The next day, Sadie and Akari brought Cassy to the room before breakfast, and Danielle started the day on a high note by finally using her enhancement Skill for the first time.
It was almost anti-climactic; she touched the purple stone and activated her Skill, and her mana pool dropped from 54 to 3. The stone glowed faintly for all of two seconds, and that was that. The 15% expansion wasn’t easy to see or feel, either. She could put one of the pots into the bag without distorting its shape, though, which wasn’t possible with an unenhanced bag!
Everyone was pretty excited, but of course it wasn’t as flashy as Cassy’s light scroll, and there wasn’t anything else to do with or about the bag once they’d seen the pot fit in the previously-too-small space. Five minutes later it was just breakfast, and breakfast was tomatoes and necessities store jerky; they considered eating the rest of the marmot hot-pot, but in the end, decided to have that for dinner instead. With more food already on hand, they even decided to spend the morning looking for materials instead of fishing again. Accordingly, they loaded up with their paint pens (to mark the path to anything they might want to be able to find again) and all the baskets and shopping bags they had, as well as the usual water, camp spades, weapons, etc.
They started by checking their snares, where they found no less than three rabbits. The catches belonged to Akari, Sadie, and Danielle, and once again Danielle let Heather make the kill, but still had to clean it. “I’m starting to understand why you’d want a Skill to just separate all the parts of an animal,” she joked. Akari agreed with a chuckle; Sadie gave a very serious nod. Heather pretended to gag.
“I know I’m going to regret saying this,” Cassy said, “but in the interests of doing it enough times to get a Skill for it, when it’s my turn to make a kill, I’m going to do the gutting.” She paused, then sighed and added, “And the skinning, and the brain-tanning. Eugh.”
“Oh, right – we should do that,” Sadie said. “Now, even.”
“Not right now,” Danielle objected. “We need water and rocks and a hole to put it all in and a fire to heat the rocks, and some cleanish sticks to mash stuff in the hole, and aren’t we supposed to do stuff to the skins first? Clean them or something?”
“OK, so we light a fire and start digging a hole, then – ” Sadie started.
“Let’s do the materials hunting first, then bring everything home, and you can work on prepping skins after dinner,” Akari interrupted. “If we just drop everything and switch projects now, we’ll never get the other stuff done.”
“But it’ll go to waste! You know we already had to bury the oldest stuff with the bones. It doesn’t last that long, that’s the whole point of tanning it!” Sadie said.
“I’ll help you prep skins after dinner, Sadie,” Danielle said. “We can find the rocks while we’re at it this morning, and we won’t have to go that far from the Rooms just to make a fire and a water hole. We’ll find the most critical materials, head back a little early, and get it done. We can even afford to stay up a little late if we need to, because tomorrow’s Sunday, so it’s a rest day anyway.”
“Which means you’re not going to let me work on them tomorrow,” Sadie groused.
“Hey, if you want to work yourself to death by refusing to take breaks, I can’t stop you, but Akari and I are taking the day off,” Danielle said. “The deal was if we had food on hand, you have to let us have the day; and you should take it off too. We all need rest for health and sanity and stuff. We talked about this.”
“Yeah, yeah, rest and recovery are part of getting stronger and so on,” Sadie said. “Fine. Original plan, then, but faster – what’s the first target?”
“Start with clay. With any luck, that’ll get us close to water, and from there you should be able to find reeds pretty easily,” Danielle said.
“OK, here I go,” Sadie said, and activated her Skill. “Single material, clay,” she told the System. Then she slowly turned and pointed roughly north-northwest. “Closest is that way,” she said. “Let’s get moving before the Skill runs out.”
The Skill definitely did run out before they found clay, but they kept going the same direction, looking for any sign of it based on what they’d read in the guidebooks. Heather activated her Find Edible Plants Skill along the way, and the Skill pointed her at the greens of a low growing plant with cupped leaves. Nobody knew what it was, but they didn’t let that stop them from harvesting a bagful of it.
They actually found the clay after the third activation of Sadie’s Skill, but fortunately Danielle had been correct about it being near water. It was, in fact, under the water of a shallow pond in a grassy clearing. A stream ran through it, so Sadie argued that it was less a pond than a wide spot in the stream, but Cassy argued that since the pond was mostly roundish and the stream had distinct entrance and exit points, rather than gradually widening and narrowing, that it counted as a stream-fed lake. Danielle and Akari stepped away from the discussion and crossed the stream, looking for slightly less waterlogged clay on the far side of the pond, but the best they could find seemed to be clay in shallower water.
Fortunately, while Danielle dug up a basket-load of clay and Sadie collected a smaller basket-load of water-smoothed stones, Cassy turned to studying the plants in the pond and stream, and found reeds on her own. At first, they were a disappointment, because it was clear they weren’t the right sort for what she wanted to make, but then Sadie pointed out that they looked like excellent material for smaller, more finely-woven baskets and maybe drying racks, so they collected two big bundles anyway. Then they followed the stream downstream for a while, looking for better reeds, and eventually found a stand of bamboo.
