Demesne Weekly Digest 2 (#6-#8) (Patreon)

Food and Other Resources to Manage

The next day dawned and nobody had died.

Also, sleeping on a pile of sand is still sleeping on rock, only with an infinite amount of sharp points.

"I need a bed," Lori muttered as she washed herself off. A rock had been raised around the cave opening, with space for air to pass around its edges so she could have a quick bath. She'd briefly debated using the recess the Dungeon's core floated above as a tub, and the only thing that had stopped her was that it was too shallow. Obviously, she could dig it up, but it was too early for that kind of work, her door rock notwithstanding.

Lori got dressed, pulling on her hardwearing cotton trousers and shirt before pulling on her rain coat and putting her hat on. Socks had been exchanged. Ah, dry socks! The best of luxuries!

She could already tell it was raining again. Now that they didn't need its protection any longer, the constant cold water falling from the sky was now a problem. Still, better rain than a dragon…

As she did every morning after she'd made herself presentable, the first thing she did was make sure her two corpses were still properly on ice.

Rian found her as she was burying them again, the ice restored to last for another day and a half.

"That is still immensely disturbing, and I was there when those two died," he commented, adjusting his leather cloak.

"I said I'd bury them, didn't I?" Lori said, walking over the loose mud to tamp it down. "They're buried."

"It still seems immensely disrespectful," Rian said. "At least make a room for them."

"I'll consider it," Lori said. "So, how was the shelter?"

"A bit tight, although given how cold it was, that wasn't a bad thing," Rian said. "We were able to fit in more than half the people into it. The rest of us slept around the kitchen and kept a fire going. The shelter could use another fireplace, it's too big for just one to heat it properly. A second shelter would be even better."

Lori nodded. "We'll need more wood, then. If people can get some cut, I can probably get it dried enough to burn."

They both glanced up at the lightly falling rain. In the distance, a thick wall of gray said it was going to come down harder soon.

"Don't supposed you can deal with that?" Rian said hopefully.

"Too high up. Our demesne isn't wide enough to reach those clouds," Lori said.

"Can't you… make a wall of wind or something?" Rian said.

"They don't maintain very well," Lori said. "I've heard some demesnes can do it, but this isn't one of them yet."

Rian sighed. "Well, dare to dream. I'll get the men started on cutting wood and as many people as possible looking for food now that we can roam around. Hopefully no one will find something that turns out to be poisonous."

"Hmm…" Lori said. "Sounds like you have a lot to do before you quit."

Rian paused. "Yeah… But I'm still quitting. I'll quit this afternoon."

"Well, make sure to talk to anyone with seeds first and find out what they need to start planting," Lori said. "And make sure no one threw away that beast skull, it'll make for a good shovel."

Rian paused. "I thought you didn't know how to Deadspeak yet?"

"Who's Deadspeaking? Bones are basically a kind of rock. You can Whisper those, and we'll have a shovel that's light but strong," Lori said. "No one might want to dig now, but I assume planting will involve a lot of moving dirt around."

"I'll ask the ones who were cooking yesterday," Rian said. "Speaking of which, we actually have breakfast this morning. We made a big pot of stew and kept it on the fire overnight."

Lori's stomach rumbled.

"Well, let's do that first of all then," she said.

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Breakfast was warm, soft, filling, meaty and officially the best breakfast she'd ever eaten.

"That's it," Lori declared as she finished eating. "I'm going out there and killing something again."

Rian, standing across from her with his own bowl– more tables would have to be made at some point– gave her a concerned look. "That sounds really dangerous. I think I speak for everyone when I say I'd rather not have our only wizard die in the middle of the wilderness and lose our demesne just because she wants some meat."

"I don't care," Lori said, scraping her wooden spoon, trying to get the last little bits still clinging to her bowl. "I want more meat inside me. Lots of nice, warm, juicy meat."

"There are some here who know how to hunt, you know," Rian said. "How about we ask them to do it instead?"

