Chapter 125: Storm Passed
Kalli sat through the day, slept again, and woke up to an unexpected reality.
The storm had not ended.
She had been certain that it would have passed over them by now. By her calculations, it should have stopped being a threat hours ago. But the howling winds outside were still far too loud to be safe to go out in, though they were diminished from what they were.
And worse, she could see that the entire compound was one giant puddle.
They had put in storm drains when they built the perimeter wall, but probably not large enough to keep up with this much rainfall.
There was sure to be flooding in the basement levels, and likely on some of the lower main floors as well. As for her office, the water had pooled outside the doors, but it wasn’t yet up to the level of the automatic door, so it couldn’t be more than a few centimetres deep.
She could barely see the other buildings from the front doors, but they appeared to be intact. The barrier was still active over the main building, and the lights were still on.
As good as they could hope for.
So, she returned to lounging about, and took another nap as she waited for the howling of the wind to die down.
It was another ten hours before the howling of the wind died to nothing more than a gentle rainstorm, and a message appeared in her System Interface.
{Damaging Weather Event ended} Barrier protection in Suspend Mode.
{Time Remaining} 11 hours, 1 minute.
{Building choice cannot be changed}
Two and a half days the storm had raged, strong enough to damage buildings, or at least the solar panels on the building. Now, she just needed to go check everything else and make sure that all the buildings were safe to keep residing in.
They were concrete or stone structures, so they should have weathered the storm fairly well, but everything would have to be checked for structural damage.
And someone would have to go check the storm drains, to make sure that they were not going to be sitting in a pond of stagnant water. With the storm faded, there was a lot of work to be done, and among the most important parts was to check on the food.
The greenhouse had survived, much to Kalli’s surprise. The walls were a flexible acrylic, not glass, and while they were heavily scratched, they did not break.
That would cut down on the sunlight getting in, unless they had something to polish them, but it was better than losing their herbs and vegetables. Now, she just had to go check on the tubers and see how their most resilient of foodstuffs had fared.
Kalli purchased a set of hip waders from the System store, and headed out to check on the crops.
Anything that wasn’t solid was destroyed, and there were shattered trees speared into the soft soil of the Academy grounds. At least one had shattered storm shutters on a dorm building, but that was less damage than she had feared.
At least it hadn’t hit the roof.
Kalli stepped over another relocated tree just outside the Academy gates and made her way past the apartments.
They were in rough shape, as they didn’t have the same quality of protections as the Academy buildings did. They had storm shutters, but most of them were aluminum. They were heavily dented, and the paint was completely peeled off them on the north side.
But it looked like most of the windows of the apartments were intact.
The real issue was that the surface of the building had been nearly worn through on the north side. They were going to have to completely renovate the buildings, if they could find the proper materials.
The walls they could manage. Stucco was primarily concrete, and they had plenty of that. It was the damaged windows and storm shutters that they were lacking materials to fix properly.
That could wait, as the residents were still working on the interior, and then they would patch what they could before coming to her for materials.
Briefly, Kalli wondered if they would be able to make replacement glass for the windows. Even with what the storm blew around, there should still be plenty of volcanic ash around, and that could be used to make glass.
At least, she was pretty sure it could be. Volcanic sand could be, so ash too, right?
Whatever, that was someone else’s department.
Kalli made her way to the closest field, and checked on the tubers. The plants had been hammered to the ground by the wind, their leaves were in tatters, but most of the stalks had not been severed.
So, given a bit of time to recover, they should be alright.
They just needed to get some of this standing water gone because if you left root plants in water for weeks at a time, they would rot. She knew that much about farming, despite having come from a hive city.
"Coordinator, do you have orders for us?"
Kalli nodded. "Head to the wall and make sure the drains are clear. We need to eliminate as much of this water as possible, so the wall doesn’t become the side of a swimming pool.
I am going to go check on the defensive turrets. They anchor to the concrete, so I’m hoping they are fine, but the ash storm might have damaged them."
The men rushed off to check the drains, and Kalli headed for the main gate.
From there, she could see the whole wall, and at least count to make sure the turrets were still there. The loss of even one of them would be painful, but there was a chance they were just knocked out of the concrete and might still be repairable, even if they were missing.
They would just have to find them.
Kalli smiled as she saw the two turrets standing proud at the outer gate, and made her way up the hill.
They were still panning on their usual scan routine, but she could hear some grinding coming from the joint. If she recalled, there should be a self-cleaning function for just this reason, grit in the joints.
{Self Cleaning initialized}
Black crud was forced from the rotating joint of the turret by compressed air, and the grinding noise stopped.
{Self Cleaning Compete} Unit Operational
Now, for the rest of them.