This Is The Way The World Starts, Part 3
Once Akatosh was on board, the project rapidly took on a life of its own. Lorkhan had been planning to lash something up out of chicken wire and string. A bit of papier-mâché, a coat of paint and a few lights, it wouldn't be hard to make it look good. It wouldn't fool Aka for very long, of course, but then it wouldn't need to.
But Aka spoke to everyone, and his enthusiasm for the new project was infectious. People kept turning up and volunteering to help, which was good news in one respect, but bad in another. Each new person helping out meant that Mundus, as people had started to call it, had to be that much more convincing.
And then Magnus got involved. Magnus was this little, sober faced dude. Not much to look at, but talk to him for five minutes and you realize that this guy has brains like Trinimac has muscles. Magnus was the sort of guy who had to bench press fifty weighty theorems every night before bed or he wouldn't be tired enough to fall asleep.
Magnus had a dramatic effect on the project. All of a sudden, people were using words like "engineering", "professionalism" and "ethics". Everywhere you looked there were clipboards and hazard signs, and you couldn't even get on site any more unless you were wearing a hard hat and steel toed boots.
The Mundus Lorkhan had intended to build was a pure snow job - just a prop intended to get Akatosh's co-operation for as long as Lorkhan needed it. Now Lorkhan was faced with the uncomfortable realization that he was going to actually have to build the thing for real if his plan had any chance of working. Worse, he was going to have to work doubly hard if the thing was going to do what he needed it to do without Magnus finding out and spilling the beans.
And so Lorkhan pitched in with a will, doing everything from sitting in planning meetings to pouring cement, and all of Aka's friends marvelled at this improvement in his attitude. Lorkhan's friends were impressed as well; Sanguine, Mephala, Hircine, Boethia and all of that crowd - they thought it was purely hilarious! Here was Lorkhan, once the coolest kid on the block, working has ass off every day, just as he'd once sworn he never would. The spectacle was too much for Lorkhan's old buddies to resist, and they'd sit around all day, drinking beer, cracking up and generally jeering at the workers. Lorkhan bore this with as good a grace as he could muster. Just wait until he had a place of his own and they weren't invited. Then they'd be sorry!
Finally, the structure started to take shape. The funny thing was that while everyone agreed that it looked really good, no two people could agree on what it looked like. Some saw a wheel, and some said a tower, some said it looked like a flower while others just saw the endless loops of temporal conduit.
Only Lorkhan saw it as what it was: a racetrack. It was a giant wall-of-death racetrack for a terrified time dragon to run around, faster and faster until he climbed the wall to the top. At which point, if someone were to be riding on the dragon's back, and if they were to jump at just the right moment, the force of the leap combined with the dragon's speed should be just enough to propel them to the Edge of Everything. When that happened, Lorkhan could kiss goodbye to squaresville and all the hard work would have been worth it.