Weekly Digest 17 - (#51 - #53) (Patreon)

We Need More Houses

"What do you mean, we need more houses?" Lori asked.

"We, pronoun, meaning the speaker and at least one other person," Rian said. "Need, verb, to require something as essential or important. More, determiner, meaning an additional amount of something. Houses, noun, plural form, a building for human habitation, typically with a roof and at least three walls."

Lori stared at him for a long moment. "Was that supposed to be a joke?"

"I was breaking down the sentence into individual words in case it was a specific part you were having trouble with," Rian said.

"Are you mocking me?"

"Lori, if I were mocking you, I'd point at you and laugh," Rian said. "You are, however, a unique existence and I sometimes have to genuinely stop and wonder if you do, in fact, understand what I'm saying."

"That still sounds like you're mocking me," Lori accused.

"I told you 'we need more houses'. It was a simple declarative statement with little possible ambiguity, and you don't seem to understand," Rian said with a shrug.

"I understand the sentence, I don't understand what you mean by it," Lori said. "We have a lot of houses, people just haven't finished building them yet."

"Oh, we're done with those," Rian said. "The last one was roofed while you've been digging your Dungeon. All the houses you put up are roofed now. But we need more houses, because our population grew."

Lori scowled. "Can't people stay in the shelters?"

"It's drafty, it's crowded, the floors are cold, and they can't decorate," Rian said. "Also, we need those houses to head off civil unrest. The reason the work has gone so much faster now than it was before was because of the former militia people in the Golden Sweetwood company doing the work, but the original housing list was made to prioritize people with large families and those with family members in essential jobs, like the sawyers, carpenters, and the cooks. They're happy, because they have their own house now, but the people who actually built those houses want their own houses, or else they'll feel cheated. So, we need more houses, or else there'll be fighting in the street, general unrest and bad feelings all around." He paused, then added, "Which will be bad for overall productivity and really bad in the long run. So, we need more houses, and we need them now. The militiamen are willing to keep building, so long as they know they'll get their own place soon, but I think it's only fair we bump them up to 'essential workers' and have the next batch of houses they make be their own."

"So why don't they?" Lori said. Why did she have to deal with this over breakfast?

"Because you raised the walls of the last batch, which meant most of the work was putting in the roof, doors and internal furnishings," Rian said. "If you do it again, the work gets done a lot faster, and there'll be less to bother you with. Also, it will seem like you're treating everyone equally, since you have everyone living in stone-walled houses, which are more secure and less likely to burn than wooden ones. And they took the brunt of the dragon very well."

Lori scowled. This sounded suspiciously like a 'fairness' thing. The world was fundamentally unfair– everyone said so– so why did people insist on 'fairness'?

"Look, just look over the proposal I made first," Rian said, picking up a tray-sized plank of wood. It was become a familiar sight, with Rian washing it off and writing on it every day when he needed to show her something, like lists or just notes. "I've already marked out the area to be cleared so they can build the houses there, and I've got the new housing list drawn up. I just need your approval for the site. You don't need to start building today, since they still need to clear the trees."

Reluctantly, Lori held out her hand, and Rian handed her the plank. It was heavier than she'd thought, but Rian didn't let go of it until she was holding it with both hands.

The sketch on it was simple but seemed to be to scale, and had even helpfully marked the sawpits, the current farm fields, the projected farm fields, and where she'd stashed the corpse of the baby islandshell. The leather parts hadn't been recoverable, but the bones and shell would still be useful… once she thought of a use for it.

She looked over it critically. "Why am I looking at a long box?"

"I figured it would be more efficient to make the houses a single long building that share walls," Rian said. "Makes building it simple. Admittedly, it cuts down on the number of walls that can have windows, but this way you have less building to do, and it'll be easier for them to put on a roof."

She looked at another drawing. "And the reason the walls will be five paces high?"

"It'll give people the option to put in a loft or attic, or even a second floor, if they feel like it," Rian said. "More space."

"I can already hear the people who have houses now complaining their house isn't as nice," Lori said. She gave him a look. "You handle those."

"Yes, your Bindership," he said.

"I suppose we'll have to find a new use for the shelters after this," Lori mused.

