I hiked past the cave that Nika and I had emerged from only two days prior and eyed it warily. I was on high alert for trouble, and I imagined the beady red eyes of kobolds glaring at me from beyond that dark haunt, waiting for nightfall so that they could have their revenge.
I made a mental note to return to the cave soon and lay some booby traps. The monsters hadn’t emerged from there since we had been at our homestead, but it was a clear path to the underdark, and I didn’t feel like being surprised at night by a war party.
A half hour later I reached the camp that the travelers had made and ran up the hill. I put the chicken cage down and pulled my M17 when I topped the ridge. Then I surveyed the land to the north and listened for any sign of trouble. All that came to me was bird chirping, and Nika’s beautiful voice as she sang a happy song.
Relief washed over me when I heard Nika singing, so I put away my weapon, picked up my chickens, and walked the rest of the way with a big fat grin on my face.
“Honey, I’m home!” I called out as I entered camp.
“Ken Jewell, you’re back!” she declared happily as she tossed aside her broom.
We ran into each other’s arms, and I lifted her off her feet and she wrapped her arms and legs around me.
“I was so worried about you,” I confessed after we had kissed passionately. “Is everything alright? Did anyone come by?”
“Of course not, silly,” she gasped as I kissed her neck. “I’ve just been keeping house, but I was worried about you too.”
Our passionate kisses led to frantic stripping, and I carried her to the new bed as she giggled.
Nika asked me what I purchased while she rode me. For some reason, my shopping list was the hottest thing she had ever heard, and when I listed the variety of food that I had brought back for her she began to climax. As soon as she had come down, I flipped her over so I could take her from behind. As I slid inside of her and pulled her hips back into me, I told her that I had also brought her a special treat: a delicacy that humans called chocolate.
Her resulting orgasm sent startled birds erupting from the tops of all the nearby trees.
An hour later we rose from bed, and I brought the wares over to the table and laid everything out. Nika had a hundred questions about the new and delightful things I had bought, and I happily explained them to her. She sampled the bread, fruit, vegetables, and finally the chocolate. Her appetite for food almost matched her appetite for sex, and my heart swelled at how happy she was.
“Can we eat those animals too?” she asked as she eyed the chickens hungrily.
“We could, but they will provide us with eggs every day. We’ll eat some eggs, but we’ll let the rest hatch. Then we can start eating chicken once a week or so.”
“So they will make new ones that we can eat?” Nika gasped. “Ken Jewell, you are amazing!”
“I just want to take care of you and the baby,” I said with a shrug and smile.
“I wish to take care of you as well,” she said as she proudly showed off a baby basket that she had fashioned from thin wooden branches. “Look what I made while you were gone.”
“Wow, that’s beautiful, Nika,” I said. Her craftsmanship in making such things was truly impressive. “I bought some cloth as well, and some thread and a needle kit. I figured that it would come in handy if you wanted to make a blanket or a tablecloth. Oh, and I got you something else.”
I cleaned off my hands and presented her with the lacy pink sundress. Her eyes watered as she beheld the beautiful garment, and she hugged me fiercely. “Oh, Ken Jewell, you are too good to me.”
“I know,” I teased. “Go try it on.”
She stripped out of my t-shirt and underwear and pulled the dress over her head. I had guessed right, and the dress fit her perfectly. It hugged every curve of her wonderful body and made her small baby bump that much more noticeable.
“Wow, you’re really starting to show,” I noted.
She beamed at me and caressed her tummy lovingly. “Yes, the baby is going to be very strong and healthy. You are a good provider, Ken Jewell.”
I let Nika take over the cooking of the fish and set my focus on the construction of the house. The first thing I needed was to outline the frame, and that meant cutting down a lot of trees.
Felling axe in hand, I trudged down the hill and surveyed the nearby forest. Pine was the best wood to use for a log home, and there was an abundance of it. The only problem was that the best looking trees were on the other side of the river.
