Ethan poured trickles of water into Gadget’s mouth, wincing every time some of it fell out and onto the ground. The bottle soon ran out of water, and Ethan handed it back to Alyssa. Before bothering to figure out how to fill it back up, Ethan wanted to eat.
Ethan turned his phone’s flashlight back on and located the fire-starting kit. It was a simple black box about the size of his hand, and Ethan was surprised to see that it was branded.
‘Did the System just steal this from Earth?’ Ethan wondered. Nothing else he’d seen from the System- which, admittedly, he hadn’t seen very much- had been branded. Shaking his head, Ethan opened the box.
Inside was a rod of something and a scraper, and an instruction manual laid beneath them. Ethan pulled the instruction manual out and read. A few minutes later, he placed it back inside.
The box contained a two-inch Ferrocerium rod and its complementary scraper, which were modern tools used to start fires. He simply needed to scrape the Ferrocerium rod with the scraper, and it’d produce sparks hot enough to light even damp wood. Unfortunately, he didn’t know precisely how hot the sparks were because the temperature was in Celsius, which he didn’t understand. He assumed 3000C was a lot, though.
More than ready to eat something, Ethan stuck the two objects back into the small box, turned off his phone’s flashlight, and placed the Fire-starting kit into the pocket next to the one containing his Mana Orb before limping over to the pile of wood they’d gathered. He glanced outside the burrow and grimaced; it was already sprinkling.
“Fuck. We can’t start a fire in here; smoke inhalation isn’t a joke. We wasted too much time… although I doubt we could’ve cooked the Ferrow before the storm hit even if we’d been faster.” Ethan said, and Alyssa let out a loud groan.
Since he still couldn’t cook the Ferrow, Ethan decided to summon an additional goblin. He’d then see if he could feasibly sustain three at once before sending them all out to search for food and get a lay of the land.
‘I wonder if they can make a crude map,’ Ethan thought. Deciding to check, Ethan called Fred over before instructing him to depict the forest as he knew it thus far. Shockingly, Fred didn’t need very much cajoling or rewording, and did so.
The ‘map’ he made in the dirt using his claws depicted the shelter, where they’d slept during the night, and the paths they’d traveled through as well as the area the Goblin had explored while searching for the shelter. That wasn’t very much, but it was far better than what Ethan could’ve done, although it hurt to admit.
Ethan hadn’t really been paying attention to where they were going, and had gotten turned around too many times to know anything more than that he was in the Verdant Gauntlet. Directions didn’t seem to be his thing, really.
After confirming that the goblins could make for excellent scouts, Ethan got to work summoning Fred a friend. He couldn’t force his mind into the state of concentration he’d reached while summoning Fred, but flowed through the Forms easily regardless, only truly struggling on the very last one. Ethan needed to put more points into his Agility Attribute soon, because his hands simply couldn’t keep up.
Ethan was gradually starting to wonder if he’d misinterpreted something about controlling mana, but he decided to think on that later. Right now, he had a fourth goblin to deal with.
The pulsating, knotted ball of ropes made of mana gradually became a living thing, and soon, a goblin stood there, looking around in awe. Alyssa, who’d been watching the whole process, approached.
“What’s this one’s name going to be?” Alyssa asked, looking the goblin up and down. It looked to be on-par with Fred in quality, which was a shame.
“Why don’t you name him?” Ethan said, not particularly feeling like it himself.
“I… don’t really want to,” Alyssa said with a strange tone, and Ethan turned to look at her. Her face was beet-red and she’d averted her gaze from the goblin… and Ethan realized his mistake. For a second, he was paralyzed by embarrassment, unsure of what to do.
“…I don’t really know how to clothe this one,” Ethan eventually said awkwardly, looking around. Fred was still wearing the loincloth Ethan’d made out of his shirt, but he was all out of shirt by now.
“It’s… fine.” Alyssa said, still turned away.
“I’ll have it work exclusively as a scout and such, so you’ll never see it.” Ethan said, and Alyssa let out a sigh of relief. She’d been willing to be around it if she had no choice, but she didn’t want to see the goblin’s bits and bobs.
“You’re Gred. Go look for food and scout out the area. Return every once in a while and carve a map into the surface of the nearby trees and leave whatever food you found at the entrance, but don’t enter without permission. Take this,” Ethan said, handing the goblin his Shardtree branch so that it’d be armed. Gred did as he was told, dashing out of the burrow and into the increasingly-worsening storm.
“Fred’s going to remain with us as a guard since he’s clothed,” Ethan said, pausing to measure the drain on his mana. His natural mana regeneration was enough to sustain Fred and Gred both with some to spare. “I think I’m going to be able to permanently sustain a third one in combination with the Mana Orb, so I’m going to summon it in a minute.”
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“Thanks for the warning,” Alyssa said, her tone seeming to imply that she’d recovered from the situation- but he wasn’t sure, since it was so dark. He could only see a foot or so away from him, and was only able to clearly perceive the locations of everybody in the burrow through his mana sense.
Ethan summoned his third goblin, rapidly named it Cred, and then sent it off to go look for food and scout out the area. Throughout the whole process of the summoning, Ethan felt like he was doing something wrong, but couldn’t locate the problem. Cred came out just fine.
He could still detect the two goblins even as they ran off. The maximum distance that they could be from him had increased dramatically with his improvements to his Magic Attribute, so they had quite the distance to move around.
Ethan wanted to practice communicating through their weird link, like Fred had done, but decided to list everything he needed and wanted to do and prioritize them.
Food and water were at the very top of priorities, with water being the lower-hanging fruit. He had no clue on how to solve the problem of smoke inhalation in the small burrow, but getting water out of the rain shouldn’t be too hard.
