Restoration Engineers

from vids.myspace.com posted with vodpod

Under the roots! video

Our last performance before the big shutdown! *sniffle*

from veralun.vodpod.com posted with vodpod

Tickets for the Winter concert

You can now reserve your ticker for the Cavern Choir performances of December 16th! Hurry up, seats are limited!

Stained glasses

Since the DRC didn’t believe it was necessary to put up a gallery of all the restored pieces, I figured it would be good to show here the works I restored.

I believe them all to be by the same author or, at least, from the same school. This person or school, whose name I haven’t been able to identify, was evidently experimenting with the use of different materials for their stained glasses; the ‘glass’ in their artworks is in fact, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, artificially made igneous rock molted directly into the frame.

Dating is hard, since we do not know when Tsogahl and Delin were made; it could be back in the garden binge of the 8100s, or they might have been written specifically for the new Nexus ‘hoods. Another lower bound on the dating would be the year when the Great Zero was designed in its current configuration, with the crystals and the ‘wheels’. The glasses showed signs of wear, but it’s difficult to ascertain whether it was due to the Fall or abandon.

Great zero

Probably the earlier of the three pieces, a sort of test for the rock injection process.

Eder Tsogahl

A more elaborate piece. The ‘glass’ has the consistency and feel of stone, if an extremely lightweight one.

Eder Delin

The latest of the pieces. The stone here has a marble-like feeling and could almost pass for glass.

I’m looking for more information on these pieces. Maybe SR’s famous museum has something similar; I’ll have to ask Ava Cormac, and hope that Kingsley doesn’t have a fit again…

Exploration #1 – Page 11

20070519

I spent most of yesterday organizing notes, visiting San Juan and booking another trip.

I am now on a coche-cama (literally, a bed bus) on the road to Buenos Aires; I’m going to visit the city for a few days and say hello to an old friend. I guess she’ll be quite surprised to see me here.
The seats on the bus are comfortable and can be reclined almost all the way back for the night; very Minbari, but it is a 14-hour trip in the vast emptiness between two cities, and it’s not difficult to see why the bus companies made comfortable sleeping one of their basic services.

20070521

Too much to visit, too little time. Writing postponed.

20070523

I would have loved to stay more, but I had stretched this trip to Argentina already too much and it was time to head back home. On the evening of the previous day I said goodbye to my friend and pretended to go to the airport, but I really shifted back to the small island-hut. I was tired and fell asleep almost immediately. I thought I heard something rustle in the night, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, and I lost, perhaps, the chance to meet the mysterious overseer of my journey.

~~o\|/o~~

I woke up in the morning and noticed immediately that something had changed. The Habnn journal was not there where I left it the night before, and the locked drawer was now open instead. Inside I found a new journal: a diary, apparently, in the odd havenese script and with a single bookmark on front. As I flipped through the pages a note fell out: it was in English, and addressed to me. And it was signed…

I realized with sadness that this first exploration had come to an abrupt end; a new one, however, had just begun.
I won’t divulge the contents of that note for now. Suffice to know that I’m now translating the new journal and learning more and more about this new hidden civilization. It might be years before this is published, but I keep working on with the knowledge that, at the end of this job, I might even go and visit Habnn itself…

“And now I am at rest, understanding that in Books, and in Ages, and in life, the ending can never truly be written.” — Atrus

Exploration #1 – Page 10

The next two stops were relatively uneventful, but still stunning for the views they offered. The sun was setting when we reached the end of the tour and began our way back, the great red mountain looming on us all the way to the base camp, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some sort of magic in these rocks that went beyond links and bookmarks and was deeply tied to the Earth itself. More than anything, had it been possible, I would have asked to stop the car to throw my arms into the sands and touch the ground with my bare feet. Even through the lazy droning of the car engine, I could feel the life in this land where it rains less than a month in the whole year. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I prayed for the rain.

