The next morning came and I found myself once again wishing I actually had the means to produce a more comfortable cloth than oak-fiber burlap. Or, for that matter, a better mattress than straw-stuffed burlap. It was still a damned sight better than that dingy hole with the grass hammock though. I would have considered putting time and energy into that topic today but frankly considering how productive yesterday's escapade was I rather doubted I'll have the time. Especially considering the fact that since I'd now confirmed there are human-threatening predators out there, I really had to vamp up the manor and install some sense of defenses beyond a simple ossium barbed wire fence with the occasional quartzite flare lamp.

The scope of all the regular maintenance tasks needing doing was also really starting to eat into my stress-levels too. Simply put, I needed help. There was only me, but that doesn't mean I was necessarily completely out of luck.

As I was going about watering and pruning and grow-stimming the farm and garden (including the grass in the cattle spider pen), I had found myself mentally perusing all the various techniques and practices I had access to for quality of life stuff. The simple truth however was that almost all of it was either useless to me, because it only offloaded the manhour costs onto someone else or I was basically already doing it. I wasn't willing to start downing tinctures like my fugue building state would, though; there was simply no knowing the long-term impact on my psyche except that it couldn't possibly be good. Plus, even if I did, it would largely just be robbing Peter to pay Paul anyhow; I had basically slept through two full days after binging on stamina tonics for five. Oh, the amount accomplished in that period was still damned impressive, but I suspected that had as much to do with my fugue-state's efficiency and focus as anything else.

No, what I unequivocally needed was an extra set of hands. Or five. And right now, I only had access to the one set and that was that. But there was one thing I remembered from old Earth that I could maybe -- just maybe -- accomplish that might just help me out of this jam. With that thought in mind I started making my way over to the alchemy lab and began collecting samples of probably the vital element in this task: myself. Strands of hair, saliva, blood, a bit of cuticle skin … pretty much every fluid or substance that might contain the specific essence of myself went into the essential cauldron for rendering down and extraction.

The process wound up creating a kind of foggy tan tar in a decently sizeable flask, with enough essence to hopefully permit three or four trials of what I was about to do. I honestly had no idea if it had worked the way I wanted or not, given I couldn't perform several of the refinement steps I wanted to perform, but there was only one way to really know if I'd just wasted half of my morning. To get there would require that I extract eggs from a female fish and from one of my cattle spiders and use the two to infuse an unfertilized egg with an essence negation of the source species altogether, infuse my own essence, and then spam it with that old sanguinism growth magic.

What I wound up looking at when I completed all of these tasks was… I don't know exactly what I was expecting but it certainly fit the general description of a "grotesque diminutive creature". With the basic torso and head of a human attached to the abdomen of a spider, but with the legs growing from the side of the torso as they normally would a spider, the human arms apparently taking the place of the chelae, the twelve pound cat-sized monstrosity looked up at me with expectant eyes. And a damned text popup.

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Advanced Alchemy.>>

I wait impatiently for the visual obstruction to fade.

"Can you understand me?" A hissing groan was followed by the thing leaning back on its abdomen so it could face me well enough to nod.

"You know what you are?". It again groan-hissed and nodded, otherwise showing absolutely no initiative to move or wander around.

"Move over to the research bench, and use the stylus to write out the word for what you are, and what your purpose is.". The blank -- almost docile -- faced creature jumped off of the alchemic bench, picking up the stylus with both diminutive hands and resting the length of the stylus against its shoulder, used both hands to gracefully guide the stylus over the wet-clay scratchpad. When it finished, there were two rows of text, the first with one word and the second with two.

"Homunculus."

"Obey Maker."

I couldn't help but smile inside as I read those two lines. I did however at least try to avoid the standard Evil Overlord error of not checking how loyal his minions were by following up with a third question.

"Is there something you want or need? Something to make you happy?"

Scribbling of stylus on clay -- which honestly looked a little like those massive kanji scrolls you see sometimes in martial arts films -- and then there was a third line.

"To obey Maker is the best!"

Well. I can work with this. "Would you mind if I made you a few friends? To help with the work?"

"Maker makes. Homunculus obeys. To obey is the best."

Yes. Yes I can work with this. God help me… or actually maybe not, here, given what Eldritch gods are usually like … I might even start to find the things cute. Like people who own pugs.

"Come then. Clean the equipment while I prepare more samples."

