between then and know

[intricate_engineer]

It was a trap.
Glen should have seen it coming, but she'd thought the offer might be genuine. Wasn't the possibility of immortality worth the risk?
Well, not this time.
Her pendant, her way out, was broken.
She tried to use it anyway.

Comments

[intricate_engineer]

She gathers the pegs and the few nails and hinges in small piles next to the chest.

The design of the furniture is interesting. It suggest a high level of craftsmanship. The furniture carved out of a single piece of wood suggest genetic engineering, magic, or giant trees. The lack of other technology makes her doubt genetic engineering, but doesn't rule it out.

She heads outside to judge the time and the weather.

[pythbox]

Evening, just past sunset. The sky is clear, and the temperature is warm but getting colder; there's a bit of wind picking up, too.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen heads back to the inner room.

She shouldn't need to worry about being eaten. There have been no signs of life whatsoever. No recent kills, no droppings, not even any living plants.

But it's going to get cold soon, very cold if the other deserts she's lived in are anything like this one.
She's wearing light clothes and is already getting chilly.

She needs a fire.
She has wood, but no matches.
She doesn't have a blanket either, another emergency basic she didn't think to include.

Glen is the architect of interplanetary travel. She'd never expected to be stranded. She'd prepared to be injured or holing up somewhere safe until the danger passed, but stuck? Never.

Of course, she thinks, staring at the wood. Even then, matches would have been useful. Glen's just never had much thought for wilderness survival.

She wishes Alex was here. This is, essentially, his job.
Of course, if he was stuck here, he'd be trying to survive until Glen could come rescue him.

She could start a fire with her computer's generator, but it's unlikely she could dismantle and reassemble it with the available tools. She's not going to sacrifice her computer, not unless things get truly desperate.

Wasn't there something about rubbing two sticks together?
But that seems ridiculous, she doubts she could build up enough friction...

Flint. She needs flint. It might still be light enough.
She heads back outside.

[pythbox]

The flat dead ground is very flat and very dead and not especially resource-heavy, but if she inspects the outside of this hill, she'll find a few promising-looking rocks. Actually, quite a few promising-looking rocks. Some resemble flint; others look like they could be raw gemstones, if she's in the market for those.

[intricate_engineer]

She circles the hill.

It's been a while since she's used flint and even longer since she's seen it in its natural state, but she can't take every rock.

So she grabs every rock that's a dark black, has broken into a sharp edge, or that has an oily shimmer. She hopes one of the criteria will be effective. If she picked up any gemstones, it's by accident.

She stops when her bag begins to be difficult to lift. She does one last check of the surrounding area before heading inside.

[pythbox]

Surrounding area: Still dead. Still flat. Still no signs of anything coming to eat her.

Inside, everything is right where she left it.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen settles down next to the chest and sweeps the rocks onto the floor. She digs into her small toolkit and pulls out a small wire cutter with a steel head. Then, she dims her computer until the outlines of her hands are barely visible in the dark.
She begins striking the rocks, one by one, watching for sparks.

[pythbox]

Rock number two: sparky!

[intricate_engineer]

Glen grins and turns her computer back on.

Now to start a fire.
Glen has never started a fire before.
Well, once, but that was an accident! It also involved several unintended exothermic reactions and a tank of hydrogen which doesn't seem relevant here.

She doesn't user her paper, because though easy, it would be a waste of her very finite resources.
She definitely does not use the books.

Instead she takes the knife and begins to shave slivers off a piece of wood. Once she has a small pile, she places several small pieces of wood around it, then strikes sparks into the shavings.

[pythbox]

Sparks, sparks, sparks... yep, that's a fire. It would be congratulating her on her technological prowess if it weren't too busy burning.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen pushes a few larger sticks in and makes sure the area around the flames is clear.
She accidentally breathes in some smoke and coughs.
She probably should have built the fire closer to the door.

[pythbox]

The ceilings are high enough that it shouldn't be too bad.

Burning continues. Different pieces of wood have different characteristics as fuel, sometimes very different - some of them burn fast, while some hardly seem to burn at all. Maybe some of the wood is fake, and made of non-flammable materials.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen takes notes.
It's hard to judge differences in color in the dim light, but records what she can, taking note of the smell of the wood and the different patterns of grains.


She drinks some water and morosely swallows her "dinner".
She's going to get sick of these pills really fast.

