A vinyl record? That's, uh, okay maybe that's not weirder than having Fists of Death towards specifically fish but it's pretty weird, okay. 

Olivia thinks her first spell should be Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit: it's only barely more complex than the recommended first spell and she's going to need the information to design her house.

And thus, visions of purple architecture in her minds eye, she drifts back off to sleep.

Stadiometer's Purification is drawn like a sort of slanted table, counterclockwise from one of the legs. But it won't disturb her sleep.

The monsters might, if she's not yet used to the splashing and groaning and — when the sun comes up — bursting into flames on her roof.

Bleh, monsters. She's pretty used to the splashing and groaning - it was going on all through her midnight research binge - but the bursting into flames right on her roof will wake her, yes.

Today Olivia is going to build a house with magic. She's extremely excited. First, however, she's going to punch a fish for breakfast.

Honestly, Olivia is so extremely normal for that. Apparently, at some point, wrestling with fish becomes routine. Does she care to try setting anything on fire to cook her fish with, or is she going to get right to house building?

No, raw fish is still pretty adequate if, by this point, pretty boring. 

She finishes up with breakfast and walks back out the sandbar. The safest way to get the precious amethyst and journals (and other supplies) out, she thinks, is to pull off some planks and make a hole in the hull.

This is pretty nerve wracking - if she runs into trouble making a house she can't retreat back to the shipwreck - but getting the journals wet would be just as much of a disaster.

And the TOMES barrel is not easily re-sealable. It's okay, she can make a small hole and pass things out without too much fuss.

As small a hole as possible, that's the idea.

She ferries her TOMES objects to land and tucks them in her bag (it's a fairly large bag and it didn't start out full). 

Then, she flips her sketchbook to a new page, and makes a plain ink drawing of the measure-yourself spell: three glyphs, now collected on one page. 

In American units, Olivia is 5'8" tall. Time to see how tall that is in Oz cubits.

She extracts the precious drawstring bag of amethyst dust, and holding the reference in one hand and staff in the other, casts: Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit.

When she finishes the first glyph, there is a sudden presence inside of her, in a space that she has always had but has never previously noticed, because it has always been empty. The presence feels like herself.

After drawing the second glyph, the presence transforms into something that feels more like a platonic ideal. The number 1.7272, just hanging there in her inner space. That makes her about 3.5 cubits.

Upon drawing the third glyph, the number disperses, her staff gives a happy little chime, and all three glyphs, which had previously been drifting in the air around her, vanish.

She writes down 1.7272 natural units, and then after double checking the Stadiometer's Purification description, ~3.5 cubits.

5 foot 8 is 68 inches is 63 + 5 inches. 63 / 3.5 = 9*2 = 18. And 5 / 3.5 is about four thirds probably? 

Then: 1 cubit ~ 19.3in ~ 1.5 - 1.75 ft. Hopefully she didn't make a mistake in the math there, she's really used to having a calculator for this part.

Okay, so a minimum area of ten or so square feet. That's actually a lot smaller than she was expecting! Does the spell run at exactly minimum cost require the sheet of metaphorical purple plywood to be all in one piece? Any particular shape? Can she move it after it's been created?

According to the journal, she can make stationary, permanent, immovable, rectangular, contiguous, transparent panels in any orientation and size she pleases. It doesn't say anything about how thick they are, but probably if they were literally two dimensional the journal would mention being careful of the edges, and it does not. The panels can be gotten rid of with another spell for negligible amethyst cost, or with sufficient amounts of brute force.

But they are strong enough to, for example, hold the author of the journal's full weight as they jump up and down. The author mentions in passing, but does not describe the exact composition of, a spell that launches one into the air and then places a panel to land on, in order to ascend vertically.

Okay! Immovable, rectangular, and contiguous are all limitations, but it could certainly be worse. And it's good to know that if she accidentally misplaces one, she can get rid of it. 

She's thinking of building a one-room dwelling, with a very slightly peaked roof for both rain and ventilation. She can't make a door out of immovable panels, so maybe a little bit of a squiggle entryway so she doesn't have a complete gap anywhere? She was initially going to put the house high enough in the air to deter monsters that way, but with those restrictions she can't easily make a staircase or ladder.

The fire pit is for sure going outside, so heat is going to be an issue, and that means a smaller dwelling is a better idea. Unfortunately. But she still needs it big enough to fit herself and her stuff (as she accumulates stuff). 

So ... two "natural units" wide by three long and two high, with an entrance hall and cistern extending the length by another natural unit. And the entry can wrap around the corner to offer more protection, but she'll mostly be dependent on the light-source spell variant to discourage monsters from walking in the door.

She can put her bed against the back wall. That gives her 60sqft of floor space in her room and another 30 in her entryway - certainly a microstudio by any measure. But she thinks it's probably the right trade-off, here, if she finds a huge source of amethyst (or finds that she doesn't ongoingly need her initial seed fund) she can expand the house in a couple of months. And if she doesn't -- she'll be glad to have saved the dust for more important things.

