Neolithic III
Sandy River DL
(Verified Destroyer Leader)
- Location
- Lake Michigan
- Pronouns
- Her/She
After a Christmas drought, I have completed the next installment!
Unnamed Location, Earth Tǩóymos, Jan 6, 2011.
The light of the dawn sun shining through a gap in the wall woke me as it passed over my face. Standing, I groaned as my spine popped. Right, making a proper bed or getting a pad of some sort was now in my Top Ten Needs list, because gneiss makes for terrible mattress. Also, never sleep in my brigandine again. Issuing another groan, I began gathering up the supplies I'd need to build my hydro-generator, before stopping. "Shit, don't have anything for wires yet. Guess I'll need to hit a hardware store in the next few days, maybe get some lights, sockets, and outlets while I'm there."
Letting out a sigh, I set down what I'd just picked up and instead grabbed my axe-pick and visor, along with a spam tin. This done, I slid aside the odd bark-and-branch door on the hut and stepped outside, where I found a trio of footprints that appeared to have been made by a pair of dress shoes. Strange, but unless there's someone else capable of interdimensional travel, it was probably Cauldron related. No idea what would bring them here overnight, but it could easily have been them checking in on me, given the doctor's interest.
I shuddered slightly. Yes, as power sellers they had good reason to be interested in the results I got, but I still didn't like the idea of only being valuable because of superpowers.
Pushing that line of thought aside, I set the drones to scanning the surrounding flora for edibles before heading down towards the stream with them in tow. When in unfamiliar forested terrain with no trails, following waterways was your best for not getting lost, after all. Additionally, rivers and streams often exposed interesting mineral deposits, such as the malachite vein just upstream of me. Walking along the bank to the sound would give me a good idea of what I had to work with in terms of geological resources. The abundance of heavily metamorphized rock and ongoing volcanism in the area made me hopeful of finding rutile, ilmentite, gold, silver, and other such materials, which would give me a nice boost once I had the infrastructure to utilize them properly.
My primary goal though, was searching for clay and either geothermal hematite deposits or accumulations of iron sand. While copper was useful, I didn't want to depend on finding cassiterite to get tool production going and with my power I could easily make the jump from stone to iron. Or just skip stone entirely, as I already had the tools needed to get the ores harvested and make the furnaces, while not having any workable stone.
Transporting the gathered resources would need some thought, as I'd like to keep my bag clean for food. Maybe finding a flax substitute would be a good idea, then I could make more bags and sacks as needed.
With all that considered, I began traversing the stream bank with my axe-pick serving as a walking stick.
"I'm going to need more beacons, I think. For the ore sites and this beach, as it's quite a nice one. Those reed things could be useful too, if they're similar enough to cattails. Cloth, food, and fuel in one package," I said aloud as I surveyed the area. Looking out towards the sound, I focused on the only visible barrier island. "The Annette Islands, I think. Or maybe I should name the sound after her, and call the islands something else. While the islands shelter me from the storms, the sound can provide nourishment and comfort… Eh, I'll figure that out later."
Abandoning the naming for now, I turned to the water plants and began carefully harvesting a good number. Digging them out by the roots was going to be annoying, but I wasn't inclined to waste anything that might be useful in them. Once I had one, I carefully split open the base of the stalk at the junction with the roots and gave it a sniff. "Wow that smells sweet. Less starch and more outright sucrose here. I guess these are closer to sugarcane than cattails, which means that they won't make good fiber sources. Oh well, they're still quite useful." Fermenting them should allow for water purification and disinfectant production. Having sugar is nice too, even if I didn't want to put the effort into having it regularly. It also meant that I still didn't have a local starch source yet, and would need to dig through the sensor logs to look for one.
With that thought, I paused. Other than the feathery swan-rat, I hadn't actually seen any wildlife here that wasn't an insect or water-dwelling. It was strange, but possibly a result of the local animals being the cautious sort or maybe my drones were emitting infrasonics that were repelling them. That was… mixed news, as it meant that while predators wouldn't be much of a concern for now, hunting would also not be viable until I worked out what was happening and made the necessary steps to either modify the drones or let the fauna get used to me.
Musing finished, I returned to uprooting 'sweettails' until I had an armful of the plants, at which point I called back my drones and triggered the recall system. Appearing back at base, I almost dropped my cargo at the sight of the doctor standing next to my hut. That was… not expected, though considering that they had no other way of contacting me, it should have been. And I had made my first appearance as a cape yesterday.
"So, doctor, what brings you to my humble abode?" I queried, reasoning that the sooner the visit was delt with, the sooner I'd be able to begin processing my harvest.
With one of her maternal smiles, she replied "Just checking in on you. I received a report that one of our people left you something?"
I shrugged. "Depends on if the name 'Tessa' means anything to you. She stashed a box with a laptop, a bicycle generator, and a communications relay that the accompanying note claimed has Haywire derived technology for interdimensional usage. It looks enough like the transceivers I got from you guys for me to find a connection plausible."
