[IC] Lost in Dreams (Daniel Landvik)

[ericthered]

Setting poles to point towards his location works just fine.

He cleans out the yams in that spot and removes the marker pole.

He does find a basket to carry things around in. Its thin, light, stiff, misshapen, but appears to be strong enough for the job.

As it turns out, he doesn't use any of the tinder. He just uses kindling, the coals from last night are still hot enough to start the fire up. So that worry won't be as big of an issue.

what's the rest of the morning spent doing?

[Toptomcat]

Oh. That was surprisingly easy. I suppose tinder won't be nearly the limiting factor I thought it was.

Daniel feeds the last of his dry grasses into the fire and looks over the small pile of larger sticks that remains.

Dry fuel, on the other hand, might be. It took me about an hour to gather the fuel I've used for my last two fires-but it'll be exhausted with this one. The climate's absolutely sodden, so there's probably not a lot a lot more of it drying out in my immediate vicinity. If I stick to what I've been doing, I'll have to range further and further to find what rare bits of dry vegetation I can.

On the gripping hand, I might not need to do that. I have all the damp fuel I could ever hope to use, and if I keep some of it in my hut, next to the hearth, it might get dry enough to use.

The small cookpot with its diced yams reaches a boil: Daniel waits a bit longer to take it off the fire this time. They've consistently been a bit underdone.

It'd be handy to have some kind of drying rack to keep a lot of fuel as near the fire as possible without being too close. I guess I'll look for one while I'm gathering broken furniture and stuff for the signal fire.

Lunch is bland, as usual. Just yesterday, Daniel was contemplating swift starvation and nearly crying with relief at the sight of one of these yams. What a difference a day makes! Already he's grumbling to himself about not having salt and butter, only half in jest.

Once the meal's finished, he goes outside to gather dyed wood for a signal fire. He doesn't have to look too far: he's already got a head start on it from his earlier sweep of the village for working tools.

[ericthered]

Finding a rack is tricky -- he's not sure what determines what burns and what doesn't. Its certainly not color or texture: he's burned things that look exactly like his cooking pot (which doesn't burn).

How much dyed wood does he want? that's one commodity that's not in short supply.

Perhaps there are edible plants around ... but how would he know what they are?

The monkeys and birds still hoot in the trees. Its hot, and he's perpetually in the shade in the first place.

[Toptomcat]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Finding a rack is tricky -- he's not sure what determines what burns and what doesn't. Its certainly not color or texture: he's burned things that look exactly like his cooking pot (which doesn't burn).

He's looking to put the rack right next to the fire, but not over the fire. If the rack got hot enough to ignite, so would the drying fuel, which would make the whole enterprise both pointless and excessively dangerous.

How much dyed wood does he want? that's one commodity that's not in short supply.

A fair bit- enough to make a pile substantially bigger than he is, and enough to require a few hours to gather. If a small fire could do it, someone would have come to investigate already.

Perhaps there are edible plants around ... but how would he know what they are?

So butter and table salt are probably out of the question, but I do need to broaden my diet. How could I work out what's safe?

The monkeys and birds continue to make their racket.

I suppose observing what the animals eat is the most obvious possibility. The birds are right out, though: birds eat holly berries at home and I'm pretty sure those are poisonous. Would the monkeys be close enough to me that I could safely eat what they do? Aaargh. Don't know. I think I remember them being close to human but not as close as the great apes, but what that means in terms of diet I couldn't even begin to say. I guess they'd be better than any of the other creatures for that purpose...Curious George eats bananas, after all.

Or I could cut out the middleman and just eat Curious George. (Perhaps not: that's how AIDS jumped the species barrier. Or was that orangutans, not monkeys?)

Daniel squints into the trees, trying to track down one particularly vociferous primate. He scowls as it proves impossible to locate.

There's just one problem with all of those options, though- eyesight! It'll be a real challenge to get close enough to hunt, trap, or see what they're eating.

He makes a sour face as a rather disgusting but thoroughly practical idea occurs to him.

Of course, I suppose I don't absolutely have to get close to them to figure out what they're eating. I could pick through some monkey stool to see if I could identify anything partially digested.

...as a last resort...

[ericthered]

Making his pile of two different kinds of fuel takes a long time, but there is still daylight left over. The wet fuel is the easiest. His rack options end up being either stack the fuel cleverly or use a brightly colored table.

He finds himself wondering exactly where one would find monkey poo, and thoughts of disease dance around in his head.

