Down on the Disk (Graverobbing for Fun and Profit in an Original Science-Fantasy Universe)
- Thread starter CuttleFish2.0
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- original open voting
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Taking the body for preservation wins.
Last edited:
Other than studying the thing, can we set aside a portion of the basilisk to eat when we figure it out if its in anyway edible? Prolly a nonessential leg or so?
An alien reptile....
that's a predator from a biome we're unaccustomed to...
that may have several different diseases, parasites, and pestilences that we're unable to detect....
I bet if we eat it we get powers. Everything gives you powers if it's weird enough and you eat it.
Life magic my good duck! With the right skills, we can out alien the alien, parasite sucks on us? They shall suck out poison instead!
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Theoretically you don't see any reason why not... though your skills in actual life-shaping are theoretical enough that you're not sure how well that would work out in practice. It largely depends on what you want to end up using it for; supposing the basilisk has any parts that are useful as 'reagents' of some description (which you suspect it should) those should be salvageable alongside getting meat for eating out of it, but if you want to use it as the base for anything more... uh, creative it would need to be more or less whole you think. At least with how currently skilled you are.
Remember, like Natya you have what amounts to a good theoretical basing for your magical discipline but not much of a practical one. Golac held a rather dim view of magic in general and an especially unfriendly one towards things that mucked about with flesh and blood and bones and such.
Day 32.3/33 - Before the rot sets in
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Winner: Taking the corpse for preservation.
Day 32.3/33 - Before the rot sets in
Transporting your 'spoils' is easier said than done in the end though. Back on Golac, at least in the canyonlands around Pravj, raroh hawks like Nosta were the largest animals one was likely to encounter.
Grown fat off the back of its ability to paralyze its prey with but a look the basilisk out masses any one of you and is at least half again as long as Opal-Nine is tall. You actually think it's probably close to 22 meters long from snout to tip now that it isn't moving about so much and threatening to bite down on you like a tasty morsel. Even with just a cursory visual investigation your mind whirls with possibilities.
All that muscle and sinew and solid bond, ready to dance to your magic. If you can preserve it. Which requires getting back to the Prefab.
Between you and Natya you can move it by lifting one end and laboriously dragging it. Doing so the two of you can manage shifting it about two hundred meters before needing to a quick rest, nearly three hundred once you think to shoulder the burden from below, at a pace that will see you back home before night has fully set. Opal-Nine of course could speed that up, but none of you are feeling like leaving yourself totally exposed to another surprise and so you all settle for the slower option. You have no illusions about the idea of yourself or Natya providing scouting for your part.
It is a long, sweaty, uncomfortable journey. Made no more pleasant by the natural consequences of death, not decomposition. That will take hours and days to set in and is what you are hoping to prevent.
No. You face a more… mechanical process.
Put plainly, the thing shits and pisses itself after only a few minutes of being dragged along.
That the dead release their bowels on death is no secret to you, or even Natya, much less Opal-Nine. But you'd thought the corpse had already gone through that in the moments after its death, certainly it had seemed too.
Unfortunately you figure out afterward that by lifting and maneuvering it about you either dislodged or cleared a path for whatever was further up the digestive tract of the creature. With a guff of unpleasant air it releases a liquid gush of half processed food.
None, thankfully, ends up directly on any of you. Still the smell ends up persisting for more than an hour.
Even after it has dissipated you are left with the, only more tolerable by lack of pungency, natural odors of the basilisk. It's mouth in particular gives off a strong stink that somehow mixes burning hair, mildew, and hot tires.
It is a trial to be sure.
Finally, finally, finally you make it back to your home as the last rays of the sun are just beginning to set below the horizon.
While that means the end of the trial for Natya and Opal-Nine, you are not so lucky. You have no one to blame but yourself of course.
After helping you drag the body into the storage shed your two companions beat a hasty retreat, leaving you to stare at the stinking mass of scales and flesh. Much of the smell has dissipated over the hours, especially as you are no longer standing right next to it. Part of you is tempted to leave it for the next day, surely a single night will not do too much damage to the flesh of the creature. But you know that that is wishful thinking.
You won't be able to do much anyways, but every bit you can do will make things going forward much easier.
With a sigh and a shake you get down to business.
Your first enemy? Bacteria.
Even just sensing all the myriad bacteria present on and inside the corpse is a struggle. Most of your practice before now has focused on the life energies of things much larger; plants, animals, people. You've done a little bit of experimenting trying to see if you could make washing your hands a simple snap of your fingers but you were never entirely sure how successful you were. Especially as you had to be careful after the first time ended with your hands breaking out in a number of small, uncomfortable rashes over the next few days.
Apparently not everything living on you that wasn't strictly you was bad.
This time you don't have to worry about that.
