(Draft v1.1) Demesne Chapter 1, Shelter Building Scene (Patreon)

So, I've rewritten the scene where Lori builds the shelters again to emphasize that the speed came about at the expense of quality. This will hopefully make future building scenes where she takes her time but gets neater results less confusing. Hopefully this works better now.

As to the shelter, I'm trying to give it a 'dug a whole in the snow for shelter during a snowstorm' feeling of quality, excepting somethings that had to be done so people wouldn't get hurt. 

After she finished eating—and eyed the large pot but ultimately forwent a second helping—Lori went back to her first building project as a Dungeon Binder.

Between the water-worn cliff face to one side of their settlement and the nearby river, it wasn't hard to assume that the rock underneath them was likely sedimentary. That meant she had to be careful when pulling the rock out of the ground with earthwisps. It would take more experience with earthwisps in general and this material specifically before she'd be able to identify lines of cleavage and tensile strength without examination and testing—read: hitting rocks with other rocks—so for the moment, she'd done what she could by simply excavating a hollow space in the ground and raising the displaced earth and stone upwards to act as a roof.

Viewed from inside, the shelter structure she had made was essentially a mostly-underground half cylinder. It was a good, simple structure where the shape itself provided strength and support. It was the quickest, most expedient way she could build some kind of sheltering structure large enough to be able to accommodate the many people that needed to be housed that night. This way, she didn't have to raise anything up too high—relatively speaking, anyway—and the roof of the structure was thick with displaced mass

If Lori was going to do this properly, she would have done this by raising up individual arches, lifting the stone up from the ground with support under them, then removing that support once the shape was set and the stone was supporting its own weight. Raise another arc next to the first one, then fusing the two into one structure. Repeat until she had a building. Doing it like this, however, would have been far, far more time consuming and take time she didn't have, especially since she needed to make another one to be able to accommodate everyone.

What she'd built was quick, inelegant, and structurally flawed since the walls and arc of the cylinder were made of alternating stone and dirt that she had fused together with earthwisps. Given time, the latter would like start coming apart, perhaps even start letting water leak through, but it would do as a temporary solution to the issue of shelter.

Lori had done her best, she'd hardening the floor and walls to the same stone consistency with bindings of earthwisps so that they'd better support the arcing roof. She had then sealed the openings on the ends of the half-cylinder structure with more stone and compressed dirt, save for a single wide entrance and a ramp leading down to the shelter's floor level.

Afterwards had she finally gone back for lunch.

Upon returning to her building, she found the floor of her shelter thick with rainwater that had flowed in from the door she had made .

Ah. Right. She'd forgotten that could happen.

The ramp leading down to the shelter was slippery from water, be she was able to make her way down and only slid a little bit near th end, making her stumble and catcher herself on the shelter's wall. Her feet splashed on muddy rainwater as she glared at the ramp. She'd have to do something about that…

Collecting lightwisps, she went inside the shelter, her boots splashing on the water on the ground. Anchoring the bindings on the walls of the shelter to produce illumination so she could keep working, Lori bound the waterwisps and pulled the water out of the shelter. It streamed up the ramp she had made to the shelter's entrance, and flowed across the muddy ground, even as more water began to trickle down again.

Lori inspected the shelter's walls, but the lining she'd made looked like it was at least managing to hold the groundwater back so that it wouldn't seep in. Still, she'd need some other solution for rainwater. She cut a little channel in front of the entrance to the shelter to divert most of the rainwater away from it, and made a pit next to the shelter proper's entrance to act as a catch basin for the channel. Someone would need to empty the pit with a bucket every so often, but Rian would take care of it when she told him.

After that, she set about making windows to let in air into the shelter.

Putting slit-like openings at one end of the cylindrical shelter was simple enough, since it was a simple wall that wasn't meant to be load bearing, and in fact was mostly just dirt and stone she had pushed up to block that end. Lori took advantage of this to put in a chimney there for a fire so people in the shelter would be able to keep warm, running the chimney out through the piled stone of the wall.

Knocking holes into the sides of the arcing stone structure of the roof was also simple, though she had to do it from outside to make sure they were high enough above ground level that no rainwater would flow in from the ground. They were simply holes with a little stone overhang to keep the rain off, quick and dirty work to let air in.

She nodded to herself and turned to climb up the ramp so she could get to work on the next shelter… and nearly slipped and fell as her feet slid on the now-wet ramp she had climbed down on.

…

Ah. Right.

Lori didn't have a spirit level or any such tool at the moment, so she simply had to reshape the ramp into steps as best as she could. She used the rainwater coming down to see if they were, if not completely level, then at least level enough. It was frustratingly slow and tedious work, but this she had to do properly, lest she slip and fall. Eventually, however, the steps were finished, and she was finally able to climb up from the first shelter.

Then she turned and walked several paces to the side to begin building the second shelter, binding the earthwisps of stone and wet…

After all, if it collapsed, it wasn't like she'd be sleeping in there.

The rain stopped at about late-afternoon, while Lori was putting the finishing touches—windows, chimney, making sure the packed earth and stone walls were keeping water out—on the second shelter. From the entrance, she heard tentative footsteps come down the stairs. Rian stuck his head in the door. "Is this one ready too?" he called, his voice echoing strangely in the shelter's acoustics. "We don't have much time before it gets dark."

"It's ready," Lori said. "They'll have to sleep on the ground, but they'll have air and a place to build a fire. We can fix any problems in the morning." If the shelter didn't collapse in the middle of the night, at least. "Have someone empty out the water next to the door unless you want to be flood by rainwater in the middle of the night if it starts to rain again."

Rian nodded, looking relieved. "I'll get someone to bring in some wood and come by with a bucket," he said. "Can you make a fire with it while I get everyone ready to move in?"

Lori nodded absently, looking around the shelter. She'd probably have to put in another fireplace tomorrow, since it might be too big for the single one they had. But right now, she was tired. Her head felt fuzzy from moving magic around all day, and her feet were killing her. She wanted to take off her boots, warm up her socks, roll up in her blanket and go to sleep.

Outside, people were milling about, carrying things to be moved into the shelter. Blankets, clothes, tools that could finally be properly protected from the rain…

Lori wanted to rest. Rest sounded good.

Still, there was one more thing she had to do.

She found a nice area away from the river and dug a few holes down, making them nice and deep, with a little water at the bottom. Then she raised some simple dirt and stone mounds around them to act as walls and anchored a binding of lights near each.

The latrines done, Lori went to tell Rian they needed seats.