“Do they know how complicated light is?” I said. “It’s one thing to manipulate a process like combustion, which can produce light as a by-product, but creating light itself? What, do they think I’m a genie, making their wildest dreams come true? These things take time. Time, I say! Speaking of time, do they want me to start time traveling too now, huh? I mean, I’m already doing it, aren’t I? Look, I traveled a second into the future. Oh look, I did it again! It’s pretty impressive if you think about it.”
“It’s fine, Cas,” said Kelser. “It was just a tiny misunderstanding. You don’t have to keep talking about it.”
“You’re right, I’m rambling to hide my embarrassment. I do that sometimes. Say a bunch of smart sounding words, put together in fancy sentence constructions, and suddenly, people don’t think you’re the kind of person that can make a fool of themselves! Works every time,” I said.
“Right,” said Kelser.
“I swear, you won’t believe the number of times I’ve gotten out of awkward situations by rattling on about lithium ion batteries and funny sounding names of companies in Japanese. Seriously, people forget all about the time you call someone by their ex’s name after they hear you say Walt Disney and Berkshire Hathaway in Japanese,” I said.
“You know, I can only keep pretending like I know what you’re talking about for so long,” said Kelser.
“See? I’ve replaced the awkwardness with confusion. You’re welcome. Another job well done by Caspian the rambler,” I said.
It was almost dusk, which meant most of my light magic wasn’t going to work. I was still stuck manipulating light in minor ways, since my light magic wasn’t advanced enough to do anything else, which meant I could not use light magic at night. I mean, I could, but it wouldn’t be very powerful. The glass had helped me improve my invisibility magic enough that I could make myself blend into the darkness at night, as long as the light source was stable. That meant I could hide in the moonlight, but could be revealed by a torch, or by clouds rolling over the moon.
Kelser shook his head, and I put this embarrassing situation behind me. I went around to the elders, asked about how things were going, and decided to begin planning for the winter, properly. I gathered the elders again, this time before nightfall.
“We need to know how many people we need to feed for the winter,” I said.
“We would prefer to feed everyone, Teacher,” said elder Brol.
“No, I mean of course, I mean,” I stammered. Darn this crappy translation magic! “I mean we need to know how many people are here at this encampment, so we can prepare for the winter.”
Of course, they didn’t have a system for arithmetic and counting large numbers, so I introduced Arabic numerals. Then, I realized that system was too complicated for what I needed to do right now, and most of the tribesmen were giving me confused looks, so I decided a rudimentary tally system would suffice. I grabbed a whole bunch of sticks, and told the elders to bring me a stick for every single human in their tribe, regardless of their age. If someone was pregnant, they might as well bring a stick for the child, too.
I also asked them to estimate how many days there were in winter, but the lack of arithmetic really hurt us there too. In the end, I had a rough estimate of how long this winter was going to be, but I knew not to trust the numbers too much.
By the time the elders returned, the sun had already set, and I was sitting by a campfire. I gathered up all the sticks and started counting them separately. I wrote some numbers on the ground, both to help me keep count and to get everyone comfortable with them. When I was done, I knew the population of every tribe, as well as the population of the entire encampment.
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There were a hundred and seventeen humans in this encampment. That meant there were 118 mouths to feed, including mine, as well as one large Fil Tusker, although she was happy munching on grass, and this place didn’t lose its grass in the winter so I knew she’d be okay.
I made some calculations based on how long people thought the winter was going to last, the availability of food in the region during the winter, as well as the possibility of moving further South if necessary.
Thankfully, this was the place the Imm and Oko tribes came to for the winter, so it didn’t get too cold, and the river and the sea provided plenty of fish throughout the season. There weren’t going to be a lot of fruits and vegetables, but a lot of small monsters would migrate to down here from the North, which would help keep us fed.
That morning, we began making our first batch of vinegar. The wine-like substance we were going to use didn’t work out in the beginning, but I made some changes in the clay pots we were using, by plugging up holes with earth magic, and soon, we had some vinegar!
I realized earth, air, and water magic could be really useful for food preservation, and decided to try preserving stuff in a brine solution before draining it out with magic and sealing the pot with magic. Hopefully, that’d make it hard for stuff to rot, but I didn’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket. As soon as we had enough vinegar to go around, I started pickling vegetables to preserve them for the winter.
I made a stone storage space for grain, and hoped pests wouldn’t be able to get into it if I sealed it off properly. I knew some grains from my Earth lasted longer if their outer coatings were removed, and I asked the tribesmen if they knew that was the case for their grains. They said most grains should survive the winter in their natural form.
The tribes also knew of various plants and herbs that could help preserve food. One of them had a strange minty spell and it kept all sorts of insects away. I figured if this world had mosquitoes, these herbs would have been even more popular.
We stuck some of the herbs in the grain storage spaces, as well as among many of the tubers, dried fruits, and smoked meats, and rubbed sap from some plants over different types of food. By this point, we had a game plan for the winter, and were busy gathering everything that we could. The farms wouldn’t be ready yet, but the herded animals, plentiful seafood, and stored food would see us through.
As the summer wore on, I spent most of my days checking up on the food storage, setting up the farms, and marking trails for our herded animals. The Roja kept supervising magic lessons, while getting their own lessons from me and Kelser. And Kelser trained with me to try and invent his own spells.
Summer turned to fall. Leaves fell, the heat died down, and the rains began pouring. It was around this time that I figured we could make simple shelters. There was a lot of clay near the river, and it was easy to shape with earth magic, and even easier to bake with fire magic. Soon, our little encampment was dotted with little ramshackle clay huts. They weren’t the prettiest of things to look at, but they got the job done.
I moved the stone slab I was using to mark the days until the solstice into my hut, which was a small one I’d made myself. I even dug out a little basement with earth magic, which was where I liked to experiment with some of my spells. By playing with light sources in the darkness, I was able to improve my light magic even more. Now, I could take a light source, like a torch, and spread its light to fill a room! Things would look a little blurry, but I was able to see further with this spell.
But I didn’t think I could get much further with light magic without running some pretty difficult experiments. And so, I decided to go back to motion magic. Motion magic, which was still stuck in the classical period conclusions from my previous world, had to be brought up to speed. And I knew just how to do it!
“See this?” I said.
“What, the pebble?” asked Kelser.
“Exactly! Look!” I released the pebble and let it roll down the stone slab I’d propped up at an incline.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” he asked.
“That!” I pointed at the pebble as it ran into a stone, and came to a rest. “See? It was rolling, rolling, rolling, until it hit something and stopped!”
Kelser gave me a strange look. He looked at the pebble. Then he looked at me. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. Eventually, he scratched his head and strolled over to me. He pat my back, gently, and said: “Let’s get you some rest. You’ve overworked yourself into insanity.”