Category: One Among the Dead

Day 603

Killed some rock rats today and managed to save their skins. Why sometimes the bodies fully disintegrate and sometimes they don’t I don’t understand in the least and I’m hoping it’s something simple and not “because the ones that disintegrate put something into the air that will kill you”

Not that “will kill you” isn’t a requirement of this place to begin with.

When I got home I started tanning the skins, something I’m actually pretty good at now. They’re fragile, but I’m thinking that if I poke the tines through a ducken skin (which is thin but surprisingly sturdy, based on my mattresses) then I should be able to do something to attach the ducken skin to some cards (or heck, maybe just wrap it around a brick) and then use that as a carder.

Or I’ll stab myself ten dozen times with the tines and have a giant allergic reaction and die. Hard to tell at this stage.

Day 602:

Digging is my top priority today so I dug and dug and dug… and got attacked by zombies and skeletons and rock rats and exploding giraffe corgis.

If there was some way to tame the exploding giraffe corgis and make them explode on command, this would be done a lot faster.

The skeletons are actually pretty handy because most of the time I can salvage arrows from them that are better than the ones I make myself… and to be honest it feels somewhat fitting to kill them with their own weapons.

The zombies have no purpose except to annoy me.

Oh, well, actually, they’re also really good at telling me that there’s a cavern in a particular direction, because they’re already in the cavern somehow yelling their fool heads off.

And the rock rats are great at biting shoelaces apart and damaging boots. But they also have sharp quill-like spines… and I’m trying to figure out if that could come in handy.

Because those quills look a lot like carding tines…

Day 601:

Still digging, and it’s going well. I think, based on my estimates of distance, that I should be almost all the way out to the big mountain.

It helps that it turns out some of my deepest tunnels were already most of the way there. Part of the reason I know I’m close is because today I ran out of tunnel, dug straight up, and found myself nearer the mountain than I’d imagined.

It’s not as helpful that apparently mapping to scale is still not something I’m very good at.

The carding isn’t going as well. I’m still good at making nail-thickness iron, and still really bad at anything smaller. I might have to sit back and think about my technique for a day or two.

Day 600:

During the day, I dig toward the big mountain.

At night, I’m learning how to make a carder for wool.

I’m kind of glad my parents used to drag me to all those historical reenactment sites as a kid. I mean, I don’t have any idea how to make all the fancy complex tools that they had, most of which looked so old and rotted away I’m not sure I would have understood them anyway.

But I do remember that to make the wool long and spinnable you had to brush it between two things called cards, which were like two big flat hairbrushes with metal tines.

So like everything else here, it’s not as easy as run down to the local storage synthesizer, where as long as the computer had a 3-d image of a thing it could produce it. I’ve got to melt the iron down and then roll it while it’s hot until i have thin enough chunks that I can cut them into nail lengths, then hammer the nail lengths into the wood.

(I did try to weld a set onto metal, but let me tell you, I don’t have the energy or patience to do that kind of delicate work after digging all day. It’s hot and smelly and hammering is more fun. )

Tonight’s attempt made nails that were too thick, so tomorrow I’ll try again.

Day 599:

The llamas are back! And this time they were accompanied by a man – humanoid at least. He was holding their leashes. (Are they called leashes when they’re on llamas?) The llama man turned out to have a limited vocabulary of mostly “Huh?” and “Ahhh” but between his hand gestures and mine I figured out he was some sort of trader. He wouldn’t come inside, but he was willing to trade some of my emeralds for what appears to be dye — black and hot pink!

I can make colorful socks, folks! This is amazing!

Of course, now it means that I have to cut the wool off the sheep again to dye it…

Anyway, that wasn’t the only amazing thing. As dark was falling I tried to invite the trader in again, to keep him safe, and he shook his head no. He pulled out a bottle from his cloak and drank it… and disappeared.

I kid you not.

Freakin’ disappeared, invisible except for the llama leashes.

So it was him! Or someone like him! Who visited me the last time!

If there was ever a day that made me think the falling cow gave me a concussion it was this one.