word mining central
Day 723:
The map I made of this area is complete and ready for me to hang up.
Now it’s a decision to make – do I keep going west and try to get to the mountain even though there’s a volcano in the way? Or do I head east toward the zombies (not that any direction is away from the zombies) and the town?
I’m thinking the town.
Day 722:
Today, a bunch of the actual squids, the kind with ink sacks and the whole bit, spent the whole time that I was “mining” sand out of the river. Absolute total pain in the dorsal arms if you ask me. I ended up killing two of them just to drive them away.
They’ve never acted like that before, but it was that kind of day.
If the squids in the water acting aggressively was a surprise, then the super-tall jet-black land squid that vwooped into the room where I was mining, and promptly ignored me no matter what I did (including swing my sword at it a couple of times) was a total surprise.
Those squid thingies are generally incredibly paranoid and incredibly deadly. Literally giving them a sideways look has gotten me drawn into a heck of a fight in the past. But this time? Nothing.
Maybe it’s backwards day or something.
Day 721:
This morning I went out the eastern door of my complex only to find a sopping wet zombie standing in my foyer.
Not how I wanted to start the day especially since he immediately attacked me with an egg.
At least it wasn’t a potato this time.
Anyway, having dispatched him, I spent the day cleaning up the yard so fewer of them can sneak up on me.
I’m starting to worry though that they are finding my entrance easier now that I’m cleaning it up. This is the second surprise morning visit I’ve had in recent memory.
I’ll have to think on it. I don’t necessarily want to put a building here but it might be required.
Day 720:
When I mined for a living instead of just for survival, I wore mech arms. They were work, don’t get me wrong, but their gravity assist and inertia dampeners meant I almost never got any kind of muscle strain.
I do more damage to my arms now just pulling weeds from the pumpkin patch than I did working a full week in a mine.
I can remember getting in trouble with the captain when they found out we were using the mech arms off the clock so that we could play marathon FPS Classic tournaments on our days off without getting wrist strain.
I bet I’ve totally lost all my gaming skills.
On the other hand, this is a mean pumpkin pie I’ve baked for lunch, so not everything is bad.
I wish I could figure out a way to make ice so I could treat this pulled triceps though.
Day 719:
I got caught in a firefight with some skeletons earlier when this exploding giraffe-corgi popped up in the middle of it to blow me to smithereens. I mean it was close, can-smell-it close and let me tell you that’s not a pleasure no matter what you’ve heard about giraffes or dogs.
Anyway, before it could go kablooey the skeleton, which was aiming at me, shot the exploder instead! I was saved!
But that wasn’t the weird part. I mean the skeletons have pretty crappy aim, like bad-guy-in-a-vid aim, so them shooting themselves, each other, the zombies, the spiders, all kind of “normal” for whatever normal is when you’re using these nouns in a sentence as if these things can happen.
The weird part was that after I dispatched the skeletons, and I was picking up loose arrows and the like, I found a record.
Like, a record!
A black waxy disc with some writing on it and very very tiny grooves as if something was carved into it!
I mean, I wouldn’t even recognize it if it weren’t for the box of them my grandfather inherited from his great-grandfather and then sold to pay off the farm.
So I’ve found something more precious than diamonds. How it got into that firefight I have no idea, but I’m locking it up somewhere safe because I’m pretty sure an anthropologist or someone will want to see this thing if anyone ever comes to get me off this rock.