Category: One Among the Dead

Day 124:

I’m finally starting to feel good enough to mine again, but the walk from the east entrance and back with all that stone is still pretty intense.

I’m mining a ravine nearby instead. It’s a little dangerous because the ravine runs between the ocean and the lake, and one wrong strike against a wall could bring the waters together, and me stuck in a cave below them.

Even if I wasn’t facing imminent death, it’s a major breach of mining ethics to dump an ocean into a lake. That’s how you wreck an ecosystem, right there.

Anyway, I’m hauling a lot of fill stone and gravel into the ravine to strengthen it. In some small ways I’m probably wrecking a caving system in the process, but compared to the damage that ocean could do to that lake’s freshwater fish population, I’ll take my chances.

Day 123:

I was jumped by some zombies when I went outside to feed the duckens. Not sure where they got them, but one of the zombies was wearing gold boots.

Gold boots don’t even make sense, really. Gold is such a soft metal that they scratch like the dickens, and the hinges to keep the bits together have a lot of wear on them. I don’t even think they’re worth the gold they’re made out of.

But they sort of fit, so I’ll probably keep them around until I decide whether or not to melt them down. I don’t really want to because if I try to melt down the gold, there’s going to be a lot of impurities and I’m not sure I want to get the furnace hot enough to burn those off.

On the other hand, the gold I dug up wasn’t much purer, so maybe if I melt it all at once I’ll get something worthwhile.

Day 122:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

There are tiny zombie children running around in my yard yelling “GRRR” like their zombie elders and attempting to kill me.

My salvation so far is the bar on the door, which even those little monsters haven’t figured out how to lift.

So somehow these things do breed. And oh are they ugly. I hope I don’t come across a whole kindergarten of them.

Day 121:

Been working on the bed some more because the gash in my leg is only just starting to heal closed and I don’t want to push it further than necessary.

I’ve got enough wheat at this point to make flour, though grinding flour is definitely not something I’m good at. My flour is filled with chips of rock and I need to figure out a better way to make it. Still. Flour I have.

I also have lots of ducken fat, scraped from the skins of the duckens I’ve been killing and plucking to make the feather bed.

Which means tonight, for the first time since getting stranded here, I had good old-fashioned fried ducken. Fried ducken is delicious, especially with fried potatoes and fried carrots.

Don’t question the carrots. If you’d boiled everything for the last 120 days you’d fry the carrots too.

Day 120:

I took some time today to just walk around the caverns and see where things were at. You know, kind of a tour of my domain, or somthing.

I’m making good progress digging to the east. At least I think I am. I can clearly see the big mountain when I’m at the east entrance, which wasn’t true of my home location, so I’ve definitely gotten closer. It looks like the area I’m digging in might be south of the big mountain, but I can shift northerly when the time comes.

It’s also hard to tell for sure how far away I am since I can’t tell if the mountain is big and close or really big and far away.

At some point I suspect I’ll have to dig under the river. Not really looking forward to that. If I have enough ducken skins left over after making my bed, I might try to figure out how to waterproof some leather.