Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

The first few days after Karsh and his family had moved into the village were very difficult for them.  It's not a big surprise, but considering they don't speak the language, nor do they know anyone here, they probably felt isolated.  Beyond that, they were surrounded by demons without a single dwarf to talk to outside of their family.  Honestly, I was feeling pretty bad for them.

Thankfully, Karsh didn't let that deter him from doing work.  I myself was busy working on their house, but I made sure to check in multiple times a day to make sure everything was going alright for them.  Thankfully, by the fifth day after Shasta left, things started to fall into a reasonable pattern for them.  Karsh's wife, Rishi, would go to the market to get one meal a day for their family, and in the evening Karsh would be the one to pick up food.

They might not speak the language, but it's relatively easy to point to what fish or swamp beet you might want, and then get the price estimate.  I watched the first few times to make sure they weren't being swindled, and thankfully, it doesn't seem like any of the goblins were arbitrarily charging extra.

The skeleton new home should be finished by sometime tomorrow, eight days after I started construction.  Doing the detail work to make it seem like the walls were made of blocks rather than solid stone took a bit of time, so I hope they appreciate it.  I've seen a few goblins stop on their way past the house and look at it for a while, so I'm hoping that it doesn't kick off a new phase this early where they all suddenly want these custom houses.  If they pay for it though, I suppose it would give them something to work towards.

After the skeleton of their home was completed I asked Karsh and his wife to follow me to the house so that I could get details on furniture.  Since much of the furniture is going to be made from stone, I wanted to make sure it was all placed where they wanted it, so no one had to strain to try to move things.

It took quite a while to go from room to room, marking where things would go, and of what size, but after a few hours, I'd gotten all the info I needed from them to begin making their basic furniture.  Beyond basic furniture, they'll either have to hire someone else to make it, or trade for it.  They at least seemed pleased with the house thus far, which made me glad.

Finishing their basic furniture took another three days and brought us into the last month of winter.  Once the snow melts, I'm sure Karsh will want fresh ore as soon as possible for smelting.  Before that, the priority for me is going to be getting the Reka field set up to drain properly so that it can be utilized through the entire spring season.  

So now that I've finished with Karsh's house enough that his family can move in, that's exactly what I'll be working on.  I'm going to hire out some goblins to help dig the trenches necessary for installing the drainage tile in the field to speed up the process.  I'm also going to pay a bunch of goblins to start removing the tree stumps from the other planned fields so that we'll be ready for spring.

Getting the Reka field finished took an additional ten days, and was sped up drastically by the help of the goblins that I hired.  Karsh has started to make a bit of money by selling metallic cookware like pots, pans, and even grilling covers, which are much better than stone for cooking.  This was one of the many reasons I was glad to finally get a proper blacksmith in town who could work full time.

Stone has a lot of uses, but there are many where metal is a significantly better option, and I wasn't about to spend all day learning to properly smelt when there were more pressing tasks to try to achieve.  When Katarko was here, it was a big help having him around, and even then he only knew a bit of blacksmithing from doing repairs and growing up around some smiths.

Karsh's ability as a blacksmith is easily ten times more valuable than that.  It seems that his class is 'Blacksmith', which confers a lot of benefits to him in this process.  He's at a middling level, but he has bonuses to heat resistance, endurance, and strength.  Each are very useful to a smith.  He also has something similar to my 'Thermal Hands', but it only expends mana to resist heat, rather than change the temperature of the item.

I have no clue what it's called though, since neither of us has learned much of the other's language yet.  It took over an hour just to get that small amount of information conveyed to him.  That was off topic from what I had initially wanted to discuss, which was upgrading the forge and furnace.  I had asked because I saw him holding a red hot cooking pot in his bare hands to quench it in some nearby water, which shocked me.

After discussing that for a while, I remembered to ask him to help design upgrades for the forge and furnace.  The rest of the day was spent charting out designs.

There were quite a few things that were simply impossible for us to make on our own, and would require trading for next year, or Karsh would have to make them himself at a later point.  There were a lot of improvements and new facilities that I could make with him, however, so I spent two weeks working with him to get his new work area into the best possible condition I was capable of.

The previous area had been pretty simple, with a flat area for working in, the waterwheel powered smelter and furnace for melting metal ore and heating it for shaping respectively, a few stone blocks to function as anvils, and an area for sand molds.  Now it's been properly organized. The furnace and smelter are built to a much better standard, with better airflow and workability.  The area with stone blocks has been replaced with a proper anvil and stone containers of various sizes filled with either fresh or briny water for quenching.  The sand molding area has been left relatively unchanged, save for some new bins for storing sand or other materials.  Many of the areas are now covered, but in a way like the pavilion, where it's all open air from the sides to allow work during mild rains.  There is also a covered area nearby for storing enough charcoal for a few days worth of work.

All in all, it's quite the improvement over the old area.  While I was improving the overall area, Karsh was making more tools for himself, and then storing them along a working wall in the anvil's area.  He should be good to work once we get some fresh ore for him.  The snow should be melting any day now, meaning we'll be able to get ore soon.

Hopefully it helps improve his mood some.  It seems like he and his family have been quite depressed lately due to the bland diet and lack of entertainment or social interaction.  Karsh and his wife seem to be learning small amounts of the demon language from their daily interactions, so that's a good step towards more social interactions for them.

The spring rains came a little late, so it was another two weeks before the snow started to melt on the mountain.  It took another eight days after that before I could even reasonably go get more ore, however.  In those 22 days, I took the time to build a new apartment building for goblins outside the city wall towards the marketplace along with a new stretch of stone wall.  While doing that, I also started clearing more trees from nearby with the intent on getting yet another field area set up for future Barga herds.

Ultimately, we'll need a lot of these animals to supply not only meat, but hides and wool too.  It's become painfully obvious how far behind our clothing is since we've started interacting with the dwarves, and wool should be at least a step up from random plant vine fibers.  The hide should also be useful for both leather and parchment, which we'll probably need a decent amount of.  The new type of meat should also prove valuable to diversifying our diets.  Thankfully, Barga are willing to eat a lot of our plant material scraps that are left over from our various industries, and we'll start having even more available once we get more fields of the new dwarven crops.

I finished cutting the last of the trees growing in this new field area yesterday, bringing my level up to 19.  I'll leave the cleanup of the wood and stumps to the goblins, because I'm going to be mining ore next.

<MYTHIC LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 19
HP: 1719/1719
MP: 1070/1070
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands