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there is no such thing as the unknown
Confusing the hell out of Bruce Banner is too much fun
Permalink Mark Unread

This was a lousy idea and Bruce is having a lousy time.

"Come explore the Stata Center with us," they said. "Grad students deserve to have fun too," they said. "It's better than anything else you could be doing at 3 AM," they said. Well now he's gotten separated from the group and ended up in a room with, and he has counted several times, seventeen sides and nineteen corners.

He can't tell which door he came in; worse, they're all locked. There's a window, but it doesn't open, and all he can see out of it is a different exterior wall of this same damned building. 

Bruce looks up at the ceiling, or at least at the point where all the walls converge, and his head swims, and he should have gone to sleep a long time ago, and it feels like he's about to fall off the floor into . . . 

There is a series of sense impressions that fail to resolve into a model of the world, and then Bruce is somewhere else.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Superficially, this location resembles a forest.

The ground is thickly carpeted with small green growing things in the moss-and-grass genre. There are trees in every direction, fairly sparse in the immediate vicinity but still dense enough on average that there is no line of sight from his current position that makes it to the horizon without hitting a trunk.

However, as forests go, this one is... weirdly regular.

The trunks of the trees are all near-perfectly straight, and while they grow to different heights and have different arrangements of branches, their diameters are unnaturally uniform. They look sort of like their shapes were procedurally generated by a fairly simplistic algorithm and then clothed in perfectly realistic bark and leaves afterward.

The ground is flat. Genuinely flat, geometrically flat, flat like the Cartesian plane, with small variations in the texture of the surface and the height of the ground cover but absolutely no detectable changes in elevation as far as the eye can see.

There are no living creatures visible or audible except for Bruce himself. Nothing is moving, nothing is making noise. The only sound is the gentle rustling of leaves in the wind.

Although there's plenty of stuff growing on the ground, the kind of debris that's usual in forests—twigs, rocks, fallen leaves—is totally absent. The only thing here that isn't a plant is Bruce.

Permalink Mark Unread

While Bruce can't actually be sure he isn't still in the Stata Center, it seems pretty likely that he's not. He fights back panic; surely if he got here from campus he can get to campus from here. He takes stock of his surroundings and deems them Extremely Weird. Whoever made this place--and it definitely has the feel of something made and carefully maintained--put in a lot of time and effort for no clear purpose.

He knows if you're lost in the woods with people looking for you you should stay where you are and be easy to find, but with no clue how he got here he doesn't want to bet that anyone's looking. The next best strategy is to walk downhill until you find water, but that's not an option either.

If he's going to start walking, he needs to make sure he doesn't go in circles. He takes out his multitool and starts cutting the bark off a tree, aiming to make a ring around it at eye height.

Permalink Mark Unread

The bark comes off fairly easily.

As soon as he completes his ring, the tree makes a gentle creaking noise, sways slightly, and then from just below the ring upwards it—collapses? Vanishes? There's a puff of dust, the bark he detached crumbles into tiny fragments, and from the space formerly occupied by trunk and branches an assortment of little wooden blocks rains down on Bruce, the ground, and the unnaturally smooth stump. Each block is a cylinder, about an inch long and slightly less than an inch in diameter, like a miniature section of trunk, complete with bark on what would have been the outer surface.

Permalink Mark Unread

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa what. That is not something that happens in, in the world. Trees don't do that. He doesn't even know how he would rig a tree to do that. The little wood blocks feel real in his hands, he has normal proprioception and that never happens in his dreams, trying to wake up does nothing, but the fact is he remembers feeling about to fall unconscious and now nothing makes sense, so he's definitely super dreaming.

Knowing he's dreaming provides exactly fuck-all useful information about what to do next. Okay, what happens if he cuts another ring into the bark of the dream-tree with his dream-knife a little farther down?

Permalink Mark Unread

The next two feet or so of trunk do the same vanishing routine, and now he has one additional cylinder. If he collects them all up and counts them, he'll have twenty-one. The remaining stump is about two feet tall.

Relatedly, if he looks around, he might notice that the trees appear to be laid out on a grid. They're placed semi-randomly within that grid, but there are definitely rows and columns at work here, with each row and each column being about two feet wide and each tree trunk being slightly less than that distance across.

Permalink Mark Unread

He puts all the little blocks on top of the stump except two. Of those two, one goes in his pocket and he tries scraping the bark off the other. Also, do any of these trees look climbable?

Permalink Mark Unread

The bark Does Not come off the little block. It's as solidly impenetrable as though it was made of glass.

The trees don't, as a rule, have branches low enough to grab from the ground; it might be possible to climb them, but it sure won't be easy.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

A little creature toddles out from behind a nearby tree, walking on tiny pointy feet. It waves a tiny pointy arm in his direction.

{!!hello!!} it says, in a voice like creaking branches and rustling grass and fluttering leaves, which he somehow understands despite the complete lack of recognizable phonemes. {friend!!}

Permalink Mark Unread

Bruce puts his knife away when it's clear that trying to cut the tiny wood blocks will only damage it, so it's back in his pocket when the little creature shows up.

Aliens! Adorable aliens! He waves back at the being, slowly, not wanting to startle them. "Hello! It's good to meet you." Hopefully they understand him as well as he understands them.

Permalink Mark Unread

{you found wood!} It points a tiny arm at the tree stump. {pick up wood, make thing!}

There's something slightly odd about how the concepts of 'pick up' and 'make' come through, like the words don't quite fit right around the underlying ideas.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yup, that's typical dream logic communication. He should probably make sure not to do anything that would be really stupid if he wasn't dreaming, like, uh, trusting a strange alien who might or might not be actually friendly, but on the other hand if they're not friendly he doesn't want to piss them off and does want to establish communication. He picks up one of the little wood pieces from the tree stump, wondering if dream logic is about to tell him how to "make thing".

Permalink Mark Unread

When he reaches for the wood pieces, all of them stand up and lean toward his hand like iron filings reacting to a magnet. The one he's specifically reaching for starts hopping up and down, in tiny two-millimeter jumps, and leaps into his hand as soon as he gets close.

And now, when he's holding a piece of wood, he can sort of... 'read' something in it, similarly to how he can 'hear' meaningful communication in the adorable alien's plant noises. It's kind of like a list of... recipes? Except that each 'recipe' consists of an 'ingredients list' that's blurred out except for the part that says {1/? wood}, and a 'title' that's also blurred out, and it seems like the recipes get farther out of focus as their ingredients lists deviate farther from the {1 wood} he can currently access, so that as they reach three or more separate ingredients it gets to the point where he can barely tell they're there at all.

There's a few different things he can make with {1 wood} alone, though. If he focuses on one of those, the invisible not-text seems to 'brighten', like he's highlighting an option in a computer menu, and there's a sense of how he might activate it to produce the output of the recipe.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oooh, neat! What things can he make with {1 wood}?

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, if he tries an arbitrary one, he gets...

...a tiny fencepost?

And now - he can still access the recipe list, sort of, but it's all blurred out because he is no longer holding any ingredients.

{you made fence!} congratulates the alien. {you can put fence on ground!}

And indeed, if he holds the tiny fencepost and looks around, he can 'see' a sort of visibly-invisible preview of what it might look like scaled up to a four-foot height and standing in any particular grid square he focuses on, and he can activate that preview the same way he activated the recipe.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, sure, he'll place his tiny fence-segment and watch it turn into a human-scale but very horizontally short fence-segment. Then he'll grab another wood-cube and see what else he can . . . no, wait, he's been ignoring the person in front of him in favor of science again, and that's rude. "Thanks for your help! My name is Bruce; what's your name?"

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{i am forest spirit! i help!!} It waves excitedly. {is good to meet bruce!}

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's good to meet you too, Forest Spirit! What other ingredients can I get? Is grass an ingredient?" He reaches down and picks a handful of grass.

Permalink Mark Unread

Grass does not provide him with any recipes.

{you can get dirt!} says the forest spirit. {you can get rock! you can get ore! you can get more wood! and different wood! and things from monsters! careful though. monsters are dangerous.}

Permalink Mark Unread

Monsters, huh? Yeah, he's definitely going to assume those can kill him in real life until proven otherwise. "What are monsters like? How does one avoid them? Um, sorry for asking so many questions, this is all very confusing."

Permalink Mark Unread

{is okay! i like helping!} the spirit assures him. {monsters are many different. forest is safest place, has only green slimes and night monsters. slimes only hurt you if you touch them, so is mostly safe. night monsters scary, but can't open doors, so build house first, will be okay.}

Permalink Mark Unread

"Build a house, huh? Okay." He scoops up a bunch more wood to see if building an all-woood house is an option.

Permalink Mark Unread

Probably there are things he can build with a bunch of wood other than the fence.

In fact there are several such things!

There are 5 things he can create for 1 wood each,
and 3 things he can create for 1 wood each with a slightly different format in their recipe entries that might indicate they belong to a different category,
and the fence for 1 wood,
and three more things for 1 wood each that seem to be in the same format as the fence,
and two things for variable quantities of wood (minimum 3) which seem to otherwise have the fence format,
and a thing for 4 wood that's mostly in the fence format but not quite.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bruce has a sudden desperate need for paper and pencil, and no way to get them. Unless, as seems plausible given the implausible context, he can assemble them out of wood. He tries the four wood thing first, then the two variable things at three each.

Permalink Mark Unread

The four wood thing turns out to be a {Crafting Table}, and the two variable things turn out to be a {door} and a {wide door}. The recipe list now shows each of these entries with its name attached.

Permalink Mark Unread

Having the recipes labeled once he's tried them is a lot more convenient than the alternative! This dream (drug trip? psychotic break?) is weirdly coherent for what it is. Also, the name "crafting table" suggests it will help with the recipes somehow. He puts it down while keeping the doors tiny, then stands next to it and puts his hands on it to see if that does anything, while asking the forest spirit, "What other ingredients do I need for a house?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{can make floor from wood and wall from wood and chair from wood! can make torch from wood and gel, and lamp from wood and torch!}

Putting his hands on the crafting table doesn't do anything extra, but being near it seems to unlock a whole bunch more wood-related recipes. The new ones have a tag indicating that they are crafted at the Crafting Table.

Permalink Mark Unread

Neat! He'll just make one of everything he can make with only wood, then, until he runs out of wood or recipes or runs into something dangerous to have a miniature one of.

Permalink Mark Unread

All together, including things he previously made, this leaves him with:

a fence, a floor, a wall, a thick wall, a door, a wide door, a beam,

a helm, cuirass, boots, gauntlets, and greaves,

an axe, a pickaxe,

and 1 remaining uncrafted wood.

All the items start out in tiny form, but can be expanded according to their category: placeables can be placed, wearables can be put on, and tools can be equipped to wield. The axe and pickaxe cost 2 wood each, the door and wide door he made for 3, and everything else cost 1. There seems to be one remaining uncrafted item in the tool category, none in the wearable category, and plenty more in the placeable category.

Of placeables he could make using wood alone, two cost 2 wood, two cost 4 wood, one costs a variable amount with a miminum of 2, and two cost a variable amount with a minimum of 3. All those require the crafting table; he has exhausted all the only-wood handcraftable recipes except for that one remaining tool.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks, spirit! This is cool stuff!" He puts on the armor, expecting that it will somehow fit him perfectly and be wearable despite being made of wood, places the walls at right angles in a clear space, and attempts to cut down another tree with the wooden axe.

Permalink Mark Unread

His expectations about the armor are accurate! It's surprisingly comfortable, too.

The axe is highly successful at cutting down the tree; the first five chops each take out a single small chip from the trunk, and the sixth causes the whole tree to dissolve into a rain of tiny logs. Now he has more wood, and a couple of little acorn items which turn out to place little saplings.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ooh, he can do sustainable forestry, if that's even a concern here. He plants the saplings nearby enough to keep an eye on them but out of the way of his two walls worth of pre-house.

"How do trees grow here?" He asks. "What would have happened to those acorns if I hadn't cut the tree down?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{plant tree, tree is small. tree is small, is small, is small, is small, then tree is big! tree gives seed sometimes when cut. before cut tree, no seed.}

Permalink Mark Unread

"So they only reproduce when they die, then? Huh."

More house-building! Four walls and a floor. Four thick walls, if he can pick the thin one back up: he knows there are hazards about, and even if thick walls won't necessarily provide more safety they probably won't provide less.

Permalink Mark Unread

He can pick the thin one back up if he tries bopping it with a tool of some sort; the axe and the pickaxe both work for this purpose.

