Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig stretch. I feel like I slept a year. And wow…

When I first got here one of my very first priorities was making a shower or bath. It’s weird but after weeks of not having one, that priority dropped lower and lower. It just hasn’t seemed as important anymore you know? I had magic, why would I focus on something mundane like that?

Well…Today I work up. Just now even! Covered in dirt and grime from working with dirt and plants. Covered in sweat from the heat of the fire greenhouse and exertion. Ignoring that priority has come to bite me in the end. I feel grawful. Gross and Awful all in one.

It’s decided. A proper bathroom is my #1 priority once again!

To upgrade from sneaky dumps of pond water to modern luxury we have three goals. One. A way of transporting water. Worst case is carrying buckets or seeing if Len wants to fill my baths but that seems weird. My goal is actual plumbing of some sort.

Two! A way of heating water up for baths or similar. My goal once again is a proper heating setup but the worst case would be sticking a bathtub sitting directly on top of a fire. Sam stew!

I think some hotubs or something work that way? It’s definitely a thing. Don’t look at me like that.

Three! A way of filtering or disposing of the water…

So right now I’m taking a lot of water from the mini lake. I’m kind of pretending its an infinite water source but I also just drastically increased the amount of crops that need watering…dammit. Len. I’m really sorry to increase your workload until we find a solution. I’ll make it up to you – reach out if you want me to prioritize a watering system!

Anyways. At some point if I just blindly take water it will just vanish one day. I mean….it won’t vanish – it's going into the ground and I’m pretty sure my world's a closed system so it's still around…but I haven’t had rain yet and I still feel like I’m going to drain my whole lake.

The Worst and simplest answer is to just dump all my wastewater back into the pond…The fishes and any algae that grows will probably fix it? As long as it's not too dirty? Oh I also have to stop ignoring my waste water. Yuck. Let’s burn the outhouse to the ground now. It sucks!

Anyways. Let’s start on problem one. I’m imagining the whole top of my current house can be a cistern…but no that’s a bad idea. I don’t know how waterproof my tiles are let alone how structurally sound they might be. Let’s…lets put it beside my current house. On top of the eventual bathroom?

Yeah. I like the sound of that – I’m thinking we make the pot down below and then sort of lift it up? It needs to be high so we can use gravity to push it around…I wish I could glue wings to water that would make all of this so much simpler.

Okay. I’m just going to talk while I work and if anything sounds wrong please feel free to speak up. Isher, you can start figuring out how we will lift all the water up. My two ideas are some sort of screw thing – I remember seeing pictures of old mechanical pumps – or maybe a sort of water wheel/faris wheel thing?

Thefishyminer. You’re going to have to do a lot to lift our tub up…how much weight can you lift again? A nice pile of rocks? We’ll figure something out.

Anyways. To start, I think I’m going to make the bathtub and use that as practice for making the cistern tub.

Obviously we make it out of sand cement. Easy to mold. Relatively strong while set. Biggest problem for the bath will be making it nice to sit in. Like, its kind of grainy? I used the sand to make sandpaper after all and while my cement isn’t that rough…it’s still not the most comfortable.

It’s been a while since I played around with making buckets of self glued sand…let's see if I can figure out anything with my higher skill levels.

Gathering my materials on a grand adventure to the distant sea and treacherous desert, I swirl my sand slurry in triumph. It’s easy enough by this point to focus on the feedback my skill gives me – I just have to focus on the tingling in my hands and give names to the different shivers.

This shiver is called dave.

Incredibly quickly I might brag, the bucket reaches what I used to consider full saturation. I keep at it spinning around and around teasing the idea of letting it stick. It’s like the friction of my swirl has made sparks that zapped away through all the grains of sand. It’s like my skill is a needle and thread and I’ve threaded millions of grains of sand together in long chains. Those chains then tangled up with each other creating a knot and stretching the idea of what this skill should be.

I continue.

Soon the bucket begins feeling a bit like…like silly putty maybe? It’s sticking to itself but not me…and its sticking to itself in a weird way. I haven’t let it solidify after all – the threads haven’t connected so currently everything is sticking to itself from a distance.

I pull a strand of the cement out, slowly raising my chain up and laugh as it stretches in a goopy line.

I have created a whip! Mwahahaha. I try to spin my whip around and cry when it breaks. Turns out my unsolidified super cement can’t handle the shear force of my ultimate spinning technique.

Lame.

No matter. I use a dirty finger to press my invisible smart scientist girl glasses up the bridge of my nose and turn to final results.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Solidify my gelatinous minion! Mwahahahaha! Solidify!”

The extra spun glob sort of does a “slirurk” it freezes so fast. I was holding it from solidifying pretty hard that time.

Reaching out I feel my new creation. Its…a bit strange. An entirely different texture from my previous cement and yet entirely the same in all the worse ways? Something fun to note is that the long thread I pulled off solidified into a sort of pole strong enough to stay hard even though it’s as thin as a pencil near the end. Kind of fun. Still gritty.

I think if I had to describe this test, it has a texture that lets me feel the binding agent that is my skill? If previous cement solidifies into something that feels like maybe sandstone, this solidifies into something that’s like someone mixed glue into some sand and let it settle?

Why am I so focused on making a smooth cement? Okay well…For one I could use wood right. I could make a wooden bathtub. Make it water tight. Call it a day…but I think wood goes bad when damp a lot so I would need to water proof it witch would be harder…and splinters. Heck splinters! I did figure out how to make a sort of sandpaper but we both know that high key sucks. Its like. The coarsest type of sandpaper made like the cheapest method you can think of.

