This patch of forest is very much uninhabited.

Not only does it contain no people, and no wild hogs, it also contains no birds, squirrels, insects, or other animals of any sort. It contains grass, and trees, and Wilbur and Lucy.

The grass is oddly uniform in length and colour, and the trees are oddly regular in width and placement, and the ground is really bizarrely level. It looks like an exactingly constructed diorama of a forest, made to scale by someone struggling to depict a natural-looking forest despite an unstoppable compulsion to make things line up really neatly.

She spits her brother out. 

He takes a moment to futilely attempt to scrub her spit off his coat, then looks around. 

"Lucy, what the fuck." 

"I don't know! The cultists did it! They finished chanting and then everything was dark and then--this!" 

"Great..." he mutters. "Is there even anything edible around here?" 

Well, not super close by there isn't, but if Lucy looks around from her higher vantage she might catch sight of an apple tree some distance away. All the other trees in this forest are weirdly regular oaks; the apple tree was clearly manufactured to the same specifications, but its leaves and bark and big red juicy-looking apples are all appropriate to its species.

"There's an apple tree over thataway," she says, flicking one tentacle along Wilbur's shoulder to indicate the direction in question. "I can't see anything else good to eat from here, but if there's one fruit-bearing tree there could be others." 

"It would take a lot of fruit to keep you fed." 

"I know. But anything is better than nothing--and--if we're the only people here--you don't smell edible..."

"I'd much rather it not come to that." 

"Yeah. And the tree is a start, c'mon," she says, and lumbers off in the direction of the apple tree. 

He follows, glancing at the ground in her wake to see how deep she leaves footprints. 

Her footprints seem shallower than normal; the ground here is pretty resilient.

The apple tree, when they find it, has a tiny creature perched on the end of one of its highest branches.

{hello friend!!} it says, in a voice like creaking wood and rustling leaves, wordless but somehow perfectly clear. {and friend!!} It waves a tiny pointy arm.

Whoah what the heck. 

"...Hi! Can you explain where we are?" 

{in forest!}

"This is a very strange forest. Do you know anything about that?" 

It gives a tiny pointy shrug.

{only know this kind. don't know other forests.}

"That's fair. --Lucy does it--" 

"No, it smells like...trees." 

"Good." To the little creature: "What is there to eat besides these apples?" 

{more apples! different fruit! animals! fish! monsters! careful though. monsters are dangerous.}

"Monsters?" 

{monsters!} it confirms. {there are monsters. monsters try to hurt you.}

"What makes something a monster?" 

It sways from side to side on its pointy feet, considering this question in depth.

{you are friend. i am spirit. tree is tree. animal is animal. monster is monster. friend does friend things, spirit does spirit things, animal does animal things, monster does monster things. friend things are many. spirit things mostly talking. animal things mostly moving around, sometimes eating grass. monster things mostly trying to hurt friends and spirits and animals.}

"So I'm not a monster? Even though I'm big and invisible and have tentacles?" 

{???} says the spirit, somehow. {you are friend! big invisible tentacle friend!!} It waves its tiny pointy arms for emphasis.

"Wilbur this thing is so cute," she whispers to her brother. 

"Yes. Yes, it is," he whispers back. 

"What kinds of monsters are there? Why do they try to hurt stuff?" 

{many kinds! monster is monster, does monster things because of being monster.}

It sways thoughtfully again, then looks around a little, and finally points in a direction.

{small monster there! green slime. is reactive monster. hurts animals always, but only hurts friends who touch it or hurt it first.}

In the direction it pointed, there is a round blob of translucent green jelly, hopping along the forest floor. The blob is about a foot in diameter, when not distended by the force of its motion.

Lucy immediately goes up and pokes it. 

It wobbles in place for a moment, then launches itself directly toward her. It stings when it hits, and the impact has enough force to slightly stagger an ordinary human; Lucy, of course, is rather harder to stagger than that. It's still going to bruise a little, though.

"Are monsters people?" she asks the spirit. 

{not mostly. special monster maybe. special monster is like spirit, is only one of each kind.}

The green slime bounces off Lucy, lands, and hops aggressively into her again.

She plucks it out of the air and eats it.

It tastes like slightly grass-flavoured water, and has the consistency of particularly bouncy jelly.

Also, although it didn't look like it had anything inside it, there turns out to be a small rubbery ball somewhere amid the goo. It tastes sort of unappetizing, not even as foodlike as grass.

{small thing is gel from slime!} the spirit says helpfully. {useful. not good to eat.}

She spits out the gel. "What's it good for?" she asks, examining it.

{can make thing!}

And as soon as the spirit says that, she can start to... 'read', maybe, in the same way she 'hears' meaning in the spirit's speech... a list of things one could make with the gel. Unfortunately, all the entries are mostly blurred out, with just the {1/? gel} part visible.

"Whoa what the heck is this."

{can make thing!} the spirit repeats. {need more things though. can get wood from tree, make torch!}

"Why are there fuzzy recipes in my brain." 

"Why are there what?" 

She hands him the gel. 

"..." 

{is how make thing,} the spirit explains.

"Why is how make thing in my brain???"

{??}

It looks up at her in confusion.

"Why does the gel tell me how to make things with it?" 