The doctor sighed a little. "Yes, she's one of ours. A rather eccentric Thinker, albeit a very strong one. And presumably she felt we'd made an oversight in our handling of your situation and decided that giving you those items would remedy it. She's also liable to turn up at random to ask odd things of you, or deliver a briefcase full of drugs in the middle of the night…" Shaking herself, the older woman continued "Ultimately, you just have to learn to roll with it if she takes an interest in you and hope it's short term. It usually is for the rare customers who attract her attention, but on occasion she's seen fit to keep sticking her nose in like she does with the rest of us at Cauldron."
I groaned. The last thing I needed was a stranger wandering in at random on top of everything else. It would be distracting, at the very least, and could ruin any hunting attempts as much as the potential infrasonics problem. "Is there any way to get her to leave me alone, or at least stick to drop offs? I'm not exactly in a great place right now, even with all the resources available. Winds, I haven't even secured a food supply not based on theft!"
"Unfortunately not, though she is generally considerate enough not to interrupt anything important. I didn't just come here to chat with you about my colleague's quirks however, so let's move on," was her reply. "Now, you said that you don't have a local food supply?"
"Yeah. I'd thought I'd found something, but these reeds here turned out to be more like sugarcane than cattails. That leaves me without a native starch, and I'll need to go through my sensor data and do more exploring to find either a fruit or root vegetable to keep me going until I've got a successful harvest of the crops I acquired. Stealing food works, but I don't want to continue doing it indefinitely because I hope to be self-sufficient by the end of the contract, and, more importantly, a pattern like that would get me caught. I'd very much like to avoid that, for a variety of reasons. So playing hunter-gatherer while I build up is probably my best choice, if I can find what I need and figure out why the wildlife is avoiding me."
A few moments passed with a thoughtful expression on the doctor's face before she responded. "There isn't anything I can do to help, at least not directly. Just prioritize yourself over your villainous activities and I will keep your sponsor from using the contract to disrupt your efforts. And if you wouldn't mind doing so, Cauldron would pay you, monetarily like for the notoriety tasks or in processed materials, for the creation of several of your recall anchors for our use."
"Thank you, and I'll see what I can do about building you some anchors. I'd need tools and parts though, and I'm… aways… from being able to make what I need here. All I've got at the moment is this hut and what I made during power testing. Though with a bit more time, I can start clearing some land for farming and start building infrastructure for fabrication…"
The doctor nodded, her following words breaking me out of the beginnings of another fugue. "I will see about setting aside a workshop for you to use, along with the materials you used to manufacture the original units. Do you have preference in payment method, or shall I just send it to the account that your notoriety pay goes to?"
I blinked. "Wait, you never mentioned a payment account when you talked about the notoriety tasks. I thought I'd be getting cash!" Then a though occurred to me. "What would I even use money for anyway? It's not like I'd be going shopping in costume and a homeless teen isn't exactly going to have much."
"We didn't cover that?" came the older woman's response. "I thought I had told you we were setting you up with a bank account under your customer pseudonym through Number Man. As for what you can do with it, there are websites that you can order items through for delivery. Most of them don't even ask questions about the address used, so you could send things to the warehouse you're using for pick up. I believe some even deal in survival equipment and seeds."
Eyes widening under my visor, I breathed "And Toybox… I completely forgot about them! They might be able to supply me with tech that would let me skip some of the more annoying steps. Like if I could get something that could refine magnesite, I'd be able to start making batteries and light structural alloys I need for…" I shook my head "Yeah, lots of options."
A smile on her face, the doctor replied "A good choice there, though I would recommend caution when dealing with Toybox. They aren't what could be called dangerous, but will try to use their reputation to leverage you into their orbit and a tinker as versatile as you would be quite appealing to them."
I let out a groan. "Everybody really does just want me for my powers…"
"I'm sure you'll find someone who cares about Taylor Hebert, teenage girl. It may mean going out as a civilian, but you're bound to meet a real friend at some point," the older woman said, placing a hand on my shoulder.
Sighing, I asked "Was there anything else? I need to get to work processing these sweettails to see what I can get out of them."
The doctor didn't verbally respond, simply stepping backwards through a portal that had just appeared. Well, that was certainly a way to say that the conversation was over.
Glancing back down at my armful of reeds, I had to force down the impulse to facepalm. "I didn't even think about how to soak these… Stupid! Looks like I'll have to be finding what they can be used for without having the sugar extracted first."