Besides, she doesn't know enough about the seasons here and she might have to rebuild in a few months just from that.

First things first, she's going to have to clear an area for her house, generously large compared to what she actually needs, next to the river and not far from the ocean. 

This open scrubland doesn't have too many trees and bushes for that, does it? She's going to harvest and uproot any grain growing in that area.

No, there's plenty of space between the trees. She can clear an area big enough for her house and then some just by finding a good spot and pulling up grass. In the process she turns up some more wild wheat, and also a tiny root vegetable — maybe a beet, based on color?

She sets aside the grass: she has plans for it for later. 

Olivia eats the wheat and the beet (mmm, sweet!) and thinks over her plans some more. Because, honestly, as much as only building the bare minimum appeals, she really won't feel safe relying on just the light spell as monster (bug) repellant. 

The problem is, any obstacle that Olivia can traverse easily (she will be entering and leaving her house several times a day, sometimes carrying heavy or unwieldy objects) she thinks the monsters can too. And the magic building material is fixed in place; she cannot make anything temporary or moveable with it.

Nor can she rig up a bearbox away from her main living area, because the thing the monsters are after isn't food, it's herself. (Shudder.)

While she thinks, she fiddles with the grass. 

If she takes a few of the longest and sturdiest strands, and tries variously laying them side by side, end by end, gently twisting or braiding or knotting them together: can she get them to "craft" into something from the twine or rope genre?

... no, that doesn't seem to be a thing. Maybe the individual blades of grass are just really hard to arrange in the right pattern by accident?

If she knows traditional rope-making techniques she might be able to make twine or rope by hand, but not just by putting grass blades near each other.

There are the sheep that she saw a while ago; she might have more luck with wool?

Mmmpf.

Yes, that's reasonable, and she can spare an hour to go track down one of the sheep. The animals here have been very unafraid so far, but Olivia is still only planning to run her hands through the wool and harvest loose hairs, and she will back away at any sign the sheep is feeling uncomfortable or crowded.

The sheep, which are the same size as the cows were, baaaaaaah at her peacefully. They don't seem to have any particular objection to letting her card their coats. They do sniff around her pockets in case she has something interesting in there.

Eventually she can have a big clump of miscellaneous, dirty wool fiber. Also, incredibly moisturized hands, because lanolin is great for the skin.

Her hands could really use it! She hasn't been dwelling on it, but she has been subjecting them to a lot of underwater lately, between the shipwreck and the daily fishing. 

She'll gently rinse the fiber and pull out the larger flecks of dirt and bark, then see if she can pinch and twist it into a yarn single. If she does this on a flat surface, does it at some point magically "craft"?

No, this doesn't result in "crafting" either, unfortunately. On the other hand it's not that difficult to hand-spin wool; it's a noticeably clingy fiber.

Spin or felt; she expects she's going to be spending much of the next few weeks as an ad-hoc sort of shepherd, in order to gather enough wool for her cloth needs. 

One more experiment with "crafting" to try, before she gets back to work. If she gathers three sticks and three planks, laying them out as if to craft a magic staff but without the crystal, can she make a nonmagical staff? What if she replaced the crystal in the pattern with a similar sized rock from the riverbank?

The sticks, planks and stone hesitate for a long moment — almost long enough for her to declare a failure and move on — before shivering and merging together into a non-magical staff very similar to her magical one, except tipped with dull grey stone. There's a distant, source-less tinkling sound.

Jackpot!

These staffs are sturdy; with an easy way to make them Olivia expects to be able to construct (small, at least) moveable lattice doors and rafters and suchlike.

The message popping into her mind is more unexpected; did the crafting recipe section of the hex journal just get magically longer??

Nope!

There are exactly the same number of recipes as before.

Then where, and more importantly what, is her recipe book? 

She doesn't know about any such thing (and she no longer has so many possessions that she could have it without knowing). She would very much like to read her recipe book, universe?

Absent the unlikely event of the universe listening, Olivia has realized that she could put her house over the river, instead of land, and is contemplating the various merits of doing so. 

On the one hand, she hasn't explored the south side of the river at all, and is sure to want a bridge once she can. Building her entryway as a bridge would make both structures more amethyst efficient, and offers new angles for monster defense. On the other hand, there's always the risk of another tall-masted ship like the wreck coming through the river/canal, and if so she'd rather lose just a bridge than her house. How wide is the waterway here? And for that matter, how deep?

The water is about ten natural units across, at its widest, and perhaps five at its narrowest. There's one deep pool that is about twenty natural units deep, but the average bits of riverbed are only four or five natural units.

It looks like it would probably be a bit tricky to navigate a tall-masted ship through the river's twists and turns, but it could potentially be done.