{is not tell how, is how. hold gel, see things gel makes. hold wood, see things wood makes. hold all things to make thing, see thing, make thing.}

"...Huh." She considers the apple tree, then decides that no, apples are important, then turns to the first non-fruit-bearing tree she sees, wraps a tentacle around the trunk and attempts to uproot it. 

The tree creaks and groans and falls apart into a shower of tiny little log-sections, each the same size as the ball of gel. There are also two tiny little... stylized carvings of acorns?

If she holds a tiny log at the same time as the ball of gel, she gets a bunch of clearer recipes where the full ingredients list is readable, including one where she can use {1 wood} and {1 gel} to make, presumably, a torch. (The name of the product is still blurred.)

...She...makes a torch?

Now she is holding a torch! A teeny tiny miniature torch, the same size as the miniature logs. Its teeny tiny miniature flame flickers merrily without giving off heat. The word {torch} is now unblurred in the recipe entry.

{can put torch on ground,} the forest spirit contributes.

And she can 'see', anywhere she looks, a ghostly preview of what putting the torch on the ground would result in—a stick about a foot long, standing straight upright, with a burning lump of something-or-other on top. It seems only able to stand in places precisely aligned with the invisible grid that dictates the placement of the trees: either at the center, edge, or corner of a grid square.

The previews can be activated in much the same way as the recipe.

...She...activates a preview?

And now there is a torch on the ground, exactly where she meant it to go!

"This is not how I'm used to things working." 

{is how these things work.}

"...Okay." 

She picks up an acorn. 

The acorn gives her no recipes, and a build-preview of a little sapling.

"If I--place an acorn as a sapling--will it grow into a tree?" 

{yes! not right away though.}

"How fast does it grow?" 

{usually a few days.}

"...It only takes a few days for a little sapling to grow into a tree?" 

{it is little and then little and then little and then little and then big!}

"After a few days, it turns into a tree all at once?"

{yes!}

...Where can she put trees, exactly? 

In the center of any unoccupied grid square in sight. There might be terrain limitations, but the only available terrain at the moment is grassy forest floor.

Can she put a tree on top of another tree?

That doesn't sound like an unoccupied grid square at all!

"If I pull up the apple tree, will that drop seeds too?" 

{tree gives seed but not always. sometimes one sometimes two sometimes three sometimes none. mostly two.}

"Okay, definitely not damaging the only fruit tree I know of. ...Do you know where there are more fruit trees?"

It gives a tiny pointy shrug. {look for shore!} it advises. {forest tree usually oak, sometimes apple. shore tree usually date palm, sometimes coconut palm. careful though! some places dangerous. forest is least dangerous place.}

"How much more dangerous are other places?" 

{mostly not much more, but some very! shadow place very dangerous, blood place very dangerous. if trees bleeding or screaming, is scary place.}

"You know, that makes sense. Which way to the shore?" 

{all ways! is island.}

"...Huh." 

"Since I'm much squishier than you, I'm going to stay here and do experiments that only rely on reasonably available materials." 

"Okay. Do you want me to tear down some more trees so you have wood to work with?" 

"Yes, please." 

"Okay." Tentacles lash out and destroy several more "oak trees." 

This results in lots and lots of acorns and wood!

And then she shambles off in a random direction, pulling down any trees that get in her way so she can find her way back more easily. 

Forest, forest, more forest...

The grid turns out to be three-dimensional; when she encounters a hill, it seems to have been assembled out of cubes, some of them cut in half on a forty-five-degree slope to fill the gap between levels. Most of the cubes are the grassy forest-floor stuff, but some are bare dirt and some are a rough grey stone.

(There's another apple tree at the base of the hill, a little ways out of her way.)

Farther up the hill, it gets colder, and there's snow on the ground and different (though still fruitless) trees. A creature hops toward her: it resembles the green slime, but colourless, frosty, and sparkling prettily in the sun. (It's also twice as big, the full width of a grid-square.)

She detours to pull down the apple tree and collect everything it drops. 

She eats the frosty thing. 

The apple tree drops two apple seeds, some wood, and an abundance of apples. The dropped apples are in tiny-and-stylized form, but expandable in a similar way to torches although with a much shorter placement range and fewer restrictions on target location.

Conveniently, if she collects up a pile of the same sort of thing and pushes them in very close to each other, they collapse into a single object from which she can deploy the individual instances at will.

The frosty thing tastes cool and refreshing, like a spoonful of snow. There's a hint of sweetness to it. It drops two balls of gel.

Another frosty thing shows up after it, and another after that; they seem to arrive at a rate of one every couple of minutes or so.

She continues snacking on frosty things and spitting out the gel. She pulls down a tree and collects its stuff for Wilbur to experiment with. 

The snowy tree looks like some sort of conifer, and its seeds are little pinecones.

Up, up, up... at the crest of the hill, a solid mass of ice rises above the snowy ground, clear and sparkling like the frosty slimes, devoid of trees. If she climbs to the top of that, she will find a pond and a view.

Supposing that the current direction of the sun is west, she's been travelling northeast. From the pond, a river flows down the hill to the northwest; there's a grassy area wrapping around the snowy hill from the northeast shore of the river all the way around its eastern edge to meet the southern end of the forest on the other side, and beyond the grass is a sandy shore. Southwest of the forest, there is a broad expanse of sand that looks more like a true desert than a mere patch of shore; on the southeast end of the desert, there is a small patch of dense forest that might be a jungle. East of the jungle, and due south of her current position, there is a hill taller than the one she currently stands on, and it's hard to tell at this distance exactly what's going on with it, but it's very... red.