Keeping an eye on the live feeds, I wandered over to the westward side of the hill, examining the broadleaved groundcover that clad the gentler slope in that direction. A plant with ribbed leaves had caught my attention in the data as having tuberous structures in the roots that may be similar to potatoes, though the current scanner modules in the drones weren't good enough to check the makeup though the intervening dirt and loam. Actually finding the correct piece of flora turned out to be a bit of a chore, as there turned out to be multiple such herbs of varying sizes and the drone logs didn't convey scale well. Another thing to fix once I had the capability natively I guess. Always more to do…
Shaking that thought clear, I crouched down and gave a candidate plant an experimental tug. It came free with a slightly surprising amount of ease, revealing a cluster of russet tubers that certainly resembled potatoes, even if their edibility was not a guarantee. Splitting one open with my knife, I took a sniff, leveraging my thinker ability just like I had with the sweettails. "Okay, I think these might be some variety of actual wild potatoes. Or close enough, considering how long ago the divergence for this world must have been. Still, not too surprising to find them, given that potatoes came from the Americas to start with." A slight smile then formed on my lips. "Heh, maybe I'll find chili peppers, tomatoes, and onions next. Spicy food without waiting for cultivation! Kyne willing, I might even be able to crossbreed the local versions with heirloom cultivars to produce my own customized varieties, which could be interesting. I'll need to find some spices and seasonings too, preferably locally though, so I don't need to do as much work tracking down and farming Bet ones on top of the critical food crops."
Yeah, I'd definitely need to buy some stuff from Toybox to skip a few steps so I could build the equipment to keep ahead of all the things I needed to operate. Maybe I should try recruiting too… No, bad idea, way too risky. I didn't even have any friends, let alone people I trusted enough to bring here. Hell, I didn't trust Cauldron to be here, but there wasn't any real way to keep them out. …Well, there was, but I was a long way away from building a terawatt-class fusion reactor and a planet-wide network of dimensional shroud emitters. I'd be space-capable before I reached that point, considering some of the requirements.
I blinked. Wow, it was beginning to look like I somehow ended up with my own version of Leet's power, one without the one-off limit and the tendency toward catastrophic failure. It'd take me awhile to exploit it properly, but Emma would definitely regret insisting on the Nemesis rider eventually. Assuming I didn't send her off the deep end with my villain persona and get her jailed for her actions. In which case she probably wouldn't be regretting the forcing me to be a villain part and be more wishing she'd chosen to go villain herself so she wouldn't have to care about PR or the real heroes looking over her shoulder. Either way was fine.
Turning my focus back to the potato plant I'd uprooted, I began examining it for signs of readiness. While clearly not the same species as that cultivated on Bet, I could tell the plant's small fruits were ripe and that the potatoes themselves were mature enough for use. A look at several near-by plants that I could now recognize as the same showed them to be at somewhat different stages of development, with two being in bloom. It made sense, this being a subtropical to tropical area, the annual plants wouldn't have a discrete growing season and would thus be developing at varying rates based on when their seeds sprouted. Ah, the benefits of farming and foraging where it doesn't freeze every year…
A shudder ran down my spine and my breathing quickened. "Get it together Taylor! You aren't in Brockton Bay anymore. You're on Tǩóymos, there aren't any blizzards in tropical coastal lowlands, so you can stop having trauma flash-backs!" Sucking in a deep breath and holding it for several seconds, I exhaled slowly. "Fucking PTSD… It would've made sense if I had an attack when I was on Bet, but here?"
After a few more cycles of controlled breathing had settled the narrowly aborted panic attack, I headed back to my shelter with the harvested potato plant in hand. I'd need to build a proper storehouse soon, though that would wait until after I'd decided whether be staying at my current location or moving elsewhere. The confined flow of Malachite Creek made for excellent power generation, but the adjacent hillsides were not ideal for farming and unless there was another water source like I hoped, I'd need to settle the flood plain of the… let's go with Alexandria River to take advantage of the rich alluvial soil there. I'd still want a hilltop to set up my main buildings though, both to protect against flooding and to keep myself well away from volcanic gas releases. It wouldn't help should there be pyroclastic flows, but the only two volcanoes in range were likely shields and thus had little risk of turning me into a miniature Pompeii. Still, something to look into soon.
Finding other ore deposits and a place to set up a hydro-generator on the Alexandria would take time and would likely be less convenient, but there's no such thing as a truly perfect location in the real world. Having all the resources one could possibly need within an hour's walk was something that only happened in lazily written fiction after all. Still, even without any additional anchors, I could always make a boat of some kind for riverine transport, which, thinking about it, would also allow me to move much larger quantities of raw materials around than I could by hand, even with a wheelbarrow or sacks. It was, after all, one of the big reasons that waterways were major trade routes even to this day.
Hydropower was, however, still problematic. Constructing a small water wheel to drive a generator was fairly simple, but harnessing a river required a much more significant and complex setup than that, which is the big reason I wanted to stay where I was. Between the ease of running my base off the Malachite and the various benefits of direct access to bedrock, my current location was quite defensible against whatever predators might be around and could easily be electrified once I hit a hardware store.
On the Alexandria, however, I had a good chance of either needing to lay a full powerline connection, or being left exposed in a valley. Neither of those was appealing, and I wouldn't make any decision until both my current area and a large stretch of land from the estuary to about five miles upriver had been scanned. Better to spend time being thorough than make a snap judgement and get my ass bitten by something I'd missed, after all. And 'get my ass bitten' meant 'death', not 'oh I goofed', because this was a virgin world with no margin of error from having other people around.
