When she woke, it was yet another morning of exquisite pain. She had lain crumpled against the machine, her chain ending up awkwardly wrapped around one leg, and her head nestled against a network of branching tubes.
As she regained her thoughts, she stood, anxious now, suddenly very aware of her total ignorance of her surroundings. As she took in the scene, she found herself certainly in some sort of factory. Rows of machines bore clusters of workers, all chained like her, but people of all sorts. Nothing shocked her anymore, already. Her brief time at the warehouse had shattered her sense of reality; how many kinds of people could there be? Some weren’t even living, but robots, or golems. It was all too much.
She noticed, though, that all of the other workers she could see were more or less similar to herself. There was no sign of the hideous bird creatures, or any roaming automatons. Perhaps she was back in her own world somehow? Perhaps she’d never left, and it was all some dream.
A voice from behind jolted her reality again, and sent her spinning backward to see who spoke.
The man was a good deal shorter than the voice had seemed to advertise; but the beard seemed almost to make up for the lack of stature. Equally, the figure was quite broad, not in an overweight sense but more in the sense that a massive ancient oak is thick and strong. Asphaella got the sense that, like an stout old oak, the dwarf could not be pushed over save by the heave of a mighty storm.
“Oakheart’s the name. You can tell me yours later. Actually, I really don’t even want to know. I’m here to tell you how to operate your machine. Don’t ask questions. Just get it right the first time.” The stout factory worker hurled each sentence at her face like a ten pound mallet.
She opened her mouth to speak anyway, but was essentially slapped in the face with a sharp grunt.
“No! Wrong! See that lever? When you hear a whistle, you pull that down. See that dial? When it gets halfway down, you turn it up, slowly, slowly, all the way back up, gently or it will blow. See that switch? It should face down when you are turning the dial, and up when you pulling the lever.” She looked at each part in turn, her sharp mind having no trouble remembering the sequence. Lever up, dial down, switch back and forth. Wait that wasn’t it. She looked at the dwarf imploringly.
Begrudgingly, gray beard waggling, the supervisor went over the routine again, this time having her act out each part as though it was happening. When he was was sure she understood, he departed, leaving at the same time as a tray of hard biscuits and water arrived. So she was to eat and sleep chained to this machine. To her humor and horror, she then noticed that indeed, one of the machines within her reach was most certainly a toilet.
She wasn’t sure of the time, but as she set to her task, the hours certainly dragged on for several eternities at a time. The whistle hardly ever blew; the dial was almost always almost full; she hardly ever touched the switch. Eventually evening set in, and the soft glow of sunset filtered down through the dusty factory windows and lent a lustrous glow to the network of tubes and dials and gears and belts that cast the scene as very nearly beautiful.
