On the next day, From shared his observations.
Cometh was immediately critical. “What do you mean above? Why would it come from above?”
“I do not know. It just did.”
“And so? What does that change?”
“Have you ever been up there?” he said, still as slow as ever. “Maybe someone is dropping it?”
Glass bit on that detail immediately. “We could get up there? Have a look.”
“And how would we do that?” Song said.
“Well,” Glass said, looking up, “there’s a whole lot of timber in the warehouse down to the left.”
Cometh grimaced. “Hm. All right, then. Let’s meet our makers.”
They
began figuring out how a tower would look, and got a chain of the
others to help them carry timber and materials into the large room
around the board and they began constructing a scaffolding and a work
area for sawers and nailers and biters and hammerers.
Wayside was
eager to help but didn’t know how to like some of the others did, so he
went along and offered suggestions which sometimes worked and sometimes
very much did not. Glass and From took care of the planning, took small
lumps of timber the others broke off in rests and made small-scale
models for how towers could be stable, while Cometh and Wayside helped
with the practical work of cutting, sawing, and hammering the wood into
shape. Of course, there were many others, like Grip, Plastic, Solder,
Shimmer, Folklore, and others who wanted to help see what was up “above
the board”, as it became known, as they worked all that very day.
Glass and From disagreed on a few details and was unsure how to make
the construction scalable enough to be as tall as they needed it to be,
because, frankly, they didn’t know how tall it needed to be. They could
see up at the board, but it seemed to disappear into the darkness of the
ceiling, or disappear further up to where a ceiling no longer existed.
Out the windows they couldn’t see it either, as if it disappeared into a
cloud.
But it came together, and soon they were able to stand
taller than any one of them, so tall no one could reach the feet of
those who were hammering away at the tower, so tall, soon, that they had
to shout at each other, all the while, working so hard none of them saw
that the board had gotten its second message.