Lori pursed her lips. "Better idea," Lori said. "Have everyone write down their name and what they can do so I don’t have to ask you to keep finding out." She'd never really paid attention while they were traveling. She knew Rian because he was an annoying busybody, she knew his admirers Umu and Mikon because they sometimes appeared and argued around the annoying busybody, she knew the brat because she still hadn't managed to forget the name from yesterday, and she knew one of the doctors, Ganan, because she'd once come down with something and nearly dehydrated to death. That was the extent of the names she was familiar with. She wasn't some Mentalist who could remember everything that ever happened to her. Some things just weren't worth remembering.

"I feel I must point out we don't have that much paper," Rian said. "And most things we can use to write on are a little wet right now."

"Nonsense. Our shelter has lots of nice, clear stone walls and we have plenty of burnt wood," Lori said dismissively.

"Second point, we shouldn't assume everyone can write," Rian said. "I mean, you obviously can, since you went to school and everything, but not everyone got to do that."

"The doctors can write," Lori said. "And they'll be down there taking care of sick people anyway. What's a little writing on the walls?"

"That reminds me, they say they need more light down there," Rian said.

"Noted," Lori said. She started gathering some lightwisps to leave at the shelter. "Anything else I should know about?"

Rian paused thoughtfully. "What do you want us to do about any eggs we find?"

Lori gave him a confused looked. "Eggs?"

"Well, beasts might have left their eggs behind," Rian said. "We could eat them, but if they're far enough along we could hatch them, then raise the beasts ourselves. It's the pain and neural shock of the Iridescence leaving their bodies that hurts and kills beasts. Eggs at the right stage of development wouldn't have the nerves and organs to hurt."

Lori mentally filed away 'neural shock'. She had to wonder what sort of education Rian had gotten. "Give it a try. If it works, then it'll be good for us," she said. Domestication? Without Deadspeaking to keep the animal from dying? Well, it was worth a shot. Personally, she didn't think it would work. Beasts were vicious things.

As if to punctuate her thought, in the distance was the high, piercing roar of a beast.

"I should probably get started," Lori said. "Lots to build…"

Rian nodded. "I need to go talk to people," he said.

They went.

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It was a full morning for Lolilyuri. The beast skull was found (it had apparently not been brought back to be butchered since she'd decapitated the beast, but had remained where it had fallen next to the now-superfluous water break) and, after knocking off all the sharp, curving teeth, she was able to use earthwisps to flatten it enough to be mounted on a stick as a shovel. The upper part of the skull worked as one too, though she had to flatten it a bit more. She kept the teeth. They were reasonably sharp, maybe they could use them for a saw or something.

The shelter had lightwisps bound to it, with enough magic to last the day and a little bit into the night so people could get settle down. The children staying out of the way in the shelter cheered when she made the lights. Lori supposed they missed proper, civilized illumination.

She had an audience watching her, whispering and pointing as she made the second fireplace by reshaping several rocks she'd dragged long for the purpose. Instead of trying to knock a hole through the arcing roof, she figured it was safer to just run the shaft out through a window. That's what they were there for, after all.

Then she started building the second shelter. It was faster this time, since she'd already done it once the day before.

Lunch was a little remaining meat, wild vegetables, and roots, all cooked together into mush.

Then she went back to finishing the second shelter. This time it had two fireplaces right away.

When she went back to her cave with the core, she started in bemusement at the dead seel hanging outside the opening on a stick, the long, serpentine body with its thick, water-repellent hair just… hanging there, like a dead songbug her old petbeast had killed. It looked like it had been clubbed to death. That is, someone had held it by one end and clubbed it repeatedly into the ground to kill it.

She was about to throw it away in disgust, wondering who'd thought this was funny, when something tickled at her memory.

Gingerly, she turned it around, finding the guts had been scooped out. Not a prank then. Someone had cleaned the seel first.

"I accept your offering," she muttered.

A thought wrapped the seel in water, and another changed the state of that water into ice.

Well, at least she'd have some sort of meat for breakfast…

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Suspiciously Sunny Day

The days passed. As they did, the settlement developed and the number of buildings grew.

Wood was cut. The kitchen got real walls, and then the walls became raised stone, so the wood was used for a proper roof, and then the dimensions were expanded to be able to seat nearly everyone. Tables and chairs were made. A washing area was set up, and Lolilyuri raised a stone cistern to provide water for it, which she had to refill with river water every few days. One of the men with carpentry skills and tools was even able to make a decent spigot to attach to it.