And then he sees a heavy pit on the ground, the flesh mostly scraped off. He's not entirely sure he recognizes what fruit its from though.

[Toptomcat]

Aha.

Daniel picks up the pit and turns it over in his hand. The juice is sticky and sweet-smelling.

I suppose I don't know that this fruit was eaten by a monkey, though. It could have been eaten by something else.

He considers for a moment- then looks up, paying close attention to the trees right above the spot where he found the pit. Is it a hangout for monkeys? Is it mostly birdsong he hears? Are there any patches of color that match the little bits of flesh still hanging off of the pit he holds?

For five, ten minutes he stands there, straining and squinting and cursing his missing glasses. Only once he's sure that he's seen all that he possibly can does he move on and start lighting up the signal fire.

Since he's lighting it out in the open, far from his usual cookfire or anything else that might ignite unexpectedly, it takes a bit of creativity to get it going with coals from his old fire rather than using precious tinder. Still, eventually he finds a small hand shovel that he can use to scoop some of them out and transfer them to where they need to go at the base of the signal fire.

Once it ignites in one place, it's simple to ignite it at another half-dozen places at the base of the pyre, to ensure that it all catches quickly and burns evenly. All that remains now is to wait.

[ericthered]

his mind goes over animals that eat fruit. He supposes it could be a bird, but its really unlikely -- those look like tooth marks, not pecking. His biology training starts his mind spinning: Possums, fruit bats, those weird raccoon-looking things, civets ... its certainly not a list limited to monkeys. But it could have been a monkey.

He stares up at the trees. There's certainly a color besides green up there. it doesn't match the white pulp clinging to the pit, but looking around on the ground reveals small bits of fruit skin that haven't been eaten -- and those match the nice orange color up there. He listens, and it weirdly occurs to him he's not sure if those sounds are monkeys or birds. He thinks he hears more monkeys -- but he doesn't know!

He lights up his signal fire and piles on his fuel. A pillar of brightly colored smoke starts to go up.

What color will he make the signal? Red? Purple? Orange? multiple colors?

[Toptomcat]

Daniel sighs in frustration.

It might help if I got a closer look at one of the fruits intact- perhaps it's something I'd recognize. I think the climate's right for mango.

A tiny inner voice pipes up to remind Daniel that he hates mango. It is swiftly bludgeoned to death by a tag team of his common sense and survival instinct.

Maybe I could knock it down with a long pole, or shake some down with a big enough mallet. Climbing's out: I don't particularly feel like getting an impromptu lesson in how Mister Concussion is Not Your Friend. In extremis, I guess I could cut the tree down? But amateur lumberjacking has its own risks, and it'd be a lot of time and effort.

After staring up at the vague patch of orange for a moment longer, he shrugs, tosses the pit away, and takes careful note of the tree's location. He'll return to it once his current task is done- but for now, he's not quite done feeding fuel into the fire. It's fuel of every vivid color of the rainbow: perhaps the colors have meaning to the locals, but being ignorant of whatever system they may have, he hasn't got any real reason to be choosy about it.

[ericthered]

The 'rainbow' column goes up. With a start, he realizes that mixing the various smoke just dillutes the various colors. The fire isn't raging yet, but he's going to get an ugly but not particularly distinctive cloud.


OCC: Does Daniel have any experiences with the tropics? they have a wide variety of fruit down there, a lot of it very seasonal and unknown to folks up north. speaking from experience

[Toptomcat]

Huh. For some reason I envisioned it going up like a rainbow, the different colors remaining separate. I guess that just means that this stuff is behaving sensibly now, like normal, mundane pigments mixing.

It's just as well, really- if it had lit up like a Lisa Frank sticker, I'd go nuts trying to work out the hows and whys of the thing with my half-remembered gen-ed chemistry and no proper tools. I want a mass spectrometer, damn it. Actually, for all the weirdness I've seen since I got here, I want two dozen PhDs, an army of grad students and several tons of equipment. I want a Stargate. I want a decent pair of pants. I want-

Daniel's hands momentarily tremble: he fumbles with the chunk of wood he's holding, nearly dropping it on his bare foot.

-I want to go home-

After a moment's clumsiness, he gets a proper grip on the stick. His knuckles whiten, and he throws it into the fire with rather more force than is required.

No. I can't afford the distraction of getting maudlin, not when I'm still one screwup away from death. I'll cry when I'm safe and not a moment before.

Spoiler:  

OOC: Hmmm. Certainly not extensive experience, but there's a decent chance that he'd have visited Thailand for a month or two for training purposes. Flip a coin.