[IC] Lost in Dreams (Daniel Landvik)

[ericthered]

Daniel Landvik dreamed strangely that night. He dreamed of a tall, green, verdant range of mountains that clouds hung around, watering a lush rainforest full of rivers and lakes. He dreamed of colorful birds, agile leopards, and monkeys bounding from tree to tree. But that wasn't what was strange.

He dreamed of several small colorful villages in the mountains. Extremely colorful. The houses were all sorts of bright colors: bright reds, deep blues, Ivory whites, pitch blacks, and every other imaginable color -- and those were the simple ones: The more elaborate ones had murals in bas-relief. Sometimes the effect looked plastic. Sometimes it looked glazed. Sometimes it looked stately. Sometimes it looked ridiculous. The material the houses was built out was strange: Seemless but rarely perfectly smooth.

The pattern persisted throughout the village and the people: Their humble farm tools where coloured and patterned, their clothes were as vibrant as any cosmopolitan city, and their draft animals (which seemed to be some variation on a two humped camel) had their fur and even their faces coloured. The skins and hair of the people were coloured: The base color was usually a rich dark brown, but ranged the full spectrum of human colors and including even pitch black and bone white. Patterns covered their bodies: as clean and fresh as henna lines. Usually the patterns matched the clothing. Hair was almost exclusively black with a secondary color providing highlights, though many were bald.

As evening fell, the people gathered together and ate a meal of what looked like rice, yams, and tomatoes (normal colors) off of colorful plates and bowls, and then many of them went to sleep-- but many of the young men stayed up, walking around the edge of the village.

As night fell, by different fields, a different village woke up. Small dark people, shorter than the other villagers, began streaming out of a hole in the ground. They were black in all their features, and moved quickly through the dark. The sky was overcast, with no moon, and the people carried no lights of any kind, but they seemed to be able to see every branch and every rock anyway. They then began to work their fields in the night. As the sun began to rise, they filed back into the whole, except for a few who stayed above ground, laying low under bushes with what looked like swords.

Dave woke up on a hard cold slab of --- stone? It was certainly smooth, glossy, and cold. Opening his eyes revealed a great deal of color. He was resting on a flat stone, lying at an angle, smooth as glass. He could hear animals calling in the forest. He and his stone seemed dry for the moment, but the air was wet. Looking around, he saw that he was in some overgrown building with brightly coloured glass walls. It was covered in murals, from the collapsed ceiling to the worn down walls to the floor broken and slanted by tree roots. the murals were in bright colors, and presented varying degrees of fantastic elements.

The place had lots of vines growing all over it, and the morning sun was not visible through the overhead canopy, though the sky did peek through. Birds called loudly above.

[Toptomcat]

Daniel Landvik stirs on the slab, closed eyes scrunching tighter to shut out the sudden, unwelcome brightness.

"mmmnph."

His fingers grope for a blanket to throw over his head, something to shut out the light and annoying birdsong. A blanket is not forthcoming, and his hand encounters something glassy smooth.

The tiny portion of his brain that has been fully roused from sleep considers this. On the one hand, it is strange. On the other hand, another five more minutes can't hurt. Yes. That makes sense. Snuggle into the mattress for just another...

"mmmnwhaddafaaa?"

No mattress. Cold glass on his cheekbone. Something is seriously wrong.

Dan slowly sits up on the slab and tries alternately to shake the cobwebs out of his head and force his eyes to focus. No amount of blind fumbling to the right can successfully locate his glasses- or, indeed, the bedside table they're supposed to be on. Once it occurs to him to rub the grit out of his eyes, though, things go reasonably well, and a bit more coaxing finally persuades his peepers to focus on the opposite wall.

"What the hell?"

No bed, no bedside table, no glasses, no dorm room, no underwear, no explanation. Daniel just sits there for a few minutes, mind slowly churning away at the problem and finding no purchase.

Some kind of prank? No. Not only am I not in my dorm room- I'm not in the dorm anymore. I don't even think this could be put together on campus. They'd have had to anesthetize me to have brought me here without waking me up.

Anesthesia. Drugs. Booze? Could I have gotten blackout drunk? Hugely unlikely. I don't drink. And I don't feel more than usually horrible.

I think I was dreaming about a place like this a moment ago. Could I be dreaming now?

