A groan reaches my ears as I slowly wake up, and as my senses slowly come alive it feels like I have once again been hit by a freezing truck though for some reason, its all dulled...
except the sickly sweet taste of blood in my mouth.
"Hgffguh", I mumble out with all the grace of a sack of radishes. I then laboriously open my eyes.
I slowly look around the walls of meat around me briefly cause me a great amount of confusion before I remember where I am
I sigh to myself as I look back up to the ceiling of flesh.
'Ok, what was the plan again' I ask my still sluggish brain.
…
'…oh…'
'Umm, I mean, I've had worse ideas…' I think to myself
'You don't have to lie, these are the ramblings of a sleep deprived, mana deprived, probably concussed, and incredibly desperate person, and we're only one of those things right now so we should come up with a new plan!.' A voice in my head replies…
I groan as I lift myself up onto my feet and begin to pace, trying to think of a good plan that isn't going to potentially take multiple months…
But as I start to pace I accidentally step on something sharp. After a stretch of curses at the pain, I look down to see what I stepped on only to find, a bloodied knife.. 'did that beast eat a knife?' And then it came back, the reward! This is that knife the board gave me.
I pick it up and scrub it down with my shirt, only to realize that my shirt is far too bloodied to do anything but make it more messy…
Thinking twice before wiping it with my hand, I move to the now very cold entrance and envelop most of my body in a mana skin, and then shove my hand out into the cold dessert air, and quickly wipe the knife off on the fur of the beast.
I pull my arm back in to inspect the knife, and see that it's blade is a bone white, still a bit bloody.. but better than nothing.
And I go back to the center of the stomach, and pull up the runic board, with a new plan in mind.
- - - -
You would think it'd be easy to make a rune, right? But for being specifically designed to be as simple as possible to understand, it was still hard to actually design one… especially one that you didn't want to explode.
Seriously, I have three unamed prototypes of this rune alone that were all just different flavors of 'BOOM'…
But I did eventually settle on a design that shocked me with it's simplicity.
A circle outside of a clockwise spiral start that starts in the center and makes its way outward.
For what ever reason, this specific pattern is capable of producing a function without a command. If magic comes in contact with this rune, it will act as a magical adhesive, for some reason…
The rune board said it is because the coil will 'hook' onto the magic signature of whomever it comes into contact with…
With that out of the way, (and seven more 'prototypes' put into the runic board memory storage to never see the light of day.) it's time to get to work!
As I envelop myself in magic skin again, and with a clearer head, I notice for the first time that the mana skin is thicker than it was before…
But either way I form a wide flat layer of the mana skin on the soles of my feet to act as snowshoes, and waddle to the blocked off entrance, I then open it and step out of the hole.
Only to be instantly and practically blinded by the sheer amount of hail reflecting the sunlight directly into my eyes.
Upside, the mana skin stops me from dying of frostbite instantly.
Downside, it is a subtle see through blue, and does absolutely nothing to stop my retinas from being blasted with the force of the midday sun.
Shutting my eyes sharply, I stumble back to the insides, and enclose myself in the mostly dark stomach…
I lay on the floor of the belly for why seems like hours, before my eyes recover from the light that was seared into them…
New plan, make snow goggles first.
Luckily, I have an amazing source of bones, and I'm sitting in it!
I think for a moment about what bone to go to, and nod my head at the thought of the head bone, seeing as it most likely has the least amount of muscle and fat between it and the throat.
With the knife in hand, I move through to the top of the throat and cut up the carcass there with some quickly improvised mana skin 'gauntlets', and shovel the excess out the mouth, and once I get to bone, I check if I can pierce the bone with the claw, and it works if only a little, so I shuffle back and carefully put the knife on the stomach floor, seeing as I didn't actually need it for this part.
I then get back to etching out a streak of bone and dislodging it.
I then take this bone slab and start whittling with my thumb claw, taking it slow, as to not snap the bone, I form the rest for the nose so would fit snugly on my face, I then indent two flat lines on the outside and inside of the goggles where I want the eye holes to be, making sure to make them even to each other so I could actually see out of them.
I continue to wittle at these two lines, intermittently turning it over, and repeating my actions on the other side, and after I don't even know how long, all I need to do to complete the snow goggles is the strap to keep them on my face, and a good strap would be sinew. There should have been some in that meat pile I threw out…
'this is why you never waste any part of the animal' a voice in my head that sound suspiciously like old man Allen scolds me.
- - - -
A sheer cliff, a mile tall, and incomprehensibly wide is what is keeping me from my bed.
I sighed as I clambered up the bears fur to get to the stuff that isn't covered in ice.
It began hailing, as I worked, but the mana skin was able to protect me mostly, I finished with the sinew collection a while ago, and am just starting on the real beginning of the new plan, in which involves skinning the beast so that I have something to wear.
And then scaling the massive cliff face no matter the cost.
