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((The Monday Triple: page 3 of 3))
‘Okay, but how does the funneling actually work?’ said Hector. ‘I mean, where does the heat go?’

‘Oh, the heat is transferred into a “cooler,” which is an area where someone--likely a servant or team of servants--is working around the clock to maintain a low temperature. It would be a very tightly-controlled environment. They used to just be caves that had been lined with loads of heat shielding materials, but they might be different now. I’m curious to see one, but I don’t know if we’ll get the opportunity. We didn’t come down here for a tour, after all.’

‘Hmm. But, uh... so these servants who are keeping that place cold... uh... are they not in the city itself? Or...?’

‘Well, they could be, I suppose, but they’re probably not. The idea behind heat funneling was to construct a vast network that could cool many cities, without ever making it so that any one city was entirely reliant upon any one cooler--the logic being that, if, for whatever reason, a cooler failed, then the other coolers in the network would be able to pick up the slack.’

‘Smart.’

‘Before funneling was invented, it was just as you said. Very powerful servants would create “safe zones,” and everywhere else was pretty much off limits.’

That made Hector want to ask what happened so long ago to make people migrate all the way down here in the first place, but someone bumped into him before he could formulate the question.

A loud group of Hun’Kui were crowding around a young Rainlord on his right, and even though Hector couldn’t tell what they were saying, their intentions seemed apparent enough from the way they were pushing into the comparatively small entourage of Rainlords.

The body language, the shouting, the unprovoked aggression--Hector had seen this plenty of times before in Atreya. Without even thinking, he flicked his wrist and encased every single one of them in iron.