"...Alright. I'll do it."
The floating woman in the strange gothic-esque style clothing clapped both her hands together with a dazzling smile. She wore a black shirt with large white text that said "Welcome 3 Hell", two large red blood splatters over a few sections of the black, and a skirt which was split into three vertically colored sections. Red, yellow, and blue. Her hat was more of a headband attached to a choker on her neck with literal chains, also flowing off the side to three orbs reminiscent of planets, one of which sat atop her headband-hat. The planets were also red, yellow, and blue.
"Great! Perfect! You'll do just fine, I think."
To my ears and brain, it felt as if she said those three sentences at the same time.
The woman with blood-red hair who had introduced herself as Hecatia Lapislazuli, chose that moment to speak again.
"Hm… Well then. Let's go."
She glanced off to the side, then began waving her arms as a ring of radiant light appeared under the two of us, interlocking circles upon interlocking circles with triangles and other geometric shapes and what looked like alchemical symbols filling the empty space between the edges of the ring.
She looks up from her work at me.
"Don't forget to let me know when you're about to send a rocket up."
Then the edge of the circle turns white and everything outside of it vanishes, replaced with brilliant radiance.
For a moment, before I closed my eyes from how searing that light was—
There were three of her.
That chained-planet "hat" of hers…
There were three "planets" which hung off of chains attached to her choker-necklace. One was already on her head, a glowing red orb, perhaps representing what domain she as a Goddess ruled over: Hell in its entirety.
The second was blue-green with white. I recognized it easily enough as my home planet, Earth.
The third was a pale yellow, tiny craters littering it in patterns I stared up at every night.
The Moon.
The other two Hecatias appeared underneath the chained planets as if they were always there.
Moon Hecatia, blonde-hair as opposed to red, locks eyes with me at that exact moment in-between moments, and grins.
Then, there is light.
—-
When I reopen my eyes, the sight that appears before me is strange, to say the least.
It's as if I am in a cave, yet the ceiling is so high up above my head that I cannot see it, but a red-ish glow that suffuses the air makes it seem as if there's a sun and sunlight shining through the land.
Truly strange, but I wave the peculiarity off as just part of the deal I made.
That is to say, one forced on to me by that Goddess.
"I need you and your experiences as an Engineer to conquer Hell!"
"What? No."
"Then die."
"Er, um, hold on. Can we talk about this?"
—And that's how I was roped into it.
So what about my 'experience as an Engineer' made me the most suitable for the venture that I was sought out for?
Long story short…My employer's cargo spaceship crashed landed on an alien planet with bountiful resources but hostile natives and I was on it so I created industry to successfully defend myself and build a fully functional rocket to escape.
Now, that woman is asking me to use that gained experience to conquer Hell.
I feel like I am back on that planet again, land so plentiful with raw ore that in some places it literally sticks out of the ground as a tripping hazard.
Did she really recreate those conditions?
…Huh. I guess Hecatia really wants it to happen that badly.
Well, I already said yes and kinda don't-want-to-die from going back on my word.
Let's get started, then.
—-
Stone for a furnace.
Coal for fire.
Raw ores to turn into plates of metal.
Then, we take the plates and extra stone to turn it into a coal-powered mining drill so that I don't have to take the extra effort of bending over to swing my pickaxe at the solid masses of materials sticking out of the ground.
A single drill can't mine as fast as I can…but how about two? Three drills?
What about six of them, each staggered in their rate of 'production'?
Well, that idea doesn't do justice the fact that I have thirty drills, each of them practically scooping raw minerals out of the earth, crushing them, and spitting out the pieces onto lengths of conveyor belts, where some basic coal-powered robot-arms grab the masses of ore off the belts and stick them into containers.
I have no idea who decided that there would be coal-burning robot arms, but their impractical decision has been the backbone of my survival once before and now once again.
From the moment I got started in the creation of my furnaces, my Engineering Suit's modular fabricator device has not stopped crafting things.
Finger directed lasers invisibly pick up plates of iron from the furnaces and deftly shape some into water pipes as wide as I am tall, others morphing into perfectly symmetrical toothed gears.
The floating mass of metal objects then combine with a final amount of the plates themselves, interlocking perfectly with each other to create a fully functioning Industrial Steam Engine, albeit a basic one.
In total, that took about ten seconds.
With how common Engineering Suits like mine have become, this is simply normal. Especially when taking into consideration the kind of limiting unrefined materials I have access to, this is still normal.
Now, I just need a large enough water boiler to provide the steam it needs to function.
Oh, I already have a water source nearby thanks to the Goddess and now a simple offshore pump to move water around.
Once that water boiler is done and hooked up to those, I'll have entered the Age of Electricity and Pollution.
