Microstory 2438: Raindome

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Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

Oh, this one is interesting. There are two lakes, one of which is higher than the other. They are appropriately named Upper Lake and Lower Lake. I’m a little disappointed at the lack of creativity, but there’s no mistaking it, and it’s not that big of a deal. The water flows from Upper Lake, into a river. Can you guess what it’s called? You’re close, it’s not just River, but Spiral River. This river flows all along the entire perimeter of the dome, and then some. There are bridges all over, so you can step out to your left any time you need, and head for the nearest exit. They’re hidden behind the dome’s immersive hologram, but will illuminate once you get close enough to the wall, so if you get lost, just find the border. You won’t get trapped, I promise you. I say this because someone on my boat did have an issue, and they were struggling to get out. They probably should give you the instructions ahead of time, so that’s a bit of constructive feedback. Let’s get back to the river. You can take all sorts of leisure boats on this thing. Canoes, kayaks, riverboats. You choose whatever you want. You may be with a group, and they may be humans, or NPCs. It really just depends. The river flows out of Upper Lake, and down a steady slope in a spiral. It isn’t perfectly circular, it still meanders a little bit, but if you look at the drone feed above, it still doesn’t look natural. It’s often raining, which is why this isn’t called Lake-Spiral River-Lake Dome. These aren’t the sprinklers that I think they use in Nordome. This is real rain, powered by the process of evaporation and cloud formation above, supplied by all the water that’s around. Since there’s no sun inside the dome, they use extremely precise heating lamps to trigger this evaporation, but they try to keep visitors from seeing it. I suggested to our captain that they should heat the water from below, but he says the physics doesn’t work out all that well, and they would like to put fish in there at some point. That would be cool, I wish they were already there. I hope they don’t have to transport them all from Earth, or we could be waiting for over a hundred years. Here’s what’s amazing about this. You can request a boat that’s completely sealed up, which has its own holographic display. You collectively decide on the apparent environment. You can make it look like it’s raining when it’s not, or not when it is. That was such a great idea. I never would have thought of it myself. And it really works. Anyway, I think you can guess the rest. The river keeps going down the spiral until it reaches Lower Lake in the very center. Keep in mind that while I said there were all sorts of boats, that doesn’t include all boats, full stop. There are no motorboats or personal watercraft. This is meant to be a relaxing environment, not an invigorating adventure. There are plenty of other places for that. Have you tried Polar Tropica? Like, stop complaining. Sorry, it was annoying that our boat ride was delayed because of a belligerent visitor who was demanding them to give him a water jetpack. They literally didn’t have them. Again, that’s not what this is. This is an amazing feat of engineering, and nothing you could get on Earth. It’s against the law to rupture land like that these days. One last thing so you don’t wonder, but you don’t have to be in a boat, or be on it the whole time. You can just get out and relax, maybe have a picnic under a mini-dome where it’s not raining. Don’t be rowdy, though. Just sit back and enjoy it.

Microstory 1433: Peak Valley

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Before there was even a spark of an idea to build the eighth town of Astau, construction began on a new town called Peak Valley. It may seem like an oxymoron, but there really was a smallish mountain to the south of Springfield and Splitsville, on top of which was a sort of bowl that looked like any other valley. Experts believed it once housed a glacier, but they couldn’t explain what would have happened to all the water on the surface. In fact, it was a question they never answered about the whole world. There were signs of water erosion all over the place, but no liquid or solid water anywhere. The planet must have ventured close enough to its star to evaporate it all away before that star expelled it from its system, but there really wasn’t any proof of that either. Regardless, the real magic of the Peak Valley was that there was an extra seed portal from Earth there. For the most part, seeds only showed up on Durus in a certain region, and any plants that grew beyond it did so due to the normal spread of vegetation. They appeared from small flashes of light, like fireflies. It wasn’t particularly safe, because of the monsters, but teenagers liked to go there on quick romantic getaways, and watch the seeds appear. The Peak Valley was the only other place where this happened. It would have been a nice place to live all along. While monsters definitely had the ability to climb up the side of the mountain, or simply fly, it was still a well-fortified area. It was easy to see them coming from pretty much anywhere in the valley, which would give mages enough time to prepare for an attack. As always, the main reason they never settled there before was because of resources. It was difficult to pump water up from Watershed, but as time went on, both technology and time powers promoted progress. By the 2070s, it was a sufficiently viable option. The filter portaler would remain in Distante Remoto, where she belonged—even though they could have used her—because there were other ways of getting what they needed, which they didn’t always have. Laying pipe in the ground was a fairly easy endeavor when dirt could be teleported out of a hole, the pipe could be teleported into the hole, and then the dirt could be teleported back on top of it. The new town was initially planned for a 2075 completion date, but in 2072, a new member of Mad Dog’s Army was sourced who could make quantum replications of objects. A single pipe could be manufactured once, and then copied thousands of times. This process was not instantaneous, but it started moving a lot quicker once the quantum replicator joined the project. Peak Valley was finished in 2073, and prospered for seventeen years.