Chapter 5 - Speed-running Civilization

I awoke to a general panic, and at first I thought we were being attacked, until the first drops of rain started hitting me as the goblin sleeping mound churned and became a tangle of fleeing, frightened creatures.

I watched as they all sought shelter under trees and limbs, holding their smelly, raw-hide cloaks above them for cover. They had no concept of housing or umbrellas to keep the rain off—despite being wet seeming to agitate them. I’ll admit, it was an unpleasant sensation, having wet fur. But, having spent significant time on the water in college, I was able to grin and bear it. I pushed myself up and wobbled over to the scummy pond, cupping my hands and bringing the water to my mouth. It was only slightly better than the after-taste of raw sewage. I thought back to the impromptu meal.

Part of me definitely found the texture of raw meat distasteful, even if my goblin taste buds relished the flavor. But it wasn’t just texture that cooking improved. It released and preserved nutrients, allowed food to be kept longer and eaten more safely, while providing more benefits to health.

I looked back at the village of goblins, who watched me from the shelter of bushes and trees. I spotted two slightly smaller goblins without the curious skull masks and called up the system window.

I’d gained two more members overnight. Well, the racial traits had mentioned that more goblins could spontaneously appear close to existing goblins. I hadn’t expected that to mean that they’d appear nearly full-grown. That was how they kept from going extinct, I suppose, despite having next to no concept of language, invention, housing, or self-preservation. I doubted they’d be much for child-rearing—especially seeing as their heads were at least twice as wide as their narrow hips. If there was some sort of god watching over this place, he surely had a soft-spot for keeping the little guys around despite all impracticality.

“System, can you provide me with custom notifications?”

“Every time I wake up, define the current tribe size and delta from previous tribe size notification.”

I took a seat near the closest tree and started to ponder the monolithic task ahead of me. Lofty goals like getting to this world’s moon were well and good. But I had stone knives as a starting point, advanced space flight as the end-goal, and a whole lot of fill-in-the-blanks in between. I was reasonably assured of being able to create, say, a simple two-stroke aircraft with a simple engine—provided I had aluminum, steel, and the ability to mill cylinder heads, pistons, and a prop shaft. Oh yeah, and fuel refined enough to power and lubricate the whole thing. But how to acquire an alloy as versatile as aluminum and shape it into panels? How to find and process oil into usable fuel? How to build a spark plug? And all with a non-verbal work force.

I decided I was getting ahead of myself. The goblins as they were now, were living in a pure subsistence society of hunter-gatherers. They had no concept of anything but how to live the next few minutes. They had no safety net, no concept of permanent shelter or food storage other than their own bellies. The existence of the cliffords proved they had natural predators, as well, easily capable of picking off isolated members of the tribe. And what about larger predators? Forest dwellers? Hell, there might be humans in this world and I’d seen enough movies to know that humans and goblins rarely got along. The tribe’s only safety was in numbers, and being able to spontaneously reproduce was their ace-in-the-hole that let them maintain the population. Thanks to that, they were hanging on. Barely. 30 members was not a sustainable number for a community that wanted to enter industrialization.

That’s where I needed to start. Before I could start tackling advanced concepts like metallurgy and chemistry, I had to make sure their basic needs were met in order to expand the tribe. They needed to be able to know where their next meal was coming from, and that they’d have a roof over their heads so that the next rainstorm wouldn’t leave their fur drenched.

Food was most important. I selected a party of six goblins at random. “Go hunt something for tonight’s dinner,” I said. The six of them raised their knives over their head and raced off into the forest, screaming a war cry.

“An animal!” I shouted after them, shaking my head. Lord help whatever was in their path. Death by a thousand cuts awaited. Hopefully the hide would be in decent enough shape, so that I could figure out how to process leather.

I needed two things for that: tools and raw materials. You could do a lot with wood, stone, and string. But there were still limits. Luckily, the bone pile would be a convenient source of small, precise tool parts like needles and hooks and pins. Other raw materials were plentiful as well, and I’m sure the forest would provide if I could figure out where to look. If we were going to kick-start construction and manufacturing, I had a few priorities that were, as yet, unsourced.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I needed material harder and sharper than shale for cutting tools. Obsidian would be best for sharpness, but I knew that had something to do with volcanoes. It was also too brittle for things like saws and axes. Flint would be best. I was pretty sure it was more common and workable in relatively simple ways.

