Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

It's only been a day, but it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders after successfully making a large crystal that can survive down here in the goblin village.  It even seems like things are more cheery. I heard a lot of birds chirping in the morning, and had time to just listen to them. I felt just bristling with energy to go start my day.  While the path needs work done on it, today I just went to check on the various other things in the village that need potential maintenance, like the rain runoff system and the dam. I have a few other village improvements that I'd like to do as well before working on the path. 

Namely, the salt evaporation pond and the potential leather workshop.  The salt evaporation pond has been useful, and the goblins have gotten used to using it.  The bad news is that they've been using all the salt for food, and as such, there isn't much excess to use for making leather, which needs to be remedied by making more salt evaporation ponds.  Since they do have some salt on hand, I can teach the goblin how to make leather at least, and he can begin the process for some hides.

It's been just one more day, but I'm starting to wonder if there really were this many birds near the village in the past.  All the goblins haven't paid much mind to it, so I'm not concerned.  Maybe it's just that occasionally flocks move into the area, and so they're used to it happening occasionally.  I had a second weird event happen though as well.  It's been ages since I've seen a lizard around the goblin village, basically since Zaka went on a rampage killing them, but I ran into one on the way to go expand the salt evaporation ponds.  After it noticed me, it tried to attack me, and I dealt with it fairly easily.  I let Zaka know about it, so they could come and harvest it, and also keep their eyes peeled for any other lizards that might be about.

Fighting one near here reminds me of when I first came to the village, where all the goblins lived in glorified holes in the ground, and weren't even hunting with tools.  A whole lot has changed in the area since then.  The goblins were practically paleolithic, but it seems that Zaka had some relative knowledge that he didn't know what to do with until the village got it's feet under it.  Now, it's some mix between stone age and medieval, and I'd like to move it forward even more.  Having others who can contribute and provide valuable resources is way better than doing it yourself.

It's been two more days, and I'm almost certain something is up now.  Zaka seems to also sense something is wrong.  There is a lot more wildlife just outside the village than there was before, and the goblins have run into lizards twice now on trips outside the village.  It's been quite a while, but one goblin died while collecting vines.  Until we figure out what is going on, all the goblins who aren't explicitly hunting are to stay in the village.  Zaka is already forming a group to try to go deal with the lizards that have moved back into the vicinity.

It's been three more days, and things have started to get a bit wild.  We had a lizard attempting to break down one of the wooden gates this morning.  Zaka's squad has been hunting lizards, and every day they've killed five.  Which is more than they were killing back before they started the extermination.  I'm almost done building a second smokehouse just so that there is a place for all the extra meat.

Something clicked in me when the lizard was hitting the gate this morning, and I'm starting to suspect the crystal is the cause of all this.  On the mountain, we've had a few run-ins with the lizards when we hadn't seen them in some time up there.  Once, back when the four foot crystal broke and there was the massive mana wave, and then more recently when we finished making the six foot crystal.

I'm starting to wonder if the reason I've been feeling so energetic in the mornings isn't because I've finally finished the crystal project I've worked on for so long, and is instead some property of the crystal itself.  I'm not certain about this, and I'm also not about to smash the crystal.  I'm afraid that would be like setting off a bomb.  Also, it doesn't seem like it's making any of the wildlife behave differently, lizards were always aggressive.

I'll need more evidence before I make a move on this, but I'll keep an eye out for any other signs that the crystal is the cause...

It's only been two days, but we're experiencing what can only be described as a siege... of lizards.  Lizards are outside the walls of the village, pounding on gates, and even fighting amongst themselves.  At this point, I'm fairly certain it's the crystal's fault... which makes it also my fault.  There isn't a way to undo this now though.  We can't exactly take the crystal out of the town.  I've said before too, that I'm pretty sure if I break the crystal, it'll explode with mana.

No, the only way out is to kill the lizards.  At this point, none of us can leave the walls to the village.  I've already reinforced the gates with leftover stone so that they don't get broken down.  Zaka is full time on the wall shooting fireballs at the lizards, although a single fireball barely hurts them, but the range at least allows him to use it freely.

We talked it over, and tomorrow, I'm going to start working on closing off an area near one of the gates inside, so that we can let a few lizards in at a time to attempt to kill them all off.  Zaka can't easily kill any from the walls, because when they get considerably hurt, they run away.

Today was a fucking disaster.  I built a space behind one of the gates so that we could try to fight a handful of the lizards at once.  What followed when we opened the outside gate was a nightmare.

Lizards flooded in, and there were so many that we couldn't close the gate behind them.  Myself, Kaga, Zaka, and some of the hunting goblins were in the walled in area to kill lizards.  Initially, things were going well.  With the lizards having no way back, it was easy to kill them.  A well placed Earth Spike could easily kill one lizard, and Kaga and Zaka were able to easily kill lizards when we started.

As the minutes dragged on though, we noticed a problem.  The gates weren't closing, and the dead lizards had started to pile high enough that the alive lizards were using them to attempt to climb up the wall.  Zaka and I were both practically exhausted of mana, and had resorted to old fighting tactics to kill lizards.  We had only planned to kill a dozen or two lizards at a time, close the gates, recharge, and then repeat.  What we didn't count on was the stone mechanism used to close the door from on top of the wall to break due to the lizards ramming into the doors while the goblins on top attempted to close them.

What followed that was a fight for not just our own lives, but for the lives of all the goblins in the village.  We had to frantically fight through the lizards towards the door while exposing our backs to any lizards we might have missed in the carnage all in an attempt to manually close the gates. Being out of mana, I couldn't even use stone shaping to safely close the gate.  When we eventually made it to the gates, we realized that as long as the lizards were trying to get in, we couldn't close them.  At least one of us would have to be outside the gates, holding the lizards back while the gates were closed and reinforced.

I don't know if it was pride in the fact he made the gates himself, or if it was just something I'd failed to see before in Kaga, but he marched through the gates and in a feat of sheer strength he used a lizard's corpse as a plow and shoved back into the approaching horde, and as the gates closed, he was surrounded by the horde.

I'm still shaken by what happened.  If we had been more prepared it could have been easy.  If I'd been more careful with the crystal, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.  If I'd checked that the mechanisms could hold up to this, no one would have had to been outside the gates.  If I'd had spare rope on the walls maybe we could have gotten Kaga out.

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