Bec woke up feeling fine. She didn’t hurt. She didn’t have a headache. She felt fine. Rolling over, she felt something stabbing into her hip. A rock. Oh, right. She passed out on the riverside.
“Thank Dust, you’re up. I fixed your clavicle, mostly, as you slept. Please don’t make a habit of falling asleep outside.” Al almost sounded like he’d sigh. Bec decided “it” didn’t suit such a real, human, thinking thing like Al and she’d just have to go with him since that was what the timbre of his voice made her think.
“I don’t mind if you call me a “he”, but you need to get to the trailer now.”
She realized that it was getting dark and was inclined to agree with Al. It would be very dark out in the middle of nowhere. Bec sat up and felt gravel and her shirt sticking where a frankly fucked up amount of blood covered her shoulder and the ground. “Is this ok?” She gestured at the whole mess she made.
“What do you think?” Al responded.
“I feel fine.”
“You feel fine? Well, let’s reevaluate that notion soon.”
Bec stood all the way up and her vision began to fuzz. She felt her balance go to shit and she fell back down. She was so dizzy. Eventually, she kept on her feet and made the kilometer trek back to the trailer. It was the hardest walk that she had ever made. Bec’s huffing and puffing made it extremely clear that she was severely hobbled. “I’m dying.” She said as she tried to catch her breath and failed.
“You aren’t dying. You are just anemic and extremely deprived of calories and other nutrients.”
“Nutrients.” Bec’s voice filled with determination as the trailer came into sight. She opened the door and fell to her knees and crawled over to the fridge. She ate the last three Danishes right there on the floor and fell asleep again.
Bec awoke to find she was again stuck to the floor. She literally peeled herself from the cold paneled ground and looked into the mirror vanity. She looked like absolute hell. The back of her hair looked like a blood-soaked soap pad. Her shirt was just drenched in blood, so she took it off and threw it in the sink and ran the water.
Her bra’s strap was completely and utterly ruined. Man, I liked that bra… She shrugged and placed it in the newly dubbed “destroyed shit” drawer in the bottom of her dresser. It may be useful still. She tried to roll her damaged shoulder, and it felt tender and sore.
“It will take a while to repair but the tendons are fixed, and the bone has begun to reattach. Soon it’ll be strong again.”
“How soon?”
“Not soon enough. It’s the impacts you face that worry me. It’ll be maybe a few days until you can afford to take a hit without breaking it again. You should be fine to do heavy lifting in a day. The real problem is that I don’t think your diet is conducive to rapid repairs. Basically, I’m on a shoestring budget, so to speak.”
What I wouldn’t do to just destroy some fish right now.” Bec was hungry. Really, really hungry. She didn’t want to practice what she felt was a real foothold in her Word until she had a food source. If it burned calories, she’d be risking exhaustion with no way to replenish her stores. “I need to catch those damn fish.”
Bec needed a plan. She had no idea what the limits of the penetrative power of the newly named “Bulletfish” were. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to catch one with a t-shirt strung between two sticks like a net. Bec knew that they were even better at piercing underwater because she was bleeding out dead in an instant that time she waded into the water. *That one time I died... apparently*. Bec fought the urge to grit her teeth at that.
Letting her mind wander back to the task at hand, she felt like she just had to use one of these metal panels from the trailer or risk them poking through her defenses. It was her only option that didn’t risk existing material and opened up her to a new resource.
She imagined that she could lay a panel onto some smoldering coals and cook. Then again, she could probably do the same with a sufficiently dry large river rock. Her mouth watered at the prospect of eating some warm food. She picked a corner floor panel from the dining portion of the room. She wasn’t gonna miss this panel.
She lugged the heaviest rock she could find into the trailer and took her smaller hammering rock and started looking for weak spots. She banged the flooring panel until she had an idea where the panel was hollow underneath as opposed to part of the frame of the trailer. She lifted the boulder over her head and slammed it down on the vulnerable part.
It dented. Only a little. She had some work to do. She kept banging and banging for almost 5 minutes and she was exhausted. Seeing how the floor panel was no longer perfectly flush with the floor gave her hope. The panel had come loose to an extent. She had to pray it wasn’t affixed to the frame with anything like a screw because she didn’t think she had it in her to shear metal without a crowbar.