"Actually, I have an idea for that," Rian said. "We'll just make it storage and housing for people without families. Bachelor quarters, sort of thing. Just put in internal walls so we'll all have our own room. We can turn the other into storage, or for growing mushrooms or whatever."

"Hmm…" Lori 'hmm'-ed. She pointed at another square near the new houses. "What's this?"

"The proposed site for the new bathhouse," Rian said. "That way it's convenient, and we won't have so many people crowding around the current bathhouses. By the way, people are also requesting we build a shaded roof between the two old bathhouses, so they'd have a better place to relax."

"Why do you keep bringing me so many requests?" Lori sighed. She still hadn't finished her breakfast.

"Well, you've made it perfectly clear that you want to be the absolute authority, so people are complying with that by not making any decisions without bringing it by you," Rian said. "And since you literally won't talk to anyone but me unless you have to, they pass it to me, and it gets passed to you. And this is just the stuff I don't dismiss out of hand for being silly or self-serving."

"Like what?" Lori asked.

"People want to know if they can own land."

"They're still on that?" Lori scowled.

"They never stopped, they just know better to than to bring it up to your face," Rian said.

"We don't even have money," Lori said. "We don't even have a barter economy! What would they possible need discrete ownership of land for?"

"Bragging rights? Status symbol? Wish fulfillment?" Rian suggested.

"Tell the next person who asks that I'll be awarding them the location of the latrines and they'll be personally responsible for maintaining them," Lori said.

"I know you mean that as some kind of ironic punishment, but I can already see them trying to charge people wood or fruit or rope or sexual services for the use of the latrine," Rian said.

Lori grimaced. "It's too glittering early in the morning for this," she muttered.

"Hey, you asked," Rian said. "Have more faith that I know what you'll think is silly and pointless."

"Noted," Lori sighed. She looked at the map. "Inform me when the land is cleared and I'll inspect it before commencing building. And add spots for latrines and people assigned to maintaining them."

"Got it," Rian said, nodding.

Grumbling, Lori went back to her breakfast. When, exactly, could she stop building things and just bask in her power?

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The excavation work continued. It soon became rote. Soften stone, draw it out, form a pillar with arcs to support the ceiling, drag the stone outside. Repeat again and again until lunch. Repeat until mid-afternoon, then do something else. Curing wood. Making ice. Checking on all the wisps she'd bound to make sure their output wasn't too hot or too bright. Making stone axe heads to spare their metal ones from wear and tear. Wonder how she was doing more work for less pay as a Dungeon Binder than she had been as a student.

Occasionally she had to stop and make sure her floor was properly level, which involved making a grid of channels, filling them with water, then molding the stone to match that. It was tedious work, but the perfectionist in her made her do it. And honestly, it felt much nicer to walk across.

When enough land had been cleared, she'd taken a break from excavation to inspect it with Rian. It was on the other side of the dining hall, which was finally being used for its intended purpose again, though the number of tables and benches was less because the carpenters were busy with other things, and could only make one set at a time. The rest were still in the Dungeon, and Lori was resigned to them being here permanently. At least she didn't have to walk far for meals now, and the food stores for dragons and winter was building up nicely, mostly with smoked meat and edible seeds like ropeweed, though there were some cut that had been sealed in ice. For something nice in the middle of winter, she'd been told.

There was some variance of elevation at the proposed building site, but nothing that wasn't fixable, especially with earthwisp, but definitely something she'd need to adjust for, given Rian's suggestion of how she should build this. Honestly, it wasn't bad, now that she'd thought out it. A simple build, and with all the wood they had now, she could use planks to brace the tops of doorways and windows.

"Why do the houses need to face that way though?" she asked as she examined the stripped branches that had been thrust into the ground to mark the boundaries of the proposed build. "It doesn't line up with the grid established by the other houses."

"The sun angles down from that side when it it's climbing and setting," Rian said. "Might change as the year progresses, but it's there now. This way the light will naturally angle into people's houses in the middle of the day. It'll let anyone doing indoor work like spinning, weaving or making rope have a decent amount of light. We still don't have that many candles, mostly an emergency stash for the next dragon if you're too busy to make light, since what fat and oil we're getting is being used for soap, cooking and lubricant. A few people have been trying to catch sweetbugs that were born inside the demesne, so they can harvest bugswax, but that won't really be viable as a source for some time. Plus we'll either need to ready a space for them in the Dungeon in case of dragon or have some in the Dungeon itself, and without flowering plants, they won't have much reason to build their hive."