Beyond the shores of this island, there are other islands visible in the distance, some far enough to be hardly more than smudges on the horizon, others close enough that she can see a few details. The closest one is to the northeast, past the end of a long tapering shoal; its nearest parts seem to be all grassland.

She considers this, and then heads down and north towards the grassland. 

In the grassland north of the hill there is grass, bamboo (although she may not recognize it), and exactly three fucking enormous trees. The fucking enormous trees are each two grid-squares across—that's four feet—and taller than the hill, with no branches low enough to be within Lucy's reach.

There is also a grassland slime! It is adorably wee, only a few inches across, and clear and shiny like an adventurous dewdrop.

Cute! She noms it. 

...

Gosh, those trees. She wants to climb one. The lack of reachable branches is inconvenient--and surprising--but her tentacles can get a grip on sheer cliff; probably these trees have textured bark she can use to get a climbable grip?

The dewdrop slime tastes surprisingly sweet.

Those trees do indeed have climbable bark! And they're sturdy enough to support her weight. She can climb so high. Well, all right, not that much higher than the hill, and the view isn't significantly better, but in the treetop all that distance is directly below her instead of hidden in a gradual rise of the landscape.

That is sooooo cool. 

Can she see any other giant trees besides these three if she looks around for them? 

She can! There's a whole grove of them in the grassland on the neighbouring island. And there might be more south of the hill, if they're short enough not to be visible above it.

Hmm. Hmmmm. Yeah, leaving the island without telling Wilbur is still probably a bad idea. Oh well. 

She half-climbs half-controlled-falls down the tree and looks around for more tasty dewdrop things. 

There's a bunch of them, hopping to and fro without a care in the world.

Yay! She eats them. 

Are there any other monsters or things that might be monsters around? 

Over by the river there's a brightly coloured slime, segmented like an orange into six rainbow parts: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

Oh cool!!! She runs over to eat it. 

It tastes FRUITY. The emphatic combination of cherry, orange, lemon, lime, raspberry, and grape is a little overwhelming.

Ohhhhhhh wow. 

She takes a little time to chill out on the riverbank and process the flavor, then gets up and looks around for more. 

There's a green slime hopping through the forest on the other side of the river, and a couple of dewdrop slimes bouncing past through the grassland, and another rainbow slime floating down the river, spinning gently in the current.

Rainbow slime! 

She darts off after it, but instead of popping it into her mouth whole, she tries to take a nibbling bite out of just the red section. 

This is difficult to accomplish with the slime bouncing and wiggling and slamming itself into her face at every opportunity. These things sure pack a punch for creatures made entirely of jelly. She successfully gets her nibble, at the cost of a bruised cheek and a noseful of assorted citrus.

So now she knows which flavor is red. She holds onto it more firmly with more tentacles, wrapping it up tightly to limit its ability to wiggle, and samples the orange. 

Orange, predictably enough, is orange!

Mm! Yellow?

Lemon!

And green is lime and blue is raspberry and purple is grape and this slime is now very dead and smeared all over her tentacles and face.

Okay, she wasn't expecting that. She licks slime goo off her tentacles and rinses her face in the river, then looks around for anything moving that isn't slime. Or is a kind of slime she hasn't seen yet. 

The river contains a number of fish, in varying sizes.

Ooh, fish. She snags a fish and eats it. 

It tastes fishy.

Yum. 

...She was promised monsters, dammit. The tasty slimes barely count. 

Fine. She heads back up the ice hill and towards the red area. 

The ice hill has another couple of frosted slimes, and the southern grassland has several more dewdrop slimes (and, indeed, two more enormous trees), and as she approaches the red area a northbound breeze blows a strong scent of blood into her face.

And when she gets closer than that...

The trees are, indeed, bleeding. The ground beneath them is soaked in blood, so thoroughly that it's hard to tell if the stuff under that clotted coating is grass, moss, dirt, or some other less natural thing.

A round red slime sails serenely out of the mess, spattering blood across the grassland and leaving behind a wet red smear with every hop.

That smells like human blood. She...does not eat that slime. 

She wanders cautiously into the bleeding forest. 

Another couple of red slimes pass her by, disinclined to bother her unless she bothers them first.

A... creature... approaches her. It's about ten feet long, with a mismatched abundance of long spindly legs, a snakelike body plated in chitinous armour, and glittering glaring gold slit-pupiled eyes scattered like warts all over its limbs and body. Its front end has a mouth that looks like it was designed by an artist with a vague description of spiders and an overactive imagination; there are teeth and teeth and more teeth and four pairs of chelicerae, each with its own side-mounted eyeball. Its long tapering tail has a serrated blade on the end, studded with eyes. Each of its legs ends in a slightly different design of nasty clawed foot with an eye on it.

Every single one of those eyes is staring straight at her, and blinking away tears of blood in its own unique rhythm.

It's moving purposefully, but not very fast. She could probably escape it if she turned and ran away right now. Unless it turned out to be good at sprinting.

No, she would instead like to lunge towards it and tear it to pieces. 

