The Online Craftsmaster 106 The City of Stahl

Scrappy was still traveling around the world, he went where no player has been yet. It has already been a while since he terrorized the Golem community he met on his journey, but nothing really managed to quench his thirst for more scrap. It was like a neverending burning desire inside him that drove him forward. And everytime there would be a sliver of a chance to collect some Scrap, Scrappy would go forward just to get even the smallest piece of Scrap that he could find.

Scrappy even started to develop a sixth sense for finding scrap, so he felt a strange poking when he was riding Junky, crossing plains of grass. He ordered Jnky to stopped and looked around the find the source of this feeling. He didn't find it but when he looked to one specific direction the poking started to get stronger.

So Scrappy didn't think long about it and rode Junky in the direction the feeling pointed him to. At first it was only plains he saw but strangely the landscape was rough as if it was recently dug up, also there was no tree to be seen even in hundreds of miles and as nearer Scrappy came to the poking feeling the more the landscape changed.

Soon the grass started to stop growing, next scrappy could see mounds of dug up earth and holes that looked like something was ripped out of it. Then it started to get dark, Scrappy looked up and saw what he thought were big clouds covering the sky. But soon Scrappy suddenly reached a giant unnatural cliff, he looked around seeing that this giant crater in the ground spanned of Kilometers.

But still something was urging Scrappy to continue his journey in this direction, so he made the sylphids carry him down to the bottom of the crater. It took them several minutes to reach the bottom but when Scrappy looked around now he saw some strange hoses on the ground that were leaking a little bit of water while he also discovered that the cliff side were also soaked in water.

But Scrappy didn't care for the hoses or the rock on the cliff that looked like they were containing ample amounts of ore veins. He didn't want to stoop so low again to gather this soon-to-be Scrap, he needed real scrap. Maybe he would collect gold nuggets as they were nearly real metal scrap not something like magnetite for iron.

But as Scrappy was thinking about if Ores would count as scrap a strange rumbling ran through the ground. Scrappy looked around and saw strange water beams hitting the cliffside which soon after toppled down. Scrappy found that interesting and started walking toward this sight, and when he reached it Scrappy looked at it with surprise and interest. A group of dwarves was hammering an iron rod with a strange ring on one and into the ground, then some other dwarves walked over carrying one of the hoses Scrappy saw a while back. They attached it to the metal ring and shouted something to some other dwarves behind them.

One of those dwarves who had a torch in hand turned around and waved it in the air. Suddenly Scrappy heard a screeching sound of metal rubbing against metal followed by a gushing sound like water would make if it was in free fall. Suddenly the hose that was attached to the metal ring started to vibrate and whistle as air came blowing out of it. Some seconds later a concentrated beam of water was thrown out of the hose hitting the stone wall that was about twenty meters away.

Scrappy was in awe of the power the water had as he saw it bursting the the rock apart, but as fast as the water came it also stopped really quickly, and after it stopped gushing out of the hose the dwarves started working.

They brought several wagons to the mining site and loaded them with the ore that the water burst out of the rocks. Scrappy knew that they were highly professional miners and that this ore would soon be the Scrap that he so liked, and that's why he had an enormous amount of respect for the craft the Dwarves were performing right before his eyes.

He even had so much respect for them that when suddenly some bad happened to one of the miners that he walked over to them and gave them a straight metal piece out of his priceless collection to help them treating a broken leg. The miner was hurt when a crack suddenly formed on the cliff letting several more rock tumble down, they rolled several meters into the direction of the crater and hitted the metal pole that held the water hose. The pole was bend by the sheer amount of weight the rock put on it and suddenly snapped in half. The top half of the pole soared through the air hitting a poor dwarf in the leg breaking it.

The other dwarves quickly ran to the wounded and started treating him but when they wanted to treat the leg with a splint they noticed that they didn't have one only some cloth stripes to stop bleeding. That was when Scrappy reached them grabbing a round metal bar out of his bucket and gave it to the dwarves that looked at him with surprised and thankful faces.

They loaded the wounded onto a Wagon and glanced with an asking expression in Scrappy's direction. Scrappy saw that and quickly jumped on the wagon too, he wanted to see how the city of these dwarves looked like.

They were traveling for at least half an hour before the reached to first buildings but to Scrappy´s surprise these tower like buildings that reached high into the sky weren't for living in them. A dwarf saw Scrappy´s interest in these towers and explained: "Those towers store water for us, there a big tank on top and we have a mechanism where we can open a valve that lets the water fall down a pipe that gets thinner the nearer it comes to the ground basicly speeding it up in this process to achieve a higher pressure. We then connect these pipes to the hoses we were using earlier to get the blast of water that burst apart the ore rich rock."

Scrappy was intrigued and imagined what kind of interesting scrap he would get if this contraption was used with molten metal instead of water. They were still traveling when Scrappy noticed that the smoke that he thought of as clouds were getting thicker and darker. He soon found the reason for that as they reached a big industrial area were hundreds and hundreds of foundry were emitting smoke out of their chimneys.

Scrappy really thought he was in heaven when he imagined how much scrap those foundry's would produce and earned a hearty laugh from the dwarves as they observed him running and looking around like a child.

Soon the wounded got of the wagon and given to professional medical personal but the wagon continued onwards as it was in the dwarven nature to thank their benefactor appropriately. Suddenly a group of dwarves came riding to them on what like giant rats and asked the dwarf angrily why they weren't working.

One of the miners explained the head guard what happened and that this small robot helped them, the guards attitude turned around completely when he heard that. He bowed down to Scrappy while sending one of the rat riders ahead and made the rest of his group take escort positions.

Scrappy saw the dwarf ride away and once again felt this itching and poking he felt get stronger and was happy that the destination they were going to seemed to be the source of that itching. But suddenly a Dwarf said to Scrappy that he should look ahead to see to most beautiful city that he would ever see in his entire life.

And the dwarf was right, Scrappy never expected to see something better than the treasury of the strange person. But now Scrappy gazed at something that he never imagined to be true, something that shook his core. Scrappy just couldn't take his eyes away from this magnificent view, and pure joy was burned into his memory.

It was even the first time after he got the spatial gem that Scrappy thought that his bucket might be to small. But Scrappy just could take enough in as he was gazing at this City. This City the dwarves built was completely made out of metal, the dwarves lovingly called it the "Earth´s Child born from Flames".

It was the biggest pile of Scrap Scrappy had ever seen, the shining enormous City of "Stahl". The Giant crater they were traveling in was created just to build this city all earth that is missing from this crater was melted into metal while every tree in hundreds of miles around the City were consumed by the neverending fires of the foundry...

Chapter end