Category: One Among the Dead

Day 39:

I dug through the night. After all the problems I’ve had surface-level lately, honestly, it felt good. I think I’ve overdone it a bit though because my right shoulder’s halfway to frozen, and I don’t have a stim kit here to loosen up the muscle if it freezes up.

That means I have to spend the day tomorrow topside doing other things – gathering my crops, checking my animals, etc. etc. Moving my shoulder around, but more gently than swinging a stone pickaxe.

To be honest, I’m not looking forward to it.

I know, I know, humans need sunshine and vitamin D and all that. And the heat of the sun will help my cold and sore muscles, because staying underground all the time isn’t exactly great for me.

But half of what’s outside wants to kill me and I’m not up for that all the time.

Yesterday, when I came up to my rooms to grab some water to drink, one of the camouflage giraffe corgis was standing at my window, just staring in. Just… staring… like the only thing it wanted to do was come inside and blow me to kingdom come.

I guess if there’s one thing I’m lucky about, it’s that they seem to be too dumb to realize they could collapse my cave house, and crush me inside, by blowing up right next to it.

And at least it isn’t the land squid. I heard one of them while I was mining yesterday, stopped mining, and hid under an overhang for about a half hour, hoping it would pass me by. It didn’t do it’s **vwoop** thing into the cave I was in, so I was spared.

I’m not really safe anywhere here. I just feel safer in the caves. After all, I’ve been trained in mining, not so much in farming and animal husbandry. Especially xenobiological animal husbandry.

Anyway, the sun is up, and I should go use it to relax. Maybe I’ll start a fire and heat some water and take a bath or something. I miss hot showers.

Day 38:

All I did today was dig and fall down.

Occasionally, when The Company knew we’d be working in risky locations, they’d allow us to use the internal dampening belts, that ensured if you fell you wouldn’t hit the ground hard.

(The complication was that they also dampened the inertia of our mining, so they slowed us down significantly.)

I’d give my eye teeth for a dampening belt right now.

Day 37:

I said I was going to dig all day and I did. Wore out a number of my tools, too, so I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

I hit a huge vein of ore  (I think I mentioned that the other day), but I didn’t realize how huge. It’s big enough I’ve been digging for 14 hours and it’s still going. For a while it was swerving off my chosen course of “toward the mountain” but then the entire vein swerved back toward the mountain, so I’m good there.

I’m sore. I’m tired. I’m running out of tools and seriously missing my mining laser. But I feel a lot more accomplished today than I did when I was repairing things other creatures broke.

It takes a special kind of person to fix things that other people break, especially when it happens over and over and over again. I was always kind of impressed that the ship’s mechanic, Marvin, didn’t just beat me over the head with my laser mining pistol after the third or fourth time I held it too close to the wall and half-melted its firing mechanism.

Marvin was pretty awesome.

Marvin was actually his last name – his first name was like Hinkley or Reginald or something horrible that had been passed through the generations, so we all called him Marvin.

He was about two meters tall, sandy hair that was thinning at the edges and showing a bit of grey at the ears, stormy grey eyes but a smile that lit up the room. He spent most of his time laughing. He loved a challenge, loved to see what horrible ways we’d broken the equipment this time, and almost always could fab something out of the fabricator to repair whatever we’d done.

One time when I was snooping around his workshop waiting for him to finish a job for me, I looked him up on the versnet. Turned out he was the top contributor to the MakerBotVers network for repair and upgrade instructions in like the whole universe. Or at least the part of the universe that uses versnet.

He was like everything my dad wasn’t when it came to life: handy, friendly, laughing, willing to share what he knew with others…

Anyway.

Dug a lot of holes. Need some sleep. Will probably do the same tomorrow.

Day 36:

All I’m going to say about today is that it hadn’t been my plan to double the size of the carrot bed…. until two (TWO!) giraffe corgis jumped me at the fence line and blew a giant hole in the bedrock so I didn’t have to.

If you’re going to fill in a crater and rebuild a fence anyway, might as well plant more crops I guess.

To heck with this noise; tomorrow I’m going back underground where it’s peaceful.

Day 35:

I thought I’d take it easy today, since I almost got crushed to death by falling rock yesterday.

Ha.

I woke up, took a quick dip in the cave’s spring, got redressed, headed outside to pick my carrots, and a camouflage giraffe corgi was just waiting around the corner like some kind of… like some kind of stalker or something. One minute I’m carrying a basket I weaved to load full of carrots, the next I’m flying through the air like a rag doll.

So much for healing those sore muscles.

Even better, when I came to I discovered that the beast had blown a wall through the fence like that kept the chickens and the cows in. By headcount, I think I only lost one of each. The cow it appeared wandered off. Based on the smell, though, that chicken had to have been trying to snuggle the giraffe corgi through the fence when it exploded.

I do not understand exploding fauna.

I seriously do not understand exploding fauna that have to live near other fauna.

Anyway, spent the rest of the day repairing the fence while nursing a sore shoulder.

And I still don’t have the coddamned carrots in, so I now have to do that tomorrow instead of digging toward the mountain.