Surviving Arkadia

I searched wider afield for more of the dried grass. By the time I’d finished turning a second armful into another ball of twine I’d levelled up again. Twice, because I’d got TAILORING to level one and then, a little while later, MAKE BASIC GEAR to level two.

Each time I heard the ding I announced it to Jethro who congratulated me with seemingly genuine pride and enthusiasm.

Once I’d processed all the grass I could find into balls of twine I stood up and stretched. I ached from sitting too still for too long, but actually less than I expected to. Must be the benefits of a lithe and youthful body. I resolved to take better care of it than I had of my old body. Though, if I was going to be honest with myself, my old body never took particularly good care of me.

I went looking for a tree with thin, smooth bark. I had a clear mental image that I was pretty sure came from one of my skills and not from Jethro’s description, which hadn’t been all that specific really. Once I’d found my tree I had to work out how to harvest the bark. Punching it clearly wasn’t the way but would a claw strike work? That way I could level up UNARMED COMBAT at the same time as FORAGING. Maybe. If the system worked that way.

I slashed at the tree, feeling my claws sink deeper than I’d expected. I peeled up the bark at the edge of the slash marks with a forefinger claw and found that I was able to roll the bark off in long strips.

The word barkcloth swum through my mind. Was that a thing? Was that a thing that I could make? I closed my eyes and looked into the details of MAKE BASIC GEAR. Barkcloth was a thing and I could make it but it needed the inner bark of a different kind of tree and required a lot of pounding. It was good to know though.

I returned to Jethro’s blanket with the strips of bark and made myself some much stronger twine with it. That was enough to level up MAKE BASIC GEAR again, though not TAILORING. Did the thicker twine not count for that? Maybe it was too thick and inflexible for clothing?

I’d had an idea that maybe I didn’t have to rely on the skills I could unlock here. Using the claw of my little finger as a hook I began to crochet myself a bag out of twine.

I made the base quite dense and then reinforced it by weaving the bark twine between the stitches. Then I made a loose net for the sides. A net bag was good enough for the grasses and bark strips and mushrooms that I planned to carry in it.

I got up and collected more bark strips so I could make straps to carry the bag by.

Jethro leant on his felling axe as he watched me finish the bag. “You ready to make your first stone tool?” he said, as I stuffed the last of my mushrooms into the bag on top of the unused twine and bark strips.

“Now’s as good a time as any,” I said.

Jethro described the exact kind of stone I needed to find. He reckoned that the key wasn’t the blade but that the stone was a good shape for tying to a handle. A stone axe is not the same thing as a flint axe at all. Flint tools are all about the incredibly sharp edge. Jethro seemed to be saying that the stone axe was going to work by brute force rather than by blade so the shape of the blade didn’t really matter.

I searched around for the right kind of stone. I gave the cleared area around the felled trees the once over and then headed in the direction of the stream. There had been a lot of smooth stones in the stream when I was drinking from it so it seemed like a good place to look.

I found a couple of likely looking stones and carried them back to Jethro. He pronounced both of them good enough and suggested I make the larger one into an axe. He showed me how to use the smaller one as a crude tool to break a branch off of one of his felled trees. I cleaned up the branch as best I could and split one end. I wedged the larger rock into the split and then tied it in place with twine.

I heard the light ping of an achievement. I was beginning to recognise the difference between that and the more aggressive and louder ding of a skill level. I briefly closed my eyes to see the notification. It was called QUEEN OF THE STONE AGE and it was for making my first true stone tool. Apparently just hitting things with a rock did not count as tool use. The notification also said that I’d unlocked LUMBERJACK at zero level.

Jethro told me to clear the branches from one of his trees. I realised that he’d purposefully left the thinner branches to me while he cleared the larger ones.

Using the stone axe was a huge pain in the arse. No wonder my distant ancestors had gone to all the trouble of learning to knap flint just so they’d had an edge to work with and later all the trouble of smelting copper and tin so they had something they could sharpen. I was thoroughly done with stone tools by the time I heard the ding of LUMBERJACK hitting level 1. I closed my eyes to inspect my progress and noticed that there was a new section of the skill tree that had opened up. Apparently I’d unlocked the ability to use metal tools.

Standing there with my eyes closed while frowning and looking confused was all the evidence Jethro needed to put the case together.

“Did you ding?” he said.

“Yeah, and unlocked metal tools,” I said.

“Brilliant, you can get rid of that garbage. Unless you’re sentimental and want to keep it as a souvenir.”

He was holding out his hatchet with the handle towards me.

“Really?” I said.

“It’s just a loaner. Use it until you’re ready to get one of your own. That shouldn’t take long, the rate you’re going.”

I finished cutting the side branches from the felled tree. Jethro told me not to try cutting the tree into manageable logs because I had the wrong tool and using the wrong tool added a risk of injury. By then the sun was getting lower, dangerously close to the treetops. Once the sun was below that I was sure that it would be much darker in the woods.

So it was almost a relief when Jethro said, “Time I was heading home.”