Bec tried to get a grip on the corner that had bent up, but it was too smooth. Bec bit her lip in frustration. She just couldn’t get a grip on the other side of the panel for leverage. What was she going to do? Bec looked at the door frame to try and figure out how the trailer was constructed. If the walls operated anything like the flooring (and the fact that there was a single step down from the trailer to the ground around it was encouraging), she imagined that there was airspace between the ground and the floor panel.
Bec walked to the outside corner of the dining quadrant and examined it. Was there a way to dig under the trailer and push up? Maybe she could peel the trim around the bottom of the trailer and stick her hand inside? She had to move the pile of chair chunks away from the corner when she saw gold.
Bec lugged the boulder back outside and started chucking it at the panel siding with renewed vigor. The long and narrow panels hiding the airspace of the flooring were raised compared to the majority of the wall, meaning that a slight bend in the panel would give her ample grip to rip it off.
Finally, after a series of bolder slams, it gave up the goods as it popped out of whatever mooring it was affixed to and fell off. No prying necessary! Bec cringed as she then realized her mistake. This 2-foot-long panel was what she needed more than the flooring panel and now there was free air flowing in from the outside into the trailer. Sure, it was only a crack in the flooring but Bec wasn’t happy about the prospects of alien bugs or snakes or whatever sneaking into her room. The crack wasn’t that big, so she just laid her damaged t-shirt on the problem for now.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Bec looked at the airspace underneath the trailer and noticed that there didn’t seem to be any piping going towards the sink in the opposite corner from the dining area or the toilet in the far corner. “Al, how do my sink and toilet get water?” Bec couldn’t get an amazing vantage point to the roof since the trailer was inconveniently placed at the top of a hill, but she couldn’t really see a tank on top. Other than a motorized pump, tanks on roofs or in a tower would typically be the other solution to pressurize the water flow of a building.
“I don’t know, and I don’t see anything specifically about your sink in the Shop. I do see a number of books on plumbing ‘fabricators.’ Maybe buying a book may help you learn what it’s doing.”
“How much?” Bec knew not to get her hopes up.
“10,000 LuCre for ‘Plumbing Fabricators for Morons: Ins and Outs on Human Ins and Outs’.”
Bec was curious, for sure, but she knew it was not the time for something like that. The title alone gave her the impression that the Fabric was capable of either 1) generating energy for pumping or 2) generating water for drinking. She wouldn’t know for sure, but it helped to paint a fuzzy picture about the Fabric and her Word. If her Word was water, would she be able to shoot jets of water out of her hands? Bec thought her riverside revelation about her Word was that it needed to use existing waves to work but maybe she was wrong about that. Well, maybe she was wrong about the whole idea and she was dying to test it out. “First food,” Bec reminded herself.
Bec’s plan started by rolling the big, smashy boulder down the hill towards the river. It was constantly getting stuck in the increasingly moist dirt of the area, but she managed to pull it loose with the panel. “I’m gonna really love you, aren’t I?” Bec’s grip on the panel tightened as though she feared that it would be stolen by some accursed force of nature that prevented things from going her way. Finally, after an exhausting kilometer of boulder rolling, Bec had it poised on the lip of the river.
The river wasn’t too far across. Maybe five or six meters wide, but Bec was not an Olympic jumper and she was going to need to figure out how to cross it safely. Bec shook her head to clear her thoughts. “Food.” She focused on her plan. “Please work.” She pushed the boulder in, causing the flow of the water to subtly change as it rushed around the boulder. The disruption wasn’t enough. Sure, she could see the water crest over the top of the boulder but after a minute, she knew it failed. “Damn.” She tossed the panel down to the ground in frustration. After a few moments of fuming, Bec collected herself. It might still work, if I find a new boulder to toss in.
Bec was so, so unhappy that she had to find another damn boulder to roll in the damn river. After a miserable three hours passed, Bec managed to get herself another boulder and lifted it onto and then over the other boulder. She could have danced as she saw that her well-placed boulders, side by side, seem to be a real annoyance to the fish of the stream. A scant few of them opted to not “go with the flow,” and hopped over the tire-sized boulders. Boulder, boulder, boulder, boulder. It totally stopped sounding like a word to her.
