HC:Handyman | Ch. 49 - Allosaurus' Dump (Patreon)

Jack ran his hand through his hair as he looked at the horrible, deformed vase before him. It looked like an allosaurus had taken a dump on his workstation. “Ai, ai, ai. What a disaster!”

When Jack started crafting the vase, it all looked fine and dandy. However, things started going south when he arrived at the seventh coil. By then, the vase had grown as tall as his knee and was starting to lean sideways slightly. 

Jack managed to correct it and kept going. By the time he reached the 12th coil, the vase was almost falling. Jack tried to straighten the vase again, but as he worked on the drooping side, the other side of the vase gave. He tried this several times, but the more he tried to fix it, the worse it got. Finally, he had arrived at this twisted, sad result. 

In the tutorial video, the coils held up so well, but here, for some reason, they were collapsing under the weight of the other coils. Was it because his surface wasn't perfectly even? Did he have to wait until he returned to the city to make a tall, coiled vase? He didn’t want to wait. He wanted to do it now! These big, tall vases had to award a ton of experience, right? Also, leveling up from pottery 9 to 10 would require a lot of grinding. How much longer would it take him if he couldn’t use his highest-leveled recipe?

Jack scratched his head, replaying the video to see if he had missed something. The old potter placed the first coil and then moved to the second one. Jack frowned. There was something wrong with the video that Jack couldn't quite place. He re-wound it and watched the coil placement. The impression that something was off only deepened. He replayed it several times until he finally understood what he had missed. 

“The coloring!” he finally said. In between the first and second coil of clay, the color of the first coil had lightened. “The potter is letting the coils dry,” Jack mumbled in realization. Whoever made this video had edited the footage to make it look like one streamlined, uninterrupted process. Something was happening between coil placements that was hidden in the video. 

 As clay dried, it lightened. Jack had already crafted plenty of vases, and he could spot the slight difference in coloring between video frames. The potter wasn't letting it dry fully, but it was letting it dry enough so that it hardened and didn’t collapse as he added more weight to it. 

Did he have to wait a couple of minutes between each coil? If so, that was no problem. He could just find other things to do in between. Jack grabbed all the clay he had used in the vase and tore it piece by piece, rolling it into balls and setting them aside. He would start over. 

This was one of the good things about clay. No matter how often he made a mistake, he could still reuse the material if he caught it early on. It's too bad that the same couldn’t be said about life. Or could it? He wondered if other professions could do similar stuff, too. Jack made another flat disc of clay and set it on his makeshift table, and he waited. Nothing happened.

He tapped his foot and made one coil, joining it with the disk. He waited a minute, but no progress bar appeared over the pot. It wasn’t drying. He hadn't thought this through. In the game, the drying process of a piece of ceramics only began once he put together a predefined shape. How did he override this? How did he make the base start drying slightly to prevent the vase from collapsing? 

He kicked a nearby pebble. This game was so realistic in some things but so stupid in others! He tried putting the disc away in his inventory, but as he picked it up, it deformed in his hands before he could save it in his inventory. 

“That's not going to work,” Jack complained. “What am I missing?”

What could he do to get the coils to dry in between? Jack looked at the clay, lost in thought. 

“Excuse me, sir.”

“AAAH!” Jack jolted, turning toward the newcomer. A lone adventurer had sneaked up behind him. Seeing his leather armor and daggers, he could see why he hadn’t heard him coming. He was a rogue.

“Are you still serving food?” the rogue asked, nodding toward the fire and the pots near it. 

“Yeah, of course. Have a seat by the fire so you can start recovering health,” Jack said, putting on his best customer service smile. He disappeared into the bush to capture berries from his last harvesting spot. 

He collected them, still thinking about the problem with the coiled vases. Should he ask Felix about this? He looked at his friends list and found that he was offline. Although he would probably return soon, Jack was just too curious. There was something exciting about trying to figure out the answer to this mystery on his own. There had to be an underlying technique here that he was missing.

Jack returned to the clearing and started adding the ingredients to the pot. 

“25 silvers, yes?” The man confirmed while observing Jack cooking.

“Yes. That’s it.”

The fire was losing durability, so Jack threw more twigs into it. As he was about to throw the last one, he looked at the branch, then the fire, and his eyes opened wide. He reached into the fire and picked up one of the burning sticks, but it immediately stopped burning as he pulled it out. Stupid, stupid game, Jack thought to himself. “Tell you what? Do you happen to have any fat on you?”

“Excuse me?” The man said, a little insulted. 

“No. You misunderstand. Animal fat. Do you have some?”

“I don't have the skinner profession. You would have to ask a skinner for that.” 

“Right, right. Okay, yes, then 25 silvers.”

Jack had just had an idea. He would just have to wait for the right customer to arrive. In the meantime, he would keep crafting using the methods he was more used to. The truth was that he had never crafted a vase, and he might as well try to pinch one before he moved on to experiment with a new crafting technique while trying a new recipe.

The vase recipe he’d unlocked upon reaching level 9 contained little to no information on how to craft it. It just said that he had to make a vase shape. How was he supposed to do that? That’s what he needed to know. Sighing, he tried to look for help online. “How to craft a vase, pottery, New Earth,” he typed. 

