Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

After a little while, all the birds and the lizard are cooked, and all the goblins take a small share of the food.  Between everyone, there honestly isn't much food.  In fact, on closer inspection, it looks like most of the goblins are malnourished.  Actually, considering how they've been getting a few goblins every time they went to the cave, I was honestly expecting more goblins here.  I've got a bad feeling about the situation here.

As evening begins turning to night, the goblins all retire to their huts, and their leader gestures for me to join him in his hut, but I decline.  I don't fit after all.  Looks like I'll be roughing it tonight.  I give a shot at stone shaping on the soil, but have pretty dismal results.  I'm able to form small beads of stone from dirt, but it leaves a grimy sludge behind.  Well, soil is less than half mineral, so I suppose pulling the minerals out would result in this.

As a result, I guess I'll just be sleeping on the ground.  I toss and turn for a while before starting to finally feel tired enough to fall asleep, but then, just as I'm falling asleep, it starts to rain, waking me back up.  Its not a heavy rain, but it upsets me nonetheless.  If I'm going to be up anyway, I may as well take the opportunity to look around a little bit, even if it's fairly dark under the cloud cover.

The goblin village is all situated on one side of the stream running through the clearing here.  The stream itself is fairly shallow, only a foot or so deep with a rocky bottom, and only about five feet wide.  It also is already almost running over its normal channel.  There is a gentle slope on either side of the stream, leading up about two feet over twenty or so feet.  The goblin huts are scattered about in the clearing with between five and ten feet between each hut.  All of the huts are built above the slope down to the stream as well.  Gauging from the stream right now, I'm guessing that is on purpose.  I have a feeling that between winter melt and rain, the stream runs over onto its slope quite often.

As I look at the goblin huts, I'm actually fairly surprised that they do seem to be doing a good job of keeping the water out of the hut.  Of course, checking this scared a goblin half to death as I peeked in to see inside.  From the outside they really do just look like brush piles, but it seems that more care went into how they're made than I initially gave them credit for.

It seems like they dig a pit down to the rock layer, about three feet down, and then build their roof over that.  Well, its good to know that there are rocks fairly close here.  Just for good measure, I ping a few times with tectonic sense, and sure enough, it seems like a fairly steady layer of rock throughout the area.  I wouldn't mind digging a pit of my own just to get to the rock to work with, but considering the rain, it'll just fill with water and become useless to me.

Despite the rain, I'm finding myself tired enough that I can probably fall asleep under a tree on the edge of the clearing now.  I curl up under the tree and close my eyes, and let sleep overtake me.

When I wake up, my body feels very cold and achy.  Looking around at all the mud, it seems like it rained for quite a while yesterday.  I check my stats for good measure.

<LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 5
HP: 852/911
MP: 303/303
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

I guess being excessively cold could actually kill if I'm not careful.  I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised though, I've lost hp to mild poisons before as well.  As I wake up and look around, it looks like a few of the goblins are out and about.  A few are drinking from the stream, which is closer to a river right now, running a foot higher than before.  The remaining goblins are gathering into groups.

The ground is fairly muddy as I walk about, and honestly, I'm in a pretty bad mood given my sleeping conditions last night.  I'm not upset with the goblins though, I mean, I was offered to go into a hut, even if I couldn't really fit, and it's not like they knew I'd be coming to their village.  Which means I guess I should build myself at least some form of cover for the night.  Although again, I'd like to just go back to my cave, but I think I'll need to be guided back there, and right now, I can't really communicate effectively with the goblins.

Luckily, I have my Earth Manipulation trait, which gave me my shovel shaped claws, so I can easily shovel through the mud down to the rock layer.  First though, I should actually decide where I want to dig.  I decide on a location at the far edge of the village, towards the mountain.  I don't want to intrude on anyone's potential claims they might have, so I give myself plenty of space, and begin shoveling mud.

Unsurprisingly, I dig through the mud quite quickly, and start building up a pile of mud a little ways away.  As I dig, quite a few goblins come over and watch, and they seem impressed by my digging ability.  Before long though, the leader goblin directs everyone to go out and hunt.  He comes over to see what I'm doing after the crowd clears, and stands on the edge in silence for a bit before turning and heading off into the forest himself.

While I keep digging, I soon hear the sound of leaves and sticks being dragged, and look out from my hole to see the leader goblin dragging foliage over to my hole.  I climb out of my hole, and attempt to stop him.  The attempt at communication doesn't go all that well, and it takes a few minutes before he seems to get the gist of me not wanting help with this.  Exasperated, he shrugs and leaves the foliage on the ground, and heads back out into the forest.

I shrug and head back into the hole to dig.  After a few hours, I've cleared a decently large hole down to the stone layer, and have a large dirt pile nearby.  Well, if there was one good thing about the foliage he brought, is at least some of it can probably be used to make a weight and string like what I used up on the mountain to make vertical walls.  I quickly assemble my tool, and begin using stone shaping to slowly build up walls on the inside of my pit.  As I take from the bottom to build up the edges, I realize that it is going to take a little while this time to accomplish this task.  Normally I'd be able to get these walls built in a few hours, but that is only due to the help from all my mana crystals replenishing my mana reserves.  So I'm going to have to get creative with the construction.

When I have infinite mana, I'd normally just use stone shaping to move everything while I craft.  I think that it will be more efficient though, if I cut brick like blocks out with stone shape, then basically weld them together again where I want them, manually moving them in between.

I give it a go, and unsurprisingly, it does conserve quite a lot of mana.  An additional benefit is that as I move and align the bricks, I'm regenerating mana, so I won't have to stop as often.  Although I'm still operating at a mana deficit, so I will still have to take breaks as I work.

After an hour and a half, I've gotten about half of the pit surrounded with wall all the way up, and a crude stairwell beginning on one wall.  I realized as I worked, that since I'm cutting into the ground for building material, I should start purposefully leaving material for stairs in the wall so that I don't trap myself.  I've also just ran out of mana, so now is a good time to take a break from this.

I climb out from my pit, and decide that the first thing I should do is fill in the gaps on the two completed walls.  Now that I have vertical walls there, the sloped nature of the pit has resulted in a gap that I want to refill.

As I refill the gap, some of the goblins come back carrying small game again.  They set their catches near where the fire was yesterday, and turn back around and head out into the forest again immediately.  I'm a little disappointed they didn't come check out my pit right away, but that's fine.  As other goblins come back, they each turn around to head back out, so I decide to follow a trio of them for a little while.  They seem pretty nervous with me following them, but there isn't really anything I can do about that.  They keep whispering to each other, and sneaking glances back at me.

After a little bit, they find a downed tree, and begin breaking off bits of wood.  Once they've gotten as much as they can carry, they turn to leave.  I call out, "Hey wait a moment, I'll help."

All three drop their wood and turn to face me with terrified expressions on their faces.  Not exactly what I was hoping for, but it did the job.  As they watch me in fear, I break off some bigger pieces of wood, and then walk past them.  Then turn to face them.  They stand there for a little while, before one says something to the others, and they each pick up the wood they dropped, and we head back to the camp.