Still, feeling the minute flickers and sparks of life-energy of bacteria on your own skin is one thing. Sensing it in the still cooling corpse of the basilisk is something else.
It takes almost an hour of intense concentration. And even then you spent another thirty minutes sitting there, poking and prodding at the various clusters, scattered veins, and specks just for you to be relatively sure you've found everything.
Actually getting rid of it all is another question entirely. When you made your attempts on the bacteria of your hands you used fairly brute force methods which left you momentarily out of breath. Repeating that for the entirety of a body which outmasses you at least two times sounds like a recipe for ending up passing out with the job half finished.
So you set about investigating other methods. You know they exist.
What few texts you have at least made that clear, if only by allusion and inference on your part; after all if you can kill a person using certain techniques (frustratingly only referred to by poeticism) you should certainly be able to kill bacteria.
Having little in the way of specifics for you instead turn to familiar grounds, that is the more mundane ways of killing bacteria.
Soap and detergent. Heat. Alcohol.
All three worked by denaturing the proteins of bacterial cells. Breaking many of the weaker bonds between atoms within proteins. No individual cell could survive significant denaturation.
But how did you accomplish it?
Generating the heat necessary across the entirety of the basilisk's corpse would essentially cook it and you had no way of introducing sufficient quantities of either alcohol or soap to all the surfaces of the body you needed too.
If you could somehow make them produce the stuff themselves and annihilate each other in a vast bacterial fight to the death, a microscopic gladiatorial arena where the winner won only death at your hand, that would be magnificently elegant. You had no idea how to even begin going about that sort of thing. And the consequences for doing it wrong were… well you didn't fancy being the first victim of your own personal plague.
No, until you had a better grasp of how to tinker with the functions of a living thing that was not a road you wanted to test.
Which leaves you only the unfortunate choice of doing things the exhausting way, hoping that the years since those first experiments had seen your ability grow enough not to leave the job half finished.
You begin slowly, methodically, killing the bacteria from a tiny patch of skin on the nearest clawed limb. Coincidentally the one you'd broken.
Describing what you do is difficult, even to yourself. It's a bit like putting something in a hydraulic press and just ramping up the pressure until the thing cracks, except the thing you're trying to crush is life itself and you have to provide all the power personally. Also you had to do it a hundred times every second and the two ends of the metaphorical press are just more life.
Slowly, centimeter by centimeter you cleans patch after patch of skin. Thankfully things are easier, by a great deal, and you actually have the whole of the basilisk cleaned off in a little over twenty minutes. It's outside at least.
Compared to the vast world of life inside the body though it's less than an eighth of the whole thing.
And as the concentration of bacteria rises you find it more and more tiring. The accumulated life-energy seems to resist the pressure, forcing you to exert every more in order to get the same effects.
Less than half an hour later you are breathing hard and starting to feel a faint lightness to your gut that tells you you can't go on like this. Sighing you pause and stare at the corpse in front of you with a renewed resentment for it that has nothing to do with it trying to kill you just hours earlier. If only you could just suck up the life-energy out of the—
Hold on, why can't you?
Obviously life-energy isn't exactly like electrical charge, but it isn't entirely dissimilar. Certain things attract it and repel it, there is a certain 'path of least resistance' for it as well.
You just have to find a way to tap into that.
For the next two hours you painstakingly push and pull tiny globs of life-energy into different configurations, trying to induce the effect you want. It is at once immensely frustrating and rewarding. This is the first time you've really been able to experiment with life-shaping in a way that wasn't immediately dangerous either because of the immediate effects or if someone found out. You learn a lot.
Most of it probably nothing you couldn't have picked up from a proper text in moments or a teacher from a few words, but it is still immensely satisfying to finally (FINALLY! HAHA!) be making progress on your own path. Natya has her magic spells and you'll soon have something to match it. In time no secret will remain hidden from the two of you.
The method that you finally stumble on involves creating a sort of semi-fractal spiral in three dimensions so that a sort of cone of 'sloping' strands of life-energy are oriented towards the body of the basilisk with the wide 'mouth' open. Combining the vacuum of life-energy at the center of the cone with the concentrating 'flowing' portions of the 'sloping' strands creates a pull that slowly pulls in the life-energy of the nearby bacteria. When you say slowly you mean it too. It takes several seconds for it to pull the life-energy completely out of even isolated pockets of microscopic life and even longer when there's any concentration.
But by the end you are feeling recovered from your earlier exhaustion and can combine the two methods.
Just a little over five hours after you returned home you manage to stumble your way into the Prefab. Inside both Opal-Nine and Natya have long since gone to sleep. After quickly cleaning yourself and shoving your face full of food you gladly join them.
The next three days are no less busy.