Three other primitive materials my tribe currently lacked were clay, adhesive, and leather. Of the three, clay was the most important to primitive advancement. Clay meant containers and weather-proofing, and it was both easy to acquire and easy to work with. You could make tools and molds from clay, and even complex devices. Once you found a clay deposit, you harvested it, mixed it with sand, dirt, or water, depending on what you wanted to do with it, and then you shaped it just like clay you’d buy in a craft store. You needed fire or a lot of time in the sun to fully cure it, but judging by how damp everything in the forest was at the moment, fire would have to wait.

Adhesive shouldn’t be too difficult, either. We had sticky sap from the trees. If I could find some pine trees, their resin would be extremely effective—but storage and transportation of it came back to clay. I needed containers.

Leather came from animal hides. I think I’d seen them make it on a survival show, once, and it involved scraping the animal skin as clean as possible and then stretching it and rubbing brains on it. Which seemed pretty morbid. I’m not sure why you needed the brains, was there some fat, oil, or enzyme in brains that aided the tanning process? Either way, all the basic requirements were already in camp—including the mostly in-tact hide of the red canine from the night before. And the skull. Since clay would have to be found and transported, and I doubted the goblins would be keen to go out in the rain and hunt for it, I set that task aside.

I waved a couple of them over. “I need stabbies and a wooden square, about yay big,” I said, gesturing. The goblins mimed my motions and looked at each other before running off. Others handed their new knives to me—point first, I should mention. I gingerly took the sharpest one and looked down at what remained of the canine—which, admittedly, wasn’t much. The thing had been torn limb from limb and eviscerated in the goblin feeding frenzy. There was maybe a decent patch on its back with enough hide to maybe make a small shawl or cloak that only had a few bite marks.

I’d never skinned an animal before, so I cut along where the least damaged part of the pelt was and pulled it back, resisting the very goblin urge to just stuff everything in my mouth by the fistful. I dug and scraped wherever it caught as I pulled, and eventually it came away in my hands. The back of it was slick with connective tissue.

About that time, the goblins who had run off came sprinting back with the makeshift frame, and I took the offered rope. I pursed my lips looking at it, and then pointed to the bone pile. “Bring me a small bone.”

The goblins raced off to do as I said. They came back with a selection of bones I didn’t recognize, but then, I’m not that kind of doctor. I picked what might have been a bird’s rib bone and ground a small eyelet into it with a knife, then threaded the smallest of the cord I could find and punched it through the hide.

I pulled the cordage through and tied it to the corners of the frame to stretch it taut over the opening.

I stopped. Wait. Boney sutures and sticky framing and skinny tanning. It took everything I had not to smack my wide goblin forehead. This whole time, I’d assumed the sticky in all the sticky goblin tech referred to the sap clinging to the bark-weave cordage. Did it instead refer to the sticks? Heaven help me if this technology tree was full of puns.

Handing the knife back to its original owner (I think), I indicated the hide. “Clean this as best you can, then rub its brains on it.

I had barely turned around before I heard a splash and turned back to see the goblins smacking the whole kit and caboodle into the pond.

“Not like that!” I said, waving my arms. “Scrape it clean with the knife!”

The light of recognition passed over the tribe, and they waded back out of the pool and went to work cleaning the rest of the gristle and tissue off the Clifford skin. I left them to it and turned to the rest of the village.

While they worked, I noticed several of the other goblins hacking poles together in various shapes, and realized that sticky frames, as the system called them, weren’t just an end product, but a material on their own. Good. That meant they could be used to make more advanced things, like shelters. I found sticky frames being worked on that were vaguely triangular shaped, and had their owners hold them upright while I spent a few hours lashing a few cross-bars and weaving vines into a lattice until I got the technology window to flash again with . By the time I finished, the rain had stopped and the harsh afternoon sun was starting to beat down. The moon would eclipse it soon enough, with the totality lasting several hours if my judgement was correct. It seemed total solar eclipses were a near daily event in the world.

Since I hadn’t noticed a moon-set or moon rise, I also had to guess that the moon was tidally locked to this hemisphere, though it did trace a slow circle in the sky over the hours that I spent working, going from about 40 degrees from the horizon to directly overhead.

Now we were cooking. I looked around. Suddenly, half the village seemed to be re-working their projects. Good. They’d refine them, and then I could show them how to apply foliage and grasses for insulation. In the meantime, I returned to the hide, which the tanners were already applying the brains to.

With all the brains used up, the goblins left the hide and went to work fashioning what was left of the skull into a mask for one of our newest members.

Good. Things were proceeding well.

What the hell?