Category: One Among the Dead

Day 129:

I’d mentioned the giant mushrooms before a while ago. They seem to come in two types, which I’m going to call “big red round” and “flat and tan”.

Neither make good building materials. Neither is particularly good for anything short of making soup out of. The red one has a flavor a bit like a portobello, but the tan one would remind you a bit more of, well, tofu. There’s nothing to it. It works well with fish because at least fish already has a flavor, but it is not a mushroom to mix with ducken.

They’re so very very huge that I was puzzled for a little while how they’d even grow. Then one night I watched a zombie battle a skeleton (it happens occasionally) and where the skeleton’s death dust (for lack of a better word) fell on the wooded area, the mushrooms suddenly shot up to five meters tall.

Metabolic processes on this planet are weird, y’all.

But now that I know how to make the mushrooms grow I’m thinking maybe I’ll have more mushroom soup.

Day 128: The East Entrance is mostly underground, which means it is one of the last places on this spot on the plains that’s in the shade for most of the day. That means the monsters who catch fire in the sun like to hover in my doorway and jump me as soon as I go out.

Now I get into debates like “do I dig out enough space to put windows or will that just result in more zombies fitting on the doorstep?”

These are not the problems I thought I’d be having at this age. I thought I’d be debating which wonderful person I’d be marrying and having babies with, not how many homicidal maniacs I wanted standing around at the crack of dawn.

Day 127:

An attacking skeleton dropped both a gold helmet and a pair of gold boots during our battle. I don’t know why the skeletons and zombies have taken to wearing armor lately but I’m taking it as a compliment.

On one hand I want to melt this stuff down to use for supplies, and on the other hand I could be destroying someone’s cultural heritage. What if this helmet is from the same people who made the boots I’ve been fishing out of the river? I could be destroying the only history of an entire race.

Or I could have enough gold to make a damned clock. It’s a conundrum.

Day 126:

Outside the east entrance, I killed a zombie that jumped me.

He was wearing a chainmail helmet (for lack of a better word), so I took it.

Here’s what I can tell you about it compared to the iron helmet I was wearing:

1. Seems to provide roughly as much protection because while it’s harder for an arrow to pierce, it’s easier for someone to hit me over the head and do serious damage.
2. these rings catch on my hair constantly and pinch and pull and yank. I have a massive headache all the time.

Day 125:

I’ve found two surface-level supplies of quality andesite and granite jutting out of the surface in the area of the East Entrance.

As much as I believe that I should leave my location as secretly as possible, mining out these veins means doing some light landscaping work so that the ground doesn’t have giant ditches in it.

Between zombie attacks, anyway. They hide under the trees where it’s dark.