While your companions both head out to complete the survey, with Nosta, you hole yourself up in the storage shed and get down to work figuring out how to really preserve the body. Killing the bacteria is only the first step. Though in many ways also the most important. Especially as your method does nothing to prevent new bacteria from moving it and starting the process, requiring you to reapply it fairly consistently. And even then some breakdown will occur in between applications.
It's frustrating. But also something you have some notion of how to solve.
By your second day of work you've worked out how to not have the Life Siphon — as you've taken to calling your spell — require your constant upkeep. Once applied it can self-sustain for six hours. You're fairly sure you can extend that with a little more refining of the spell structure, maybe up to a whole day.
The other part of your solution is simplers. At least in theory.
What you need to do is get part of the basilisk to act like it's not dead, specifically the part of it that fights off infection and other things like that. Immune systems are delicate in some ways, but also very robust and decentralized in others, they don't need brain activity to function and they work off of a scattered network of nodes to produce their constituent components. Granted to get the full effect you'll need the heart to pump at least slowly so that the immune cells will circulate.
To get all that you only need to feed those specific parts a little bit of life-energy to get them to do their jobs. What ends up taking the most time is figuring out how to get the life-energy to stick around to one place, after that it's just gathering the necessary life-energy and putting it in place. There's no particular shape or artistry to this, so it doesn't get a name.
But finally you have the body preserved, for a few months at least, until you can either buy or figure out a better longer term solution for preservation. Or just figure out what you want to do with the body.
Natya and Opal-Nine's report of the rest of their survey includes no more exciting encounters. You have hope that the basilisk was the only specimen of any significant danger in your immediate vicinity. They did find another deposit of iron bearing sands a little further down the same river, indicating there's probably a fairly significant deposit of iron in the hills upstream or was at one point it might have already all been deposited in similar sand banks across the stream's meandering path across the eons. Along with that they found another potential stone quarrying site.
It seems your choice in home has at least some material wealth to speak of, though actually exploiting them would require a great deal more resources than you currently have; extracting, transporting, and refining the materials would be all but impossible at the moment.
What next?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
-[] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way. You need better materials and tools. And for those you need money.
[] Explore deeper into the wilderness.
- [] Which direction? (North, East, Southwest, etc.)
[] Work on your Life-Shaping
- [] Try growing trees into specific shapes.
- [] Try making grass for carpeting
- [] Investigate the properties of the basilisk
- [] Write-in: Subject to approval.
[] Go into 'town' Not yet. You'll need money to buy things.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
-[] Sword Mausoleum Must first Explore your surroundings
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
Day 32.3/33 - Before the rot sets in
Transporting your 'spoils' is easier said than done in the end though. Back on Golac, at least in the canyonlands around Pravj, raroh hawks like Nosta were the largest animals one was likely to encounter.
Grown fat off the back of its ability to paralyze its prey with but a look the basilisk out masses any one of you and is at least half again as long as Opal-Nine is tall. You actually think it's probably close to 22 meters long from snout to tip now that it isn't moving about so much and threatening to bite down on you like a tasty morsel. Even with just a cursory visual investigation your mind whirls with possibilities.
All that muscle and sinew and solid bond, ready to dance to your magic. If you can preserve it. Which requires getting back to the Prefab.
Between you and Natya you can move it by lifting one end and laboriously dragging it. Doing so the two of you can manage shifting it about two hundred meters before needing to a quick rest, nearly three hundred once you think to shoulder the burden from below, at a pace that will see you back home before night has fully set. Opal-Nine of course could speed that up, but none of you are feeling like leaving yourself totally exposed to another surprise and so you all settle for the slower option. You have no illusions about the idea of yourself or Natya providing scouting for your part.
It is a long, sweaty, uncomfortable journey. Made no more pleasant by the natural consequences of death, not decomposition. That will take hours and days to set in and is what you are hoping to prevent.
No. You face a more… mechanical process.
Put plainly, the thing shits and pisses itself after only a few minutes of being dragged along.
That the dead release their bowels on death is no secret to you, or even Natya, much less Opal-Nine. But you'd thought the corpse had already gone through that in the moments after its death, certainly it had seemed too.
Unfortunately you figure out afterward that by lifting and maneuvering it about you either dislodged or cleared a path for whatever was further up the digestive tract of the creature. With a guff of unpleasant air it releases a liquid gush of half processed food.
None, thankfully, ends up directly on any of you. Still the smell ends up persisting for more than an hour.
Even after it has dissipated you are left with the, only more tolerable by lack of pungency, natural odors of the basilisk. It's mouth in particular gives off a strong stink that somehow mixes burning hair, mildew, and hot tires.
It is a trial to be sure.
