Building a roof was harder than I thought it would be. Even with my skill’s gentle nudging and almost instruction-manual level of help, there were two things I couldn’t make any easier. The first was felling the trees for the roof beams. While they were small trees, that didn’t mean they were insignificant. The knife I had was woefully inadequate for the task. The other thing was finding the right sort of rock. I needed large, flat plates, preferably. Slate or similar would have been ideal.
Due to the shortcomings in equipment, I ended up using sub-par deadfall that I could find. I took the greenest and straightest I could find, but the options weren’t particularly good. Ten bits of wood—each as long as the hut—were placed at the top of the wall. This created a stepped triangular shape. The only thing left to do was place the shingles of rock against the wooden beams.
Slate—it turned out—was pretty much impossible to find. Even Flying around in the area, I wasn’t able to find what I needed. That meant I had two choices. Either I substituted heavier and ill-suited rock, or I went with wood. I didn’t want to accidentally break the roof with the rock, so wood it was.
Making wood shingles was a pain in the ass. Without an axe, the best I could work with was my knife. Each shingle needed to be split from dried wood before being attached to the beams. I didn’t have nails, so the shingles had a little tab near the top where they were able to rest against the beams. Each shingle overlapped two others, helping to make a watertight seal. It was a poor solution and one I knew would fail with even a gentle breeze. It was also the only real option I had. I made a note to get some nails and an axe the next time I ventured into town. The roof was going to be an ongoing issue if I didn’t.
So I was now the proud owner of a small stone hut. The interior was barren and there wasn’t even a door yet. It was just large enough for me to lay down and still fit a hearth and maybe a table and chair. Which really meant it was a smidge bigger than the room I’d live in at Dad’s house.
I wanted to move in as soon as I could, but I needed furniture—and a door—first. That meant I needed the axe and those nails. My weekly pilfering had been done during the day—when everyone was at work. I’d also made sure not to hit the same house more than once, which meant I was doing it at random. This time, I needed a hardware store. And I had no idea where one was.
I wasn’t exactly low on food yet, but I was getting close again. I took the opportunity to fly to the nearest town. If it had a hardware store, I’d take what I needed and find food on the way back. If not, I’d just take the food and go to another town the next day—and that was if the house I raided didn’t have an axe or nails in a shed or whatever.
The town I flew to was small. It had neither a store for food nor a hardware store, but it did have a general store. I decided to give that a chance. I changed up my Disguise Self before I entered.
The store was jam packed with many items. Some were local products—honey, maple syrup, crafts—while others were more standard—books, handyman things, and many more. Above all, there were trinkets for visitors that proclaimed the buyer had been to the great town of Sugarhill. Everything in the store was overpriced, which was fine with me. I was going with the five-fingered discount!
I looked through the home goods section. In it, I found a hatchet and a box of nondescript, off-brand nails. I was happy enough just finding nails. As long as they weren’t complete garbage, they’d do the job I needed long enough. I took a box of energy bars along the way to the counter.
An older woman stood behind the counter with a bright smile. She watched as I approached. I put the things on the counter in front of her and waited for her to scan and put everything into a bag for me. I smiled back before quickly looking around. There were no other customers nearby. I let out a sigh and used Dominate Mind to have her cancel the sale and give me the items for free. I took the bag—and a handful of candy—and left as if I had paid.
Once I was gone, I changed my looks once more before casting Illusion and flying back to my hut. As soon as I was back, I secured the shingles with nails. It took the rest of the day, but now the roof might survive a tame storm!
My goal the following day was to make a door. At least with that, I could move into my permanent home and not have to sleep with one eye open every night. Making a door was not something I’d done before. With an axe, I hoped it’d be easier than with a knife. It was, but it wasn’t exactly easy.
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First, I had to fell a medium-sized tree. That was difficult since I’d never done that before. Then I had to strip the bark off and split planks from it. I spent an entire day trying to figure that last part out. I settled on using rocks as wedges and eventually got a handful of inconsistent planks out of it. Those planks were then smoothed and cut to size. I used a branch as the hinge—one part stuck in the ground, the other into the door frame—and attached the planks to it using diagonal planks on either side. I was very thankful for the nails as it made that part much easier.
