[IC] Lost in Dreams (Daniel Landvik)

[ericthered]

Daniel seals the building.

When He's done, he has perhaps two hours of daylight left and an hour of dusk.

[Toptomcat]

Digging and hammering is hard, thirsty work: before retiring, Dan builds another fire in his shelter and cooks up a trio of yams and some more drinking water. As he does so, it occurs to him to see how much tinder he's got left: with sunlight and forest vegetation abundant, tinder represents the only real constraint on his ability to make fire.

With dinner eaten- and enough spare drinking water put aside for the morning- Daniel removes the ropes he's wrapped around himself and bathes in the stream.

A man's home is his castle, and Daniel must defend it as best he can: on his way back to his shelter, he takes half a dozen short spears for throwing and a stout, straight staff. Last night, he slept armed with nothing more than a wallet and phone, and in a room fortified with nothing but a flimsy, unlocked interior door. Now, Daniel goes to sleep as well armed and well fortified as he's ever been.

But does he feel safe? Not on your life.

OOC

Spoiler:  

I couldn't find a way to mention it gracefully and tastefully in the narrative: Daniel walks a short way into the jungle, downwind, and defecates there immediately before bathing. Maybe later he'll dig a latrine, but for now he's tired of digging.

Does the door latch? Is there a bolt? If not, Daniel will probably look into a way to seal the door. If it swings inward, I suppose he'll try dragging heavy weights to the left and right of the door and using them to secure something like a plank that can be horizontally added and removed. Forgive my MSPaintistry- like this.

If it swings outward, then I guess he'll just have to live with it.

In any case, he scatters the ground outside his door with small, breakable pots and plates to provide a bit of auditory warning of an intrusion. At least, an incautious intrusion.

[ericthered]

There is a decent amount of tinder -- enough for somewhere between five and twenty fires, depending on how much he uses for a single fire. It occurs to him that he might be able to transfer coals from one fire to another if he stays in the site overnight.

It takes him quite a while to fall asleep, worried as he is about staying secure. When he finally drifts off, he dreams again. This time he dreams of Urists in the forest. The two he dreams about seem to be female. The two are working with wood. They have a good deal of it on one side of them and a pile of bowls on the other. Its two dark in his dream to get a good look, but he is able to determine a few things: they have no tools of any reasonable description in their hands, and they are creating the bowls out of wood.

In the morning, the sounds of the forest wake him up -- a loud, squawking chorus. He's not sure if its a troop of monkeys or a flock of ravens -- or both doing combat with each other.

[Toptomcat]

"Rrrrnf."

Daniel's Morning Brain wants to procrastinate. But in the absence of a mattress to snuggle into, or a blanket to throw over his head, it proves surprisingly difficult. He stumbles to his feet, shooting a resentful look at the raven-monkeys through the ceiling.

"Whaaa...habba...daaah. Why couldn't the Brightly-Colored People have grown coffee?

All I have is...sweet potato things, whassa word...yams. Just yams. Kill me of scurvy or summing sooneralater.

Yams an'...oh, right, yam water."

Remembering the cups of boiled water he set aside for the morning, Daniel turns and begins to stagger over to the low table he put them on...and stubs his toe on his pile of spears. Cursing and massaging his foot, he sits down heavily.

Yikes. A few inches to the left and I'd have impaled a toe, not stubbed it. I need to be more careful about keeping sharp stuff around for my Morning Brain to kill me with.

The table is closer to him on his butt than on his feet anyway: Daniel crawls the last few feet over and fumbles for a cup, eyes still not properly focusing. The water helps. Not like coffee, but it helps. The morning's dehydration eases: his eyes focus, his thoughts clear a bit. The monkeys/birds are still making an enormous racket, though.

"Good God, am I going to wake up to the Lemur Philharmonic every morning?"

He stands again- steadily, this time- and stretches a few of the kinks out.

For a while yesterday I was wondering if I'd see another morning at all. I suppose the Lemur Philharmonic beats the alternative.

Fighting off an enormous yawn, Daniel opens the door and goes to bathe in the stream.

OOC:

Spoiler:  

Has Daniel heard of lucid dreaming? Does he know that there's such a thing as learning to dream lucidly, and does he know any specifics about how? Psychology-10, effectively 9 with Slow Riser.

[ericthered]

Daniel knows about lucid dreaming, but has no idea how he would intentionally do it.

Daniel isn't sure if the cold food keeps him from waking up properly or is trying to shock him awake, and the bath is quite cold, even in the tropics.

OCC: Lucid dreaming -- How I hate it. Yes, I used to lucid dream, and it was a serious pain. It was weird figuring it out. I have no idea how well known it is in the general populace, as for me it was part of discovering the weird quirks about yourself.

[Toptomcat]

Bathing properly without soap or much of anything to scrub with is a bit of a challenge, but Daniel does the best he can.

So I've had another dream. Another vision, really. If I had to summarize the first one, it was an...overview of sorts. 'Come visit beautiful Universe #226B! Mountain rainforests! Brightly-Colored People eating yams in stained-glass houses! Also, Urists exist, they're underground and weird!'