Lori sighed. Still more work to do. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to another line of sticks.

"Road," Rian said. "At least, the planned road. We're planning to mark out a course that connects through the road we currently have that runs in front of the houses and past the dining hall towards the Dungeon. We're, uh, hoping you'll find it in you to compact it down, so that there won't be any slipping accidents when people bring up the materials for the roofs later."

Lori looked between the road and the site of the new houses. "They seem to be rather far apart," she pointed out.

"Planning for the future," Rian said. "We'll eventually want a wide road, and it would be nice if it didn’t come up right to people's doorsteps. And the four paces of space gives people a nice garden plot to grow vegetable or something. Once we figure out how best to grow vegetables, anyway. "

"And all the stumps?" she said, eyeing the many fresh tree stumps all around.

"Well, if you're going to be moving the earth anyway…" Rian said, looking aside.

She gave him a level look. "I'll soften the ground, but you have to arrange for them to be dragged out of here," she said sternly.

"That's fair," Rian said meekly. "And we'd have more usable firewood than if you just made them explode."

She kept staring at him, but nodded. "Anything else?"

"Well, we have a lot of felled trees now, and they need curing to be useable… "

Lori rolled her eyes. Of course. They probably had more logs stacked than the sawpits could handle right then. "Fine. I'll go and see about curing the logs."

"Also, people are asking for someplace they can put all the wood with mushrooms they've managed to cultivate, so the spores won't spread on the new wood on the houses and what furniture we have…"

Yes, she was definitely doing more work now than when she'd been merely a student. Almost, she wished one of the two wizards who come with them hadn't died so she'd have someone to push some of this magic work onto.

Almost.

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Foundations

Lori thought having to build more houses would be irritating. Thankfully, the heat wasn't that much of a problem. Her demesne wasn't large enough for her to manipulate clouds unless the clouds were really low, but she had more than enough to control the wind, and she'd been having a nice breeze blowing for her as soon as she'd had to step out of her Dungeon.

Wearing her hat to prevent overheating, she started the building project. She'd managed to produce a surplus of stone from her excavating, and from the calculations she'd made she just barely had enough to make at least the new housing, and the rest of the excavation would let her build the bath house. The first thing she had to do was to move the excavated stone up to the building site. She had to do it in batches, since she wasn't sure she could control the whole mass well enough that it wouldn't start to slip on the packed dirt paths they used as main roads, though she was able to move incrementally larger batches as she made more trips back and forth.

It took her most of the morning to drag a sufficient amount of stone to the site that she felt she could get started laying down a foundation properly after lunch. The place was full of holes from all the tree stumps that had been dug out and chopped up for firewood, so she had to fix that first. Then she could pack down the earth and lay down the foundation for the rest of the building…

Should she put in fixtures for internal plumbing? No, that would just be too complicated. And she didn't want to have to maintain a sewer system on top of everything else.

Thankfully, Rian didn't bring up any issues during lunch– either there weren't any or he'd thought it wasn't the time– as she spent it looking at the plank with the proposal drawing and muttering to herself about dimensions. Most would be sleeping on the floor at night, since beds were less of a priority and everyone had bed rolls, but that meant having enough free floor space for a family of ten to sleep on the ground…

Rian had to prompt her to eat three times, then had to ask for his plank back, since he was still using it for notes.

After lunch, Lori got to work. She bound light wisps and placed them over the sticks marking the boundary so she could remove the sticks and start compacting and leveling the soil, leveling out out the variances of elevation. The whole site was on a slight incline, but nothing she couldn't deal with. She'd have to level the floors of each segment individually once the internal walls were up, but that was simpler that trying to get everything perfectly flat.

She finished putting down only a quarter of the stone foundation by the time late afternoon rolled around and she had to stop because it was dark and she was feeling sweaty. It wasn't leveled, compacted or otherwise rendered structurally sound, with no bubbles, just laid down. She'd have to pack it down properly tomorrow…

"How's the house-building coming along?" Rian ask as she lay face-down on the table.

Lori groaned in response.

