CHAPTER 7:

THERE'S A FISH IN MY BOOT

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It was a good thing Adi was lying on her side because she woke up hacking more water out. Eurias had been convinced she was dying. She assured him that probably wasn't the case and curled up to finish her recovery nap.

When she next woke, Eurias had half the items out of the bag and scattered around him, ears trained forward on whatever he was fiddling with.

Adi sat up with a yawn. "What are you up to?"

The serthyen started, ears flying up, a twig and rock dropping out of his hands. "Oh, Adi," he said, twisting to look at her. Twine dangled from his hand. "I was trying to create a wand."

"How's that going?" She uncovered her legs to peer at her wounds. They were scabbed over now and looked a lot less terrible.

He sighed heavily, ears drooping as he picked his implements back up. "About as well as finding a container."

Honestly, Adi was impressed he had tried, and that he'd gotten them someplace alright to sleep while she was in shock. It was the most work he'd done in the time they'd been together and all without her direction.

Ears perking, he exclaimed, "Oh! But I found this." He picked up a long stick lying next to him, proudly presenting it.

"Nice," she approved. "Walking staff?"

"Yes," he said, chest puffed a little. "It helps greatly."

"I thought it would." Getting to her feet, she stretched, then picked her way over to her clothes. They were still damp. She took her shirt down and went to sit by the fire with it, next to Eurias. She watched as he tried using the rope to attach the rock to the twig. His fingers fumbled around, trying to hold the rock while tying useless knots in the twine.

It was clear he had zero crafting experience. She decided to take pity on him, asking, "Have you tried splitting the twig and putting the rock in the middle?"

"Splitting the twig?" he asked, looking up. "Why would..." His eyes narrowed in thought as he looked back down at it, then cast around. He picked up the hatchet. It looked extremely unsteady in his hands, and he eyed the twig in his other hand.

"Whoa there," she said, leaning over to take the tool. Eurias gave her a put-out look. "Blade safety. Here."

She set the hatchet on her knee while taking the tip of the twig to the blade. "Never cut towards yourself. You don't want to lose fingers or cut something open. The more power behind your hands, the more damage the blade can do. For this, just get a little notch in the top here, and then..."

When the twig had been started and was now grabbing the blade, Adi lifted the hatchet and gently banged it against the ground. The twig split cleanly down the middle.

"I see," Eurias said, leaning forward to get the two halves. He set the pieces back together, tying a knot on one end. His troubles began once he placed the rock in. First, his first knot came untied, so he stopped to fix that. The rock proved somewhat slippery, repeatedly falling out from between the two pieces, and he was having trouble getting the next piece of rope tied.

"Do you, uh, want some help?"

Eurias gave her a pouting look, defensively holding his crafting materials to himself.

"Okay, okay," she said. "I'll see what I can do about water." She looked at her feet with a frown. Wearing just one boot would leave her with an uneven gait, but maybe it was advantageous... She pulled on her slightly less damp shirt and shorts and grabbed the hatchet before starting to look around.

Now recovered from the shock of almost being drowned and eaten alive, she realized quickly she could fashion something like a bowl out of a large piece of wood. Water was the top priority, since neither of them had drank since early that morning. Hunting around, she found a fallen log about a foot in diameter. It was firm and when she pulled bark away, nothing was rotting. So she started hacking at the end to get a round off.

Adi quickly decided she wanted a chainsaw if she ever did this again. A hatchet was not an ideal tool for cutting rounds. It took her an absurd amount of time to chop away at the wood, and she had to cut out a wedge to get her hatchet farther and farther in. Despite the strength granted by her upped stats, her shoulder and arm quickly wore out and sweat soaked her shirt once more. It didn't help that she was growing increasingly parched.

About halfway through the log's girth, Adi realized she could save herself some effort. At the end of the log, she estimated where her cutting had left off and started hacking.

The wood started coming apart as she made a line across, giving off some satisfying cracking. When the hatchet began wedging itself in the center, she searched around for a rock to hit it with. She came up with a smaller log instead, and smacked that like a mallet against the head of the hatchet. Repeating the process across the diameter eventually had the log end splitting in half.

Impatient for results, Adi straddled the log, got her fingers into the crack and pulled. It started giving, but not all the way. She shoved the hatchet into the crevice, sawing at the wood while she kept pulling.

The wood snapped off at her first cut, and Adi staggered back with the piece. Triumphantly, she held it aloft over her head and cackled.

[Gained Skill: Woodworking!]

She returned to Eurias with her prize. "Behold," she said, "our water container."

Eurias looked up from the spellbook and his wand, and gazed, unimpressed, on the half-round in her hands. "That looks distinctly not container-like."

