Fortunately, I’ve already spent some time considering how to smoke my hide. With my magic already saturating the flesh, it doesn’t take too much effort to close up the small holes I created for the bark-fibre cord to pass through.
Then, folding it in half, I expend a lot more mana to make the edges match up with each other. It takes a good half an hour as I have to refill my mana pool several times, but that’s not too bad – I spend some of my meditation wondering whether my new Master level in Energy Manipulation might actually allow me to consume my Energy store to refill my mana or health.
That could come in useful if I’m in a situation where one of my Bound is severely injured – or I am. It’s probably worth testing, though it’s unlikely to be something I practise regularly since I’m trying to gain Energy for levelling up. Well, unless I find that I can increase my stat points purely with Energy – and that it’s cheaper to do that than level up.
Actually, didn’t I do something like that before? Though not with Energy, precisely. I remember all the way back to my experience in the middle of the vine-strangler forest, when I almost died from falling for the venomous creature’s trap. I’d run out of mana, run out of practically everything. I’d drawn from River, pulled his mana from him. And then when his mana ran out, I think I’d accidentally pulled at his health pool too. Certainly, whatever I did had hurt him.
But that’s something to explore later. For now, I bind the edges of the hide together on all sides but one, creating a large open-mouthed bag. Then, thinking about it, I form four more holes at the top, feeding two lines of bark-fibre cord through the holes so they cross inside.
The hide sorted, I now work on my frame. The one I used before did a very good job for stretching, but smoking the hide will require something a little different. I consider using the previous frame, but decide not: I may easily need it again, and don’t want to have to remake it in the future.
No, this time, I make something else pretty simple, but hopefully sturdy enough. If I was doing this in the forest, I would easily be able to hang the hide from a branch, but a cave isn’t quite so easy to work with. Instead, I’ll have to ‘make’ my branches. Fortunately, after all the work on trimming the tree River and I felled, I have plenty of different sized branches in my Inventory.
Pulling out a few long ones, I chop them into four roughly equal lengths, a bit taller than my height. Crossing them near the top, I bind them with some more cord into a rough sort of teepee and stand it on its legs. Since the teepee is pretty tall, I do this in the middle of the cave – it will make ventilation easier as well.
Next, I take another length of wood and cross it with one of a similar length, binding the two together in the centre. Tying rope to either end of each branch, I fix it to where the teepee lengths cross at the top.
Pausing for a moment to think about what might happen when I put the weight of the hide onto the teepee, I cut a few little notches down near the base of the legs, then run a piece of cord around its circumference. Hopefully the cord catching in the notches will stop the legs from splaying sideways and dumping my precious hide in the fire.
Using the cord I fed through the top of the hide bag, I attach the lengths to the ends of the crossed branches I’ve just fixed onto the teepee. The shape of it keeps the bag open, though I do need to adjust the crossed branches a bit to make sure it’s well-balanced. Not wanting it to accidentally tip one way or the other – I’m trying to tan a hide, not play with a puppet, after all – I use a bit more bark cord to hold the ends of the cross to their closest teepee legs.
With the whole contraption apparently stable, I pause, tapping my lips in thought. My memories tell me that I should attach a heavy water-drenched cloth to the bottom of the hide in a sort of ‘skirt’ – to ensure that the smoke from the fire is directed straight up into the hide bag. But what should I use?
Most of my clothes are not particularly heavy, and I’m not keen on destroying my few pairs of jeans – they’re pretty good for wearing in the forest since the material is quite thick. Maybe I could use the paranax hide? I don’t need to keep it for actual tanning – it’s nothing special so I can easily replace it with the hide of any of the creatures my Bound bring home. If I douse it in water and keep doing so, I should be able to keep it wet enough not to easily catch light. It’s not like I’m intending on there being a whole load of flames anyway.
Satisfied with that as an idea, I pull the paranax hide out of my Inventory and then go to fetch the other things I’ll need.
Bastet is the one staying with me today, so I go over to where she’s absorbing an Energy Heart. I hate to disturb her, but I need to get water from the stream and a load of green leaves to burn. The last time I went down to the river, I was attacked by the nere, so I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go alone.
“Bastet?” I call quietly. She’s immediately alert, opening her eyes, a sharp gaze in them which softens slightly as she realises there isn’t any sort of problem.
Yes?
I explain what I need to get and she pushes herself willingly to her feet. She makes a chirping sound to summon the cubs and they bound over from where they were playing. Well, two of them do.
“Where’s Trouble?” I ask Bastet, looking around. He’s vanished.
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Then, I hear a rustle behind me and quickly turn, my knife appearing in one hand. I only just manage to redirect it as I recognise the form leaping out at me from behind a bush, ending up over-extending as I pierce the air above Trouble instead of the raptorcat cub himself.
“Don’t do that,” I scold him. His tufted ears are already pinned against his head in fright: clearly he wasn’t expecting me to attack him. Bastet makes a scolding kind of chuff, and I sense her telling Trouble that if he’d got hurt it would have been his fault. Or something of the sort.
