2: Submerged

the crypt's kitchen is long and it's long enough to accommodate the kinetic chocolate light sculptures the one with the dragon soaring over a ridge of mountains the effect of its flying obtained by the rhythmic intersection of cutouts and two vertically louvered panels sliding back and forth against one another the one inside the overcapacious microwave a hastily engineered prototype from the early 1970s large enough to comfortably sleep a golden retriever and her seven pups that sort of capacity was deemed unnecessary as the ovens were scaled down and rolled out in the 80s inside a structure of cuboid chocolate cells pulses in localized clusters light glowing along their joining edges as the whole tower morphs and re-morphs jarringly the electricity bill is going to be huge even before we take into consideration the giant frozen chocolate vortex the vortex is created in the drum of an old top load washer dryer which has been modified to be fed with a jet of molten chocolate via a special copper flume outlet from an 8 gallon bronze kettle the chocolate stream is injected into the drum at a speed of roughly 26.4 feet per second and takes approximately 0.5 milliseconds to complete so the jet is about 14.8 feet long which uncoiled and set vertically would be the equivalent height of the strongman high striker from carter's famous steam fair that is including the original 16-inch diameter brass belt its actual height slightly less now around 14.6 feet ever since a particularly successful high striker of the summer of 77 sent the bell rocketing into a nearby duck pond a startled mallard flew into the tin hull of a decommissioned grain silo the clang comedically echoing the original victory chime the replacement bell was only 14 inches in diameter and lacked that warm heartening peal of the original brass this could have been behind the steep drop in qualifying strong men at some affairs going forward from 1978 all that may have been caused by a generalized calcium deficiency after the county's adoption of centralized reservoirs over untreated supply from the chalk rich water tables in any case the result was the same fewer jubilant chimes punctuating the low sparkling hum of merrymakers many moons away from our contemporary obsession with kinetic chocolate light sculptures at the moment the molten chocolate is injected the drum is filled with ice cold decalcified water after the injection this is rapidly drained via a centrifugal sump skirt and is instantaneously replaced with 12.43 cubic yards of liquid nitrogen delivered through a cluster of sporonic syphonation nodules after three and a half seconds the liquid drains through a separate sump skirt the drum stops suddenly and is retracted into a cylindrical chamber in the floor while a simultaneous blast of high-density salt gas guides the brittle chocolate spiral through a trapdoor in the ceiling and into the delicate white cotton gloved hands of three inuit cryogenics technicians who carefully clamp the topmost loop of the spiral onto three graphene cords distending from the bell tower this is the only part of the display that requires human intervention while the rest of the sculptures are permanent installs activated remotely and robust enough to serve thousands of shifts in the crypt's famous debutante balls the chocolate vortex chandelier is so frail that by the end of the evening it has disintegrated entirely merely under the gradual erosion of dust particles carried on thermal streams from the heat of the bodies below anterita is normally due at 7 30.