Echo Call

A series of taps echo in a small shack near the edge of the city, a Dwarf slowly writing words in time with the myriad of short and echoing sounds. Eventually, the tapping stops, the silence signally the end of the message. The Dwarf pulls out a complex contraption, beginning his own series of taps that send a quick reply. While the previous message had been long and took a moment to translate into the Dwarvish script, the reply is simple, two words that repeat three times before stopping. Message received. Message received. Message received.   Technology and magic often come together in mysterious ways, something that the Dwarves often bet on for their various infrastructure and technological advances. Magic on its own can easily fail for a number of reasons, the first being the ineptitude of the spellcaster. While machines may be just as unreliable, they can at least be made similarly and with equal abilities that can easily be fixed by one with the correct skills. Spellcasters are not a small group in the Dwarven Kingdom, but craftsmen are far more common and often better trained, making machinery king. The Telegraph is one such contraption, allowing for communication over long distances easily. Still, the complexities of the Dwarvish language and its script cannot be easily translated through short electrical pulses.   Much as they always have, Dwarves created another language, one that could easily be utilized through the Telegraph much in the same way that Mine Ticks were commonly used in the tunnels of Káto. Short and echoing taps would be made on a machine that would send electrical pulses through the coils of wire that were inlaid beneath the Old Dwarven Road and other main travel routes throughout the Kingdom. This allowed messages to be sent quickly from one side of the Kingdom to the other as long as a translator waited on the other end to translate and relay the information to the correct people. Often, the Dwarves referred to Echo Call as their "silent" language, much like the Gem Dwarves had Mine Ticks.