I wake up to the distinctly unpleasant feeling of something fuzzy on my nose. In my half-awakened groggy state I swing a half-closed fist at it with some force, and that's when I wake up completely and realize that what I'd just knocked off was some sort of tarantula-like spider. It's also when I scream like an eight year old girl upon, well, seeing a spider the size of one's own fist at less than a head's distance away.

The ensuing tumble of panic results in my being unceremoniously tumbled from my crappy hammock, eyes wildly scanning for the unwelcome intruder or any of it's minions. I find only its corpse, and that's when I notice a gold-green glowing mist -- just a faint trace of one -- flowing from it to me. That bar with a zero at the bottom of my HUD immediately fills two thirds of the way from the left to the right, and I take further stock of what my HUD is showing me to reveal that there's a sickly purple-red mark on my upper chest / collar area in the body display.

I point my finger in the direction of the spider and yell, "Did you bite me you little fucker?!", and smash it with my trusty rock one more time just to be sure it's dead. I try to look at myself in that area but can't actually see anything, as the angle just isn't to my advantage. It is, however, now daylight out and as a result I find the confidence to make the trip down to the pond to see if I am indeed short for this world.

Slightly out of breath, I'm careful not to block the morning light as I face eastward towards the pond and examine myself. What I see isn't… a great sign. There's a purplish-red swollen lump, around two clear puncture marks, but no angry red streaks or blackish pustules or yellow seepage or anything. So I've definitely been affected by some kind of poisonous bite, and definitely worse than a simple bee sting, but I didn't just encounter a giant recluce or something. I'll just have to keep an eye on it and hope super-healing works on venomous bites as well as thorn scratches.

In short order I've taken care of the usual affairs of morning ablutions as best I can given my technical sophistication is currently "a hole under a log and out of smelling range", calming down as I notice that there's a mild aching from the eight legged bastard's bite but it's not getting worse. The drop in adrenaline finally hits me and I decide that it's time to get some food in my stomach.

Most of the morning is consumed in the three separate fish traps I set up. No idea if any of them will even have the slightest hope of working, but the basic idea of a fish trap is fairly simple: find a spot where fish are likely to go, and then make it really easy to go one way into a confined area from that spot. I then spend a couple of hours trying to find tubers or roots to add into the mix. I'm doing this on a decided hunch: that the HUD will make it easier to tell if something is poisonous on account of how the spider bite was a different color than the thorn scratch. Because ultimately that's the only meaningful difference I can detect between the two. Happily, as it turns out, whatever super-healing I have now does work on asshole spider bites. I actually find something that looks a bit like a fairly sad carrot or maybe a radish, and it passes the skin rub and tongue-touch test pretty readily, so with a gimlet eye on my HUD I take my first bite of something digestible in a day and a half.

It… actually it crunches a lot like an over-raw potato. It tastes a little oily, and even as hungry as I am is unpleasant. But it's not sour, and the HUD gives me no warning signs. What I'm doing is still reckless, but right now my primary thought is that maybe it'll go down easier it if baked along with some pond fish.

But therein lies my next challenge -- actually starting a fire. My efforts at tinder-spotting yesterday were useless but today I am more determined. Plus there's dried-out reed fluff and I can scrape oak bark for shavings with a sharp-ish rock from one of the streams. I even manage to make a grass-twine bow to get a friction source to get going. It's still mid afternoon, and I've gotten very, very acquainted with the relationship between my green bar and how exhausted I am. Seriously, eighteen tries just to get a small spark, only to blow too hard and put it out. It only takes another three attempts at exhausting myself afterwards to avoid making that same mistake again. My next few moments, not gonna lie, a little manic.

"I have made fire! Behold, the awe and glory of technology! I am become Vishnu, destroyer of worlds!!!". I'm so caught up in my pyromaniac glee that I completely fail to notice my experience bar flashing before my eyes.

The textual popup that comes next, however, definitely gets my attention.

>

Oh. Oh, this changes everything. But first … grilled pond "trout" and carrotato a la chateau hovel.

… So, it turns out those carotatos actually do taste better when baked/grilled. Probably not so much when charred and a little burnt, but I'm hardly in a position to claim expertise here. Speaking of lacking expertise, the damned popup tease gave no hints or menus or what-have-yous for actually doing that "constructing or designating" of research stations. And to make matters worse, I'm running out of daylight again and my little shelter needs a serious pick-me-up if I'm going to avoid being spiderbait again… or worse.

I cast that gimlet eye again at the shelter I had made for myself. It was barely tall enough to stand in -- if you were near the tree-side that is; it loses half of its height on the way to the side with a door. There are gaps in spots of the wall and roof I can stick my closed fist through. It would have absolutely no chance of keeping out rain, or wind. I was maybe too focused on the whole "lions and tigers and bears!" thing yesterday. But. It's at least a decent beginning.