The most obvious solution was to build a bridge, but the effort would prove risky, not because I couldn’t do it, but because anyone heading down the river would see the bridge and realize there was probably a home nearby.
Then I glanced down river and was reminded of the rapids.
I’d gotten off my row boat because they had looked pretty dangerous, so I doubted that anyone else would bother trying to row up through them. It also meant that I really only have to worry about someone coming down the river, but they would also eventually have to worry about the rapids, so I guessed that anyone local would probably not even bother.
It wasn’t the safest bet, but the only other option would be building a boat to haul the logs across, and that would take much longer and be much more dangerous.
So I decided to build a bridge, and I figured that I could take it down as soon as I had collected all the logs I needed.
I set to the task eagerly. I was in a good mood. My woman was happy, we had food, and I wasn’t in goddamn Syria fighting nutjobs. Right about then life couldn’t have gotten much better. The weather was on our side as well, and as the second sun rose in the east, I started to fell the lumber that I would need for my bridge.
At its most narrow, the river was twenty feet wide, so I picked a couple of tall pine trees that grew on the bank and began chopping them down. They would be a bitch to move, but if all went well I wouldn’t have to do much more than nudge them a little on each side to get them into position. I really needed a beast of burden for the job, and an ox would have been ideal, but I didn’t have the money for one, so for now I was going to have to make do with homemade winches and pulley systems.
I didn’t have the technology available to create a cofferdam, and I had no way of effectively driving support beams into the middle of the river, so I was going to have to make do with a simple beam bridge. The pines I had chosen were more than thirty feet tall, and their length would make them strong enough to span the twenty foot wide river without much bending.
“Timber!” I yelled as the first pine tree creaked and began to fall.
I had planned the drop perfectly, and the tree fell across the river and crashed onto the distant bank. The next tree fell similarly, but it was fifteen feet away from the first. I would have to move them closer together, but first I needed to cut off all the branches.
I stepped up onto the first tree, found my balance, and went to work carefully chopping off the branches. By the time I had finished cleaning them both, Nika called to me from up on the hill.
It was lunchtime.
I joined her at the table, and we enjoyed a bountiful meal of roasted fish, apples, and bread. I told Nika my plans for the bridge and the pulley system to haul the logs up the hill, and she shared with me her plans to decorate our little abode. I debated whether I should tell her about the bounty on my head or the men who had been looking for me, but I decided that honesty was my best bet. After all, I wouldn’t have wanted her to keep something like that from me, so I told her everything that had happened.
She took the news stoically and even seemed proud that her husband had gained such a large bounty. She even laughed at the nicknames, “Crazy Ken” and “the Monster Lover from Mer Bay.” I had heard the latter in passing, and I thought it had quite a nice ring to it.
“You are already a notorious outlaw, Ken Jewell,” she said with pride. “Soon everyone on the surface world and in the underdark will know and fear your name.”
“I don’t want to be feared, Nika. I just want us to be left alone.”
“I think you can have both, yes?” She nodded to herself. “Yes, if they fear you, then maybe they will leave us alone. If not, then we will just have to crush them all with our army and take their loot.”
“What army?” I asked.
“The army of your monster children of course, Ken Jewell,” she answered. “You will be unstoppable!”
I shook my head and smiled at her unwavering positivity. It seemed like nothing could dampen her spirits, and that in turn made me feel like I was almost invincible.
The food did me a lot of good, and by the time I returned to my work I felt like a man reborn. I used the rope along with the block and tackle that I had bought from the man at the tool supply store to create a simple winch. I anchored them against one of the largest of the trees adjacent to where I wanted to make the bridge, and then I nudged the big pines into place on our side of the river. I then walked across one of the trees and similarly adjusted the other side. Once the logs were in place, I secured them with stakes fashioned from the thicker branches and tied them down.
I had set the logs six feet apart, but there weren’t any other trees in the area I could use to make baseboards. There were plenty on the far side of the river though, so I balance beamed across the water on one of the trees I had just winched into place, and then proceeded to chop down a couple of tall pines there. Once I had chopped all the branches off the felled trees, I sawed off twenty, six-foot-long logs that would connect the beams and act as a walkway.
