Elias stood on the edge of Wyvern's Gorge, pointing his finger at a patch of solid ground. "Forget the span, Kaelen. We must first defeat the rock stability. The cantilever needs a flawless foundation, and that means finding and anchoring to the bedrock."
Sir Kaelen looked at the spot, a mix of dirt and weeds. "My Lord, the bedrock is many feet down. We hire men to dig."
"No, Kaelen! We need to know the precise depth and structural density of the bedrock before we dig a perfectly calibrated hole for the counterweight!" Elias snapped. "Blind digging is a financial atrocity! We need a Geologist to survey the subsurface!"
Kaelen frowned, placing a hand on his chin. "A... Geologist? I know of Earth Mages who can sense stone, or Dwarven miners who can tap a rock and know its worth. But a 'Geologist'?"
Elias quickly discovered that in a world where magic existed, nobody bothered with the slow, difficult science of geology.
He sent a coded message on his rope-telegraph to his merchant contact in the capital. The response, hours later, was baffling: the merchant could only find a "Rock Whisperer" who charged an immense sum to perform a "Soul Reading" on the mountain.
"A Soul Reading?" Elias raged. "I don't need the mountain's feelings, I need its Young's Modulus! This is utterly inefficient!"
He finally found a candidate: a disgraced, elderly Dwarven Miner named Barin who had been banished from his mountain home for using a "blasphemous measuring device" instead of his ancestral hammer.
Elias and Kaelen tracked Barin down to a filthy, remote tavern. Barin, short, gruff, and perpetually suspicious, listened to Elias's request for a Subsurface Density Assessment.
"I'll do your fancy assessment," Barin grunted, pushing his ale mug away. "But my fee is two hundred gold crowns and three barrels of your new high-grade charcoal. And no talking about magic. I use the steel rule."
Elias was aghast. Two hundred gold for tapping a rock?
MAOI Alert: [Service Cost: Extreme. Exploitation Potential: User is the Target. Negotiate.]
Elias sighed, putting on his best scumbag smile. "Two hundred crowns is unacceptable for a man who uses such primitive tools. I will pay fifty crowns upfront, and the remainder upon successful identification of a load-bearing bedrock stratum that is within 15 feet of the surface. If it's deeper, you get only the initial fifty. Deal?"
Barin, desperate for work and charcoal, grudgingly accepted the Performance-Based Contract.
Barin arrived at the gorge, pulling a rusted cart containing his "blasphemous" equipment: a heavy iron rod, a length of calibrated rope, and a large notebook filled with archaic measurements.
Elias had already staked out the perfect spot for the cantilever's foundation: a ten-foot by twenty-foot rectangle. The foundation required a hole that was not just deep, but perfectly plumb—meaning perfectly vertical—to ensure the cement counterweight locked flawlessly into the bedrock.
Barin, using his iron rod, began his assessment—a process called percussion drilling. He would drop the rod, pull it up, measure the rope, and tap the resulting rock fragment. It was painfully slow.
"The soil layer is 18 inches," Barin muttered, scribbling notes. "Gravel and clay, another three feet. Then shale."
Elias watched the slow, agonizing process, twitching with impatience. "Barin! Can't you use a pump or a winch? We need to accelerate the data gathering phase!"
"You want speed, you get bad data, boy! Rock needs respect!" Barin snapped.
After two days, Barin confirmed the location: the bedrock was 12 feet, 4 inches down and appeared structurally sound. Elias paid him, securing his invaluable, hard-won geological data.
Now, the true, agonizing work began: digging the hole.
"Kaelen! Gark! We are not digging a ditch!" Elias announced, holding up a level and a plumb line. "We are digging a Calibrated Excavation Pit! This hole must maintain absolute verticality! Every single inch must be checked against the plumb line! Any deviation means the counterweight will fail and the bridge will collapse!"
Kaelen was given the job of overseeing the plumb line integrity, holding the heavy line perfectly still while Gark's men chipped away at the stubborn rock.
(Sir Kaelen's Internal Monologue):"My entire military career focused on eliminating horizontal threats. I am now tasked with defending vertical integrity. I hate this Baron, but I must admit: that Dwarven assessment was surprisingly accurate. This hole must be plumb."
The slow, grinding work of digging a perfectly straight, geometrically sound hole consumed the Barony's resources and the men's patience for the next three weeks. They were fighting stubborn earth, not wyverns, and the deadline for the bridge was ticking away.