Immir-shesh had mentioned, during my earliest conversations with him and Ergiza, that he could work a variety of formations into the baskets he wove, imbuing them with various magical properties. One such property, it had occurred to me, had immediate relevance to our food-preservation problem.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Immir-shesh asked, arms still crossed and tone still unfriendly.
“You mentioned a while back that you know a formation that can keep a basket’s contents cold,” I said. “How cold are we talking? Like, cool to the touch cold, or frozen cold? Can you get ice crystals on the food inside?”
He blinked slowly. “They could freeze the contents, yeah, but that makes the formation burn out faster. It’d last a few days at most.”
“Alright. Technical question about the formation itself: how important are the materials? Like, does it have to be made of woven reeds or wicker, or is it the formation diagram itself that contains most of the function?”
“It varies from formation to formation,” he said, almost as slow as he’d blinked, brow now furrowed in thought. “For the [Little Winter Basket Formation] specifically? A lot of it is the diagram — but it’s not as simple as just tracing lines on the inside of a pot. That’s been tried.”
“Oh?” I said. “What’s the difference there?”
He got that pursed-lip expression that the goblins got when they didn’t want to explain something to me. It was probably either a skill taboo thing or a lodge initiation thing.
“Alright, setting that aside,” I said. “Would it still work if the diagram was made of, say, limestone?”
A light of understanding dawned in his eyes. “It might,” he said, some excitement entering into his tone for the first time. “I don’t know that it’s ever been tried. We can’t exactly weave stone like we can reeds. But with your domain skill…”
“I’d just need you to direct me, obviously,” I said.
Immir-shesh hesitated for a moment. His knowledge of formations made him valuable — so sharing that knowledge, however rote my imitation of his skill was, inevitably would decrease that value. He knew I didn’t like him, he’d have to be an idiot not to. Consequently, I’m sure he was thinking that anything that decreased his value to me also decreased the amount of time that he and his family could shelter here.
He was wrong, of course. Plenty of the goblins were useless to me except as warm bodies, and I wasn’t going to kick them out anytime soon. I was sheltering the goblins because it was, for lack of a more well-theorized way to say it, the right thing to do. Of course, I didn’t expect him to believe that — I wouldn’t believe it, in his position. Persuading him to help me with this had to take a different angle. “Come on,” I said in a wheedling tone. “Don’t you wanna do something with formations that no one’s ever done before? I’m just your assistant, really, all the credit would be yours.”
It wasn’t particularly subtle, but look — I wasn’t a particularly subtle person. It seemed to work well enough, though, his posture relaxing as he gave into the temptation of fame and glory. “Alright,” he said. “How do we do this?”
The answer to that question ended up requiring some experimentation. I couldn’t just play with the stone like it was putty, making it bend and flow as I pleased: as such, initial attempts by Immir-shesh to physically weave the basket as he would have out of his usual materials were unsuccessful. However, I did discover that not needing to use a mortal stonemason’s tools (or a mortal stonemason’s limbs) allowed me to execute complex sculpture in three dimensions with relative ease. I ended up raising hollow cylinders of limestone from the cave floor, carving them into interwoven strips according to Immir-shesh’s meticulous instructions. Before long, we had a prototype. I fed my azoth into it at the node he indicated, and felt it sucked along a sudden pressure gradient as the array came alive. The only external indication of its activation was a quiet droning noise — very like the sound of a refrigerator running, in fact.
Immir-shesh held his hand over the mouth of the refrigerator basket. “Yeah, that’s cooling down,” he said. “I almost can’t believe that worked. What’s the azoth draw like?”
The mini-fridge took significantly more azoth to run than a magelight, but as with the magelights the cost was still so miniscule as to be unimportant even under my current azoth-starved conditions. “Manageable,” I said. “If we can make a bigger version of this, you might have just single-handedly solved our spoilage problem, Immir-shesh.”
He couldn’t contain a smug grin. “Well, good! That’s good. Maybe that’ll finally get me some respect around here.”
“Maybe so!” I said, cheerfully noncommittal. “Anyway, I’ll keep this running for a while to see how the stone holds up under sustained use. I don’t want to make any premature announcements before we’re sure this isn’t just going to explode in half an hour. I think that’s all I need from you right now, you can go do whatever.”