...I suppose that's one of those big, hairy brain-in-a-vat, how-can-Man-truly-know-anything philosophical questions, isn't it? Zhuangzi and the butterfly dreaming he was a man. I hate those.

He stares at the wall for a minute, rubbing at the grit in his eyes and feeling stupid.

No. Wait. I hate those for a reason. They're a masturbatory excuse to stop thinking rationally about a hard problem and start worshiping it as a sacred mystery. This is a hard problem, or at least a weird problem. Attack it rationally. Can I prove this isn't a dream?

Daniel lies back on the hard slab for a moment, staring at the ceiling and occasionally swearing at it. His Morning Brain is not a good tool for attacking hard, weird problems. His Morning Brain is barely a good tool for getting both legs into the right pant leg and stumbling towards the scent of coffee. This caffeine-deprived organ requires another long moment of pondering and staring at the ceiling to come up with an answer.

Of course. Movement. There's a slow, swimmy, weightless quality to movement in dreams. That's easy enough to test.

The lean young man curls and stretches, getting blood flowing again to stiff, clumsy muscles: then he stands, stumbling a little bit as he adjusts to balancing on an angle. He takes a few steps, then- reverting to the familiar- widens his feet into a kickboxing stance and throws a few experimental punches, paying careful attention to his body's weight, its heft, its inertia and balance.

All right, then. Not dreaming. I may have some kind of long-term memory problem. (!) Head injury?

He carefully inspects his scalp with his fingertips.

No bumps, no gashes, no headache. Nothing recent or obvious. Stroke? No paralysis among one side...

"The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."

...no difficulty with language. Some other, unspecified cause of amnesia? How could I...ah.

Daniel brushes his fingertips over his face.

Still more or less cleanshaven, with no razor anywhere near me. Rule out memory for now.

Hallucination? Maaaaaybe. But it's visual, auditory, tactile...

He sniffs. It smells like moisture and greenery.

And olfactory. File that one with Zhuangzi and Descartes' demon. Summary: total enigma. I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. I don't know what to do next. My only clue to my surroundings is the content of some half-remembered dream. It's like the opening of some ludicrous point-and-click adventure game.

Daniel considers this for a bit longer, and a slow tingle of fear starts to make itself known in the pit of his stomach and along his spine. He frowns, feeling vaguely embarrassed for having taken this long to realize that he ought to be scared.

No. Not at all like a game. Games are safe, games are fun. Whatever's going on, it is dangerous. I'm in a rainforest with no clothes, no food, and...I'm not willing to call dream visions 'evidence' or 'knowledge' yet, so let's go with 'reasonable suspicion' for now...with no clothes, no food, and a reasonable suspicion that there are leopards and menacing little black bastards who live underground and raid the surface with machetes.

He chews on that thought for a while as he gets moving, blearily trying to cudgel his stubborn Morning Brain into full wakefulness while examining his surroundings in greater detail- the vines, the murals, the walls, the slab he woke up on.

[ericthered]

OCC: Normally for non-character creation occ we put it in the IC and mark it as OCC. This is unique to Lost In Dreams and is for ease of finding information.

Quite a list of questions. I will do my best:

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Despite the groggy state of his mind, the dream is not fading: its as sharp and colorful as ever. He's not sure if he's seen any of these murals in the dream, but he might of. Maybe he'll remember some when he wakes up more. He can also clearly remember the day before: a Thursday. A fairly typical thursday*.

The structure he is in is in no danger of collapse: The roof has already caved in, and the remaining walls seem firm enough. He looks at the floor he is on, and feels it. Its close enough to glass: transparent, hard, and smooth. If he really wanted to be sure he'd have to try to chip it or something -- or observe the fallen rubble nearby. The shattered stone reveals a little of the structure of the rock: there are three layers: a clear uniform glassy one, only millimetres thick, the stone base, and in between a layer of colored stone of varying thickness, but usually less than half of an inch. It appears to all be one piece, even when fractured -- the color appears to be some sort of dye. There is no trace of anyone in the immediate vicinity.

Daniel can't place the artistic tradition of the murals-- though they are definitely stylistic rather than true to life-- but lack the little touches of every tradition he can think of. Not to mention no ancient tradition had this much access to color, or if they did, they preferred certain colours. This mural showed no such limitation -- or rather as a collection, they showed no such limitation. Each Mural had on it a number of people doing different things -- each seemed to have a set of warriors, a set of farmers, and a set of craftsmen. Most had at least one more set of people engaged in various tasks, and several animals. The backgrounds they were set against were starkly contrasted with one another, though several murals had multiple backgrounds.

