Chapter 45

Done with Tom, who was suddenly chatty again, I drove over to the tennis courts, and went down the stairs. No one was around, so I made a test cut into the obsidian. I cut a 35 degree downward slope, at an angle off the stairway. I had figured out that I didn’t need a landing with a 90 degree turn into the obsidian, I just needed a branch to come off, and I could cut corresponding steps so that they matched the steps already going down.

The stairs would be cut later at the same angle, but following this new line I would make the ceiling higher in the first room I was going to make. I cut the top and bottom, making this a narrower stairway. It only would share six steps until it reached the landing I was building for the new tunnel.

With my sixty inch wide block cut, sixty inches deep for the six steps, and arched, to match, I kept the ceiling height of this branch set of stairs the same. Verifying with my navigation skill that I could fly back to the RV terrace, without being seen, I shot up the tunnel, and summoned the glass block, then flew back again at 12x.

I examined what I had, and carefully cut the steps out, until I reached what was going to be the floor level. My blade cut a large arch, the cutting blade shaped like a half circle fifteen meters in diameter. By moving the blade all the way to the back, and then looping it down, and bringing it back, I could create a giant tube of cut rock.

I had found that it was still very difficult to fit a blade into a cut I had made, because my invisible knife left such a tiny cut. I couldn’t change the shape of the blade once it was formed without first releasing the blade, and creating a new one in a different shape. I also couldn’t form a blade anywhere but in the open air. I could move a blade thinner than a human hair, of any shape I desired, in and direction and way, including spinning and turning.

This time the blade was like a microscopically thin wire, as I changed its direction. The result was a very long tube, with a rounded end. A final cut at the working surface, separated the tube from the surrounding obsidian.

I went back to the top, and summoned the giant block of nearly black volcanic glass. Fifteen meters wide, it was thirty meters long. I cut a section off from the tip, 7.5 meters below the edge of the curve. That made the piece I was working with 15 by 15 meters, with a dome on top. With the piece on its side, I did the same thing again on the inside, just a meter and a half inwards. Once I summoned out the interior cut, I now had the basics of my gazebo.

The area around the entrance to the tunnel was only my cut stone directly around the entrance. I summoned the blocks of stone I had cut out when creating my storage cave, and set them as pavers, creating a 25 meter by 25 meter area. I stacked the blocks to make a single even piece. I took another cut to get everything flush and leveled. Once set, I summoned the now hollow tube section on the top of the flat platform. It sank a little under the extra weight, but not enough to be too much trouble.

The obsidian dome now needed entrances, so I cut four doorways, one each cardinal direction, making sure I lined them up precisely with north, south, east, and west. The doorways were arched, and ten feet tall at the top of the arch. I wanted to make them wider, but I was worried that the obsidian would shatter under its own weight, so I only made them 48 inches wide.