After Ryan assigned his stats, Gabriel rushed into the sitting room, shouting about the bull mutating. Ryan grabbed his bow and stormed to the kraal adjacent to the homestead. His uncle’s prized Simbra breeding bull was stomping around his paddock, clearly agitated. Inspecting the bull, Ryan saw that it was in the process of mutating. He didn’t even consider for a moment whether he should let the mutation complete and shot the bull. Imagining close to ton of crazed bull charging at him sent shivers down his spine and was an experience he would avoid if possible.
They butchered the carcass, Ryan delegated to sharpening the various knives throughout the process, as everyone accepted his superior skills in the area. It had after all been his duty from a probably too young age. They started preparing the meat for smoking and drying. When he saw Petrus carrying the heavy hide to get salted for preservation, he remembered the leopard’s and jackal’s hide he still had strapped to his backpack., he quickly went to fetch them and quickly joined Petrus in the store room, spreading out the hides and liberally salting them with coarse salt to dry and preserve them for tanning. Once he was done Ryan handed his revolver to Gabriel, who knew how to handle the firearm, and asked him to shoot any animals mutating in the kraal as quickly as possible.
It was quickly decided not to kill the cattle unless necessary, as they would provide plenty of meat in the future and it appeared as if they would not all mutate, at least for the moment. In addition, butchering sixty heads of cattle would be a tall order, especially if the meat had to be preserved by drying and smoking, it was better to do it piecemeal.
Once the initial excitement simmered down, Katrina assigned duties to several farmworkers to watch over the herds of cattle, sheep and goats close to the homestead. Except for Gabriel watching over the cattle, they were all armed with pangas and instructed to handle any animal behaving strangely with extreme prejudice. There was no need to risk injury if it could be avoided.
She also shooed Ryan to the forge, where several cracked copper pipes were waiting for his attention. It appeared that in order to fix the irrigation system for the cool room these would need to be mended as they lacked any spares. The forge had been built by his uncle when he was in his teens and interested in the art of smithing. To his uncle’s disappointment, this interest only lasted through two holidays. Thankfully it would come in handy now. He examined the pipes, the damage wasn’t substantial and he would just need to close of some holes and cracks. Analyse gave him 20mm diameter copper pipe, broken, a result he had expected.
Now all he needed was some copper. Trying to find it in their stores proved fruitless, as did the search of the dump full of broken equipment. Eventually, he decided to approach Josef, an older farmhand, and asked him where he could find some copper. Josef thought for a moment, spit out his wad of chewing tobacco, and pointed into the sky. Annoyed, thinking he was being taken for a ride, Ryan looked up. He spotted the telephone cable hanging over his head, running from pole to pole.
Ryan very nearly snapped at Josef before he made the connection, copper wire. He was an absolute imbecile. They had literal tons of copper available to collect. He quickly grabbed a ladder and cut the cable strung between two poles. It was surprisingly heavy when he picked it up, the insulation adding a lot of weight. He asked Josef to accompany him so the farmhand could observe the process and hopefully learn what would need to be done in future if any further pipes needed fixing.
At the forge, he quickly stripped of the insulation with the help of Josef before cutting the wire into pieces and adding it to a crucible. He spun the handle of the rotary bellows for about fifteen minutes before the copper finally started melting, surprised that he was barely out of breath after what he remembered being a strenuous exercise in his youth. Picking the crucible out of the fire with the tongs, he poured the molten copper onto a flat sheet of concrete which he had divided into squares lined by sand. It should result in small usable copper sheets once the copper cooled sufficiently. They wouldn’t be pretty but should work for their intended purpose.
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While the copper cooled Ryan whittled a piece of wood into a long dowel which he would insert into the pipes when working on them to keep the pipe from collapsing under the hammer. Once done, he picked up the first sheet of copper and a piece of pipe and put them in the forge. Josef was pulling duty on the bellows and all he now needed to do was wait. As soon as he deemed the temperature sufficiently high, he took both pieces out and inserted the dowel into the pipe which immediately started smoking furiously. Ryan forcibly wrapped the pliant sheet around the damaged areas of the pipe, taking care to fit the sheet as closely to the pipe as he possibly could.
Grabbing the ballpeen-hammer next he carefully welded the sheet to the pipe. Lacking any flux the weld would not be very sturdy and likely fail in time, but that couldn’t be helped. Next he welded the seam between the pipe and the sheet before finishing with welding the overlap of the sheet.
It took him about another hour to finish fixing the remainder of the pipes. Ryan was bathed in sweat by the time he was done, smithing was hot work. Josef and he carried the pipes to the cool room and Ryan headed off to find Katrina to inform her that the pipes were fixed before he took a short break in the gardens water reservoir to cool off and get cleaned up a bit.
Before he returned to other duties Ryan decided to investigate the chicken coop, remembering the ominous quiet when he arrived. Deciding it was probably safer to be armed, he fetched his uncle’s pistol, a .22LR used for dealing with vermin on the homestead, which should be plenty powerful enough to deal with any wayward poultry.
Opening the coop nearly cost him his eye when the rooster jumped into his face, viciously pecking while the razor sharp spurs demolished the arm he raised to protect his face. Ryan flung the menace away and pumped it full of bullets, repeatedly pulling the trigger. It took nearly the entire magazine to put the damn thing down, its feathers having mutated to resemble scale armour, deflecting and flattening the light bullets. When he analysed the corpse, he was at first surprised that it was Level 4 before looking around the coop and realising that not a single hen was left alive. The younger rooster was viciously mutilated, feebly breathing but not yet a corpse. Ryan immediately put it out of its misery, which earned him a new level.
By then, Johannes had arrived, quickly reacting to Ryan’s initial scream. Appraising Ryan’s injuries he stated calmly that Josefina, a trained nurse, would have to deal with the mutilated limb. While Josefina dealt with the injuries, bandaging his arm, Ryan inspected his log, trying to figure out why the shield he expected to protect him from attacks had not triggered. It had, but the shield was so weak that the rooster smashed through it with the first attack. Apparently, it would need to be upgraded significantly to have a noticeable effect.
Ryan considered that he could consider himself lucky having learned that lesson early and with no disabling injury to show for it. Josefina had finished with the arm, cleaning and disinfecting the wounds before bandaging the arm. All in all, the injuries were fairly shallow as the spurs hadn’t penetrated as deeply as Ryan initially feared and he got away without needing stitches.
It was probably for the best if he would limit physical exertion for the time being, so he decided to grab some parsley and oregano from the garden and assist Katrina in the kitchen with the spaghetti bolognaise. Katrina was probably more inconvenienced by his attempts to help than he admitted even to himself, but at least he was keeping busy and assisting someone. Cooking for twenty people proved a different experience than he expected, the process significantly more hectic than when he made dinner for Victoria and himself.
Lunch was a quick affair, everyone wolfing down the food, well aware that they had still a lot of duties to attend to if they wanted to secure the property for the night. Instead of taking a nap, as he was usually won’t to do, Ryan decided to continue investigating his Interface.