The fish leaping over the “big rocks” were exactly what Bec was hoping for. “You fools,” Bec chuckled, “your little shortcut will cost you dearly.” Her chuckle turned evil as she readied her panel like a bat and started smacking the jumping fish. The first few fish were knocked back into the water, but, after a while, she got the hang of it and started slapping the fish onto the bank. Whenever she caught one, she promptly started to wail on it with the panel.
Bec was annoyed at her shortsightedness when she was caught off guard to see that, for the most part, it wasn’t the bulletfish that she was catching. More times than not, she was trying to bat a two to three-kilo fish that jumped the rock. Bec was thinking that bulletfish were the only fish she would deal with.
Of course, there would be more than one kind of fish in this river. Bec was clearly not thinking straight when approaching this problem. She suddenly realized she perhaps could’ve used the pair of earrings in her bag as hooks. Could she have then used string pulled from scrapped clothes to fish normally? Bec didn’t dwell on this fact for very long because she was far too glad to see that this was working! Bec started to have fun trying to smack the fish onto the bank. It was only then that she noticed that, to her recollection, river fish in the documentaries she saw tended to go UP stream and not downstream. Well, she didn’t consider herself an expert on river fish ecology, but the relatively boring activity begged for some introspection, so she pondered the discrepancy.
I would normally think of river fish as going upstream to breed, so the brood would be the ones going down the stream. Maybe. Makes sense that the young would not be equipped to fight the current early on. These fish seem pretty mature though. Maybe there is a pond upstream for me to look at. These hills turn to mountains on the horizon though so maybe it’s a river all the way to the mountains. Isn’t there a saying about following rivers downstream to civilization? Does that apply when I have no idea how many people and places there are in the area? I’d imagine that tip only really works when you can assume that, if you’re lost near civilization, you can find civilization nearby. I have no idea if the Lauds people put me down in an easy spot or an insanely hard spot given how they gave me the Timelet. The Timelet, theoretically, could make even million-to-one odds doable.
Bec’s mind wandered as she waited for a fish. This was precisely why she wasn’t even remotely prepared for a stray bulletfish jumped low and punched straight through her right ribcage and she dived futilely back on to the bank almost a full second too late.
“Fuck.” The word came out raspy, choked by pain. Bec laid on the bank with her hand on the hole. It was bleeding bad and she was tasting the iron on her tongue. Al, how bad. Like a woman at her second rodeo, this wasn’t Bec’s first rodeo.
“Very bad. You are losing blood at a precipitous rate. I think you will be unconscious in the next 5 minutes. If you don’t drown in your own blood in the next ten, you’ll be dead from blood loss in an hour.”
That’s with your healing?
Al was distraught. “What healing? I have nothing to work with here! You were lucky I could fix you up the first time on a supply of pure Danish.”
Hey, there’s fruit in there. Bec coughed and felt blood dribbling down her chin. She was going to die again. Unless… Bec winced, not from the pain but from the prospect. She swallowed some of her bloody spit. How bad could it be? Honestly? How bad could it be if she just…
Her eyes wandered to the fish pile. She scooched over to the pile on her butt and picked up one of the bulletfish. It wasn’t that big. Merely pinky sized. It’ll be like eating an anchovy.
Bec consoled herself with that lie as she put it in her mouth and started to chew. Urf. It felt like Bec was eating a bloody and vaguely crunchy gummy bear. She swallowed and grabbed another one. She ate every single one, sometimes jamming two in her mouth at once. When she ran out, she bit into the belly of the first of the larger fish she caught. It reeked and tasted like shit.
I need to not think about how I’ve not cleaned or gutted my catch. Bec tried to fish out the guts with her finger but she felt her world start to fill with TV static. This is what it feels like passing out from blood loss. The fact that she was familiar with that feeling gave Bec no satisfaction as she took one more vicious bite out of the side of fish and then laid it flat behind her, elevating her head, using it as a pillow. Maybe this will stop me from drowning in my own blood, I dunno fuck it, ha. That was Bec’s last complete thought before she woke up.