Daylight brought Steve hollering that breakfast was ready. There was fish and rice stew leftover from last night, so I had the last of my chocoberries and some bear jerky. Everybody sat around the fire in silence, with the lack of coffee on this world, morning interactions weren’t exactly boisterous. Eventually when everyone was moving around and seemed fairly coherent Debbie cleared her throat.

“We were given 30 days, left on the second, got here on the third, and took two days to build the keep. Yesterday we took a day off so that gives us a little over 3 weeks, 24 days until whatever happens next. I say we spend a week here, building up infrastructure and stockpiling trade goods. We drop it off at the village and cash in accrued XP. Depending on how things go we either come back and do it again, or make another decision. Questions, comments, concerns?”

“What kind of infrastructure and trade goods?”

“Use your own judgement, just keep us all in the loop so we’re not duplicating efforts. I’m going to set traps in the woods, try and clear out some of the smaller monsters and build up skins.”

John jerked his hand at our crude smokehouse. “I’m gonna build a permanent replacement for that piece of crap if nobody objects. A good smokehouse will keep us from wasting a ton of meat.”

Turns out they had bought a two-man buck saw with their XP, and Hunter and Steve signed up to start harvesting lumber for the group. Allison went with Debbie so two people would know where the trapline was, which made sense. I volunteered to come up with something for group sanitation and Jeri immediately chimed in to help me. We all agreed to work till midday when we’d meet back here for a communal meal.

I started down the path towards the lake as Jeri fell in behind me. She picked up a twig from the ground and flicked it at me, and I paused for her to catch up when I felt the impact.

“So what’s the plan, Jack? Hygiene sounds awesome and if you got us indoor showers I’m pretty sure one of the women here would have your babies.”

“What’d Hunter have to say on that offer?”

“I didn’t say it would be me, you ass. So what’s the plan?”

“I don’t know. We could probably come up with some kind of screen to put in the lake, to isolate piranhas from a single section. Give us a place to bathe and wash clothes.”

“Doesn’t seem very fancy but would be better than nothing. What kind of screen?”

“Shit, I don’t know. It depends on how small the fish we have to keep out are. I’m here to check out the shallows and see what’s what. We’re still in the planning stage.”

She gave up on questions and followed me as I lay down on the edge of the rocks and peered into the crystal clear water. The fish were plentiful in the shallows, but only minnow sized. I tossed a piece of jerky into the water and watched a tiny frenzy rip it into shreds. I gave a low whistle and Jeri spoke my thoughts out loud.

“Holy shit. If you put in a screen, it better have some tiny mesh and be stronger than all get out. Even with that, I still won’t want to get in the water.”

“Still in the planning stage, Jeri. Obviously we need to rethink the screen idea. How do you feel about a solar shower?”

“I like the word shower. How’s it work?”

“Shit, did you never go camping back in the real world?”

“Yes, in a camper like a normal human being. What’s a solar shower?”

“It’s basically a bucket full of water with a spigot on the bottom. Sun comes down and warms the water, you trigger the spigot and viola, a hot shower. There’s plenty of bells and whistles you can add on, but that’s the basics.”

“Sounds good to me. What’s our first step?”

“Scouting locations.”

I got up and walked off without answering any of her follow up questions. I had an idea about maybe filling the shower automatically and I followed the shoreline up to the base of the cliff. The rock was worn smooth from years of overspray from the falls, but it was flat enough it didn’t seem too risky. I had to speak up over the sound of the falling water so Jerri could hear me.

“We put up a hollow pipe on a pivot with a float on one end. When the float is down the water travels through the pipe and fills the bucket, when its full the pipe inverts and quits collecting water from the falls.”

“What are you going to make the pipe out of, Jack?”

“How the hell should I know?” We were walking away from the edge now, and my voice was a little louder than I’d intended. I grimaced, and shrugged at her apologetically and started again. “We could look for bamboo or clay or something, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet. I imagine we’re going to build it out of the same thing as everything else, wood and sweat.”

She nodded and led the way into the tree line. I used my knife to cut a sample out of a couple of trees until I found a denser grain in a tree that was a decent diameter. I slapped it with the blade of my knife and pointed to one of the other ones I’d tried earlier.

“I’ll take this one for building the bucket, if you think you can harvest some sap from the other. It feels and smells like creosote so I’m guessing it would go a long way to waterproofing whatever we build.”

“And you’ve got a way to harvest sap?”

“Uhmm, sure, just a second.” I pulled up the wikipedia entry on maple syrup and skimmed through it before I shrugged at her. “I’m pretty sure you just put a hole in it and the sap will drip out over time.”

“What size hole?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Trial and error, Jeri. You act like I’ve done this kind of shit before.”

She muttered something under her breath but I tuned her out and focused on my axe. Working my way through the trunk, I wished I’d bought a double bit axe like a lumberjack carried instead of a maul, but eventually I had it mostly down. I spared a look around to make sure I had a clear path and Jeri wasn’t in the way before I finished it off. There was that stomach clenching moment when the tree started to move and I backpedaled to avoid a bad bounce. The tree slammed to the ground and I moved forward to begin trimming off the extra. I was making some headway when Jeri came back and caught my attention.

“It’s slow going, but I’ve got sap collecting in a little bark basket thing I made. What’s next?”

“We got to come up with a water tub, the pipe to fill it, and supports to hold it all up over our head.” I gestured at the tree I was working over. “I took this bad boy to build the tub, but feel free to jump in where ever.”

