The Bartislap Chiller

The Free City of Icefell is renown for its unique kafay, but kafay is not the only beverage that passes through this seaport on its way to the other Free Cities and the frontier lands beyond. Several unique wines and meads produced in the Elvenhome and in the The Grand Duchy of Elvenpass, as well as a number of delicacies that had long been considered too fragile or perishable to transport have recently begun shipping through Icefell, thanks to a marvelous invention created by a Gnomish tinkerer named Chillwiddle Bartislap.

Description

The Bartislap Chiller is device that is used to keep things cold. In its basic form, it consists of two boxes joined together by two pipes. Depending on the installation, additional components might also be involved.

The "shipping box" holds the materials that are to be kept cold. This could be be a large, open-space box, or it could be an arrangement of trays or racks, depending on the material being shipped.

The "chilling box" is specially constructed to hold racks of thin slabs of rock on which colonies of Coldshrooms are grown. These unique mushrooms, found naturally only in the caverns of the Dwarven Icehold Delve, do not draw nutrients up from roots or tendrils, but rather extract Fire Energy from the air around them. This chills the air surrounding the Coldshrooms, often to temperatures below freezing.
Device Name
Bartislap Chiller
Alternate Names
Wine Chiller
Meat Freezer
Chillwiddle's Icebox
Inventor
Chillwiddle Bartislap

The pipes between the boxes allow the chilled air to circulate, thus cooling the material in the "shipping box". Special fabric filters in place where the pipes join the chiller box are a critical component as well. In many models, a device call a Chillwiddle Spinner is fitted into one pipe; this windmill-like device helps circulate the air within the chiller.

Development

Chillwiddle envisioned his first chiller during a visit to the Icehold. There, he found that the Dwarves would store fresh meat in the Chillshroom caverns, where the temperatures were cold enough to freeze the meat solid, thus preserving it for long periods of time. He experimented with with several configurations before settling on the two box implementation.

There were some interesting glitches during the development process. A notable one which almost ended the project prematurely, involved installing an early model on a ship owned by a merchant interested in the possibility of shipping frozen giant whitebear meat to Endmere. This early model did not have the fabric filters on the pipes, and during the test voyage, the Coldshrooms matured and ejected their spores. These spores not only ended up covering the entire shipment of meat in new Coldshrooms; many escaped through leaky connections. Almost overnight, the ship was covered in chillshrooms which, in the damp sea air, started to cause the ship to become encased in ice. Fortunately, the ship made it to port and the crew were able to get rid of the infestation of Coldhrooms before anything catastrophic occurred. The first filters were added as a result to keep the spores in the "chill box".

Current Uses

Chillwiddle currently provides two different models for merchants interested in using his technology in their trading. One is a wagon-mounted unit wiith a shipping box approximately 100 ft3 (2.8 m3) in volume. The second is much larger, designed to fit into the hold of a trading ship. This model offers a shipping box with a capacity twenty times greater.

Merchants based in Icefell have started using the wagon-mounted devices to transport fine wines and meads across the Iron Mountains, keeping them chilled and thus much less susceptible to the degradations caused by hard travel. Frozen Inner Sea prawns are also shipped - anothter quite profitable item in Free City markets. The ship-mounted devices are used to complete the journeys of these food and drink delicacies beyond Icefell to destinations along the Farsea, from Endmere to Cliffport.

Credits

Banner image by Markus Kammermann from Pixabay

Character portraits by RPGDinosaurBob using HeroForge

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