Maybe the recruiting idea wasn't a terrible one, but I'd need to make some friends first and that meant going out in civvies on Bet. I might not even be able to build the necessary relationships before the contract ran out either, so that was an issue. Going back was not something I was planning on doing much once I no longer had to. Of course, six months could well not be enough time to become self-sustaining from the work of one person, so I might have to keep up the villainy for longer than the contract required…
I let out a sigh as I began stripping the local potatoes from their plant and placing them into the alcove I was using as a supply stash. Recruitment was inevitable, it seemed, if only for sustaining a stable food supply. I'd have to start thinking about how to approach that, as just coming out and saying that I'm a villain looking to populate a farmstead on an alternate Earth was a decidedly bad idea. Getting arrested was rather counterproductive to making a new life for myself.
Further musing was cut short as something from the live feed caught my attention. "Well, I'm definitely not staying here anymore," I said, focusing on the bear-sized avianoid on a hillside half a mile away. "No matter how defensible this place is, the soil won't allow for a sufficiently secure abatis to be emplaced and I don't have the materials to build walls solid enough to keep something that big out. If I had a quarry and mortar, I might be able to pull it off, but then I wouldn't have much space left and the thing could probably knock down a stonework barrier held together by immature lime mortar anyways."
Tasking a drone to monitor the megafauna predator, I sent the other two off to survey the Alexandria Estuary and lower floodplain for a site suitable for constructing a hillfort. While stone or concrete would be best, a steep-sided earthwork capped with wooden spikes and set behind a wide ditch was still a significant obstacle to a ground bound wild animal. Really, the only problematic part of a fortified homestead was accessing it myself. Using a broch as an entry tower could work, though that had the disadvantage of making it difficult to bring in supplies. A crane or hoist would solve that though, and was something I should develop anyways…
Noting down the ideas, I then forced myself to attend to other, more pressing, matters. Like how I needed to get my armor off rather badly. While temperatures had initially been mild enough that my winter-rated brigandine hadn't been uncomfortable, it was now getting to be quite warm and humid. Raiding a clothing or fabric store would be a good plan to pull soon, with locally sourcing weavable fibers and making a loom being high on the list for post-establishment priorities. Cotton would be the simplest to harvest, but was labor-intensive and thus would need a fair amount of build-up to use. Kopak would be easier to process into cloth, but required climbing some pretty tall trees to collect and was rather flammable. Flax or hemp were probably the best options, but would require me to acquire the seeds from Bet, meaning that supply would be much more limited until I could establish sufficient automation capacity. On the other hand, doing so would also guarantee having a fiber crop, as I had no idea if there even were local analogues to the former set of plants.
I ultimately ended up stripped down to my undershirt, only leaving my pants and boots on for protection, even if doing so left me still a little on the warm side. Replacing my visor revealed that my drones had reached the estuary and had already found one potential site not far from where Malachite Creek entered the larger body. A bluff-skirted hill set above a junction with a smaller river that had deposited a bar of iron sand jutting out into the brackish inlet. The hill itself was around eighty feet high, with a gentler slope on the shoreward side, leading into the forest. That lack of trees, coupled with its shape, made it less appealing than it might otherwise have been. A clay-heavy soil like that implied would not be good for building on. Still, it was the first clay source I'd found, so it was certainly a useful discovery.
Fortunately, a second option, in the form of granite studded prominence, was in close proximity. Situated on another riverine junction, this time on the Alexandria itself, this site was practically an island connected to the mainland by lightly forested isthmus of mud and silt that had accumulated after one of the rivers had wandered. An excellent place to farm, so long as I kept the banks wooded, preferably with trees that would catch more sediment in their roots. The channel immediately adjacent to the exposed bedrock was fast flowing enough for a waterwheel generator, but the slope was far too steep. Digging a canal across the isthmus would work though, and had the added benefit of serving as a moat too.
Maneuvering the drone around for a better angle, I grinned. The shoreward slope of the hill was easily scalable and had several natural terraces that structures could be built on, while creating a single trail up to the top that could have a fairly simple fortification emplaced to control. Even better, the formation was large. Large enough to fit two or three city blocks on it with room to spare, which meant there was plenty of space for a decent village, including storehouses and workshops. Depending on just how high floods could get, I might be able to put up a post bridge along the isthmus to connect to the low hills on the other side, allowing for more growth once defenses could be constructed there. And I thought I would be expanding that way, given a small brook flowing from there showed signs of being the outflow of one or more hot springs.
A few quick commands sent both drones to conduct a close scan of the site and everything within a mile of it, looking for ores and assessing the stability of the ground. If the latter came up clear, and the former were reasonably abundant, it would become my new base. I even had a potential name lined up, though I wouldn't use it until my checks were completed. A broad smile played across my too-wide lips. "The hearth of a new flame…"
Unnamed Location, Earth Tǩóymos, Jan 6, 2011.
The light of the dawn sun shining through a gap in the wall woke me as it passed over my face. Standing, I groaned as my spine popped. Right, making a proper bed or getting a pad of some sort was now in my Top Ten Needs list, because gneiss makes for terrible mattress. Also, never sleep in my brigandine again. Issuing another groan, I began gathering up the supplies I'd need to build my hydro-generator, before stopping. "Shit, don't have anything for wires yet. Guess I'll need to hit a hardware store in the next few days, maybe get some lights, sockets, and outlets while I'm there."
