Category: One Among the Dead

Day 181:

Spent the day farming. Harvested some potatoes and carrots and wheat, which means more carrot bread in my future. I remember my grandparents buying potato bread, but I haven’t figured out how to make it yet. Potatoes, it turns out, are very wet.

So am I. It’s raining like crazy outside.

Sometimes, the only time I’m really warm anymore is when I’m deep in a mine standing a few dozen meters from flowing lava. What I’d give for an electric blanket.

Day 180:

It’s been a half a Standard year since I arrived. I don’t know how I feel about that except that my memory of what it was like to live somewhere else are beginning to fade. Was there ever a time where I brushed my teeth with a sonic toothbrush and used robots to do my hair? It doesn’t seem like it.

I found a problem with my map. I was off by a few feet on one of the levels, and that meant everything else I mapped was wrong too. It wasn’t really noticeable until I tried to draw in a new chamber and it overlapped another one.

So instead of digging right now, I’m map drawing. Cartographing?

It’s using a lot of paper.

Day 179:

I’ve been taking my logs with me when I go deep in the mines for a while, so that if I don’t make it home one night I can still write something down before I sleep.

(I have two beds now — one in my “home base” where the animals are, near where I landed, and one on the eastern side of the cave closer to the big mountain. Sorry I don’t always update about my domestic chores but “sewed together three more ducken skins” every day doesn’t make for particularly interesting reading. Heck, I’m doing the work and I’m bored.)

Anyway, two days ago I dug up some strange ore that looks a lot like obsidian, and which I thought was ordinary obsidian since I found it between a lava flow and an underground spring. But then I discovered that it was behaving funny. It vibrated near paper products. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous and if I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.

So I had the ore on my worktable and I started a new notebook, because the old one filled up on day 176. I chronicled my study of the strange obsidian and left everything – the notebook, and the obsidian, and my best pen, right on the workbench.

Yesterday, I dug holes all day, came back to my workbench, wrote down a bit about digging and holes and dirt and the like, and how I’d found more lapis lazuli. So the workbench had the notebook, the blue stone, and the obsidian on it. Without thinking (because why would I?) I tossed one of my pickaxes up on the table.

There was a loud whoosh, a bright light, and a small fire.

I don’t know what the flock happened.

I do know that the obsidian stopped vibrating, probably because the notebook caught fire and burnt to a crisp. (So did my pen!)

The lapis lazuli was apparently consumed in the fire because it’s gone. And it was really pretty and I’m actually quite pissed about that. (IT WAS MY GOBSLAMMED ROCK! FLOCKING PHYSICS!)

And my pickaxe is, um, glowing. I have no idea what that means, but it also feels lighter, like it’s easier to swing.

I’m torn between using it all the time now because it’s much easier on the arms, and not using it at all because I don’t exactly have a cure for radiation poisoning sitting around and I don’t know if this is radiation but I’ve heard that radiation poisoning is a heck of a bad way to go.

Yeah. Decisions. I hate being an adult sometimes.

And so that log book is gone and I spent most of today making a new one because I didn’t have all the supplies – or a spare one – and that’s why this entry is here today and there are no entries the last two days.

I’ve moved the obsidian into a different chamber of my cave and I’m keeping a very close eye on it. There’s enough crap that explodes down here as it is.

Also, since my best pen is gone and it’s the one I used for drawing, might not be any sketches for a little while. Unless I decide to finger-paint. Which isn’t looking likely.

Day 176

I’m just… I’m mad today. I don’t even know why I’m mad. It makes getting anything done hard because it’s hard to concentrate when you’re angry and when you do make mistakes (because you can’t concentrate) you end up lashing out and throwing things and that just makes it worse.

I’m sore and tired and frustrated and I was sore and tired and frustrated yesterday too, but today I’m angry.

I HATE THIS PLACE. I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. I WANT TO GO HOME. I WANT TO LIVE MY LIFE WITH MY FRIENDS AND MY FAMILY AND NOT WITH A BUNCH OF MUTUANT CHICKEN THROWBACKS.

DAMMIT.

Day 175:

Not much to report either from a digging or a sheep-locating standpoint.

This evening, when the sun started coming down, I found a safe place to stand and just watched it go down. The sky is a brilliant orange nearly every night as the sun drops out of view, and from the other side a deep purple rises like a wave pushing the colors out of the sky.

I quite like it, even if it means that I have about thirty seconds to get inside before the zombie hordes arrive.