The thick walls are about a foot thick; the thin walls are about four inches. Thick walls seem to align most naturally with their edges along the edge of a grid-square, whereas thin ones seem to prefer standing centered on a gridline.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bruce puts his crafting table in his house. "Would you like to come in?" He asks the forest spirit, while trying more recipes in search of a roof. He also recalls chairs being mentioned; one of those would be nice too.

Permalink Mark Unread

{okay!}

It toddles cheerfully into the house and sits its round little self down in a corner.

The full list of things craftable at the Crafting Table with only wood turns out to be:

a chair (2), a bench (2), a bookcase (4), a chest of drawers (4), a table (n>=2), a bathtub (n>=3), a bedframe (n>=3), and the beam he made earlier (1).

Also, if he tries it, the remaining handcraftable wooden tool is a hammer.

Possibly he will have to use floors as ceilings and make that his roof. Or he could ask the creature about other options.

Permalink Mark Unread

The existence of bookcases suggests the existence of books! Everything is significantly more okay than it was a minute ago. He puts up some bookcases and makes himself and the spirit a chair each.

The chest of drawers and bathtub are good in and of themselves, but remind him that wherever he is doesn't have plumbing and he's going to need to learn to make soap and find water somewhere.

Also he is definitely going to try using a floor as a roof just to see what will happen.

Permalink Mark Unread

The spirit is so delighted to sit in its chair. It is comically tiny in comparison to the size of the chair, but seems to be just fine with that.

Using a floor as a roof appears to work without issue!

Also, when he places the bathtub, it appears with a bar of soap sitting in the little soap dish built into the rim near the faucet. The faucet is made of the same wood as the rest of the tub, and although there's no discernible input hookup, the knobs look like they'd turn if he tried them.

Permalink Mark Unread

Awwww, the forest spirit is so cute! He's glad they're easy to please, especially since they might well be the only other person in this reality-or-possibly-the-opposite-of-that.

Spontaneous soap, huh? Weird, but thank goodness. He turns the knobs. Does water appear out of nowhere? Conservation of mass has already gone out the window, fallen thirty stories, and splattered on the pavement, so it might as well.

Permalink Mark Unread

Water does appear out of nowhere, or at least out of nowhere that's physically attached to this bathtub. And then it flows down the drain and goes right back where it came from. There's a little wooden cork-thing to plug the drain with.

Permalink Mark Unread

That is extremely cool. All of this is cool once you get past how terrifying it is; it's like he's exploring a whole new set of consistent but alien laws of physics. If this isn't real, it's the most interesting hallucination he's ever heard of. If only he had memorized a hundred-digit number to ask the forest spirit to factorize. 

More prosaically, he's thirsty. "Is this water safe to drink? And do you know where it comes from and where it goes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{comes from bathtub. goes to bathtub. is bathtub water. is safe, I think? am not water spirit.}

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"There are water spirits? What are they like? What other kinds are there? And I'm curious about forest spirits too--are there lots of you, do you have cities somewhere. . . ?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{is just me here! and water spirit in water and stone spirit in cave and cloud spirit in sky.}

Permalink Mark Unread

"Only four of you? Are there people around who aren't spirits?" If there are only four people, either this is a really tiny place, or it's surprising he ran into someone so quickly, or . . . "Did you know I was going to come here?" Did they bring him here?

Permalink Mark Unread

{knew there was going to be friend! didn't know when. long time alone first.} It doesn't seem too upset about that, though. {just spirit and animal and monster, no friend.}

Permalink Mark Unread

Awwww he's their friend! But the rest of that was concerning! "How did you know? And what are animals and monsters?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{just knew! know lots of things. animal is animal, does animal things. moves around, sometimes drinks water, sometimes eats grass. monster is monster, does monster things. tries to hurt animal or friend or spirit. is scary.}

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"Shit--I mean, uh, yikes." Swearing in front of this dude is like swearing in front of a small child. "Do you know how I can keep us safe from the monsters?"

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{monster can't open door!} it says reassuringly. {can build house, be safe inside. most places only have scary monster at night. scary places have scary monster in day. blood place and shadow place are scary. if trees bleeding or screaming, place is scary, stay away. other places, in day only monster is slime, doesn't try to hurt you until you touch it or hurt it. also scary place very very far underground and very very high up in sky. and can make weapons, fight monster! but is scary.}

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will definitely stay away from bleeding or screaming trees! That sounds awful!" And increases P(he somehow got dosed with LSD and is now totally losing his shit on the floor of the Stata Center), assuming what he recalls of classmates' stories is accurate. "Is this house strong enough to keep out monsters?" He much prefers the "hide" strategy to the "make weapons and fight monsters" strategy, because he is not every possible flavor of nuts.

Permalink Mark Unread

{is strong enough to keep out all monsters in forest!}

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"Oh good. Hmm, you mentioned making a torch out of slime, and you mentioned monsters called slimes, do slimes by any chance leave slime around where I can find some?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{can make torch from gel, gel comes from slime. have to fight slime but slime is not very hard to fight.}

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"Ooookay. And they're not people, right, they can't talk or make deals or anything?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{slime can't talk,} it confirms. {slime only move and bounce and hit things.}

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"Alright. So it's probably okay to fight it unless I turn out to be really bad at fighting. Which I probably will." Hey, hang on a minute, he has a floor-roof on top of this building and does not yet have a torch. Why isn't it pitch dark in here?

Permalink Mark Unread

For one thing, he left the door open. For another, the ambient light is oddly bright in here; even in the farthest corners of the room, there's enough light to avoid bumping into walls.

Permalink Mark Unread

If wood is weird, maybe air and light are too. He should replicate Newton's experiments on refraction. He should replicate everything. He should get a goddamn pencil and paper and write down his experiment list. "By the way," he says as he opens the door and looks out, "do you know a recipe for pencils and paper?" He doesn't have much hope, because he would expect paper to be all wood, but maybe he can make a fire and get charcoal and write on his walls.

Permalink Mark Unread

The forest spirit sways thoughtfully. {don't know... maybe ask water spirit, water spirit knows how to make lots of things.}

Permalink Mark Unread

Hopefully the water spirit will know, since otherwise he's going to need to make charcoal with his torch, near his wooden house, in a forest. "Okay. I'm going to go look for slimes." He pokes his head out the door.

Permalink Mark Unread

The forest is unnaturally quiet, but then, this forest usually is.

 

A round blob of what appears to be animate green Jello, totally devoid of any limbs or features, hops merrily between the trees. It's about a foot wide and looks pretty darn harmless.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh no, it's cute! Fuuuck, he's probably going to have to give up veganism while he's living in the weird nonsense wilderness, isn't he. Well, he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Maybe he can get slime out of this thing without injuring it. He walks cautiously toward it, wood-armored hands outstretched. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Hop hop hop.

It's pretty easy to catch, but as soon as he grabs it it starts aggressively trying to wiggle free.

Permalink Mark Unread

He would too if he was it. Can he scrape some goo off, or squeeze some goo out, or otherwise end up with goo on his hands? (His goal when handling animals is usually closer to the opposite of this. Heh.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Goo can definitely be separated from the creature, but not in any format that yields a recipe list—

—and then it manages to launch itself at his face, tearing itself in half in the process, and being torn in half appears to kill it, and there is quite a lot of goo all over him but three little rubbery item-balls among the mess.

(The goo tastes... like very faintly grass-flavoured Jell-O. It's not exactly a gourmet sensation but isn't particularly unpleasant either.)

Permalink Mark Unread

That was neither the expected nor the desired outcome! Bruce expresses this sentiment eloquently as "Yarrrgh!" and barely avoids falling over. Once stable, he wipes off his armor as best he can and collects his item balls. He also spits out the bit that got in his mouth, and then spits a few more times, because he's not eating alien jello even if it doesn't taste poisonous.

Permalink Mark Unread

With {1 wood} and {1 gel}, he can make something which he may safely presume will be a torch!

Permalink Mark Unread

Torch: get! Safely away from any trees or walls, and not wearing his wooden armor, since he doesn't know if the mini form can catch things on fire.

Permalink Mark Unread

The mini form has a little stylized flame that is not in any relevant sense made of fire.

He can place the torch attached to a wall at an angle, or attached to the ground standing straight up.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay, putting a torch on a wall is probably fine, but he's going to place that thin wall he didn't end up using in his house and try sticking the torch to that first, so he can experiment on it in relative safety and without worrying about smoke in his room.

Permalink Mark Unread

Facts about placed torches:

It generates approximately no heat.

Objects touching the flame do not catch fire.

The torch does not burn down.

The artistic curl of smoke rising from the flame has a pleasant woodsmoke-y smell but refuses to fill an enclosed space no matter how it is encouraged; he can enclose the torch fully inside a cube of walls, wait as long as he likes, and when he checks on it there will be the same little wisp of smoke curling upward from the end of the torch and none gathered in the rest of the space.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bruce tries sticking lots of different things in the torch, starting with bits of grass and ending after the encouraging earlier results with his finger and the edge of his sleeve. He concludes that it does not work at all like real fire and in fact works a lot more conveniently. He moves it to an inside wall of his one-room house, which should really have a separate bathroom and bedroom at some point, and informs the forest spirit that "Torches are so neat!"

Permalink Mark Unread

{is pretty!} says the spirit, bouncing happily.

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"That too!" he says agreeably, then tries drinking the bathtub water. The existence of a bathtub recipe but no toilet recipe is interesting. It's like something in the whole setup is aware of humans, but not in the way a human would be.

Permalink Mark Unread

It tastes like water. Actually it tastes like nothing but water. Possibly the magic bathtub conjures distilled water to wash with.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, if you drink nothing but distilled water in real life you'll get health problems, but maybe that's no more of a risk here and now than smoke inhalation. He'll note other sources of water, but it's not super urgent.

"I'm gonna go exploring, try to find something to eat," he says to the forest spirit. "Wanna come with, or stay here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

It sways thoughtfully, then declares, {i stay. if you get lost i look for you. careful of time! if lost, build house before dark.}

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay." He starts gathering enough wood for a second house. "What will happen just before it gets dark? Will the angle of the light change as the day goes on?"

Permalink Mark Unread

{late in day, sun goes down, light is different,} the spirit agrees.

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"Well at least that's the same," he mutters. "Alright. I'll try to be back before dark and if not I'll be back in the morning. Do you know how long it is until sunset?"

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{am not good at time,} it admits.

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"That's okay. I'll see you in a few hours or else tomorrow, then."

He sets out in a random direction, making note of his best guess at where the sunlight is coming from and marking his path by hitting the occasional tree exactly once with his wooden axe. After about ten minutes of this, he doubles back to make sure the trees haven't been spontaneously healing themselves as soon as he isn't looking. 

Permalink Mark Unread

They totally have been.

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Fuuuuuuck. That's really cool and he wishes his body could do that, but fuuuuuuck anyhow. He will try dragging a visible track in the ground; does that work? Both in the sense of being able to make the mark with his axe at all and in the sense of it sticking around.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes and also yes. Or at least it's not vanishing on the scale of ten minutes.

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Great. Now that Bruce has some evidence he isn't going in circles, he goes farther in the random direction. He's looking for any of food, water, the edge of the forest, other nonplant lifeforms, that cave the forest spirit mentioned, or anything else interesting.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he finds...

...a river!

There's an apple tree growing nearby, covered with large red apples, and a beautiful willow spreading its branches over the water. All the other trees on this side are the same kind that fills the rest of the forest. The apple and the willow share the bizarre regularity of the forest trees but have different branch styles and bark textures.

On the far side of the river—a significant but definitely swimmable span—there's a grassy plain, with tall shoots of bamboo growing amid some more generic tall grasses, and a few towering trees visible in the middle distance.

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow, stuff that isn't the same trees over and over! 

He attempts to pick and eat an apple. If this is a Bible metaphor he's screwed, but if this is a Bible metaphor he's screwed no matter what and also he's pretty sure the Bible doesn't have any adorable tree-people in it.

Permalink Mark Unread

The apple is crisp and delicious and does not appear to affect his knowledge of good and evil in any way.

A blob-creature like the green one from earlier comes bobbing around the lazy curve of the river, hopping determinedly against the current. Instead of being a pale grassy green, though, it's divided into six rainbow slices like a jello beach ball.

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Once he's down to the core of the apple, he tries burying it a little ways upstream, where it won't be overshadowed by the parent tree if it sprouts. He's very curious about the six-colored slime, but not enough so to grab it and risk exploding it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Getting the apple core submerged in a few inches of dirt is a reasonably trivial task.