The final touch was a latch on the inside that would automatically close when I shut the door. This took a while to design and build—especially since I needed to be able to open it from the outside. When I finally got it to work, I was elated! A thick fiber cord went through a small hole I drilled with the knife. If I pulled the cord, the latch would flip up and allow me to enter. Other animals wouldn’t be able to do the same, which made the hut a great place to store my food. I hung my backpack from cordage attached to one of the roof beams.
With the hut officially completed—though unfurnished—I decided to move into it. I destroyed the lean-to and the firepit. All of the wood from the lean-to I dropped next to the hut so I could use it as firewood for a few days. I built a temporary leaf mattress on the floor and lit a fire. With the door shut and the fire crackling away, I felt much more secure than I had for the last month in the lean-to. I had dinner before calling it a night.
When I woke the next morning, I cursed the leaf mattress and swore to make something better to sleep on than leaves on lumpy rocks. The hut was unfurnished, and I decided to rectify that. With the knowledge gained from making the door, how hard could building a bed be?
Hard. Really fucking hard. With only an axe and a knife, cutting everything to size was a huge pain in the ass. Smoothing the timbers was easy enough with the axe, but everything else just sucked.
The process of making the bed frame was ultimately simple—even if it took far too long. I turned a medium-sized tree into several boards and lengths of square timber. The square sections were measured and nailed together to form a box with legs. The boards went on top with cross bracing underneath. Atop the bed frame went a pile of leaves for cushioning. That was a temporary measure. I hoped to pick up a sheet and some foam in the future to make it more comfortable.
Making the bed took almost a week. With the leftovers and off-cuts, I was able to make a stool and a small table in a much shorter time. When everything was installed into the hut, it felt much more like home. I had a mostly comfortable place to sleep. It was dry. It was warm.
The only thing I needed to worry about now was food. While I could steal what I needed, that was going to get harder if I kept doing it. And I would have to go farther afield. The solution was obvious. I needed to hunt, fish, and trap. Some fresh fruits and vegetables wouldn’t go amiss either.
I started with the proverbial low hanging fruit. Acorns. With fall approaching, acorns would be a great option for food. There were a ton of oak trees—and thus a lot of acorns. I made the largest crate I could comfortably carry and wandered around picking up any and all acorns I came across.
In order to prepare acorns for eating, the first thing I had to do was sort the good from the bad. This was easy. The good ones sank while the bad ones floated. With access to a nearby stream, it was a simple—if time consuming—task. That left me with a mostly full crate of edible acorns. They would need to be shelled and have the tannins leeched out of them. The bitter compounds did a great job of preserving the acorns and keeping most critters away. They were also mildly poisonous, so removing them was a good idea. Plus, the taste was terrible otherwise!
Boiling shelled acorns several times before eating them was not what I wanted to do—if I could avoid it. Thankfully, my class had a relevant skill—Remove Toxin—which I purchased and leveled twice. At level 3, pulling out the tannins was much quicker than boiling. As a bonus, the acorns could then be roasted and eaten without removing too much of the nutrition along the way. And that was ignoring the tannins that the skill left as a small, dry, powdery pile. I kept it separately, unsure what I would use it for.
Acorns were a wonderful source of sustenance, but they were dreadfully boring to eat day after day. What I wanted was meat. While out gathering acorns, I had paid attention to my surroundings and chanced upon several animal tracks. The tracks were of many types of animals—a highway of sorts. This was perfect for trapping.
I decided that anything too small—squirrels, rabbits, and the like—would be fine but not really what I wanted. If I had to go out hunting daily, I would not be able to focus on finding out how to kill a whole bunch of animals across the globe. What I preferred to kill was something larger once a month. I thought a deer was ideal.
To that end, I dug a put trap. It took a lot of effort. Not only did I have to dig through the stony ground—a monstrous pain in the butt—I also had to put spikes at the bottom and cover it with a top that would only fall if something heavy enough passed over top. It took time, but my hunger for meat pushed me forward. The daily acorn ration weighed on my mind the whole time. I commiserated with the sailors of old who had to survive on salted meat and hardtack for years at a time.
When the pit trap was done, I rested in my hut for a couple of days. I needed the break. It had been months of nonstop work to get to where I was. And it was all so I would be safely hidden while I worked on the real problem. I’d thought a lot about it over the past few months and had a few ideas.
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