Letting out a sigh, I set down what I'd just picked up and instead grabbed my axe-pick and visor, along with a spam tin. This done, I slid aside the odd bark-and-branch door on the hut and stepped outside, where I found a trio of footprints that appeared to have been made by a pair of dress shoes. Strange, but unless there's someone else capable of interdimensional travel, it was probably Cauldron related. No idea what would bring them here overnight, but it could easily have been them checking in on me, given the doctor's interest.
I shuddered slightly. Yes, as power sellers they had good reason to be interested in the results I got, but I still didn't like the idea of only being valuable because of superpowers.
Pushing that line of thought aside, I set the drones to scanning the surrounding flora for edibles before heading down towards the stream with them in tow. When in unfamiliar forested terrain with no trails, following waterways was your best for not getting lost, after all. Additionally, rivers and streams often exposed interesting mineral deposits, such as the malachite vein just upstream of me. Walking along the bank to the sound would give me a good idea of what I had to work with in terms of geological resources. The abundance of heavily metamorphized rock and ongoing volcanism in the area made me hopeful of finding rutile, ilmentite, gold, silver, and other such materials, which would give me a nice boost once I had the infrastructure to utilize them properly.
My primary goal though, was searching for clay and either geothermal hematite deposits or accumulations of iron sand. While copper was useful, I didn't want to depend on finding cassiterite to get tool production going and with my power I could easily make the jump from stone to iron. Or just skip stone entirely, as I already had the tools needed to get the ores harvested and make the furnaces, while not having any workable stone.
Transporting the gathered resources would need some thought, as I'd like to keep my bag clean for food. Maybe finding a flax substitute would be a good idea, then I could make more bags and sacks as needed.
With all that considered, I began traversing the stream bank with my axe-pick serving as a walking stick.
***
Three hours and the spam later, I'd arrived at the outflow of my stream. In front of me was a sandy estuary formed by a large river about a mile up the coast from my position, with cattail-like reeds growing in the shallows. Along the way I'd spotted several bands of gold-laden quartz along with an entire hillside of magnesite and a small beach of iron sand, all of which I'd noted down with landmarks. I'd also dubbed the waterway Malachite Creek, as veins of the blue-green mineral were practically everywhere along its run, to the point that it might have uncovered a commercially viable source.
"I'm going to need more beacons, I think. For the ore sites and this beach, as it's quite a nice one. Those reed things could be useful too, if they're similar enough to cattails. Cloth, food, and fuel in one package," I said aloud as I surveyed the area. Looking out towards the sound, I focused on the only visible barrier island. "The Annette Islands, I think. Or maybe I should name the sound after her, and call the islands something else. While the islands shelter me from the storms, the sound can provide nourishment and comfort… Eh, I'll figure that out later."
Abandoning the naming for now, I turned to the water plants and began carefully harvesting a good number. Digging them out by the roots was going to be annoying, but I wasn't inclined to waste anything that might be useful in them. Once I had one, I carefully split open the base of the stalk at the junction with the roots and gave it a sniff. "Wow that smells sweet. Less starch and more outright sucrose here. I guess these are closer to sugarcane than cattails, which means that they won't make good fiber sources. Oh well, they're still quite useful." Fermenting them should allow for water purification and disinfectant production. Having sugar is nice too, even if I didn't want to put the effort into having it regularly. It also meant that I still didn't have a local starch source yet, and would need to dig through the sensor logs to look for one.
With that thought, I paused. Other than the feathery swan-rat, I hadn't actually seen any wildlife here that wasn't an insect or water-dwelling. It was strange, but possibly a result of the local animals being the cautious sort or maybe my drones were emitting infrasonics that were repelling them. That was… mixed news, as it meant that while predators wouldn't be much of a concern for now, hunting would also not be viable until I worked out what was happening and made the necessary steps to either modify the drones or let the fauna get used to me.
Musing finished, I returned to uprooting 'sweettails' until I had an armful of the plants, at which point I called back my drones and triggered the recall system. Appearing back at base, I almost dropped my cargo at the sight of the doctor standing next to my hut. That was… not expected, though considering that they had no other way of contacting me, it should have been. And I had made my first appearance as a cape yesterday.
"So, doctor, what brings you to my humble abode?" I queried, reasoning that the sooner the visit was delt with, the sooner I'd be able to begin processing my harvest.
With one of her maternal smiles, she replied "Just checking in on you. I received a report that one of our people left you something?"
I shrugged. "Depends on if the name 'Tessa' means anything to you. She stashed a box with a laptop, a bicycle generator, and a communications relay that the accompanying note claimed has Haywire derived technology for interdimensional usage. It looks enough like the transceivers I got from you guys for me to find a connection plausible."