Finally, finally, finally you make it back to your home as the last rays of the sun are just beginning to set below the horizon.
While that means the end of the trial for Natya and Opal-Nine, you are not so lucky. You have no one to blame but yourself of course.
After helping you drag the body into the storage shed your two companions beat a hasty retreat, leaving you to stare at the stinking mass of scales and flesh. Much of the smell has dissipated over the hours, especially as you are no longer standing right next to it. Part of you is tempted to leave it for the next day, surely a single night will not do too much damage to the flesh of the creature. But you know that that is wishful thinking.
You won't be able to do much anyways, but every bit you can do will make things going forward much easier.
With a sigh and a shake you get down to business.
Your first enemy? Bacteria.
Even just sensing all the myriad bacteria present on and inside the corpse is a struggle. Most of your practice before now has focused on the life energies of things much larger; plants, animals, people. You've done a little bit of experimenting trying to see if you could make washing your hands a simple snap of your fingers but you were never entirely sure how successful you were. Especially as you had to be careful after the first time ended with your hands breaking out in a number of small, uncomfortable rashes over the next few days.
Apparently not everything living on you that wasn't strictly you was bad.
This time you don't have to worry about that.
Still, feeling the minute flickers and sparks of life-energy of bacteria on your own skin is one thing. Sensing it in the still cooling corpse of the basilisk is something else.
It takes almost an hour of intense concentration. And even then you spent another thirty minutes sitting there, poking and prodding at the various clusters, scattered veins, and specks just for you to be relatively sure you've found everything.
Actually getting rid of it all is another question entirely. When you made your attempts on the bacteria of your hands you used fairly brute force methods which left you momentarily out of breath. Repeating that for the entirety of a body which outmasses you at least two times sounds like a recipe for ending up passing out with the job half finished.
So you set about investigating other methods. You know they exist.
What few texts you have at least made that clear, if only by allusion and inference on your part; after all if you can kill a person using certain techniques (frustratingly only referred to by poeticism) you should certainly be able to kill bacteria.
Having little in the way of specifics for you instead turn to familiar grounds, that is the more mundane ways of killing bacteria.
Soap and detergent. Heat. Alcohol.
All three worked by denaturing the proteins of bacterial cells. Breaking many of the weaker bonds between atoms within proteins. No individual cell could survive significant denaturation.
But how did you accomplish it?
Generating the heat necessary across the entirety of the basilisk's corpse would essentially cook it and you had no way of introducing sufficient quantities of either alcohol or soap to all the surfaces of the body you needed too.
If you could somehow make them produce the stuff themselves and annihilate each other in a vast bacterial fight to the death, a microscopic gladiatorial arena where the winner won only death at your hand, that would be magnificently elegant. You had no idea how to even begin going about that sort of thing. And the consequences for doing it wrong were… well you didn't fancy being the first victim of your own personal plague.
No, until you had a better grasp of how to tinker with the functions of a living thing that was not a road you wanted to test.
Which leaves you only the unfortunate choice of doing things the exhausting way, hoping that the years since those first experiments had seen your ability grow enough not to leave the job half finished.
You begin slowly, methodically, killing the bacteria from a tiny patch of skin on the nearest clawed limb. Coincidentally the one you'd broken.
Describing what you do is difficult, even to yourself. It's a bit like putting something in a hydraulic press and just ramping up the pressure until the thing cracks, except the thing you're trying to crush is life itself and you have to provide all the power personally. Also you had to do it a hundred times every second and the two ends of the metaphorical press are just more life.
Slowly, centimeter by centimeter you cleans patch after patch of skin. Thankfully things are easier, by a great deal, and you actually have the whole of the basilisk cleaned off in a little over twenty minutes. It's outside at least.
Compared to the vast world of life inside the body though it's less than an eighth of the whole thing.
And as the concentration of bacteria rises you find it more and more tiring. The accumulated life-energy seems to resist the pressure, forcing you to exert every more in order to get the same effects.
Less than half an hour later you are breathing hard and starting to feel a faint lightness to your gut that tells you you can't go on like this. Sighing you pause and stare at the corpse in front of you with a renewed resentment for it that has nothing to do with it trying to kill you just hours earlier. If only you could just suck up the life-energy out of the—
Hold on, why can't you?
Obviously life-energy isn't exactly like electrical charge, but it isn't entirely dissimilar. Certain things attract it and repel it, there is a certain 'path of least resistance' for it as well.
You just have to find a way to tap into that.
For the next two hours you painstakingly push and pull tiny globs of life-energy into different configurations, trying to induce the effect you want. It is at once immensely frustrating and rewarding. This is the first time you've really been able to experiment with life-shaping in a way that wasn't immediately dangerous either because of the immediate effects or if someone found out. You learn a lot.
