Boats... When had been the last time Rothros had been on board of one of them ? He honestly could not remember. When he had seen a ship or other naval vessel in his past, it had most often been from a perspective no other seaman of the land would have liked to ever witness: keel first. And more often than not this had happened with the firm intention of letting the decks on top of that keel plunge into the sea below indeed. Of all the persons on board, he and another Undine he had spotted previously had all reason to have the least fear of things sinking, but one could never know...

He didn't even know what all of this was for yet. He personally had not even heard of this island before -- which in itself was a bit of a remarkable oddity already. His kind preferred building cities in coral reefs and not just on the bare sea floor for various reasons, the most important ones being ease of construction and finding more food. In times of growing population, scouts were usually sent out to find new reefs or other places of interest and this had happened in the past often enough so they would have stumbled upon any island long ago already, wouldn't they ?

It almost felt a bit like a conspiracy...

----

At least it was no Phospholite conspiracy it seemed, so much Rothros could tell rather quickly after their arrival on shore. The thought of jumping back into the ocean and making a run for it should things turn out of for the worse had crossed his mind, too. It could only be pulled off reasonably well while not having ventured further inland however, so the Undine male remained extra cautious for the time being. At which point his mind actually transitioned from distrust and caution to believing the words of those welcoming them -- he couldn't tell himself after the fact anymore. Maybe the revelation of humans having [i]royally[/i] screwed up and quite literally so had shaken his thoughts to their foundations enough for them to just topple over onto the other side ?

And somewhere deep inside, Rothros felt angry. So there had been dragon eggs around all the time. A power that could have been used for all kinds of things like, for example, eliminating those in the ruling class that wanted this pointless war to drag on and on. Or just to give everyone back that tiny bit of humbleness that they might not actually be the pinnacle of beings on this world ? Oh what a foolish set of thoughts that was! By now the trenches between the various factions were far too deep and it would need many more bodies to fill them. It wouldn't work that easy way he imagined and, last but not least, it was the dragons chosing them and not the other way round...

But just what had King Rosmund done exactly ? Rothros would have really liked to hammer just about everyone that hadn't been on board the ship about this, but at the same time he felt like already not liking any of the potential answers. It had to be something powerful, something rather unknown or others before him would have done it already ? Or something that had become possible just recently ? Like dragons suddenly willing to bond with more mortal beings, for example -- an eerie similarity between their situation and that of the king, wasn't it ?

Did at least somebody here have any real idea about what they were fiddling with ? Or did everybody just want to keep going, but not being the one accidentally pulling the plug ? *


[hider=*Pulling the plug]
Aside from the rather obvious issues with metallurgy, there have been some other reservations in the far past about submarine mining operations as well. While it is commonly regarded as nothing more as a superstition to scare children with by now, back in the day many Undine believed in the possibility that there could be something very different beneath the ocean floor that just more solid earth. Digging large holes into it could crack this something open and, if it would turn out to be a vast void or just thin air again, potentially drain all the water away. Contacts with dwarves who could have laughed at them and told a very different story were seldom enough for this line of thought to survive the passage of time for a surprisingly long span.

'Not wanting to be the one pulling the plug' is a common, somewhat humorous metaphor born out of this supersitition. It refers to an experimenter who is not ready, or not willing, to face the potential consequences of his experiments.
[/hider]