Advancements

The hole grew, I stopped trying to keep the ground from sinking, it was just slowing the progress. The area was rich in resources and I wasn't going to stop until I had them up. I figured it would make a good location for a larger workshop, a much more complicated one. The sun was starting to rise and I deployed the charging panels from the suit to charge up the power modules. Being so heavily refined they would hold a much larger charge than the small battery pack and once they had started producing enough I removed the temporary unit so the resources in it could be refined into something more useful as well. The properties of the various metals made the suit nice and cool to be around, despite the amount of heat and energy coursing through it while it had the panels open. The area was much more comfortable to be in, so I was letting the massive suit do all the hard work while I enjoyed some breakfast and continued working on my designs.

A little later in the day I had some visitors, from the looks of it they had planned to visit me today and found me not at home but had decided to follow the strange tracks I had left from my mechanical suit, when they saw the thing working they stopped and seemed unsure of what to do, so I went to them instead. It was a group of elders and a few of the engineers I had taught to make a display. They were carrying a few things with them and so their visit seemed to be about business, but they just stared at the mechanical figure in the distance. With some coaxing though I got some questions out of them, mostly about what that thing was that was decimating the ground in front of it. When I explained what I had made they all wanted to go take a closer look and it wasn't easy keeping up with them as they raced towards it. They touched the parts they could and made sure not to go near the moving pieces for fear of losing a limb. The suit was huge, about three times larger than any of us, though I knew it got a lot smaller when it wasn't standing, another thing I had not thought of when I had built it inside the house. I explained to them what it was and what I anticipated using it for, mostly as a safer way of doing the work I already did and on a larger scale. I could see their minds at work trying to figure out how to build their own, then they realized where they were standing and were frightened, they frantically looked at the position of the sun and then had a perplexed look on their faces. I laughed and pointed to the machine and explained that, though they were in the area that normally got too hot to be in, all the danger was now contained in and powering the mechanical figure that stood before them. This of course lead to all sorts of questions which I did my best to get around, trying not to give them too many ideas for working with this dangerous material before they were ready. I also tried to steer the conversation towards the reason for their visit, which took some time but they eventually got to it.

The objects they had brought with me were their first attempts to make advanced mining equipment. They had the technology in place to get the resources up, but when they used it they mostly brought up junk ores that had no value to them. They were hoping they could find something to trade with me so that I could assist them in figuring out how to actually find the valuable ores. This of course was now more towards the back of their mind as they marveled at my mining mechanical suit. I assured them they were pursuing the right path and that the mining suit would probably be on their list of future projects, but they needed to figure out resonance of the minerals they were looking for and to find a way to distinguish the useful ones from any other once they had a way to produce and capture the signal. This instantly got their minds going and they took only one more longing look at the technology I was currently using before heading back to town to work on their new ideas. With the visitors gone I began construction of the additional pieces to my suit, these modifications would lead to much faster advances in my own technology, which I was sure I would need as this race of aliens was quickly catching up to my own abilities. As I watches the new parts coming together I wondered if I had given them the knowledge too freely that time, but I quickly brushed it off as it was a simple suggestion and they would have figured it out soon enough watching the machine do its work, it was not nearly as subtle when it produced the shock that gave me the frequencies.