20070517

And the rain came.
It would be poetic to say that it was a grandiose storm like no other, but it was just a very light rain kiss that lasted the most of ten minutes right after we woke up. Still, our driver said it was pretty exceptional for this time of the year.
We said goodbye to San Augustin and its lake – artificial, but still a beautiful sight from our hotel – and set course for Talampaya.

Talampaya is in La Rioja, on the other half of the famous red mountain wall. Though much much vaster than Ischigualasto, the visitor tour only touches a minimal part of it, crossing through a canyon and back. The canyon was dug millennia ago by the river Tala which, just like the river on the other side, exists only for a very brief spell every year during the rain season.
After the great diversity of Ischigualasto, where every stop was almost a different planet, Talampaya could have seemed uniform and boring, but it had its hidden beauties and was still a grandiose sight for someone coming from good old Europe, where deep canyons like this one are sort of a rarity.

There are petroglyphs on the rocks of the canyon, relatively new for us of the old continent, but of tremendous relevance for the local anthropology. Oddly enough, it seems that a certain well-know underground restoration business had its hand on setting this site up; maybe they decided to study the glyphs in detail after the events of 2003, or maybe this is yet another hidden attempt to draw the Called back to D’ni.
Curiously enough, a spot in the middle of the canyon provides enough shade and water for a great variety of local flora to survive and flourish, so much that it was called the Botanical garden for its variety. Small birds made their nest there and, nearby, is also the great cut in the canyon wall called ‘the elevator’; cut the Great Shaft in two and bring one half to the surface, and that’s what it looks like. Another interesting rock formation is the so called ‘gothic cathedral’, a wall face of high pointed pillars with a path in its middle.

On the way back we saw some tourists riding through the canyon by bicycle. I wonder what wonders are hidden in the alternate routes, where normal tourists cannot go…

~o~

We left Talampaya in the afternoon. On the road to San Juan, our driver stopped to show us several panoramic stops, and a smaller park called El Chiflon where the guide showed us, and made us touch, arrow points used by the natives for hunting. Unthinkable where I come from but, once again, for most of the people here these are not yet archaeological artefacts but still just old stuff; the people that used these arrowheads are not ancestors from a distant forgotten past, but only a few pages away in the book of history.

(continues in next post)

Exploration #1 – Page 9

(Ouch, I thought I had posted this already – so sorry. But then, it seems no one is reading this anyway. :P)

It took me a moment to realize where I was. It was still the valley of the moon, but I was well beyond the visitor zone and inside the forbidden area; I could see the hills and valleys loom tall around me, glittering in the moonlight.
It was, in fact, the middle of the night, and a bright full moon hovered over my head, surrounded by a cloud of stars casting its pallid and eerie light all around.
I was sure it was not the night of the day of my visit, as there was no moon in those days. The double watch, stubbornly and rather oddly, would not give me a year but only a date: may 27th.
I wandered around, cursing myself for not having a high-ISO roll in my bag (I took some pics, but as you can see the end result is less than perfect), and wondered about who could’ve sent me here ~ because I was sure of it: someone was following my steps on this journey and leaving this trail for me to follow.
I relaxed, after a while; this person, whoever it was, wanted me to find out more about these bookmarks and not do me any harm. I just walked about, enjoying the scenery and listening to the wind. Then I heard it: like a soft music, coming from the east. I followed it to its origin and found a yellow glowing stone, the size of my closed fist, pulsing slowly with light and seemingly emanating the eerie sound that filled the night.
The moon was now veiled by deep clouds, and I suddenly felt dozens of eyes upon me, waiting for my following move with uncertainty and curiosity. With a growing sense of urgency, I touched the stone.

~o~

It was day again, and no time seemed to have elapsed since I left, if I really did leave. The glyph wasn’t glowing anymore, and the red sand in which it was drawn was now spoiled by my handprint, so that the original drawing was only barely visible. Among the sands, between my fingers, I found a small, very common yellow pebble, which I am now keeping in my wallet.
With even more questions than before and little or no answers, I hurried to rejoin the group and continued the tour.