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The twin suns burned bright overhead while I worked, and by the time I had nailed and tied down the last of my pine logs, the first sun had begun to flirt with the western horizon.
I glanced at my watch and was surprised to find that I had been working for more than ten hours. The time difference still had me all kinds of confused, but I was beginning to get used to the long days.
I decided it was time to take a break and joined Nika for dinner. We ate bread, cheese, and some fish Nika had caught as the chickens grazed on the hillside. I was going to need to build a chicken coop at some point, but I had so much work ahead of me already that I put the thought aside for now. Until I had built them a suitable coop, they were just going to have to sleep in the unfinished house.
Dinner made me crave coffee, and I remembered the tea that I had bought. One of the pouches smelled like green tea, and the other hinted at Earl Grey. I brewed some green tea, added some sugar, and sat on the hillside with Nika to enjoy the new beverage.
“Your bridge is beautiful and very clever,” she said as she admired my handywork.
“It’s not the best I've ever made,” I admitted. “But it will get the job done. Now that it's finished I can begin hauling logs from the other side of the river.” I glanced up at the holy twins. “But we’ve only got about six hours of daylight left, and I’m pretty beat. I’ll probably just focus on cutting down the pine trees we need with what’s left of the day.”
The next morning I awoke before sunrise and put the kettle on the fire. Nika and I watched the first sun emerge from the east and ate a breakfast of bread, apples, and cheese. Nika enjoyed the new tastes immensely, and she sat across from me and chewed with ecstasy the entire time. When she caught me staring she blushed, and her cheeks actually became a few shades greener.
“The baby loves the new food that you have provided,” she said.
“Oh yeah? It’s a bit of a luxury. It will only last a few days, and we’ll have to go back to fishing.”
“That’s okay,” Nika said as she smiled at me. “The baby just likes to eat.”
“Damn,” I chuckled, “does the baby want more?” I noticed how she eyed the chickens as they grazed on the hillside.
“Oh yes,” she said. “The baby always wants more. He loves this surface food, but he also wants things only found in the underdark like lizard brains, glowing mushrooms, lichen pudding, tadpole soup, baby turtles on a half shell, and basilisk meat. I think you should go back into the underdark soon. We will definitely need more loot, yes? And you can get the baby the food he wants too.”
“Back into the underdark?” I asked. “That’s about the last place I want to go. But you’re right, those kobolds were carrying a surprisingly good amount of coins, and we’re going to need more supplies at some later point in time.”
“Yup,” she said happily. “And you need to find more monster women to bring to the surface and make babies with. It is nice with just you and me here, but I can’t wait to have a big family.”
“You mean an army?”
“Same thing,” she said. “Clan Jewell will be legendary. You will see.”
“It's going to take a bit of time,” I said as I glanced at her baby bump. “You've gotten bigger, but it will be a few months before he is--”
“Oh no, Ken Jewell,” she laughed. “The baby will come in just a few weeks.”
“A few weeks?” I gasped as I spit out my tea.
“Of course, silly,” she giggled as she reached to wipe the tea off my chin. “How long do human women carry their unborn babies?”
“Nine months!” I said as I calculated the time that had passed since we first had sex.
“Yes, but don’t worry, Ken Jewell, you will have the warren finished by the time your son is born.”
“Yeah,” I said as I stood up from the chair and grabbed my axes. “I’d better get to it.”
The next day I redoubled my efforts. I needed to get the house built, but talk of the underdark had reminded me that there was still a cave leading to the place just a half-hour walk from our homestead, and it was a problem that needed to be remedied.
Sooner was better than later.
I approached the cave cautiously. There were no tracks leading from the entrance, but inside there were dozens of footprints from the little kobold devils that had chased us out more than a week before. I sniffed at the air, but smelled nothing but the musk of dark, wet places. I listened for ten long minutes, but heard nothing but the steady flow of water in the walls and distant frog songs.