But her hunger is forgotten, when she turns to the books and the tools.

She picks up the tools first.
She can't place the silvery brown leather, but maybe some of the other materials will be easier to identify.

[pythbox]

At a glance, all the metal in the tools seems to be the same stuff, a steel-like substance - perhaps it is steel, perhaps not - that also matches the material in the round metal plates.

Anything with a handle has it wrapped in that silvery leather. It's held up very well over however long it's been here; none of it seems cracked or stiff.

On closer inspection, those long sticks seem to be various sizes of paintbrush, with steel-ish bindings holding the brush heads to the leather-wrapped handles. Rather than having bristles, the brush heads seem to be made of a dense spongy material shaped into a number of different configurations. Some blunt cones, some cones with rounded points, some chisel-like wedges. It's hard to tell what exactly the brush heads are made of; there aren't too many ways to manufacture a dense sponge like that, and there are no signs that it was cut or molded or otherwise shaped into its present form. As far as it's possible to tell by looking, they might as well have grown that way on extremely well-standardized plants.

Taken in context, perhaps some of the other less-identifiable tools might be paint scrapers or similar; the metal plates could even be palettes. Why someone felt the need to bring a painting kit (and no paints or canvas) to their poorly defended stronghold when fleeing mysterious terrifying monsters is a separate question, and no obvious answer presents itself.

Whatever those brush heads are, they're either unused or very well cleaned: there is no paint residue on any of them, and they're all the same shade of pale blue. In fact, there's no paint on anything.

Among the tools is a small bowl or jar, wide and round with straight vertical sides and a rim that might be shaped to fit some sort of lid, made of a blue-grey stone not otherwise found in the vicinity. It's as inexplicably pristine as the rest.

And one of the mysterious leather-wrapped rods turns out to conceal a small knife, capped like a pen rather than sheathed like a weapon. The blade is not quite two inches long, straight and narrow, with the sharp edge turning a forty-five degree angle at the end to meet the dull edge and form a point. Unlike every other example of metal in these tools, it's also very, very blue. Blue like a butterfly's wings. If she tests it, she'll find that the tiny knife is extremely sharp.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen taps the bowl gently with the tip of her wire cutter and tests the knife on a piece of wood.

[pythbox]

The bowl makes a quiet little sound somewhere between a tick and a chime when tapped.

The knife makes marks in the wood very effectively. It's too small to be a really efficient tool for cutting large pieces of wood into smaller pieces, but its strength and sharpness are more than equal to the task.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen tests the knife on the leather and the steel-like metal.
She also pours a few drops of water into the bowl, rolls them around, and checks the water for residue or a change in color.

[pythbox]

There was a little bit of dust in the bowl and now there is a little bit of dust in the water. It doesn't seem to be particularly interesting dust - the same stuff that's distributed here and there throughout these rooms. Besides that, nothing comes of that experiment.

The blue knife scratches the leather and makes an unpleasant skreeking noise but no marks when scraped against the metal.

[intricate_engineer]

She doesn't want to test the bowl in the fire yet, so instead she dips one of the paintbrushes into the water and runs the tip across the floor.

[pythbox]

Now there is a line of water on the floor, very precisely drawn, and the head of the paintbrush is wet and a little dusty from contact with water and floor respectively.

[intricate_engineer]

She'd been hoping some trace of color had remained in the sponge, but it seems the brushes were very well cleaned or unused.
The bowl will be useful for boiling water. She can used heated stones and the tongs.

Glen's exhausted. She can explore the surrounding area in the daylight.
She should try to sleep, if her hunger and worry will let her.

[pythbox]

Nothing is going to interrupt her if she does manage to sleep. The night will go on for a while, getting colder as it does, and then the sun will rise and the temperature trend will begin to reverse; but inside the hill she will be somewhat insulated from these fluctuations.

[intricate_engineer]

She does manage to sleep eventually.
Her computer wakes her eight hours later. She has a moment of disorientation as she tries to place her surroundings. She groans when she remembers, and sits up.

She's starving. She swallows an emergency ration tablet. It doesn't help.
She drinks some water. It doesn't help either.

She stumbles to her feet and goes to the mouth of the cave.

[pythbox]

Early morning sunlight throws long shadows from the dead trees. Nothing moves, except for the wind.

[intricate_engineer]

Well, she's not going to run out of wood.
She steps out into the sun to judge the temperature.