That means I'll need to start building defenses…and offenses to go along with it.
What kind of creatures make their home in Hell, anyway?
—-
There's something so satisfying in watching the whole process of an electricity powered mining machine drill at some metal ore, vacuum it up, and spit it out into a crusher which drops it on a conveyor belt. Then, following those same chunks of ore as they make their way into my base of operations, watching it get scooped up by a robot arm, get placed into a furnace and smelted into a single perfect plate where it gets grabbed by another arm and placed on another conveyor belt and travel down to an all-purpose creation machine, where it then gets transformed into another thing and placed on yet another conveyor belt, and so on and so forth until it finally gets used by me.
It was only forty or so minutes ago that I got that single engine up and running.
Now, forty-five or so minutes later there are fourteen of them, every two of them being fed steam by a single boiler, all of which are being fed water by, like, five pumps.
I'm pretty sure that one pump can actually fuel eight or so engines, but it's just wasteful to produce that much electricity and not even use it.
Yes, when I said 'Age of Electricity', I meant that everything that can run off of coal then gets replaced with electricity powered versions of them instead.
Coal robot arms? Electric robot arms.
Coal mining drills? Electric mining drills.
Coal furnaces? …I don't think I will actually replace them. Electric furnaces absolutely eat up electricity in amounts I cannot produce at this moment, to the point where it's actually better to just stick with the coal furnaces instead.
With this acquired electricity, I can now power the second most important thing I need: Researchers.
What they do is scan materials and, based on their compositions, say what kind of things can be made with them, whether now or in the future.
The materials they take are bundles of objects I will call 'Research Packs'.
These many different Research Packs are made of many, many different materials.
So, don't I already know these things specifically from my first stint at survival?
Oh yes. I most certainly do. But, uh, a certain Goddess has changed some memories around…
Well, with how she changed things, it's more like I now know how much more efficiently to get to those same technologies than I did before, which, in a sense, allows me to 'look forwards to work backwards'.
I know my end goals which allows me to prepare for the steps I need to take to get there.
For example, 'I need a Rocket, which requires rocket fuel, which needs light oil, which needs oil, which needs oil pumps, which needs combustion engines, which needs steel…'
And so on and so forth.
Then I need to Research all of the Research Packs for each of those steps because I inherently do not know the methods of producing all the individual intermediary steps involving them.
Thanks, Hecatia.
At that moment, the wind picks up, whispering in my suit helmet's sound module.
You're welcome.
Ah. She heard me. Oh hell.
That's the spirit!
I sigh, hearing soft laughter emanating from somewhere.
—-
Presumably there is oil somewhere down here in Hell. The same goes for uranium, both of which could theoretically solve my energy problems forever.
I'll need to research those things first before I can use them, though, like I did for the all-purpose creation machines. I actually have a machine to make the machines, because I absolutely have use for them.
Machines create machines create machines create machines create…
A creation machine for each variety of robot arms, of which there are many. A creation machine for all the little gears and tiny components I would rather not have to make myself. A machine for the conveyor belts that litter the floor between the machines to bring components where they need to go. A machine for the electric mining drills to get more metal for the machines to make more machines.
A machine for the first tier of Research Packs, so that I can 'passively' research things while I am off and creating more, and a machine for the Research Stations themselves…Not that I'll need all that many of them, but they're great to have on hand.
All this so that when I get my hands on a Roboport and those construction drones, I can begin my von Neumann style takeover of Hell.
Yes, that's what this is all building up to.
All the recursive creation of machines and components and Research and…
The whole point is that I am making it happen in order to complete the objective that has been placed upon me.
I just need more materials to actually get it started, then use that super handy-dandy blueprint function of the Engineering Suit to make sure all the individual buildings I plan to include in each section are lined up correctly once I get some trains running too.
But first I need the stuff to get there.
'Oh, waiter! More electric mining drills and coal furnaces, please!'
Maybe once I get at least 100 drills in total can I really begin, and that doesn't even scratch upon the idea that I may completely tap the local resource deposits until they run out before I can get to that point, leaving me to have to manually run around desperately to find more.
It's been, what, only an hour and a half since I got here?
Maybe I could be proactive towards that currently non-existent problem…have radars been researched yet?
Ah, yes, they are. Let's just get one of those set up really quickly and I'll be getting my Engineering Suit's map function some vision of the surrounding area soon enough, which will allow me to determine what I'll be using the surrounding areas for.
The requisite iron plates, gears, and electronic circuits float from my space-bending bag into the air, the pieces snapping into place as a compact military-esque radar appears from the jumble of parts. I point and it lands on the ground, a copper wire sprouting from the side and connecting it to the electrical grid.
