kirabug's idea files

Day 654:

One of the things you need to do when you’re mining without a suit or exoskeleton is bring your own water. I’ve carved containers out of gourds, wood, and stone so far… the stone was by far the hardest (pun not intended) but also the least effective, because, well, cork is scarce around here and carving a twist-on lid is not easy in stone.

So I keep water on me, because dehydrating isn’t fun, and it’s easy to do even in humid and cold conditions like the inside of a cave.

The other thing you need to do is urinate, because you’re drinking all that water. The space suits and exoskeletons used to take care of all the various bodily functions’ clean up for us, even down to vomiting, because, well, nobody likes to asphyxiate in space. But here it’s just me and my armor and the hope that there isn’t a murderous exploding giraffe-corgi on the other side of the wall.

Lately I’ve been trying to aim for dirt, because it absorbs the smell better than stone and doesn’t leave a stain. Gravel drains everything straight through, as does sand, and “mounds of charcoal lying around waiting for you to pee on them” don’t seem to be a thing.

Today, I was draining a vein down a crevasse into what I thought was dirt… it was a zombie’s head.

I recommend using zombies to absorb urine. It doesn’t help their smell, it doesn’t remove your smell, and it seriously angers the zombie.

Day 653:

The zombies are dressing better. More and more of the ones that come to attack me are not only wearing armor, but gold armor at that.

I’m not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.

The armor doesn’t stop much. Gold is way too soft to make into anything functional, and whoever made the armor doesn’t appear to have learned much about alloys because as far as I can tell from melting it down it’s pure gold.

It does disappoint me that we don’t get many lightning strikes in the rainstorms here. (Okay, we get cloud-to-cloud but not many ground strikes.) Because a whole bunch of zombies marching over a mountain wearing highly conductive gold armor? That’s a barbecue ready to happen.

Day 652:

One of the biggest challenges I face when chasing a seam is deciding whether to chase it up or chase it down.

Usually I go up to the top of it and then chase it down… but when chasing it up means chasing it to a cave entrance where the monsters like to hang out, that’s not always the best-sounding idea.

Anyway, I’ve got a pretty nasty black eye where a zombie punched me in the face earlier, and I’m thinking I might wall off this particular surprise cave entrance and dig down for a bit.

Day 651:

Every time I think I’ve exhausted this particular mine, I find another vein of ore just below what I’m working on. It’s a lot of digging.

Also, for some reason, I seem to have a lot more granite in this particular mine. I don’t know why granite would form in one location versus another (that was the geologist’s job) but I wish I did. It would be easier to target the kind of things I wanted to find. So far all I know for sure is that diamonds are always a jerk to get to, and usually lava is involved.

In the meantime, perhaps I’ll be done this vein sometime soon and can go back to mapping and landscaping the area? So I don’t get shot at anymore?

Probably not.

Day 650:

I’m still extracting ore from out from under a chunk of hill I thought would be, well, hill. It’s going pretty deep, though not all the way to the bedrock the way some of the ore has.

I’m also still working through the night if I don’t pay attention to the time. It’s hard to pay attention when you’re underground and the watch I build is, well, not fantastic. I should probably try to figure it out and make a better watch, but sometimes I get home and I’m just too tired to do anything other than write in this journal.

I still believe, despite everything else, that there’s still hope that either I will e rescued or that my remains will be found close enough to my journals that someone out there will find me and know my story. It’s a rare privilege to have someone not only find such journals  but also pay attention to them, so I know it’s more of a hope than an actual fact. But it’s my hope.

And meantime, I dig more ore.