"You're being dramatic," Rian said, the heartless abomination. "You've done this before, it can't be any worse than a–" he let out a softer groan.

She managed to find it in her to raise her head and glare at him.

"See, you're feeling better already," Rian said cheerfully.

"Get the food or I'm going to kick you," she warned.

"And there we have the violence inherent in the system," Rian said with a nod as he got up. "Relax, the workday is done. You have the rest of the night to sleep or whatever it is you do all alone in your room with no one to hear."

That didn't make Lori feel better. She wasn't looking forward to another fruitless night trying to work out how to do even the basics of Deadspeaking, Mentalism or Horotracting. The bare summaries she remembered from her old books were being very unhelpful in aiding her attempts to access the other forms of magic.

The thought was all immensely frustrating.

Not for the first time, she wished her two corpses had left some kind of texts she could use, but like her, they had no reference books on them. Any books they'd had likely hadn't survived the crossing over the ocean.

She tiredly picked one of the bowls, and started to eat. For a moment, there was nothing but her chewing and the noise of everyone else eating as well.

"Was the day really that bad?" Rian asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Lori said, putting another spoonful into her mouth.

"Hmm…" Rian 'hmm'-ed. "Well, if you're sure."

"Yes, I'm sure," Lori said tersely.

"You don't have another hole in your sock or something, do you?" Rian said.

"If I did, I'll let you know," she said. "Can I eat now?"

Rian sighed for some reason. "Yeah, sorry for keeping you."

They ate in silence again.

"Thank you," Rian said as Lori was finishing her bowl.

She gave him another look. That was strange thing to say, even for him. "For what?"

"For everything. The hot water. The lights. The ice. The shelter," Rian said. "Just… thank you."

"All right…?" she said. She pushed the bowl towards him. "I'm going to sleep. If anyone starts playing music, flog them."

"Yes, your Bindership," he said, taking her bowl to bring it back to be washed.

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When Lori woke up the next day, she was feeling much better. Still irritated, but better. Breakfast was stew and happyfruit, which she had to peel herself. Rian, color him, peeled off the outer skin as if he'd been eating it his whole life and ate the flesh inside almost daintily. She made such a mess of it she had to go back to her rooms to wash off all the juice.

When she got back to the building site, she was finally able to pack down the floors properly, and even digging a few holes and sinking a few stone columns to anchor the foundation in case rain softened the dirt below. It shouldn't– she'd packed it hard– but a Whisperer knew better than anyone how insidiously destructive water could be. They'd studied it in class, after all.

Lori had to wonder how many of the nameless unimportant nobodies she'd shared that class with had ever needed to use that knowledge.

She finished laying out the foundation that day, all six paces by forty, compressed so tight it was almost part of the ground. It was all between the marks where the sticks had been, anyway, and she used her stone-shaping tool to keep the edges more or less straight.

…

She was going to need to spend tomorrow morning checking the measurements, wasn't she? Ugh.

Still, it was with some relief that she sat down for dinner, more satisfied after a good day's work that was actually done properly, even if it was incomplete.

"You're looking better," Rian noted.

"What are you talking about?" she said, leisurely eating her dinner.

"Yesterday you threatened to kick me," Rian said.

Had she? "You probably deserved it at the time," she said.

"If you say so," he said. "So, while they're waiting for a house to build a roof on, some of the former militia and the hunters want to go into the iridescence to hunt beasts. We've been catching less and less with the baiting towers, and it seems the beasts have caught on to that."

She blinked in shock. "Is that safe?"

"Probably not, but they all say they'd done it before," Rian said. "And quite frankly it's a much more proactive approach then leaving someone high up and hoping someone tries to eat him. We need the meat. And the leather. And the bones. And the teeth. And the claws. And we need to get it now before the beasts migrate for the winter."

"They do what for the winter?" Lori blinked.

"Migrate. Move to warmer climes," Rian said. "I mean, they'll hardly be able to survive the winter cold, right? So they'll probably go somewhere else. The same for the seels, actually. We might have to see about trapping some and growing them in the Dungeon so we'll have fresh meat for the winter." At her look, he shrugged. "How do you think they survived outside of a demesne in winter?"

"I never thought about it," Lori shrugged.