The tunnel that we had raced down to get out was more than one hundred feet long, and when I walked to the end of it, I noticed there was another passageway that we had missed because it had been behind us. M17 and flashlight in hand, I explored the new lair. The tunnel smelled like moss and fungus, and the only sound that came from within was the steady plop of distant water.
The cave proved to be only twenty feet deep and lined with bright red moss. Halfway through the tunnel, there was a large hole in the floor surrounded by a narrow ridge that led to a small shelf. Water slowly dripped from the ceiling into the dark pit, and I pointed my flashlight down there to see how deep it ran. The water took ten seconds between the time it dripped from the ceiling before it hit the distant pool, and my flashlight beam barely revealed the water below.
I continued exploring the tunnel and soon circled back to the main passageway. This new entrance was a bit of a tight squeeze to get out of, and I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was positioned between two extending rocks on the wall. It meant that the side passage was in a bit of a horseshoe “U” shape that intersected the main exit tunnel.
Then I got an idea and wiggled backward so I was back near the pit.
The pit would provide an excellent place for a booby trap, so I went back to the homestead and gathered the things that I would need. After I brought them back into the tunnel, I set to work covering the eight foot wide pit with thin branches, and then I covered them with the red moss that grew on the walls.
If anything chased me from the underdark, I could lead them down the side tunnel, maneuver around the narrow rim, and lie in wait in the small alcove. If all went as planned, my pursuers would chase me across the pit and fall through the weak branches to their sudden deaths. I might not ever need to use the pitfall, but it had only taken me a half an hour of work, and I felt a lot better with it in place.
Once I had finished the pitfall, I decided to add some feather spear traps near the entrance. After selecting two strong spring sticks, I sharpened spear points out of oak and attached them with Nika’s woven vine rope. Then I placed one tripline on each side of the entrance to ensure that no matter what way the monsters or underdark creatures went, they would be impaled by one of the springsticks. Then I marked both sides of the wall by the tripline with a kind of chalk-like stone for my own safety.
Lastly, I added a tripline to the tunnel entrance set to a deadfall trap that would set off one of my M17 bullets. I didn’t want to waste any of my precious ammunition, but with the cave a half hour from our homestead, the use of one of the bullets was the best way to alert me that someone or something had breached the cave during the night.
When I was content with my work on the underdark traps, I returned to the homestead to continue building the house. Between the home, and the defensive walls I wanted to put around our fort area, I determined that I would need about a hundred pine logs at least ten feet long and twelve inches in diameter.
It was time to get all lumberjack on these guys.
The felling axe was a great tool, and I only needed to sharpen it after every fifth tree I had cut down. By the time Nika came to bring me lunch, my arms were numb and my back was tired.
“How many trees did you chop down, Ken Jewell?” she asked as we ate.
“Twenty five,” I answered.
“You must be the strongest man in the world,” she gasped.
“Thanks,” I laughed, “but there is plenty more work to do. I have to take all the branches off and plane the edges. This will be more than enough for the walls of the home, but I’ll need a bunch more to build a wall around the homestead.”
“You must be the hardest working man in the world,” she purred.
“Maybe,” I joked. “But the army got me used to doing hard work.”
“Did they teach you how to build warrens in the army too?” she asked.
“The army taught me how to build a lot of stuff, but the job was mostly about building bridges, blowing up bridges, fixing broken stuff we liked, and then blowing up other stuff we didn’t like.” I laughed. “The cabin stuff I learned from my dad. When I was seventeen, we built a log cabin for my grandmother to live in the backyard. Before that my brother and I used to build forts all the time.”
“So, you come from a family of great warren builders?” she asked.
“Yeah, kinda,” I replied.
“Then your army taught you how to build and destroy things for war?” she asked as her green eyes grew wider.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Oh, Ken Jewell,” she sighed happily. “You will be the bestest emperor in the entire world. It won’t take long, either. Maybe just a few years. I am so blessed to be the wife of such a great man. You are a wonderful provider, lover, builder, and general. Soon you will be a great father. I will do my part to be the bestest wife I can possibly be.”