“Pottery skill tree. No. Market value for vases. No.” After looking through several articles, he found no tutorials on how to craft a vase. Felix was still offline. Should he just settle with sticking with what he already knew how to do? Should he just craft plates? Or bows?

“Wait a minute. Duh, Jack. Why are you being so stupid? Some people do pottery outside of the game!”

How could he have been so foolish? He had been too narrow-minded! The whole crafting system in the game was based on real crafts. Most of them had been replaced with industrial processes, but there had to be some enthusiasts or people who were into doing crafts the old-fashioned way. Even if the crafting process in the game was slightly different, at least it was a starting point.

This time, he slightly altered his search parameters: “Handcrafts, hobby, vase, pottery, DIY.” Dozens of results popped up. Jack scrolled through them and found one that he particularly liked. “The easiest way to make a vase,” it read. Jack opened it. It was a video of a pretty girl with freckles, black hair, green eyes, and a sunny disposition. Apart from having a clean apron, she kind of reminded him of Jenny Potter, his pottery instructor.

The girl in the video followed the same steps Jenny had taught him when he first started pottery. She made two balls of clay and then pressed them with her thumbs. She proceeded to pinch the walls and then flatten the rims. “Wait! Is she making pinch pots?” For a moment, Jack thought he had landed on the wrong video. This video didn’t have many visualizations. This wasn’t a well-established channel. Could it be that the video was mislabeled, and this was a tutorial on making pinch pots instead?

Just as Jack was about to look for another tutorial, he caught the potter doing something he had never seen before. She got a small blade and scored the rims of both pots. “What is she doing?” After leaving several marks along the rim of both vases, she moistened them with a damp sponge. The potter carefully brought the two pots together, rim with rim. By scoring the clay and then wetting it, she had somehow managed to glue them together before smoothing the joint with a damp sponge.

“Now what? All she has done is glue two pots together,” he murmured.

The potter went on to cut a small hole in what used to be the bottom of one of the pinch pots, forming the new rim of the newly formed vase. She removed the excess clay and smoothed it with a sponge. “Genius!” Jack dropped his jaw. It was such a simple technique, but it made so much sense.

The potter wasn’t done yet. She rolled a lump of clay into a thick, short cylinder. Jack wondered if the potter in the video was about to start making coils, but the cylinder was too short and thick, almost like a sausage. She gently flattened the ends of the cylinder and then used the same method of scoring and moistening both ends and two spots in the vase. “Handles,” Jack whispered. The potter joined the two handles to the vase, using a paddle tool to smooth and blend them perfectly into the vase.

Jack watched the video again.

“BOOOO!”

“Ah!” Jack yelped, frightened. He whirled toward the deep rumble that had startled him and found Horace laughing heartily. “Look, Amari! If this were out in the real world, he would have peed his pants!” 

“Y-you guys? But you just left 10 minutes ago?!”

“Ha! We’re that good!” Horace said happily.

He looked over at Amari, carrying two cages made of wood and vine, where two winged bugs slept. The dragonflies’ iridescent wings were folded neatly along their slender, segmented bodies. There was something strange about the wings. The edges seemed to glisten under the light like sharp knives. Seeing scores and marks in the cages similar to the jade mantises, it looked like this insect was quite dangerous as well. Thankfully, its segmented eyes were blank and empty, while its delicate legs gripped the twisted strands of the cage. 

Amari placed the cages in the tent, and Marie didn’t bother changing the bags this time. The team seemed refreshed, newly arrived from a vacation. After having a hard time with the crickets, having an easy time capturing the razor dragonflies hugely boosted their morale. Jack didn’t know if he should be annoyed at the childish prank Horace had pulled on him or happy to see his teammates a little perkier.

“I know you served us, but can we have another meal? Just to top us up before we go looking for the queen?” Amari asked politely.

“Of course!” Just as Jack was about to leave the clearing, he stopped himself. “By the way. Do any of you have any animal fat?”

All exchanged confused glances. 

“No. Why? Do you want to make torches?” Amari asked.

Jack nodded. Amari was knowledgeable. He immediately honed in on the only recipe Jack knew which required fat.

“Don’t you already have two fires going on?” Marie complained. “Why do you need more?”

“It’s just… I just need a torch. Alright?”

Horace stepped forward. “I don’t have any animal fat, but I have a couple of torches. Will that work? Or did you actually want to craft your own?”

“You do?! That’s great! Fantastic! Thanks!”

Horace has given you 3x[Basic Torches].

“Wait! I haven’t even paid you the money for them,” Jack protested.

“Don’t worry about it. Consider it a gift.”

Jack looked at Horace and saw something had changed between them. It wasn’t just the prank or the gift. He was looking at him differently. It made him feel esteemed for lack of a better word. It was as if he was wearing brand-new smart clothes. It was a good feeling.

“Stay put! I’ll make you a stew so you can be on your way.”

Jack ran out of the clearing. It wasn’t because he was eager to serve more food to his friends. Maybe a little, but no. He had the torches he was missing! He wanted them out of there so that he could take another shot at making coiled vases.

Ch. 48 - Sommer Crickets

INDEX

Ch. 50 - Vases