"Well, we'll have to, that's our primary source of meat we're talking about," Rian said.

Lori sighed. "It's one thing after another."

Rian shrugged. "It's living. Would you rather be back in the old continent, living in some apartment the size of this table, doing… whatever jobs there are for wizards when they get out of school, balancing your pay, your taxes, your rent and your food money?"

Lori stared at him. Then she looked around at her Dungeon.

"You make an excellent point," she said. "Fine, they may go, but tell them that they are to prioritize conserving irreplaceable resources, like metal and rope."

"And their lives?" Rian said.

"I suppose, but only after they make sure they don't lose any metal."

"I'll find a better way to phrase that," Rian said, though he chuckled for some reason. "So, how long do you think it'll take you to finish the walls of the houses?"

Lori made a contemplative sound. "A week? Perhaps less, if I fall into a rhythm. The most time consuming will be making the doors and windows."

"Maybe we can get you assistance for that," Rian said thoughtfully. "Knock out the hole and have someone else evenly cut it all? We have stonemasons, after all. They can do it when they do the roof."

"I suppose…" Lori said. "But doing it that way might compromise the structure…"

"Well, tell me if you want me to set it up," Rian said. "I'm sure they'll be glad to have something to do."

"I'll remember," she said, going back to her stew. He did as well.

Lori finished her stew and reached into her pocket for a happyfruit that Karina had offered her earlier. Giving the fruit a determined look, she started trying to peel it. Carefully, she peeled the skin back to expose the juicy fruit and took a careful bite.

This time the juice didn't go everywhere.

"You realize I can just cut that up for you, right?" Rian said. "Most of us cut it up to eat it Lori. Only the children don't because they eat it near water so they can wash up."

She stopped and gave him a level, annoyed look. Then she took another bite. "Tomorrow. I'm enjoying this."

"You're just stubborn," he said, sounding amused.

"You eat it like this," she said.

"My knife was dirty and I was hungry," he said, shrugging.

Lori ignored him and focused eating her happyfruit. She would manage to eat this cleanly.

"Thank you," Rian said as Lori took another bite if the sweet, juicy mushy hapyfruit.

She chewed and swallowed. "For what?" she said absently as started to peel more of the fruit for the next bite.

"For everything. The hot water. The lights. The ice. The shelter," Rian said. "Thank you, Lori."

She frowned at him. "Didn't you say that already? I'm fairly sure you said that already."

"Yes," he said. "But you deserved to hear it more. Don't you think so?"

"You want to thank me, pay your taxes," Lori said.

"We don't have taxes. We don't even have money. We barely have a favor-based barter economy, mostly so people don't waste each other's time" Rian said. "The children are the one pulling in raw resources often enough to actually be pretty rich, but they're good children who've all been taught to share, so they're basically giving it all away."

Lori opened her mouth.

"Do you really want to deal with all the paperwork having a tax scheme will cause right now?" Rian said.

Lori closed her mouth, and went back to focusing on her happyfruit. She took another bite.

Bliss.

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Building On The Foundation

Depressingly, Lori realized she had to reduce the intensity of her nice, cooling breeze, because the wind was making the wall she was trying to raise buckle and bend. Wrapping herself in firewisps to draw off the heat just wasn't the same, somehow.

Still, it was predictable progress, once she'd measured out a pace on the handle of her stone-leveling tool and fixed the dimensions of her foundation. She'd dragged more stone up and raised what felt like the longest wall she'd ever made… twice. It had taken two days, intermittently using a weight on a cord to make sure the walls were straight and therefore distributing their weight straight down properly. Measuring the internal dimensions to lay out the internal walls that would divide the houses took the next day, using small bumps of stone to mark where the walls would be, and led to the annoying, predictable but somehow unexpected revelation that her measurements hadn't accounted for the thickness of the internal walls. So she basically had nine and one-fourth houses instead of ten.

Lori decided to properly build the last incomplete house in the row later.

With the walls marked, she spent the next day and a half knocking down doors and windows, putting in arches at the top to take the weight of the stone wall above. It was shorter than Rian's five paces—a little under four—mostly because she didn't have that much stone, and having walls that high seemed pointless. She'd have more when she excavated, but she wanted to use that to put more mass between the Dungeon and any dragons passing overhead.