That will automatically map the surrounding areas for me…at least, for a while. I'm aware these things do have a limited range, but I have no clue what it is.
So, until then: drills, research, production, electricity, oil, more production, trains, and more research.
The factory must grow…so that chaos can be created.
That last part is for you, Hecatia.
I heard ya. Thanks!
You're welcome.
—-
I find oil pumps to be so interesting. They basically insert an enormous tube into the ground with a very clever vacuum-valve system (like a straw, actually) to slowly bring up the crude oil from the depths of an oil well, where it is then pumped into a fluid tank.
The tanks I use are made of steel and can hold so much oil. Like everything else, I am overdoing this process as well.
Why? Because if it's worth doing, then…well. Overdoing.
So how did I get to this point? After waiting and waiting for the radar to show any sign of the puddles of crude oil I was looking for, I decided to explore the surrounding areas myself with a car driven by a steel combustion engine, which was once again powered by coal (actually, any burnable fuel resource like wood, coal, rocket fuel, etc.).
I drove it around the hell-scape (not actually, it's just a landscape that's here in Hell), past the strange rivers of bony fish, forests of wooden plaques(?), and red-tinted fog endemic to Hell, until finally I saw what I was looking for.
Puddles of dark liquid with the iridescently eponymous 'oily' sheen.
Of course, they weren't puddles, but instead ran much deeper into the bowels of the earth that resolved into enormous pockets of liquid.
It was, well, oil.
The wells weren't that far, but still a decent distance from the chemical refineries for turning it into the petroleum gas I was working towards.
Then, as one is supposed to, I hooked up my further expanded electrical grid to the pumps with those absolutely enormous electrical poles that might be seen alongside highways, but next to a super long oil pipeline instead, most of which was located underneath the ground.
No shovel was needed for that thanks to the Engineering Suit simply being able to oh-so-conveniently displace the earth and then replace it with underground metal pipes. No ugliness on the surface.
And just like that, I now have crude oil to work with. Just run the pipe to the series of 25 fluid storage tanks (I have need for so much oil) and from there to the several oil refineries a bit down the line, which are then connected to more fluid tanks to collect a certain valuable resource which I'm mainly looking for.
Petroleum gas.
It usually goes unsaid, but here, gas means gas as in gasoline, not solid-liquid-gas kinda gas.
That product is then turned into more products which I am/will be in great need of, such as Sulphur and Plastic.
That's right, plastic, the foundation of modern technology and the thing most computer chips are made of, which means I can finally start making them, and oh man will I be needing them.
…According to the Engineering Suit, these chips are merely Advanced Circuits. That—as well as the fact that I've already done this once before—tells me there's a more advanced circuit board than just this one.
Of course, it's not called an Expert Circuit or Master Circuit, but rather, a Processing Unit, a proper computer chip instead of a circuit board, and just as complicated to make.
They will get me towards the Rocket I deem part of my endgame though, which is kind of important, and will most certainly be included as an element within the Von Neumann process, because that's how it works, right?
The probe builds other probes, which builds other probes, in order to build more probes.
And that all relies on the fact that I will have enough resources to get there. I mean, I will, as the entire combined resources of a single planet (or wherever Hell is actually located, since it is a real and physical place, apparently) simply do not compare to the total amount a single rocket takes.
Hint-hint, it's the rocket that takes far less.
Now now now, I have to run the petroleum gas pipelines to the other fluid tanks, then to the chemical processing plants along with a conveyor belt of coal which will then get turned into the plastic my future demands.
Some more waving of the pointer fingers and snapping into place of the pipelines, both above- and under- ground, and—
…There!
Phew! That's some hard work for a total of two hours since I was summoned here.
I wonder if I should start up some combustion engine production for the next Research Pack…not that I've started the previous one yet for all that military-esque stuff. That is to say, better guns than the who-even-knows-what-model-this-is standard pistol that is given to all space-faring engineers due to the very possible threat of space-faring pirates.
Back on that planet, I had need for it because I had to deal with hostile creatures that really didn't like the fact that I was causing pollution with all my machinery.
…Y'know? I am starting to think the lack of hostile creatures may be of another reason, but since I do not know what that reason is, I am now nervous.
Forget trains, I'm getting some flamethrower turrets and tall concrete walls, just in case.
That necessitates steel and concrete, of which I will probably need more production of. At that point, I might as well dedicate an entire production line to military stuff.
Grenades, those concrete walls, turrets and ammo of varying types.
I will remain safe.
I will make sure I remain safe.
As I work, a little rhyme comes to me.
"Behind my factory's walls
I will create and create
expand and expand
until all of Hell
is mine to command."