Bamboo was mentioned several times in A Firmitatem Ranger’s Guide to the Outside. It was, according to the book, “not a native plant, but one that even the mana apocalypse couldn’t root out. It was clearly introduced to the region because of its incredible usefulness,” and it was hard to argue that point – long wooden poles with hollow centers had a lot of obvious uses. The Party cut as much of that as they could carry, and that ended the materials expedition. They turned south, as best they could determine, and started marking a trail to the Dome road.
Before they got to the road, however, they came across what seemed like an old stone pathway. It wasn’t very wide; perhaps wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side if they weren’t carrying loads wider than their shoulders. The stones were well pressed into the ground, but had a lot of weeds growing between them. Still, they were successfully keeping the path clear of trees and bushes for quite a distance in each direction. They hit it at a sharp angle, and after some debate, marked a blaze a short, discreet distance off the trail itself, and started following it in the direction closest to their original line of march.
Sure enough, it led to the Dome road as well; it let out into the ruins of the town perhaps two blocks north of the intersection of the Dome road and the Rooms road. If there hadn’t been a ruined foundation in the way, they’d have thought it was a continuation of the Rooms road, just maintained by former Sent instead of the Rangers – or whoever it was that was keeping the roads between the Dome of Decision and the Rooms paved.
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“What do you think,” Akari asked, “did we just find the path to the Access Point?”
“Probably,” Heather said. “Why else would someone pave it with stones like that? It has to have been the last group of Sent that used this camp.”
“There could be some other resource to the north that was worth keeping a path open for,” Cassy said.
“Could be, but if there was, I bet the path still goes to the Access Point by way of the other thing,” Danielle said. “Sooner or later, everyone’s going to need the Access Point, right?”
“Our guide said there was a trail, and we’d be able to find it even if it was a little overgrown now,” Sadie reminded them. “This is a trail that’s a little overgrown but still pretty easy to recognize as a trail, and it’s straight north from the Rooms. It’s gotta be the one.”
Exciting as the discovery was, it wasn’t something they were really prepared to do anything about that day, so they continued home by their usual route. They got to their room about 3pm, which left plenty of time for Danielle to keep her promise and help Sadie deal with rabbit skins. Most of the party felt that it was too early for dinner, so in the end, they took the hides, the stones, the pot of marmot hot-pot, as much water as they could carry, and whatever reading or projects they wanted to work on during waiting time, and went north into the town ruins again – but this time, they went on the road, and found a place a few blocks north on the boys’ side of the road where there was a space between the remnants of old walls that seemed mostly free of bushes and saplings.
It did have a lot of grass, but it didn’t actually take that long for the four of them to cut it down from waist height to shin height in a small area. Then Sadie started digging a hole to do the tanning in, while Cassy dug a wider but much shallower hole just to make a firepit that didn’t have any grass in it. Then they realized their obvious (in retrospect) mistake: they didn’t have any firewood. They did at least have all their tools still with them, though, so they followed the nearest ruined road west to the tree line, and found another young tree to take down. Heather found some fallen branches to chop up as well, in hope they’d be a bit more seasoned and not just punky.
Akari made everyone practice their non-System fire starting skills, which was annoying, but Danielle couldn’t really argue against it; Akari’s insistence that they all needed to be able to start fires wasn’t that different from Danielle pushing everyone to get more fit with lots of hiking, except that it was less likely to leave them in pain the next day. She’s helping me be a better Survivor, Danielle reminded herself, and bit back her urge to complain – even as she failed to transfer a spark to the fire pit for the third time.
Eventually, Cassy helped her figure out what she was doing wrong, and she managed to add a little flaming twig to the larger fire that was already going. By that time, Sadie had dug the braining pit and lined up her chosen rocks along the near side of the fire to get hot.
Sadie, Danielle, and Cassy each took one rabbit head and one rabbit skin, with varying degrees of reluctance, and started doing their best to clean the skins. It was smelly, unpleasant work. Akari had helpfully brought along a plastic packing blister from something in the scavenged supplies, and the three of them put shreds of raw rabbit meat into it to use as fish bait later.
When the rocks got hot, they all poured water into the pit, then used sticks to roll the rocks into it. They kept working on scraping the skins, trying to get the right amount of layers removed according to the books; working mainly with the backs of their Decision Day knives, none of them actually managed to get the job done without making any unintended holes. Danielle was getting quite frustrated, but kept reminding herself under her breath, “this doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work; we’ll get better at it, and make more tools, and it’ll get easier, and we’ll get better yet, and it will be OK that the first one wasn’t perfect.”