Feeling slightly rattled at almost accidentally impaling one of Bastet’s cubs, I’m glad that she doesn’t seem to hold it against me. On the one hand, I need to tone down my traumatised responses. On the other, out in the forest, it might actually keep me alive so perhaps not. Or not yet, at least. Well, I guess it will depend on how often the cubs decide to use me as their target….
*****
The trip down to the river bank doesn’t take very long. I fill my empty pots with water, and pile a whole load of leaves into my Inventory. We’re not attacked, which makes a nice change, so we end up being quite efficient.
I also get to see the cubs practising their pouncing on things other than me. The cubs turn out to be very good hunters of small mouse-sized lizards, beating even their lightning-fast reactions to play with them. I don’t think they’ve ever looked more like cats than when they were torturing small lizards by not killing them, but also not allowing them to disappear.
I look forward to going out hunting with the whole group – it will be interesting to see how they’ve changed as a result of both the sparring and hunting practice.
Once we’re back, I’m hit by a brainwave. Rather than saturating the whole of the paranax hide, I control my mana so that it fills only about a centimetre’s width along one edge. It takes quite a lot of control to keep the mana in that single area, and to fill that area to bursting, but I manage – probably my new Master level in Energy Manipulation is helping me on that. I also sense that it’s unlikely to last for long once I shift my attention, but that’s OK for my purposes. Hopefully.
Dunking the hide into water, I arrange it around the base of the nere hide bag so that the edge I’ve filled with mana is pressing against the bottom edge of the nere hide. Not sure whether this will work, but with a backup plan in mind for if it doesn’t, I try to connect the two hides together.
The hides resist being combined, the substance that they are made of feeling different. But it’s not, surely. All flesh is essentially the same. Even between my flesh and that of the creatures here, there aren’t that many differences. Probably if I looked at their chemical composition, I might find some small differences, but we all have cells which function similarly. Our cells all require the same sort of energy to function, and generate that energy in the same sort of way.
It makes sense that I can’t affect plant matter with Flesh-Shaping: the way the cells of plants are formed and function are quite different from animal cells. But why should the flesh of one animal not be able to connect to the flesh of another? Especially two animals from the same world.
With that in mind, I focus my Will on forcing them to make the link which must be possible. They resist for a little longer before conceding, the two merging at the edge to create a single whole. Relief mixed with a sense of victory at the validation of my theory going through me.
The skirt formed around my hide bag, I hook it around one of the teepee legs so that it’s out of the way of where I need to create the fire. After setting up the fire as normal, I use my Fire Taming to encourage the fire to burn more quickly, wanting to have glowing embers more than flaming logs.
With my fire manipulation magic in addition to supplying it with oxygen through blowing, it’s not too long before I manage to achieve the kind of fire I want. Once more dipping the paranax hide into water, I place a whole load of leaves over the top of the glowing embers, though take care not to smother the fire completely. I actually maintain a connection to the fire with Fire Taming – that way I can feed it small amounts of mana if it starts running out of fuel.
Carefully arranging the hide so that the paranax skin skirt is around the edges of the small fire, all the smoke fills the nere hide bag. Watching tendrils of smoke leak out of the holes in the top of the bag, I settle in to watch my hide – I have no desire to come back to find it all in ashes because the fire went out of control and caught on my precious crafting material.
As I settle back on my heels, I can’t help my mind wondering about other applications of what I’ve just learned. If it’s possible to join one piece of hide to another, what else could I join? Could I connect it to myself? Create living armour that moves like my skin because it’s indeed connected to me? Could I offer my Bound more protection in certain areas? What about natural weaponry – could I give myself claws? Or spiked knuckles so that I’m never without a weapon?
If I attached the hide to myself as another layer of skin, I think I’d have to form blood vessels within it: the whole reason I have to tan a hide is because it’s essentially dead flesh; tanning stops the flesh from rotting. I wouldn’t want to attach something to myself that then putrefies. So blood vessels would be a must. Though, I might not put in nerve endings, otherwise I’d start feeling pain. Then again, that could cause other issues…. But nothing that I wouldn’t already have to deal with if I’m wearing it as armour. Though armour is easier to remove….
It’s an interesting question. As well, if I connect blood vessels into hide and add it as another layer of skin, what else could I add? I’ve already been thinking about wings. What if I took a pair of wings from another creature and Shaped them so that they suited me? Or what if I could add another pair of arms – extra limbs could definitely come in handy. Pun intended. Or a tail? A venomous sting could offer me an edge in a fight.
But when do changes like that – if they’re even possible – turn me from human to…something else? I did promise myself that I wouldn't become a mad scientist, and this kind of frankensteinism is definitely well into the territory of mad scientists.
Besides, how would I even control all those new additions? My brain isn’t wired like that and there’s no way I’m going to mess around with my neurons – I simply don’t know enough about how the brain works, even with magic helping me. Having wings would be pretty useless without the nerve and brain connections to make them function.
No, big changes are probably a bit too far beyond my capabilities, even if I decided that I wanted them. But perhaps a bit of skin enhancement just to protect some of my vulnerable areas wouldn’t be too much…?
A question for later. For now, I have a perfect opportunity to work on expanding my understanding of fire.