Swamped

You suppose you might have better luck if you say things it's heard before. Fortunately, you know Simone's turns of phrase quite well. She always says "Listen up!" when she wants someone's attention, and you know she's said it to the sandy-mocker here more than a few times.

"Listen up!" you say.

"Already heard it from the boss," the sandy-mocker says. It almost sounds like Theodore said it himself.

So you're on the right track, but you may need to narrow this down. Simone's said it a lot, after all...

Ah, but usually she says it with a name. She's probably said it to the sandy-mocker here, so if you just say his name with it, well, you might hear something recent.

Now if only you could remember the damn bird's name.

It takes a moment for the name to come to you. But then you remember who she named it after, and chuckle a bit at the thought of ordering him around.

"Listen up, Jeremy!"

"The patients all seem stable, so I've finally got some breathing room to get to the junkyard. Just as long as no one asks me to do anything else before I go there..."

That sounds like Simone, all right. She's a hard worker, but she also has trouble saying no, even when she's already got something to do. Must have been even worse for the last two days when you weren't around to keep her on task.

But a trip to the junkyard and back shouldn't have taken her this long. This is worrying.

You'd really like to go out and search for her yourself, but there's too much to keep an eye on here. So who can you send to check the junkyard?

SpoilerShow

Since I just needed a name, I asked in Discord. Thanks to everyone who answered.

Ix picked the name I went with.

Ol' "Junk picker" Gascoign would be good for it, if you catch them before they finish their meal.

Well. There's one grebling around here who's never busy - Gascoign, who claims to be retired and only ever seems to emerge for meals.

Not that they show up at actual mealtimes, mind. Someone, like you, might give them work.

It's still a good while before lunch, so they might still be in the mess tent. You head over there, and sure enough, there's Gascoign with a bowl of stew.

"Gascoign," you say calmly. They give you a glare.

"Don't interrupt when I'm eating."

"Weren't you on junkyard duty back in the day? I think Simone went over there, but she hasn't come back. I need someone to check it out, and you seem to have the time for it."

Gascoign just grumbles, slurps down the rest of their stew, and heads out. You've seen that defeated pose enough times to know that they're getting to work. Hopefully, they'll find Simone soon.

You can't really think about that right now, though. You've got a lot of other business to take care of.

What should you work on next?

Better check on how the recalibration of the instruments is going. Seems they've been wonky since the last gateway opened.

Ugh...Gascoign left without paying! Better pull out some unruly Grebling currency before someone tries to accuse him of meal theft and pull him away from his work.

You take a look at your to-do list, and note that several particularly sensitive measuring instruments are due for recalibration. This has been a recurring problem over the last few weeks; Theodore left a note saying that based on timing, he suspects the gateways are the cause. You want to talk to him about that, but first you want to take a look at the instruments for yourself.

On your way out, however, you notice that Gascoign hasn't left a meal-stick at the dining board. Again.

You've got your own complaints about the system, sure, but you've done inventory for the kitchen before. It's bad enough with the sticks, let alone without. Maybe if you could actually get Gascoign to do inventory duty for once, they'd pay more attention to their own sticks.

For now, though, all you can do is toss one stew-stick in Gascoign's slot and try to persuade them to hand over one of theirs later. Not that you expect that to be easy, but one thing at a time.

You've got five people to consult with right now about their instruments. Last you heard, Dominique was busy watching over one of the humans, so you'll probably want to check in with her last. Who should you see first, then?

Might as well start at the small surveyors' tent where the artifacts were being collected, categorized, identified, dated, and tagged. You were kind of hoping they'd be able to examine Pubert's lodestone and confirm your suspicions, but with the instruments on the fritz inspection had been delayed.

Might as well start with Gail, your main surveyor. She's been real annoyed at the backlog of artifacts piling up, so clearing that is your best bet at checking Pubert's lodestone.

You still need to persuade them to open the safe so you can take a look at that, but not much sense in doing that if the instruments aren't ready.

You head over to Gail's workspace and check in. Her two assistants are hard at work fixing up the instruments; Gail is sitting down at a table looking at something with a magnifying glass.

"How's progress here, Gail?"

"I'm getting tired of everything breaking, and Theo hasn't had any workable ideas for protecting the gear. So I'm trying to do what I can by hand."