As he's working on it, another slime comes floating down the river from the other direction, spinning gently in the current. This one is an opaque glossy black, reminiscent of ink. It collides with the rainbow slime and the two of them start hopping aggressively at each other; their battle gradually carries them farther downstream.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's really cool and Bruce wishes he had a camera. He makes sure he remembers this spot and how to get back to his house from here and starts exploring downstream.

Permalink Mark Unread

Downstream, the forest remains a forest; there's another apple tree a little ways farther along, and across the river a little ways farther than that the grassland makes an extremely abrupt, grid-aligned transition to snowy ground sprinkled with spruces.

A slime hops out of the snowy area and into the river, where it struggles against the current to reach the other side; it sparkles in the sun, wreathed in glittering frost.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oooh, that's a pretty slime. He wonders if these things can be domesticated. Also, he has to know what the temperature gradient is like over there. It might be exploitable for infinite free energy, and even it not he bets it's neat. Can he ford the river without getting soaked by putting a beam or two across it?

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He can! Beams can only be attached to the sides of walls, but he can build a one-block-high wall and stick a beam to the side and bridge the river in this fashion. Two beams next to each other with floors on top, if he's feeling really fancy, although at that point the wood expenditure gets significant.

The temperature gradient between snowy and non-snowy zones is pretty sharp. There's a little bit of chill creeping across the divide, and a little bit of heat escaping in the other direction, but for the most part, the snowy zone feels like a brisk winter day and the river and grassland feel like spring.

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Amazing. Between this and the torch that doesn't burn down, if his surroundings are real at all he's in a place with different laws of thermodynamics. In which case it's anyone's guess how he's managing to exist as organized matter. Maybe he's been put into some sort of fully immersive VR; that would make more sense than either "all of this is real" or "his brain is somehow generating all of it while he feels almost completely lucid". It isn't a complete explanation and raises further questions, of course, but it's a working hypothesis. He eats another apple, and this time tries picking the seeds out of the core to see if they can he planted like acorns.

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In attempting this he discovers... that there aren't any seeds in the core of this apple.

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Sigh. Of course not. That would be too familiar and convenient. Maybe apples here are like bananas and can only reproduce from cuttings. Whatever; at least he can eat the whole thing. He goes back across his bridge and starts exploring further downstream; the frost zone is interesting but cold and the river is too good at keeping him from getting lost to give it up.

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The river curves, blockily, off to the left; as the sun sinks in the sky, the river bends toward it, until he reaches the edge of the forest facing almost due west. Ahead, there's another grassland; to his right, the river swings back northward for a short distance, broadening gradually, before pouring itself into a glittering ocean. The grass is too tall for him to see clearly past it, but on the far side of the river there's a clearly visible line where the snowy area stops and a sandy shore begins; standing on the shore between the snow and the ocean, there is a tall palm tree, with heavy bunches of dates hanging from its fronds.

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Bruce should start heading back to his house if he wants to get there before nightfall. He picks some dates from the date palm and eats them on the way back, checking at the same time whether they have pits. Tomorrow he'll come straight back here and follow the coast for a bit, see if he can get a sense of what size of landmass he's on.

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The dates are as seedless as the apples.

Making his way back home is fairly uneventful; a small colourless slime follows him away from the grassland for a bit before jumping in the river and being carried back downstream, and a few sparkling ones try and fail to cross the river toward him, and some green ones wander past through the forest.

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This is a beautiful place, for all its impossibility. He feels like a pioneer exploring a new continent, except this continent seems to have exactly four people and low odds of pointless wars with any of them. And quite possibly also no dysentery, if there aren't humans or anything similar here then the local pathogens probably won't know what to do with him. He's still not drinking the river water except as a last resort, but it's starting to look like he might not be about to learn whether dying here implies dying in real life.

He should be coming up on the place where he put a beam over the river soon. Maybe it's still there.

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It is! There's one of the small shiny grassland slimes hopping across it as he approaches.

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Awww. That's so cute he almost doesn't worry about how he might be disrupting the local ecology. Also, not much farther until the point where he needs to leave the river and head back towards his house. If it doesn't look like he'll have enough daylight to make it, he should build his second house by the river instead.

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The sun is descending slowly enough that he should have plenty of time to get back to base.

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Oh good. And the trail he carved in the ground should be somewhere around . . . here.

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Yep, there it is! The grass has crept over it a little in a few places but it's still legible.

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The grass here grows quickly! He follows his trail back to his house and heads inside. "Hello!"

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The forest spirit waves. {did you have fun?}

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"I did! I found a river, and an area that's colder than the area next to it which is super weird, and a beach, and fruit trees with no seeds! Do all the trees here reproduce by being cut down?"

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{yes! tree gives seed when cut, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes none. all tree do. sometimes also special tree seed from night monster.}

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"Is two more common than none? It would have to be, or there couldn't come to be more trees. What's up with monsters having seeds, do they cut down trees to get them, what makes them special?"

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{every place have two tree, one normal, one special. in forest, oak and apple. in river, reed and willow. in snowy forest, spruce and maple. normal tree usually just have wood, special tree usually have fruit. don't know why monster have seed. monster have things usually, is how monster.}

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None of this makes any evolutionary sense. He would have expected evolution to start happening anywhere there was life, but maybe the "life" here doesn't have the right sort of variation and heredity for it.

"So the fruit doesn't have anything to do with how the trees make more trees . . . Do you know how there came to be a lot of trees in the first place? Actually, can you just explain to me the history of the world as far as you know it, starting from as close to the beginning as possible?"

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The forest spirit considers this question gravely.

{world is. world have place. island and ocean and sky and underground, and forest and desert and and river and lake and more other place. then world have tree, then world have animal, then world have monster, then world have spirit. then world have friend! then is now.}

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"Do you know what caused each of those changes? How did you come to know what order things happened in before you existed?"

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{i know things! is how spirit. don't know why world have things though. have things is how world.}

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Argh, what a frustrating answer. But it isn't the spirit's fault they were born (created?) with innate knowledge and no nearby civilization.

"Would you like to learn the scientific method? It's a way of coming to know more things."

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It bounces happily. {okay!}

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"Cool! So, the way the scientific method works is, you start out with some ideas about how the world might work based on things you've noticed with your own senses--what you've seen and heard and smelled and so on. Then you think, if the world is this way, what would I expect to see if I tried something new? And if the world is actually a different way, what would I expect to see instead? The goal is to find something you can do that would have one result if the world is one way and a different result if it's another way. Then you do the thing, and whatever result you get affects your beliefs about how the world works."

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The spirit has to sit down on the ground to grapple with the weight of this concept.

{woooow,} it says. {is complicated.}

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Bruce has definitely daydreamed about someday teaching the scientific method to children, though in the daydreams it was usually his children and not adorable tiny aliens. This is all very Star Trek in an excellent way. "Yeah, it's pretty complicated. Would you like an example? I find those help."

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The spirit bounces enthusiastically, like a whole-body nod.

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"Okay! So when I made a torch earlier, I wanted to know what torches were like. Where I come from, torches do a thing called burning, where they take a part of the air and some sort of fuel and turn it into other stuff, most obviously heat and light. And it makes them look a lot like torches do here. So I put my hand near the torch expecting to feel heat, but I didn't. And I put a bit of grass in the torch expecting it to get used as fuel and stop existing, but it didn't. So now I know that torches here only look like they're burning, and aren't actually."

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{oooooh.} The spirit sways thoughtfully. {but... i only know things about this place, not other places. can't use other place ideas. where ideas come from instead?}

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"Yeah, I have an advantage there. But you can ask yourself questions like, Why does a thing behave the way it does? What parts is a thing made of? If you see one thing doing something, what other things might do that? Does something that happened happen every time, under different circumstances? Can it be made to stop happening? Sometimes you don't need to have a hypothesis--that's the thing you think is going on. You can just try things and see what happens and then maybe you can come up with a hypothesis to test based on that."

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{sounds hard!} it says, wiggling a little. {but fun!}

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"It's the most fun there is! Want to help me with an experiment first thing tomorrow morning? I'd say now, but it looks like it's getting dark out."

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Bounce bounce. {yeah!}

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"Awesome." He looks around his cabin. Does he happen to know a recipe for a bed?

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Not as such, no. One of the recipes he made earlier in his exploration of the uses of wood is a bedframe, but it doesn't appear to come with a mattress.

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Well, he can make a bedframe and stick in opposite the bathtub, near the crafting table. "When I next go out," he asks, "what will I need to make a mattress? If those are a thing here."

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{need cloth to make bed and thread to make cloth and cobweb to make thread! cobweb come from spider. spider is scary though.}

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"Definitely a project for later, then. I'm going to get some sleep, I was up at 2 AM when I got here and I can only run on science for so long." He climbs into the bathtub and, if no more extremely improbable things happen in the next sixty seconds, passes out in the traditional manner of grad students.

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No extremely improbable things show up to disturb his rest. In the morning, everything is just as he left it.

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Bruce is very amused by the epic crazy dream he had, then realizes that dream or no dream, he's still having it. Also he feels like he slept in a bathtub.

"Blaaaaaaargh."

Yup, that was a pretty accurate expression of his emotions he just emitted.

Well, might as well act as if his senses perceive his surroundings and his actions have consequences. Bruce unfolds from the bathtub, gets all his joints approximately where they belong, and looks around for the forest spirit.

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The forest spirit waves from where it's sitting over by the wall.

{good morning friend! sleep okay?}

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Bruce waves back at them. "Yup! So, I know I said science experiment first thing, but actually, can you go outside for a bit? I want to take a bath."

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{okay!}

It waddles cheerfully out the door. It is, somehow, capable of opening and closing the door.

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Bruce is going to need to observe that phenomenon several more times. But first, bath. Soon enough he's clean and back in his one set of clothes, walking out the door. "Okay, now we can do some science!"

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{yay! science!!}

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"So, I had an experiment in mind already, but first, I noticed you were able to open and close the door without hands. Would you mind doing it again a few more times so I can watch carefully? Sometimes the best science comes from just noticing something a little unexpected and taking a closer look." He makes a close examination of the door as he speaks, including any latching mechanism.

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{okay!}

The spirit demonstrates interacting with the door: it walks up to it, hops up a little to tap it lightly with a tiny pointy arm about a foot and a half off the ground, and some distance above its little head the handle turns and the door swings slowly open.

The door has no lock, but it does have a latch, controlled by the handle, superficially similar in design to the sort of latch one might find on any ordinary door on Earth except that this one is made entirely of wood. It's capable of swinging either inward or outward, but the hinges are cleverly designed via a mechanism too complex to fit in this margin so that it still fits very snugly in its frame without a significant gap on the hinge side.

About five seconds after the spirit opens the door, it closes all by itself.

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What lovely well-designed hinges. If he wakes up in the Stata Center and this hinge design still makes sense he should try getting a course 2 to fabricate one. 

"Okay, so you're causing the handle to turn, do you know how you're doing that? If you don't, we can use science to find out! If you do, we can do something else."

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It considers this question.

{i am spirit. spirit can open door. so when i open door, door opens, even though i can't reach handle.}

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He was expecting something like that. Politely explaining to people that their epistemics have problems is not really his strong suit, but he thinks he can manage.

"So, that's definitely part of an explanation, but it's not a complete explanation, because it doesn't let me make all the predictions I want to make. It lets me predict that other spirits will be able to do the same thing, but not whether you'll be able to do other similar things, or what changes to you or the door might make it easier or harder, and so on. So we can do experiments to find out the rest of the explanation. Does that make sense?"

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It sways thoughtfully, then tries again. {friend open door with handle. spirit open door with spirit-can-open-door.}

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"Spirit-can-open-door is a phenomenon. Knowing that phenomenon exists doesn't mean I know everything about it. It still surprises me. When I really understand it, I'll be able to predict it, I'll think "of course spirits can open doors because of such and such, and if this and that were different they wouldn't be able to, and it will fit into a coherent picture of the world. Right now it's just a fact disconnected from all the other facts I know. Can you think of an experiment we can do that might help me learn things about the spirit-can-open-door phenomenon?" Bruce can think of several experiments, but the hypothesis he wants to test right this minute is "I still haven't managed to explain the concept of an explanation".

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{is hard to explain,} it says. {is like...}

Thoughtful forest noises.

{oh! is like plant tree or build house! friend can put thing in place, so do. hold thing, put in place, thing go. spirit can open door, so do. touch door, door open. same kind of way. but... don't know how experiment.}

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"That's really helpful! Honestly the thing it reminds me of most is video game mechanics, but you probably don't know what those are so it's kind of a useless analogy, sorry. Coming up with good experiments is hard, but the good news is that even an experiment that doesn't teach you what you wanted can teach you something."

