Chapter 9 - Perks

I squeezed my eyes shut, not exactly remembering how I’d gotten to the bottom of the pile yet again. But the window persisted.

The taskmaster, obviously. Scale early, scale often. More efficient workers early meant more realized gains over time. Plus, speech-capable? I might not have to wait for Rufus to come back to talk to someone after all. Maybe some more martial goblins would have been smart for the added security, but sometimes you gotta risk it for the biscuit.

I dug myself out from under the sleeping pile and pulled on a new pair of the sticky stilts I’d had the goblins make for me last night. That done, I walked to the edge of the bluff to relieve myself. There’s something satisfying about whizzing off a cliff. When I returned, most of the other goblins were dragging themselves out and waking up, scratching their bare bellies, and meandering around the village in their typical morning stupor. I spotted two that were slightly larger than the others, with a bit more cunning in their eyes. I whistled and waved them over.

“Oy, boss,” one of ‘em grumbled. The other said nothing, though she had the subtle wider hips and bust that I think denoted female goblins.

I looked between them. “Shouldn’t you both be able to talk?”

They shared a glance. The first one spoke again. “Oh, she can talk. Jus’ not the type to yak on.”

The first taskmaster had an accent right out of a bad British crime movie. “I see. Alright, well, I suppose you’ll need names.”

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“Wossat?”

“Something to call you by, to set you apart.” I pointed to the first. “Buzz,” and then to the second, “Sally.”

Buzz raised his hand in a sloppy salute. “Right, boss. Wos onner agenda today?”

I sighed. There was so much work to do, it was hard to prioritize. But having two independent thinkers would go a long way towards making sure I wasn’t spread so thin. I wondered what other industrious variants would be available as the tribe continued to grow.

“Buzz, you’re on fire duty. I want you to have a few goblins mess with friction fires. Spin sticks against a piece of wood til it makes a coal, then blow on it. Iterate on what works”

Buzz cocked his head toward the other taskmaster. “Wot about Sally?”

“We need to hunt more of those stone-sloths, but spears aren’t going to cut it. I want to start collecting bomb-fruits and storing them at the base of the ridge. Dig holes for each one, so that if one explodes it doesn’t trigger all the others.”

Buzz looked at Sally, then back at me.

“You sure she’s the same variant as you?

“Sally’s onnit, boss. Trust.”

“Good,” I said.

I left them there and went to the supply pile. Knives and spears were all well and good, but they weren’t the only tools in an engineer’s arsenal. What I wouldn’t give for a 3D-printer.

After sending out another two hunting parties, I sat down with the three primary materials for sticky-stone tools and started to make the essentials. It looked like there was actually some new rock mixed in with the shale that was harder and sharper. Flint, I had to assume. I started knocking off chips and soon got the hang of it.

Twine was the simplest compound invention. Really, just twisting two of the homespun strings together made them many times stronger. I needed the extra robustness for the abuse the rest of the tools would likely suffer during their use. The spade, the cleaver, the saw, and the auger as well.

The stringy-driver I was especially proud of. It was technically a belt-driver for manually powering rotary tools, with a loop of string attached to a small bow. When wrapped around a sharp stone that could be pushed into a surface and spun, well that was a simple drill with infinite uses. I’m pretty sure this was close to a fire-making method, as well, just with wood in place of the stone auger.

It wouldn’t be long before that technology propagated through the tribe. But I was still missing a major primitive material crucial to the upcoming projects I had in mind, in that I needed clay. With clay I could make molds for reproducing complex parts. But I also needed some way to transport it. I pulled together a collection of smaller, flexible sticks and set to building a lattice.

Thankfully I had minored in underwater basket-weaving in undergrad.