~~------------~~

Late afternoon comes by and I now have four eerily identical alchemical abominations. While they aren't particularly strong, and despite their diminutive size aren't any better than I am at fine work, they are capable of using pretty much any knowledge I myself possess that their body plan can permit them to perform. With tools designed for their use, they will become even more useful over time I'm quite sure. In the meantime I task one to gathering and cooking a meal for all of us and in general doing domestic butler/maid duties, one to begin the job of domesticating and increasing the edibility of the shelf fungus using the batch alchemy equipment, the third with the process of domesticating the numbing moss with the fine work alchemy equipment, and the last with crafting tools and equipment scaled to the homunculi.

I, in the meantime, start to work on improving the physical defenses of my manor. With the cart and a cattle spider to haul it, I once again go to the streams to collect river rocks. I do note that I have to wander much further to find any of measurable size as compared to how easy they were to find before -- I'm starting to run out of the easy supply and will need to do something… more in the future. In the meantime I take another decent span of time filling up the cart and hauling rocks back to dump them strategically around the clearing beneath the greatoak I've built my home against.

As I dump my fourth payload I can't help but note that I'm describing time more and more fuzzily. I have access to springs and gears, why haven't I made a clock? It would certainly help organize my mess, and since I now have minions I should probably do something to facilitate their coordination since I've noticed they have no inspiration or agency of their own. Without orders they'll just sit there and die. But in the meantime they are damned useful, and I needed to take advantage of the time I had left in the day to get serious headway completed with the building of better defenses. Which means schlepping as many sizeable stones as I could up around the manor.

By the time I finish with hauling rocks, the house is cleaner, literally, than it's ever been -- even the chitinite-and-cobblestone flooring is shining spotlessly. There's a pile of diminutive quartzite power tools, their tiny ossium attachments shining bleached-white in the sun, and hauling rickshaws with homunculus-sized harnesses attached. Mechanical arm extenders. All neatly piled up and sitting in the sun. There's a small bank of thigh-thick logs next to the carrotato patch with fat white wafers growing from them drag marks showing the logs had come from beyond the canopy line. There's even a small faux pond out behind the alchemy lab in the designated garden area with what appears to be, of all things, a miniature stream flowing into a shallow pool, with the stream bed clearly lined on both sides with the blue-green moss. I can't help but note that it's actually quite attractive as landscaping features go.

I do notice a few minor points of concern, though -- the pool very likely isn't a planned feature given by how it lacks a stone lining and I notice disturbed dirt going in a straight line from where the stream starts to the water tower. Which means that I would have to be careful about monitoring for out-of-bounds task errors with my new help if my suspicion was correct.

In walking over to where the garden homunculus -- for some reason the very notion of naming them just felt gauche, like naming your left thumb -- was still collecting samples of the moss and comparing the numbing potency by dint of how much of its stamina it lost when collecting from that patch, I got a clearer picture of how it was all arranged. And honestly? I felt a little foolish for not having previously thought of implementing irrigation of some kind into the farm before. Even the Egyptians managed to work that one out. Still.

"Homunculus. This stream for the numb moss. The water is building up in that pool. I have decided that I rather like this feature here, and as such -- I am extending your task. You now need to ensure that what you've built in order to complete your task will require as little maintenance as possible if I should reassign you elsewhere. In this case, for example, that pool needs to be dug deeper, lined with small stones to prevent erosion, and to have an overflow pipe installed that will ensure it drains into the pond. Stop work on refining the moss until those tasks are complete. Thank you."

Huh. I just channeled my inner Evil Overlord a little, there. Eh, no harm, no foul. Next up is the toolmaker. Without further ado I instruct him to make a proper toolshed between the house and garden that doesn't block the exterior entrance to the root cellar. Said toolshed was to have a homunculus entrance and a human entrance, and all tools and handcarts should be stored in labeled locations.

I leave the shelf farmer alone except to indicate he should also work the carrotatoes. I don't see any harvest yield from the shelf fungus -- that name is horrid, I'm calling them shelfruits -- I don't see any shelfruit yield around so on a hunch I check out the root cellar. The soft glow of the cooling quartzite crystals shows the walls have been dug out or tamped back into racks, and while the bottommost tier is empty, there are neat little stacks of shelfruits on one side, with them getting smaller and yellower as you go back, and the rack above has organized carrotatoes. All in all there's probably about fifty or sixty of the things -- which if I had to survive on them alone would last me a grand total of half a week.