Most of it probably nothing you couldn't have picked up from a proper text in moments or a teacher from a few words, but it is still immensely satisfying to finally (FINALLY! HAHA!) be making progress on your own path. Natya has her magic spells and you'll soon have something to match it. In time no secret will remain hidden from the two of you.
The method that you finally stumble on involves creating a sort of semi-fractal spiral in three dimensions so that a sort of cone of 'sloping' strands of life-energy are oriented towards the body of the basilisk with the wide 'mouth' open. Combining the vacuum of life-energy at the center of the cone with the concentrating 'flowing' portions of the 'sloping' strands creates a pull that slowly pulls in the life-energy of the nearby bacteria. When you say slowly you mean it too. It takes several seconds for it to pull the life-energy completely out of even isolated pockets of microscopic life and even longer when there's any concentration.
But by the end you are feeling recovered from your earlier exhaustion and can combine the two methods.
Just a little over five hours after you returned home you manage to stumble your way into the Prefab. Inside both Opal-Nine and Natya have long since gone to sleep. After quickly cleaning yourself and shoving your face full of food you gladly join them.
The next three days are no less busy.
While your companions both head out to complete the survey, with Nosta, you hole yourself up in the storage shed and get down to work figuring out how to really preserve the body. Killing the bacteria is only the first step. Though in many ways also the most important. Especially as your method does nothing to prevent new bacteria from moving it and starting the process, requiring you to reapply it fairly consistently. And even then some breakdown will occur in between applications.
It's frustrating. But also something you have some notion of how to solve.
By your second day of work you've worked out how to not have the Life Siphon — as you've taken to calling your spell — require your constant upkeep. Once applied it can self-sustain for six hours. You're fairly sure you can extend that with a little more refining of the spell structure, maybe up to a whole day.
The other part of your solution is simplers. At least in theory.
What you need to do is get part of the basilisk to act like it's not dead, specifically the part of it that fights off infection and other things like that. Immune systems are delicate in some ways, but also very robust and decentralized in others, they don't need brain activity to function and they work off of a scattered network of nodes to produce their constituent components. Granted to get the full effect you'll need the heart to pump at least slowly so that the immune cells will circulate.
To get all that you only need to feed those specific parts a little bit of life-energy to get them to do their jobs. What ends up taking the most time is figuring out how to get the life-energy to stick around to one place, after that it's just gathering the necessary life-energy and putting it in place. There's no particular shape or artistry to this, so it doesn't get a name.
But finally you have the body preserved, for a few months at least, until you can either buy or figure out a better longer term solution for preservation. Or just figure out what you want to do with the body.
Natya and Opal-Nine's report of the rest of their survey includes no more exciting encounters. You have hope that the basilisk was the only specimen of any significant danger in your immediate vicinity. They did find another deposit of iron bearing sands a little further down the same river, indicating there's probably a fairly significant deposit of iron in the hills upstream or was at one point it might have already all been deposited in similar sand banks across the stream's meandering path across the eons. Along with that they found another potential stone quarrying site.
It seems your choice in home has at least some material wealth to speak of, though actually exploiting them would require a great deal more resources than you currently have; extracting, transporting, and refining the materials would be all but impossible at the moment.
What next?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
-
[] Explore deeper into the wilderness.
- [] Which direction? (North, East, Southwest, etc.)
[] Work on your Life-Shaping
- [] Try growing trees into specific shapes.
- [] Try making grass for carpeting
- [] Investigate the properties of the basilisk
- [] Write-in: Subject to approval.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
-
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [X] Crashed Spaceship
- [X] Crashed Spaceship
If we got a pretty good refiner, we might get some titanium out of the sands. In the meantime, I'd rather search by following along the river. Civilizations tend to rise on the water's edge and so if one wants to find the Sword Mausoleum, its bound to be near a source of water with a propensity for ores… because where do you get more swords if not from mining?
[X] Explore deeper into the wilderness.
- [X] The upstream hills from this:
Solarstream
It's all in the cards
- Location
- Zombie World
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [X] Crashed Spaceship
- [X] Crashed Spaceship
This is pretty neat! How damaging and fast can our MC draw on a subject? Can we put the rejuvenating end of the spell other than yourself?
If we can mange to harness Natya's lightning spell and a more refined version of this spell, we might as well Frankenstein the Basilisk into our service! Is this possible though?
Well well well, it seems there was no reason to worry at all.
[X] Explore deeper into the wilderness.
- [X] The upstream hills from this:
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
It takes seconds to work on even bacteria in very close proximity, at the moment its use outside of body preservation and medicine would be extremely limited. You'll need more time and practice to refine it into anything more... threatening and even then it would remain more of a nuisance rather than anything else. Life-shaping in general isn't well suited to direct high damage attacks, that's why it's 'Life-shaping.'
