Riml¶
Riml is a man living alone in the depths of the Works — the only living person the party has found anywhere in the factory.
He is small and wiry, worse for wear, hair scraggly and beard long, and everything he wears and carries came out of the building around him: scraps of plate hammered into rough armor, a bandolier of vials at his belt, and a construct's arm fitted with a buzzsaw as a tool. He is a tinkerer and an artificer by his own account, and a very good one — he says he was drawn here by his own research, and he has clearly been living down here a long time.
His den¶
The party found his quarters before they found him: a service void off a landing at the bottom of the refinery levels, furnished out of salvage. A hooded lamp still burning, a workbench cut from catwalk grating, a stool that used to be a valve wheel, bins of fittings sorted by kind, a bedroll with the blankets folded. His tools are made from the machines themselves — a construct's arm re-strung as a clamp, a row of construct fingers ground down into picks and drivers and scrapers — and the bench is covered in careful measured drawings of the factory's workings. Tally marks cover the wall beside the bedroll and run around the corner onto the next wall; there are thousands of them, though he says he stopped keeping count a long while ago.
Laid out on a table beside the bench is one of the whole overseer-constructs, inert, its chest split open, the detonation inside carefully disarmed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
The meeting¶
He found the party asleep in his den and forced the door, frightened and angry and demanding they leave his space, with a hand on his vials. It went badly for a while — the party read his mind and put a charm on him, and when the charm broke he threw a vial at them and was taken down five-on-one, stripped of his belt and his tool-arm, and tied. Then Randy talked instead of fighting, and it turned: they untied him, shared rations, and he brewed everyone something to help them sleep, and the night ended in something like friendship.
Two things came out of him along the way. The first is that he leaves the Works and comes back regularly — he goes up the outside, slowly and carefully, keeping clear of the machines. The second is what he came here for.
What he wants — the Conductor¶
Riml is here to retrieve something he calls the Conductor. By his account it is a construct of the elder age, thousands of years old, powerful enough to command all the other constructs in the factory — which is why, he says, the place goes on about its business day after day with nobody living in it. He is certain it lies behind the last door in the lowest part of the Works, the one door he has never been able to get to, guarded by an automaton bigger than any the party has fought. He has swept the rest of the factory for years and ruled everywhere else out.
He is not shy about it: he wants to take it. He says he is a tinkerer at heart, that when he hears of powerful old work he wants to take it apart and learn how it ticks, and that he has no grander plan than that. He also allows that if the Conductor were taken, the factory would stop — which would end the poison pouring onto the coast — and offers that as a bargain: the party clears the way, the pollution stops, and he gets the Conductor.
What he knows about the machines¶
- Killing an overseer stops its drones. He says there is always "someone animating the commanders and issuing them orders," and that the factory simply builds new ones.
- Do not bother with the rusted drones. Skirt them, stealth past them, and go up a level to whatever commands them — fighting the small ones is not worth the cost.
- He claims to have taken down a couple of the commanders himself.
- He knows machinery, not magic. Shown Flint's Moon Sickle, he said there is nothing mechanical about it at all — it is simply infused with magic, and not the run-of-the-mill sort — and told Flint that if he wanted to know what it could do, he should attune to it and find out. That advice is how the sickle's properties finally came to light.
The road down¶
He got his bandolier and his saw-arm back in the morning, without argument, and travelled with the party the rest of the way to the bottom. He earned the trust along the way, or looked as though he had: he freed the seized rail dogs on the ore carts for nothing, hung the lanterns, called out the obstacles ahead on the haulage run, and threw acid from the cart at the swarming beetles.
He also very nearly died twice, and the party saved him both times — Flint stabilizing him on the cart floor at the bottom of the run and Aelion spending a healing potion on him, and later Biz pulling him back up off the chamber floor after the guardian burned him nearly to death.
At the buffer stop he let slip more of himself than he had before. He said he had been trying to work out a way to take over some of the factory's machines and mount a defence of his own — "but I don't need that, I have you guys now" — and that the opened-up overseer on his workbench had taken him years, because the ones he wants blow themselves up when they die and that was the only one he ever got whole.
At the door¶
The Conductor's guardian recognized him on sight: "You. I thought I told you that you are not welcome." Whatever the party might have talked their way into, Riml ended it — he told the machine that he was sorry, but he had to do what he had to do in the name of progress, for himself and for his mission, and that he and his friends were getting through one way or the other. Then he threw a vial, and the fight was on. The guardian's first act was to put a gout of fire through him.
What he had done¶
In the Conductor's room, Riml went straight to the console and began pulling things apart while the party talked. When Flint asked the Conductor who had switched it back on, and the Conductor said it did not know, the party looked over at Riml — and watched his face go white.
He admitted it. He restarted the Works himself, three years ago. Whole sections of the factory were impassable with the power off, so he found a way to turn it back on in order to descend deeper — and that is what woke the Conductor's guardian, and that is why he then spent three years stuck one room short of the thing he came for. Everything the coast has suffered since followed from that.
He had come to the Works from Steamveil, where he had been studying the dwarves' ancient technology and came across a mention of this operation. He set out to find it. He maintains he knew the ground immediately around the factory was in a bad way, but had no idea how far the poison had spread.
The last thing he did¶
Cornered mid-confession with Randy standing over him covered in blood and oil, he kicked one last cord out of the console — disconnecting the Conductor, which is the act that stopped the factory — and moved to claim it as his by the terms of the bargain he thought they had. The Conductor refused to be anyone's property.
He is alive, he is with the party, and nothing has been decided about him. Randy has proposed carrying the Conductor out to see the coast and letting Riml's judgment be passed by Bracken's circle, to see whether there is some way he can atone for what he set in motion. Nobody has agreed to anything.