Chapter 883 — Finding What Was Lost
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Tyre glanced at Amber, saw that those big amber eyes truly held a glimmer of curiosity, and couldn't help laughing. She stretched mightily and said in a lazy tone: "All right—I've just had a full sleep anyway, and it'll be a while before my next one... If you've nothing to do, I'll tell you how we lived on Antavien."
...
Kamel drifted into the assembly workshop, and at once a clamor of machinery and shouted orders came at him from every direction.
He looked into the distance and saw a large crowd bustling around an enormous piece of equipment. The device had a long acceleration track—and judging by the ports at either end, more acceleration structures were still waiting to be attached. A great many mana capacitors and overload devices were fixed around the track, and a host of apparatus dazzling to any ordinary eye was being connected one by one to the device's main body.
A middle-aged man, somewhat balding, was directing the workers on site. His face wore an expression of earnest concentration; the lone ring of hair remaining on his head was soaked with sweat and gleamed under the lights along with his scalp—but he was plainly in no state to notice such trifles. The work before him was far too important; it was worth a balding man temporarily forgetting his hairline troubles.
Kamel drifted over, and only once the other had noticed him did he speak in greeting: "Malin, how goes it?"
Malin Leslie bowed to Kamel, then raised a hand toward the acceleration apparatus beside him: "As you can see, our previous design has been overturned. The melting of the continuous acceleration rails was a major problem, and we're redesigning the balancing scheme between the rails. Progress this time has gone smoothly—perhaps in a few days we can run the next acceleration test."
Kamel nodded slightly.
The middle-aged man before him, Malin Leslie, bore an aristocratic surname—and indeed he was of noble birth: the magistrate of Tanzan City, Viscount Leslie, was his uncle. But Malin, as a member of the nobility, plainly preferred the company of knowledge and technology.
As one of the more senior and more capable members of the Arcane Technology Research Institute, he led a second-tier team, and their task this time was to find a way to perfect the "Ultimate Accelerator."
This device was a key component of the "High-Speed Flying Craft Project." Rebecca, head of the Department of Mana Technology, had initiated it and handed it to Malin and his technical team for concrete completion.
Such was the way many projects at the Arcane Technology Research Institute now operated: as the highest authority of the Department of Mana Technology, Rebecca's energy was, after all, limited. However many ingenious ideas she had, the number she could focus on at any one time was finite. So as research projects grew more complex and more numerous, and as the technical staff gradually filled out, she began splitting many projects off to various second-tier laboratories or independent research groups. By now, nearly all the more basic or shorter-term development tasks were completed by senior researchers like Malin leading their teams (the related honors and rewards, of course, went to those teams as well), while the projects Rebecca and Kamel personally oversaw accounted for less than twenty percent of all development work under the Department of Mana Technology.
That twenty percent was the true long-term, cutting-edge work.
Beyond that, Kamel and Rebecca would regularly inspect the various project teams and confirm the progress of each task—just as they were doing today.