(continues in next post)

Laxman outsources

In an effort to speed up the lighting of the lake, Laxman seems to have turned for the help of questionable business partners…

Exploration #1 – Page 8

(Whoops, I forgot to upload the latest pages. I’ll make this post longer to catch up.)

20070514

I spent more time analysing the text of the bookmarks until I found one that I was fairly confident would bring me to Earth again. I was not mistaken.

I’m in Argentina again, near a city called San Augustin de Valle Fertil. There are two national parks nearby, with famous rock formations and -guess it?- petroglyphs. I’m going to see if I can join a tour.

20070516

It took me a day, but I did it. The guys at the hostel managed to fit me into a tour with three guys from the United States, so I’m now en route for Ischigualasto.

~o~

Okay. That was the ultimate scenic tour.
First of all, this place was a lake millions of years ago; you can see in the rocks where the water level was, and the difference between the erosion caused by the water and that caused by the wind. Reminds me a little of Age 233, actually. But, apart from the natural beauty, the importance of this place comes from the fact that, due to tectonic movement, the late triassic period emerged in the open, revealing some of the oldest dinosaur deposits in the world and turning into every paleontologist’s wildest dream.

To preserve both the fossils and the natural state of the place, the visits follow a strict tour with five stops, and you’re not allowed to walk outside the ‘fences’, which are actually lines of black rocks delimiting the uncontaminated area.
The most famous of the stops is the Valley of the Moon, for which the park is famous; this otherworldly landscape seems to come straight out of the lunar soil, and makes for a stark contrast with the great red mountain wall that divides this region from La Rioja, and that could very well come out of the planet Mars.

Now here comes the scary part. We were about halfway through the tour, going back to our cars from the Cancha de Bochas (a field of naturally formed round bowl rocks), and I remained a little behind the group to take some photographs. The wind and the water had modeled the rock into interesting smooth formations carved with holes and, suddenly, I noticed a soft glow was coming from one of them. I peered inside and there it was, a glyph drawn in the sand, almost unrecognizable were it not for the faint purple glow emanating from its lines.
I didn’t have much time to decide what to do; I was already behind the group, and they would leave soon for the next stop, so my absence would be noticed quickly. As a draft of wind raised the sand around my feet, I muttered a “What the hell” and made my choice.
I made sure I had my Relto handy, took a deep breath and touched the glyph.

(continues in next post)

Subterranean restoration: trust issues

Subterranean Restoration is beginning to worry me. We weren’t really off with a good start, with the whole ‘enterprise’ setup and the veiled threats to the DRC, but what really gets on my nerves is the apparent contempt for the explorers.

Cormac openly said that explorers are allowed to visit ‘their’ dig sites but ‘at their own risk’, as if they had some kind of authority in the Cavern; then they hired the GoI, or at least part of them, as ’security guards’ of sorts; and now it seems that, because of the recent lootings and the chance of ‘clambering explorers’ (Kingsley is surely clambering on his own words, and should leave the PR to someone else), they are restricting Nexus access to ‘their’ D’ni art museum in the City proper only to those who intend to participate in their contests… whoops, restoration projects.
They say they won’t stop us from visiting the museum if we go there with our own transport, but considering that there is no public transport to the city, that the area itself is severely damaged, and that they’re willingly not sharing the location of the place, they pretty much covered all the bases and telling us to get shafted.

But that means that security cannot be the real reason they’re limiting access: Nexus invites are inherently more secure than free access by foot, as they have a name tag attached, can be instantly revoked, are logged in the lattice and cannot be shared.
Kingsley made it clear with his line about clambering explorers: they don’t want us around because we’re just explorers, and they’re the pros. They want our help in exchange for breadcrumbs. Want to see the art museum? Then restore a design for us, or work for us. You’re just an art student, or a researcher? Too bad then. You get to wait until we say it’s safe. The DRC at least is fair and makes everyone wait the same way, without favouritism.

So I say: I hope to be proved wrong in the future, but for now, I’d advise you to keep an eye on SubRes and their associates. They might not be so explorer-friendly as they’d like to sell us.