The Chimney Song Filebox

It is here we see the divers begin their transition into the multifarious profession they practice today. In XXXX, the Blue Embassy kicked off the scramble to map the Maze by announcing the Daedalia: an enormous reward to the first scouting group to discover a safe passage to the Abora Superstructure through the Maze. Already well-equipped and well-prepared for the perils of Prelapsarian remnants, divers signed up en masse to scouting groups in pursuit of their prize. This transition dragged the "Diver" moniker with it: Inkwell divers, with their familiarity with Prelapsarian remnants, proved extremely capable of dispatching the Maze's hostile security systems and exploiting salvaged technology to survive, to the degree that the ex-inkwell divers became emblematic of all Maze scouts. And so, the title of "Diver" stuck. This is not to say that the Maze was kind to interlopers: predation, disease, starvation and insanity claimed many of those who ventured beyond the inkwell, and those parties that returned did so with conflicting accounts of the Maze's layout. Put together, the reports seemed to suggest passageways and rooms which disappeared and reappeared seemingly at random - as if the entire structure were constantly shifting. Worse, efforts to map the Maze could only be relayed verbally: any maps of the complex would writhe under the pen and burst into flame as soon as they were put to paper.

Not to be deterred, the powers sponsoring the maze-dives hunted for a way to understand the Maze's motion, or to pin the labyrinth to a steady layout. The great breakthrough came from the Carillon Academy's experiments in declarative cartography: with the right preparations and a low, carefully-concocted dose of hallucinogens, the Maze's transformations could be halted temporarily by engraving a precise cartographic survey into lead plates. This breakthrough allowed Divers to penetrate further into the Maze while leaving a pinned, consistent path in their wake for others to follow and reinforce. The second leap was the invention of suncasters, derived from optical technology used in the 

mirror-gardeners of Kinashi to clear southern forests that get too close to their border. By piping sunlight from the surface, suncasters could be installed in mapped territory and stent the Maze open like pillars in a mine. These two innovations sparked a massive expansion into the maze, limited only by the prohibitive cost of laying lawfiber. Thousands of divers joined the workforce to lay cable.

By this point, Divers had become entangled with the growing mythology surrounding Nadabaixo: daring adventurers, seers equipped with wits, lead, and styluses, groundbreakers turning up salvage, all plunging into the lichen-lit wilderness and emerging with Prelapsarian miracles. But even while the myth of the Diver grew, the realities of diving work became ever more bleak. Supplied with the constant influx of warm bodies drawn to the city, the controlling interests in the Maze-diving industry began to cut corners in the name of expediency. Divers maintaining infrastructure and working salvage sites in the Maze were made to work long hours to fulfill increasingly exacting quotas. Expeditioners were made to purchase and maintain their own equipment, funneling much of their salary directly back to their employer. In the remote cartographer outposts that maintained the Maze's expanding network of stable passageways, employers could exercise almost complete control over their workers, establishing company towns which strictly controlled the movement of their inhabitants. Taking Nadabaixo's Parliament into their pocket, corporations conspired with The Lupin Exchequer to control the exchange of currency, turning Nadabaixo's economy into a dense web of scrips which chained workers to their contracts for fear of losing their life savings. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs showed itself in several instances - protests, industrial actions - but these demonstrations were local and decisively quelled before they could catch on. 

Then, without fanfare, five members of a party of 12 stumbled into a Zawadi Yards maze waypoint with two strangers in tow. The newcomers identified themselves as what remained of The Smokeseeker Company - a small independent group of Divers using their own experimental equipment to penetrate the labyrinth. They had found the chimney, they said, and brought back emissaries of the hanging city they found there. They introduced the strangers as Iss'coli and Padaraxet - a diplomat and her bodyguard  - of Loomward. The keepers of the waypoint were doubtful of the strangers' claims. 

"Certainly," they said between themselves "these fellows are impostors. Their clothes are strange, true, but they are unmistakably human, and no human has yet reached the Chimney. They cannot come from such a city as they claim."

"This is a trick," said another more wise to Maze-trickery. "They are surely conmen. They will ask for transit money and promise a share of the Daedalia and then they will disappear at lights-out"

"So we will refuse them chits if they ask." replied a third. "But we can afford to supply them till Station Eight. If they're telling the truth, they can find their way back to Abaixo from there."

On a vote, the the keepers sent the seekers on their way with enough rations to reach the station.

The Blue Embassy whisked away Padaraxet and the Smokeseekers almost as soon as they stepped off the station, though Iss'coli escaped in the struggle. When brought before the chief ambassador, Padaraxet revealed herself as a Weaver - of the mimic-spiders we now know to inhabit the Chimney. For delivering proof of a return passage from the chimney, the Smokeseekers received the Daedalia: a king's ransom, money and privileges enough to keep the seekers and comfortable for the rest of their days. The Smokeseekers used it to buy a broken suncaster and convert it into the most popular tavern in Abaixo: The Landlocked Lighthouse. In the months to follow, the Lighthouse became the bar of choice for divers on their way to the Maze and those coming back laden with stories. The prestige of the Smokeseekers and their bar expanded from a meeting-place to a sort of cultural center - a place where independent companies much like the Smokeseekers could take on freelance work and down-on-their-luck spelunkers could find help. What's more, the Lighthouse was the best place to hear the Smokeseekers' recount their adventures in the Chimney. Crowds would gather at the door just for the chance to hear the legendary explorers speak.

