"There's nothing in the traps," said Noel as we reconvened at our hole-in-the-ground shelter.
"Maybe it was the rain. None of the traps were triggered. The monsters might have taken shelter too," I said.
"No, there's no sign of any monsters anywhere. I think you were right. There's nothing up here in the highlands," she said.
We mulled around, thinking about what to do. After spending a dreary, rainy night talking about our families; the things we loved, things we hated, things we missed most of all, we were determined to forge ahead. Still, I could tell how restless Noel was to get moving. She wanted to find the Jora tribe, if they were still alive, or at least find some traces of them if they weren't. To do that, we had to find a way to tell how long it had been since we walked into the Immortal of Desire's tree.
And for that, we had to leave the wasteland and to do that, we had to find the sea. I told Noel the Plains of Serenity were probably a sort of river valley, which meant we might be able to find the open sea if we went down river. We remembered that most rivers and streams ran North with respect to the Sun, so we picked that direction and began preparing to walk.
"Are you sure you don't want to walk across the highlands?" I asked.
Noel nodded. "The Jora tribe probably did that, but, I don't think it makes sense to cross so much empty land with what little food we can gather right now. Besides, I want to believe the tribesmen made it out of this hellhole. We can circle around once we find a more fertile area."
I forced Noel to take us down the path instead of rappelling off the side of the cliff. We weren't in a rush anymore and I'd rather not go through that whole ordeal again. The path was steep, but a lot easier to traverse than a cliff side, and we found a few weeds and plants hidden among the rocky terrain. None of them looked edible, but one of them had a sharp, minty smell that I figured might help keep insects away so I plucked them out and took them with me.
We came down to what used to be the Plains of Serenity and started following the cliffs that marked the highlands. We could have gone further in and followed a dry riverbed, but why waste time when we had a reasonably reliable visual marker to follow right here. We always camped away from the cliff side, just in case there was a rock slide, and we set up our traps further into the plains to increase their success rate.
The highlands twisted and turned in strange ways as we followed them. The river that had carved out the land had probably changed course many times over the years. Our food situation didn't improve that much, although our motion detection traps were very useful. Still, the lack of good, varied food, meant we didn't have a lot of energy or time to spare for magic.
So instead, I spent some of our downtime working on making simple stone tools. Noel saw me struggling to knap flint, so she decided to teach me. I'd seen videos and documentaries about flintknapping, but actually doing it in real life was a lot harder. Noel showed me how to hit the flint at the right angle to break it off with a sharp edge. She taught me how to chip away at a piece of flint to slowly reveal a shape or an edge. She scolded me when I hit too hard, laughed when I shattered a whole rock in my hands, and even sighed dramatically when I ruined a shape we'd been working on for a while.
Improving our clothing situation was also high on my priorities. Our old hide tunics and shoes were in tatters. If I hadn't been insisting on washing them everyday with water magic, they would have smelled awful too. None of the monsters we caught in our traps had thick hides, so we were stuck without any good materials. We were able to use small bones to make needles, which Noel's tribe had made plenty of in the past, so she was able to help me make them. We prepared cords of sinew to use as string and used those to patch up our clothes with pieces of treated animal skin. It wasn't perfect, but it would last us until we found something better.
Now that we had a decent amount of sinew or cordage, we also began setting up snares. This let me save some energy from my motion detection magic, which was really only necessary because we didn't have access to rope or rope-like objects before. We strung together a bunch of sinew and then tied it into a noose. It seemed like it would hold well enough, but we had a lot of failures until we got it right.
"Wait, what's that?" I said as I pointed into the distance.
Noel squinted her eyes. "It's a tree?"
We walked up to it since it had been a while since we'd seen a living tree. It wasn't the most impressive specimen, probably only a few years from becoming a dried husk like all the others we'd seen on the wasteland, but it meant we must be getting close to the end of the wasteland. It was getting late so we decided to camp by the tree. As I looked at the tree, and then looked at Noel's unkempt, disheveled appearance, I figured it was time to try out some chemistry.
"You want to burn the tree?" said Noel.
"No, I want to cut it down and then burn it to ash," I said.
"There are better ways to vent your anger, you know?" she said.
After a little back and forth, I convinced her to help me cut down the tree. It seemed like it was a hardwood although, like I said before, it wasn't going to survive for too long anyway. It would have been very hard to cut it down with only the flint tools we had, but a combination of targeted fire and water magic helped us chip away at it until the whole thing fell over. After cutting off the branches and breaking up the trunk as best we could, we made a large bonfire in the center of camp. Noel complained we were using too much energy throwing fire magic onto an already burning flame, but I told her we needed to keep the fire running as hot as possible.
It took a while for the wood to turn to charcoal and the charcoal to turn to ash, but by the time we went to sleep, the first white ashes were already starting to form. In the morning, I gathered them together and put them in a large hole in some nearby rocks. I filled up the hole with some water, about three parts to every part of ash, and let it sit for a while. I fished out any pieces of wood or other materials, and stirred gently to let any large pieces float to the surface. Then, I left the whole thing to rest while we foraged and hung around for the day.
It was the first day in a long while since we'd stayed in place instead of moving on at dawn, so Noel and I relaxed a little. I taught Noel how to play tic-tac-toe, although she didn't like it because I kept winning. I ended up teaching her the trick to the game: if the first player plays in the corner, the second must play in the center. Vice versa. And a few more tricks for when the first player plays on the sides. Thanks to my explanation, we were stuck drawing every single game we played and decided to never play that game again.
While I was letting the ash solution, or more specifically, the potash, rest, I heated up some monster or animal fat in another small stone hole. After heating up the fat until it was all melted, I let it cool so I could scrape off the crust on top. I then found another hole and put the flakes of fat inside. I went back to the potash and ladled out the solution that had separated on top. I ran it through some porous animal skin, but it wasn't a very good sieve so I figured I'd make do with a less pure ash lye.
I warned Noel not to touch the lye since it was very corrosive, but she helped me bring it over to the fat anyway. I set aside some lye to use in something else, before melting the flakes of fat and adding in the lye. I mixed and stirred the whole solution with a stick to make sure there were no air bubbles, until we reached a point that is called the 'trace'. Then I crushed the minty smelling plants we'd gathered a while ago and added them into the mixture. They were dry and brittle by now, but still retained some of their fragrance.
When the saponification was finished, I let the soap rest in its hole, since I didn't have a mold to transfer it into, and went over to the other project I was working on. I soaked a bunch of animal hide in a lye and water solution and left it to rest for the night as well. We made camp as I told Noel about how I'd learned those things in my world, mostly when I was bored or when I went camping as a kid. I didn't tell her too much about video documentaries because I had no intention of explaining the internet this late at night.
The next morning, I cut up the soap into usable pieces and told Noel we could use it to wash up after we were done. She asked why we couldn't wash up right now, to which I replied that we were about to get very, very messy. We walked over the monster hide I'd left soaked last night.
"When I first heard about this, it made me queasy," I said, slowly. "But now that we're in this situation we don't have much choice. Noel." I faced her. "Are you ready for some braining?"