“Alright, I’ll just… go, then, I guess,” Immir-shesh said awkwardly, backing out of the lab. I’d already stopped paying attention to him. My focus was on the fridge-array we’d created. Immir-shesh hadn’t explained anything about the actual mechanics of the [Little Winter Basket Formation] while he’d directed me in its shaping: again, I assumed this was a result of paranoia, a misguided attempt to preserve his own scarcity-value. That was fine, I hadn’t expected him to. Immir-shesh had, however, underestimated me in several crucial respects.
First, unlike the goblins’ puny, meat-based sensory organs, my [Domain Awareness] was total within its range. It was penetrating, blanketing, omnidirectional. As such, since it was my azoth fuelling the formation, and since it was entirely within my domain, I could directly perceive how the azoth moved through and around it. While another goblin formationist might have needed to perform laborious, time- and material-intensive experimentation in order to reverse-engineer Immir-shesh’s creation, I was not so constrained.
I did intend to reverse-engineer his creation, if it needed saying. Was it stealing? Yes, probably. I quieted my conscience with the thought that I wasn’t seeking personal enrichment or glory: the awesome and lifesaving power of refrigeration would only be put to work for the common good.
One thing that my azoth perception immediately revealed to me was that most of the basket was inert — not actually part of the formation. Only a few geometric tangles were carrying an azoth current, to my senses. So, experiment: see if the formation could be stripped down to just those elements. In a distant corner of my labyrinth, away from prying eyes, I punched a cylindrical hole in the cave wall and carved the stripped-down formation pattern into its walls. Immediately, I could tell that it hadn’t worked — when I tried to feed a trickle of azoth into it, there wasn’t that catch as the formation accepted it. Hm. Maybe the rest of the basket wasn’t as inert as I’d thought? I filled in the grid of the rest of the basket. Nope, still no dice — now it wouldn’t soak up the azoth at all. It just sloshed around my domain like the formation lines weren’t even there.
What was I missing? I thought it through. Immir-shesh had taken steps to conceal the actual design of the formation, even beyond the structural requirements of working it into a woven basket, but he’d treated it as a given that it would take the shape of a woven basket. Was that just because it was a medium he was familiar with? Maybe, but… I knew formations weren’t just simple circuit diagrams. Form created function, as Ergiza had told me. What of the form had I failed to capture? Was it- oh, wait, hang on.
I carved a new test hole. This time, rather than inscribing the stripped-down diagram as grooves on the walls, I carved it out as thin rods of stone threaded through each other like the warp and weft of a basket. You probably couldn’t have fit a scrap of paper between where they touched, or between them and the wall, but they were each separate and distinct objects.
Skill Gained!
[Little Winter Basket Formation]
Keywords: Formation, Knowledge, Crafting, Elemental (Ice)
A formation that gradually draws some heat out of the area it delimits. Useful for preserving food and chilling beverages.
1 skill point gained from [Scholar]!
Success! The [Little Winter Basket Formation] was three-dimensional! Only barely, sure, but clearly the vertical arrangement of the azoth conduits mattered in addition to the horizontal. Plus I’d gotten my first [Scholar] skill point rebate! Man, coming straight off the door debacle to this? Talk about the epic highs and lows of life as a dungeon.
I didn’t let success slow me down, though. Next on my list of experiments was comparing and contrasting the fridge formation with the magelight formation, to see if I could identify any common elements or shared motifs. I figured that if I wanted to learn the underlying language of formations, building up a “vocabulary” of basic components was a good place to start.
As tempting as it was to throw myself entirely into this new project, though, I mustered all of my executive function and successfully spun off only a small strand of my awareness to continue my formations research. There were other things that still needed my attention. For one, the foraging team was back!
After the food-supply strategy meeting earlier, my minions had split off into two groups. One group, the foragers, consisted of Teekas, Sarsu, Neraru, Enshunna and Ninkur, Harig’s younger sibling Enlil-itu, and Kizurra to stand guard. The other group consisted of Striga. She was out hunting, as usual. I debated sending someone with her to supervise, but I realized I didn’t have any great candidates — I was keeping Nar-shesh back to guard the dungeon, Teekas was supervising the foragers, and none of the others had the levels or force of personality to actually keep her from doing anything stupid. Oh well, she’d only caused two major incidents while unsupervised so far. It would probably be fine.