The foundation of the Lighthouse also coincided with the third great expansion into the Maze. As soon as the route to the Chimney was mapped and stented, the Blue Embassy commissioned The Eleuther Line: a direct rail link through the maze between Abaixo and the Chimney, the largest single construction ever attempted in the Maze. The construction of the rails was stymied, however, by subterfuge and sabotage from Loomward. The initial reports sent back the the hanging city by Iss'Coli had put it on edge, apprehensive about the prospect of an aggressive expansion and the severe cost of an overt conflict. In the political theater, Loomward projected a cordial facade to Nadabaixo and the Embassy, but behind the scenes the Weavers brought their exceptional natural mimicry to bear against the logistical mechanisms of Nadabaixo's industry - Supplies were mislaid, records went unwritten, and equipment failed. Enough to cause serious setbacks while remaining plausibly deniable. Loomward's campaign was bolstered by the sympathetic efforts of the Divers themselves: While the citizenry's view of Weavers was one of alien motives and monsters in the dark, most Divers founded their opinions on the testimony of the Smokeseekers, who recounted their firsthand account of Loomward as a martial culture deeply suspicious of outside dangers but whose friendship, once earned, was inviolable. As the relation between divers and corporate interests continued to strain, many divers found themselves more sympathetic to the weavers than to their employers. Many diver groups, especially those working on the Eleuther Line, collaborated with Loomward to perpetrate industrial action, and rumours began to spread of organized resistances developing in all spheres of Maze industry.

Tensions continued to escalate as these fractured worker factions took more and more overt action against the exacting demands laid on them. This came to a head when a group of railworkers calling themselves **The United Navigators of Abaixo** declared a strike against Zawadi Yards and occupied Fiddler Station, Acima's freight station on the Eleuther Line. The UNA put an embargo on all supplies in or out of the Station except for food and essential supplies for the Maze towns, demanding an eight-hour workday, higher wages, and formal recognition of their union. Zawadi Yards refused the UNA's invitation to the negotiation table outright, and instead hired a mercenary group known as Gowan Private Eye to break the strike. Gowan's attempts at intimidation escalated to violence culminating in the Battle of Fiddler's Bridge, which saw nine mercenaries and twenty-five railworkers dead and successfully ended the strike. The remaining members of the UNA were arrested, their headquarters were raided, and their leadership disappeared without a trace.

This would not stand. Several influential labor factions called a meeting of leadership at the Landlocked Lighthouse to formulate a response. Mediated by the Smokeseekers, representatives from nearly all branches of organized labor in the Maze debated the proper course of action. Very little from the eight hours of this summit was recorded, but its outcome is well known: three days later, on a vote from each union, twenty-nine of the thirty groups in attendance merged together as chapters of **The Divers' Union**. A single multilateral organization collectively representing the enormous majority of maze workers.

What followed is today known as The Hundred Days of Rest. The Divers' Union declared a total cessation of work in the Maze, demanding the recognition of a charter of workers' rights from every corporation that drew profit from the derelicts in Mt Abora. Zawadi Yards and the rest of the affected companies responded by forming The Castiron Coalition, sending the Gowans once again to break the resistance, but the mercenaries quickly discovered the Diver's Union to be much more entrenched than the UNA. The Union had commandeered not just Fiddler Station but the entirety of the Eleuther Line, giving them uncontested control of the Maze and the resources within it. The Castirons' attempts to forcibly penetrate the Maze and restart salvage operations were phyrric victories at best and humiliating defeats at worst - the strikebreakers were out of their element, and the Divers knew the territory much better than the outsider forces. What's more, the Divers were well-informed of the Gowans' movements: Loomward was feeding the Union information from its extensive intelligence network, deepening their good relations with the Smokeseekers and strengthening their own position. 

Realizing the impossibility of reclaiming the Eleuther line by force, the Castirons took a different tack: starve the union out. Since the ecosystem of the Maze is completely inedible to outsiders, every settlement past Abaixo is reliant on regular shipments of food from the city. The Gowans mounted raids on several Union stockpiles and reclaimed Fiddler Station, enacting a blockade of all food and medicine going into the Maze. Here as well, though, the Union had the home field advantage. Taking advantage of the twisting warrens and crags of The Byways - a network of small connections between the Maze and the surface - they smuggled supplies to the waystations, using new entry points as the Castirons blocked off old routes. They would have to ration their supplies, but the blockade was no longer a death sentence for the Union.

Concurrent to the conflict, the Castirons and the Union were waging another battle in the field of public opinion. Establishing its own printing house in the basement of the Lighthouse, the Unionists began publishing their own periodical, The Abaixo Keeper, to argue for their demands and debate the Castirons' claims that adopting the Union's charter would destroy all industry in Nadabaixo. The Keeper became the Union's dialog with the citizens of both cities, responding to reader-submitted questions in opinion columns and providing detailed insight into the state of the maze behind the blockade - stories which other papers refused to publish until the Keeper stoked the public's hunger for the dramatic. 

While the surface city of Acima remained largely separated from the conflict, many in Abaixo found common cause with the Union, and the Castirons found themselves dealing with more and more spontaneous civil unrest in the undercity. Sensing the growing crisis, the Parliament of Nadabaixo sent the city guard to restore order, but the perceived favor towards the Castirons only served to inflame the protests further. On the fifth week of the strike, Union leadership led a march from their headquarters all the way to the city hall on the surface, sitting on the steps outside and refusing to leave until they were allowed to deliver an address to the assembly. Parliament agreed to pull back on the guard's deployment in Abaixo, but made no move to recognize or support the Union until the third month of the strike, when economic pressure forced it to intervene and bring the Castirons to the table. Negotiations were fraught and threatened at several points to fall through entirely, but at long last the Castiron coalition agreed to formally recognize the Union and accept a pared-down version of the worker's rights charter. The Divers' Union declared victory, reopening the Eleuther Line and bringing badly-needed supplies into the starving Maze waypoints.