It turned out that food was plentiful in the woods and the slopes on the other side of the raised cliff the dungeon had been dug in. At first, the foragers stripped every plant bare, until Rian ordered that the wild vegetables be, essentially, brought back alive so they could try to raise them on the not-bad argument that as plants native to the region, they were likely to grow better than their own crops.

Lori spent her time exercising her new power by clearing land. She and the ones cutting the wood for the settlement had a deal: they'd cut the wood into planks or pillars and whatever else they needed, and she wouldn't bring down the trees by turning all the water inside them into steam and making them explode. Apparently they didn't get a lot of usable wood when she did it that way. Steaming the wood to more quickly cure it wasn't nearly as must fun.

It was boring, but she had to settle for using fast, narrow streams of water to cut through the trees so the settlement could use them. Blowing up the stumps just wasn't the same.

Also, she learned that you apparently couldn't till soil by moving earthwisps, since that just made the soil move as a solid mass. Who knew? It turns out properly tilling soil required aerating it, and while there might be a way to use air- and earthwisps to get it done, all she'd managed to do was blow a lot of mud around.

Well, at least they had shovels to do it with.

They had more beast-skull shovels now, as they had managed to devise an ingenious system of hunting beasts. It went like this: someone stood on a tall stone pillar on the outskirts of the demesne, equipped with a signal pole and some spears, which were essentially just sharpened sticks. They'd bait any beast that came by– and beasts came by surprisingly frequently– and raise the pole to let people know they had a beast. While they'd try to keep the beast's attention, Lori would rush there as quickly as she could and kill the beast before it decided to leave or managed to jump high enough to eat the settler.

They didn't catch one every day, but the beasts were big enough that the meat lasted a long time. That meant their numbers of shovels grew. It also allowed the settlement to finally make new clothes using the beast skins. And while the beast feathers were pretty tough, with enough work the down and barbs scraped off the rachis worked as pillows. Not everyone had them, but Lori did. It went with her new wooden bed. Granted, her bed had no mattress, but it was marginally softer than sand or rock.

After clearing land for wood and planting the wild vegetables came building homes. While everyone was gathering food or resources– and in the doctors' cases, trying to keep sick people from dying– Lori started building individual homes for families. She didn't mess around with elegant stone arcs. She pulled dirt and stone up from the ground, compressed them into walls and floors, knocked out a few holes for windows, stuck in squares of wood for frames before adding dirt back over them and called it done. She didn't have the time, inclination, or ladder to get high up and put in roofs. If people didn't want to share her shelters, then they could put the roofs and doors on themselves.

Honestly, she hadn't realized becoming a Dungeon Binder meant working on building nearly everything but her Dungeon. So far, it was still a cave with a bed and a hole in the ground for the dungeon's core. She'd already almost fallen in twice.

She'd tried moving the core around, but had immediately run into the problem of it not liking being moved, which she half-expected. She could move it if she really, really tried, but it had been a difficult experience. She hadn't been able to just grab it and pull. Against purely physical forces, it had been resolutely immobile. She'd needed to bind and will it to move, and even then it had caused a strong, nauseating feeling within her, like it was already right where it should be and moving it was a stupid idea. It reminded her of the time they'd been asked to reshape the bones in their own body, just so they'd understand what a horrible idea it was. She'd only been able to move it a few handspans, and by the end of it she was tired, sweating and feeling like her body was the wrong shape under her skin. That feeling faded after a few hours, but it certainly explained why demesne almost never changed location, even though there were a few stories about it being done, usually in truly desperate circumstances that ended either epically great or epically terrible. She gained a new understanding of how desperate the people involved had been, to try and move their core.

So she used it as a place to hang her hat and raincoat. It might as well be useful.

That didn't mean she didn't try to improve her cave. The ground had been evened out and, using the old trick with water and channels cut into the rock, leveled. That had been pretty much all that's she'd had time for, in the moments where she was lying in bed waiting to get tired enough to not mind she was sleeping on a pile consisting of her rain cloak over her other clothes. If someone knew how to weave reeds or strips of wood or vines into a more adequate back support than bare, rough planks, Rian hadn't managed to get them on the wall list yet.