As for the other, with some more time and practice you won't need to use a a lightning spell; you're reading has been very clear on that front. Living horrors are the bread and butter of life-shaping. Or at least it's more unsavory side, most practitioners actually probably use it for like saving lives and super resilient crops.
This would be quite powerful for a frontline if we can harness this spell further.
The tank's bleeding? Take a load off from the enemy and patch up your buddy while he beats up the offender's drained meat.
A long ass marathon chase from cannibals? Drain those fools while on the run! See who's laughing at getting eaten now, when it's the bastards' turn on the life shaping table!
When we get the chance of enemy encounters, I move to practice siphoning the enemies when they're occupied by Opal, see if we can tweak the spell even further.
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Ooh, looks like you'll be setting on your very first expedition!
Day 36 - Planning
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Winner: Expedition to Crashed Spaceship
Day 36 - Planning
For nearly a month you've worked to prepare the foundation for your time on the Disk; shoring up your home and establishing the basic facilities you'll need to proceed once you have something to work on and the supplies to really tinker with. Part of you has itched the entire time to just throw caution to the wind and strike out into the deep wilds. Especially with the mausoleum so close.
You can practically taste the secrets.
But you've resisted so far, knowing that you would only have to come back and do the work anyway in order to get started. This way once you've picked up something you won't have to deal with the frustration of it languishing untouched while you do.
Now that it's finally time to get started. And you know just what to get started with.
From all the rumors and talk you heard back up on Zerzura the crash site should be a huge thing; exact classification of the old shipwreck varied from story to story — sometimes a glittering battleship or a massive troop transport and other times some rich prince's pleasure yacht — but they all agreed it was big. Large enough for a village or two to huddle in its shadow and for the intervening centuries (or millenia as the case may be) to not have seen it swallowed by the forest. Anything that size is sure to contain at least a few treasures for you to study or at least sell for a solid profit even given the long years since it crashed.
The main problem for your purposes is its isolation.
People live in its vicinity, Opal-Nine tells you, but only in scattered lonely villages far flung from one another where the inhabitants won't have seen an outside but maybe once a decade. He insists you should be able to count on them to offer shelter and food in an emergency, but you aren't so sure yourself. In their position you probably wouldn't be quick to take in any strangers.
Your encounter with the basilisk has you a bit worried about what else might be waiting in the deep wild. Demarch is one of the tamer regions of the Disk, and the areas around Thyrus particularly so.
Still you won't back down now.
Stumbling on the mausoleum meant to be somewhere in your relative backyard would have been convenient but without either better leads or some other method of quickly narrowing your search area the chances of that are low. Though you have months yet before your supplies even begin to run out and you need to resort to hunting and foraging, you aren't going to turn complacent. Making it on the Disk will need boldness. Thus your choice.
Announcing your plans is somewhat anticlimactic. Natya and Opal-Nine stare at you from across the dining room table when you first utter the words.
Neither reacts, either negatively or positively for a good long second.
"Finally," your friend says with grin, "I was wondering if you'd lost your nerve."
You raise your eyebrows in surprise. Between the two of you natya is usually the one to favor the cautious, patient approach where you prefer to charge ahead once you've got an idea.
Then again, she did follow you across the galaxy.
Answering her grin with your own, you glance towards your other companion. Opal-Nine regards you both long and you find yourself trying to read something from the multifaceted reflection of yourself in his eyes. Still not your strong suit.
"One of us will need to stay here. For security."
You frown. Didn't you just finish surveying your surroundings?
"We just finished exploring the area."
"Mmm," he does that affected hum again, "That was simply to get a feel for the land some, it will be weeks and months yet before we can be sure of things. If some beast was drowsing, or spending time in the far reaches of its range, or it simply wasn't the right season."
That… makes some sense you guess. But it does prevent a bit of a conundrum. Namely who will actually be going with you; Opal-Nine obviously has more experience out in the wilds even if he is unfamiliar with the region, while Natya has more knowledge directly applicable to what you might discover at the crash site. You and Natya together should be able to manage the more mundane aspects of travel without issue but if anything strange occurs you will be lacking his experience.
At the same time, taking him along with you would mean leaving Natya back here all alone. You know there's no right choice, exactly, just benefits and drawbacks, but you still feel compelled to consider the question thoroughly.
Who do you take? Nosta will accompany you either way.
[] [COMPANION] Natya
[] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
And that's not the only choice you have to make either, though it's the only one of your choices which you can't really go back on. The other is simply a matter of logistics. You have a pair of decades old maps of the region to work from to choose your route, hastily annotated in your and natya's hand from what you could gather from the crew of the lighter that brought you down to the Disk's surface.
