Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

When I got back to the village, I started making a building near one of the areas we recently cleared.  It's basically just a barn, but made of stone.  I'm leaving the inside empty for now, since I don't know much else about the animals we're getting.  I'll probably need to fence them in as well, but if they're like the animals high on the mountain, then they won't be able to be kept in by normal sized fences.

I luckily finished up the barn in the morning of the ninth day of working on it, and that afternoon, the trader arrived with a caravan and Shasta.  They brought along all the traded goods I requested, including the parchment.  The livestock look like they might be distantly related to the animals that are up on the mountain, but they definitely seem less skittish.  I inquired in the best way to keep them corralled, and was told a fence a little taller than their heads should be enough to keep them in unless something frightens them.  They also said that they'll prefer to run somewhere that they think is safe if they're frightened, which means the barn I built was probably a good idea.

They really do look like a mix between a deer and a sheep.  They've got a deer's head and build, but sheep horns and fluffy hair growing over the center of their body.  The dwarves call them Barga, and since we don't have a word for it in demon, it looks like we'll just adopt that name.  We'll have to be careful to manage them appropriately, and we should trade for at least one more male for next year, to prevent inbreeding issues.

As for the three different crop seeds, the merchant actually brought an example of the plants, and someone to explain how to take care of them, which was quite informative. Shasta translated for him as he explained the various soil conditions, planting and growing periods, harvesting methods, and things to watch out for while growing them.

One is a fast growing root plant that grows well during high rainfall periods, but not in muddy soil.  The soil needs to be well drained.  It is generally grown along the coast of the dwarven country, where they have a rainy spring and fall.  Since we also share those rainy periods, we'll just need to make sure that the soil is appropriate for them.  The dwarves usually get two harvests in spring, and two in fall, so that should be quite useful for us.  The dwarves call them Reka.

The second one is planted during the rainy spring, and is harvested before the fall rains.  The edible part is the seeds, which would make it comparable to grains on earth.  The seeds can be eaten roasted, but generally are ground into a flour before being mixed with water and cooked.  Unlike earth grains, these plants grow in bundles closer to the ground.  They're a bit of a pain to harvest apparently as well, but they're good for making alcohol.  The dwarves call them Korogo.

The final plant is a ground vine that has large fruits that take most of the year to grow.  You plant them in spring, and harvest at the end of fall when the fruits change color, much like gourds or melons.  That said, they're actually more of a flat disc shape, and we've been informed that you should be careful while walking through the patch to harvest them, not only because you might accidentally step on one of the fruits hidden under a leaf, but because the fruit will actually explode, and the hard rind will cause some degree of injury.  They'll also explode if you don't harvest them apparently. The dwarves call this plant Boto-Boto.

For most of the fields, we won't need to do much work, but the Reka field will need to be modified to make sure that the soil drains well.  Our soil here can get quite muddy, so it'll probably need agricultural tile dug underneath it to assist drainage.  I would have been quite happy with just that, but Shasta says there are a handful of people who want to migrate.  They're currently back on the island the dwarf's control, so she wants me to come up with an application form for them to fill out.  That'll be a whole ordeal, but ultimately, I'll have to have Shasta translate and make the forms, then translate for me again.

Before that though, I brought out what trade goods we had available, some of the metal ingots that I made, which the merchant evaluated to be worth only about a quarter of the ones that Katarko had made, which was a shame, but it did provide us with the funds necessary to trade for three more females and two males of the Bargas, more parchment, and the remainder in dwarven currency.  The merchant was surprised we wanted some of their currency, but I currently don't have any other items that I want from them.

They seem to also use coinage, although their coins seem to be made from copper, silver, and gold.  They have two copper coins, one silver, and then two gold coins.  Their currency has 12 small copper coins to a large copper coin, 12 large copper to a silver, 5 silver to a small gold (or 60 large copper), and 12 small gold to a large gold.  Which means their smallest denomination is 8640 times smaller than their largest.  Comparatively our currency spans only 250 times in value.  That said, ours is essentially fiat currency, with value set by the arbitrary price points we've set for usage of government facilities.

Sometime in the future, I'd like to hear the reason that they have so many different coin denominations.  In medieval times on earth, the gap in currency value within a country was generally quite low, as much of the trade was done via bartering.  Honestly, I'm surprised our currency got into use as well as it did.  I suppose making the food providers adopt it probably played a big role in that.

After we settled on upcoming trade, I sat down with Shasta to prepare immigration forms.  This was a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I tried my best to ask important questions such as: "What is your reason for wanting to move to our country?", "What skills or abilities do you have?", and "How many people do you intend to bring with you?".  I realized while we were working on the paperwork, but we don't have a name for our country.  It didn't come up before this, and while we were working on the questions, I worded them carefully to avoid using a name.  According to Shasta, we're referred to as an aberrant monster country by the few people who know about us.

Considering the fact that people know we're a monster country, I'm surprised that anyone would want to move here.  However, we have 12 applicants to deal with, so I'll have to work with Shasta to see who, if any, we want to allow in.  It'll be a few weeks before she returns.  I'll have to be sure to talk with Zaka and Zeb about a name for our country.

After three days, we got Zeb back in the village to discuss the idea of our country's name.  I should have known this would happen, but Zaka insists we call our country Gokura.  Thankfully, Zeb and I were able to talk him down from that.  It would be fine, except the mainland literally just fought a war of life or death against the individual they refer to as 'Demon Lord Gokura'.  I'm not in the business of inviting conflict back here.  If we were seen as a surviving outpost from that, I'm sure most countries wouldn't even need to declare war, heck they might already have alliance treaties they could call on to raise armies to come smash us.

No, we needed a new name.  We brainstormed for a few hours, until we settled on a name, Kembora.  Kembo is part of the demon word for friendly, and the suffix ra is used to mean 'from'.  So our name translates to something like "We're friendly".  As an interesting point, Gokura translates to something close to 'Of the Goblins', which I actually find to be quite fitting.  According to Zaka, the Gokura territory is the historic homeland of the goblins.