It snaps and slashes and struggles and manages to cut her pretty badly in a few places before she successfully kills it.

Once dead, it immediately blows apart into a dozen juicy monster chunks, plus assorted leg shrapnel. But the forceful shower of claw fragments bounces harmlessly off her skin.

The blood on its outside smells human, but the blood on its inside smells... monstery. Sort of sour, strongly metallic, with several unfamiliar overtones.

She eats as much of its insides as she can--it's not great, but not terrible either. She double-checks the blast zone for nifty items. 

A scattered handful of little stylized coins, and something else that's fallen too deep in the muck to be visible as more than a glint.

Another couple of spider-snake-eyeball-horrors show up while she's looking for loot.

She grabs the coins and the thing in the muck and skedaddles. 

Now she is back in the grassland, covered in blood, and being pursued by two spider-snake-eyeball-horrors, although they fall behind steadily as she flees.

She flees all the way to the river, where she can clean the blood off and examine her prizes more closely. 

There are two silver coins and three copper ones, and the copper ones are each a stack of ten. She can combine them all into a two-silver coin and a thirty-copper coin if she likes.

The other thing looks like... a little scrap of red meat, vaguely in the shape of a tattered heart, frozen into the same glassy immutability as all the other items she's encountered.

...Can she...do anything with it???

It has some crafting recipes! She could make... something... with {1/? Heart Piece}, and a few other things with blurred-out missing ingredients.

She captures some dewdrop slimes and takes them and her items and heads back to where she left Wilbur. 

The trip back offers her nothing more interesting than another apple tree.

She leaves the apple tree alone for the moment. 

Wilbur is surrounded by miscellaneous furniture items, some wooden tools, and what appears to be a suit of armor made of wood. 

She pauses for a moment to stare at this, then says, "Hey! I found a whole bunch of stuff. You should try one of these, they're good," she says, holding out a dewdrop slime. 

"...Thank you," he says, taking it very very carefully and biting into it. 

The bite is very tasty, in a sweet refreshing no-particular-flavour sort of way; the slime wriggles free of his grasp and baps him in the face, hard enough to hurt but not to cause lasting injury.

He grabs ahold of it, squeezing to make sure it doesn't wriggle free again. 

...Maybe squeezing a little too hard. 

SPLAT.

...

He wipes off of himself and eats as much of the thing as he can.

It's still tasty!

Good. Still. 

"Maybe I can work out how to make a container to kill those things into first," he muses. 

"Ooh, that's definitely a good idea. Anyway I found some stuff and I wanna ask the cute thing what the heck it is." She looks around for the cute thing. 

It waves from its perch atop a tree stump.

{what things?}

She holds up the weird heart thing. 

{is heart piece! can get more, make heart.}

"What's a heart?" 

{can eat heart!}

"Does anything happen if you eat a heart?" 

It bobs affirmatively. {is good. gives health.}

"It would fix my wounds?"

Affirmative bob. {fix, and harder to hurt next time!}

"Ooh. Is there anything else, anything safer, I could do to fix my wounds in the meantime?"

{can make campfire with wood and gel. sit by campfire, get better.}

She has wood and gel! She makes a campfire and sets it down on a random furniture-less spot. 

Its cozy radiance causes her bruises and cuts to heal with visible speed. At this rate she'll probably be fine in a couple of minutes.

Ooh. She curls up by the cozy fire. 

"...Does this do anything for old injuries or scars?"

{not sure,} says the forest spirit. {maybe, maybe not.}

"Wilbur--"

Wilbur comes to sit by the fire, paying special attention to the intense scarring on his hip.

If there's an effect, it's subtle enough not to be immediately noticeable. Everything feels more comfortable and cozy, but it's hard to say whether the scars feel especially cozier than usual.

"No perceptible effect."

"Darn. Oh well." To the spirit: "Is there a way to make a bucket or something to hold tasty goo?"

{can make bucket with metal! can make metal from ore. first get stone, make furnace.}

"How do I get stone?" 

{stone is type of ground! can dig in ground with pickaxe.}

She identifies the wooden pickaxe. "I'm going to take this and go dig somewhere, okay?" she asks Wilbur. 

"Have fun," he says agreeably. 

She heads off in the opposite direction from the snowy hill. 

Opposite the snowy hill, there is a bunch more forest and then a desert!

The desert landscape is a grid-aligned patchwork of loose sand and hard flat sandstone. The sand seems unconstrained by the strictures of the grid, but the sandstone comes in the familiar cubes and half-cubes, and the picture they make together is more than a little surreal.

Here and there, the gentle sandy slopes are interrupted by an unnaturally regular cactus. They seem to be the local equivalent of trees, growing tall and cylindrical with neat rows of pointy spines and pleasingly balanced arrangements of arms.

...She pokes at the sand with the pickaxe. 

The pickaxe interacts with the sand exactly as one might expect.

She warily approaches a cactus, and tries very hard to wrap a tentacle around it without impaling herself too badly on the prickles.

She can successfully uproot the cactus in this fashion. Do cacti even have roots? Regardless, once it is reduced to Tiny Item format, it's not prickly anymore.

Interestingly, instead of the cacti dropping seeds, it seems that any old cylinder of cactus can be planted on sand or sandstone as a wee cactusling, presumably to grow up into a full-size cactus from there.