I reach down, pick up the oldest and youngest of the fungus I can spot, and take a small bite of the shelfruit. It's… honestly it's a bit like tofu. The flavor is extremely mild and there's hardly any texture to it at all. It's perhaps a little … leathery-er? It takes a little effort to sink your teeth in, but there's no crunch to it. I try the original shelf fungus, for comparison, and immediately regret it. I practically chipped a tooth, it was so dry. And there's a weird dirt/metal aftertaste.

I silently collect the shelf fungus and decide to toss it to the rubbish pile. Or maybe the cattle spiders will eat them. I certainly wouldn't be. I can't help but be amazed at what a round or two of the domestication essence could accomplish. I mean, it's literally cast-from-hit-points magic but damn.

Heading up the stairs through to the kitchen entrance to the root cellar, I find my fourth homunculus sitting by the stone-and-chitinite stove, patiently waiting for my arrival to take the meal he’s prepared for me off of the low heat. It’s the first meal I haven’t prepared for myself in … I don’t actually know exactly how long I’ve been on this god-forsaken alien rock, but it’s definitely been at least a couple of months. Words cannot begin to describe how true the aphorism about how meals you don’t prepare for yourself taste better than ones you do. I mean, it’s still just pond trout and carrotato but I haven’t had anything actually resembling non-grilled food in months. I practically cry tears of joy at the fish-and-herb soup set down in front of me, even as I start soaking up the broth with the carrotato flatbread. Tears of joy. The manliest.

~~------------~~

The next morning I discover that I have made a terrible mistake of biblical proportions, as I roll over in my semiconscious state and find four arachnid abominations staring at me with too-human eyes in utter stillness as they cling onto the wall of my bedroom. I freeze in terror for a brief moment before the adrenaline clears the fog of my pseudo-inebriated state.

“Okay. New rule. Homunculi do not go in the bedroom unless fulfilling a specific duty or order. Now. Out!”

They nod in silent unison and in equally perfect silence -- or do I imagine hearing the pitter patter of tiny tarsial claws as they make their way back down to the living room? In any case, I’m alone and riding the wave of the smallest bit of terror in the … apparently slightly overcast … morning. Hrm. Another note: how good is the charge on my quartzite gear? Can the fully solar-powered stuff like the water tower still do their jobs without full sunlight for more than a day? Something to figure out later. For the time being I step into the attached bathroom and turn on the shower while I brush my teeth as gently as I can with the spider hair toothbrush. A gentle scraping of the enamel later I step under the chitinite showerhead and bask in the sensation of heated water, wishing I had proper soap instead of just scrubbing myself with a hand brush. But hey -- it beats scrubbing myself with sand in the pond.

Once I’m dried off I head down the stairs and point at one of the homunculi to order him to reheat some of that soup and flatbread one that had been made last night, enough for the lot of us. I don’t really even know if homunculi need to eat or if they actually eat human food, but there’s only so many magical bullshit assumptions I’m willing to make without evidence so … food for all. By the time I finish my meal I have no idea if they enjoyed theirs or not but they did actually eat something. Between the four of them they ate about half as much total as I did, and a quick confirmation check informs me that this was the first meal any of them had eaten.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

I lay out the orders of the day after that; one homunculus is to continue with the general cleaning and maintenance duties of the buildings, as well as meal prep. One is to focus on farming -- this time working on basic domestication of herb plants, and the one that worked on the numbing stuff yesterday is to work on the garden and sample collections in general. I don’t know how much longer those glowbug grubs can keep; my knowledge doesn’t really extend to the exact maturation cycle of the critters. Only whether they’re harmful or edible. (They are edible, in fact. But… no.) The fourth will act as a gofer for me while I start constructing an actual wall around the perimeter of the manor’s clearing. Or, more precisely, as I allow myself to go into another builder’s fugue in doing so, with the intention of having a low stone wall acting as the base for a log palisade around the manor, with four equidistant gates and one in the direction of the pond.

