Day 2.5

August made it three layers deep into the right-hand side wall before he ran out of stones that were large enough to be of use, and at that point, he’d once again given up on digging due to his hands protesting the continued vibrations.

“What do I do for a door?” August wondered.

Sealing himself inside the [Lean-to] with a new wall every night was certainly a solution, but it wasn’t a good one. Maybe he could make a rectangular frame out of branches and then tie it to an upright with the vine?

August almost felt silly building these things from sticks, dirt and rocks—it was almost like when he was a kid, and he’d crawled underneath sheets, pillows and chairs to make a hideout in his room, protection from the shadowed corners, the branches curling against his window during the night, and the monsters that sometimes roamed his house.

“What I’d give for a pillow,” August hummed, gazing up at the blue sky above and the faded Moon that was just peeking over the top of the shelter.

[Analysis].

Gyges

The second Moon of Gaia and the closest of the three.

August had missed them last night, their position somewhere behind him and out of sight from inside the [Lean-to]. He leaned forward, far enough to see the edge of the smaller Moon behind it, and once against used the spell.

Cottus

The first Moon of Gaia and the oldest of the three.

Three moons in total, Briareus and Gyges, absolutely dwarfed the much smaller Cottus, the colour of the three celestial bodies hard to determine from the almost transparent façade of sky that hung above him.

The descriptions were noteworthy, each relating to something different rather than a singular descriptive factor—It wasn’t Briareus, the large, Gyges the medium, and Cottus the small as he might have thought. It was [Largest], [Closest], and [Oldest] respectively, and August wondered if there wasn’t any clue to be found there.

There was a big clue present that had actually eluded him, and it struck him like lightning.

“Why do they have names?” August said, frowning. “Why does the planet have a name?”

Who named them? Planets and moons didn’t have names in a vacuum, and it was far larger in scope for planetary bodies to have been named than just some insane monster island. Was it the same person who’d come up with Devil’s Nest? The same person responsible for that serial number he’d seen in Ladybug’s summary?

Earth, back home, had been named by the people who lived there, and the Moon… well, words were constructs created by the dominant species to facilitate communication, so ‘Moon’ was just a category that had been created. Did Earth’s Moon even have a name outside of that category? August had never even considered the thought before.

The point was, humans had named the planet, humans had named the Moon, and humans had named countries, islands, cities and everything else in his little corner of the universe—so the question was, who’d done the same here?

Who’d chosen the names Briareus, Gyges and Cottus? Was that a translation of the original names, done by [Analysis] so that he could even read it? Or was the alphabet of whoever named it really so strikingly familiar to languages of the Earth?

August lifted his hands to his face, staring through his fingers at the lake.

Devil’s Nest was even worse—Devil was a concept from Earth, from a religion that had spread across most of the known world. He wasn’t even sure what it had originally meant, or if it had a definition—it might well have been a name.

Why would a word from Earth even be here on a planet called Gaia? Was the word Devil supposed to be some kind of translation for ‘monster’? Monster’s Nest seemed like it fit pretty well for this place, given the things he’d seen so far.

None of that even took into consideration the [Menu] and all the things it seemed to be able to do. Somebody had built it, given it menus, categories, functions, and now here August was, afflicted by it.

“Where are they?” August sighed.

How did he even get caught up in this mess—what business did someone from Gaia want with a nobody from Earth? There were actual astronauts on Earth, people that had walked on the Moon, people that were smart enough to make repairs on complicated machinery in space. Why would they bring a fade into the background extra like him?

“I want to go home,” August murmured. “I want to sleep in my bed.”

These days it was hard to think of his bedroom without thinking about Alice, not after the things they’d done there. It worsened his mood, though, because his mind followed the pattern and left him sitting with the guilt.

He’d never been able to say no to Alice, and nor had he wanted to—If Alex had known what they’d done behind his back, August wouldn’t have been around long enough to end up on Devil’s Nest in the first place.

August sighed and shook his head.

He started sorting through the various shapes of wood he had retrieved on that last trip into the forest, setting out a large, barebones frame on the dirt. He measured them between the two uprights to make sure they would make it most of the way across and then set them next to each other.

August propped one end up with his knee and then held it against the upright, winding vine around it until he managed to tie it off. He then took a branch that was perhaps a meter long and stood it up on its end right next to the much thicker upright.

He spent a moment tieing the bottom of his gate together, and then once he was done, he started on the top of the gate. August tied it to the upright, just like he had the first time, and then to the side of the gate—he let it go, and it sagged downwards to the ground.

Ignoring the mess, he searched through the piles for a few other pieces to use as braces; he’d need them to have the gate maintain its shape. He found some useful pieces of wood and then set about tying them up—sure enough, the gate stayed upright this time.

Opening it outwards was met with some resistance as the vine tied to the upright and didn’t really rotate very well, but the bottom of the braces seemed to help keep it upright.

Basic Gate Blueprint Unlocked

August winced at the abomination before him, wondering if anyone had ever seen something so tragic.

August fingered the vine wrapped around the upright, making it a bit easier to spin but otherwise leaving the horrible mess as it was. He’d have to fill the gaps between the braces up at some point because anything smaller would get through.

“It’s something, at least,” August decided. “A gate today, a fortress with auto-turrets lining the walls tomorrow—that’s how that saying goes, isn’t it, Ladybug?”

Ladybug trilled in agreement.

“Nobody like a yes-woman, you know?” August laughed. “Or a yes-monster, as the case may be—if I end up riding an [Otrogon] off a cliff, you better tell me it’s a bad idea before I’m falling to my death, alright?”

He received a dubious tilt of the head in response, which technically was what he asked for, wasn’t it?

“We’ll call it a work in progress,” August said dryly.