Tunnel Rat

Senior Engineer Milo was seen all over for two hours before he hopped on board a fast train to the Uptop. He visited each of the teams working on new variations of tunnel drillers, making cryptic comments and dropping hints about how close the other teams were to starting. By the time he left, the teams were in a feverish race to once again redesign their machines for better fuel efficiency, more power, and sharper drill heads. The other Senior Engineers were patrolling the materials warehouse with weapons set to 'Painful Stun' and trying in vain to keep the Junior Engineers from taking all the best metals and spare parts. While they guarded the warehouse entrance from three teams, a fourth team using an improvised tunneler broke in and made off with what they needed for their project. Word spread fast, and when Sledgemonkey opened the door to the warehouse, the cupboards were bare.

The other Senior Engineers, frustrated at the Juniors outfoxing them, grumbled and looked to the Chief. "What now?"

He smiled, "We go tap a keg and guard the alcohol. Those little weasels were going to steal anything not riveted to the floor eventually. You all remember how we were at that stage. Let's go toss a few cold ones back and then take a look at the designs tonight. I'm anxious to see what they come up with. Milo has them wound up tight with their brains buzzing."

"And just where is Senior Engineer Milo?" Two-Screws always felt better when he knew what Milo was up to, which he rarely did.

"Off to the Uptop, and then down to the Hollow. Probably going to rile up their digging teams."

Sparkplug rolled his eyes, "Digging with picks and moles isn't going to go a tenth as fast as the slowest of our drillers."

The Chief noticed who laughed and who didn't. There were some knowing smiles among the Engineers who had seen Buttercup and Rosie playing with their new picks. "Well, I'm sure they'll contribute something from their end. What's the odds, by the way?"

Sparkplug looked at the latest sheet. Squad A is the favorite at 2 to 1, Squad B at 3 to 1, Squad C at 6 to 1, and the rest of the field at 10 to 1. We included the ratkin, but no one has bet on them yet. 20 to 1 odds if you're feeling like betting on the underdog, Chief."

Sledgemonkey tossed over a bag of clinking coins, "Sure, toss a hundred on the Hollow team."

"Me too, I don't want them to think no one was rooting for them." Two-Screws put his gold on the table. "Now let's grab some beer and tell lies about what we did when we were Junior Engineers with more enthusiasm than brains."

"The Chief looked at him. "Are you claiming to have more brains now?"

"Naw, but I'm a Senior Engineer. That much changed at least."

After getting to the city, Milo raced over the rooftops and descended to the mines, waving to Bernard as he ran past. He barely slowed as he bounded down the steep tunnel to Limburger Hollow. He'd taken the route several times and wasn't bothered by the few monsters he encountered, steep drops, or the occasional rockslide. Halfway down, he passed a group of ten players in a desperate fight against a monstrous mole named Melvin. Not wanting to interfere with their battle, he leaped over Melvin, waved, and continued. The mole didn't notice him, but the cleric healing the tank was distracted by a crazed ratkin bounding over the boss, doing a double flip in midair, and racing down the corridor. His Mega Heal spell came a second too slow, and Melvin bit the tank in half, then trampled half the raid before the rest ran away to regroup. Melvin was barely hurt and let them go, content to go back to grazing on mushrooms in his tunnel.

Where players traveling to the hollow took an average of twelve hours and several gaming sessions, Milo made it in three hours, jogging along at a steady pace and leaping over obstacles. As he came into the home stretch, he became excited to be back in the Hollow. His first stop was at his home, where it turned out only Gendifur was in residence.

"You're just in time for food. Sit, eat, and tell me all the news. Brutus and the girls were barely here for two hours before they raced away with some story about racing through tunnels and digging up dwarves."

Milo was starving and thankful for a large plate of pan-fried cavefish, mushrooms, and muffins made from golden puffball flour. The beneficial mushrooms were being cultivated in large fields now, their restorative properties keeping the community healthy. Care had to be taken with their poisonous cousins. Neither would grow in a cave without the other. The poisonous shrooms were cultivated in fenced-off areas to prevent accidental poisonings, and both the old healer and Gendifur had vials of the Golden Elixir in case of emergencies.

"Do you know which route they took through the caves?"

Gendifur sighed, "Only too well. Brutus spent weeks planning out the routes for his caravan trips and left me maps." She handed him a roll of parchment. "This is the planned route for the tunnel. It takes the main cave down for a hundred yards, then they planned to cut through the rock and into another cave system, and cut off a lot of time meandering through caverns we already knew about. After that, who knows?" Milo approved of the intricate maps with notations about sloping tunnels, approximate depth below the hollow, and the proposed route. He finished up his food, grabbed the maps, and thanked Gendifur for dinner. "I need to catch up. We're in a race with the dwarves, and I have some ideas about clearing rock quickly."

"I'll get the splints and bandages ready for when you cause a cave-in. Give my girls hugs for me and make sure they're keeping up on their schoolwork. I promised them I'd help them build a cage for playing in if they kept up with their studies." The last bit worried Milo, and he hoped he wasn't going to be playing 'cage match' with them.