The result of that intention is mostly what I'd thought up in advance, and reviewing my recollections of what I'd done in that automatic state is largely what I'd expected. Though what I didn't fully anticipate -- but maybe should have -- was that I would send my "adorifying assistant" to whip up a batch of stamina tonics again. I know the things are close to an alchemical equivalent to caffeine, but I don't particularly like just how many I seem to chug in that state. It is pretty hard to argue with the results, though. I'd gone through and cut down a series of trees with a quartzite power saw, and my helper used a smaller one to strip off branches as I went, shaping the trunks or branches that were at least the thickness of my thigh but no more than half again that for later use, both of us dosing as our reserve energy depleted from overworking ourselves. The result was what was basically a manic dash to operate, with near perfect teamwork and every step seemingly performed by an absolute expert. The cutting took up the entirety of the first day and night but the logs themselves were left to cure for the rest of the second day as I'd moved on to pile up the ten to twenty pound rocks into place while using mud as a mortar due to simple expediency. The stones would be placed by me and the homunculus would slather the mud to join them, while I left post holes the correct distance apart for logs to be inserted down and tamped into place.

The actual stone wall wound up taking the rest of the afternoon, while positioning the logs ironically went faster as I had the homunculus literally feed me tonics or hold quartzite lights in place so I could see what I was doing, as I'd worked entirely through the night without slowing down in the slightest. The next afternoon was when I'd come out. A two and a half days went into building up the new wall, and while it had some gaps, they were largely due to the rope bindings that kept the tops of the logs bound together as though they weren't also held by two feet of length beneath the surface and another two feet of stone wall. The tops of the logs themselves were another six feet taller than that, making the defensive barrier far higher than visible height. Even if those raccupines were decent climbers it was unlikely they'd be able to cross that kind of wall.

The wall itself had the gates I'd wanted, alright -- logs bound with white ossium frame on a chitinite-and-granite bevel for ball-and-socket hinges, with four ossium bars that could be rotated into place in a manner akin to how bank vault locks worked. The mechanism was smooth enough that even my homunculi could use it -- meaning I could actually leave my home base and have it be locked up at least while I was gone.

~~------------~~

Having extra peace of mind while sleeping is always a good thing. Not having to manually re fluff the straw mattress I slept on because of an adorifying house maid was… at least comfortable. Sleeping an entire afternoon and evening after a fugue-state stamina binge -- again -- would have left me grouchy for quite a while if I didn't have that jacuzzi-style bathtub. I'd soaked for quite a while in there while letting the stiffness of days work it's way out of me, and as I vegged out I let my mind wander.

Having minions now to do tedious tasks is a total life-saver. I've avoided the tedium of domesticating two additional plants and kept everything in working order while completely focused on another task. But as useful as they are, they are quite limited in total capacity. There's no way they'll actually be able to fight for me, for example. Not anything bigger than a regular spiderzilla. They just don't have the body strength and I have no knowledge that hints at changing the shape or body size of a homunculus. I'd used the eggs of domesticated pig-sized spiders in their making but got minions the size of their feral cousins. No real logic to that one that I can understand but as with so very many topics since I arrived in this bizarre place -- I'm channeling my inner Elsa and just Letting It Go.

Still, as much as a classic heroine can inspire sanity-preserving measures, maybe I can draw inspiration from another heroine. Maybe it's time to see about abusing my Late Stonepunk Era knowledge and giving the little guys something like Ripley's power loader? I don't have any current knowledge for prosthetics or anything, but I do have quartzite motors, tension springs, and infused blackleather for cabling. I can come up with something.

Or, rather, I can take the plunge of producing another pair of homunculi and have them come up with something by trial and error design approaches. And then I myself can focus on planning out what I want to do next. I gather myself together and greet my arachnid minions for the morning.

"Alright, you lot. One of you will continue with the general house servant duties as usual. One of you will continue with the farming, and one with the tending of the samples. The fourth of you will be performing two projects today: I want those pond reeds domesticated, and you're going to work out how to make reed-fiber cloth. No more of this hand-woven stuff. And make sure to develop a strain that produces a lot of fluffy tuft material, too. Pillowtop mattress get!". I pumped up my hand into the air with my last sentence before shooing my faithful if silent companions to their various assigned tasks.

Growing the next pair of homunculi takes far longer than the previous ones, and I notice that my blue mana bar dips precipitously when they awaken. A quarter of the way for the first one, and after two more hours of alchemical puttering about the next takes up half of my by then long-since recharged little blue bar. So it would seem there's some sort of mana-backed connection between myself and my minions, and there's a soft cap on how many I can have. Because this can't get too easy, now can it?

