Three...
Now a crew of men and women, most of the same species as the tall man but some furrier or rounder, labored at the black wall.
One of the used a flame device like Ryuk's to heat the wall. Then he nodded and stepped back, and a woman stepped up and used her own device. Whiteness sprayed from the hose she held, the hose attached to the tank on her back, and the air got cold, very cold. The whiteness struck the heated stone.
The stone shrieked. The tall man liked the sound of that.
But only a small bit of the stone fell free. The tall man picked it up. It stung his fingers with lingering heat. It was heavy, far heavier than stone should be.
The man and the woman looked over the tiny crack formed in the waals surface. They made noises at tone another. Then the woman, apprehension on her face, turned to the tall man, forming images. The tall man reached out and plucked them forth.
The hot-and-cold would succeed, she told him. In a long time.
What is a long time? he asked. A light and a dark?
Many lights and darks, she said. Many groundshakes would come and go, the plants would make many more buildings fall, small things would grow and old things would die.
The tall man growled, and the woman staggered back from the force of his anger.
But she had another thought, and she forced her way forward to give it to him. It was a machine with arms and knobs and treads and she imagined it standing before the wall, using its own cutting flames and pounding knobs to shatter the stone.
With contempt, he dismissed the idea. he imagined himself standing side by side with the machine, striking the wall himself, neither of them doing any harm to its surface.
She shook her head, a sign he'd come to understand, and changed his image. In it, he became smaller and smaller, until he was nothing but a tiny dot standing beside one of the machine's treads.
He scowled at her, not understanding.
She showed herself beside him, also tiny, and drew him into her eyes. He saw through them as she looked up, and up, and up at the machine.
He understood, then, He hadn't shrunk. He'd misunderstood The machine was vast, the width of a gap between buildings, as tall as this enormous chamber.
The tall man laughed. The woman and all the other workers, suffused with his humor, also laughed. Weaker than he, they laughed until they coughed, laughed until they fell over, while he watched them in good cheer. Only when some of them began coughing out blood did he relent.
He stood over the woman with all the thoughts and made one of her own. In it, she found one of those machines and brought it here.
She nodded, but, too weak to obey immediately, it was minutes before she could rise and go about her new erand...