Their path was easy to find. Brutus had marked their twists and turns with chalk. Within another hour, he'd caught up with them. Brutus was relaxing and taking a nap with half an eye open, a useful guard skill. The two digger moles were at work tunneling through a section of loose sandstone and gravel with one girl directing each. They were singing loudly, shouting in voices that Milo thought could shatter stone. The moles didn't seem to mind; in fact, they seemed to be enthusiastic about the song. While conventional wisdom said noise could attract predators, in this case, it was announcing two apex predators, and anything else was slinking away to other hunting grounds.

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"I am a mole and I'm digging a hole!

Diggy, diggy, mole!

Diggy, diggy, mole!

Digging a hole with my friend, another mole!

Diggy, diggy, mole!

Diggy, diggy, mole!

Brutus beckoned Milo over, "Don't ask, I've got no idea where they heard that song, but they've got endless verses to it. Something they picked up in Shadowport. I blame drunken dwarves. But they're having fun, the moles are having fun, and we're tunneling at a good pace. Now and then, we load the rubble on tarps and drag it to another cave to dump it or fill a crevasse we have to cross over. If we hit harder rock, they give the moles a break, and we use the new picks. They've been competing to see who can get their mining skill the highest, and they picked up a point of strength each, not that the little dears needed it."

Milo sat with Brutus for half an hour, listening to the catchy tune until it lodged in his brain, never to leave. Mid-chorus, the moles backed out of the hundred-foot-long tunnel, and there was a crash of stone and rock. No one seemed hurt, but this session of digging was clearly over.

"Daddy, Daddy! We found something Bernie and Earnie can't dig through. Hard stuff and a loose chunk of it crashed down!"

"No worries. Why don't you each get one snack from your packs and feed your moles, and Milo and I will take a look."

"Yay. Cheesy snacks!" They ran to their packs and each pulled out a small piece of cheese, wrapped in bright foil. From the size of the packs, there was a lot of food in them.

Milo felt a small craving for cheese, just at the mention of it. "You aren't worried they'll eat too much."

Brutus didn't reply until they were at the end of the tunnel, and even then, in a low whisper. "Well, yes. But you have to instill trust in children, and that means taking chances. They've been good so far. That said...each time they sleep, I replace three of the cookies in their packs with cheese in the same wrappings. I trust them, and they need to have a chance to resist cheese, but I'm not going to take a chance on an overdose. If they get into more than they're supposed to, we'll have some long talks and start over, but things have been going well. I think keeping them busy and learning new things is helping the most. And boy, did they learn a lot on that trip to Shadowport! Gendifur wasn't happy with some of the language they learned from those dwarven pirates. You were a little bit busy during your fight, but trust me, the words used by the audience were colorful."

Milo didn't know the meaning of most of the words the Scavengers used, either. He was pretty sure he didn't want to know. Picking their way through the rubble-filled tunnel, they made their way to the front. There had been a change in the material the moles were tunneling through and when the softer material underneath was dug out, the heavier chunks above had crashed down. The dark grey rock had flecks of shiny material embedded in it. Milo took out his pick and began tunneling right, along the face of the new stone. After twenty feet, he went back the other way, again, tunneling along the rock face. Finally, he tunneled down at an angle, confirming that this wasn't a small chunk of stone, but a larger vein.

"What the hell is it?" Brutus had little knowledge of mining other than good copper and 'too hard to mine' copper.

"High-grade dark iron ore. It's what the girls' picks are made of, sort of. Those have dark steel heads; iron ore infused with carbon. This is raw dark iron ore, with very few sulfur impurities. I wonder how thick this vein is?"

Brutus hefted his pick. There was room for the two of them to work side by side. "Only one way to find out." They'd only been working for fifteen minutes when the girls came running down the tunnel to see what was happening. They knew Dad hated to hit rock, something they considered silly. They liked anything that let them stretch their muscles and work off their energy.

"Ooh, a race? Why is Dad losing? He's so much bigger than Milo?"

"Don't be silly. Milo has mined before, and he cheats."

"We need to get better at cheating. Like hiding hammers and bombs!"

Brutus turned to his daughters. "Why, yes, it is a race. Milo bet me his afternoon snack that he could get to the end of this vein of rock before I could. But it looks like I'm going to lose..."

"No, not the snacks!

"Let us mine! Remember? You don't like to hit rocks!"

"Take a nap, or keep watch, or both!"

With little urging, the girls began cutting through the vein of metal-laced rock, trying to catch up with Milo who had a lead over them by two feet. Milo began mining faster. A race was a race, and he was determined to win. Unfortunately, the vein was over a hundred feet deep. Fiendish Stamina and Fiendish Strength beat a good pick and better mining skills. Milo heard them cheer and saw they were over ten feet ahead of him.

"We win. And we found a new cave. Snacktime." The girls ran back to claim their prize.

Milo moved to their side of the tunnel and stared at the 'cave'. It was a room roughly thirty feet square, with timbers supporting the roof. Several broken tools were scattered around, and a broken whiskey jug was sitting in a corner. Rusty iron rails came halfway into the room, emerging from a small tunnel directly on the other side. The vein of Dark Iron extended along the walls for another twenty feet. Someone had been working this side of the vein, mining it out across a 30 x 10-foot face, creating the room as they went deeper. The floor and ceiling of the room were also dark iron for twenty feet, telling Milo that the vein extended further up and down.

Further thoughts fled his mind as a scream like tearing metal echoed through the mines, and he heard the scuttling sound of many feet moving toward him. Bright eyes glowed in the dark from twenty sources.