Once per year the generators die. Once per year the ruin and the city that is Downwarp is locked in darkness. Once per year, vast caverns and basements are littered with seeds like discarded batteries. Even to having that faint bit of juice left.
In the tangible dark, something moves. The first seedlings hatch out mobile, wading through ground and walls to jostle for prime locations - closest to the steep energy gradients in thiswarps' substructure. Those most successful skim enough off the top to instantiate enhancements - massive power banks and eventually superconducting cables to the grid itself, increasing the flow of energy. Providing services the generators themselves are too simple to understand.
Of course, no one has ever
seen it. How could they?
Add, subtract or modify as you will. Myths are common property, after all.
- Ooh! How about seedlings that are the precursors of the existing generators, eventually becoming the next set thereof? There's a sentimental little girl in me that absolutely loves the idea of a electrical-generator Circle of Life when one day the adults die and the kids grow up and shoulder the burden.
Of course, I'm not sure how compatible with Down such a healthy and orderly theme of regrowth would be. -g0
- Might be neat. So far, I've been pictuing the active part of their lifecycle along the lines of a beachful of walruses during the mating season. Except the adult generators die off before their seeds hatch (or why would we have the period of complete darkness?), and probably get eaten for raw materials while the little ones are still moving around. (Which begs the question of how generatorkind reproduces, when they can't move much/at all as adults. Pollination? Exchange of schematics before they go sessile? Simply instantantiating potential successors?) Anyway. Yeah. - Volarian
- "Here, on this rooftop high above the streets of Down, we are witness to one of the most majestic natural spectacles in this entire warp: the annual migration of the generators. For several days each cycle, the warp falls dark as thousands upon thousands of these gennies unplug and uproot themselves, and crawl or roll along the expressways towards their recharging grounds in Up and Charm.
- "Most of them don't make it. In their drained and weakened state, they are vulnerable to predators and scavengers. Even this three-phase, six hundred volt behemoth is easy prey for this flock of turbojet crows.
- "Without the gennies, the entire downtown core of Downwarp is without electricity. In a public square, a local shaman conducts a ritual to bring back the light. Here, a party of young Eisenstimmen hunt in the debris of an old power station... and this is what they're after: eggs. In three to four days, these will hatch into baby gennies - probably Potentia sinusoides. The finding of the eggs is cause for great celebration in the clan's forge..."
- -- Dr Darlus Courbin, The Secret Ecology of Downwarp