NOVEL SIMPLE [Vol.5] Ch12 Recycling
I accompanied the goblins for two days on test salvages, which went off without any problems. We only recovered cannonballs, and it was a relatively slow process, but I was pleased to see the process working. The hobgoblin divers had a close call with a relatively large fish approaching, and they had to hide for a minute in the downed ship to avoid it. For good measure, we waited half of an hour before resuming with salvage.
After I was confident that the goblins could continue recovering salvage on their own, I began the next projects I had in mind over here. For one of the projects, I intend to build up a stone road into the bay out to a low tide area. Admittedly, the road will cover with sand over time, so I'll need to place regular stone markers to indicate where the footing is underneath, so that it can be cleared when it needs to be used. This will be the path for bringing carts to the salvage boat to unload cannons if we recover them.
The other project was the plan for a warehouse on this side of the island. I plan on having a large portion of the warehouse be underground, and potentially hiding the underground portion, so that in the off chance it gets robbed, not all the goods will go missing. By making an underground portion, similar to other buildings I've made, I'll get the stone necessary to build the rest of the building, and in this case, also hopefully get enough stone to build out the stone road into the bay.
I've been slowly excavating an area next to the end of the existing road, just before the beach, to serve as the warehouse area. I've left the goblins to salvage on their own for five days, and they've been slowly recovering more and more cannonballs, and storing them in the fort on the beach. Unfortunately, due to mana restrictions, I haven't been able to work at the pace I'd like to, so I've only excavated about a fifth of the first basement level. While I waited for my mana to recover, I spent my time cleaning up the beach and bay of our fortifications. It'll take a lot longer than the few days I've been working at it to fully restore the beach, but I'm making noticeable progress.
Unfortunately, we have to head back to the city tomorrow, because our food supplies are starting to run low. On the return trip, we'll be bringing a few carts with us with food and fuel, and then returning with the carts full of salvaged metal after working for a while. I also intend to bring a few fishing poles back with us next trip. When the salvage ship is anchored and the diver hobgoblins are working, the majority of the goblins on the ship don't have much to do other than wait. Instead, they could be fishing off the back of the ship, as long as we establish rules for it for safety reasons.
After the two day journey back to town, I told the goblins they'd have five days to rest before we go back. Then they'll spend 15 days doing salvage before repeating the cycle. Their erratic work schedule is an unfortunate consequence of the distance they have to travel to work, similar to the mine exploration team, except the mine team doesn't have to travel for nearly as long to reach their worksite.
During the five days in town, I worked with the carpenter to get some more carts made, told Zeb about my warehouse and unloading road plans, and then checked in on Tiberius. I'd left him to his own devices for a few months, and I was really starting to worry about what might be happening in the lab.
What I found when I went to check on him were many odd contraptions that he'd haphazardly assembled from wood. It was a far cry from any of the workmanship that I'd produce from stone, but it seemed functional. Tiberius was nowhere to be found to explain what he was working on. In fact, thinking back on it, I hadn't seen him much at all even when I was working on the boat in town. I at least expected he'd have been on the fishing jetty a few times.
As for the devices in the lab, they all seemed to be amalgamations of fish parts, blood, and wood. I can at least guess what he's trying to do, but it's quite disturbing seeing it in action. There are some of the electrical direction organs centralized with other, unknown components connecting them via blood soaked wood to what looks like chambers for storing something in, though they're empty right now.
It really seems like he's trying to harness the electrical fish's abilities in some way. I was concerned enough about the fact I haven't seen him, mixed with his project, that I started asking around the city to see if anyone had seen him.
Almost no one had seen him, but after asking a few of the fishergoblins, I found out where he is. He's apparently convinced two fishergoblins, a hobgoblin and a regular goblin, to go with him to other fishing spots that they knew of to try to catch large fish. Those two goblins had heard of where Boggs would fish, and have been going on multi-week fishing expeditions with Tiberius.
Next time I see him, I'll have a few questions for him, but for now, I'm glad that it doesn't seem that he's died somewhere. Since the situation doesn't seem very urgent, I felt content to continue working on my own project while I left Tiberius to work on his.
While the goblins continued their salvage work, I continued building the warehouse and cleaning the beach. Given how long they were able to fish for during the day, the goblins were able to supplement a large part of their food requirements with fresh fish, which was a nice bonus.
After the fifteen days of working on the beach, I'd made good progress on the stone road into the water for the barge, and had started on the second basement level for the warehouse. The goblins had also recovered enough cannonballs to fill three carts for the return trip. They've salvaged four smaller ships that we sank, and also brought back a bunch of swords and armor which are filling two additional carts.
I think that if I keep working through the goblin's break time, I'll finish the warehouse and path after their next cycle of salvage. If I head back now though, I'll almost certainly need to come back a third time to finish it all, which seems impractical. We have an excess of preserved food, thanks to the amount of fresh fish that they caught while working, so I won't be short on that while I work.
I ended up cutting it pretty close, despite having a total of 24 days to work. The warehouse is fairly large, but I finished it literally the night before the salvage team planned to return to the city again. I did end up having to spend a day helping the goblins when they got the winches jammed on the crane while it was mid-lift of some cannonballs. It wasn't that hard of a fix, they just needed to release the cannonballs so that it was safe to start working with the winches, pull the cable up onto the ship, then respool it. The issue was that I had to be rowed out to the ship, and then work through the process with them, and be rowed back to shore again.
When it looked like I was close to finishing, the goblins had volunteered to work for an extra day or two if I needed it so that I could return with them. I took them up on their offer, but I really didn't want to be the cause for them delaying their break, so I was especially careful with my mana consumption to finish in time.
I also chatted with one of the hobgoblin divers while I was clearing portions of the beach while I waited for my mana to recharge one evening. Though it didn't seem to disturb the hobgoblin much, he said that he's seen well over twenty skeletons of humans underwater while he's been recovering materials. When I pressed him for how many 'well over twenty' was, he said he stopped counting at twenty, and that was part of the way through the first salvage cycle. I can only assume he's probably seen close to one hundred.
Ultimately, this time the haul is two and a half carts of cannonballs, and another cart and a half of armor and swords. All the materials are completely rusted from resting in sea water for almost a year now, but we're just recycling it anyway, so I don't mind. The downside is that we've probably lost a lot of the iron to the ocean in the form of rust flakes.