For a shelter that would last years—rather than months—I had a few choices. Ultimately, though, it boiled down to what I had nearby. The three that seemed strongest were the Log Cabin, the Brick Hut, and the Stone Hut. The Brick Hut was the one I tossed out first. The ground in the area was sandy and rocky rather than clay. Making bricks was a nonstarter. I decided against the Log Cabin as well. Though there were plenty of trees around, I didn’t have the tools to cut them down. That left me with one viable choice.
Unlike the lean-to, this was meant to be more permanent. As such, I spent the experience to bring it to tier 2. The difference in knowledge was striking. At level 1, the skill gave me a very general idea of what I needed in order to make the hut. It was like having watched a video about building the hut and also having a cheat sheet of the main points. At tier 2, it was more like having a blueprint and an instruction manual. At least, that’s how it felt.
The first thing with building the hut was selecting a suitable location. The flat-ish area I’d chosen was good enough to start with. Or so said the skill. It wasn’t happy about how lumpy the ground was, but it would be something I could work with—or at least amend to be better.
Next came the primary building material: stone. There were stones everywhere. If I were going to name a country of land like that, I’d go with something on the nose… like Rockland. At level 1, the skill would be fine with any and all rocks. Not so at tier 2. Not every rock was good enough. There were particular specifications for different portions of the hut. The bigger and sturdier the rock, the better. Smaller rocks would be used to fill in any gaps.
For the next few hours, I pulled any large rocks to the building site. Some were more stuck than others, requiring a digging stick to dislodge before I could move them. As much as I wanted to build right away, the skill would have none of it. I had a small pile of rocks, yes, but I needed to fully prepare the ground, first. While it needn’t be laser-level flat, it shouldn’t be lumpy, either.
I set some of the smaller rocks into the ground to level the ground where the hut would go. I didn’t have nearly enough rocks to get that task done, but I’d made a nice dent in the work by the time my stomach was rumbling.
Hunger meant food, which reminded me of the trap I had set in the stream. I wandered over to it to check if I’d caught anything—and to fill my water bottle. I pulled the trap from the water. There were no fish inside, but there were a couple crayfish. I decided that was better than nothing and took them with me while resetting the trap.
I Sparked a fire in the firepit as soon as I returned to my temporary shelter. Crayfish were new to me. I had no experience cooking them, so I went with the simplest cooking method I could think of. I stabbed each through with a stick and planted the stick in the ground so that each crayfish would be held over the fire to cook.
They smelled good as they cooked. In case they had parasites or other creepy crawlies inside, I let them cook longer than was strictly necessary. After the outside was charred—and the inside dray and rubbery—I broke the shells and ate the two crayfish. They were alright. Maybe better with some salt or as part of a stew. They also weren’t terribly filling.
I let the shells burn away in the fire. The last thing I needed was to attract a bear or a big cat. I shuddered when I remembered the panther that had nearly killed me the last time I was in the woods. Just the thought of that cat made me feel like the darkness was trying to push through the fire’s light to swallow me. The fire was a good friend, so I thanked it for its help and warmth.
Realizing what I’d just done, I pulled up my status. Where before I’d been nearly out of faith, I now had a small amount. Not as much as I’d had the first time I noticed, but some. My thanking the fire—or praying, I realized—was the secret sauce that made faith work. My lack of religion seemed not to be a barrier. A simple acknowledgment of nature helping was enough—it seemed—to gain faith to spend on skills.
People who prayed to a god or their ancestors or anything else would probably see results. And that was dangerous. I could envision the conflicts already between faiths over which was better at generating the faith resource. Even if I hadn’t felt a sense of wrongness when using faith with skills, this revelation would have been enough to remove it from the running as an option to power skills. That didn’t mean I would ignore it while I had it. A second option besides blood was a good one in my book.
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Before I turned in for the night, I picked up another few armfuls of wood for the fire. When I was happy, I crawled into my lean-to and got as comfortable as I could. In my head, I went over what I’d done during the day and what I needed to do the next. It was a ritual I had come to appreciate as it helped to keep me focused on what needed doing. My concern—again—was food. The trap had netted me—ha—some food, but it wasn’t enough. I’d need something better. Before I could do that, however, it was a good time to secure some to tide me over until I had enough traps and maybe a small stockpile to put everything I gathered.
I mulled the options of where to go and how to get back while sleep eventually claimed me.
The next morning, I woke with my mind clear. I was basically out of food. Sure, there were a couple of candy bars remaining, but that was all. I checked the fish trap—empty—before I looked around. Getting the food was the easy part—I knew where the people were. It was the getting back that would be hard. Thankfully, there was a skill for that.
The skill filled my head with a crude mental map of the area. I hoped it would be enough for me to find my way back later. I went to the pond and got a running start. Then up I went. The crude map filled in more as I saw more. I was able to recognize the pond in the map, and that would be good enough to find my way home later. Hopefully.
I roughly retraced my steps towards civilization. My faith was low so I used blood as my primary skill fuel. The feeling was as horrible as ever, but the twisting of my stomach pulled be onward. I made sure to give myself an Illusion and a Disguise Self so that anything nefarious I did wouldn’t be traced back to me.
Twenty minutes later, a small town came into view. I came in for a landing in the backyard of a house that looked like no one was home. It looked lived in, which is precisely what I needed. I snuck quietly to the back door and gave it a try. It was open! I made my entrance as silently as I could—Flight helping tremendously.
I kept an open ear for any animals or people in the house. Hearing nothing, immediately, I looked around for food and a pot. Cooking on stone was not what I had imagined when I had left Dad’s house, but a lack of cooking equipment left me no other choice. So a pot, a spatula, and a spoon were what I needed to cover my bases. That and food.
The kitchen of the house was well stocked. I found a medium-sized pot in one of the cabinets. Inside, I piled whatever non-perishable foods I could find. Atop that went the spatula and spoon. A plastic bowl and eating spoon didn’t go amiss either. I packed everything as tightly as I could before sneaking back out of the house.
When I took off with Flight, I kept Mapping up to help me return home. The landmarks I’d noticed on the way over looked different on the way back. Still, the narrow band of map I’d created in my flight pointed my way towards the pond and my shelter.
I landed twenty minutes later. My stomach was grumbling like an old man when some young whippersnapper was on their lawn. I dug into my pilfered food before I even made it back to the camp. After eating a couple chocolate chip bars, I felt better. The rest of the food was stashed in my temporary shelter to keep it out of the elements. I estimated that what I’d taken would last me about a week. After that, I’d have to get more—either by hunting or trapping or by borrowing more provisions from the surrounding area.
Now that food was taken care of for the moment, I put my efforts towards working on my permanent shelter. For the next four days, I dug as many rocks from the nearby area as I could. It was enough to lay a mostly flat floor for the hut. While not perfect, it was the sort of floor I was unlikely to trip over in the dark. The rocks were stabilized by the ground below them so they wouldn’t move much over time.
With the floor done, I began working on the walls. The walls demanded a different sort of rock than the floor had. The walls needed to be thick enough to hold their own weight without any cement. I filled the gaps with mud, which—while not as permanent as cement—would last a long time. Long enough that I didn’t think I’d need to worry about it.
The rocks for the walls were much heavier and bulkier than the ones for the floor. They also needed to fit together decently well—something hard to do with the lack of tools I had on hand. I did the best I could, but the skill was unhappy with my shoddy craftsmanship. I thought the hut would be perfectly serviceable for the length of time I predicted I’d live there.
My routine of waking up, having food, then digging rocks for a few hours before finally placing the day’s haul onto the hut’s walls lasted until I ran out of food. The fish traps caught a handful more crayfish and two fish. That gave me an extra day before I needed to fly to town for more to eat. In that time, I’d managed to get the walls about half done. There was one day where it rained too hard for me to do any work, but otherwise, I felt the time had been rather productive.
My resupply flight took me to another village. I didn’t want to take from the same people time and time again. I might be a thief, but I had a conscience! With another week’s worth of food, I carried on my construction efforts. By the end of week two, I had completed the walls. This included a gap for a door and a mud-reinforced stone chimney so I could have a fire inside the hut for cooking and warmth.
The only thing left was the roof. This was the part the skill gave me a few options for. I chose to continue using stone as much as I could. The roof would be held up by wooden beams, and the shingles on top would be made with whatever flat stone I could find. The other options—straw and wood—would degrade too quickly. While I didn’t plan on being around forever, I was going to use the hut for at least a decade!
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