Slabmourn: Strip the Colossus Before It Sets

Lift7Poured last. Still wet.

The top lift of Colossus Nine at night: the giant's shoulder still wet inside open formwork, a scaffold walkway with one hanging lamp, and the lights of a small town far below.

Ilse Brandt, a lean formwork carpenter with cropped hair and scarred forearms, a crowbar across her shoulder and a caged orange lamp in her hand.

Act I

The Footing

The Monolith Province has nine colossi, poured in concrete by mould-makers who died long ago. Concrete that thick needs three hundred years to cure. All nine are still soft somewhere inside.

Ilse Brandt strips formwork for a living. She is thirty-four and grew up in the shadow of Colossus Nine, close enough to hear it settle at night. Her half-sister Tamsin Orr signed on to the Nine crew as an apprentice. Two months in, a night pour closed the rebar cage behind her.

Ilse starts at the footing with a crowbar and a lamp. Nine days of scaffold later she reaches the top lift, the only place soft enough to start opening.

A bandaged hand reaching through a round tie-rod hole in rough timber formwork, wet slurry around the hole. — **Lift 3, a tie-rod hole.** Tamsin puts her hand through it every night so the crew below knows she is still breathing.

Lift6Green. Takes a print.

The rule

Death pours you

On Lift 6, Ilse misjudges a plank and falls two storeys into fresh concrete.

She gets up at the last lamp she lit. Where she landed, the concrete kept her shape. The next time she climbs past that spot, her own cast is a step she can stand on. It stays there for the rest of the game.

Each death leaves a cast where you fell, and the cast stays there as a step.

Every death also gives the colossus one more hour to cure. A wet face takes the full weight of the crowbar. A cured face throws it back. So each death hands you a step to stand on and a harder seam to cut.

The Cure clock counts those hours. Watch it during Strip the Formwork, two lifts down.

A grey concrete cast in the shape of a curled human body, its top worn flat into a step, rebar stubs at one end. — A cast from a fall on Lift 6. Worn flat on top by everyone who climbed over it.

Lift5Tacky. Holds a boot.

Act II

Seven Lifts

Colossus Nine went up in seven pours. Each lift has a keeper, and no keeper wants the boards off early.

The man who gives them their orders is Pourmaster Aurel Kest. He is sixty-three and has run this pour for forty years. He does not hate Ilse. He thinks that once Nine sets, the Slumped at its feet will sleep in peace for good. Strip it early and they wake up hungry. He would lose one apprentice before he lets that happen.

The Chute WidowPours on anyone climbing the wet lift beneath her.
The TamperBeats the air out of fresh concrete, and out of you.
The WalerClamped into steel walers. Slow, and impossible to knock over from the front.
The Sleeper ChoirThe Slumped who wake whenever a board comes loose.
The CageRebar that closes behind you. Tamsin is in here.
The CalfThree panels, and the order you take them off.
Aurel KestHolding the last face shut.

Cracked welding goggles caked in plaster dust, resting on a timber plank beside a pouring paddle. — “Let it set, Brandt. Three hundred years and nobody down there is ever hungry again.”
Aurel Kest, Pourmaster

Aurel Kest, a broad older man in a long plaster-dusted coat that flares like a bell, welding goggles on his forehead, hands folded on a pouring paddle.

Lift4Firm. Rings when struck.

The giant concrete foot of Colossus Nine on a stepped plinth, surrounded by small grey figures asleep on their feet, heads bowed, one lamp glowing on the wet ground.

The Slumped

Around the footing, hundreds of people sleep standing up. They were the pour crew's families once.

They only wake when a mould is opened, and they wake starving. If Nine finishes curing, they sleep on for good and never wake hungry. If Ilse opens it now, Tamsin comes out. So do they.

Ilse wants her sister back. Aurel wants the town asleep, and he has forty years of pours behind that wish. You will hear both of them out before the last face.

Lift3Hard to the touch. Not yet set.

The cage

Tamsin Orr

Nineteen. Two months on the crew. A helmet two sizes too big.

She went into the cage to clear a jammed tie-rod and the night pour came early. Her hands are wrapped because she has been pulling at the bars. She talks to Ilse through the formwork in a cheerful voice, which frightens Ilse more than screaming would.

Tamsin Orr, a small young apprentice in an oversized hard hat and a jacket too big for her, hands wrapped in bandages, leaning to one side.

Lift2The calf. One seam still wet.

Try the rule

Strip the Formwork

Three panels hold the calf of Colossus Nine. Take off what has set first. The wet panel comes off last, and then you cut its seam while it can still take the bar.

Drag the crowbar onto a panel, or tap one. With a keyboard: Tab to the panels, arrow keys to choose, Space to pry.

The calf of Colossus Nine, a huge concrete column encased in three tall timber formwork panels clamped with steel walers, wet slurry leaking from the joints.

The calf is clamped in three panels. Set, tacky, wet. Choose the first one.

Lift1Poured first. Nearly set.

Colossus Nine standing over a small town at night, one side stripped pale, the other still in dark formwork and scaffolding, timber props bracing its lean.

Act III

The Face

At the last face, Aurel stands in front of the boards with his paddle.

Ilse does not open all of it. She strips one side of Nine, the side the cage is on, and leaves the rest in its formwork. Tamsin walks out. The colossus cures half hard and leans a few degrees toward the town.

The timber props hold it there. The people below go back to their kitchens and their shifts, living next to something that might wake up one night, or might not.

BaseslabSet hard. Where you start.

Early reveal

Follow the Reveal

We will write when the next lift comes out of its boards: new footage, the first keeper fight, and the date of the first playtest.