The wall of the shelter, with the list of names and specializations all written in dirty and smudging wood char lines, had become a sort of part census, part chore list. Rian, with his near-satirical exactness and thoroughness, had written 'Lolilyuri 'Lori'– Dungeon Binder, Whisperer, Wizard' at the top. Beneath that, he'd written his own name next to the word 'Lord (temporary)'.

After that came a long list of names, trades, useful skills and specialties. Some, like Lori, had only their given names, although Rian had added the nicknames of those who preferred such things, as he had with her (she liked her given name, but had gotten tired of people mispronouncing it). Others had two names, as if they were from a noble house. Oh, Lori knew that in some demesnes the naming conventions where different, like using the name of the demesne the way nobles used house names, which was why she had a carpenter named Yonas Steamfissure and his family, while in other places people had a profession name, like the blacksmith named Lanwei Smith. It seemed ostentatious to her. Also, more annoying names to remember. Why did some people feel like they had to double their names? Well, she didn't need to remember them. That was what the list was for. Now, if she could just get people to write their names on their clothes…

The '(temporary)' amused her though. Rian still seemed to think he was going to quit, even after several days of putting it off. As if she'd let him. He was too useful.

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The next day dawned bright and clear and sunny. No matter which direction Lori looked, no matter how much she bound lightwisps to gather light and magnify the range of her view, she couldn't see any walls of water waiting to come down from the sky to ruin their day.

It was incredibly suspicious.

"I'd call you paranoid, but you're always like this," Rian said over breakfast. They had tables now, so they sat across from each other. She ignored Umu and Mikon sitting at the table behind him, alternately enjoying the view of his backside and glaring at her. He was just completely oblivious, despite the intensity of their gazes that should have bored holes through his trousers. For alleged romantic rivals, they are awfully quick to join forces against what they thought was a third party. Idiots.

"So you're accusing me of being paranoid all the time?" she said. If people still had any spices on them, they were hording it, so the meal was flavored with the meat's natural fat, the bitter acridness of the vegetable's greenery, and the mushiness of the root vegetables. Lori switched from the stew the grilled seel meat, washing away the taste the stew left in her mouth. She didn't know who was leaving a dead seel near her cave every day, but it was just that little bit more meat.

"It's a sunny day," Rian said. "Why would you think that anything bad will happen to us because of it?"

"Because sunny days are when iridescence grows back quickly," Lori said grimly. "It's hot, it's dry, there's a lot of thermal energy to quicken the Iridescence's growth… don't have any people up on the beast-baiting towers today. In fact, have everyone stay close by."

Rian grimaced. "Ah. I forgot, what with all the rain we've been having," he said. "I'll let everyone know. Well, it's not a bad day to work near the river. Maybe everyone can do laundry or go seeling or have a bath or something. With all the seels we've been catching, we certainly have enough tallow."

Lori suddenly became aware of every itchy part of her body. "We have soap?"

"The chandler, Chandler, says he has some ready," Rian said. "Thanks to you we haven't had to make candles yet, so he's been saving up the seel tallow and ash, and making soap."

"So our first community fair is going to be a public bathing event," Lori said flatly. "Joy. Aren't we having enough problems with horny idiots? Do we really need to actually encourage people to get naked and wet in the middle of the day?" She made a note to designate someplace downstream for bathing. These idiots would probably bathe right next to where the children did their seeling from sheer laziness otherwise.

Lori had recently needed to start leaving the entrance to her cave blocked off after she'd caught two young men trying to sneak in during lunch, in the process of taking their shirts off. From then on, morbid curiosity had her noticing how some people didn't always attend the midday meal. Or skipped the morning meal. Or skipped– or at least were late to– the evening meal.
Really, ever since she'd noticed she hadn't been able to stop. No matter how much she'd tried. Why had her social apathy chosen to abandon her now, in her hour of need? Like some twisted joke, her facial recognition seemed to have improved because of it, even if she still couldn't name people. She wondered what they got first, a wedding, a baby, or someone with an axe to the head?

All the children were always present for meals. She'd since insisted on that, and insisted no one start eating until all the children were there, in their special low table in the middle of the room. She wasn't having any of THAT in her demesne. You always heard stories about some places…

For once, Rian actually looked uncomfortable. "Well, it's not like people have anything else to do," he muttered. "We don't even have a bar."