The individual people in the murals were drawn very differently, with different features. In some cases this was limited to the face or skin color: In other cases it was reflected in height and build. One mural even had people with fur. Another had dragons. And several fantasy races appeared to be depicted: elves and dwarves at least. There were quite a few murals**, instances include:

A mural set entirely in dark tunnels. It has three different kinds of figures: the squat dwarves, who are depicted as the craftsmen, taller, dark figures who seem to be farming mushrooms, and a set of long limbed warriors who's skin is a bland grey. The grey warriors are in all sorts of athletic postures.

A different mural depicts mesas sticking up out of lush farmland. The sun is depicted as changing shape as it moves through the sky: sometimes a full disk, sometimes narrowing to a football shape of various widths (but always the same length. The farmers here look like they are from India, though their non-human overseer looks like one of the warriors in the mural. The craftsmen are shorter than the farmers, with knobs on their bald heads reminiscent of a warthog. The warriors are furred (blacks and greys), short, heavily built, and have pointed ears like a fox and sharp teeth. Its not quite clear what weapons they are fighting with -- the swords, hammers, spears, and shields seem to be translucent and not always in the hands of their users. Two more kinds of people are present. One is depicted buying and selling things, and are very small and spindly. The last species is depicted in a sort of ceremonial circle, and look like brown versions of the warriors with much smaller ears.

Yet another mural depicts a rolling forest with elves, short folk with very rounded features, and dark fanged people depicted in all sorts of fights, from wrestling to clubs to blades. Dragons also fly around. Wild life shown includes ground sloths and hippogriffs.

One mural is full of rivers and water falls, with giant lizards or salamanders all over the place. Two kinds of people live there, with one only depicted as farming the rice fields and the other crafting and fighting as well as farming.

The mural on the floor is the largest: A bunch of brightly decorated people in colorful houses in a vibrant rain forest and mountains. among them are several of the small black people in the tunnel mural. The colored people are either human sized (all the murals seem to use the same sacel) and have round ears and brown to black skin or pointed ears and varying shades of green. The groups are quite mixed: everyone farms, everyone fights, and everyone crafts. It's certainly the happiest of the murals: almost all of them depict taskmasters and unhappy faces on at least the farmers. Surrounding this central a ring of what look like human sacrifices: people bleeding out on alters. Around them people are sobbing or leaving through disks that show jungle.

All of the murals except the one on the floor have symbols underneath them, reminiscent of Sanskrit or perhaps Tolkein's elvish-- four words each.

Looking outside of the building reveals more than just rain forests: lots of other buildings are in similar states of ruin. They are (or were) decorated much closer to his dream. Most of them are just houses. There are two other large buildings in the area, both docorated with murals, these once again of the colored people. Daniel racks his mind for details about rain forests: The closest to new Jersey would be -- either Southern Mexico or the Caribbean. He's not sure which is closer. Neither is close in any reasonable meaning of the word. He recognizes the type of vine -- kind of. Its indigenous to the American tropics, though what part of the American tropics he's not sure.

*feel free to fill in the details of a typical thursday.
** more than I care to describe in detail. I am intentionally describing the ones that are likely to be significant.

[Toptomcat]

He looks at the floor he is on, and feels it. Its close enough to glass: transparent, hard, and smooth. If he really wanted to be sure he'd have to try to chip it or something -- or observe the fallen rubble nearby. The shattered stone reveals a little of the structure of the rock: there are three layers: a clear uniform glassy one, only millimetres thick, the stone base, and in between a layer of colored stone of varying thickness, but usually less than half of an inch. It appears to all be one piece, even when fractured -- the color appears to be some sort of dye.

Daniel turns a small fragment of wall over and over in one hand, examining its layered structure closely.

Okay, so it's some kind of tightly bonded three-layer composite. The clear glasslike layer is thin, uniform in composition and smooth to the touch. And there's a lot of it: whole buildings' worth. It's presumably not rare enough to be precious, because it's just lying here without being salvaged. That implies some kind of technically advanced glassmaking industry, doesn't it? I don't know the exact history of the thing, but I know that my old house in Franklin had original windows that looked thicker, not as clear or flawless. And glass wasn't plentiful, easy, and cheap enough to make glass-fronted office buildings until...um...some time after 1800.