(He realizes that if this is real, he's never going to have to write another grant proposal again, and suddenly he's in an even better mood than before.)

"I have an experiment suggestion. Try doing the same motion you did to open the door, while not wanting it to open. Can you do that?"

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{okay!}

It does the thing.

The door is not affected.

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"Cool. So now we know that either the door is detecting your thoughts, or there's something you did differently without noticing and it depends on small details of what you do instead of just happening every time you touch the door. We didn't know that before; we learned it from doing the experiment. Does that make sense?"

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{oh,} it says. {no, is different from that. touched door, didn't open door. open is different thing from touch, but need to touch to open. but open is different thing from want to open, too.}

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"You need to touch it to open it? Did you already try opening it without touching it, or is that something you know instinctively?" He has at least three other questions, but unfortunately in-person conversations can't have arbitrary tree structures.

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{is like can't put thing without hold thing,} it explains. {the do is not there.}

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He attempts to place a wall without holding one, just to be sure. Yup, no wall.

"Okay, cool. So now, I'm wondering what happens if there's something in the way. Try opening the door again while I'm holding the handle stationary?" He suits action to words, preparing to resist some amount of force but also prepared to let go if the door is "stronger" than him.

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{okay!}

The spirit touches the door, and the handle turns. It is definitely stronger than Bruce. That door is going to open regardless of his opinion on the matter.

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That was in Bruce's hypothesis space, so he doesn't get hurt when it pulls itself out of his hand, but it's still impressive. Now he's wondering what would happen if two spirits opened two doors that had been set up one right in front of the other so they collided. Possibly the position grid thing isn't dense enough to make that possible, and anyway he only knows the one spirit.

"Cool!" he says. "Can you think of any other things to do with the door where you don't know for sure what will happen?" 

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It thinks about this.

{when spirit open door, door close soon. don't know if same when friend open.}

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"Okay, let's try that." He shuts the door and opens it again, trying to leave it at the same angle it tends to go to when the spirit opens it.

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It stays open for five seconds, then closes.

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Bruce doesn't have a stopwatch, but he can get at least a pretty close comparison of the timing for when he opens the door and when the spirit does it. Do they match?

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Yep!

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"Okay, so the door closing works the same for both of us. I have a couple experiment ideas but if you have any others let's do those first. Both so you get practice and because you know more about this place and will probably have better ideas than me."

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It considers for a moment.

{spirit open door only one amount. friend open door different amounts?}

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"Yes! At least, I think so. Time to test the hypothesis!" He tries opening the door just a crack. If that works, he shuts it and tries opening it as wide as it will go.

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Both of these attempts succeed!

When he opens the door fully, there's a slight click like something snapping into place, and a slight resistance to being closed again.

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"Ooh, did you hear that?" Bruce says when he notices the click and the resistance. "And it was a little harder to close again. IIIII have a hypothesis, can you guess what it is? Or possibly you already know. But guess anyway?" A door that potentially props itself open when you open it all the way is not that objectively interesting and he feels kind of silly for being excited about it, but here everything is new and full of potential coolness.

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{door stay open?} it guesses, bouncing.

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"That's my guess too!" Time to test it! Push, release, one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi . . . 

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Door stay open!

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Bruce waits until twenty Mississippi to call it. "We made a successful prediction! High five!" He holds out his hand low enough that the spirit can high-five him, at least if they're familiar with the concept.

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The spirit boops his hand with a tiny pointy arm.

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What an adorable being. Bruce shuts the door again and asks, "Can you try opening it all the way, or do you not have the option?"

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{can't,} it confirms. {spirit open door is only one thing.}

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"Can you open it your usual way and then push on it until it opens farther?" And if not, is that because of weird action-permissions or because they're simply too small to exert the needed force, he wonders, but it would be rude to ask that out loud instead of trying to infer it from observation.

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{can try!}

It tries.

It can sort of nudge the door open a little farther that way, but only with immense effort.

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"Okay, thanks," he says the moment he's sure the door moved. "Looks like you can do it but the door is heavy." He checks whether the door can be switched repeatedly between "propped open" and "open but not quite that far" without closing it in between.

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The spirit oofs a tiny oof made of forest noises and sits down on the ground.

The door cooperates with being switched in and out of the fully open state.

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Okay, so checking whether the spirit can swap the door in and out of fully-open is a valid experiment to do when they're not so worn out. "Thanks for putting so much effort into that experiment! Do you want to take a break for a bit?" His own stomach rumbles. "And maybe eat something?"

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{spirit not need food much. break maybe good though,} it admits. {science very tiring.}

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Bruce does some quick mental math, realizes that what the spirit just did was the equivalent of him trying to open a a door fifty feet tall and proportionately wide and thick, and says, "Yeah, definitely time for a break. I'm going to go get some more apples." Unless the spirit has anything else to say, he heads out towards where he remembers an apple tree being yesterday.

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The apple tree is right where he left it!

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Score! He had been pretty sure of that, though still noticeably less confident than one usually is with trees. He breakfasts on coreless apples.

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They're very tasty.

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Did any new ones grow since the previous day? Bruce didn't see any immature ones yesterday, but he wouldn't be at all surprised if apples just popped into existence on tree branches when nobody was looking. 

Also, he notices that he's not craving protein the way he normally would if he had been eating nothing but fruit for a day. He wishes he had the equipment to draw some blood and investigate how these apples were interfacing with his biology. 

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If he has been keeping close track of the number of apples on the tree he may notice that there are a couple more now, yes.

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Spontaneous apples, yup, called it. Void, does he ever want a webcam so he can spy on this tree and learn all its spontaneous-apple-growing secrets. He eats a couple and brings one back for the forest spirit.

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It's a small spirit and a big apple. The result is somewhat comical. The spirit seems to appreciate it, though.

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"So, we've spent all of today so far doing what I wanted to do; what do you want to do?"

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The spirit considers this question, swaying thoughtfully, and then toddles over to hug his leg.

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Awwww but also oh no what do? Bruce pats the spirit awkwardly on the back.

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It lets go of him and does a happy little bounce. {hugs are nice!}

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"They are, aren't they?" This is not his usual opinion on spontaneous hugs, but it's hard to get introvert burnout when there are only two people around and it's even harder to feel threatened by a person with the size and temperament of a corgi.

"Hmm, what to do next? Maybe I'll build something."

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{good plan!} the forest spirit says supportively. {build what?}

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"Well, what can I build with the ingredients I've got?" He asks, more of his weird internal recipe-sense than the spirit. Maybe something that will help him get more ingredients. Can he make a shovel and get some dirt, or anything like that?

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Shovels don't seem to be an available recipe with his current materials, but he does have that pickaxe, which is technically also a digging implement...

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Sure, he can pop outside and try to get some dirt with the pickaxe! Not right next to his house, he doesn't want an inconveniently located pit. How about over there?

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Bopping the dirt with the pickaxe a few times—a number of times that is wildly insufficient to actually dig up a significant amount of dirt—yields a cube-shaped hole in the ground with a wee little mini-cube of dirt in it, and if he gets close and reaches for the cube it leaps into his hand and now he is holding {1 dirt}. There don't seem to be a ton of handcrafted dirt recipes, although the recipe for Thick Wall seems to allow him to substitute dirt in for wood, if he'd like to build his walls in a different style.

He can repeat this operation as many times as he likes. If he goes near the crafting table, he'll discover that having both wood and dirt unlocks a new crafting table recipe requiring one of each.

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He gets ten dirt, partly in case he ends up needing a lot for something and partly because being able to dig quickly and without strenuous exercise is so novel and fun. Now, what can he make with one wood and one dirt?

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A roof!

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He was already using a floor as a roof, but might as well swap it out and see if it's an improvement.

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The dirt roof is thicker and has grass growing on top. It makes for a somewhat more aesthetically pleasing exterior.

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That's pretty neat. He knows humans are biased to see minds and agency everywhere but this whole setup really does seem intelligently designed. If that's all he can make with wood and dirt he might need to get more ingredients.

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There are many places he could look for more ingredients! He could try digging a deeper pit to see what's under the dirt, he could wander around and attempt to forage...

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Yeah, he remembers hearing a mention of ore and that sounds neat. Deeper pit it is! With stairs so he can get out of it afterwards. Can he mine out a block and leave the dirt above cantilevered out, and if so will it hold his weight? Because that would be way cool, and also make stairs a lot easier.

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Yes he can, and yes it will! His pit will be so fancy.

A few layers down—six, if he counts—he uncovers a patch of grey rock. The first one he mines yields {1 stone}, and it turns out that a lot of recipes involving wood can substitute stone instead—fence, floor, wall, thick wall, door, wide door, all the armour pieces... The tools still need {1 wood} each, perhaps for a handle, but he can substitute {1 stone} for the other wood in the recipe if he likes. If he hauls some stone back to the crafting table, perhaps he'll find yet more recipes with stone alternatives.

Stone by itself, not substituting for wood, seems to have only one handcraftable recipe, and it requires {4 stone} to make.

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Nice big pit! Nice big square spiral staircase around the edge of his pit!

He knows a handful of things about stone and a handful of things about videogames and suspects that stone tools with wooden handles might be better at their jobs along some dimension. He makes a stone pickaxe and tries chopping two blocks of stone at once, one with each hand, and then makes a four-stone thing.

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Dual-wielding pickaxes works fine, and the stone pickaxe takes fewer bops to mine a stone block than the wooden one. (Stone requires more bops per cube than dirt. No doubt there is some formula dictating these numbers. The number of bops is perfectly consistent given the same tool mining the same resource, if he checks.)

The four-stone thing turns out to be: a furnace!

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Oh wow, a furnace! He's gonna learn metalworking!

He's gonna want a nice big house for all the stuff he's going to make, with a bedroom and a bathroom and a workroom and possibly also a kitchen. He starts designing a floor plan in his head as he mines some more.

Oh, hey, side question: what happens if he mines out eight blocks in a hollow square, two blocks deep, then leans downs and carefully takes out the block underneath the middle block? Does it fall? Does it break itself when falling? Does it hang in mid-air?

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It totally hangs in midair.

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Oh, that's hilarious, Bruce loves that. He spends an entirely too long time sticking his arm underneath it, jumping up and down on top of it, etc.

Okay, back to business. Is there enough time left in the day to build a big house with a stone facade and wooden interior walls and a bunch of what will for now be sparsely furnished rooms, or should he just park his furnace in his single room for now?

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Ambitious construction projects should perhaps be left for tomorrow. Also, he still doesn't have the materials for a mattress, so it looks like he'll be sleeping in the bathtub again tonight.

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He would definitely rather sleep in the bathtub than fight what he strongly suspects is a spider the size of a dog or larger, yeah. He falls asleep and dreams of floating rocks and bizzare architecture.

"Good morning, Forest Spirit!"

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{good morning!!}

It waves a tiny pointy arm.

{what do today?}

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"I think I might build a new house! A big one, with a bunch of rooms. Do you want your own room or anything?"

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It bounces excitedly. {room! wow! yes please!!}

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This little dude has such a high happiness set point and it makes them really fun to be around.

"Will do! Let me know if there's anything more specific you want; this kind of construction is amazingly easy to redo on the fly."

He starts by clearing a big area of trees, enough for seven rooms the size of the one he has now. Then he uses that wood to lay a floor and set up interior walls and doors, demarcating: an entryway/living room, which connects to the spirit's room, the workroom, and a kitchen; his bedroom on the far side of the workroom, and bathrooms off both bedrooms. Compared to his previous lodgings in a grad student dorm, it's a mansion, but hey, almost-uninhabited planet. It's not like he's a breeding population of humans needing to worry about sustainability.

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The work goes surprisingly fast when he can build things by magic. Soon his mansion's skeleton is complete. Perhaps he would like to give it some skin next? He might need more stone to finish all those walls, if that's what he's after.

The forest spirit is very excited about its new room, even though there's nothing actually in it yet and it's missing two walls and a ceiling. Bounce bounce!!

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He can totally get more stone! Unless he hits magma. Or balrogs. Or an index out of range exception.

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He does not hit any of those things!

He does, after a few more layers of digging, hit an ore deposit. Ore is very sparkly. It requires a few more bops per cube than stone. In total he can mine {19 tin ore} before the deposit runs out.

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There's gonna be metalworking! He wants to figure out this world's version of atomic theory. It seems totally possible that "wood" and "stone" are the equivalent of elements in addition to "tin" and that "tin" does not contain atoms with 50 protons. Is the sparkliness more like one thing with facets or more like one thing with flecks of another, shinier thing embedded in it?