Adi rolled her eyes and sat down near him, putting more wood on the fire. "It's not done. How's your magic thing going?"

He held up his shitty creation proudly. And for how hard he had worked on the wand, Adi was proud of him too, even if it did look like a second-grader had made it. "I'm choosing a spell to bond to the wand."

Taking the hatchet to the center of her log, she started hollowing it. "Something that can kill giant spiders would be nice."

Eurias' eyes widened as his ears went back. "Giant eight-legged arthropods? Did you... see one of those?"

"No, but they're the classic fantasy thing. Tolkien was scarred by a spider as a child and put giant spiders in his stuff and then everybody else had to have giant spiders in their books. I figure we're bound to run into one at some point."

"The more I hear about your world's literature, the less I like it."

"Listen, I only know about the wine one because it was a meme. And that was Poe. He wrote weird shit." She cleared a small amount of wood chips off her project. Hopefully this wouldn't take too much longer. It might not rain tonight, but not having any shelter was just asking for it. "How do you store a spell in there, anyways? We don't have anything that can carve stone."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Carving? System forbid," Eurias said. "You need only hold the stone and concentrate on the desired spell for approximately one hour."

"How can you tell it worked?"

"Well, many casters have identification skills, but for our purposes, simply trying to cast the spell would confirm success or failure. A bonded stone will also emanate mana once finished."

"Cool," she said, trying to work the hatchet around angles. She found that if she made parallel vertical cuts against the length of the blank, she could come in horizontally and chip more wood out at once. Unfortunately, the curve of the blade would limit how steep and deep she could make this.

Eurias was once more buried in the book. "Since we lost the good quartz, I suspect this can only hold one spell, if that. At least we can write with it. I'm considering force blast or fireball."

Adi paused to give him a concerned look, suspecting he hadn't thought this through. "Fireballs are good at setting things on fire, I'm guessing. Like trees."

Eurias looked up and around at the forest, ears turning back briefly. "Force blast it is." He set the book aside on the blanket, standing up with the wand in hand. His ears went forward in concentration. He raised it into the air, and the tip of the wood started to glow. Adi paused to watch as he began drawing in the air, lines of white light left floating behind.

"How do you do that?" she wanted to know.

The serthyen's ear flicked to her and his lines went up in smoke. He sighed. "You channel mana through the wand. It also takes a bit of concentration."

"Sorry," she said, falling quiet as he tried again.

He got further along this time, but she guessed he made a mistake when he gave a ferocious mumble and waved the lines away, tendrils of white lettering dispersing into the air. On his third try, the spell worked.

Adi felt a light buzz in her chest as the lines morphed into a transparent distortion of air and shot off. A fern about ten feet away rustled as if disturbed.

"Not bad!" she said, clapping. "You almost got that fern."

Eurias' ears drooped. "I was aiming for the tree." He pointed to the tree three feet from the fern.

Adi refrained from laughing, instead saying, "I'm sure you'll get there!"

Brightening and straightening, he started drawing it again. Adi went back to carving. Eurias only hit a tree occasionally and by total accident.

Maybe an hour after she'd started carving, Adi estimated she had at least two cups' worth of volume. That would have to do for today, because they only had an hour or two left of light by her estimate. She set the hatchet aside with a drawn sigh. "It ain't pretty but it'll work."

The System apparently agreed. [Woodworking leveled up to Rank 2!]

Eurias, looking worn from his practice, also stopped. "Well done."

"Now we just... gotta get water," she said, shuddering at the thought of going back to the waterfall. Maybe they could find a shallow spot downstream, one less likely to harbor giant man-eating monsters. But... she glanced at the sky again. They really didn't have time for exploration tonight.

"Let's pick up real quick," she said, shaking the blankets out and shoving them into the pack. She didn't like the thought of leaving their stuff unattended and she certainly wasn't going to go get water alone.

Eurias tucked his wand away in a pocket, crouching to help. In under a minute, everything was packed back up. Getting his staff, he joined her as they trekked back to the waterfall about five minutes away. Adi was worried about finding the still-burning fire again, so she marked trees with the hatchet on their way.

The waterfall looked foreboding now that it was cast in shadow. Adi once more left Eurias and the bag at the log they had utilized earlier, trepidatiously approaching the water once more. Pausing, she went back for Eurias' staff.

As she came to the water's edge, however, a pleasant surprise caught her eye: a boot and a canteen rested about a foot from the edge. Her boot and the lost canteen. The only explanation was that the "fisherman" had returned to fetch her stuff for her. She hoped she'd see them again so she could say thanks.