But the Brightly-Colored People looked agrarian. I'm confused. Post-collapse society? Novel materials?

He frowns, then shakes his head, dismissing speculation for now.

If it's glasslike, and tough, and tightly bound to some non-sharp rock, then maybe there's a fragment suitable for use as a knife. Or a handaxe. Stone Age tools are better than no tools.

Daniel casts about the rubble for fifteen minutes or so...carefully. If this stuff really is glasslike in its ability to hold an edge, a bit of caution seems well worth it. Blood loss and infection are real dangers here.

Daniel can't place the artistic tradition of the murals-- though they are definitely stylistic rather than true to life-- but lack the little touches of every tradition he can think of.

Uh-oh.

...can't make too much of that. I'm not an art historian.

The individual people in the murals were drawn very differently, with different features. In some cases this was limited to the face or skin color: In other cases it was reflected in height and build. One mural even had people with fur. Another had dragons. And several fantasy races appeared to be depicted: elves and dwarves at least.

"bah...whaa?"

Daniel sputters with incredulity for a moment or two. He consciously suppresses a twitch under one eye.

Okay, I was almost starting to entertain the 'spontaneous travel to a parallel universe' idea, but this is ridiculous. Proper, naturally-occurring many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics parallel universes don't do that. Most of them are going to be, uh. Boring? No, that's not the world. They'll be...natural consequences of their point of divergence. Lots of dull, sterile parallels where the initial conditions of the Big Bang resulted in a starless, planetless Universe fundamentally inhospitable to life. Parallels where Dewey beat Truman. Parallels where the Chicxulub impact never happened and dinosaurs rule the Earth. Buffy's World Without Shrimp.

But there's no conceivable point of divergence for this. Pop-culturally recognizable dwarves and elves, right next to each other and cohabiting with dragons, are a post-Tolkien thing. Really, a post-Gygax thing. There's no conceivable route from 1950 to the Brightly-Colored People, let alone 1970. Nothing that couldn't just as well explain any observation.

I suppose it's an enormous point in favor of Zhuangzi and Descartes' bigger, meaner, more modern, disturbingly plausible older brother: the simulation hypothesis. I'm a high-resolution computer simulation of a human being, being run by some future civilization that has read Tolkien.

Either that, or...what? What's left? Heinleinian multiple pantheistic solipsism? All Stories Are True, and Lazarus Long gallivants about the multiverse visiting the Land of Oz and John Carter of Mars and the First Lensman of Earth?

The overwhelmed young man stares into space, fighting down existential panic, eyes gone just as glassy as the wall. He has to take a deep, shaky breath before he can shake it off and move on.

Useless, even if true. If I'm a sufficiently high-resolution simulation of a human being to worry about all this shinola, then I have the moral status of a human being.

...I'll also bleed like a human being, and need food and shelter like a human being. Right! Back to practical problems.

I need to find civilization. The Brightly-Colored People, probably. Let's see, ways to find villages. They'll need drinking water: find a river and follow it. (Problem: leopards also need drinking water.) They'll use fire: look for smoke. (Problem: eyesight. And I can't see the sky.) They'll want to trade amongst themselves: find a road. (Problem: not sure if they're advanced enough to make them. And rainforests aren't great road-building territory.) They'll want food: rice is grown in paddies. Paddies are, necessarily, flat and homogenous, obviously cleared land. Find a rice paddy. (Problems: eyesight again, but less so. Seeing above the treeline.)

The easiest way, though, would be to find out that I'm already in civilization. I haven't thoroughly searched the whole village I'm in, and I don't know that it's fully or permanently abandoned. Even if I'm alone here, I could find some useful tool. Or some goddam pants.

Thus resolved, Daniel sets out to explore the rest of the buildings surrounding him- looking firstly for some sign of life, and secondly for tools and clothing. As he does so, he keeps an eye out for some kind of path or trail out of town.

OOC

Spoiler:  

I hope I'm not getting too meta for you. That was fun to write.

[ericthered]

OCC: Its fun to read. And establishes a very analytical character. I think this world will work really well for him.

