Gallery, Tokotah and King's Stairs

Work has been all-consuming of late, and with this Cate Alexander woman showing up and stirring the pot of explorers, I really haven't felt like going down into the Cavern. I deal with people like her plenty at work, so I don't want to deal with them in my free time. The DRC may have annoyed me in the past, but at least they were scientists and explorers. Reading the transcripts of her conversations, I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth that I hope will pass. If she really is only interested in money, and can't see the wonder of what's going on in the Cavern, I want nothing to do with her. (This is not to say I will chase her away - I will simply avoid her and the places she is.)

I plugged the DRC's KI numbers into my KI, courtesy of Jishin. Now I can tell where they are - and hopefully not get caught in the press of the crowd. I would love to sit and talk with them sometime, perhaps to ask Kodoma-sensei if he has a favorite tea, or what he thinks of the geological goings on in Eder Gira, or so forth, but with all of the explorers who DO want to talk to them, I really don't see that they need to talk to me. If they ask for help, I will give it. If they block stuff off...well, I'll try to get past it, of course. But I don't want to get in their way, and I don't want to be an annoying idiot who asks if the Bahro taste like chicken.

Speaking of going places and fixing things - Engberg fixed the fountains before I got back down there with my plumbing snake, so I guess it was a distribution problem, since they're ALL back on, instead of just a blockage in one pipe. Now there's a guy I'd like to help out. No cryptic stuff, just hands-on, fix-it-and-keep-working. Then rest of the DRC finally re-opened up Tokotah and the Courtyard again, and then Engberg got the doors to the Kadish Gallery working. Well! Now at least we know where THAT set of doors in the strip mall goes. Having finally been able to get up to the landing, I walked around the top, puzzling at the D'ni script that goes around the top of the Gallery...

Then I stopped dead. The stained glass window at the end of the hall isn't the standard Mushroom/Tree pattern that is on so many of the others. This I'd noticed before. But I'd never gotten the proper angle to realize... it looks like HIGHLY stylized D'ni script. REALLY stylized, but the 'n' character in my name is a radical in five different characters, and it's quite distinctive. And it's in that window. So is the curve in the top of the 's', and that's ALSO in the window. (I have the accented character, 'sh,' so I can recognize that one too.)

I KI-mailed a shot of it to Blade, who is the best D'ni linguist I know well - I would ask Domareh, but I don't think I have his KI number, and he's been busy with the Choir these past few weeks anyway. Perhaps Blade will have better luck than I at decyphering it, as it looks like the standard mandala issue of strokes being deliberately blended together to make the letters look pretty. It's almost worse than artistic kanji. Almost. (Edit: Nope, I'm informed that nobody's solved this one yet.)

After puzzling at that for a bit, I went out into the strip mall and then up to Tokotah and the courtyard. The stairs to the Hall of the Kings are blocked off - and there's quite a lot of rubble just on the other side of the barricades. The DRC may not be having us on about instabilities caused by the Scream after all. For further justification, I can't see any damage to the arch over the base of the stairs, which leaves me to wonder if it fell from the roof of the Cavern. If it did that, I'd think it would have left more cratering, though. (I wonder if anybody was standing on the stairs when the Scream hit - if so, I wonder if any of them saw anything?)

Other changes in the courtyard included a podium and mic behind a roped off area next to the tent, an area that I'm pretty sure wasn't roped off before. It looks like there are more boxes back there too, so somebody's expecting to give press conferences. I'll leave the reporting to the Cavern Today, thanks, and avoid the crush. After so long being quiet in the Cavern, it feels weird to have more than a few people around.

Indeed - we had FOUR people in my Relto the other day, and that was downright bizarre. Meiczyslaw, Jishin, Jack Feeney and I were all in there, hanging out for a bit before we headed off to Gira to enjoy the warm weather and play with steam-assisted flying, and ended up climbing out on one of the steam pipes to watch the sun rise from pretty much flat against the cliff wall. The sky in Gira turns GREEN at sunrise. There has to be something up there in the atmosphere that can account for that - I wonder what it is?

Further questions - why are the safety lights off in front of the Library? The scopes are back in the 'hoods, and so we can see over there; the D'ni lights still appear to be on, but nothing else. Hmm. And the rope bridge between the Concert Hall and the walkway beyond the Hall of Kings is gone; if you walk down to the plaza just below the courtyard and look, you can tell it isn't there anymore. Either the DRC really freaked out about so many explorers using an obviously temporary solution...or the scream took that out as well. I don't expect to get much in the way of answers, though. Ah well. That is, in some ways, the life of an explorer - to ask more questions than you can conceivably get answers too.

I suppose it's a good thing for my curiosity that, barring scheduled meetings for things like the Choir, or perhaps the occasional poking at things, I don't expect to be able to spend a HUGE amount of time in the Cavern until sometime after March. (Granted, if I hear there's been a major shift in the way things are being run down there, perhaps I'll come more often. But for right now, I think that the coming storm hasn't reached us yet, and so I'll give it a bit of a rest right now.) Work is just too all-consuming. This isn't to say I won't be down there, just that I won't be down there MUCH. And I'm sure there's going to be at least one day in February where I scream at the sleet outside my window, tear at my hair, and dig out my Relto book and head for Gira. Winter's got to start in earnest sometime, after all.

Shorah!