Chapter 103: The Monsters Stir
Chapter 103: The Monsters Stir
Group after group came back with the same responses.
The snakes were leaving the woods. The squirrels were still active, but hoarding hard enough that they didn’t even care if they came within a metre of the humans. Everything else was migrating away.
"Maybe it’s an earthquake coming?" Yara suggested.
"How do you figure?"
"Well, that’s the usual response right before an earthquake, isn’t it? Wildlife flees the area. Perhaps our next problem is going to be a tsunami?"
Kalli looked down at the beach, kilometres away and hundreds of metres vertically below them.
"If it was just a tsunami, it would be mostly isolated to one direction. We should be mostly safe from that. But the squirrel’s hoarding suggests that it will be larger scale than that.
I just wish that we had someone who was a bit more sensitive to such things. Don’t we have rangers and druids?
Shouldn’t they know?"
The healer laughed and shook her head. "They say that their senses are so confused by the changes in this world that they have no idea what’s going on."
"Dammit. Alright. We will just prepare for everything that we think of, and hope that it’s something we prepared for."
The Academy windows were all equipped with heavy-duty metal roll shutters for security, but the apartment buildings had nothing of the sort. Still, it was a start, and they didn’t have to worry about the grid going down, as it was already long gone.
There were a couple of things that Kalli could still do, though. The generator she had received was still in storage, but she could set it up in the back room of her office, giving up a little storage room under one rack to integrate the small power supply to the Academy’s system.
They had plenty of solar and battery storage for general purposes, but if they were going to get major storms, they might not be enough.
A heat wave with clear skies would be best for their power supply, as they didn’t have to run the majority of the AC compressors, just a third of the dorm buildings. Everyone had gotten good at saving energy, so the Academy was actually in an enviable position for most things.
The other thing that she could do was to put a shelter over the water well she had placed by the gates. Or did she ever get around to placing that?
She had promised the civilians that she would.
Kalli stuck her head out the door, and saw the well standing by the gate. So, she did do it. That was good. She really needed to start keeping better notes of everything that she did.
Kalli searched through her options of household goods and camping supplies until she found a [Toolshed].
{Toolshed} made of durable high tensile alloy. 2m x 2m in size, 3m high. Suitable for outdoor storage of tools. Includes anchor kit suitable for soft soil or gravel. Anchors not suitable for concrete pads or solid rock.
Kalli purchased the shed and placed the shed over the water well, to reduce the chance that the water would be fouled by acid rain, wildlife, or evaporated away by intense sunshine.
That was as good as she was going to get, and everyone else had been working hard to lock down the entire area.
People were out picking rocks, hauling sandy soil from the hill, blocking up the windows of the buildings’ lower levels, gathering food from the tree line, and everything else that they could think of.
The Academy’s shutters were on a manual switch, so the entire complex was in lockdown mode now.
It would be the equivalent of blackout shades for every room, but until they knew what was coming, it was better not to risk someone leaving one open.
Kalli watched the area go into full lockdown mode, then froze as she felt the ground rumble beneath her feet.
An earthquake.
The building it was in should be sturdy, the synthetic concrete of her home world could take much more than a little vibration. But what Kalli saw in the sky was much more concerning.
From the north, the west and the southeast, great black plumes of ash and smoke were billowing into the sky, turning mid-afternoon sunlight into deep twilight, and the ash clouds were only getting thicker.
The earthquake wasn’t the cause of the disaster, it was a symptom.
At least three simultaneous volcanic eruptions had begun, all far from Marimgar Academy. But from what Kalli’s memory told her, the direct impact wasn’t the only thing to worry about.
They were out of the immediate magma zone for now, but the eruptions were all around them, and the ash clouds were moving toward each other, blanketing the sky.
"Well, that’s about worst-case scenario. Nuclear winter, followed by volcanic winter before the radiation was completely settled. Those three explosions are going to make this whole region dark for months, if not years.
I hope that you have something to supplement our solar panels because for the next few months, we can forget about anything resembling decent output," Sanchez noted as he joined Kalli in watching the sky.
"I’ve got one 30 kilowatt generator. However, it takes thirty mana per hour to keep it running.
That’s not a whole lot of power generation, split between two apartment towers and the Academy. But I’m hoping that it will be enough to power the stoves and the boilers, so we can keep the heat on.
Without sun, it’s going to start to get cold. Once the ash cools, that is.
Because in the next two hours, it’s about to get very hot."
"I will warn everyone. It’s a shame that we didn’t have more time for firewood collection, but if the ash doesn’t start a major fire, we should still be able to collect it. We will just have to find a way to use it to power the boilers in the apartment buildings to keep their steam heating on."
Behind him, Yara laughed. "That’s not going to be an issue. Those buildings are old. They were built for a coal boiler, and it was retrofitted to electric later. The old coal chambers are still there. ’Part of the historic charm’, they called it.
So, we can burn wood there to heat the whole building.
It won’t be as good as coal, and we might need to make charcoal for it to work properly at all. But we can figure something out when the electricity runs low.
But we also have dozens of mages. We can charge the generator, and keep a baseline amount of power supplied. As Kalli said, it’s not much, but the Academy was redesigned to be high efficiency.
We will make it work."