Jeri shrugged at me. “I’ll put up the supports. Got to be pretty strong to hold up all the water, right?”

“Yep, sturdy as hell cause we’re gonna be standing under it.”

“I’ve got it.”

She walked off towards the lake while I went back to my tree. I’d seen tree trunk buckets before. Saw off a chunk of trunk, chisel out most of the heart leaving an inch or so in the bottom and on the sides and you have a water-tight bucket. .I needed something on a larger scale but figured I could swipe the idea for a start. I left the tree lying horizontal and started into it from the top side. I started the rough work with my axe and when I’d cleared quite a bit out, I switched over to the chisels. It took me quite a few hours but after a while it started to vaguely resemble a horse trough. I had plans to use tongue and groove to extend the sides and make it deeper, but the afternoon had drifted away from me and I headed back up to the keep leaving it unfinished.

Everybody else was sitting around eating when I got up to the campfire. John showed off his plate, unreasonably proud of the meal.

“They ain’t onions like from home but they taste a lot like them. I found ‘em yesterday when we went fishing. All the plants of the allum family are edible, so when I smelled these I figured they had to be too. Liver and onions, just like back home.”

I wanted to tell him if he’d been eating that shit back home, then he had problems. Instead I kept my mouth shut and took the plate. Vitamins from the liver served with native greens, it was probably the healthiest meal I’d had since I woke up in this mess. It wasn’t something I would have ever eaten back home, but once I started on it, it was better than I expected. I focused on eating and halfway listened to their conversations.

Hunter and Steve had taken down a dozen trees, which was pretty impressive before you considered just how much firewood we went through in a day. John had kept the smoker going, and was rendering down fat from the animals with a plan to make candles or lamp oil, depending on how successful he was at refining it. Allison and Debbie had killed a couple of crabadillos on their trip, and left a dozen traps out someone would need to check in the morning. Jeri had reported on our progress with a solar shower, and both of the other ladies mentioned they’d kick in on the project tomorrow. It wasn’t until the talk turned to our plans now that we were off the clock that it got interesting.

John was headed out with his e-tool to take soil samples, looking to site his garden. Steve was going with because the buddy system kept you alive in this world. Allison and Debbie were headed down to the lake to wash clothes and get cleaned up, they weren’t willing to wait on my solar shower. That definitely seemed the most interesting but I assumed I was not invited. Jeri and Hunter did ask me to tag along with them, and I turned that offer down. As predicted they were the first to want to build their own place and move out. The surprise was what they were planning on building. They’d picked out one of the forest giants not too far from the keep and were planning a swiss family robinson style treehouse. My inner 12 year old thought it sounded awesome, but the adult me had a raging fear of heights brought on by a failed carabiner and an asshole on belay who was not paying attention. I took a hard pass on helping lay out the treehouse, but because I didn’t want to look like an idiot I gave the first excuse that popped into my head.

“I’m gonna work on building my own place.”

Once the decision had been made, it didn’t seem like too bad an idea. I had a secure space to sleep already, but it would be nice to have a place of my own. It wasn’t too long after I made the declaration that the group around the fire broke up, and everyone went their own way. I got stuck feeding some green brush into the pit under the smokehouse, and then wandered off as well, scouting for a good location.

I wanted to be within hollering distance of the keep and whatever Hunter and Jeri ended up building. I also wanted to be fairly close to the water for convenience sake. On the other hand, distance equaled privacy, and I knew that at some point as this camp expanded it would get pretty crowded around the keep itself. When you added to all that the terrain itself I’d limited my options pretty good. I wanted a dirt floor instead of rock so I could put in a root cellar some day. That meant away from the cliff face, but I wanted it relatively free of trees so I didn’t have to spend the first couple of days just clearing land. I scouted around for a couple of hours before I found a spot that met my criteria, and it was probably worth it. Straight out from the keep parallel to the water’s edge the ground eventually started to slope back up in a low hill away from the water. I paced out a chunk of that hillside to serve as my place.

When I had a good firm plan in my head, I turned around and walked away to start gathering materials. The trees I found near the water weren’t willows exactly, but they had that same droopy kind of cast to them, and more importantly, the small branches felt right. I cut a withe from it, about the diameter of my thumb, and gave it an experimental flex. As close as I could tell it really was some kind of willow, so I set to cutting more. When I had a bundle as big as I cared to carry, I hauled it back to my place and then went back for more.

I killed a single crabadillo while I was working, but didn’t really see anything else. I wondered if the cave bear had kept other stuff from congregating in his area, and now that it was dead how long before other critters started coming in? For now I was just happy to be working in relative peace, although I kept scanning my surroundings as I went just in case. Nothing showed up as I began to weave my withes together in a big loose basket. I always hated this part of it, and would have loved to use chainlink for my basket just like in the real world but didn’t have the option. My plan was to make a bunch of the baskets and fill them with soil from the hill like gabions. Laying the gabions out in a half circle, in front of the hole I’d cut in the side of the hill to create them, ought to give me earthen walls all the way around with a minimum of effort. Lay in some logs across the top, then cover them with sod and it would be weatherproof as soon as the sod caught. I’d planned for efficiency as much as possible but it was still one hell of a project for a guy by himself. The light started to fade before I’d completed more than a single gabion, and I took off to the keep before I ended up having to travel in the dark. It probably wasn’t really all that late, but I was bone tired.