This one was not an overview. Instead, it seemed to be about...answering a specific question, I suppose? It went a long way to confirming my novel-materials/novel-engineering-techniques hypothesis for explaining the strange tools and construction materials I've been seeing.

Reality check: what else could the dream-vision have been about? Urists in the forest, check. I knew they come into the forest already. Female Urists exist, check. I don't remember seeing any explicitly female Urists in the previous vision, but I would've been enormously surprised if they didn't exist. Not really new information. Urists work with wood: okay, again, technically new information since I didn't get a sufficiently good look at their farming tools or swords in the last vision to definitively say if they were made of wood. But they were using tools that are conventionally made of wood, and they live under a forest. I would've been very surprised if they didn't work with wood. Urists specifically make wood *bowls*. Technically new, as I haven't observed a Urist with a bowl. But not interestingly or surprisingly new, again. Urists come out in the dark: knew that already. Urists engage in woodworking without any visible tools: not only novel, but interestingly, surprisingly novel. Urists make their wooden tools outside, at night, rather than in their caves in the daytime? I guess that's a surprise, but not an interesting surprise.

So: on the assumption that my initial hunch is right, and the general purpose of the dream-visions is to inform me, the specific purpose of this dream-vision is to answer the question I posed with my novel-materials/novel-craftsmanship-techniques theory. (Careful about that initial guess, though: I made it working with a sample size of just two dream-visions. Shaky ground to generalize on.)

The bath finished with, Daniel heads over to the place he's stashed his yams to fetch some breakfast to cook. He didn't really stockpile them yesterday, just looked long enough to confirm that there was something to eat and brought back an armful. Breakfast will leave him with one remaining yam: he'll have to go out and pull some more today.

The vision, then, was an answer. A direct answer to a question I've never spoken aloud. If the dream-visions are coming to me from some outside agency, that implies it can read my mind. Which is, um...very weird. Terrifying, really. Given the existence of an entity capable of putting informative dreams into a human mind in the first place, though, I guess it's not terribly surprising: anyone with write access to my brain probably also has read access.

And the alternative to the outside-agency hypothesis is...what, exactly? Some kind of psychic oracular ability, completely independent of any Apollo to speak through me or meddling simulation-runner? But this is a simple restatement of the problem, a fake explanation- a way of rephrasing 'I magically get information from nowhere' to make it sound like I've understood something, without actually reaching any meaningful conclusion.

Could the visions come from some law of nature, an inherent consequence of being present in a non-native universe, or of being a slider? But now I'm just shuffling mysteries around, without actually solving any of them. 'Here is an impenetrable mystery: perhaps it's mysterious because of this equally impenetrable mystery.'

...in fairness, the two mysteries are obviously related in some fashion. I'm not magically getting information from nowhere about physics, or karate, or the price of alligator eggs in Alaska. I'm magically getting information from nowhere about the strange new universe I'm in, and I started getting that information more or less the moment I arrived in that strange universe.

It doesn't really sound like a law of nature. Not a natural law of nature. 'People who find themselves in a Universe other than their own start getting prophetic dreams about the local universe' isn't a rule like 'what goes up must come down', or 'the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides', or 'in every operation there exists an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation'. Nature is an accident. That rule is not. Even if it is somehow an ontologically fundamental law of nature 'round here, all that does is prove that this Nature isn't natural, that it was built by someone who cared about people enough to give them prophetic dreams. God, author, programmer, some combination of the three, doesn't matter: if the law exists, then they do.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that the law-of-nature hypothesis and the outside-agency hypothesis are equivalent. Someone is giving me these dreams, and probably reading my mind to do it.

Daniel pauses in the middle of lighting his cookfire: suddenly, alone in the middle of a deserted city, he feels absurdly exposed. It doesn't help that he still hasn't found a stitch of clothing. After an anxious moment, he casts his nervousness aside and embraces the ridiculousness of the situation, addressing the empty air:

"Now that I've outdone Anselm of Canterbury and proven you exist, I don't suppose you'd mind revealing yourself?"

[ericthered]

The sky, Voices inside of his head, and everything else is stubbornly silent. Except for the the shrieks in the trees. They've died down, but are still there.

[Toptomcat]

Daniel waits expectantly for a moment, then sighs.

"...I didn't think that would work, but it cost me nothing to try.

On the chance that you can only communicate with me through dreams, and are open to communication: please begin my next dream-vision with an image of a red object, an image of a green object, an image of a blue object, and an image of a yellow object, in that order."

Daniel returns his attention to lighting the fire.

Okay, that's enough God-bothering for one morning. Back to more practical concerns. I guess I need to go pull, clean and store some more yams. That's half an hour, I guess. And I'll have to make another fire or two: another half-hour. Beyond that, what are my priorities today?

