Building a Better Tomorrow

[greatcleavage]

Who: Roy Greenhilt and OPEN
What: Roy is doing construction work and needs help, plus he has questions for others!
When: November 13-20th
Where: Outside the mana pool located in the former monkey compound.
Warnings: What you bring?


Stone by stone, the area that had once been home to countless cannibalistic apes gained a semblance of order.

Literally stone by stone; Roy could plan and design buildings, but he lacked the tools and the knowledge to shape stone any more than crudely. Wood was a better resource, and with his hatchet Roy could make makeshift joins like giant blocky teeth, but without better resources wood didn't have the durability of stone, and that was important.

So the structures and buildings Roy put together were ramshackle. No hope for it. So long as they served their purpose, what more could he ask for? A coop for the bludrocs had been finished first; now he turned his attention to making a large building, out of blocks of stone cut from the nearby seaside cliffs and hauled here with brute force, and wooden poles cut as best he could manage and jammed into the ground.

Roy had big plans, because he believed they were, if not literally necessary, so highly advantageous for the long-term survival of everyone here that he couldn't justify not doing this. And thus he labored on.

Honestly, though... the man looked exhausted. Not physically; he could honestly keep this up for days without flagging. Blocks of stone and trees' worth of wood were no real burden to him. No, his exhaustion was all spiritual, bordering from a quiet conviction that had only grown in strength over time: they were all doomed. A chaotic, disorganized bunch that was one pig head on a stake away from being a literary study of the madness that lurked within mankind as soon as the trapping of civilization were stripped away, with a series of unavoidable, unfightable, unmanageable disasters queued up to batter then down till they broke. His last breath of sympathy for the Storyteller had utterly vanished when that god had made clear in no uncertain terms that they were to leave the mana pool in the temple compound utterly indefensible, thus guaranteeing they would be assaulted on the islets in due time. Roy, in other words, was a man bereft of hope; his efforts to build, to protect, to preserve were all grim defiance of the inevitable at this point, a commitment to going down swinging.

Not the healthiest attitude, but it kept him going.

No laboring in grim solitude for this fighter, though! As people passed through, emerging from the mana pool in the former compoundd to conduct whatever mainland business they had to accomplish, Roy stopped to offer them a wave. "Excuse me, just one moment? I'm looking for more resources for this task, anyone who can craft, and compiled information about the Storyteller." (One of these things is not like the others.)

Comments

[greatcleavage]

Fustercluck. [Roy has to keep pointing that out because he still feels both terrible and picked-on for being part of the expedition that discovered that katamari monstrosity.] That may be the answer, honestly -- anything that large gets noticed and eaten without exception over time.

[bloodyashes]

[Yeah well imagine the feeling that the people who found TWO of them have.]

That's not wildlife, that's some kind of abomination against the concept of wildlife.

[greatcleavage]

If we start listing all the things that are abominations of the concepts of things, 'adventure design' would be so high up there it'd render everything else moot. [Roy has been sitting on a few serious complaints about, well, everything -- no surprise that one or two would bubble to the surface here and there.] But that does raise serious questions about how long we can sustain ourselves here.

[bloodyashes]

[And now Roy is getting the kind of puzzled look that he's probably getting used to, where he's just said something that isn't crazy for his universe but makes no sense to anyone else.

He'll just... Respond to the second point.]

At least food is the only immediate concern. There's enough water to go around.

[He sighs and rests a hand on his chin.

It'd help if we had any idea what the seasons are like here. If right now is the peak growing season, we're screwed, but if it's a lean period, we're in good shape, as long as no one gets too sick of mangoes.

[greatcleavage]

For the most part the latitude of the island is apparently consistent with a tropical or subtropical climate, meaning it likely has relatively warm seasonal pattern and we can expect a wet season at some point. But that, and I'm not exaggerating here, varies on a daily basis -- I don't think the island actually has a fixed point of existence relative to the world we're on, which means that the tropical weather pattern is likely to be reliable over a long period of time but inconsistent in the short.

[In other words, don't be surprised to wake up to snow tomorrow. Do be surprised to wake up to a week of snow. That's what Roy has concluded.]

[bloodyashes]

[Asch hums thoughtfully.]

That's consistent with the kind of plant life around here, at least, and a good thing for us in the long run. Hopefully we won't have to worry about the potential for planting a set of crops and then having all of them die off in a frost because none of us realized winter started halfway through their growing cycle.

[Another hum.]

Are the islets the same?

[greatcleavage]

The islets were, as near as I can tell, directly created, summoned, or otherwise brought to their present location by the Storyteller. Ruins and all. As such I'm hesitant to venture anything about them, but my working assumption is that they are close enough to Enso for the same rules to apply. Muffet's having some farming success, at the very least.