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More like flecks of shiny, but a lot of them.

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It really ought to be possible to separate it into the shiny substance and the less shiny substance, then. Are all the things he's found as impossible to chip a bit off of as the wood was?

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The small-cube forms of resources he encounters seem to be strictly indivisible.

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What if he tries to scrape at the not-small form of a bit of rock with his pickaxe? Can he scratch either one of them? Does scraping count as a bop in that the cube busts if he does it enough times?

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He can scratch ambient rock, at least if he uses the stone pickaxe; the wooden one isn't hard enough to leave a mark. Scraping seems to inconsistently qualify, or possibly qualify but only at partial strength, or something.

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So the rock in large form does seem to be made of a substance that can be changed, much like the wood. Maybe he'll find a substance hard enough to dissect the tin. Separately, maybe something interesting will happen if he accumulates a sufficient mass of wood shavings. But first, does he have enough rock to put walls and a roof on his mansion?

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He does! The stone version of the wood-and-X roof recipe looks a bit rough, but it matches the stone walls nicely.

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Then he can install his furnace and see what it lets him do!!

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The furnace looks very Stone Age, and has an abstract interface with which to accept wood as fuel; each cube of wood thereby donated causes a smallish amount of fuel to appear inside the structure, but if he tries to reach inside to mess with them, an invisible forcefield brings his hand to a gentle stop.

The interface also accepts ore as a—component? Reagent? Ingredient? The slot isn't labeled.

If he inputs both wood and ore, the furnace lights up and begins merrily burning.

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He definitely wants to mess with the forcefield more once he's made something, but he doesn't want to interfere with it doing whatever potentially-hazardous thing it's doing. He only put two units of wood in before the ore, so presumably it will run out soon and he'll be able to see what happened.

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Warmth radiates from the front of the furnace. Flames dance inside of it, obscuring whatever else may be going on in there.

After about thirty seconds, its abstract interface advertises that if he likes, he can retrieve {1 tin} from it.

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He would like! Especially if he can retrieve it by a direct act of will without sticking his hand in there!

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He can! He can retrieve it by a direct act of will!

The unit of tin comes in a small-cube-sized rectangular ingot, as stubbornly unscratchable as other small-cube-sized items.

Thirty seconds later, it offers him another one.

In total, his two units of wood yield {4 tin}.

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He's refining metal all alone in the woods! In a bizzare dreamworld where everything is easy mode, but it's still so much fun! He skips over to his crafting table to put the tin down, because he's in a skipping kind of mood, and gets down to the business of figuring out the "stoichiometry" of this "reaction". Which reagent did he run out of first? How much wood and how much ore make how much tin? Tracking the number he's put in is a pain in the bum with no paper, but eventually he's going to have an equation!

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It turns out that exactly 3 wood produces exactly 8 tin from exactly 8 tin ore.

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Neat! And does six wood make sixteen tin from sixteen ore, or does it make eight tin in half the time?

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Sixteen from sixteen!

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Bruce wants to squee about this! He goes looking for the forest spirit.

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The forest spirit is in its room, doing a happy little dance, possibly about the fact of having a room.

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D'awwww. "Hi! I found ore and made tin!"

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{congratulations!!} Happy small bounces.

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"Thanks! Want anything in particular in your room? Also that room over there is nominally your bathroom if you want one but I have no idea if spirits take baths, so, do whatever I guess."

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{don't know yet!} it says. {i will think about it.} Bounce bounce. {you make thing! very exciting!}

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"I'm excited too! If you think of any things you want me to make, let me know! I'm going to go move all my stuff into this house."

And he can get his chair and crafting table in his workroom and his bedframe in his bedroom and bathtubs in both bathrooms and then disassemble the old house for parts.

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It turns out that, in fact, almost every recipe at the crafting table that accepts wood also accepts stone as a substitute. The bathtub additionally accepts tin. The only one that accepts tin but not stone is the beam.

And there's another thing he can make at the crafting table now, with {1 wood, 1 stone, 1 tin}.

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The wood bathtub and whatnot seem pretty good, but he definitely wants to see what the one-of-each thing is! Possibly it's an even fancier pickaxe; possibly it's something even cooler.

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It is... an Advanced Crafting Table!

It offers him some recipes, but all of them require ingredients he doesn't currently have.

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Well, what ingredients are they? He can go out searching! And also apple-picking; he's hungry.

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The missing ingredients are blurred out in the ingredients list, but he could try asking the forest spirit.

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He's definitely going to do that.

"Hi again! I'm going to go get more food, maybe some apple seeds to plant near here. Do you know what ingredients I can get while I'm out that will let me make more things?"

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{am not crafting expert,} it says. {think maybe glass? can make glass from sand in furnace. water spirit is crafting expert! can find in ocean, ask about make thing!}

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"Sounds like I should take a trip to the beach, then!" It occurs to him that weird geography is weird, so he adds, "Can I get to the ocean by walking downstream along the river?"

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{can get to ocean any way! is island.}

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"Hah! Fair enough, you got me there." He heads out towards the river anyway, because he has some tree-related experiments to try. Starting with picking all the apples off an apple tree and cutting it down with his pickaxe. He's going to feel really dumb if this doesn't result in seeds, so he doesn't go for the closest one to his house.

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The pickaxe takes an unexpected number of bops to take down the tree, and might be an inefficient tree-bopping tool, but once he has the tree down he gains... one apple seed, plantable like an acorn. And a bunch of wood that is different from the other type of wood and does not stack with it, but can be used in all the same recipes; his handcrafting recipes now distinguish between {oak wood} and {apple wood}.

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Darn, he had been hoping for two. Well, he can bring the seed and the apples he doesn't immediately eat back to base, plant the former and offer the latter to the forest spirit. Also, crap, he should have left one apple on the tree when he cut it down to see if he would get it or it would just vanish or what. Lessons for next time.

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It's a good thing apples can be stacked in Tiny Item form because he got quite a few off that tree.

The spirit is pleased with the apples and decides to decorate its room with one, right in the middle.

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That's really cute. "I take it you don't eat? Also, do you know how long the apples will stay edible if we keep them tiny?"

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{apple not stop being edible! edible is how apple.}

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"What, never? Even if you keep it large? Huh!" That has fascinating microbiological implications and he really hopes the bacteria he brought here on his skin don't rampage across the ecology like a horde of tiny X-Men.

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It nods its round little self.

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"That's really neat! I'm going to head down to the beach now. . . . You might be able to ride on my shoulder if you want to come along."

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It hops delightedly up and down. {yes please!}

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"Okay then!" Attempted scoop? If the spirit is made of solid teak he's going to regret this later.

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The spirit is very scoopable, and seems to be made of a light enough wood that it's no worse than, say, carrying a small-to-medium-sized textbook. If textbooks had pointy little limbs with which to balance themselves carefully on his shoulder.

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Excellent. This is easier than a backpack full of crap and a lot cuter to boot. And they're off! In a new direction this time, so they can do some exploring on their way to the beach.

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Let us designate this direction arbitrarily as 'south'.

South of the forest, he finds another river, or maybe just a different section of the same one; and across that river is a sandy desert, dotted with cacti. On the far side of the desert, a purple-grey haze is visible on the horizon. It looms in a way that suggests a mountain, or maybe just an especially aggressive hill.

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"Oh, neat, a desert. Do you know anything about deserts, or just forests?"

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{desert is different from forest! have different night monster, different ground, different tree! tree is cactus and plum, and ground is sand and sandstone, and night monster is parched zombie.}

The spirit leans forward a little, balancing carefully, and squints past the desert at the hazy hill.

{i think is shadow forest over there. screaming trees. scary place.}

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"Yeah no let's not go to the place with the screaming trees. I do want some sand though, and some plums.  And possibly some of whatever can be acquired from cacti." He crosses the river as before, digs up a bunch of sand (careful not to unbalance his passenger) and ruthlessly axe-murders a cactus.

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The cactus yields Tiny Item cactus cylinders, any of which can apparently be replanted as smaller cacti which will presumably grow up into larger ones later. They also appear as alternative woods in wood-related recipes. The sand appears to be ordinary sand.

{oh!} says the forest spirit. {can make bucket from metal, carry sand!}

And indeed, he has a handcrafting recipe requiring {1 tin}. There's another one that needs two, but it's the first one that comes to mind when the spirit mentions it.

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Bucket get! Does sand not come in tiny quantity-of-sand form, then?

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Well, if he un-tinies the bucket, and fills it with sand, he can tiny it again and it will become {1 bucket of sand}.

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That makes both more and less intuitive sense than if it had behaved like rock. Very convenient not needing a to lug the full-sized bucket, though. Can he also get a bucket of river water, and does he see any plum trees about?

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He can totally get {1 bucket of water}, and that might be a tree-shaped silhouette over thataway in the desert, in the direction of the ominous hill.

A round jellylike blob hops toward them from the desert. It's a pale, slightly sparkly golden yellow that blends in with the sand around it. {sandy slime,} the forest spirit identifies. {is monster, but reactive monster. only try to hurt you if you touch it. can get gel from slime, make torch!}

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"Gosh that's pretty. But last time I tried to get gel I exploded the slime, so, yeah." He gives it plenty of space and tries making a small cactus-wood wall to see if it has spines or what.

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A cactus-wood Thin Wall is spineless, but a cactus-wood Thick Wall has spines on one side, and he can choose which orientation he would like to place it in. Both versions are a pleasant shade of green and have a smooth cactusy texture on their non-spiny parts.

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Well, file that one under Awesome But Impractical. He attempts to estimate the length of the spines, and to break one of them off.

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The spines are a few inches long, roughly the size of pine needles although considerably sturdier, and when he breaks one off he has a broken-off cactus spine.

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If he finds something to use for ink and something to use for paper, he could attach this to a stick and make a pretty decent pen. It would work even better on a clay tablet; when he gets back to base he should mix water and dirt and see what he gets. But first he wants to get plums, from the plum tree farthest from the creepy shadow zone.

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The plum tree farthest from the creepy shadow zone has pretty purple leaves and small dark fruit. Intermittent howling noises can be heard faintly from the south, but nothing comes out of the shadow zone to bother him.

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"Will plum trees grow in the forest?" he asks, "Or only in the desert?"

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{if can plant tree, tree can grow! plum tree grow in forest.}

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"Nice!" In that case, he will go just a bit closer to the spooky sector and cut down another plum tree for its seed(s), plus a stock of tiny plums.

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The tiny plums are so round.

The spooky sector is definitely making noises which one could describe as screaming.

 

Also there's movement from that direction.

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Nope nope nope back away slowly while trying to see what the movement is.

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It's...

A slime! An inky black slime.

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"Is this one also reactive or is it going to come at me?"

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{all slime is reactive,} the spirit assures him. {problem if nightmare see you though.}

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"Then I am going to offski." He offskis.

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This is probably wise. The forest spirit balances on his shoulder, looking back nervously at the shadow zone.

{oh dear...} it says. {nightmare coming!}

And indeed, if he looks back, there is a long snaky shadow flowing across the landscape toward them. It has an oddly shaped head, a hard-edged silhouette suggestive of armor plating, and an uncomfortable overabundance of legs.

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"Ohhhhh shit. I don't think I can outrun that thing." He puts the spirit down. "Will it go after you if you run for it and I stay here?" he asks, eyes locked on the nightmare.

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{am not abandon friend!} it says, stamping its tiny pointy foot. {friend fight monster, i help!}

The nightmare is getting closer. Its surfaces are a uniform glossy black colour with purplish undertones, except for the two vertical rows of deep, lightless, faintly smoking pits in its face, which are arranged more or less where and how one might expect eyes. Speaking of its face, it looks sort of like a spider, except that someone apparently got confused about how many chelicerae a spider is supposed to have and put in three extra pairs, then filled the resulting maw with a really excessive quantity of glossy black teeth. There's a tongue in there, forked and flickering like a snake's. It is also covered in teeth. The amount of teeth going on here is downright unreasonable.

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Bruce is filled, somehow, with even more affection for the spirit. Whether or not they can help fight, that's amazingly gutsy for someone so small. Bruce grabs his stone pickaxe and tries to look menacing, on the theory that it's supposed to work with bobcats.

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The nightmare does not seem appreciably menaced.

The forest spirit digs in the sand with a tiny pointy arm, somehow comes up with a little ball of sand not much bigger than a golf ball, and flings it at the nightmare with all the force its round little body can muster. The sandball splatters on the nightmare with a gentle paff, and a little gets in its eyes, disorienting it momentarily. While it pauses and shakes its head to clear away the sand, the forest spirit readies and heaves another sandball.