Only when she had doors and windows to pass through did she start putting up the internal walls that divided the long structure into individual houses, since she'd no longer have to worry about trapping herself in a box. That took another two days.

When she was done, she proceeded to level the floors inside, cutting channels of water to find the level, then moving around the stone until the floor was more or less flat. It was sweaty work since the stone walls got hot very quickly, especially without a roof to give her shade, and she brought up a wind again to cool herself off after the walls were done. It wasn't as refreshing, since the wind had to pass through doors and windows, but it was better than nothing.

When she finally finished the last house on the end, adding more wall and foundation to make it the same dimensions as the others, she'd let out a sigh of relief and stopped working to have an early bath.

"Congratulations on the new houses," Rian said as she sat down for lunch. "Does this mean I can have them start planning how to put the roofs in now?"

"Yes," Lori said, freshly bathed and in her first clean set of clothes since she'd started building. Ah, her nice, cool Dungeon! "They should be able to handle all that now, right?"

"Hopefully, though we might have to call you to embed the wooden components into the stone for added stability," Rian said.

"As long as it's not tomorrow," Lori said.

"No need to worry, they'll probably need this afternoon and tomorrow to plan how they're going to do it," Rian said.

"I thought they already knew how to put on roofs?" Lori said.

"They do," Rian said. "Which is why they plan, so they can do it efficiently and safely."

Lori considered that, and shrugged. "Well, not my problem," she said as people started coming in for lunch. It was beast meet today, since the new hunting party had been productive again. "Is the food ready yet?"

Rian stood up and briefly looked towards the kitchen, then sat down. "Almost, I think," he said. "Just a little longer. So, now that the houses are done, what are you doing the rest of the afternoon?"

"Nothing," Lori said with happy finality.

Rian chuckled. "So you're going to live the dream of not needing to work for a living, just sleeping the day away in your cave?"

"Dungeon," she corrected.

Rian rolled his eyes. "Lori's Dungeon?" he said, sounding amused for some reason.

"Obviously," Lori said.

"Well, at least you're sticking to the naming scheme," Rian said. "If you're not doing anything else this afternoon–"

"I justsaid I had plans," Lori said flatly.

"—could you look over this idea I have for water distribution?" Rian continued as if she hadn't said anything. "So you have something to do while you're lying around doing nothing?" He held up a piece of wood.

Lori sighed at the impertinence of some people but reluctantly took the wood. She frowned. "What am I looking at?"

"Something to bring water up to the area around the houses you just built," Rian said. "I figure it'll help with the third bathhouse, since it's too far from the river for you to use underground pipes, and it'll make maintaining the agricultural field easier, since bringing water down is a lot easier than carrying it up from the river."

And then the drawing, slightly smudged, fell into place.

"This is an aqueduct," Lori said flatly. "You want me to build a twenty-pace tall aqueduct?"

"It doesn't have to be that tall," Rian said, not even denying that was, in fact, what he was proposing. "It's just that a tall aqueduct would be the most efficient structure to carry the water–"

"No," she said.

"You're going to have to bring water up there anyway for the bathhouse, why not like this?" Rian pressed. "This way you also provide easily accessed water for drinking, washing, and irrigating the fields."

"I am not building a twenty-pace tall aqueduct," Lori said firmly.

"What about a string of three-pace ones?" Rian wheedled.

"I'm having lunch," Lori declared. "Then I'm going to my room–"

"Lori's Room," Rian said brightly.

"Yes, that's what I said," she said, tilting her head and giving him a look. That was strange, even for him. "Then I'm doing nothing until dinner, then I'm sleeping, then tomorrow, I'm going back to excavating my Dungeon. I still don't have a new reservoir ready. If a dragon appeared, we'd have to use the old one."

Rian got a thoughtful look on his face. "What if," he said, "The Dungeon reservoir provided the water for the aqueduct that would bring water up to the third bath house? That way, when a dragon comes, all we need to do is seal off the outlets, and this way we'd keep the water in the reservoir from going bad due to stagnation…"

"We don't even have a reservoir yet," she said, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

"Then it's a design feature we should think of now, right?" Rian said brightly. "While we're in the pre-planning stage?"

"Just go get the food," Lori said flatly.