You take a glance yourself. Seems she's examining a clay shard. Probably a piece of a broken pot.

"So what exactly are you checking now?"

"Age. It's not very precise, but I can get a reasonable idea of the century it was buried, at least. Passable for the moment, then we can fix the carbon scanner when fixing up the dates is all we need to do."

"How long do you think it'll be before then? I found something interesting on the way here, and I want to compare it against the readings on the compass."

"We'll have these instruments done in about ten minutes," one of the assistants pipes up. "Then it'll take, uh, four hours if we don't get another interruption?"

"Which is hardly guaranteed," the other assistant mutters.

"Four hours? There's that much backlog?"

"Just twenty or so things," Gail says. "The main issue is, we've already gone through all the objects my sons can really help me with the work on. So I have to do everything myself. It takes quite a bit of time."

"We could if you'd actually give us a chance, Ma," the younger assistant grumbles.

"It's not about giving you a chance. It's that it will take even longer if I have to train you two on the tricky details. Just focus on the instruments for now, boys."

"Is there any way I could help speed it up?"

Gail gives you a doubting look.

"Aside from not distracting me while I'm working?"

"If the answer's no, I'll get out of your hair. Just trying to do what I can."

"Hmmph." Gail looks back down at the shard for a moment, then suddenly stops. "Actually, now that you mention it, there might be something, yes."

You wonder what she could have in mind.

She's actually hungry.

"I haven't got the time to get to the mess tent," she continues. "If you can get someone to bring us meals, that saves the boys a few trips and I have some other tasks I can put them to work on."

"All right, I think that's manageable."

She hands you a meal-stick, and the boys do too as you go past them. You don't particularly want to deal with this yourself, but it's a simple enough task to delegate. You could probably even ask one of the humans to do it.

So. Where are you headed to next?

Well, you're hungry. Get a snack.

Steal all their food

Seriously, go ask a human

As you're contemplating who to check in with next, you spot Boris heading to the mess tent.

Well. He's on your list, and you've got to get Gail some food, so you may as well head back there. Maybe you can even grab an early lunch yourself... no, you ate breakfast not that long ago, you'll be fine.

You head in and catch Boris grabbing a plate of celery. He waves as he spots you.

"Yvonne! I'm so relieved to see you're all right!"

You head over to the middle table with him. Boris is a good-natured fellow; he won't think anything of bringing food over to the survey tent. But you've got more direct business with him first.

"Boris, how are your seismic instruments doing?"

He looks a little disappointed.

"I dug an extra level down to see if the disturbances would still affect them. It wasn't enough. Now I'm trying to measure the disruption to see if it's any better, at least, but there are so many variables I don't know. I would have to see if the same variance happened with the instruments aboveground, but then I would be disrupting other people's work..."

"Good news for you, then. Gail's been manually checking the age on artifacts so that they don't have to take extra time fixing everything over there. Maybe you can get a look at the things she's not using yet. And while you're at it, she wants some food for herself and her boys."

Boris beams.

"I will be happy to help."

"Of course, I don't want us going too long without advance warning about tunnelers..."

"Naturally, I will finish the measurements as soon as I can and then work on fixing the instruments. Thank you for letting me know."

He gives you a hug before you hand him the meal-sticks, leaving you to work out who you should see next. You've really only got two options before Dominique, so you think about who's left.

>Go visit Jebediah, the priest.

Well. You're in a good mood, so this is probably about as prepared as you'll be for paying Jebediah a visit. You go towards the chapel.

It's not that you dislike him. You feel sympathy for him, even. You've got your own problems with the church, after all, and they line up pretty well with his.

But damn, the man's never happy. You've never seen a grebling in such a low mood all the time. Belle's tried her best, but nothing seems to give him any joy.

"What do you want?" Jeb mutters as you step in. Then he pauses. "Oh, it's you, chief. Good to see you back. You here to give Reth a little thanks for her guidance or somethin'?"

"Actually, I'm here to check how your instruments are doing. You've got another job here, after all."

"Right," Jeb grumbles. "Figures it'd be work. What do you need me to look at, again?"

These figures, they're literally off the charts

You pointedly glare in the direction of the large graphing device that takes up a third of the tent. The drawing-stick mechanism has gone off the graphing board in several spots and there are markings on the tent itself now.

"That," you say. "Though I can already see it's having problems."