The doctor sighed a little. "Yes, she's one of ours. A rather eccentric Thinker, albeit a very strong one. And presumably she felt we'd made an oversight in our handling of your situation and decided that giving you those items would remedy it. She's also liable to turn up at random to ask odd things of you, or deliver a briefcase full of drugs in the middle of the night…" Shaking herself, the older woman continued "Ultimately, you just have to learn to roll with it if she takes an interest in you and hope it's short term. It usually is for the rare customers who attract her attention, but on occasion she's seen fit to keep sticking her nose in like she does with the rest of us at Cauldron."
I groaned. The last thing I needed was a stranger wandering in at random on top of everything else. It would be distracting, at the very least, and could ruin any hunting attempts as much as the potential infrasonics problem. "Is there any way to get her to leave me alone, or at least stick to drop offs? I'm not exactly in a great place right now, even with all the resources available. Winds, I haven't even secured a food supply not based on theft!"
"Unfortunately not, though she is generally considerate enough not to interrupt anything important. I didn't just come here to chat with you about my colleague's quirks however, so let's move on," was her reply. "Now, you said that you don't have a local food supply?"
"Yeah. I'd thought I'd found something, but these reeds here turned out to be more like sugarcane than cattails. That leaves me without a native starch, and I'll need to go through my sensor data and do more exploring to find either a fruit or root vegetable to keep me going until I've got a successful harvest of the crops I acquired. Stealing food works, but I don't want to continue doing it indefinitely because I hope to be self-sufficient by the end of the contract, and, more importantly, a pattern like that would get me caught. I'd very much like to avoid that, for a variety of reasons. So playing hunter-gatherer while I build up is probably my best choice, if I can find what I need and figure out why the wildlife is avoiding me."
A few moments passed with a thoughtful expression on the doctor's face before she responded. "There isn't anything I can do to help, at least not directly. Just prioritize yourself over your villainous activities and I will keep your sponsor from using the contract to disrupt your efforts. And if you wouldn't mind doing so, Cauldron would pay you, monetarily like for the notoriety tasks or in processed materials, for the creation of several of your recall anchors for our use."
"Thank you, and I'll see what I can do about building you some anchors. I'd need tools and parts though, and I'm… aways… from being able to make what I need here. All I've got at the moment is this hut and what I made during power testing. Though with a bit more time, I can start clearing some land for farming and start building infrastructure for fabrication…"
The doctor nodded, her following words breaking me out of the beginnings of another fugue. "I will see about setting aside a workshop for you to use, along with the materials you used to manufacture the original units. Do you have preference in payment method, or shall I just send it to the account that your notoriety pay goes to?"
I blinked. "Wait, you never mentioned a payment account when you talked about the notoriety tasks. I thought I'd be getting cash!" Then a though occurred to me. "What would I even use money for anyway? It's not like I'd be going shopping in costume and a homeless teen isn't exactly going to have much."
"We didn't cover that?" came the older woman's response. "I thought I had told you we were setting you up with a bank account under your customer pseudonym through Number Man. As for what you can do with it, there are websites that you can order items through for delivery. Most of them don't even ask questions about the address used, so you could send things to the warehouse you're using for pick up. I believe some even deal in survival equipment and seeds."
Eyes widening under my visor, I breathed "And Toybox… I completely forgot about them! They might be able to supply me with tech that would let me skip some of the more annoying steps. Like if I could get something that could refine magnesite, I'd be able to start making batteries and light structural alloys I need for…" I shook my head "Yeah, lots of options."
A smile on her face, the doctor replied "A good choice there, though I would recommend caution when dealing with Toybox. They aren't what could be called dangerous, but will try to use their reputation to leverage you into their orbit and a tinker as versatile as you would be quite appealing to them."
I let out a groan. "Everybody really does just want me for my powers…"
"I'm sure you'll find someone who cares about Taylor Hebert, teenage girl. It may mean going out as a civilian, but you're bound to meet a real friend at some point," the older woman said, placing a hand on my shoulder.
Sighing, I asked "Was there anything else? I need to get to work processing these sweettails to see what I can get out of them."
The doctor didn't verbally respond, simply stepping backwards through a portal that had just appeared. Well, that was certainly a way to say that the conversation was over.
Glancing back down at my armful of reeds, I had to force down the impulse to facepalm. "I didn't even think about how to soak these… Stupid! Looks like I'll have to be finding what they can be used for without having the sugar extracted first."
***
I ultimately just laid out the sweettails on the outcrop to dry and started searching the scanner logs from my drones rather than do anything labor intensive. While doing this, I also set the drones themselves to do some general surveying of the landscape around my hill for sites of interest. A better water source that could also supply a farm, for example was high on the list because, while good for electrical generation, the stream was ill-suited to irrigation and drinking water collection thanks to the steep banks and narrow channel that made it useful for the former role in the first place. If there wasn't one, this location would be effectively nonviable.
