, that air, water and soil are quite similar to those on earth, except there are a lot of small lifeforms which look like clams in the soil. On the other side, there are no worms or wormlike creatures – so it seems, the “earth-clams” are Afelahns equivalent to our worms. Fascinating.

Kennett brought a small excavator with him on Saturday, and did some test bores. He said, the rock is stable enough to excavate bigger cavities – maybe even rooms!

The only problem is, that it would need a lot of time to cut out rooms with this small excavator – if only we could bring one of the bigger ones into Afelahn… but as we know, only that which comes with you when you walk comes with you when you link.
So, how are we supposed to get the bigger equipment from age to age?

After spending a lot of time in Afelahn, I went to Tufolehn again, this time joined by Alex and Peter Chang, who is a microbiologist. He had done a little research on Tufolehns water and wanted to see it himself – he said, there were a lot of strange microorganisms in it.

When I showed them some of the strange fauna of Tufolehn – sea urchins, jellyfish, starfish and a strange, slimy mass (yuck!) floating on the water – Peter said, the fauna of the age is quite similar to our own earth in the geological era of Cambrium or Ordovicium.
And he recommended not to swim in the water… there are a lot of small creatures with nettles swimming in it – some even might be poisonous, but at least swimming would be quite uncomfortable.
A pity… I would like to explore the other, bigger island – it´s just a few dozen meters away.

Asheten mansion

Continuing my report about what happened yesterday:

After I had made my preparations, I linked back to the Kurat neighborhood and met with Dr. Forberg. He had an interesting, portable D´ni-device with him: some kind of KI-encoder/decoder. He told me to put my hand with my KI into the device, programmed it, and it loaded a new Nexus-link into my KI (better said: the clearance for a new area.)
We then moved on to the Nexus, and from there to the expedition´s headquarters, a mansion at a lower part of city proper, which lies directly at the lakeshore.

By the way: In the meantime I´ve asked Dr. Forberg about the name “Kurat” meaning derogative things in some languages, and he answered, this was purely coincidental, as it was a D´ni name. So, all Estonians who read this, this name is not meant as an offense to you :)

It was quite impressive. The mansion was in exceptional good condition, and Dr. Forberg told me later, that they had been cleaning up and restoring it for nearly 2 years now. It once had belonged to a D´ni guildmaster namend Asheten, who had been a rich and influential individual.
The three ages that had been in Ashetens possession now are in the hands of the expedition, Risoahl being one of them.

I was introduced to some members of the expedition, was given a tour through the mansion – the architecture of that place is astounding – and then we sat down in the dining room with four other people to discuss things out.
A redhaired young woman, wo intruced herself as Alex, a certain Dr. Stejskal, two guys whos names I can´t remember, and another, curly haired, bulky man, who nearly squashed my hand when shaking it. We had a long, interesting conversation about the goals of the expedition and their achievements of the past two years, and of my possible role.
I found out, that the main purpose of Dr. Forbergs expedition was research, not restoration, though they of course had to do some cleaning up to be able to do their work.
After talking a lot, Dr. Forberg asked me, what I thought about the offer. I said, I had to think it over – but if I would work with them, then not as a part of the expedition, but as an outsider – but with full access to their ressources and manpower.
Dr. Forberg smiled, and after giving me a thoughtfull look, agreed.
In return, he said, the expedition would like to have the right to examine and research each of the ages, I would write. I stated, that I would allow that, but only on my terms. If anyone did something with/ in my ages, I didn´t like, I would withdraw my allowance at once.
We talked at least two hours more, and then said goodbye to each other.

After the meeting, a lot of thoughts went through my head, and I decided to make another visit in Tufolehn. It is a calm, peaceful place, and really good if you need some time for yourself.

I had brought a backpack with me, with my kor´nea I had begun to write in. When I was slowly walking along the beach of my small island, I watched the greenish sea, and suddenly saw something, aproximately twenty meters away from the shore, in the sea. It drift closer to the beach, and I recognized it being some sort of big jellyfish, two meters in diameter, with long, thin tentacles. It was shining in dark blue and bright red – it seems, that many of the creatures in Tufolehn are quite colorful.
It was washed to the beach finally, by the surf. I stayed away from it – didn´t know, if the nettles were dangerous – and admired it´s beautiful colors.
I think, I will have to name the creatures I discover – I don´t have a good name for this one, maybe one of my blog readers can help me out with that?

First trip

Just came back from my first trip to Tufolehn. Well, it is an interesting age, at the same time it is very minimalist.
If I understood the book of commentary correctly, this is the typical style which Anesh wrote in, and it was appreciated by many (including Tumak).
I put on my maintainer suit (don´t ask me, where I got it from) and laid my hand on the linking panel.
The area I linked in to was a small, flat island amidst a vast, green ocean. The sky and the sun looked quite similar to those on earth.

In the shallow water around the island, there were strange, round creatures – maybe invertebrates – formed like little, green balls with red spots in various sizes. At least think those are animals, can´t tell for sure. Other than that, I didn´t see any animals or plant life. I heard no other sounds than the ocean surf.

There is another, bigger island in the near vicinity of the first one, but I chose not to swim over to it before the basic tests – maybe the water is acidic or poisonous, I´d rather find that out the comfortable way.

I´ve taken some samples of soil and water and plan on coming back soon. For now, I´ve got a lot of preparations to make for my first book, my first age.

(edited to give more details on my visit)

Tufolehn

I´ve returned to the general area where I´d found the book of commentary. The house, where it had laid in, was in good condition, and so I searched it inch for inch.

I found some notebooks, appearantly written by Tumak, so I suppose, the house must have belonged to him.

I quickly read through the notebooks – most of the stuff was not very interesting – but then I found a part, where Tumak mentioned a secret room, where he had the descriptive books he had researched! I suddenly felt exhilarated, and looked for an entrance.

Finally, after two hours of examination, I found a secret lever, which opened a door behind a bookshelf. There I found the aforementioned secret book room – and a leatherbound tome, with the name “Tufolehn” written on it in D´ni letters.
A descriptive book!
My hands trembled, when I took the book from the place it had rested for hundreds of years.

I opened it slowly, and there it was, the linking panel, showing a bright, amazing panorama.

Now I´ll have to visit this age – see it for myself!