So…that’s why I’m trying to build this out of glue. It’s not like I can buy sheets of plastic after all. I could use the wrappers of stuff from the corner store but that would need a lot…and making it out of garbage feels weird.

Honestly, if I could just solidify glue and nothing else I might be good…is that even possible?

I stop to think and then grab a fresh bucket of water – this time not dropping any sand into it.

Swirl, Swirl, Swirl.

I spin my hands about, reaching for something and not finding it. The only friction that seems to light up in my mind as a cheeky tingle is the friction of the water against the side of the bucket – and that’s barely there. My hands brushing against the side tingle quite a bit more as something to grab onto and I’m for sure for sure not going to just glue my hands to my bucket. That’s licking a telephone pole in winter levels of stupid. Not again. You get one of those per lifetime and I’ve used two.

Why can’t I glue the water to itself? That’s…that’s kind of what I feel like I should be doing. Water feels smooth – I would love a water bed and a water bath.

Like…water on the outside and inside? You know what I mean! I’m not being confusing you’re being confusing!

Early days I tried tossing mana crystals in everything hoping they would magically pazza everything. Hoping that would jump into some crazy effects I could proudly show off…and then I came upon the sad realization that glueing mana crystals to things was equivalent to duct taping batteries to the side of screw drivers or something and expecting them to become electric.

I did figure out a way of making things glue better however…maybe?

To start I dope my water with a single handful of sand.

Nothing crazy – just enough to get some friction up in here. Some friction up in the hood! Down in the club!

It's friction time.

With a swirl I instantly begin to affect all of the sand hundreds of small sparks of…some sort of like static electricity. Static friction or something? I mean it can’t be static because its moving but…you know what. I’m going stop trying to describe what I’m doing. Ishner’s looking at me funny for that last line.

I swirl this mostly water, smol sand with one hand – swirling a flat side of my last test with the other mostly just to keep a target in mind.

I focus on making this as weak but dense of a connection as I can and then immediately begin to use mana crystal creation.

Got you!

The feeling Triboadhesion gives me twists as MCC makes the mana in my spell obvious and helps me touch it.

Dragging my fingers through the threads breaks connections but I don’t care about that. I don’t actually want it to stick to the sand you know?

Swirl. Swirl. Swirl. Rip apart. Rip apart. Rip apart.

I drag the connections formed from glue mana into physicality and then use them as my new base. I can glue the glue mana to my glue mana easily enough – doing it this way breaks most of the connections to the sand I spiked my water with but that’s fine. It's more than fine – this is perfect.

The frayed ends of glue mana immediately start breaking and dissolving away as soon as they snap, but by gluing them to each other that decay immediately stops.

The old sand gets freed up and lets me continue swirling it – and then I’m free to harvest more threads and grow my goop.

Yes goop. As much as I’m talking about this as threads and knots the reality of my new set up is my bucket is starting to feel really goopy. It’s kind of fun. Like less gross slime? I'm nearly positive I'm transmuting the water of this bucket into magic glue.

This is probably good as a test… With a mental flick I designate all the glue glued to glue as safe. All the glue glued to sand is break.

Swirling and shaking my glob, I try and remove as much sand as possible – the grains flaking away from bits they’ve stuck to. Some stay – trapped in the middle of goop – but the majority is gone and that’s what matters.

With a shake, I pull my goop out of the bucket and spread it over my first test coating the entire thing in a translucent film.

Annnnd insta dry! With an unnecessary snap of my fingers the glue freezes in place bonding to the first test and sort of sucking in…it kind of looks like I wrapped it in almost invisible shrink wrap?

Now for the finger test.

I slowly poke and prod my example. It's…pretty good actually. No longer gritty. Pretty smooth. Pretty stronk. My only complaint is the texture is kind of…scrunchy? Is that a word?

I place this test back in the water and feel it again. Yeah. This works pretty well. The scrunchy disappears when submerged in water and makes it feel surpisingly close to a tile. Textured just enough to provide some slight grip but not enough to break anything.

Okay! Now to shape my bath and make more of this…I hope its pushing my skill in a new way because it takes way longer than normal glue creation.

…

My bath is complete. It took me nearly the entire rest of the day to form but at the end of the day (heh) its simple enough in shape. A basin just a bit longer than I am tall. Wide enough I can sit sideways. Deep enough if I sit upright on the bottom it goes up to my neck. I placed a little seat on one side so I can settle back and hold onto the edges with my two arms.

The bottom has grippy strips. Lines of super cement glue I can rest my feet on – hopefully they will prevent slippage.

It's mostly sloped – The far end where my feet might go is a inch or so lower than the rest of it and that’s where I’ve placed a hole for drainage. I can fit a block of wood into it – glueing my plug to the sides as needed to create a seal and reverting my glue to pop it out and drain water as needed.

I had some vague plan to build this into the sand beside my house but realized that would make draining so much harder. That’s why my final result is sitting on top of the sand – the hole laying on the ground instead of under it. Less fancy looking, but easier to make a drain…I could of course dig a hole and lay some pipes but I don’t want to dig it up if it fails or clogs.

Besides the bath I also made a basin. I made a rough boxy shape with wood – roughly as long as my house and half a meter wide. I then heavily cemented everything with my stronger cement for strength and extra water proofing.

It's heavier than I can lift – heavier than thefishyminer can lift as well – but friendship is magic and between the two of us we get it up above my head and into place. Three stilts coated in cement act like columns and the whole shindig is glued to cement, the house’s wall

Tomorrow we can do heating and plumbing!

See you soon.