Keeping an eye on the live feeds, I wandered over to the westward side of the hill, examining the broadleaved groundcover that clad the gentler slope in that direction. A plant with ribbed leaves had caught my attention in the data as having tuberous structures in the roots that may be similar to potatoes, though the current scanner modules in the drones weren't good enough to check the makeup though the intervening dirt and loam. Actually finding the correct piece of flora turned out to be a bit of a chore, as there turned out to be multiple such herbs of varying sizes and the drone logs didn't convey scale well. Another thing to fix once I had the capability natively I guess. Always more to do…
Shaking that thought clear, I crouched down and gave a candidate plant an experimental tug. It came free with a slightly surprising amount of ease, revealing a cluster of russet tubers that certainly resembled potatoes, even if their edibility was not a guarantee. Splitting one open with my knife, I took a sniff, leveraging my thinker ability just like I had with the sweettails. "Okay, I think these might be some variety of actual wild potatoes. Or close enough, considering how long ago the divergence for this world must have been. Still, not too surprising to find them, given that potatoes came from the Americas to start with." A slight smile then formed on my lips. "Heh, maybe I'll find chili peppers, tomatoes, and onions next. Spicy food without waiting for cultivation! Kyne willing, I might even be able to crossbreed the local versions with heirloom cultivars to produce my own customized varieties, which could be interesting. I'll need to find some spices and seasonings too, preferably locally though, so I don't need to do as much work tracking down and farming Bet ones on top of the critical food crops."
Yeah, I'd definitely need to buy some stuff from Toybox to skip a few steps so I could build the equipment to keep ahead of all the things I needed to operate. Maybe I should try recruiting too… No, bad idea, way too risky. I didn't even have any friends, let alone people I trusted enough to bring here. Hell, I didn't trust Cauldron to be here, but there wasn't any real way to keep them out. …Well, there was, but I was a long way away from building a terawatt-class fusion reactor and a planet-wide network of dimensional shroud emitters. I'd be space-capable before I reached that point, considering some of the requirements.
I blinked. Wow, it was beginning to look like I somehow ended up with my own version of Leet's power, one without the one-off limit and the tendency toward catastrophic failure. It'd take me awhile to exploit it properly, but Emma would definitely regret insisting on the Nemesis rider eventually. Assuming I didn't send her off the deep end with my villain persona and get her jailed for her actions. In which case she probably wouldn't be regretting the forcing me to be a villain part and be more wishing she'd chosen to go villain herself so she wouldn't have to care about PR or the real heroes looking over her shoulder. Either way was fine.
Turning my focus back to the potato plant I'd uprooted, I began examining it for signs of readiness. While clearly not the same species as that cultivated on Bet, I could tell the plant's small fruits were ripe and that the potatoes themselves were mature enough for use. A look at several near-by plants that I could now recognize as the same showed them to be at somewhat different stages of development, with two being in bloom. It made sense, this being a subtropical to tropical area, the annual plants wouldn't have a discrete growing season and would thus be developing at varying rates based on when their seeds sprouted. Ah, the benefits of farming and foraging where it doesn't freeze every year…
A shudder ran down my spine and my breathing quickened. "Get it together Taylor! You aren't in Brockton Bay anymore. You're on Tǩóymos, there aren't any blizzards in tropical coastal lowlands, so you can stop having trauma flash-backs!" Sucking in a deep breath and holding it for several seconds, I exhaled slowly. "Fucking PTSD… It would've made sense if I had an attack when I was on Bet, but here?"
After a few more cycles of controlled breathing had settled the narrowly aborted panic attack, I headed back to my shelter with the harvested potato plant in hand. I'd need to build a proper storehouse soon, though that would wait until after I'd decided whether be staying at my current location or moving elsewhere. The confined flow of Malachite Creek made for excellent power generation, but the adjacent hillsides were not ideal for farming and unless there was another water source like I hoped, I'd need to settle the flood plain of the… let's go with Alexandria River to take advantage of the rich alluvial soil there. I'd still want a hilltop to set up my main buildings though, both to protect against flooding and to keep myself well away from volcanic gas releases. It wouldn't help should there be pyroclastic flows, but the only two volcanoes in range were likely shields and thus had little risk of turning me into a miniature Pompeii. Still, something to look into soon.
Finding other ore deposits and a place to set up a hydro-generator on the Alexandria would take time and would likely be less convenient, but there's no such thing as a truly perfect location in the real world. Having all the resources one could possibly need within an hour's walk was something that only happened in lazily written fiction after all. Still, even without any additional anchors, I could always make a boat of some kind for riverine transport, which, thinking about it, would also allow me to move much larger quantities of raw materials around than I could by hand, even with a wheelbarrow or sacks. It was, after all, one of the big reasons that waterways were major trade routes even to this day.
Hydropower was, however, still problematic. Constructing a small water wheel to drive a generator was fairly simple, but harnessing a river required a much more significant and complex setup than that, which is the big reason I wanted to stay where I was. Between the ease of running my base off the Malachite and the various benefits of direct access to bedrock, my current location was quite defensible against whatever predators might be around and could easily be electrified once I hit a hardware store.
On the Alexandria, however, I had a good chance of either needing to lay a full powerline connection, or being left exposed in a valley. Neither of those was appealing, and I wouldn't make any decision until both my current area and a large stretch of land from the estuary to about five miles upriver had been scanned. Better to spend time being thorough than make a snap judgement and get my ass bitten by something I'd missed, after all. And 'get my ass bitten' meant 'death', not 'oh I goofed', because this was a virgin world with no margin of error from having other people around.