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Lori's afternoon was not as relaxing as she'd intended it to be.

Rian had left the piece of wood with her, and with nothing better to do but to either lie down on her bed—which was hard and stiff on her—or sit in her own private pool of water in her bathroom, shaped using earthwisps—which eventually started feeling silly—she eventually had to decide between considering the proposal drawn on the wood or once more try to perform the basics of any of the other three forms of magic.

She went with the less frustrating choice.

It was actually a decent solution, one that required an application of wisps in only one place, to get the water to the top of the aqueduct. From there, it would naturally start to flow down, and the various spouts on the side of the aqueduct would let it fall down to basins, which it would circulate to remain clean, before eventually flowing to a runoff channel directly under the aqueduct that would bring the water back to the river.

That last wouldn't do. Some of the random notes around the drawing had things like 'clean latrines?' on them, implying that Rian was considering using the runoff to wash the latrines. The same runoff they were going to send back to the river. They got their drinking water there, was he insane? Besides, River's Fork was downriver. She didn't want to have to put up with accusations from Binder Shanalorre that they were deliberately tainting the water going down there.

Clearly the runoff would have to be passed through some sort of filtering medium, like clay or sand…

Actually, why keep it in the demesne when they could just dump it outside, away from the river? Though that would be an extremely long…

Lori twitched and cut off that line of thinking.

All right, she grudgingly had to admit the idea had merit, but the proposed aqueduct was too high! It would take more stone than she'd used so far in all her building projects just to build the support columns to keep it stable, never mind the actual aqueduct itself! No, it would be much more sensible to make a stone pillar in the river where water could be drawn up, then used columns of compressed dirt instead of stone for the columns on land. For the actual aqueduct channels, they could use planks of wood coated with stone to waterproof it…

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Lori barely managed to keep herself from throwing the piece of wood at Rian when he approached their table for dinner.

"I hate you so much," she said, glaring at him. "You ruined my afternoon."

"Sorry," Rian said with a wide smile that said he wasn't sorry at all. He had another piece of wood under his arm, and was carrying a small sack that seemed full of something solid. Lori eyed that wood warily. If it had anything written on it, she was just going to set it on fire…

"What's that?" she pointed at the wood accusingly. "It's not another color-brained idea, is it?"

"Hmm?" Rian 'hmm'-ed. "Oh no, this is something I asked one of the carpenters to make. I think we might have a boredom problem soon, and I wanted to head it off before people started playing music and risking a flogging."

Despite herself, Lori glared at the piece of wood curiously. "What is it,then?"

"A game board, basically," Rian said. "You can play this on the ground too, but this is neater."

It wasn't like the gameboards Lori had seen before. There was no flat board with semi-circles denoting demesnes, no lines marking out grids. Instead, recessed bowls had been carved out on the arm-long length of wood, seven pairs all along its length, with larger bowls on either ends. Definitely not for playing chatrang or lima or even pincer, which was the extend of the games played on boards that she knew of.

"What kind of game can you play with this?" she asked skeptically.

"It's something I used to play when I was younger," Rian said, turning the sack and dumping out a pile of small, smooth river stones.

Some sort of noble children's game, then? Well, that would certainly explain why she'd never heard of it before, or even recognized the board. She watched as he started putting the stones in the paired bowls.

"Are you asking me to play?" she said.

"Oh no, not at all," Rian said as he put down the stones. Whatever this game was, color didn't seem to matter, since he was mixing stones of different colors together. "I know you don't want to stay down here after dinner any longer than you absolutely need to."

Oh. Well… good!

"Oh. Well… good!" Lori said. "Why are you setting it up, then?"

"Well, I'm hoping someone gets curious and asks to play," he said, still putting down stones. "If they don't, I'm going to have to randomly ask people, and that's just going to be embarrassing."

She didn't think there was any problem at that. Already people were glancing and looking at what Rian was doing, and the three women behind him were all standing to get a better look at the strange game board.

"So you're just going to leave it there while we're eating?" Lori said.

"Best way to get people's attention," Rian said, putting the stones in the last bowl. He hadn't put in all the stones, but he put the rest back in the sack he'd been carrying them, setting them down on the bench next to him. "I'll go get our food."

He walked away towards the kitchen to get their food, leaving Lori alone with the strange, stone-filled game board.