Daniel searches for a piece of 'glass' that he could use as a knife. He doesn't have much luck: some of the edges are jagged, but not in the same way glass is. most of the time edges either are all the way around a thin sliver or the glass portion is stuck to the stone -- the break patterns are enough to make him suspect this might not be glass. He does eventually find a piece that has an edge, is safe to hold on the other side, and is light enough to carry -- its about seven or eight inches long and about four inches wide at the 'handle'. One side of it is the glassy substance, of some sort of bug on a tree trunk.

He finds no real sign of human (or dwarven, or strange dark person) habitation any-time in the last year. The clothing has been cleaned out of the houses, along with any fabric of any sort. Other kinds of stuff is lying all over the place: knives, pots, bowls, shovels, hoes, most of it very crudely made -- at least its shape seems crude. The bowls are misshapen , and the shovel handles crooked, but they are all quite smooth, brightly colored, and seem to be in good condition. The materials used are a mystery: at least some of it seems to be very well polished wood, but it hasn't rotted at all, despite being in a jungle and extremely dirty. sometimes rock or clay has been incorporated into the items, but it was difficult to tell were the rock began and the wood ended, as everything had the same brilliant color all over it. Despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any metal, the blades on the tools are quite sharp and everything looks quite strong.

Judging from the pieces lying all over the place, none of the items are very flexible, even the wooden ones-- shattering seems to be the main mode of failure. All the furniture remaining is broken, but it seems to have been built similarly: bright colors, elegant design patterns, but often unsymmetrical and shattering is more common than bending. No nails or fasteners seem to be used on anything. While the workmanship of portable items is bad, the construction appears much better.

Daniel can pick up whatever low quality items of the types described that he wants (or anything that feels like it should be on that list).

There do seem to be three or four roads leading away from the community, as well as a stream running through it (complete with a solid piece bridge arching over it)-- but all the routes have since become overgrown with vegetation.

[Toptomcat]

Daniel swaps his improvised knife for a purpose-made one the moment he finds it.

So the glassy material doesn't seem to break or hold an edge like glass. The new knife's handle seems like some kind of ceramic, blending smoothly into...woodish stuff...without any apparent seam. All very polished.

How could someone make one of these? Make the handle and blade to fit together precisely, put them together, polish the whole thing with successively finer abrasives until the seam is invisible, then dye it? ...with some dye that colors pottery and mystery wood exactly the same shade? No, probably not. If it were all ceramic I might say it's been glazed, but I don't know of any wood you could put in a kiln without scorching it. Maybe it's been coated with some kind of resin or epoxy that joins the two components and hides the seam? But then both materials would have the same texture.

Not to mention all of that seems like it would be an enormous bother, something requiring a lot of workmanship and time. But all these things are, um.

He picks up a fallen bowl and turns it upright, setting it on the floor: it lists heavily to one side, unable to lie flat on its misshapen base.

They're kind of crap, really. That's very weird.

So I'm back to the idea that the Brightly-Colored People have access to novel materials, or novel craftsmanship techniques. That's interesting. Wish I'd studied engineering.

...of course, the simplest explanation for all this is that I just don't know jack about archaic toolmaking.

Dan begins to sift through the collection of oddments for things that might be useful- a better knife, a machete, a walking stick, a compact shovel- but rapidly realizes that his ability to carry tools is limited by his total lack of pockets, belt loops, a bag, or any other way to bring something with him without carrying it in his hands. So he gives first priority to looking for such a thing. Even a decent length of chord or twine would be fantastic- he could tie a sort of bandoleer or sash, then attach things to it.

Failing that, he briefly examines the village and its immediate environs to see if there's some kind of vine that seems tough and pliable enough to braid together and make some improvised rope. He tries to be careful about it, holding his forearm against the plant for a few minutes to see if it produces a rash or itching before handling it extensively, and carefully examining it for any insects it hosts.

Always, though, he keeps his mind on the clock, trying not to spend more than half an hour looking for and investigating the vine and a half an hour braiding and tying it. He's in a race against time now: he knows little enough about wilderness survival that death by starvation, exposure or predators is inevitable if he can't find civilization swiftly.

Engineering, hell. What I really oughta wish is that I'd been a Boy Scout.

[ericthered]

Daniel doesn't find any cloth or rope or fibers of any sort -- at least not already fashioned into a rope. There are plenty of vines around, and several different types. He takes a while to figure out the best vine: mostly a compromise between strength and irritability -- the stronger vines are wooden and itchy or have little hairs on them. he does get a braided string of vines made, enough to carry the tools more easily. He isn't sure how to make it comfortable to sling over his shoulder though.