...Huh. 

What happens if she attempts to dig in the sand with tentacles and feet?

It behaves like sand, much as the water in the river behaved like water. She can dig it up and uncover the sandstone below it.

She hits the sandstone with the pickaxe. 

Bop! The specific cube of sandstone that she hit is abruptly transformed into a Tiny Sandstone Item.

Neat. She hits some more sandstone. Bop bop bop. She's going to keep doing this until something other than more sandstone underneath happens. 

That might take a while.

In fact, before she reaches that point, she'll reach the point where the sand pouring in from the sides is too deep for her to reach the sandstone with her pickaxe.

Also she has a whole lot of sandstone now.

Hmm she can place the sandstone, right? What if she creates a wall of sandstone around herself to keep the sand out and then flings all the sand that is currently inside the wall out of it. 

This is... moderately effective. Kind of a hassle, though, because she can only place the sandstone into a gridspace that is almost completely free of sand. If she's really really diligent about digging, though, then yes, she can manage it.

She is really really diligent about digging and she has a lot of limbs to do it with. 

It's still gonna take a while, though. How long are the days here?

The sun is descending in the west, and it's well past the point where the edge of her pit casts a shadow that covers the bottom of the pit completely.

She crafts a torch and sticks it to the wall and keeps digging. 

And digging.

And digging.

And digging.

Okay this is dumb. Can she craft more pickaxes? Out of cactus or something? 

Yes, as a matter of fact! Cactus pickaxes are green and oddly springy, but they bop sandstone just as efficiently as her wooden one.

Something falls into her pit. She might catch a glimpse of a translucent, shimmering, sand-coloured slime sailing through the air before it lands on top of her and splatters everywhere.

Ooh, what do sand slimes taste like? She wipes up some goo to taste it. 

Sort of like... cake? A fairly bland light cake, like a cupcake with no frosting. In jelly form.

Mm, nice. 

She considers her current number of pickaxes, considers how long it took her to dig a hole this deep with only one, and crawls up out of the hole to harvest more cactus. And maybe eat some more slime. 

The sun is setting by this point. A couple more of the sandy slimes are hopping by, shimmering prettily in the light. There's plenty of cactus near the pit.

She eats the slimes and spits out the gel like cherry pits, then sets to harvesting cactus. She doesn't craft all of it into pickaxes, though; she wants more cactus later if she needs it, so she plants some of it in rings around her hole. 

A sensible plan!

The sun sets; the moon rises. The stars are bright and beautiful, a glittering expanse above the pit.

A couple of minutes after sunset, more things start falling into her pit. Just two to start with.

They look... well, like people, after a fashion. People who have been dead for several years, in the desert so they're all dried-out and withered instead of rotted, and they smell like death and dust and they make horrible rattly groaning sounds as they land on top of her and attempt to beat her to death with their bare hands.

Eww! Ahh! She's not scared of them but they're still...concerning. Really, really concerning. 

She snatches them up in her tentacles, abandoning her pickaxes on the floor of the hole, and scurries up to the surface. 

They're surprisingly strong; they kick and hit and bite and struggle and do minor damage to the tentacles she's holding them with.

Also, before she's out of the pit, two more land on her. And once she's on the surface again, she can see another three shambling toward her from seemingly random directions.

She has so many tentacles, she can collect all seven. 

And then go tearing off back towards where Wilbur and the spirit are. 

Once she's back in the forest, the corpses shambling toward her are much less dry! It's kind of gross.

Sooo gross. She attempts to dodge around them. 

They continue shambling toward her, but they're slow enough that she can pretty easily keep out of their way. She's going to have quite the entourage by the time she gets back, though.

Well that's a problem for later. 

When she gets back, the first thing she sees is a wooden structure. The second thing she sees is that Wilbur and the little spirit are nowhere to be seen. 

She reaches the obvious conclusion, and opens the door of the structure, making sure to obstruct the entrance with her body so the walking corpses can't get in. 

"Hi! There are shambling corpses. They're monsters, right?" 

The spirit is hiding in a corner.

{yes!}

"Did they used to be people?"

{monster is monster. before monster is not anything.}

"So they're not really dead bodies, they just look like them?" 

It seems confused about this question and too busy huddling nervously to come up with an answer.

Yeah okay. She closes the door (poor thing) and squeezes all the mummies she's carrying into oblivion. 

Now she has a bunch of mummy fragments, an assortment of coins, and a dozen gross forest corpses crowding around trying to beat her to death.

She collects the coins and twists the gross forest corpses' heads off. 

The mummy fragments crumble into dust as she's dealing with the gross forest corpses, and the gross forest corpses fall apart and sink into the grass as she's dealing with the next wave of gross forest corpses.

Do the gross forest corpses drop anything?

Coins! And one of them drops an apple seed.

Apple seed!!! She plants it. 

Gross forest corpses continue to approach from all directions.

She decides to go back to her hole. She kills any gross forest corpses she encounters on the way. Or less-gross desert corpses, once she gets that far. ...Before she actually goes back into the hole, it occurs to her to wonder if the desert corpses drop any seeds, and she decides that destroying a lot of them is the best way to find out. 

After about thirty corpses, she does get a seed. It's not apple.