"Really? You're telling me in all this time since we set out from Covehold, no one's managed to get a still running?" Lori said, not believing it.

"They did, but I appropriated it," Rian said. "We needed the barrel for food storage. Our latitude is low enough that we can probably expect snow, so we should start testing to see which foods keep and for how long."

"Wow. People must really like you, to not try and hang you after you did that," Lori said.

"Oh, I told them it was by your authority," Rian said. "Requisitioned by the government."

Lori glared at him. Rian just replied with a wide-eyed, innocent and earnest smile.

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Minions Require Facilities

As it wasn't raining, and therefore people could finally work on putting roofs and doors of the houses she'd built– she left the matter of assigning which families got the houses to Rian, as she didn't care– Lori could finally stay in her nice, cool cave instead of working in the hot, sunny, humid outdoors, and develop her Dungeon.

Step one was putting a binding at the entrance that kept the humidity from getting in. She put in a lot of magic into that so it would last several days. Was there a way to permanently direct power at a binding so it would work in perpetuity? There should be, she remembered there were tools that had bindings placed on them so they only needed wisp beads to function, but it wasn't something they'd studied at her school. Well, she had a dungeon, a way to make as many beads as she needed, and no other means of entertaining herself, so it was something to remember for the future. The sunlight from the entrance was bright enough, and the floor where it shone was reflective enough from her leveling of the stone that she didn't need to bind lightwisps to illuminate the cave, so that was one thing she didn't have to worry about right then.

She started expanding the room by using earthwisps to soften the stone. She'd gotten a lot of experience doing this from working with the shelters, and the stone flowed like honey. She didn't know what she'd do with a large, open space, but she'd probably figure something out when she finally had it. She also decided to finally square up the entrance of her cave so she can put a door on it. Raising a boulder to block it was just asking for some sort of asphyxiation accident in the long run.

The stone flowed across the cave and out the entrance intermittently as she melted off stone from the walls little by little to shape the cave into a proper room. She stacked it up next to her door with her boulder. It wasn’t long before she had a nice, mostly square space with her bed in the corner and the dungeon's core floating off to one side, next to the door.

She took that in for a moment, and then went back outside to drag in some of the excavated rock.

After building a stone wall to hide the core from immediate view of the cave entrance and moving her bed because this had resulted in her bedspace becoming severely cramped, she examined the space again. As rooms went, it was certainly a generously large one, that little awkward alcove with the core notwithstanding. She'd have space for a table, chairs, her own private lavatory (Lori made a note to dig new latrines, it had been enough days for them to fill up again), storage space, maybe her own food storage…

Lori eyed the stone she'd excavated outside.

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When lunch rolled around, Lori was still in her cave forming rocks into furniture

"Why do you have a sacrificial altar in your cave?" Rian said from the cave entrance.

She gave him an annoyed look. "It's a table."

"It looks like an altar Dungeon worshippers use to sacrifice beasts," Rian asserted.

"Well, it's not, it's simply the best shape when you're making a table out of stone and don't want to risk it collapsing on your legs," Lori said. "Did you come here for something besides judging my furniture-making skills?"

"Lunch is ready," Rian informed her. "I thought you'd like to have the chance to show up, while the food is hot."

" Ah. Thank you, then." Lori stood from where she'd been making sure the table was balanced and grabbed her hat. She pushed back her hair and tucked it under the brim, reminding herself to find someone with scissors. Maybe one of the doctors? Worse comes to worse, she'd try to cut it with a beast claw.

"You're welcome," Rian said. "Also, I think we need to have a community meeting sometime soon."

Lori blinked at him in the middle of dragging her boulder in front of her cave. Now that the entrance had been squared off there were gaps in the upper corners, but not enough for someone to fit in. "Why?" she asked suspiciously.

"Well, for one thing, we don't have a name for our demesne yet–"

"'Lori's'."

Rian blinked. "What?"

"The name is 'Lori's'," Lori repeated. "Lori's Demesne."

"Are you serious? Who names a demesne after herself?"

"Iskandaliya Demesne, capital of the empire of Iskandal the Empire Binder," Lori said authoritatively.