I head on back to the patch of waist-high grass and reeds and proceed to once again make grass rope. This time, however, it's so that I can carry a heavy bale/bundle of bound reed and haygrass -- I'm calling it haygrass -- back by slinging it over my shoulder. This gives me plenty of material to work with on fewer trips and after what can't be more than three hours I've added tied-down thatching to the roof of my little hut. I've also gathered a bunch of river rocks and mud and piled them up against the exterior wall except where my door is. That, I wove reeds into, to make a hopefully effective spider barrier against.

Granted, it now makes my tree home much darker now inside, but c'est la vie. My only lightsource now is fiery in nature and until I can make a chimney/fireplace… I'll take dark over suicidal.

By the time I'm completely done with the door, the fire I built is almost burned down. I seem to recall something about checking or banking fires so they'll be re-stokable the next day but I'll be damned if I actually know how to do that. On the off chance it might work, though, I toss a pair of logs into the cinders and try to cover them loosely with loose dirt.

I go to bed my second night in this new world very exhausted, very naked, and slightly hopeful.

~~------------~~

My third morning on this alien rock is … well, better than the second. No spiderzillas, yay! Hammock falling apart …meh. No live cinders in the firepit outside the hovel, ugh! Cold leftover baked fish for breakfast… at least I don't have to worry about starving to death now.

I sit down by the cool firepit and for the sheer convenience of it start scratching bullet points down in the dirt next to me with a stick, listing priorities for myself. They look a little something like this:

Naked == bad. Grass kilt? Need Better. Hovel. Chimney? How? Foooooooood. Plant carrotatoes. Others. Research! How?

I won't even claim to have been caught entirely off-guard when the last item disappeared and I got a HUDful of bold popup again.

>

>

>

I just about blacked out, however, with the sheer amount of information that I suddenly knew. How to knap flint like a pro. How to make charcoal. How to tan leathers and hunt game. How to weave cloth from greatoak bark fiber. The naturally edible berries, nuts, bugs, and tubers around the forest -- and those edible with processing. Centuries -- no, dozens of centuries -- of cultural techniques and know-how accumulated by entire populations, poured into my head all in a matter of seconds.

The instant I got my head back together I knew exactly what I needed to do. I would not go another day in free Willy mode, damnit! I was so focused on achieving that noble goal that I practically didn't even notice how auto-pilot it felt to climb the tree my hovel was built against high enough to find the suppler bark, strip it only from younger unforked branches, and begin the process of properly hand-separating and weaving the fibers into a burlap-like fabric. It should have been unsettling to instantly become as skilled as an expert who spent the entirety of forty years performing this task, but… compared to everything else I'd already been through?

I was going to have pants, damnit!

~~------------~~

Okay, so scratchy pants are going to take some getting used to in the absence of smallclothes. But to simply not be naked for the first time in three days? Yeah. It's the little things you miss. Like warm, plentiful, and tasty food. That won't slowly poison you like carrotatoes will unless you smoke them and then boil them. Traitor carrotatoes.

Still, crisis averted I suppose. Speaking of crisis averted, those little unlocks have given me a hint as to how I can advance further. Now that I have cultural background relevant to the history this system seems to be based around, I understand what I did earlier. Tribal lorekeepers were also fire tenders, and the act of trying to figure something out next to a kept (if cold) fire? That triggered the research station "designation". Right now I'm working on the hypothesis that demonstrating knowledge of some sort advances research unlocks, which then fill in the gaps. My little hovel and fish traps were "tall" conceptually, so I got a "wide" info money shot right to the cerebellum.

From here, I'm pretty sure I can easily pick up neolithic, but crossing into the Chalcolithic or Bronze ages is going to be… tricky, without access to the means to actually build stuff from those eras what with the whole "not having access to mines or resource trading partners". I can only hope that the tech tree is more flexible than that. I'll have to futz around and see if I can get "hidden" unlocks. Maybe … hmm… worth a shot?

I sit my non-bare ass down before the now-properly banked firepit and begin the process of creating a "proper" set of tools for myself, including a knapped and wood-handled stone hatchet made by splitting a small oak sapling of suitable size, tamping down the flint head, and then binding it in place with greatoak fiber… no, I'm calling it burlap … with burlap cloth bindings quadruple-knotted to guarantee it won't slip. I repeat the process for a pair of blunt throwing hammers and a hunting/fishing spear. I then scrawl with one of the giant thorns on oak bark next to the fire a picture of a recurve bow and another of a stone cottage with windowpanes and a small stepped garden. I scribble about tera preta and kugelculture fertilization for the farming, and add a bullet point that just reads "carrotato cultivars -- how soon?"

>

>

>

I smile viciously as I feel to be starting to get a sense of this whole thing. I once again attempt to meditate and perform those qigong exercises I had before to no avail and then scribbled down again about needing a way to sense mana and utilize it. The response I got next was… well, it was better than nothing at all, but at the same time not.

not attainable for races with Technologist trait without exposure to Eldritch entities of at least arcanism level or equivalent. >>

Not even slightly ominous. That can only end well. Everything is fine.