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Bruce wishes he was Gordon Freeman and flails wildly at the nightmare with his pickaxe, trying to stab it in the eyeball while it's distracted.

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It flails back at him. None of its feet are quite the same design as any of the rest of its feet, but they are all sharp. With the spirit distracting it, though, he manages to get a few good hits in before it lands one. Good thing he's wearing that wooden armor; the creature's claw sticks in the wood, and he won't have more than a bad bruise on his arm.

The forest spirit's aim is improving with practice. Between that and Bruce's pickaxe, the nightmare is running out of unobstructed eyes. They might actually win this fight!

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"What the fucking hell!" Whack. "I stabbed you in the fucking eye!" Whack. "Just run away!" Whack whack whack

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It makes a horrible hissing noise and flails its spiky teeth-covered tongue at him. Glossy black drool splatters onto his armor. Three out of twelve eyes are now bleeding profusely and most of the rest have sand in them. The nightmare is, not surprisingly, very upset about this. It lands a few more hits with its claws, but still doesn't manage to do worse than bruise him.

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Aaaaaa he doesn't know what he's doing this was a bad plan whack whack whack too late to late to switch plans whack.

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The nightmare is getting increasingly unhappy about the eye situation. Three becomes four, five, six... and, several whacks after the twelfth eye, the nightmare explodes, showering the immediate vicinity with glossy black blood and carapace shrapnel. A claw gets stuck in Bruce's armor, up near the shoulder, but the blast isn't forceful enough to knock him back very far or do very much damage.

A shower of Tiny Items drops out of the air where the creature's head was a moment ago, and lands in the gore-splattered sand. There are a few shiny copper and silver coins, and a ragged little scrap of dark purple something-or-other, and... a cherry pit?

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ACK WUT oh it's dead thank fuck, pant pant pant time to sit down on the ground for a bit.

A couple minutes of adrenaline crash later: "Hey, we're not dead! . . . Sorry about freaking out and almost getting us killed. And all the swearing."

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{is okay,} says the forest spirit, toddling up to hug his ankle. {monster very scary sometimes.}

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Bruce puts an arm around the spirit. "You're sweet. We should get out of here before any more come by." He looks around and notices the dropped stuff. Huh. How very Dungeons and Dragons. Might as well take it. He scoops up the loot and the spirit and makes a second attempt to return to the river.

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This time nothing chases them.

Also, halfway to the river the blood and monster parts vanish off both of them.

As for the loot: all together he has {8 copper coins}, {2 silver coins}, {1 shadow scrap}, and {1 black cherry seed}. The seed is plantable; the coins have very few recipes attached, just one and two respectively; the shadow scrap has a few more, one of which requires only shadow scraps to craft, although it won't tell him how many.

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"Is anything weird likely to happen if I plant this thing?" He asks, holding up the black cherry seed. "Like, is it going to poison the soil or multiply super quickly and take over the whole forest or whatever?"

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{no, is just tree,} the spirit assures him.

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"Oh good. And . . . that nightmare wasn't a person, was it? Like, it couldn't talk or make complicated plans or use tools or anything, could it?"

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{nightmare not talk! only some very special monster talk.}

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"What are all the ones that talk? I really don't want to fight those, especially if I can be friends or at least neutrals instead."

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{monster try to hurt friend, is how monster,} the spirit says apologetically. {special monster is in stronghold! every stronghold have special monster. most special monster not talk either but some do. cloud spirit or stone spirit maybe know more.}

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"Well, if they stay in their strongholds I can just refrain from trespassing; if they show up at my house looking for violence . . . I guess I'm doomed."

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{special monster stay in stronghold,} the spirit confirms.

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"Oh that's good, we can just ignore each other then." When he reaches the river, he turns downstream and sets a course for the sea that doesn't go anywhere near the screaming forest.

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A sandy slime from the desert hops into the river and is carried away on the current.

The river winds all the way around the forest he started out in, passing by the place where he bridged it earlier on, curving past the grassland and the snowy area to the north, and finally empties into the sea a little northwest of the forest, between the snowy area and another grassland. He and the forest spirit are undisturbed on their journey except by occasional gelatinous passersby and, once or twice, a sparkly little fish leaping out of the water and then splashing back down and swimming away.

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"Oh hey, fish! Are fish a kind of monster, or are they just, like, swimming around and eating . . . whatever fish-edible things are around here?"

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{fish is animal! is different from monster. animal not try to hurt friend, not try to hurt spirit. animal mostly move around and eat plants.}

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"Oh good, just like the animals I'm used to." Walk walk walk along the river. Mental note to try chopping down a maple tree in the winter area when he's got the other ones planted, and also to try tapping one and see if it has sap he can turn into maple syrup.

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And when they reach the end of the river where it lets out into the sea, where the grassland on the south side and the snowy area on the north side both give way to a sandy shore dotted with palm trees—

A little round head pops out of the water, a few block-widths off the shore, and a little round arm emerges beside it and waves.

{hello!} says the water spirit.

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"Hello! Are you the water spirit? I'm Bruce!"

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{yes i am! hello!}

The water spirit swims to shore and climbs out onto the sand. Its round blobby body appears to be made entirely of water, but it holds together in sort of the same way as a slime. Unlike the forest spirit's forest noises, its not-voice is made of the sound of falling rain and rushing waves.

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Bruce is full of questions about the water spirit's physiology and also retroactively about the forest spirit's physiology but can't come up with a polite way to ask. Also they might not know--he wouldn't know squat about his own physiology if he wasn't from a big old civilization full of dead people and those willing to dig them up.

"Pleased to meet you. I hear you know a lot about crafting!"

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{i do!} the water spirit confirms. {what would you like to know?}

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Bruce's search space is massive but his priorities are simple. "Do you know a recipe for something I can write with?"

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Tiny blobby nod.

{you can make a writing desk at a refined crafting table with wood or stone, glass, metal, reed, and ink!}

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"Nice!" Fist-pump! . . . Hastily aborted fist-pump so he doesn't unbalance his shoulder friend. "Where do I get reed and ink?" He bets the void an imaginary dollar that he has to harvest the ink from squid.

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{reed grows in rivers,} the water spirit says, pointing at a bit of vegetation poking up out of the water. {ink comes from shadow forests.}

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He owes the void an imaginary dollar and also yikes. "The shadow forest is that place with the screaming trees and the nightmare monster?" He attempts to pick some reeds and resolves to make metal armor and also a shield or a sword or something before attempting another run on that forest.

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The water spirit nods. {it's scary there!}

{very scary,} the forest spirit agrees.

The reeds come up fairly easily, and when he pulls up a stalk it transforms in his hand into {1 reed}, Tiny Item-style.

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"What do I do to get ink once I'm in there?" He shouldn't even be considering this. But the need to take notes on all the things he's discovered is a constant mental nagging, like a bit of dirt on his glasses that won't let him forget about it until it's fixed.

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{you can pick it up with buckets, i think,} says the water spirit.

{yes! is liquid!} agrees the forest spirit. {like water and lava and honey and blood!}

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"So there's just. Rivers of ink. And honey and blood. Sure, why not."

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{no, no river,} the forest spirit assures him earnestly. {only water do river. other liquid do pool!}

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"I guess that makes more sense than a whole hydrosphere of each. Does this place have a water cycle like I'm used to? Water flows from rivers to the ocean, evaporates in sunlight, condenses into clouds, falls as rain?"

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{...water is, river is, ocean is, cloud is, rain is...} says the forest spirit, somewhat uncertainly. {what is evaporates?}

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"Where I come from, water can exist as a liquid, or a solid--ice--or as vapor in the air. When you heat ice it turns into water, and when you heat water it turns into vapor. So the sun heats rivers and oceans and lakes and puddles, and bits of water from all of them turn into vapor and float up high where the air is cold, and then they cool down enough to become liquid again, and that's clouds. And when there's enough clouds it gets to be too much water to float around in the air, so it falls as rain."

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{oh,} says the forest spirit. {think cloud different here...}

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"Nifty!" Bruce stares at the clouds above them. "So what are they made of, then?"

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{is block!}

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{you could see them for yourself if you made wings!} the water spirit suggests helpfully.

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"Oh, wow, I can make wings? How?" He's going to learn to fly and possibly get extra limbs, how cool is that?

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{you need a delicate crafting table and some ingredients! the least scary kind to get is probably the leafy wings, that needs five seeds from different special trees...}

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"Is a delicate crafting table different from a regular crafting table? Also I probably shouldn't just stand here interrogating you all day, sorry." (He doesn't look very sorry.)

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{yes! you make a delicate crafting table at a refined crafting table which you make at an advanced crafting table which you make at a crafting table.}

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"Well that's just extremely aesthetic! You've been super helpful, is there anything I can do for you?"

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{i like helping!} the water spirit says cheerfully. {i'm a spirit, it's what we do!}

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"That's a really nice way to be! I'm going to head home now, but I'll definitely be back later. Will I always be able to find you here?"

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{now that we've met i might try exploring upriver. but if you want to be sure you can find me, you could try building a spirit house!}

{what's that?} the forest spirit says curiously.

{you can make it at a delicate crafting table once you meet a spirit! there's a different recipe for each of us. i'm not sure exactly how it works but i think we can visit our houses very easily even if we're very far away!}

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"That sounds useful! I'll add it to the agenda."

He mentally reviews said agenda: armor and weapons to infiltrate the shadow forest and find ink to make a writing desk, orchard of every kind of tree right by his house because he's too lazy to walk around for food variety, crafting table bootstrapping, spirit house.

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{good luck!} says the water spirit.

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"Thanks!" And he waves (no pun intended) goodbye, picks some dates, and eats them on the way back up to his house.

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{water spirit is nice!} says the forest spirit. {is good to meet more spirits!}

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"They are nice! Had you not met them before, or did you just mean it was nice for me to meet them?"

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{never met other spirits! we live different places.}

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"Wow, I might be the most extroverted person on this island. Which is a contender for weirdest thing yet. I guess we can meet the other two together, then!"

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Tiny pointy happy wiggle.

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Well, he can hardly put the forest spirit down of they're going to be doing adorable tiny wiggles. He will just have to try check for recipes involving dirt and water, and put the sand and some wood in the furnace, with a shoulder friend. (Unless they want down, of course.)

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Shoulder friend is happy to stay perched!

The furnace melts sand into glass in a similarly tidy fashion to how it melted ore into metal, but with better fuel efficiency, although he might or might not have collected enough sand to determine exactly how much better. (One unit of wood melts four buckets of sand into four units of glass.)

Crafting recipes involving dirt and water are thin on the ground, so to speak, but he can make a bunch of things at the Advanced Crafting Table if he approaches it carrying glass. The possible recipes include:

1 wood or stone or metal, 1 glass;

1 wood or stone or glass or metal (three different recipes);

1 wood and 1 stone and 1 glass and 1 metal.

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He didn't get enough sand for all that, but he can probably make it out to the beach again and back with more before dusk, now that he knows the shortest route there! Though presumably the thing that needs one wood or stone or glass or metal is walls, and he's fine with the ones he's got. What are the other two things?

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1 wood/stone/metal and 1 glass produces a Window, which can be inserted into a thin or thick wall to let in some natural light. (He can even hot-swap it into an existing wall, exchanging it for the already-present wall item in whatever spot he places it.)

One each of the four materials produces a Refined Crafting Table, at which there are two recipes available with his current ingredients: something for 2 wood and 1 glass, and something for n wood or stone or glass or metal where n is at least 2.

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Sure, he can put a window in the wall of the common room and one in his workroom. But the really exciting thing is the next step of crafting table, and the two things he can get from it! He uses two wood for the "2 or more of something" one, since he has a bunch from all the trees whose seeds are now growing in his "yard".

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The 2-or-more thing turns out to be... a shower stall, 2 blocks wide by 2 blocks wide by 3 blocks high.

The 2-wood-1-glass thing is a grandfather clock.

There's also those three 1-of-something recipes from the Advanced Crafting Table still untried if he wants to take a crack at those.

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Showers: way better than baths even with infinite water. He takes a moment to put the shower in the bathroom (and the bathtub in the bedroom, since killing probably-giant spiders for thread just doesn't seem to want to come to the top of his priority list), leaves the clock on the basic crafting table (he'll set it at sunset), then tries the three one-of-somethings (in wood again). 

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The three one-of-somethings are:

a sink,

a "Superior Roof" (fancier-looking than the wood-and-dirt kind),

and a toilet.