"That's a minor issue," Jeb says. "The parameters on the graph got thrown off, but the actual datasets weren't affected this time, thank Reth."

He doesn't thank the goddess lightly, but you understand his relief. Last time, you had to get the whole camp poring over notebooks for days to get the data back in order.

"So what about fixing up the grapher itself?" you ask.

"There's only one wrench that fits, and Dominique has it," he says. "It'd take a good two hours to get everything back in order, because the damn thing's so big. On top of that, we can run it as-is if we really need to, it'll just mark up the tent a bit. So Dominique got priority on the wrench."

"I'll see if she's done with it when I check in on her," you say, making a note about it. "Is there anything else you need?"

Some way to get sandymockers to stop screeching and squawking would be nice, but you probably can't help with that.

"Hmmph. Right now, my main issue is that there are wild sandy-mockers flying by, and they keep squawking at ours."

"Didn't Simone make you those earplugs sometime back? Are they not working?"

"Oh, no, the noise isn't the issue. It's that for some reason, they like to roost on top of this tent at night and that makes it a real mess in the morning. I clean it off when I get up, but obviously I'd prefer not having to climb up there so often. But I doubt there's anything that can really be done about it."

"I'll make a note of that," you say. It occurs to you that Rider might be able to help out with this. "Thanks for your time."

That was less unpleasant than most of your meetings with Jeb, probably because you were able to keep it short. Now there's just one person to meet with before you finally check in with Dominique.

Harbottle the skywatcher.

With that business sorted out, you head to the one permanent structure in camp: the watchtower.

It takes you a few minutes to climb, mostly due to its height. You still find it hard to believe this thing was made for humans - ladders are so inefficient, and they don't have claws to secure themselves with.

At the top, you give Rudolph a quick wave. He waves back before going back to scouting. Then you step into Harbottle's observatory.

"Good to see you, Director," they say. "How have you been?"

Of course. Harbottle's usually behind on the news. You see them so rarely that they probably didn't even notice you were gone yesterday.

"It's a long story. Someone will catch you up on it by the next general meeting," you say. "I'm here to check on your instruments, you had trouble with them a while back."

"Ah! Yes, I've had to manually calculate the star positions for two nights now. Nearly got the recorder back in shape, though. Don't suppose you've made any progress on finding out what's causing this?"

"We have, actually. Seems news is slow to make its way up here, though."

"I suppose it is," Harbottle sighs. "And vice versa. I had some results I wanted to show you a while back, but what with one thing and another, I was never able to get a message to you."

They walk towards a rolled up star chart at the back, and unfurl it.

"Take a look at this," Harbottle says. "Does anything strike you as odd?"

Pretty normal sky-stuff here, Harbottle.

Wait, is that the Maiden's Veil? It's too early for that to show up isn't it?

At first you're not sure what Harbottle is talking about. The first thing that crosses your mind is unusual movement by the stars or constellations, but that doesn't sound at all sensible, and everything is about where you expect it to be. You aren't an expert like Harbottle is, but you know where things are in relationship to each other. The Longboat's figurehead is where it should be, and everything around that looks normal... the Poet, the Wash-Basin, Anna the Maiden...

As you glance at Anna the Maiden, however, you realize what Harbottle is saying. The four stars of the Maiden's Smile aren't on the chart. That doesn't normally happen until the winter.

"How is the Maiden's Veil happening so early?" you ask.

"Well. Do you know the main theory as to what causes the Maiden's Veil?"

You shake your head. You don't follow astronomy that closely.

"We don't really have the means to prove this, but we believe that the four stars of the Maiden's Smile are each orbited by a very large planet. Large enough that, at some point in the cycle, it blocks the light from the star. Like an eclipse, only we're seeing it from much further off."

"And these planets happen to have a cycle that's close to our year? And they all get blocked at once, for about two weeks in mid-winter?"

"So the theory goes. It would be quite the coincidence, of course, but far from impossible."

"So why is it showing up earlier?"

"The most obvious extrapolation would be that we're seeing some other celestial bodies blocking the stars, perhaps on a less regular cycle. That, of course, is assuming there's no magic or divine intervention involved."

It's certainly odd, but you're not sure there's anything to be done about it other than reporting the observation. You make a note about it.

Is there anything else to be done here before you climb back down?