Her wait seemed longer and more annoying than usual as it seemed like everyone in the demesne casually walked past and back again to look at the board. The children didn't even make that much attempt as subtlety, just walking up to the table and staring at the board, and a few particularly brave ones poking at the stones in the nearest bowls. They all dispersed as Rian came back, holding a bowl in each hand.

Lori picked one and started to eat, not looking up from her bowl at all. "So, what came up today that I have to know about?"

"Well, we've got a lot of rope now," Rian said. "The Golden Sweetwood people had a roper with them, and he formed a partnership with the children who'd been making ropes using the ropeweed. They're learning from him for now, so they're technically apprentices, but it's on record that they're his partners since they know how to find and harvest the ropeweed. They're already starting to argue with the weavers for priority, since the weavers need the ropeweed for thread too. Right now, I have the ropers getting their weeds upriver and the weavers getting their weeds from downriver. So yeah, that's clearly another plant we need to start farming. I've been having them dividing the seeds for planting and for eating."

"Are we really using that much rope?" Lori asked.

"It takes a lot of work and fibers to make a good rope," Rian said. "I've also had them doing cords too, something not as thick for tying up foods for smoking and storing. So that's another industry we have. And that's just with half the demesne's resources. We still haven't really been able to get at the resources on the other side of the river yet."

"I'm not building a bridge," Lori said flatly.

"Not asking you to," Rian said. "No, I'm having the ropers make a rope long enough for us to stretch over the river so we can make a ferry that we can just pull across. Arak is taking care of that."

"Who?"

"The master roper," Rian said. "Well, technically he's a journeyman, but he's worked on big ropes before, so now he's our master roper. The others are working on cords."

Lori noted the name and let it slide away as not important. "Anything else?"

"We might need more buildings for workshops," Rian said. "The weavers are working from their homes right now, but the ropers are working around a tree, and they might need to move if we have to clear land again. I was wondering if they could move into the Dungeon's next level until we can set up someplace for them? They need someplace they can keep their tools, and space to stretch the ropes."

"The excavation isn't even finished yet," Lori said.

"Hence why I was only wondering," Rian said. He hesitated. "To be honest, we might need to hold another community meeting soon. Now that we have food more or less under control we have whole new issues we have to deal with."

Lori groaned.

"Yeah…" Rian said. He actually sounded sympathetic. "Not looking forward to it either. It's a lot for just me to deal with." He sighed. "I reallywish Grem hadn't tried to kill Shana sometimes. Another lord would be so nice to have right now…"

"Find me one," Lori said. "We're not holding another meeting until you find me a new lord to help deal with this."

"The last time I recommended a lord, he basically tried to commit treason first chance he got," Rian said. "Maybe you should do it. Your last pick for lord turned out to be a wonderful, hardworking person."

"Stop flattering yourself and find me someone," Lori said. "Or else I'll have to make Karina a lord. Lady. Whatever."

Rian paused. "Why Karina?"

"She's the only one–" Lori began

"–whose name you remember," Rian interrupted her, rolling his eyes. "Why am I not surprised."

Lori gave him an annoyed look for the interruption. "Actually, I was going to say she's the only one who pays taxes."

"So, you're letting yourself be bribed," Rian said, looking amused.

"If you think you can do better than her, find me someone," Lori said as she finished her bowl of stew.

"Challenge accepted," Rian said. "Though maybe she'll be good in a few years when she's older."

"What will a few years change?" Lori said.

"She'll be older? Not a child?" Rian said.

"And that should matter… why?"

Rian opened his mouth. Paused. Closed his mouth. "Huh. You're right. Right now, I'd only suggest not raising her because I think we need someone from the Golden Sweetwood people so they'll have someone to represent them and their concerns properly…"

He lapsed into silence as he finished his stew, obviously trying to think of someone. Lori handed him her bowl for him to take back to the kitchen to wash.

When she came back, the game board was in the middle of the table in front of her.

"Oh, wipe that smirk off your face," she said as he sat back down. "I have nothing better to do and I'm bored. How do you play this game?"

"Well," Rian smirked still, reaching over and turning the game board by a quarter circle so that each side with the seven bowls faced them both, "first, you turn it this way…"