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Thankfully, it looked like this expedition had gone a little better than Teekas’ ill-fated trip into the wood demesne. Everyone was walking under their own power, no one was bleeding or missing limbs, et cetera. The vibe was weirdly tense, though. Neraru was walking quickly a distance ahead of and away from the others, basket of forage clutched protectively. Kizurra, bringing up the rear, was practically dragging a raincloud behind him so thunderous was the scowl on his face.
“Hey, Teekas,” I said in greeting as my number-two minion crossed into my domain. “How’d it go?”
“Could have gone worse,” she said. “Lots of chestnuts left, even this late in the season.” The heaping basket of nuts she hefted provided visual emphasis. Several of the others were comparably laden.
“Damn, where’d you find those?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Just like, on the ground? They’re all over the place. Like half the trees in this forest are chestnut.”
What the fuck? There’s just free food on the ground? Baskets and baskets of free food? To my modern city-girl self, this was incomprehensible bordering on miraculous. “That’s wild,” I said. “What’s up with Neraru, though?”
Teekas scowled. “Kizurra was being a shit and she got all upset. It would have turned into a big argument if I hadn’t told everyone to shut up and keep an eye out for danger.”
I’d have clicked my tongue in annoyance if I still had a tongue. “What was he doing?”
“So he’d dug up some grubs,” she began to explain.
“What the fuck was he doing digging up grubs when I sent him with you to keep watch for humans?” I said.
“I already gave him an earful about that,” she said, twitching one of her long, pointed ears as if for emphasis. “Anyway, he’d dug up some grubs, and it was actually pretty impressive that he managed to find so many big ones so quickly. They were like-” She held her thumb and little finger apart to indicate the length, then made a circle with her thumb and index finger. Damn, those things must’ve been about the size of a can of soda! “But Neraru started fussing at him, saying he shouldn’t have dug them up and to put them back.”
“Why so?”
Teekas shrugged. “She gets…weird, about bugs. Won’t swat flies, won’t step on ants. One time she spent like an hour chasing birds away from snails.”
That was kind of cute, honestly, albeit in the way that made you a little worried about someone. I felt like my mental portrait of the goblin woman was becoming more detailed. Something about it was starting to look familiar, too… “Alright, go on,” I said.
“Well, they went back and forth for a while. He got all defensive because he felt like his contributions weren’t being appreciated, she got upset because she felt like he wasn’t listening to her, it was stupid. Anyway, eventually he ate one of the grubs in front of her just to make her mad, which… worked.” She grimaced.
Aw, the poor grub. I would have been upset too. Like, at least kill it first, don’t eat it alive! That’s messed up. “I see,” I said. “Alright, I’ll wait for him to cool off a bit and then talk to him. In the meantime, we should talk about how we’re going to store all this. I may have good news on that front, by the way.”
I carried on chatting with Teekas, [Walk and Talk] offloading the cognitive burden of doing so, and cast my attention ahead to Neraru. She’d descended the spiral staircase down into the hill as quickly as she could without slipping, and speedwalked into the dormitory-cave. There she deposited her basket with a gentleness that sharply contrasted her preceding haste, and crouched to gently extricate from among the nuts, berries, mushrooms, and so on… yep, there were the rest of the grubs. Teekas hadn’t been kidding, those were some chunky little fuckers. They spilled over the edges of Teekas’ hand at both ends as she carefully nestled them in a fold of her tunic and scurried back out of the common area. Head down, avoiding eye contact like it burned, she eventually came to rest just outside the room I’d penned the spiders into. She sat down heavily against the wall and stared morosely at the grubs, which squirmed lethargically in her lap.
“Hey, Neraru,” I said, visibly startling her. “Whatcha got there? Don’t answer, I can see that it’s grubs.”
“Hello, Lady Persephone,” she responded, stiff and nervous. “I wasn’t stealing them. I wouldn’t steal food from the group.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said. “I heard you had a fight with Kizurra earlier.”
She fidgeted. “I wouldn’t call it that, exactly.”
I sighed. “Neraru, you’re not in trouble and I’m not mad. He was being a dick.”
She relaxed fractionally at that. “I didn’t mean to shout at him, though,” she said. “I know it’s silly to get so upset. They’re just bugs.”
“They’re cute, though,” I said. “With their fat little bodies and stubby little legs.”
“They are cute!” she said, breaking into an enthusiastic smile. “Like babies!”
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, I wouldn’t want one crawling on me, but I wouldn’t want a baby crawling on me either.” I paused for a moment. How best to broach this topic? I didn’t want to assume the goblins had no theoretical framework for understanding something and then look like an idiot when it turned out they did.