Which is when brings me here, to the top of the bear, slowly cutting away at its thick pelt with a sharpened mana skin finger, I'm hesitant to use my new knife, mostly because I'm a bit afraid it will break on me half way…
The blood that spills out, already cold from death, freezes almost instantly upon contact with the outside world, just another reminder as to why I should absolutely not be out here for long. Even with my thick mana skin, it's still deadly cold…
It took me a while to think about a way to cure the newly cut hide, this place is chalk full with frozen water, what with the hail all around, so what I was really aching for was a pot and a solid floor that I could enscribe a basic rune of fire.
(one that doesn't explode, hopefully…)
But what could I use for such…?
Hmm…
A thought comes to my mind to use one of the larger spine tips of the beast, they might be big enough to be used as a curing pot. I nod to myself as I shuffle around the corpse to find a spine tip and get to work carving away at the flesh, so as to get at the bone.
It takes a while, the sun has moved a bit about fourth five minutes seem to have passed, but I've got to the bone.
And I was right to an extent, it is big enough to be a cure pot, but the problem is the way it's tilted. its naturally slanted, like a regular bears would be… 'I'm starting to think this is just a bear that got hit with a growth spell or something…'
But either way it's not really suitable for a cure pot, but it is flat and wide enough to act as a heat slab. So I'll use it for that.
I scratch a line at the base where the upper frill meets the base connecting bit, and carve at it which takes a even more time… and by the time the thick ass bone finally snaps where I want, the sun is going down and I suddenly realize.
'The solctice is in two days.' A part of my mind wants to freak out, but the rest wants to eat something.
So I push the bone slab down the now heavily frozen beast and finally stand after far - far too much time outside in this cold.
I carefully slide down the beast and drag the bone through the hole into the insides of itself.
Back inside I take the goggles off and sigh in relief, I may have made them myself, but wearing bone for hours in a creeping cold is truly hell. I then shove the frozen fish carcass into the hole to plug it up.
I then get to to work making as big a flame rune as I can under the blue light of a mana bullet hovering above me.
I pull up the runic board and select the tune labeled 'fire array #17' and looking at the board and not the bone, I push my magic into strings and weave them into the shapes, lines, and commands of the rune just above the surface.
And then once all the strings are in the right places for the rune to work, I push the strings all down at once and the rune is almost instantly engraved into the bone.
I then reabsorb the unused mana in the strings, and then add some of that mana to the rune so that it will activate and remain active for about an hour and a half.
Taking the time to reflect, from the long term usage of Mana Skin and this rune application… I am at about one third of my total reserve.
I feel frustrated by the seeming fact that no matter how hard I try, I can't get my magic to a more efficient state…
It might not seem like it, but in order to survive, the farther you can get with the minimal amount of mana used to get there is best, since it means you have more mana to use in case of an unexpected scenario, or for use in getting through even more long struggles.
And the thought that by raising my foundations to their best, I'll be able to make sure my power in the upper levels is more stable is one I like.
Of course, most of that is the philosophy of a protagonist from a novel I used to read… I referenced it because I think it has its merits.
But the slow rising of heat infront of me distracts me from the train of thought, it would seem the rune is taking a while to get going due to the sheer cold, but I still huddle closer to it, as it's better then nothing.
'How to go about growing is for a time when we aren't about to die from frost bite! The point is, we used half of our mana reserve for the mana skin, we need to make that cost less. So that we can go about simply existing outside for longer than a half an hour…'
'But that last time we existed outside for like four hours…'
'And that's weird! What was different?'
'We simply weren't thinking of the ice, the cold inside us was disregarded for our task…'
I ignored the rest of the conversation happening inside my head and instead I place a prepared slab of bear meat onto the now hot enough open flame, not the best way to cook something, but it will have to do…
And as it cooks, I decide to rest the limits of the mana skin maliability increase I got from the secret reward.
Trying to minimize cost while maximizing heat retention and consistency.
The issue?
Can't have all three.
If I want consistent heat retention and general form, I also need to expend a lot more mana then I want. But I can maximize meat retention for cheap if I lower consistency…
The problem is that consistency is good because it makes it easier to produce the best version of mana skin for the job.
The sizzling of the meat catches my attention, having an idea i extend my mana covered hand into the fire and I turn the steak around to the other side and lick my lips as my stomach rumbles a bit.
I then dissipate the mana skin, deciding to just eat then try to get enough sleep before starting on the rest of the plan.
On second thought, I take off my clothes, however raggedy they are now, and put them on the bone to dry near the fire.
- - - -
Under the full moon of the incredibly cold desert of hail lay slumped the form of a young dire bear, mutilated beyond life, and from a hole in the bear's stomach escape the tracks of a persons feet on the previously unmarked expanse of hail.
But as the winds pick up, something shifts in the bear, it slumps further into itself and the hail sifts in turn, and the bear is slowly consumed by the waves of hail.
- - - -
Oopsies~
Looks like Shepard has a few more things to get through before going home.
:)
Thanks for reading