[Toptomcat]

The first cord Daniel braids is the longest- long enough to go from his shoulder to the opposite hip and around again to meet itself, like a sash. The next is slightly shorter, going around his hips to serve as a belt.

Heh. I can actually wrap this thing around my waist and have my protruding hip bones hold it up. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd be proud of that: making weight at lightweight is a real accomplishment at my height. But it means I'll starve that much sooner if I don't find any food. First time I've wished I had a bit of a paunch.

Lastly, he braids together about a dozen shorter cords, about the length of his forearm, and goes in search of tools to tie to his impromptu web gear. After some consideration, he settles on a machete (tied at the handle and tip and secured diagonally across his back), a navel-height walking stick (held), a compact shovel (tied at each end and secured behind him, like a fanny pack), and- this last takes a while to find, but it's worth it- a wide-bodied, narrow-necked vessel with a bulge near the neck, like a calabash, in which drinking water can be carried without worrying about the complicated, failure-prone 'net' of cordage that would be needed to carry a conventional, round bowl or bottle upright. This he ties to his left hip, and goes to fill it from the stream.

That takes care of water. Food is the next priority. If my dream can be trusted, the Brightly-Colored People have agriculture. I can't think of any reason for them to separate their fields very much from the village itself: when you need to walk to the fields every day and bring back what you harvest, a 'commute' of any real distance would be badly impractical.

So their fields would be very close. In all likelihood, one or more of the roads leading out of the village would lead to them. Since they'd need access to water to irrigate them, the road that's closest to running parallel to the river is probably the one.

The Brightly-Colored People have been gone, it seems, for about a year. (Why? What drove them from this place? Table that for now.) They won't have cultivated their fields. And I don't know if it's still April here, or what the harvesting season is for rice, yams and tomatoes is in a rainforest climate. But not all crop plants need replanting to grow back, and it takes decades for cultivated land to fully reforest: there's a decent chance that there are some food crops growing wild. Not enough to sustain a village, but maybe enough for one man to avoid starvation.

Daniel leaves the village on a foraging expedition, looking for the village's abandoned fields. He makes a point of being conservative, going no more than a hundred yards in any direction before doubling back: the foliage is thick, his vision is poor, and getting lost is a sure way to hasten his death.

OOC:

Spoiler:  

Aaargh, the mistitling of the thread has me seriously confused about my own character's name. I keep needing to go back and change 'David' to 'Daniel' :-)

Tomatoes are big, obvious red/green fruit, and thus probably identifiable without a roll: rice, yams and other food crops may be harder to identify. Daniel pulls up one of each kind of plant he finds to see if it has big, tuber-like roots, and gets as close as he can to minimize vision issues, but realistically sight is probably going to be something of an issue. Also, making a roll to try to remember if tomatoes, rice, and yams need to be replanted every year or if they grow back naturally. Not sure if Biology (10), my Naturalist default (7), my Farming default (8) or my Gardening default (9) is most appropriate for the plant-ID roll and my annual/perennial question. Quite possibly it's Gardening for tomatoes, a common houseplant, and Farming for the rest of them.

Concious of his limited eyesight and the thick foliage, Daniel is making an effort to depend principally on hearing rather than sight for threat detection.

[ericthered]

Daniel plunges into the forest, looking for crops. He searches for a quite some time. If its truly only been a year, then the fields were either farther away or they planted among the trees in small gardens. He has little luck until he finds what appears to be a section of irrigation trough, made of the strange colorful clay material. This leads him to a pond with lots and lots of foliage on its banks. He tries all the plants in the area and finds that the plant that grows in the pond has a tuber root -- and he thinks its probably edible. Or its that one yam you have to treat just right to not poison you.

[Toptomcat]

It's a tiny thing, finding a golden-brown, dirt-covered root. Twenty-four hours ago it would've been irrelevant, silly, utterly forgettable. But now, looking at the ugly tuber, Daniel feels the knot in his stomach slowly begin to unclench.

I'm not going to die.

He pulls up another few roots, enough for a meal, and does his best to memorize the route on his way back.

Okay, I'm probably not going to die as quickly as I thought I might. Still, I'll take good news where I can get it.

For long-term safety, I still need to find the Brightly-Colored People- but it looks like I might be able to reorder my priorities a bit. Here, I have water, I have shelter, and I now have food. I might be able to live here temporarily.