She plants it! So okay she won't be able to see what it is for a few days but still. 

...Ooh. She heads east towards the grasslands to investigate its corpse-slash-dropped-seed content. 

Grassland corpses are drier than forest corpses but grosser than desert corpses. They are all wearing hats and backpacks. Each one drops a useful item of some kind in addition to its scattering of coins—usually a torch, sometimes a coil of rope, occasionally a pickaxe or axe or hammer with a copper head.

It takes forty-six of them before she gets yet another new kind of seed.

She is so delighted by these objects. She plants the seed and heads north to the snow. 

In the snowy region, the corpses are wearing adorably cozy fur coats!

Unfortunately, the sun rises before she's killed enough of them to get a seed from one.

Awww. Do they drop anything besides seeds?

The last one she kills before the sun rises drops a Tiny Item version of its coat.

...She gazes at the tiny item coat in bewilderment, then picks it up curiously. 

There is a sense of being possible-to-activate. It seems like she could... put it on? It is not at all clear how that would work, but the option is there.

Sure why not. 

She is now wearing an adorably cozy fur coat.

It has sleeves for approximately the upper two-thirds of her tentacles, and a hood with fuzzy flaps that can be pulled forward to wrap around her face.

Holy crap???

She scuttles over to the river and peers at her reflection--or, rather, the coat's, because her actual body is still invisible--and giggles. She takes off downhill back to where Wilbur and the spirit are, eager to show off her newfound coziness and partial visibility. 

The spirit is just peeking out the door when she arrives. It waves.

{friend! you found coat!}

"I did! It's crazy how this thing can fit me, but look! You can see me where the coat is!" 

It hops up and down excitedly. {you like coat! is good!}

"Yes!!!" She waves several tentacles excitedly. "Hey, things keep dropping coins, is there anything I can do with those?" 

{can buy thing! not yet though. first find other spirits.}

"How can I find other spirits?" 

{stone spirit underground, cloud spirit in sky, water spirit in ocean.}

"Nothing weird'll happen if I go to a different island, right?" 

{might get lost,} it suggests thoughtfully. {make sure to remember directions.}

"Hmm." 

She drops some of the sandstone off with Wilbur to experiment with, then picks up all her pickaxes and heads for the snowy hill. 

A frosty slime bounces toward her as she ascends the slope.

She absently eats the slime. 

When she reaches the very top, she starts constructing a pillar out of sandstone. When it gets tall enough she has to climb it to add more. Eventually it's tall enough that she's satisfied that it'll probably be visible from other islands and climbs down. 

Now she has a pillar!

Good. Now...

Now she has an idea. 

She heads downslope towards the bleeding forest. 

A welcome party of two horrible nightmare creatures is there to greet her!

Time to do science. 

How far away from them can she get before they stop chasing her?

They turn around and slink back toward the bloodforest once she has a lead of about forty cubelengths.

Hm. 

She starts digging a trench around the bloodforest, about thirty cubelengths away, narrower than her but much wider than a nightmare creature is long. 

Periodically a nightmare creature comes out of the bloodforest to pester her while she works.

Aaaaand if she runs away across the trench?

She can escape them the same way she escaped the others, but they turn out to be able to climb both sides of the trench without trouble. All those legs are good for something.

Aw maaaaan. There goes her entire plan. 

--Hey what happens if she jumps on them. How do they handle Suddenly >10 Tons. 

Splat!

Yay! She picks up whatever it drops and then wanders into the forest, merrily planning to jumpsplat any more of the beasties she runs across. 

In this way she can accumulate several more heart pieces. And a lot of bloodstains on her lovely new coat.

--Aw, man. She should really have thought of that. She collects her heart pieces and heads for the river to see if she can get any of the blood out. 

The coat cleans up fairly nicely!

Oh good. She's still going to take it off before going into the blood forest, this time. 

Then she can accumulate bloodstains not on her lovely new coat!

Her hide doesn't really stain, she's much more confident of her ability to wash the blood off herself. 

How many heart fragments does it take before she can make a heart? 

Five!

Cool! She makes a heart. And eats it. 

The heart, when expanded to edible form, appears to be the real live heart of some sort of creature—not a human, it's too big for that—candied like a fruit and dripping sugary red syrup.

Once she eats it... the feeling resembles the cozy glow of the campfire, but simultaneously fainter and deeper, like it's radiating from her very bones. And it doesn't go away. That barely-there hint of warmth and comfort lingers indefinitely.

Oh. Wow. 

She wants more. 

Time to go on a complete fucking jumpsplat rampage. 

The candy heart effect turns out to stack linearly! Two hearts is twice as good as one, and three adds one more heart's worth, and so on.

As she continues to eat hearts, she might notice that the eyeball-snake-spiders' claws have a harder time making a mark on her.

That's good. She crafts and places some campfires in miscellaneous places around the forest anyway, it can't hurt. 

When she gets slightly bored with squishing horrors, she pulls down a tree to see what happens. 

It gives wood and seeds just like any other tree!

Does the wood still bleed once it is no longer an alive tree. 

It does not. In Tiny Item form it's just another Tiny Item.

What if she places it? 

The log is very red but it's not actively bleeding!

Okay cool. She breaks it off from the ground again and stacks it back with its fellows. 