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Those! Are some really nice things to have! For reasons the narration has been omitting! Now the bathroom is an actual legitimate bathroom and Bruce can wash his hands without bending over a bathtub and life is greatly improved in general.

He isn't super clear on what the advantage of the superior roof is supposed to be--maybe there's going to be rain at some point and it will keep the rain out better?--but he swaps it in over the workroom anyway. 

Next up: armor. Can he make a suit of armor out of tin with the same recipe as the wood one?

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He totally can! It is much prettier and also less bulky. Goes clank when he walks, though.

At this point he may be running low on tin and it could be worth making another run to his mining pit - although the sun is also getting low, so maybe he'd rather get a good night's sleep in his bedtub first.

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Yeah, he did a lot of walking around in the fresh air today and now he's the good kind of tired. In the morning he can take an actual shower again, which continues to be awesome, wash his clothes in the tub, and breakfast on apples and dates before heading out to the ore mine again. 

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Another few levels down the ore mine, he breaks through into some sort of natural cavern! It's kind of dark in there. He might want to bring a torch if he's going to explore further.

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Oh wow a cave! But what if there are monsters down there? But cave!

He goes back upstairs to grab the torch off his wall, and also to say to the forest spirit, "I found a cave! I want to explore it but I'm a bit worried it's got monsters in it."

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{monster in cave,} the forest spirit agrees. {stone spirit in cave too!}

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"How dangerous are the monsters in the cave? Is there a way to sneak around them? . . . And they're not going to attack the stone spirit if I go down there and bother them, are they?"

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{day monster in cave is just rocky slime. night monster is skeleton,} says the spirit. {stone spirit is fighting expert, will be okay.}

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"Oh good. Where do the night monsters go during the daytime? Is there a risk of running across a sleeping one? Either in the cave or up here."

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{in daytime, night monsters not!}

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"Somehow I kind of expected that. I'd probably be angry too, if I popped in and out of existence every 24 hours. Hey, wait, does that mean if someone kills a monster they'll just start existing again the next night?"

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The forest spirit, somehow, looks deeply thoughtful.

{don't know if same monster... but don't know if same monster anyway,} it muses. {is night monster on different night same one, or different? don't know!}

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"Yeah . . . Void, I wish I had the guts to try to communicate with them! Or any clue how, with space aliens I would do prime numbers but I worry skeletons aren't in a position to learn much math."

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Doubtful forest noises. {could talk to special monster, maybe... but special monster very scary.}

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"Why would I be more able to talk to them, if they're more dangerous?"

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{some special monster can talk words!}

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"Ooh, neat! Do you think they'll know things about other monsters, like whether they come back if they die and stuff?"

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{maybe! other spirit might know too. stone spirit knows things about monsters.}

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"Nice. In that case I think I'll spend today experimenting with armor and go down there first thing tomorrow morning so I don't lose track of time and end up staying down past nightfall." He has enough tin now to replace this armor, right? Because he wants to bash it and his wooden armor to bits with various tools and see how strong they each are.

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He totally has enough tin for that! He also has enough tin to try the 2-metal handcrafting recipe, which turns out to yield a Short Sword. That might be useful for armor-testing purposes.

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Yes it is! Does chopping up wooden armor and then tin armor with a tin sword ruin the sword?

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It super does not, actually!

The wooden armor goes down noticeably faster than the tin, and also when he whacks one half of a pair of gauntlets or greaves into a nonfunctional state the other one crumbles to match, and if he re-itemizes the resulting wreckage once his experiments are complete he gets e.g. a {broken wooden helmet}.

...also, if he hangs around his Refined Crafting Table after itemizing all those broken things, he might notice a recipe that calls for 1 wood, 1 glass, 1 metal, and 10 broken items.

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The symmetrical destruction is bizzare and amazing and yet another reminder that the degree to which anything here is made out of atoms is highly questionable. Also, he gets to make a Garbage Thing! What is the Garbage Thing?

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The Garbage Thing is... a Tinker's Table! The Tinker's Table will accept arbitrary quantities of arbitrary materials for an unclear purpose, with an interface more reminiscent of the furnace than of a standard crafting recipe.

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Hmm. He gives it any more broken stuff he still has, and a piece of wood and a date.

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The Tinker's Table absorbs all these things without an outward trace, possibly by magic or possibly into one of its rather excessive number of cute little drawers.

And, once it contains both a piece of wood and a few pieces of extra experimentally-broken wooden armour, it offers him something much more like the crafting interface: a selection of all those broken wooden things, each of which can be repaired for... {1 tinkering wood}? Of which the table apparently contains 10. If he examines its abstract interface more closely he may also be able to tell that it additionally contains {10 tinkering dates}, but those are presumably not useful for repairing any of the broken stuff he gave it.

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Ooh, this is neat. Very environmentally friendly. He fixes the wooden helmet, as a proof of concept, then tries to get as much as possible of his wooden armor back. Some of it got used to make the table in the first place, and that's probably a write-off, but maybe he'll be able to end up with a full set again more cheaply than by starting over entirely.

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He can totally do that! Each piece of wooden armor takes 1 tinkering wood to repair, and the table turns every piece of wood he gives it into 10 tinkering wood. Repairing a broken set of armor is therefore definitely cheaper than making a whole new one.

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That's so aesthetic! And he can get his tin armor back too! So now he has tin armor and a tin sword and also another question for the forest spirit. "What other metals are there? Are they sorted by geography like the trees?"

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{metals is lead tin iron copper silver gold platinum! better ones lower down.}

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"What does better mean? I'm used to different metals being better for different things."

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{not sure. water spirit might know, because crafting! or cloud spirit might know because magic? i think some metal is magic.}

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"Okay, cool. I think I have time to try to get some ink from the shadow forest today. He would kind of rather put it off because he doesn't want to fight another monster, but also he can't just procrastinate indefinitely. He puts on his tin armor, grabs his sword and a bucket for the ink, idly wonders if he has a recipe for a scabbard somewhere or if the ability to tinymode things made whatever comes up with recipes decide he didn't need one, chides himself for anthropomorphizing, eats some apples, and heads out. Maybe he can get in and out with some ink without seeing a monster, if he's fast enough.

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This time he manages to approach close enough to pick out individual trees in the smoky purple haze. Their leaves are thin, ragged, and black, and release wisps of purple-grey mist at unpredictable intervals. Their bark is thick, gnarled, and ranges in colour from charcoal grey to a dusty lilac.

...except for the one tree that's different from all the rest. Its bark is smooth, its leaves are neat and glossy, and its branches hang heavy with clusters of large, slightly iridescent, pitch-black cherries. That faint iridescence is the only hint of colour on the whole tree: the rest of it is all shades of grey, paler on the leaves and darker on the bark.

There are no pools of ink visible from outside the forest; he'll have to go deeper in if he wants to find one.

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He's been informed that the black cherries are edible, but that only gets him as far as picking some for later. He keeps moving, trying to go quickly and with a minimum of sound, ready to turn around and book it if he sees another nightmare.

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The grass underfoot is greyish purple and gives off more wisps of mist when stepped on. The mist is neither damp like fog nor chokingly dry like dust; it smells faintly sweet, with an aftertaste like stale air freshener.

When he's deep enough into the forest that the desert is getting hazy behind him, but not yet deep enough that it's disappeared entirely, he glimpses a second black cherry tree up ahead, presiding over a small pool of black liquid exactly the same colour as the cherries.

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Oh, thank goodness. The gridded arrangement of the trees makes it pretty easy to be sure he's not going in circles, but not being able to see the edge the next time he looked over his shoulder would still have been worrying. He pulls out a bucket and heads for the ink pool, ready to scoop some up and head out.

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Scoop! He now has a bucket of ink!

—and there's a rustling in the trees off to the side and he should perhaps be going now.

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The fastest Bruce has ever gone in his life before this was the time in high school when the gym teacher said anyone who got a personal best on the mile run would be allowed to skip the mile run the following week. Bruce is now going significantly faster than that. 

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He makes it to the desert before the nightmare catches up.

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Well the nightmare came out into the desert after him last time didn't it so how about he just keeps fucking running.

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The sound of pursuit fades into the distance behind him.

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Then Bruce can slow down enough to look over his shoulder, and then eventually slow down more to catch his breath. Gradually his fear turns into exhilaration. He's alive, he didn't get in a fight, and he has his ink! Time to grin the entire rest of the way back to camp.

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Camp contains a forest spirit who waves at him as he approaches!

{all okay? not eaten by nightmare?}

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"Not eaten by nightmare! And I got ink, so now I can make that writing desk!" Go go gadget writing desk?

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Go go gadget writing desk! It's got legs! It's got surfaces! It's got numerous drawers!

There's a cute little lamp affixed to one corner on a swivelable arm, so he can adjust the lighting situation to his liking, and the drawers prove to contain lots and lots of neatly stacked paper and fountain pens and bottles of ink. The desk has a little circle, in the corner across the top edge from the lamp, into which such a bottle could nestle.

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The pens being fountain pens makes sense, under the insane moon logic of this place, given that the recipe called for reeds and ink. That doesn't mean he knows how to use a fountain pen at all, so his next activity is going to be learning that, and then taking notes on all the stuff he's observed. While conserving ink despite the apparent abundance, because he doesn't want to have to go get more any time soon.

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If he tracks his supplies, he might notice that the drawers are self-replenishing: there are six pens in the drawer when he opens it to take one out, and six pens in the drawer when he opens it again to put it back. The same for paper and ink bottles.

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Well that's just amazing and cool. Friendship ended with Conservation of Mass, now Writing Desk is his new best friend. He writes down every phenomenon he's noticed that's different from what he'd expect on Earth and a bunch of speculation about possible underlying physics and a half-notes half-rant paragraph about how, if he can eat the food here and have it keep him alive, then either he and the food are made of the same kind of substances or the food is changing what it's made of when he eats it. So either food here (he should ask the spirits if they've named this place; if not he's naming it Gridland) is made of proteins and carbohydrates and whatnot or it's turning into that stuff inside him or he is entirely or partially made of alien matter now. His biology seems to be working normally except he can apparently live on apples without feeling like crap or constantly craving tofu.

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Writing Desk is a very good friend! He might need to do something eventually about all this paper his new friend is generating, but for now, he has infinite stationery and can write all the ranty paragraphs his heart desires.

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When he's done writing he goes to find the forest spirit again. "Hi! How've you been?"

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{good! how friend? is ink good?}

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"I'm doing well and the ink is great! Want to do some more science, now that I can take notes?"

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Bounce bounce. {yes!!}

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"Great! Is there anything you're especially curious about?"

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Thinking, thinking...

{am curious about sky,} the spirit finally decides. {cloud spirit knows things about sky but cloud spirit is in sky so hard to find and ask.}

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"The sky is cool! Are there are specific questions you want to answer, or shall we just gather data and see what we find out?" For his part he wants to know if the acceleration due to gravity is the same and whether air resistance works the same and whether the ideal gas law still basically holds and whether air pressure drops the higher you go and what the composition of the atmosphere is, though his ability to breathe it means it's at least pretty similar to Earth's unless it's the same weird deal as with the food.

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Tiny pointy shrug. Tiny happy bounce. {science!}

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"Well then, let's build a tower and drop stuff off it!" If he stacks up a bunch of blocks of dirt and rock, can he make a story or two of climbable freestanding staircase? Being able to chop the supports out from under a block and reuse them should help there.

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He can definitely do that!

{wow! you can go up so high!}

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"Yup! . . . Possibly I should be figuring out some sort of railings." If he makes the staircase three blocks wide with the outer two being elevated by a block relative to the inner one, it should be much harder to fall out but not any harder to drop things. It's a bit slower, but it doesn't take that long to get to a good dropping-things height. "Okay, want to climb it and see if heavier objects and lighter objects fall at the same speed?"

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Bounce bounce. {yeah!!}

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"Great, let's get some things to drop!" He grabs a minified block of wood, an apple, and two sheets of paper (one to fold up small) and gestures an offer to carry the forest spirit up the stairs since their steps are kind of large even for a human.

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The forest spirit will happily be a Shoulder Friend for this experiment.

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Then once Bruce has demonstrated counting at a steady pace, they can drop stuff off their non-leaning tower! Just like Galileo except much better off in a lot of ways.

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The apple and the sheets of paper fall in just about the expected way.

The minified block of wood seems to have an abnormally low terminal velocity, and drifts to the ground only slightly faster than the flat sheet of paper.

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"Whoa," he says, watching it fall. "That was an unexpected result! Did you expect that result? I should have asked you what results you expected before I dropped anything but I got overexcited and forgot." Bruce is so hype about getting an unexpected result.