Maybe the recruiting idea wasn't a terrible one, but I'd need to make some friends first and that meant going out in civvies on Bet. I might not even be able to build the necessary relationships before the contract ran out either, so that was an issue. Going back was not something I was planning on doing much once I no longer had to. Of course, six months could well not be enough time to become self-sustaining from the work of one person, so I might have to keep up the villainy for longer than the contract required…
I let out a sigh as I began stripping the local potatoes from their plant and placing them into the alcove I was using as a supply stash. Recruitment was inevitable, it seemed, if only for sustaining a stable food supply. I'd have to start thinking about how to approach that, as just coming out and saying that I'm a villain looking to populate a farmstead on an alternate Earth was a decidedly bad idea. Getting arrested was rather counterproductive to making a new life for myself.
Further musing was cut short as something from the live feed caught my attention. "Well, I'm definitely not staying here anymore," I said, focusing on the bear-sized avianoid on a hillside half a mile away. "No matter how defensible this place is, the soil won't allow for a sufficiently secure abatis to be emplaced and I don't have the materials to build walls solid enough to keep something that big out. If I had a quarry and mortar, I might be able to pull it off, but then I wouldn't have much space left and the thing could probably knock down a stonework barrier held together by immature lime mortar anyways."
Tasking a drone to monitor the megafauna predator, I sent the other two off to survey the Alexandria Estuary and lower floodplain for a site suitable for constructing a hillfort. While stone or concrete would be best, a steep-sided earthwork capped with wooden spikes and set behind a wide ditch was still a significant obstacle to a ground bound wild animal. Really, the only problematic part of a fortified homestead was accessing it myself. Using a broch as an entry tower could work, though that had the disadvantage of making it difficult to bring in supplies. A crane or hoist would solve that though, and was something I should develop anyways…
Noting down the ideas, I then forced myself to attend to other, more pressing, matters. Like how I needed to get my armor off rather badly. While temperatures had initially been mild enough that my winter-rated brigandine hadn't been uncomfortable, it was now getting to be quite warm and humid. Raiding a clothing or fabric store would be a good plan to pull soon, with locally sourcing weavable fibers and making a loom being high on the list for post-establishment priorities. Cotton would be the simplest to harvest, but was labor-intensive and thus would need a fair amount of build-up to use. Kopak would be easier to process into cloth, but required climbing some pretty tall trees to collect and was rather flammable. Flax or hemp were probably the best options, but would require me to acquire the seeds from Bet, meaning that supply would be much more limited until I could establish sufficient automation capacity. On the other hand, doing so would also guarantee having a fiber crop, as I had no idea if there even were local analogues to the former set of plants.
I ultimately ended up stripped down to my undershirt, only leaving my pants and boots on for protection, even if doing so left me still a little on the warm side. Replacing my visor revealed that my drones had reached the estuary and had already found one potential site not far from where Malachite Creek entered the larger body. A bluff-skirted hill set above a junction with a smaller river that had deposited a bar of iron sand jutting out into the brackish inlet. The hill itself was around eighty feet high, with a gentler slope on the shoreward side, leading into the forest. That lack of trees, coupled with its shape, made it less appealing than it might otherwise have been. A clay-heavy soil like that implied would not be good for building on. Still, it was the first clay source I'd found, so it was certainly a useful discovery.
Fortunately, a second option, in the form of granite studded prominence, was in close proximity. Situated on another riverine junction, this time on the Alexandria itself, this site was practically an island connected to the mainland by lightly forested isthmus of mud and silt that had accumulated after one of the rivers had wandered. An excellent place to farm, so long as I kept the banks wooded, preferably with trees that would catch more sediment in their roots. The channel immediately adjacent to the exposed bedrock was fast flowing enough for a waterwheel generator, but the slope was far too steep. Digging a canal across the isthmus would work though, and had the added benefit of serving as a moat too.
Maneuvering the drone around for a better angle, I grinned. The shoreward slope of the hill was easily scalable and had several natural terraces that structures could be built on, while creating a single trail up to the top that could have a fairly simple fortification emplaced to control. Even better, the formation was large. Large enough to fit two or three city blocks on it with room to spare, which meant there was plenty of space for a decent village, including storehouses and workshops. Depending on just how high floods could get, I might be able to put up a post bridge along the isthmus to connect to the low hills on the other side, allowing for more growth once defenses could be constructed there. And I thought I would be expanding that way, given a small brook flowing from there showed signs of being the outflow of one or more hot springs.
A few quick commands sent both drones to conduct a close scan of the site and everything within a mile of it, looking for ores and assessing the stability of the ground. If the latter came up clear, and the former were reasonably abundant, it would become my new base. I even had a potential name lined up, though I wouldn't use it until my checks were completed. A broad smile played across my too-wide lips. "The hearth of a new flame…"
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Nope-ing out this way. With her talking about a village I'm wondering who she plans to invite along.