Ah, fuck it. Direct approach.
“Hey, weird question,” I said. “Have you felt like an unlikeable weirdo your whole life, constantly getting punished for failing tests no one told you about or breaking social rules that everyone but you seems to know without having them explained?”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Yes,” she said. “All the time! Like with jokes — I can never tell when I’m supposed to laugh, and whenever I try to tell a joke everyone says it isn’t funny.”
“Mhm, mhm,” I said. “And would you say you get extremely interested in specific topics, and that learning about them and talking about them make you happy? Like bugs, for example?” She nodded. “Do people call you a picky eater? Any trouble with certain textures of food?”
“I don’t like it when things are mushy in my mouth,” she said. “Like berries. I have to swallow blueberries whole.”
“How do you feel about arranging objects in rows or sorting them into groups?”
“It’s very relaxing. Doesn’t everyone like that?”
“Lol. Lmao, even,” I said. “If only that were true. Loud noises?”
“Awful. They make me so angry. What does ‘lol’ mean?” she asked, her accent coloring the consonants.
One upside of this isekai adventure: no one had the cultural context to get on my case for saying “lol,” “lmao,” “uwu” or suchlike out loud with my mouth. I was free to do it until it stopped being funny to me — and it was never going to stop being funny to me.
“It’s just a word you can say to indicate something is funny instead of laughing,” I said in answer to her question. “Lmao is the same thing but like, more so. Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. Do goblins know what-” I stumbled for a moment. Apophic didn’t have a word that directly corresponded to ‘autism,’ which I guess was not particularly surprising given that it was a language spoken by eldritch abominations in the lightless waters of primordial chaos. I could cobble together something etymologically parallel, call it ‘inward-turning disease’ or something, but that sounded weird. I decided to just use the English word. “What
Neraru shook her head.
“Okay. It’s a-” I paused again. Apophic also did not have a word for ‘developmental disability’ — the closest it got was ‘birth defect,’ which seemed kind of mean. “It’s something you’re born with, like Malik’s arm. The brain grows differently, out of step. It can affect senses, emotions — one of the most common symptoms is that it makes it hard to pick up on social cues. Anyway, you have it, I am 100% sure.”
She blinked, and then wiped at her eyes, which were wet. “Can you fix me?” she asked, a pitiable and wounded hope in her voice.
“No,” I said. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the way you are. If people treat you like shit, that’s their problem, not yours.”
“I just want to be normal,” she said. “I want people to like me, instead of just putting up with me. Clumsy Neraru, weird Neraru, doesn’t-know-when-to-shut-up Neraru. Even my parents didn’t like me. I don’t have any friends. I’m forty years old and I don’t have a single friend. Do you know what that’s like?”
“Nope,” I said. “But look, I’m not just talking out my ass here. I am also
“Oh,” she said, clearly unsure what to do with that information. “Really?”
“Really really, girl. I have hyperfixations about stuff you’ve never dreamt of.” That was no exaggeration. I knew more about L**g** of L*g*nds lore than anyone should, especially given that I didn’t even play the game. “Anyway, I always had friends growing up. That doesn't mean we're not the same, it just means I was lucky. There was a healthy supply of freaks, weirdos, and misfits for me to hang out with. How big was your village, before the plague?”
“Three hundred and thirty-six people,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. Of course she would know the exact number. She’d probably counted. “I counted.” Yep, called it.
“Okay, you have no idea what a high school is, but where I grew up there were four thousand people, and that’s if you only counted the teenagers. It’s a pure numbers game. There’s nothing wrong with you, you just haven’t had as many chances to find people that you fit with.”
Neraru’s brow was deeply furrowed. “I feel like there actually is something wrong with me if I need to meet four thousand people just to find one or two to be my friend.”
“Okay, first, I had more than two friends in high school. Second, you’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter if there’s something wrong with you. That’s no reason for people to be cruel to you. So no, I’m not going to fix your brain and make you normal.”
Her frown only shrank slightly at that, clearly not entirely satisfied with my reasoning.
“Don’t think I’m just hanging you out to dry, though,” I said. “I can’t make you normal, and I can’t make people like you, but I can and will give you the power to kill anyone who’s a dick to you.”
She pondered this for a moment before speaking. “I guess that does sound more reliable…”
“Exactly!” I said. “I knew you’d understand. Now come on, let's see about getting these grubs back underground where they belong."