tea – Aceade's Tales

The machine that stood on the counter gleamed. Its shiny metallic body rose from a rounded, well-polished wooden base, curving up towards a boxy tower on one end and an alcove at the other. An array of brass plates adorned the front of the machine, marking the buttons, rounded glass light housings and an embossed slot in a font that appeared to have been delicately carved from the metal itself. In one corner, a thick black cable snaked around behind towards the wall.

“Is that made of silver?” Aoife asked, pointing at the machine, eliciting a few smiles from the other children in the room as they gathered around it. Her twin brother Ciaran gingerly reached forward to tap at the corner near him, where somebody had intricately carved some larger words and the number 418 in what looked like English. His face and body immediately slumped as he found out that it felt too hard to be silver.

“What is it, anyway?”

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Two things inspired this:

A few months ago, I had the misfortune of trying to get a Tassimo coffee machine to work;
Banging my head off the very finicky JavaScript package managers npm and yarn.

So, here’s the fictional instructions for a tea machine developed by a dwarf-owned firm, meant to be performed by one person. I’m considering a larger piece around this needlessly complicated process.

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