Broadly speaking, I've got two main goals. The first and foremost is to stay alive. I've got food, water, fire and shelter. My access to the first two is predicated on making fire, and my ability to do that is constrained by my tinder supply: I need to figure out how to find or make more tinder, optimally conserve my existing tinder, or both. I don't know how much food is available, only that there is some: I need to take an inventory of how many yams are available to be pulled, and experiment with ways to store them. And while an all-yam diet will keep me alive in the short term, in the long term it'll lead to nutritional deficiencies. I need to find a second food crop, or alternatively, figure out how to hunt or trap. My shelter is...perfectly adequate, I guess. From the looks of it it will stand up to jaguars, the largest natural predator around. It's still standing, so presumably it can endure whatever extremes of weather happen around here- though checking to see if the roof leaks might be worthwhile. I might want to fortify it against human threats- but if I torque off the locals badly enough to face a siege, in the long term I'm probably screwed anyway.

Second main goal: find civilization- or get found by civilization. Heading out in search of it, as I'd originally planned, is looking less and less attractive as I get safer. That means drawing others here. Earlier, I'd wondered if the locals use that colorfully-burning wood for smoke signals: whether or not they do, a signal fire of broken furniture might attract their attention. And it's a good use of scrap wood that's otherwise useless as fuel, due to my concern about pigments contaminating my food and water. Beyond that...should I put up some kind of sign or marker, perhaps? This place is a city: I can't be everywhere at once, and I want to be sure of being found if the Brightly-Colored People send a scout to investigate my fire. Or if someone just happens to come along for incidental reasons. I suppose I could put together a kind of improvised way marker with the tools I've found: a pole with a spear, dart, or shovel on top, pointing the way to my shelter. All of these ideas are visual, though. What about sound? I've heard of drums being used for long-range signaling. I'm probably not going to find a proper *drum*- the hide will have rotted away- but I might be able to find or improvise some manner of wood-block percussion instrument that could serve the same purpose.

Finally, a secondary goal that can't be put under either heading: learn more about where I am. This is a big place, and my first sweep of murals can't possibly have found them all: finding more could be informative.

The pot of yams finally comes to a boil, and Daniel begins counting under his breath: he still hasn't got the knack of it. The last few meals were all slightly undercooked, though progressively less so as he's learned to give them more time. Maybe this time it'll be just right.

To summarize, then:

• Find tinder
• Make tinder
• Tinder efficiency experiments
• Sweep surrounding jungle for yam plants
• Yam storage experiments
• Look for second food crop
• Learn to hunt
• Learn to trap
• Check roof for leaks
• Fortify dwelling
• Build signal fire
• Make signposts
• Find a 'drum'
• Make a 'drum'
• Find and decipher more murals

Some of these can be worked into the obligatory tasks. It makes sense to sweep for yam plants and look for other crops when I venture into the jungle to pull yams. And I can experiment with efficient ways to use tinder when I light my cookfires.

Beyond that...I'll occupy myself with building a signal fire. See if I've got any time left after that.

Daniel finishes his breakfast, sets aside more boiled water for later, and puts on his improvised web gear. After a moment's thought, he also collects half a dozen bright red poles, none exactly alike but all reasonably narrow and easy to carry around. All this collected, he heads out to the spot where he originally found the yams, marks it with a pole sunk into the ground, and carefully uses his knife to notch it in the direction of the town. Then he begins to carefully and systematically search the area for additional patches of yams and other food crops- keeping himself oriented by marking each finding with another notched pole.

OOC

Spoiler:  

Faced with no interruptions, Daniel will continue to do this until he gets hungry. If needed, he heads back to town to get more poles, sawing impractically long ones into sections if necessary.

[ericthered]

The yam hunting is difficult. The patches aren't large. Daniel is persistent, and finds a few more spots over the course of a few hours.

notching the poles is a problem though. The poles are impossibly hard to cut. When he tries harder, the knife just slips against the impossibly hard pole.

[Toptomcat]

Daniel fruitlessly tries to put a notch in the pole for about ten minutes before giving up.

Should I smear some mud on one side and mark direction that way? No, it would just wash off in the rain. Wait- better idea.

Rather than try to do anything to the pole itself, Daniel simply sinks the thing into the ground at a slight angle, indicating the direction of the village by leaning the pole towards it. It takes a bit of digging and compacting the earth at the pole's base before he's satisfied that they won't tip over, but it's a simple solution and it works.

After he's done marking all the yam patches he's found, Daniel finds his way back to the furthest and most inconvenient one and pulls out enough yams to make lunch, dinner, and tomorrow's breakfast, plus a few extra. Lacking any pockets or other convenient containers makes this more of a chore than it ought to be: it takes Daniel three trips before he's got everything he needs. If this exhausts the patch of yams, he removes the marker pole.

Maybe next time I can bring something to put them all in. Something with a handle, not too heavy. Might as well find it now, actually, since I'll be carrying them all around anyway to clean and cook.

After rummaging around in his sorted pile of stuff for something suitable, he washes off the day's yams in the stream...all but one, which he sets aside in the hut. He lays the rest next to the hearth and begins trying to light a cookfire- experimenting with using leftover coals from last night, breaking his tinder into small pieces, seeing how small an amount he can get away with using, and whatever else he can think of. It's a delicate balance he has to strike...how much tinder can he afford to use in working out how best to conserve tinder? With a shrug, he resolves to use no more than two or three fires' worth in lighting this fire.