The water got simmering hot, so they had to let it cool back down some. When it was cool enough to get the stones out, they removed them to use again later, and each of the would-be tanners cracked open a rabbit skull and added a brain. Danielle had never wanted to get a System shortcut more than she did in that moment. Still, Sadie used a stick to mash the brains in the pit, and the result looked about like the book told them to expect, so they all put their skins in and took turns using sticks to mix and mash the skins in brain-water.
Akari and Heather sat well away from the process and heated the marmot hot-pot pot on the embers of the fire.
Eventually, they got the hides out of the pit and started stretching them as the instructions in the book said. When they seemed to be getting pretty dry, the three of them built a framework of sticks tied with grass, over which to hang the hides for smoking. They got the hides hung, and added some of the more rotten-seeming bits of Heather’s dead wood and some wood chips from cutting down the little tree, and then everyone backed off and washed their hands with the last of the clean water they’d brought, before eating their dinner. Each of the would-be tanners took a turn getting up to adjust the hides over the smoky fire, moving them so that spots the framework might have been covering would be exposed to the smoke.
The hides were declared done smoking when the framework itself caught on fire; fortunately none of them were singed, because Cassy noticed the problem before it could climb the legs that far. Danielle was confident that the hides had actually been over the fire longer than the minimum time the book recommended, anyway, and they were quite noticeably darker inside.
They were also quite obviously stiffened in spots, so the process hadn’t quite worked right. Akari pointed out that as long as they didn’t start to rot and stink, it was still at least a qualified success, and Sadie agreed with a sigh. Cassy agreed that as long as they were preserved, they could be made useful, and Danielle nodded in spite of her frustration. “Maybe we can make them into the top parts of hats, and line them with something else, or make something that needs a little stiffness. We’ll figure something out,” she said determinedly. “There’s a lot of days worth of rabbits and marmots and whatever else between now and winter, we’ll get better at this between now and then.”
“All I can say is, the sooner you get the System Skills for all of that stuff, the happier I’ll be,” Heather said.
“You and me both,” Cassy said.
“Yeah, I’ll be happiest when I never have to do it by hand again,” Danielle admitted. “Call me squeamish, but I didn’t enjoy that. I’m sure that it’s something you can get used to – they say people can get used to just about anything that doesn’t kill us. I’m not sure I want to get used to that much up close and personal biology, though.”
“It’d be worth it for the materials even if the System wasn’t going to give us Skills to help, though,” Cassy said. “We’ve got one blanket each, plus the capes I guess, but I just don’t think that’s going to be enough to be outside safely in winter. I mean, it’s literally freezing outside in winter, right? That’s why nobody goes camping then. We’re going to need better clothes than this,” she continued, gesturing to her Sending uniform.
“We’re going to need some bigger pieces to work with, or else we’ll have to do a lot of just stitching bits together to make bigger pieces and then cutting them up again in different shapes,” Heather said. “I barely even know how to sew, really; do any of you?”
“The Ranger’s Guide has a chapter on it,” Akari said. “I don’t think those little sewing kits we got in the Necessities store are going to have everything we need to sew leather, though. I’m sure they’ll help repair these regular cloth clothes, but for leather clothes, the Guide talks about making sinew and leather lacing and stuff.”
“None of which will fit in the metal needles we have,” Danielle said, “which is another reason to figure out bone carving. Bone needles are kind of big for cloth, but they’ll be much better sized for that stuff.”
“I hate to tell you this,” Akari said, “but cleaning bones doesn’t seem to be that different than cleaning hides. It’s all scrape it, soak it in soap all day, scrape it again, soak it for another whole day – has anyone else noticed that everything seems to assume you have a safe place outside to put stuff all the time?”
“Maybe with normal Sendings, they don’t worry as much as we do about other Sent stealing stuff while it’s drying,” Cassy said with a sigh.
“Maybe,” Danielle said. “It could also be that they tend to go further from the Rooms, though. Think about it; if we went upriver far enough that we weren’t afraid that camping out would just get us killed in our sleep, and camped out for a week or so, we could get a lot done. We’d probably have to keep some kind of watch at night to keep wild animals from stealing our stuff while it dries, but that seems doable. Just go hunting the first day, and then spend the rest of the week drying meat, tanning hides, cleaning bones, maybe drying some plants on the side. At the end of the week, we come home with just the finished products, and never have to worry about whether we’re at risk of stinking up the town if the wind is bad.”
“Not a bad plan, once we know what we’re doing well enough,” Cassy said. “It matches some stuff my parents were saying too, so that’s a good sign. It’d take a lot of planning, though.”
“Planning we can do,” Danielle said. “The trick is to make sure our information is good enough to make a plan that works.”
lot longer, so Sadie focused on the fast way. Of course, she might reconsider if they manage to find oak trees, and suitable places to keep the hides for a long period of time.
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