Category: One Among the Dead

Day 498:

Remember when I said the other day that I might try burning the red rock to see what happens?

Ok, so my thinking was that the rock has a texture a lot like the coal I dig up – kind of porous and shiny, easily capturing oxygen and the like from the air.

And all my torches are pretty much giant matches – sticks with ground coal dust that i mixed with a very tiny amount of clay so they’d stick to the sticks, thus making torch like thingies.

(This also qualifies under my “this shouldn’t work like this, why won’t I just wake up already?” clause from the other day.)

So I thought “what the heck, let’s make torches out of the red rock too.”

(The fact that I’d accidentally gotten some of them mixed up together — the coal dust and the red rock dust i mean — might have something to do with this decision.)

Turns out the red rock does burn, and when it does, it shoots little sparks of electricity in all directions like one of those horrible science experiments from physics class where everyone’s hair stood on end even more than usual. (My physics class was in a low-g classroom.)

So that was painful.

But also revealing, because if I can make some wire I can probably capture the sparks and run them to the gold rails.

Day 497:

Did some fishing and pet some duckens and rested my weary head for the day. Sometimes I get stuck on a problem and this is the best way to fix it that won’t get me blown to the next asteroid belt.

Day 496:

So it turns out I can build a small length of golden rail, a longer length of plain rail, and another small length of golden rail, with a nice earthworks at each end to keep the cart on the rails. And if I reach down and whack the red rock it’ll get me from one end to the other

So now I’m trying to figure out how I can do it without whacking things with a hammer because, well, that’s more work than I want to do having spent all day with a pickaxe to begin with.

I haven’t tried applying fire to the red rock yet but I might experiment…

Day 495:

Figured out the right ratio of red rock to cart after multiple experiments, most of which involved blowing the cart so far down the rails so fast that it took me an hour to pick up the pieces.

Also, carts: not as durable as I thought.

Glad I already made helmets because I’d be making them now otherwise.

Day 494:

After a day and a half of experimentation, I got just enough shock out of a pile of scary red rock to get my cart to work.

To be honest, there’s something about all of this — I don’t remember electrical physics very well but I do feel like there was supposed to be more to it than this.

Maybe it’s the other day’s shock wearing on me, but when things like this go well, and they shockingly do on occasion, instead of being happy about it I get suspicious, like maybe this is all a fever dream and I’m hallucinating that I’m competent with electricity.

Heck, for all I know the shock I took might’ve been someone jolting my heart back to life in “the real world”.

Or maybe it was just me being pessimistic. Hard to tell.

But the wheels work, sort of, and that’s good enough for me today — at least until I wake up from this hells cape and find out I’m still in high school or something.