Next priority: safe water and safe food. I need fire.

How do I make a fire?

Daniel reaches the outskirts of the village and heads for the river, tubers in tow.

I need fuel, of course. Dry fuel. Which could be a bit of a problem in this climate. Fuels...there's wood, of course. And dry grasses, leaves, that kind of thing. Plant matter. Peat? This isn't a bog.

Coal and charcoal? I think you mine coal, which would be difficult without metal tools, which the Brightly-Colored People seem to lack. And people make charcoal, somehow? I think so. How? Is charcoal an industrial thing or a pre-industrial thing? I have no idea.

I can vaguely remember something about people burning dung for fuel, but I sincerely doubt it's as simple as taking a dump and lighting it up. It must be processed somehow- dried? Something more than dried? Whatever, move on.

Liquid fuels...lots of stuff that would require petroleum chemistry. Naphtha or raw crude? Rare. Is the geology right for it in a mountain rainforest? Hell if I know. Animal or vegetable oils, but they would probably have been taken by the fleeing villagers or rotted away.

Aaaaaand...hydrogen, I guess, but I'm hardly likely to put together some kind of electrolysis rig. Thermite?

Ideas getting stupid, time to move on.

The tubers wash off readily enough, and the machete trims off the stems with ease. Daniel almost loses a yam to the current when its stem snaps off by itself, but rescues it just in time.

So, practically, my options are wood and grasses. And I guess be on the lookout for a stockpile of charcoal or dried dung. I didn't find one earlier, but I wasn't looking.

Besides fuel, I'll need some means of igniting the fire. Use another fire? There isn't any: haven't noticed any lightning or wildfires or magma. Probably a good thing. Matches are right out. Even if I knew what flint looked like, I haven't got any steel. I think most primitive means of firestarting used friction somehow? I dimly remember the term 'bow drill' being used in the context of friction firestarting, but I don't think I'd know one if I saw it. What else...is there something else...?

Daniel heads back to a largely intact building right next to the one he found himself in at the beginning, ducking carefully under a dangerous-looking, crumbling 'glass' wall on the way there. Then he stops and looks at the wall again-the glass wall- and smacks himself on the forehead with a yam.

A lens! The Brightly-Colored People must start fires with lenses!

Pffft. Magma. Matches. Thermite and hydrogen. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

Putting his precious yams on a smooth, clean glass surface much like the one he woke up on, Daniel makes another, more purposeful sweep of the village and its environs. There's got to be a fire pit or a hearth somewhere, and in all likelihood, any fuel stockpile or firestarting lens will be close nearby. As he searches, though, a curious thought occurs to him.

I don't remember noticing a fire pit on my first sweep of the place- which, come to think of it, is downright strange. Hell, maybe the Brightly-Colored People don't even use fire. If they're this good at 'glass'-making, maybe they just boil water and cook with focused sunlight, not bothering with any fuel at all. Keeping it dry in this climate would be a challenge. What would their cooking area look like, then? Would there be a fixed lens in the ceiling? That would only be usable at noon, but you could eat a raw-food breakfast, a hot lunch, and a cold cooked dinner.

Wait, no. Seasons. The sun is not at the same place in the sky at noon on the winter solstice and noon on the summer solstice. Depending on longitude, it might be close enough that you could build a fixed lens in the middle and cook with it...particularly if you could move the pot to wherever the focus of the lens happened to be that day. But more likely, the lens would be movable, to be able to track the sun and cook a hot meal at any time during daylight hours. Handheld, maybe- how light can they make this stuff? How big a lens would you need to boil a pot? Big, to get it done in any reasonable time. Water has a high specific heat capacity. And you'd want to put something in the water that wasn't transparent, to catch the light more efficiently...dark rocks, maybe. Or dark food. Or both.

At any rate, the lens would be big, and probably heavy and difficult to hold long enough to boil something. I'd mount it on some kind of articulated frame. But that would be easy to notice, and I don't think I saw such a thing on my first sweep of the village. But, again, I wasn't looking...

OOC

Spoiler:  

I never expected to be engaging in out-there techno-anthropological speculation about how glassmaking jungle people would cook their food. I'm probably wildly off-base here, working with as little information as I've got, but the idea that a culture would be fireless because they somehow got good at glassmaking far before their level of industrial sophistication would ordinarily permit it is kind of cool.