Once the two new arachnoid mini-me's are up and running I describe in loose terms what I expect them to accomplish, and that includes constructing a machine shop for them to actually work in. I get the sense that I'm going to start going through a great deal more bone than I had been going through as a result of both their experimentation and the end product of what I want them to make, but that's not actually the end of the world, as I actually have a planned solution to that issue as well, though it will depend on what I suspect to be the last of my "unallocated minion slots" to actually create: expanding the pool water feature is already required for the domesticated reed farming. But next up would be domesticating some fish from the pond sail that my entire food-chain would be contained within these walls.

As I set myself down to the task of creating my seventh adorable abomination, I found myself starting to develop a growing headache as I attempted to perform the growth step of the me-imbued blank spider eggs. (For whatever reason, a minimum mass of eggs was required for this, with all of them consumed in the process.). It was nearly as bad as some of my worst migraines I used to get back on Earth, and surely enough was timed to that blue bar being completely emptied.

A dose of the numbing moss juice to the temples and forehead helped greatly but the underlying ache didn't go away completely for most of the afternoon, and my stamina being at "half-mast" the whole time didn't help matters at all. Still, the last of my spiderling homunculi did successfully grow, completely identical to the rest. Once it finished bursting from its slimy-gelatinous shell, I immediately tasked it with gathering and cultivating three varieties of the "trout": one to grow larger and have tougher scales (as they apparently counted as bone enough to qualify for making ossium, if of low grade), one to simply be meatier and more flavorful, and another to be the " base" feral stock as always.

By that point most of the day had gone by so I decided to check in on the machine/tinkering workshop the new pair had built for me. I was mildly surprised at how well-made it was, actually. Much like the exterior walls, it was built with loose stones and mud mortar, with moderately sized and smoothed branches tied together with rope and greatoak bark tiling. Almost exactly the same construction as the alchemy shop, in fact. The pair of windows had simple shutters of the same construction as the roof, which made the whole setup a little… exposed to the elements, but being able to air it out was probably more important given what it was for.

Upon actually entering the single-room stone-walled hut, I found the pair working on what I could only describe as exoskeletons. I knew immediately that there was basically no possibility of the setup being useful for me: the materials and power sources I had access to were only barely useful for the homunculi, and at that simply because it would take them from being as weak as kittens to being able to manipulate things with the strength of a large toddler. The whole setup appeared to consist of six finger-length quartzite crystals that were embedded in a harness of blackleather. Each crystal, by dint of the vibration it consumed its charge for and that being cleverly attached to a stone gearwork mechanism that converted the vibration into mechanical action, would wind the ossium clock springs of the arm it was attached to. This in turn gave the four walking legs and two manipulator arms the motive juice necessary to operate. The arms themselves only had open/close gripping and were essentially little more than power-assisted puppets for the homunculi’s actual human arms, but for most things that would be more than enough to get the job done.

The whole setup rattled and clicked with the ticking of clocks as it operated, but compared to their utter silence before, I rather preferred it this way. The two of them together were working on the construction of more of the -- damnit, I guess I could call them clockwork harnesses -- for the rest of the homunculi, plus a few spare parts it looked like because these things would definitely require regular maintenance. I could see that while the clockwork harnesses gave the little guys much more total strength and load bearing capacity, they sacrificed somewhat in total speed to accomplish that: the harnesses could only move at one consistent speed and while that was triggered by and mimicked their natural movements, it couldn’t be sped up or slowed down. Worse still; the actual movements could only be sustained for two hours or so before the springs would simply wind down too much and need to be recharged again after another hour of waiting. So again, my adorifying minions wouldn’t be fighting any battles for me anytime soon in these things, but they weren’t going to be doing that for me at any point anyhow so it washed out even. After ordering the two in the workshop to deliver and equip the other homunculi as they finished the harnesses for each, I moved on to review what else had been accomplished for me that day.

Going into the root cellar next informed me that I should have been a little more clear about how I wanted things arranged, as one of the empty walls was now stuffed with reeds of gradually growing dimensions -- the most recent in the stack were easily mistaken for proper bamboo, in fact. Immediately adjacent to the faux bamboo was just one giant pile of fluff, looking much like someone had decided to shred a hundred stuffed animals and left the stuffing behind in some sort of plushy massacre. These were things that definitely did not belong in the root cellar, but I had not designated an actual storage area for them either. Since they were harvested from plants, into the cellar they went. I muttered to myself about how “the logic checks out” but just moved on, since there wasn’t enough fluff there to do more than make a decent-sized pillow and I didn’t have enough leather or non-burlap cloth to make said pillow… and I definitely wasn’t going to make another one out of oak burlap. What definitely belonged in the cellar and that I was quite happy to see was the tripling of stores of both shelfruit and carrotato, meaning that without the output of any of the still growing products I now had roughly two to two and a half weeks’ worth of food supplies. With the small assortment of herbs and a dedicated cook to vary up the offerings, that meant I was starting to look at a diet that wouldn’t bore me to tears anymore.

