Rinse and Repeat

I awoke to the sound of someone knocking on the door, I must have fallen asleep while working last night because I was barely sitting in one of the chairs I had made. When I opened the door I was blinded by the sunlight, it was already late in the morning. The group before me was still composed of the wrinkled faces of elders, but this time I could see that only a few of them had visited before and the rest were all new. I knew right away that most of my day would be spent showing them what I had made and what could be done with it and discussing what I knew of myself and the technology. They would try to persuade me to give them the technology and I would explain to them why I felt I could not do that. Eventually I might be able to get to work again, but probably not with enough time to try my latest improvements to the tools.

When they had all left I still had some daylight, at least a couple hours I figured. I had been trying to work out how to prevent the ground from sinking after mining up the resources and had implemented the bits and pieces that would be necessary to rework the junk ores from the resource I was actually extracting without first pulling it up. If anyone ever found the cavern it would leave behind they would probably wonder how nature could produce such strange supports our of such a brittle material. I wanted to try it out, but I knew I would need an area farther from the house and I would not have time to make that trip, so I opted instead to gather a few natural materials to make some better lighting for the house.

The noises of creatures trying to get in did not occur again this evening, instead I was left with only the noise produced from my work. I spent hours creating digital blueprints in the device, not having the materials to actually produce the results. I also did my best to simulate how it would work when it was done, though the device could only show me so many outcomes, the real test would come when I could produce this technology. The greatest thing to try was going to be to make a much more sophisticated refiner, one that would hold quite a bit more materials without gaining a lot of weight. The materials required were not all known yet, so there would be some time spent mining, which would also end up producing new tools. My plan was to get out of the house at first light and hopefully avoid the visitors I was sure to have again if I missed my window of opportunity. As the first of my lights began to fade I realized how late it was getting and quickly put everything away, jotted down some notes and got some much needed sleep.