Between you and the area of the crash site — somewhere deep in a system of valleys spreading between a cluster of low mountains — is mostly fairly flat terrain. That said, the straight path is heavily wooded and strewn with rivers and such that you would have to ford. On the other hand if you head about 70 kilometers east of your location, you should come to the remains of an old road which eventually, some 100 more kilometers north, connects with another slightly more modern one. It would mean travelling several days out of your way but it would also cut maybe half a week off of the twenty or so days you expect to spend travelling otherwise.
More maybe if you run into a caravan and use the last of your diminishing coinage to pay for passage.
Of course that does mean interacting with people. You don't hate people so much that that alone would eliminate it as an option, though you have been enjoying time away from the humdrum of so-called 'civilization' (then again this is the Disk, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad), but more troublesome in your estimation is that it would reveal you to other concerns. After all you don't imagine anyone will be wondering long why someone like you is travelling.
You've never been good about remaining low-key. That was why you have to keep yourself to only the most basic, tentative investigations with Life-shaping back on Golac.
There's the chance, if you choose the faster, more public route you could run into bandits or the like.
How do you intend to travel? You will have opportunities to shift your plans early on.
[] [TRAVEL] Choose the straight path through difficult terrain.
[] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
It takes hours of back and forth between the three of you before both questions are resolved. You each take turns offering arguments for and against each option. Darkness has long since settled by the time you do come to a conclusion.
Over the next three days you split your time between helping Opal-Nine and Natya gather and organize the necessary supplies for the journey and working on refining your Life-Siphon so that the body will not decay in your absence. Though you are eager to get going, you don't want to rush either task. Unfortunately by the time everything is ready and assembled you've only managed to stretch the spell otu to three weeks. Half the minimum trip time if all you do is take a look and head back.
Even to get that you have to modify the spell so that it was much, much weaker over all. You'll probably see some decay no matter what.
"Could bring it along," Natya says as you express your frustration.
You take a look at the already loaded sled.
It would take more than a little rearranging and leave the sled a little awkward to maneuver, but you do think you could. And if you did it would mean you could continue experimenting, maybe even manage to return it to life.
Doing so would leave you a bit distracted of course.
[] [BODY] Take it.
[] [BODY] Leave it.
Day 36 - Planning
For nearly a month you've worked to prepare the foundation for your time on the Disk; shoring up your home and establishing the basic facilities you'll need to proceed once you have something to work on and the supplies to really tinker with. Part of you has itched the entire time to just throw caution to the wind and strike out into the deep wilds. Especially with the mausoleum so close.
You can practically taste the secrets.
But you've resisted so far, knowing that you would only have to come back and do the work anyway in order to get started. This way once you've picked up something you won't have to deal with the frustration of it languishing untouched while you do.
Now that it's finally time to get started. And you know just what to get started with.
From all the rumors and talk you heard back up on Zerzura the crash site should be a huge thing; exact classification of the old shipwreck varied from story to story — sometimes a glittering battleship or a massive troop transport and other times some rich prince's pleasure yacht — but they all agreed it was big. Large enough for a village or two to huddle in its shadow and for the intervening centuries (or millenia as the case may be) to not have seen it swallowed by the forest. Anything that size is sure to contain at least a few treasures for you to study or at least sell for a solid profit even given the long years since it crashed.
The main problem for your purposes is its isolation.
People live in its vicinity, Opal-Nine tells you, but only in scattered lonely villages far flung from one another where the inhabitants won't have seen an outside but maybe once a decade. He insists you should be able to count on them to offer shelter and food in an emergency, but you aren't so sure yourself. In their position you probably wouldn't be quick to take in any strangers.
Your encounter with the basilisk has you a bit worried about what else might be waiting in the deep wild. Demarch is one of the tamer regions of the Disk, and the areas around Thyrus particularly so.
Still you won't back down now.
Stumbling on the mausoleum meant to be somewhere in your relative backyard would have been convenient but without either better leads or some other method of quickly narrowing your search area the chances of that are low. Though you have months yet before your supplies even begin to run out and you need to resort to hunting and foraging, you aren't going to turn complacent. Making it on the Disk will need boldness. Thus your choice.
Announcing your plans is somewhat anticlimactic. Natya and Opal-Nine stare at you from across the dining room table when you first utter the words.
Neither reacts, either negatively or positively for a good long second.
"Finally," your friend says with grin, "I was wondering if you'd lost your nerve."
You raise your eyebrows in surprise. Between the two of you natya is usually the one to favor the cautious, patient approach where you prefer to charge ahead once you've got an idea.
Then again, she did follow you across the galaxy.
