Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Despite how much of the lizard was crushed, there is still a lot available to be harvested. Both the upper part of the tail and the hind legs were left mostly untouched, which ends up producing more than the double the meat that I had gotten from the 10 imps I harvested over fifty days ago. I think even if winter is exceptionally long, this should get me through the season. Of course, to even harvest everything I have to stay up exceptionally late making more drying racks and cutting meat, so I quickly fall asleep when I'm done.

After I wake up, I head back out into the cavern.  No longer do I need to sneak about due to fear.  Unfortunately, I also have to now clean up the mess I've made.  I'll have to get rid of the rubble and burn the smashed bits of corpse.  In addition I'd like to close up the bit of the ceiling I collapsed.  It's not open to anything, but it looks very conspicuous so I'd like to hide it as best I can.

I wish I could say the rubble will be easy, but it's so mixed and covered in blood that I think I'll actually need to pile it with wood and burn it before I'm comfortable saving it for separation into dark and light stone.  Now I'm glad that I gathered extra wood earlier because between the gore and rocks, I have a lot I need to burn.

It takes two days to pile everything and start burning it, and I suspect it'll take a day at least until the stone is cooled again.  Which, as I think about it, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the cave didn't have a cave in before, with all the bonfires I had, which in turn heated and cooled the surrounding rock, if it was going to cave in, it probably would have already.  I'll also take the opportunity with the light from the bonfire to use stone shape on the ceiling to roughly close up the hole I made.  Yup, this is going to be a long process.

Well, it took five days, and I haven't fully cleaned up yet, but I moved all the rubble into buckets, then also collected most of the ashes into separate buckets, and closed the hole in the ceiling.  All of the buckets are in the storehouse, save a few of the rubble buckets which are in my room for separation and refining.  I've got a handful of tasks ahead of me, which should end up taking a few days at the least.  I've got lots of the rubble that I'd like to separate and refine, all the new crystals I gathered need to be sorted and then put into crystal trays for charging, and I'd like to go recharge my existing crystal trays as well.

As for the crystals that I had previously scattered on the floor of the slaughterhouse area, well, they're not showing much promise.  Right now I don't need the room though, so I'll just leave them there.  It shouldn't take to long to clean them up when I need the room again anyway.

After another five days, I've got the new crystal trays done, including a second rack for them to sit in, all the trays are fully charged again, and a few of the rubble buckets refined down.  There is still at least 2 times the amount I've done still sitting in the warehouse, but I'll get to it when I get to it.  The more important discovery is that the cave is now fully snowed off from the outside.  While finishing the crystal tray charging for the day, I wandered up to the entrance to check how the weather was faring, and the obvious answer to that was not good.

I've made some good and some bad assumptions in the past, but I think that I probably won't be visited by the goblin again this cycle.  He'd normally arrive in another 24 days.  If I've got 24 days at least, plus approximately 45 days, if I assume that the goblin will actually stick to that schedule, I think that maybe I should try to plan a longer project to work on.  I have a project in mind, but it'll likely tax me mentally.

I'm fairly confident that I need some additional practical experience with tectonic sense at this point.  The cubes have been a big help, and training on them every day has definitely helped me get more used to the sensation, and have made me more able to notice small details.  The issue is that the cubes are very uniform.  I made them that way on purpose for beginner level practice, and to get used to the sixth sense.  So now, what I'd like to do, is map the cavern.  Not a physical map though.  Specifically, a survey map.  What I'd like to do, is go through about every 10 feet, and do a 15 foot radius ping at each point, and take some notes on any points of interest.  The first step to plan that will obviously be actually trying a 15 foot radius ping on a real surface.  For the past many weeks I haven't actually tried tectonic sense on a real surface, so I'm not sure how it will go, but I decide to give it a go where I know the bubble behind the wall is.

Initially it overwhelms me a little since I've gotten so used to the test cubes, but I can confidently say I do have a more detailed view than I used to, and can spot differences more readily.  The first hint at this, is that I notice there are a few crystals embedded in the walls of the bubble.  The second is my ability to make out the shape of the bubble.  It's shaped a bit like a gourd, with one part being large and round, and then a tube extending out from behind it which is smaller in diameter, but reaches backwards a little more than twice the size of the initial bubble.  Since I'm in my room anyway, I etch into the wall some small details about the bubble in this spot.

Another thing I've decided is that the goblins and imps here aren't actually all that perceptive.  So I think as long as I don't put markings by the entrance where they're obvious, I can actually just mark up the walls in the cavern and no one will notice.  I mean, the imps definitely won't, they only just came into existence.  Unless they're like me, and have some memories from before they were an imp, then even markings on the walls are just normal to them.  The old goblins really don't seem to pay too much attention either.  Guessing from how they come here like clockwork, I'm assuming at this point it's so routine to them that they just don't notice small detail changes.  

What I have in mind is keeping master information records of each point, then just etching a small number in the wall where I used tectonic sense.  I'll probably need multiple shelves to hold all the tablets of etched information as well, so I'll need to make that as well.  Ultimately, it's a large project that will require me to spend a lot of time in the main cavern, so having this time where I'm snowed in should provide the perfect opportunity without any fear of a random intruder suddenly spotting me.  The downside being that I'd really have liked rope to help with the project, but I don't really have the option to go out and collect things for it, so I'll have to make do with making some measuring sticks instead.

Another thing I can do is move my training cubes to the storage room.  I could dismantle them, but they can be dismantled in the future if I need to.  For now they can just be piled into a back corner of the storage room, and that'll be just fine.  Although if the storage room gets much more full, I'll probably need to design a new project to deal with the upcoming storage issue.

For now though, I have a few days worth of preparation work before I begin the actual survey.  I need to make tools, get the shelving ready, and prepare plenty of blank tablets to etch information onto.

It took a solid three days of work, but the new tools are done, as well as the shelving with plenty of blank tablets.  I had a few epiphanies while I worked as well.  First of which is a folding ruler.  It stacks up side to side, and each ruler is attached with a rotating joint that can rotate 360 degrees, for a total of 11 feet of length in 11 segments.  Initially I just planned on making 10 footlong rulers, but then I thought that being able to ensure that the rulers all stayed in a straight line would be useful.  The only slight downsides are that each is offset by the width of a ruler from the previous ruler so that when closed they all stack on each other, and that the rotating joints are somewhat rigid because they are stone on stone joints.

The second epiphany is pretty neat.  I started embedding the smallest crystals into the four corners of these tablets.  They don't provide much ambient light, but it's enough that it helps me see easier on the tablet.  Which given there are some darker patches in the cavern, especially towards the back, I think that it'll be useful.  The only thing left for me to do is actually go out there, and start marking things and doing the survey.  Which I'll start tomorrow first thing when I wake up.