Checking out the farm area showed that the patches of shelfruit and carrotatoes were now twice the size they had been before I built the wall. I also saw that just out of sight beside the outside entrance to the root cellar was now an overhanging lean-to built against the house, where a small assortment of smoked fish were hanging from grass-rope ties. The interesting part there was that I hadn’t specified how the domesticated fish were to be stored and it’s clear that the minion working on that task had just followed a default value that required some sort of storage. Including their smoking. Of course, I could see that this also included the ten or so fish that had been developed for their scale and hide, but c’est la vie.

This “default storage methodology” assumption was only reaffirmed when I went back behind the cabin itself and found the four-foot-tall loom next to a few boiling pots each with a heat emitting quartzite crystal pointing down into the water, and crude spinning wheel that my homunculus assigned to weaver duties had been working on throughout the day. As I watched, passed reeds through boiling water to soften them up, and then rolled them against a graded chitinite surface until the long fibers within were separated. It then added those fibers to a second pot and when it was full started fishing out the fibers from a third pot, now looking much finer and a lighter brown in color. It then carried that bundle of fiber over to the spinning wheel and with its tiny almost kitten-sized hands started twisting the fibers while pushing the spinning wheel’s foot-paddles with its two forelegs. The process was actually quite efficient and created a fine thread. That went on for a while until it had a full spindle, and as I watched it connected that spindle up to a shuttle as it already had more of the same thread hooked up into the loom. The process it went through was complicated from there, but when it was done it would have another four or five foot long and one foot wide “bolt” of what I could not distinguish enough from linen to call it anything else. I say another because I saw rolled up adjacent to the loom another four or so of those bolts. Things were starting to come together for me, finally; I was finally starting to feel like I was back in some sort of civilized livelihood. Come tomorrow I would finally evolve beyond this burlap material and start having proper clothing again. Clothing that didn’t force one to ignore every possible inconvenient itch under the sun.

It wasn’t until I went to sit down for a spell in my two-story cabin that I realized that I had received exactly zero prompts throughout the day for any of my activities. I immediately made a “bee-line” back to the alchemy lab and began writing on the research bench there of all the things that my minions had done for me that day, sketching out their activities with charcoal drawings in “action shots”. I made a special point to diagram the clockwork harnesses and the methods they were using to transfer motive power on demand from the tension lines which triggered spring-assisted switches in turn. I also dedicated an entire book to the processes of using the loom and the items I recognized there -- warp, shuttle, loom… and so on. Once I’ve finished going through about ten books’ worth of all of these things, calling for one of the homunculi to transfer the books over to the library in turn, my field of view is filled with a series of pop-up messages as I’d hoped would occur.

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Early Clockwork Schizotech Era. >>

<< Special Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Chalcolithic Era. >>

<< Special Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Bronze Era. >>

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Primitive Biopunk Era. >>

Wait. Bronze age unlocked and I’ve never even smelted copper, let alone tin? How does that … huh. Oh. Oh goddamnit. There’s been copper ore in those streams the entire damned time. If I’d just tried melting various rocks I would have gotten there ages ago! I was literally looking at a small clump of the ore that I had used as a wall-building material because I couldn’t tell bornite from granite before. This means that somewhere along the path of those streams is a seam of ore, and where there’s copper there’s usually proper iron as well.

I can’t even bear to think about how annoyed I am by the prospect of having essentially cockblocked my own conventional tech-advancement through simple lack of disciplined experimentation, so I unhappily go to eat my evening meal as prepared by the housemaid homunculus -- this time it’s a wrap of herbs, chopped sauteed shelfruit, and reheated smoked trout, all in carrotato flatbread like a burrito. It occurs to me that I also need things to drink besides just plain water. There’s a few tea options that immediately pop into my mind thanks to my Basic Deciduous Survival, and I recall that I never worked out de-poisoning those clusterberries.

Nor, for that matter, have I actually captured those blackbirds like actually kicked off my great adventure before. Ahh, well. Another day another dollar; that can be tomorrow’s problem.