Answering her grin with your own, you glance towards your other companion. Opal-Nine regards you both long and you find yourself trying to read something from the multifaceted reflection of yourself in his eyes. Still not your strong suit.
"One of us will need to stay here. For security."
You frown. Didn't you just finish surveying your surroundings?
"We just finished exploring the area."
"Mmm," he does that affected hum again, "That was simply to get a feel for the land some, it will be weeks and months yet before we can be sure of things. If some beast was drowsing, or spending time in the far reaches of its range, or it simply wasn't the right season."
That… makes some sense you guess. But it does prevent a bit of a conundrum. Namely who will actually be going with you; Opal-Nine obviously has more experience out in the wilds even if he is unfamiliar with the region, while Natya has more knowledge directly applicable to what you might discover at the crash site. You and Natya together should be able to manage the more mundane aspects of travel without issue but if anything strange occurs you will be lacking his experience.
At the same time, taking him along with you would mean leaving Natya back here all alone. You know there's no right choice, exactly, just benefits and drawbacks, but you still feel compelled to consider the question thoroughly.
Who do you take? Nosta will accompany you either way.
[] [COMPANION] Natya
[] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
And that's not the only choice you have to make either, though it's the only one of your choices which you can't really go back on. The other is simply a matter of logistics. You have a pair of decades old maps of the region to work from to choose your route, hastily annotated in your and natya's hand from what you could gather from the crew of the lighter that brought you down to the Disk's surface.
Between you and the area of the crash site — somewhere deep in a system of valleys spreading between a cluster of low mountains — is mostly fairly flat terrain. That said, the straight path is heavily wooded and strewn with rivers and such that you would have to ford. On the other hand if you head about 70 kilometers east of your location, you should come to the remains of an old road which eventually, some 100 more kilometers north, connects with another slightly more modern one. It would mean travelling several days out of your way but it would also cut maybe half a week off of the twenty or so days you expect to spend travelling otherwise.
More maybe if you run into a caravan and use the last of your diminishing coinage to pay for passage.
Of course that does mean interacting with people. You don't hate people so much that that alone would eliminate it as an option, though you have been enjoying time away from the humdrum of so-called 'civilization' (then again this is the Disk, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad), but more troublesome in your estimation is that it would reveal you to other concerns. After all you don't imagine anyone will be wondering long why someone like you is travelling.
You've never been good about remaining low-key. That was why you have to keep yourself to only the most basic, tentative investigations with Life-shaping back on Golac.
There's the chance, if you choose the faster, more public route you could run into bandits or the like.
How do you intend to travel? You will have opportunities to shift your plans early on.
[] [TRAVEL] Choose the straight path through difficult terrain.
[] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
It takes hours of back and forth between the three of you before both questions are resolved. You each take turns offering arguments for and against each option. Darkness has long since settled by the time you do come to a conclusion.
Over the next three days you split your time between helping Opal-Nine and Natya gather and organize the necessary supplies for the journey and working on refining your Life-Siphon so that the body will not decay in your absence. Though you are eager to get going, you don't want to rush either task. Unfortunately by the time everything is ready and assembled you've only managed to stretch the spell otu to three weeks. Half the minimum trip time if all you do is take a look and head back.
Even to get that you have to modify the spell so that it was much, much weaker over all. You'll probably see some decay no matter what.
"Could bring it along," Natya says as you express your frustration.
You take a look at the already loaded sled.
It would take more than a little rearranging and leave the sled a little awkward to maneuver, but you do think you could. And if you did it would mean you could continue experimenting, maybe even manage to return it to life.
Doing so would leave you a bit distracted of course.
[] [BODY] Take it.
[] [BODY] Leave it.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
[X] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
Practice on the road! Get that Life-Siphon up to become an offensive leech dps boi! If we can revive the basilisk, might as well get it under our control first before doing so. Hmm having a basilisk mount would be pretty rad if I might say so meself.
Natya in the meantime must grind that lightning spell for unlimited powah levels when we get back.
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
Practice on the road! Get that Life-Siphon up to become an offensive leech dps boi! If we can revive the basilisk, might as well get it under our control first before doing so. Hmm having a basilisk mount would be pretty rad if I might say so meself.
Natya in the meantime must grind that lightning spell for unlimited powah levels when we get back.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
"outsider"
Missing capitalisation.
[x] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
[x] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[x] [BODY] Take it.
Maybe we can sell it off if we run into a caravan.
[X] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
Ah, perfect. Nothing can go wrong from this, I'm certain.
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
Ah, perfect. Nothing can go wrong from this, I'm certain.
[X] [COMPANION] Opal-Nine
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
[X] [TRAVEL] Choose the roads, to get there a bit faster.
[X] [BODY] Take it.
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
A clear win for taking Opal-Nine, the roads, and the body.