Even with the hyenas dispersing, it didn’t seem wise to venture from the safety of my plateau with zero SP in reserve and my HP sitting at a precarious [11/22]. Tomorrow would be a new day, with renewed stamina, revitalized HP, and new opportunities for hunting. That left me with the remainder of today to contemplate my next moves.

My encounter with the tortoise had given me one thing: experience. I was 88% of the way toward reaching level 3. Tomorrow, I should probably start off by hunting down some easy, attainable prey: that would prevent immediate starvation, and hopefully boost me up to the next level and give me more abilities -- or “skill points,” as they had been called -- to work with.

I wondered if the tortoise shell from yesterday would persist. During the brief preview I had gotten of this world from Athena, I had gotten the impression that slain monsters would disintegrate after their remains had been looted. I guess that left the question of what became of a corpse whose “remains” remained untaken: if there was still meat in that shell, then it seemed probable that the turtle shell would remain. What would become of that meat if neither I nor other predators could get to it? Would it just sit there and rot away? That had to be something that had happened already: a tortoise dying inside of its shell was surely routine in this world, if tortoises died of “old age” or any kind of “natural causes.”

Since I had nothing to do with my afternoon but wait, I decided to track the time by scratching out a rudimentary sundial on the rock surface of the plateau, scratching out an arc around one of the loose rocks that I found, which stood several inches tall, enough to cast a visible shadow. The word “hour” didn’t have any meaning on its own, but there was nothing arbitrary about the word “day” -- that indicated the rotation of the planet about its axis, easily measured as the duration of time between one sunrise and the next, roughly speaking, if you had tools for measuring such things. Partition that “day” into 24 equal portions, and that unit of time was your “hour.” Since I was creating my own units, there was no reason that a day had to be 24 hours -- I could partition a “day” into 20 equal segments if I felt like it, or 10 if I felt like making things more “metric” -- but 24 was a convenient number that could be easily divided into quarters, eighths, or thirds, something that a factor of 10 wouldn’t do so cleanly. Plus, if I met any other people from Earth, there was a decent chance that they’d arrive at a 24 hour day as the same natural Schelling point -- why fix what ain’t broken?

However, creating a sundial wasn’t as simple as drawing a circle around a rock and marking it with 24 equidistant marks. The relative angle of the sun changed more during the morning and evening than it did closer to noon, and from my physics background, I was also aware that the earth’s shape and axial tilt had something to do with sundial accuracy -- though, if you pressed me for the specifics, I couldn’t give an exact formula. I briefly gave a thought to trying to derive the angles from first principles, but then remembered something about the angles changing depending on the orientation of a surface — vertical sundials worked differently from horizontal ones, and while the plateau seemed like a flat surface, there was no guarantee that it was one.

Sadly, the world in practice was not as perfect as a physicists’ model — there was nary a spherical cow to be found on planet earth. Heck, even earth itself wasn’t a perfect sphere, having poles that were slightly flat due to the earth’s rotation. I couldn’t assume any of the same things would be true about this world, but it seemed reasonable that the same would apply here: if this world was supposed to have seasons, then axial tilt seemed like a straightforward way to achieve that, and making a rotating planet maintain a perfectly spherical shape would require messing with the laws of physics in some majorly unnecessary ways. Hey, why fix what ain’t broken? That’s not to say I couldn’t point to plenty of things about earth that were “broken,” but if you asked me to start naming them, “axial tilt” and “flattened poles” wouldn’t be among them.

Even if I did figure out what the angle between each hour of the sundial was, how was I supposed to actually measure out 30 degrees? Just eyeball it? If I had the tools, I could make myself a protractor by folding a piece of paper to create triangles with known angles, but I didn’t have paper, let alone hands that would be dexterous to fold a piece of it. As I looked down at my claws and the rock that had once been the centerpiece of my sundial aspirations, I considered that the form of a dragon did not lend itself naturally to living the life of a scientist. Tool-making was probably a task best left to those with fingers. After all, why bother creating weapons and armor when you seemed to naturally produce them?

Still, fine motor control didn’t seem like the kind of skill or ability it was wise to neglect. I might not have fingers, but I could at least make the most of what I had, and I decided to experiment by using my front claws to pick up rocks of various sizes that I found on the surface of the plateau, first gathering them, and then stacking them, from largest to smallest. Learning to use tools — or construct them — could wait until after I had mastered the use of my own body.

Surprisingly, the most difficult part of the task proved to be lifting the heavier rocks that were toward the bottom: I had figured that a rock that I estimated to be twenty pounds or so should be well within my ability to lift, considering what my tail slaps could do to hyenas, but I was aware on some level of the concept of “muscle groups,” and a “lifting claw” motion probably worked the kind of muscles that a dragon didn’t have to rely on frequently, so it stood to reason that my forearms would be unequipped for the job.

It seemed that my hind legs were much more powerful: when it came to simply rolling large rocks around the surface of the plateau, I could push with the full force of my full body, and that made the task easy, even for rocks that seemed far too heavy for my forelimbs to lift off the ground.

Maybe it was my current lack of SP that was to blame for that -- it was clear that I could move at faster-than-normal speeds by exerting myself and expending SP to “sprint,” and perhaps I could lift heavier-than-normal objects by exerting myself when I had SP to burn. Yet another thing to test on another day.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, I peered over the edge of the plateau to confirm that the tortoise shell was still there. If I was lucky, it would still be waiting for me tomorrow, ready to be cracked open, when I woke up fully energized with both body and mind ready to find a way to crack it open.

Or, maybe the moral of this story was that I had bitten off more than I could chew -- in fact, I hadn’t even gotten as far as biting into the thing. I was a baby dragon, after all. Perhaps hunting prey as large as that tortoise was too ambitious for my station in life. Still, there was something in me that didn’t want to accept that I was incapable of taking on this challenge. And, considering how hungry I was, busting open that giant tortoise shell was exactly the kind of win that I needed right now. It had been a long day -- my satiety was now resting at a paltry 7%. 7 was supposed to be a lucky number, but right now, I felt anything but lucky. Hopefully that 7% satiety would be enough to get me through the night.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 2 Progress toward next level: 88% HP: 11/22 SP: 0/11 Satiety: 7% Traits: Carnivore Kin sensitive Abilities: Sprinting Noxious Breath