“That sounds great,” I said, and then I blinked a few times as I reminded myself about how crazy all this was. Just a few days ago, I had been about to die in Syria, and now I was about to be a father to a half-goblin-half-human baby.
For half a moment, I almost freaked out, but Nika’s bright smile kept me rooted to the ground. This beautiful woman had absolute faith in me, and I knew that I wouldn’t ever let her down.
After lunch, I started narrowing the logs with my side-axe. The blade was set on the left side of the haft for right-handed users, and it allowed me to make cuts that were closer to the surface of my target than a normal hatchet would have. I chopped perpendicular traverses every foot on both sides of the logs, carved off the bark, and then proceeded to plane them flat. When the day began to wane, I joined Nika for a second dinner, then collapsed into bed like one of my felled logs.
In the morning, my muscles were sore, but I worked through the discomfort. Ever since I was about thirteen years old, I had exercised regularly, and the Army didn’t give a shit about over working people, so I was used to ignoring such growing pains.
Nika asked if she could help me, but her bump was starting to become more pronounced, so I insisted that she just focus on the smaller branches while I handled dragging the beefier logs.
Once all the wood was up to the site, I chose my bottom logs and carefully carved them to fit the foundation. While I worked, Nika went down to the riverbank and the dark parts of the forest to collect moss, and we used it to seal the spaces between the bottom logs and the stone foundation. I placed the center beam and built a support wall through the middle of the house to give us two rooms. It was more work, but I liked the design better than a single, opened-aired cabin. The added support would also help to strengthen the ceiling joists and support the roof. It took some work notching the corners of the logs and getting them just right, but by the time nightfall came we had half of the walls up.
We finished the remainder of the walls the following day, cut out the doors and windows, and began on the ceiling joists. I elected to secure two logs together for each joist and connected them with a dovetail notch that sat on the center wall. We used a ramp and rope system to get the lumber up onto the roof and worked on the tables until yet another day had passed.
“I have never seen a more beautiful warren,” Nika told me as we stood and admired our work in the light of the waning second sun. “How did you ever think of building something this amazing, Ken Jewell?”
“Wait until it's done, it’s going to be nice and warm and dry,” I said. “No more sleeping under the stars at the mercy of the elements.”
It hadn’t yet rained since I’d been on the new planet, but I didn’t know if that was strange or not. I was looking forward to it, since I guessed Nika hadn’t yet experienced rain, and I guessed that she was going to absolutely love it.
All the days of working meant that we were starting to get low on food again. Fish were bountiful in the river, and I had caught two more hares, but seven days had passed since my return, and in another week I would have to go into town for more supplies. I wanted to buy a mule and a cart as well, and I needed to get a lot more food this time. The less I went into the neighboring towns the better, so I was looking to stockpile. I also needed some more tools, and real glass windows if I could find them.
But first I had to get money, and that meant going back into the underdark again.
Nika had been on me about getting her the exotic food that she and the baby craved, but I wanted to finish the house before I went back into the dark underbelly of this strange new world.
The next day I started on the roof and built up the gables with the pitch of the roof in mind. I still didn’t know if it snowed here, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. If I made the pitch too shallow, then the snow would collect, and there would be more of a chance of leaking, so I settled for a forty-five degree slope. Once my gables were mounted, and the dowels were in place, I used a rafter model to draw lines on the gables, then carved off the excess wood. Next, I nailed the roof truss, and attached the center beam to the ceiling joists and side walls.
Another day passed and was spent chopping down the fattest oak I could find and sawing two foot slabs off the trunk. Once I had a half dozen quality pieces, I used my saw to cut out the hundreds of shingles that I would need. I managed to fashion all of my roof planks by the end of the day as well. By the time the sun set the following day I had nailed down all my planks and placed my shingles.
All that was left was the windows and the doors, along with some touch up work, but before I could do that, I needed to get our money situation taken care of.
It was time to head back into the underdark.