Ethan just needed to find some way to funnel the rainwater into their water bottle without dirtying the water.
“I hope the storm ends so that we can eat soon,” Alyssa said, a loud grumble from her stomach punctuating the sentence.
“Maybe Gred or Cred will find something to eat before then,” Ethan said hopefully, but Alyssa’s sigh didn’t sound like she shared his hope. Truthfully, he didn’t really, either.
∑
Ethan stared down at his contraption with more than a little bit of reluctance. Ethan realized he didn’t really need dry wood for this and had tasked Gred with bringing back as much wood, damp or not, as he could, and then used the many sharp metal blades and spikes jutting out of some of the Shardtree branches the goblin had brought back to carve a very crude funnel of sorts. Half of it was held together by hopes and prayers, and the other half of it needed to be manually held together by Fred.
The metal water bottle sat in the center of the crude wooden funnel, where it would hopefully be filled with clean water. With a sigh, Ethan decided that there wasn’t much better he could do with what they had on hand and brought the contraption outside. Ethan propped the precariously held-together-on-its-own side against a small boulder jutting out of the hill, since the other side would be manually held together by Fred.
“Just stand there and hold the funnel together until the water bottle’s full,” Ethan told Fred, and the goblin nodded sadly, already drenched. Ethan went back inside quickly, his cargo pants and hair soaking wet.
“We could probably use the fur sheet to block the entrance,” Alyssa pointed out a few seconds after he entered, and Ethan nodded.
“That’s a good idea. It’ll help keep the cold and water outside, and hopefully dissuade animals from coming inside.” Ethan said.
“Speaking of animals…” Alyssa said, and Ethan sighed. He really didn’t know what to do with the Wyrdfur pup. “I think the Ferrow’s going bad already.” Alyssa finished, surprising Ethan.
“Really? Already?” Ethan asked, grabbing his phone off the ground- he hadn’t taken it out into the rain, obviously- and turning the light on, shining it at the Ferrow’s body.
Shivers ran down his spine when he saw it again, and Ethan grit his teeth. Seriously, why was the Ferrow bothering him so much?
‘Because I saw it die. I didn’t see the Wyrdfur die; it just shuddered and I escaped its fur. Its death wasn’t brutal, either, whereas the Ferrow had its head bitten off in one go.’ Ethan thought. The Ferrow’s death had been far more brutal than the Wyrdfur’s; his face was covered in its dried blood even now, as his best efforts hadn’t been able to get all of it out. Ethan had seen other things die, of course, but their deaths had all bothered him then, too.
Shaking his head, Ethan shoved the thoughts away and inspected the Ferrow. Its body did, indeed, look like it was rotting a little already; some of it was brown and it was beginning to stink to high heavens.
“So, Ferrow has a short shelf life.” Alyssa said, more clearly able to see that it was definitely rotting with the light on it.
“It would appear so,” Ethan responded with a grimace. Their sole item of food was already disappearing.
“What do we do with it?” Alyssa asked, and Ethan rubbed his forehead.
“I don’t know how safe it is for a dog to eat raw meat, but it can’t be better than starving. I think we feed the safe sections to Gadget and then give the rotting stuff to Cred and Gred to dispose of. We can maybe use the fur to make something out of, and I know there are ways to use some of the organs to make tools… but I’ve got no clue how to do that.” Ethan said, “Besides, I already don’t want to have to butcher the thing; I definitely don’t want to mess with the organs any more than I have to.”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea to feed your dog raw alien meat,’ Alyssa said reluctantly, and Ethan agreed… but again, it was probably better than starving.
“We don’t know when we might next find more food. Dogs are descended from wolves, which eat their food raw… so it should be fine, right?”
“I’m pretty sure most wild animals are also infested with parasites and worms,” Alyssa said, and Ethan sighed. She was right… maybe it was best to just toss it all out.
“Ah! The safe meat can go to the goblins. They get hungry, thirsty and tired too, but it’s possible to sustain them solely on mana. Solving their needs makes them cheaper to sustain.” Ethan said. It wasn’t the most efficient use of the meat, since he wasn’t really lacking in mana right now- even now, with three goblins out and about, his natural generation of mana was only barely losing out to the costs, which the Mana Orb could easily fill in for-, but it was better than just letting it go to waste.
Alyssa nodded, drawing the dagger she’d gotten from the chest and kneeling over the Ferrow. Ethan was a bit surprised, but didn’t let it show. “Are you going to need any help?” Ethan asked, and she shook her head.
“No. I took an internship at a butcher shop for a while.” Alyssa said, and Ethan nodded. She’d seemed lost in thought after killing the Wyrdfur, which had led him to think that it was due to the killing of the Wyrdfur, similarly to his feeling with the Ferrow… but if she’d been a butcher, maybe not. Maybe she was just tired, or generally depressed at their situation.
‘This is a good opportunity to strengthen our bond, isn’t it?’ Ethan thought, but then shook his head. He didn’t want to distract her from her work, and she seemed very withdrawn anyway. Or maybe she just didn’t like him, for some reason?
‘Is there anything I might’ve done? Anything about me that she might not like?’ Ethan wondered. She’d been weirdly afraid of the storm, which had turned out to be completely ordinary… was she afraid of water, maybe? There were phobias like that, he thought… but what did that have to do with him?
‘Shit. My thoughts are so scattered right now…’ Ethan thought, shaking his head to clear his mind for what must’ve been the sixth time in the last hour. He glanced down at his watch. 1:01 P.M. it read, and Ethan sighed. There was still so much time left in the day, and it wasn’t like he could waste it.