Hmm. She's slightly bored of just jumpsplat rampaging, but she does want more hearts. If nothing else, Wilbur hasn't had any and she doesn't think Spirit has either. She could dig here? Except she left all her pickaxes in the bottom of her desert hole. Well, she can go and fetch them and come back, it won't kill her to take a little time off from being in the blood forest and squishing its nasties. 

...Also she's starting to get a little peckish and doesn't really want to eat bloodslime or nasties that have been ten tons worth of squashed, thus potentially grinding their exterior human blood and also maybe dirt into their insides. She can hunt on the way. 

If she remembers the view from the top of the ice hill right, she can take a shortcut through the dark green stuff she hasn't actually been in before. 

She can do that!

On her way toward the dense green forest, though, she'll see a remarkable sight: a single tree that isn't bleeding. It's very different from the other trees in the bloodforest; its branches start lower, and they droop heavily, laden with bright red cherries.

Gasp!

It's pretty. And fruit-laden. 

She is so spending the night here and killing corpses for seeds. 

She plucks and eats a cherry as she continues on her way. 

The cherry is delicious, and it doesn't even taste like blood!

The jungle is dense enough that it's hard to move through it without uprooting a swath of trees ahead of her. There are vines entangled with the trees, and when she takes out the trees, the vines drop as items.

Neat. She collects wood, seeds, and vines. She assumes the vines can be crafted with?

She can currently make one thing out of {1 vine}!

Ooh what can she make?

Rope, it turns out! The same stuff the grassland corpses were dropping.

Huh. Can she make anything with rope, come to think of it. 

Not currently. She can place it, though, if she would like to hang ropes from things.

That sounds like a thing that would be more useful to someone less able to climb things than her. So, Wilbur. She hangs onto the rope and the vines to hand off to him later. 

Are there slimes here? She would like to find out what this kind of slime tastes like. 

There are!

They look much like green slimes—maybe a little darker—but they're huge. About four feet across.

Oh goody! Om nom hungry half-human horror. 

The giant slime tastes like a medley of exotic fruits. It's much gentler about it than the rainbow slime was; this one is just sort of a gentle unspecified fruitiness.

Yummy. She dines on slimes as she moves through the rainforest, keeping an eye out for rainforest fruit trees. 

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing... mango!

She has no idea what this kind of fruit is. Except, once she tries it, tasty. 

She harvests as many fruits off the tree as she can find, adding the little stack to the collection she's carrying. Wilbur'll love these. 

She reaches the desert and starts eating sand slimes for dessert. Now, her hole's over there...how's the sapling doing? 

Sapling-shaped.

Fair. She crawls down her hole and retrieves her pickaxes and crawls back out and goes back through the lane she carved in the rainforest to the red area. Time to start digging!

Digging in the bloodforest yields dark red dirt, and after she's gone down a couple layers, also some dark red stone. (Also, it would be wise to construct a barrier to prevent blood from flowing into her dig site.)

Ew. Yeah she does that after getting dripped on one too many times. 

When she's a few dozen layers down, a blood slime leaps into her pit and goes splat.

Man, she's so going to have to wash when she leaves. Dig dig. She adds a little alcove to put a campfire in. 

That's probably a good plan, as the nightmare creatures are continuing to arrive at a rate of about one or two per minute.

Yeah stomping them is a little harder when they're coming from above. She continues compiling and eating lovely cozy hearts. 

She is going to be so hearty.

The sun goes down again.

Bloodforest corpses turn out to be fresh. Fresh and messy. And very aggressive.

By the time the sun goes down, she's started saving some portion of the hearts for Wilbur and the Spirit. She abandons her digging, when it does, instead focusing on killing as many bloodforest corpses as demihumanly possible. 

Occasionally they drop heart pieces.

Eventually they drop a seed!

Oh cool. She wasn't expecting anything other than the nightmare creatures to drop heart pieces. Maybe she should be more proactive about splatting the blood slimes too. 

It turns out, if she investigates this, that blood slimes drop heart pieces less often than blood corpses but not never.

Neat. She keeps actively hunting the blood corpses, incidentally splatting any slimes she happens to come across. 

She can accumulate five cherry seeds this way before sunrise!

Sweet!!!

When the sun rises, she heads to the river to wash off the by now copious blood covering her, retrieve her coat, and test if a cherry seed can be planted there. 

She can totally plant cherries there.

Also, there's a teardrop-shaped slime swimming in the river. It's hard to see, on account of being nearly the same colour as the water.

It takes her a little while to spot it but when she does she lunges after it and eats it. 

It has a slightly different 'sweet, refreshing water' flavour from the dewdrop slimes!

Nice. 

Once she's got all the blood off, she puts on her coat, picks up her stuff, and heads back to where Wilbur and Spirit are camped out. 

By this point Wilbur has added a Lucy-sized shelter and is constructing a more spacious actual house for the two of them. 

Lucy stops for a moment and stares before bounding over. "Wilbur! I have hearts for you! And rope--you can attach it to stuff, I think it's for climbing? And seeds for this really pretty cherry tree!" 

"Oh, lovely. Maybe we can start an orchard." 

"Yeah. The corpse monsters drop 'em, not too often but often enough, I got five cherry seeds last night. I planted one of them by the river to make sure they could be planted outside the area they're from." 