"All right, first off, the woman was a raging egomaniac," Rian replied. Lori reluctantly increased her assessment of his knowledge of history. "Secondly, that was also the new name given to every otherdemesne she conquered into her empire. Are you going to tell me you're going to be equally unoriginal?"

"'Lori's' is a perfectly original name!"

"Thirdly, I refuse to be a lord in such an unoriginally named place," Rian continued as if she hadn't spoken. "If you call it that, I'll quit."

"You're already quitting," Lori pointed out. "You're quitting today, right?"

"I'll quit even sooner."

They reached the kitchen-turned-dining-hall, and Lori headed for the line for the midday stew, Rian following after her.

"Anyway, forget the name–"

"Never."

"– we need to talk about supplies," he persisted. "We're running out."

"We have plenty of food," Lori said.

"Yes, so we're unlikely to go hungry," Rian nodded. "It's everything else that's running out. We need nails, metals, medicines, new clothes–"

"Haven't we been treating all the skins and furs?" Lori interrupted.

"Are you willing to wear leather underwear?" Rian asked pointedly.

"All right, continue," Lori regretfully conceded.

"Basically, every product of civilization we left behind, we need," Rian continued. "Right now, only Covehold Demesne will have them. They're the oldest demesne in this continent that we know of, so they–"

"Wait, 'that we know of'?" Lori said, turning to look at him.

He shrugged. "I think it's arrogant to assume no one lived on this continent until we arrived. Have we looked?"

"You're not one of those people who think that our ancestors actually did cross an ocean of stars to some kind of promised demesne, do you?" Lori said. "I'm pretty sure that was proven to be a metaphor for the development of tools for navigating by the stars."

"We know the world is round," Rian argued. "Maybe people arrived on this continent from the other side. And we still need to have a community meeting. We need supplies only Covehold has, unless you've managed to find iron inside the hill. Even copper will do."

"I haven't exactly had time to go digging," Lori said evasively. "I've been busy."

"We all have," Rian said. "And if we want to keep being busy, we'll need those supplies."

"Fine, I'll start beading money, we can–"

"Won't work," Rian said. "I don't know if you asked, but Covehold accepts only old continent beads or Covehold-issued beads."

"What?" Lori demanded, rounding on him. "That's ridiculous! Beads are a universal standard! Everybody uses beads!"

"I'm not sure of the exact, technical reason," Rian said, backing away, hands raised placatingly. "But apparently it's to prevent anyone with a dungeon just beading out a bunch of beads, slapping a '100' or a '1,000' or a '100,000' on it, and buying out all of Covehold's goods. If we want to trade, it has to be in tangible goods."

"They're worried about inflation? Why? Taniar Demesne is in charge of regulating currencies to stop that from happening and they wouldn't let…" Lori trailed off. "Oh. Taniar doesn't have a presence on this continent."

"It's sort of part of the appeal of living here," Rian pointed out.

"How did you even know this?" Lori said.

"I asked when we were there," Rian said. "Didn't you?"

She had not. "Okay, fine," she grumbled. "Set a meeting for tomorrow."

"Why tomorrow?" Rian said.

"So that everyone has time to take a bath, and I have time to build a bath," Lori said. She thought about it. "Make it the day after tomorrow."

So much for her nice, sunny day off.

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After doing it so many times, Lolilyuri had gotten good at raising buildings. She could practically do it while seated next to where the building was to rise.

So that was what she did, sitting on a slightly compressed block of dirt while beside her, earthwisps made dirt and rock flow, compressing into walls and an arcing roof. In the basic shape it wasn't that different from her initial shelters. The difference was the long troughs of water high along the walls that fed down to basins inside individual alcoves. On the floor were holes that acted as drains, full of bound waterwisps that would serve to carry the water out against the flow of gravity and out into the field outside, which would likely get very muddy. It didn't seem smart to bring that water directly to the river. Give the land a chance to filter it out a little. If she had time she'd find a way to make the water pass through sand.

Rian was in charge of making sure everyone had soap. She figured that was only fair. She had to make two more buildings, after all. With internal plumping, this time. It would be good practice for making her own private bathroom and lavatory.

If things went according to plan, at least the community meeting would have everyone smelling clean.