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{didn't really expect things,} the forest spirit confesses. {but if i expected things it wasn't that!}

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"What do you think will happen if I attach a piece of paper to the wood block and then drop them both?"

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The spirit considers. {attach how?}

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"Well, I don't have any glue or string, so the first thing I'll try is rolling the wood up in the paper and folding the ends, like I'm wrapping a--okay there's no way you've heard of Christmas presents but my point stands."

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The forest spirit spends a moment picturing this, then nod-bobs. {maybe will fall like paper! maybe will fall like wood! maybe will do something different!}

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"That's roughly my hypothesis space too. Now we try it and find out!" He makes a quick trip back to ground level to retrieve the materials and then does so.

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The paper-wrapped wood falls like wood.

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"Okay, so we know that blocks can hang in midair, and the wood is sort of more like a block than the piece of paper is. I wonder if there's a weight limit to what it can slow down, or if it would fall exactly the same if there was something really heavy tied to it. I don't have anything heavy and easily attachable, though."

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Thinking, thinking...

{stand on ground, hold wood, jump up?}

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"Yeah, good idea. I don't think anything will happen because it moved normally while I was walking around with it, but you gotta try it to find out for sure." He goes down the stairs and holds up the wood and jumps. Off the last step of the stairs, to get that bit more airtime.

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If the block is lagging at all as he drops, it's too subtly to notice. Or, on the other hand, Bruce might be falling weirdly right along with it. How familiar is he with what it's like to jump off a two-foot block?

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Not super familiar, but he can jump a bunch of times with the wood and a bunch of times without and then if the forest spirit is up for it they can do the same thing.

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The forest spirit is up for it!

There doesn't seem to be a difference between the way they fall while holding the wood and the way they fall while not holding the wood, or between the way Bruce falls and the way the forest spirit falls.

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"Okay, so either we're both too heavy for the wood to hold us up noticeably or we're in a different . . . category . . . than the piece of paper. I'm going to try dropping more things and see if that helps me get a sense of what the categories are." Back up the stairs again to drop: a wood beam, his otherwise useless dorm key, and a stone block (preceded by "watch out, this could make quite the thud if it doesn't hang in midair").

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It turns out not to be possible to get a stone block into a droppable state. It's not obvious how to do it with the wood beam either, for that matter. They only want to come into existence attached to things.

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That continues to be weird a phenomenon he doesn't understand yet, but okay. Do the apple and his dorm key at least land simultaneously if he drops them simultaneously? 

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They do!

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Okay, so he's got the categories "earthlike", "slow", and "undroppable". Undroppable might be the same set of things as the things that hang in the air when their supports are removed, but first he wants to pin down the natures of "earthlike" and "weird". He drops the key and the wood bit from a bunch of different heights repeatedly and records his best estimates of the fall times and averages them, and that should give him a sense of whether the earthlike group has an earthlike linear acceleration and of what the (currently one-member) "slow" group is doing. He also asks the forest spirit to drop the wood one time so he can watch it from below and try to catch it and check if it feels like catching a falling object on Earth, and also to make sure it works the same when the forest spirit is doing it.

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The forest spirit is happy to help!

Catching the wood item feels pretty much like catching a falling object on Earth; it's just going slower at the time than it really should be. The earthlike group does turn out to have an earthlike linear acceleration; the slow group has one too, at least initially, it just caps out really early for no good reason. (Other Tiny Items also belong to the slow group, if he tests them.)

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What if instead of just dropping the wood block, he flings it downwards with an initial velocity faster than its terminal velocity?

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It decelerates to its preferred speed, almost as though encountering an abnormal amount of air resistance.

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Bruce really wants to know this thing's secrets. What if he pitches it horizontally? Same weirdly low top speed?

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It's harder to tell, but the top speed in non-vertical directions might be higher?

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What if he holds it in one hand and swings it around like he's going to throw it but doesn't, does his hand feel any resistance? How about if he goes indoors and gets in a room alone and takes off his pants and ties it into the end of one pant leg and swings around by the other one? (Look, he really needs to know what's up with this thing, okay?)

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While in his hand it behaves exactly as any other object in his hand might.

The pants nonsense mostly fails on the grounds that the weight of the wood cube isn't enough to change much about the behaviour of the pants.

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"This is stupid. I need string." He returns his pants to their rightful place and goes to his writing desk and starts tearing paper into strips and weaving them into a little basket with a very long handle. He has no background in weaving and none in origami either and has to figure this out from first principles, so it will probably take the rest of the day.

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{what doing?} wonders the forest spirit, after he's been at it for a bit. {can i help?}

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"Hi! Sorry for wandering off; I got super nerd-sniped. I'm trying to make a thing for swinging the little wood piece around really fast so I can figure out why it moves so differently from other things the same size and shape." He shows off his partially-completed sling dealie.

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{wooooow,} says the forest spirit, marveling at this technology. {you made thing... out of other thing!}

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"I did, yeah! . . . Oh jeez, you don't have opposable thumbs, do you. That must be really annoying."

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{??} says the forest spirit, somehow.

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"Uh, I don't know what you're asking. Opposable thumbs is this," he makes some illustrative hand gestures, "and it lets me do fiddly delicate stuff."

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{oh!} Nod-bob. {can i try too? i want to make paper things!}

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"Sure!" How excellent that they have infinite paper. Bruce demonstrates how to line up the edges to fold a strip of even width, then how to crease it so it tears neatly. "Want to give it a try yourself?" He hands over the paper, keeping a close eye on the forest spirit's limbs to see how they adapt the motions to not having fingers.

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The forest spirit seems to have the ability to manipulate objects in ways not directly enabled by the shape and structure of their tiny pointy arms. Sort of like they can decide whether and how hard things should stick to their points, but with a little more fine control than that implies. It takes them several tries to get the paper lined up and folded and creased, but they do manage it eventually.

{yay!! i did the thing!!} Happy little wiggles.

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Awesome alien manipulator appendages for his awesome alien friend. "You did! If you make a bunch more I can show you how to weave them together." He holds up his in-progress thing; it looks sort of like a paper scarf extended beyond the length of a single sheet by offsetting the "warp" strips relative to each other.

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Ooh! The forest spirit is excited about this. Fold fold fold!!!

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"Nice," he says when they're done. "And then to weave them you want each strip going alternately over and under the perpendicular strips, like so . . ." with both of them working on it, they'll have a piece long enough to whirl the wood around in pretty soon. Bruce tries sticking a finger in an ink bottle and seeing if ink placed between two bits of paper and left to dry will stick them together at all usefully.

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Ink does stick paper together, but not very usefully; a few light tugs is usually enough to unstick it.

The forest spirit is So Excited about papercraft.

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Then he will not bother coating the whole thing in ink. Instead they can both be So Excited about finishing the weaving step, then he can try putting the minified wood in the middle and dangling it by the ends. Does its weight feel normal in his hand?

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It does! Still pretty light, but not any lighter than usual.

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Then he'll try swinging it gently back and forth along the axis that won't drop it out of the scarf, hoping to getting it moving through the air at slightly faster than its falling terminal velocity (or else see air resistance slow down the whole thing).

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Air resistance sure is a thing when you're swinging a paper scarf around with a very light weight held in the end, but it looks like the wood block might be exceeding its falling terminal velocity this way.

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Great, now what if he attempts to harness the power of centripedal force centrifugal force Newton's first law and swings it around in a full circle really fast? After making sure he is outside with plenty of space in which to do so, of course.

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Tiny wood cube goes wheeeeeeeeee!

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Oh, so now you're acting like a normal small rigid mass, huh? What if he lets go of the scarf ends?

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Tiny wood cube goes wheeeeeeeeeeee ee ee ee e e e  e  e   e.

The deceleration starts while it's still flying sideways, and by the time it bounces off a tree trunk and falls to the ground, it's already at standard tiny item top speed.

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"What the heeeeck. Not that there was any result that experiment could have had that wouldn't have left me going what the heck."

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{what's a heck?} wonders the forest spirit.

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"Uhhhh, 'what the heck' is a phrase people say when they're confused, it doesn't actually make any grammatical or semantic sense." He goes and retrieves what he flung. "I still don't have any idea why this thing moves differently from other things."

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{item is different from not item!} says the forest spirit, with a thoughtful air. {wonder why different like this, though?}

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"What other things are items? Is a bucket an item? Is an ink bottle an item?"

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{bucket is item! can be small like wood.}

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"Then if you think the bucket will fall at the same speed as the wood, then that's a scientific prediction! Want to test it?" (This question is accompanied by excited bouncing.)

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Bounce bounce. {science!!}

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Then the two of them and a bucket and anything else the forest spirit classifies as an item can go up the Science Stairs and test some predictions!

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Things that can Become Small in the way that the wood block Is Small are items, and when thusly ensmallened they behave just like the wood block. At regular size they behave like regular objects. This is excitingly in line with the behaviour the forest spirit expected!

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"Congratulations on a successful prediction!" He still doesn't know why, though, so it's time to mess with ensmallened items some more! Does the tiny version of a thing feel like it weighs more or less than the full-size thing? Can tiny things be damaged at all? Can the full-size versions be damaged at all? Can he carry sufficiently small things in a tiny bucket, like a few shreds of grass or the tiny wood bit?

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Tiny items all seem to weigh just about the same as other tiny items, i.e. about what you'd expect from, say, a glass marble of about that size. Full-sized versions can be damaged; tiny versions cannot, and in fact if he dents a bucket and ensmallens and disensmallens it, the dent is miraculously restored. All tiny items are about an inch along their largest dimension, and he can indeed carry shreds of grass in the tiny bucket, but the tiny wood bit doesn't fit.

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There are so many ways in which this world does not have the laws of thermodynamics Bruce is used to, and he really wishes that a whole civilization could exist here instead of just him and four spirits and a couple of sapient monsters, and then once he dies of old age just the spirits and the monsters. On the other hand . . . 

Between experiments, he asks the forest spirit, "Are you likely to exist forever?"

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The forest spirit considers this question very seriously for a few seconds, and then says, {as long as world probably? spirit is part of world.}

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"That's good. And how long will the world exist, do you know?" He really hopes he's about to get reassurance that sentient life will endure forever, rather than cause an adorable spirit to become aware of their own mortality and/or discover the world is going to end in six months.

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{don't think world is thing that stops?} says the spirit, in a slightly doubtful tone. {have not thought about it before.}

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"I hope it isn't the kind of thing that stops. It's a good world."

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Nod-bob. {is!}

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"It's getting pretty late," he says, having only just noticed this fact. "I should sleep. And maybe start work in the morning on getting an actual bed. I seem to remember there was a spider involved in the process somewhere?"

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Nod nod. {spider makes cobweb, cobweb is ingredient in thread, thread is ingredient in cloth, cloth is ingredient in bed!}

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"Do the spiders make cobwebs on their own such that I can find some and steal them, or do I need to interact with the spider directly?"

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{not sure. maybe ask stone spirit?}

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"Fair enough. The stone spirit is underground somewhere, right? Do you know where in more detail or should I just expand my tunnels some more until I find them?" The latter sounds like a very slow process, but digging tunnels is oddly fun when it's this easy and the results are this rectilinear.

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{stone spirit in cave probably. don't know where. i think on this island though!}

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"Okay. Do you want to go looking around caves together?"

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Bounce bounce. {yeah!!}

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"Awesome. We can start with the one I found last time I was mining, since it's the only one I know where it is." 

Time to go down a hole!

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The forest spirit perches on his shoulder as they descend.

Inside the cave, there is dirt and rock and a large craggy grey slime bouncing aimlessly around.

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Can he see the entire cave from here, or are there places where it goes around a corner or beyond the range of his torch?

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The torch illuminates a significant amount of cave, but the far end is still dim when he stands just outside and peers in.

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Then he'll go explore the far end, keeping a wall immediately on his right in case it gets twisty.

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The fundamental orthogonality of the universe means that it's hard for a cave to get that twisty, since all the walls are made out of identically sized cubes and part-cubes. That being said, it's still a cave, and within its constraints it does indeed attempt to twist.

At the far end of the cave, there is a right-angled bend and a descent of one cube-height into a narrower corridor, where a rocky little dude is trundling toward Bruce from a deeper dimmer area.

{hey there,} says a deep gruff spirit-voice like stone grinding against stone. {careful. there's monsters down here.}

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"Oh, hello!" Bruce says quietly. "Are you the stone spirit? I'm Bruce and this is the forest spirit."

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{that's me,} the spirit agrees. {nice meeting you both. met anybody else yet?}