"Well, that won't bear fruit--heh--immediately, but still far faster than if these were ordinary trees. Speaking of fruit, have you anything for me to eat besides apples?" 

"Oh! Yeah, I dunno what these are called but they're tasty," she says, handing him the stack of mangoes. "I'm working on it, I promise, but I haven't gotten ore yet to make a bucket. When I do I'll bring you tasty goo." 

"Thank you," he says, immediately resizing a mango and biting into it. He makes a noise of pleased surprise at the taste. "You're right, this is delicious." 

"Yeah! Oh, and these hearts are for you," she says, handing him a stack. She looks around for the spirit. 

The spirit is sitting near the door of the Wilbur-sized house. It waves.

"Hi!!! I brought you some hearts." 

{oh!} It sways thoughtfully. {...spirit can't eat. hearts no good for spirit. but friend is nice!!}

"You can't? But what if you get hurt? I don't want you to get hurt!" 

{will be okay,} it promises.

"...Okay," she says reluctantly. She goes to give the spirit's share of hearts to Wilbur, then returns. "Are there any things we can make that would make carrying things easier? It mostly wasn't a problem, I have lots of arms, but I was very aware how many of them I was using to carry stuff." 

{can make backpack! first find stone sprite. or get from night monster in grassland.}

"Huh. Okay, tomorrow night I'll hunt the grasslands, I can try to get a backpack and fruit seeds. Do you think the backpack will manage to fit the way this coat does?" She waves several ensleeved tentacles for emphasis. 

It bobs affirmatively. {things fit!}

"I noticed, it's great!" she hugs herself. "I've never worn clothes before." 

Happy wiggle. {is good!}

"Yeah!!! Can I hug you?" 

It bounces. {yes! can hug!!}

She wraps the little spirit up gleefully in a many-limbed hug, careful not to squeeze them hard enough to injure. 

The spirit is so small and round and cuddly. Its tiny pointy arms can only sort of manage to hug her back, but boy does it try.

"You're so good." 

Happy wiggle!!

{you too.}

"Are the other spirits like you?" 

{made of other things. i am forest spirit, made of wood. stone spirit is stone, water spirit is water, cloud spirit is cloud. all same size though.}

"Are they all as nice as you?" 

{spirits are for helping! don't know though. haven't met them.}

"How do you know the things about them?" 

{i know things!}

"Well, I'm glad you do. I'm so glad you're here, this would have been so much harder otherwise." 

Happy wiggle. {i like helping!}

"You're so so good at it." 

Wiggle!!!

Snuggle!!!

Eventually: "I'm going to go inside and sleep for a while." 

It hugs a tentacle one more time and then lets go and hops to the ground with a little wave.

So good and cute!!!

She lumbers inside the Lucy-sized shelter, wraps her tentacles around herself, and sleeps. 

She wakes as the sun is starting to set. 

A gross forest corpse shows up to ineffectively try to kill her, as corpses tend to do.

She dispatches it easily and heads off to the grasslands, killing incidental forest zombies along the way. Heeeere, grass corpses! Lucy would like to extract seeds and a backpack from your destruction! 

It takes a while, but a few of them drop seeds, and one eventually drops a backpack.

Yes!!!! Backpack!!!!

She puts the seeds and pickaxes and so on in the backpack. She dons the backpack; how does it warp to fit her decidedly nonhuman shape?

It finds a good spot to nestle among her tentacles where it's out of the way while still being readily accessible, and secures itself there by means of a slightly absurd arrangement of straps.

That is so neat. 

She checks the position of the moon in the sky. Is there still enough time before sunrise to make going back to the snow and killing some corpses there worthwhile? 

There's enough that she might get lucky and catch an interesting drop or two.

She bounds off towards the snow, then, zigzagging a little as she intercepts and dispatches any grass zombies she spots along the way. She's not wasteful. 

And among the snow corpses she receives one seed and another fur coat. Then the sun rises and the corpses stop coming.

And she returns to base. Adding the snow seed and the grasslands seeds to the cherry saplings that make the tiny foundation of their orchard-to-be is important, as is seeing if the forest spirit can wear the coat, because that sounds freaking adorable. 

It can! It can wear the coat!

The sleeves engulf its tiny pointy arms. The hood engulfs its tiny adorable face. It bounces excitedly, covered in fluff.

So precious.

"Yay! You look very cozy." 

{am!!} it concurs. {coat is good!!}

"Yeah! I like mine a lot. The next one is for Wilbur but he already has a coat from not-here, it's not as good as one of these but it's not nothing." 

Bounce bounce.

"Do you think the other spirits would also like coats? Maybe I should hunt the snowy area for the next few nights so everyone can have one." 

{not sure!}

"Okay! I guess we'll find out when we meet them." 

(Bounce.)

"I'm gonna try visiting another island, today. Maybe I'll find the ocean spirit on the way there." 

{good luck!} It waves.

She heads off along the route she remembers to a visible island--over the snow hill, down to the grassland, past the tall trees, snacking on slimes all the way. 

Eventually, she finally actually reaches the shore. She vaguely remembers something about date palms. 

There are indeed palm trees scattered along the shoreline, and most of them are growing dates. One is instead growing coconuts.

Oh, cool. She pulls down a date palm. 

Wood and seeds and dates!