D.A.B, day 14
Canoe
"Almost there!"
Reiley increase her riding pace, and I grab her hips and finish inside her. Reiley makes a deep guttural orgasmic moan and grab the bed frame as she leans back, and I finish unloading as I look at the fantastic sight she is. I sit up as I caress her sides and glide my hand up to the side of her breast, before licking her nipple, and I'm rewarded with more moaning as her whole body shakes. We collapse back down and passionately kiss as Reiley lies on top of me. I fondle her butt and that sweet spot on her back that makes her butt and vagina clench and shake, and I feel her fangs as she gently bites me in my lower lip. I'll probably get puncture holes in my lip sooner or later. We just enjoy the moment and feeling each other. I feel Reiley's fangs as she gently nibbles on my ear and softly say:
"The weather is nice, and the wind not too bad. Take a morning canoe trip along the coast up north? If we have a problem we have time to make it back on foot."
"Yeah."
"Standard belt kit with water bottle, nose clamps, flower bottles and weapons. Cloaks for the sun and as concealment. Light rucksacks, with just extra water in those clay bottles and some dry salted jerky, plus a roll of cord or two. Then the three larger sealable pots for any salt if we find that Salt Boon. We could always use more salt. We should take another pot or two just to store things in if we find something. Your projects needs good sand."
"Sounds good."
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After filling up the creek pots, I fill up the small flower bottles and seal them while Reiley keep watch. I really would have made a true test of this plan, but it is as is, and I have a plan for A-B testing. Two raw meat pieces on sticks by the river and both under simple roofs to protect the meat from rain. But one piece with a good amount of dried flower powder. The tricky part is that it needs to be done just before rain, but it will give us some indication that it works.
After washing off we take the rucksacks, and make our way over to the canoe. We carry the canoe out over the beach and gently glide it into the water. This is one of those canoes where we sit with bended knees directly on the ribs, so at least I will be a bit sore and stiff later today, but it is at it is. Reiley takes the front position and I take the back. That way she can focus on looking for threats and maybe shoot with her bow and sneak a shore to take a peek, while I steer and adapt to her paddling and is ready to leave. I've paddled canoes and kayaks before since that is a part of basic outdoor experience in most Swedish schools, just like orienteering and doing a couple of hikes, and I've been on canoe trips with friends. There is something like a hundred thousand lakes in Sweden and so many prepared canoe trails, especially in southern Sweden. Most rivers have many power plants, but that actually makes the river more navigable since the rivers would have too many rapids otherwise, and most power plant dams have a canoe take up ramp and signs to make passing the dam easy. The bad part is that it might be a kilometer or more to carry the canoe, so a folding transportation cart is basically mandatory. It's very easy and quite cheap to rent canoes and take a trip, and there are many many companies that just supplies canoes and the canoe transportation, or for a trip across a connected lake or two. With the right to roam it is easy to move in nature, and many many routes and places have prepared shelters and rest locations. Being out in nature is just a big part of Swedish culture. Of course, many never do, but many regularly do. During late summer some popular routes and over night camps have so many people that it might be hard to find a nice spot. I tend to avoid those trails simply because it's just nicer to avoid the crowd, and it is not like there isn't plenty of options.
Going sideways in the waves is a bit of a challenge, but the wind and waves aren't that bad and we make it work. A lot of the shore is surprisingly shallow, but I guess all the rocks and weathering from the ridges must end up somewhere, and we pass between huge rocky spires covered in green foliage jaunting up from the sea. This nature is very pretty, and the canoe works well, although it feels weird doing this in cloaks and without life jackets. And the paddles could be better.
Gliding forward through the water while looking at the nature and Reiley, make me realise how very strange my life have become. I'm in a leather wrapped canoe made by an alien, exploring a rocky jungle coast on an alien planet with planetary rings and at least two moons, with an alien woman that I'm in a relationship with, and we are trying to evade Dinosaurs and other aliens. Just calling it 'strange' seems like an understatement. I wonder what happened those 9 days, and just how far I am from Earth. Maybe the damn alien bastard messed with time and slowed it down. I don't know how they managed that, but gravity does that, and they seem to have cracked FTL. Hell, I could be a clone or something, but did they really clone my memory, clothes, tools and tech to perfection too? I don't think I'm a fabricated human with made up memories. What does my family and friends think happened to me?
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We find the 'Salt Boon' in a protected cove behind another ridge from the one where our huge cliff with our hut is, and it should be reachable by land without much difficulty. It is just more difficult than from the sea, and will probably take far longer. The cliffs and spires form a natural break water that protects the cove from the sea, and there is pretty much only one 25m wide section that a canoe or shallow boat can pass, and the watercraft have to make a tricky turn around a tall cliff spire. The 30 meter tall black eight sided spire isn't a very subtle way to make people get curious and find this. The DAB's obviously want people to find this, and the spire might be their common way to mark other important Boon's. The Salt Boon is basically a tiny artificial island a few meters from the shore, and we step on the stone pavement and lift up the canoe as we careful look at the surrounding nature for an ambush before approaching the spire. Anyone ambushing will have to attack us over the beach and through shallow water. Or just camp the narrow section through the break water, and there is that tall cliff spire to use to rain arrows down from, although getting up it would be hard. Bows and shields would be a good thing here. We really should make a shield or two.