Adi inched towards her items, smacking at the water in the pool with Eurias' staff. No giant monster appeared, so either it was dead or gone—or just smart enough not to be fooled. She placed her crude bowl down, tucked the staff under her arm, and darted forward to grab the boot and canteen. Water sloshed out of her boot as she retreated.

Once at a safe distance three feet away, Adi realized that her boot was moving. Or, more accurately, something was in there moving. She tipped the boot over the bowl, and two whole-ass fish came flopping out into it. The wriggling things just barely fit, and they certainly weren't happy about it.

"Sorry," she said to them as she pulled her wet and squelching boot on. "I'm gonna eat you though, so this isn't even the worst of it."

Repeating her routine with the staff in the water, Adi knelt quickly next at the water's edge, plunging the canteen in. She wasn't sure how long it was going to take to fill, and it felt like way too long when her heart was pounding in her ears.

The canteen finally stopped bubbling and she pulled out of the water, backing up swiftly and capping it. As she looked downwards, she noticed some kind of scratches on the rocks at her feet, where the boot and canteen had been left.

She crouched down to examine it, moving her feet out of the way. There was a squiggly line with a bulb in the middle. An X marked the middle of the closest side of the bulb. Some kind of emphasis lines were drawn on the inner right side of the bulb. An arrow started at the X and went past the right side of the bulb, curving with the squiggly line until it reached another X.

A map? Adi realized the "bulb" was analogous to the waterfall pool, if the action lines were the waterfall and the X was where the fisherman had helped her out of the water. Did they want Adi to find the other X? What was there?

She called up her CPU compass, trying to figure out far off track it would take them. She had stopped looking at the compass when they had been following the sound of water, so it was anyone's guess.

To her surprise, the arrow pointed in the same direction as the unknown X. I guess that's where we're headed.

Adi stuck Eurias' staff and the canteen under her arm to hold the disgruntled fish with both hands, then made her way back to Eurias.

"Your boot!" he called in surprise. "The canteen! Fish!"

"It looks like our friend came back!"

The two of them made their way back to camp, and Adi told Eurias about the map.

"It's curious that he fled right after saving you and then came back later," the serthyen said.

"I dunno," she said. "Maybe he's shy. How do you know it's a 'he,' anyways?"

"Fishermen are primarily male," he said. "And they almost all prefer male pronouns when they're not, anyways."

"'When they're not'?" she echoed, surprised to hear about preferred pronouns here. Even fantasy races could be progressive, she supposed. And there had been the option in her custom evolution package to add genitalia (not remove—just add).

"The largest fisherman in a group becomes female," he explained, "while everyone else becomes male."

"That's wild," she said, so many impolite questions on her mind now. What was their sexual dimorphism like? Did they go to sleep with one set of genitals one day and wake up the next with different ones? Did it happen slower than that? If they hung out around people outside their species, would the sex or hormones of those people affect them?

Adi wasn't sure how to kill the fish effectively. Chopping off their heads would work, but wouldn't that lose their juices? She settled on bludgeoning them with the flat end of the hatchet and that worked alright. Then she staked the two over the fire to cook.

Eurias wasn't sure his water purification spell would be strong enough for the whole canteen of water, so the bowl hadn't been a waste of effort. Adi waited for his first round of purification, then tested the water. It tasted clean and pure, and with her throat no longer totally dry, she started gathering shelter material as fast as she could. She tasked Eurias with watching the fish to make sure they didn't burn and clearing debris from the shelter spot.

The sunlight was starting to dwindle as Adi hammered two Y-shaped sticks into the ground near the fire. Placing a thick stick into the cradle, she leaned sticks against it for another lean-to.. It didn't look quite as neat as the first one because she wasn't stopping to make the lengths somewhat consistent, only splitting sticks when they were long enough to make two pieces for the shelter.

When the smell of fish was permeating the air, Adi stopped to eat. Unseasoned freshwater fish turned out to be incredibly bland, and scales and bones were annoying. But it was good protein and it was edible, so she made Eurias eat it too. They needed to conserve the dry rations.

After scarfing down the fish, she returned to her shelter-making, now working by firelight. She leaned branches on the two ends of the shelter, closing them off from the wind. She didn't think there was much more she could do in the darkness, after that.

Exhausted, she got their blankets out and shoved the pack inside the shelter. "Bedtime."

Eurias didn't complain, though he was clearly dubious of the shelter's capabilities. It was long enough to accommodate him from hoof to antler, at least. Adi had him lay on the inside and put his staff within easy reach as she took the outside. To fit both of them totally under the shelter, they would have to squish. As it was, her side pressed against him.

"Goodnight," she said. "Sleep well."

"That's extremely unlikely," he grumbled. "But goodnight."

Adi laughed softly, pulling her blanket around her tightly and fell asleep.