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The lower part of the black spire splits into four pillars on the large stone paved surface, and in the middle there is a shallow pool with salt. The DAB's also have a serious thing for the number 8, so I guess they might have 4 fingers on each hand, and have a number system based on 8, and probably finds that handy if they have binary computors. I make sure to think loud and say this so the Alien bastards can hear me. If I'm wrong I bet they will smugly let me know.
Oh! Can I troll the DAB's?
Like posting something wrong on the internet?
People might not help you, but will go through great lengths to prove you wrong. Maybe I'm doing this the wrong way? The DAB's seem to have huge egos - they are after all pretending to be Gods - so maybe I should diss them? Worth a try, although I shouldn't over do it all at once. Death by a thousand cuts and so on. The surface is glass-like, and I try scratching the surface a tiny bit with my steel knife, but there is no scratch, so probably glass. Reiley is a bit awed as she feel the smooth mirror like surface.
"This is so pretty and smooth!"
"Nawh, it's kind of lame. It's some type of hard concrete coloured black or glass surface. They should at least have made it tall enough to be visible above the ridge lines to really lure people here. The ridges and cliffs that make the break water hides it quite well. Reiley, your people could have built something similar from bricks and then just covered the surface in that wood ash cement, smoothed it out and painted it."
Reiley lifts her eyebrows, but tilts her head a bit as she contemplate it: "Oh. I guess you're right."
"Humans built something called the pyramids thousands upon thousands of years ago, which is more than five times higher and far more in width, covered in smooth white rock with a shiny metal covered top. In sandy deserts and before we even figured out iron. Just an insane amount of huge blocks of stone transported from far away on barges and rolled on log rollers, and it's not like they built just one. They were tombs for mighty rulers, so each ruler wanted his own and bigger, and each took decades to build. Just monumental vanity projects for humans worshipped like Gods. Building something like this with modern technology is a doddle, and if pre-built it could have been installed in a couple of hours. I could have made one in my backyard, although the neighbours would complain that it is unseemly."
Reiley is leaning over and looking at all the salt in the 'pond' as she draws her hand through it. There is far far more than for our pots.
"What about the salt?"
"There is probably an underwater pipe from an offshore inlet that siphon it or similar simple mechanism. It might be natural heat that evaporate the salt, or they might have made a heat pump that use the temperature difference between the black rock and seawater to evaporate it quicker. It might siphon sea water up in the stone above, evaporate it there, and it just sprinkle down here when finished. If it was just about extracting salt from seawater with sunlight, this isn't a good structure. A large shallow pool with some kind of transparent glass roof to protect it from rain would have been more efficient, but I guess they wanted something that couldn't easily be repurposed by people finding it. And they wanted something impressive looking. This spire should at least be higher at this location to be noticeable, but I guess they might have a theme going which fits with pre-built thinking, where they might use the same basic shape and size for other things so people learn there is something important. So stylish and pretty more than efficient, and I bet one reason for being in this location is aesthetic, and the other is probably game-theory based."
"Game-theory?"
"That is a field of knowledge on how to win games, or the best solution to certain problems, and I know some examples although I never cared much for it. Anyway, this is not an expensive thing to build for a civilization as advanced as theirs, so they could have built many along the shore, but here it should be a safe spot from large dinosaurs, and is fairly hard to defend if someone wanted to prevent others from taking the salt as the structures base builds up from the water. There is no good farmland or real freshwater source except creeks that have run through jungle, so basically a bad spot for a large camp. There is probably other considerations too. Let's just get salt, take a break and leave."
We fill our salt pots and take a break in the shade, but we won't stay here. There shore is a mixture of stretches of sand and rock, and it looks to be good sand, but we will pass here going back so might fill up with sand then. I kind of want to do a hide up in the jungle and watch this spot for a few days or a week as it might give me more info about any people in the area. I would like to make some kind of tripwire silent alarm when there is someone here, but I can't. It would be very obvious, and it would be better to just watch from that top and spot all the access ways here. I remember to smooth out the surface on the salt to erase the trace from our collection. It wouldn't surprise me if the DAB's use some kind of hidden solar panels or heat pumps to make electricity, and the top might have cameras, radio relay's or satellite uplinks. But honestly, this is a bad spot for a uplink since there is a limited view of the sky and the ridges should block most radio transmissions.
Humm.... Considering the likely video streaming from our eyes is fairly high resolution, that require bandwidth and we can't have a too big antenna in our body, and it seems unlikely we all have some kind of satellite uplink in our head due to antenna size and power. So there should be something like cell towers high on hills that can connect or uplink. Are there hidden cell towers slash uplinks? Maybe like those cell towers camouflaged like trees and cactuses on Earth? They might be very very well camouflaged, but I should look for hard to reach trees or fake rocks high up that will have a good all around view, like on the top of the cliff we live on. It might have a line of sight from the top of the Boon Spire. Can I see something from here? And what part of the high inland terrain is visible?
I'm not sure I should point all of this out. In the end I might have a bomb in my head, and ruining their fun might eventually make them decide to just say: 'Eh, fuck it. He's not worth it.' Kaboom. Sabotaging their data link infrastructure or trying to break into the Spire top with a long ladder and a hammer with a ceramic tip might do it. I assume the DAB's are watching through my own eyes and listening through my ears, so I am living on an extremely tight leash. Not even the worst prisoners in human society is that intimately and invasively watched.
Damn alien bastards!
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