Nothing like a predator's roar to light a fire under the ass of a lone, recently reborn, dimensional traveler. Ulric immediately went to the vivid flowers and took a broad leaf in his fingers feeling its waxy texture which was, thankfully, free of oil. He immediately rubbed this leaf vigorously on the inside of his left forearm and then repeated this with the leaves of each flowering shrub and herb he came across, mentally tabulating the time of contact and which plant had touched which spot in a centimeter by centimeter grid. He then repeated this task with the leaves of the flowers themselves on his left bicep. It'd be at least half an hour to be somewhat confident about the lack of sensitivity or potential contact toxins that could be detected before they caused a stroke or fatal arrythmia.
"Digitalis would be a nightmare." Ulric said to the clearing. He had started narrating his actions to nobody in particular as a way to relieve stress and to help his mind catalogue events. It was the first time he'd been anywhere so eerily quiet. Even walking a relatively under traveled track in a fairly remote region back on Earth there'd always been some sort of noise. A distant road, a running stream, crickets chirping, some fucking thing. Here, the forest stretched around him like a living tomb, celebrating the supremacy of the arboreal. It was the kind of silence which ate into the subconscious and chipped away at morale.
While he waited for the sensitivity test to yield results Ulric harvested a few meters of vine and found it wondrously pliable while also strong enough to withstand a good hard pull between his hands. He could break it with an effort but three or four loops and it would resist whatever he did using the strength of his upper body alone. Most of the next half hour consisted of Ulric pulling vines, skinning the leaves off of them, and then looping them around his arms to make a roughly meter diameter coil. All told he'd probably managed to gather a solid three hundred meters of viney cordage. Enough to get a solid shelter in place. Enough to secure a sharp rock to a pole/branch and improvise a spear. And enough to make a tripod over which he could hang items once he'd made a hook stick.
Inspecting the skin in the test regions found only one patch of irritation, a section where the forearm skin had formed a few distinct blisters and which matched the area on his biceps where he'd rubbed the flower of the same plant.
"Stay the hell away from the yellow ones with the red stripes. Got it." he said, as he brought his vine coils and a heaping armful of broad sturdy shrub leaves that had a shape and color similar to large magnolia leaves to the pocket of stone he was already starting to think of as camp.
Stirring the coals and putting another bundle of broken sticks onto the fire Ulric set about figuring out how he wanted to construct his shelter. Wishing he had a folding saw, he grabbed the longest, thickest branches he had and made a tripod out of sturdy poles about five meters long. Lashing them together he then spread the poles centered over his campfire and had a conical space about 2 meters high with a diameter of around 8 meters. There wouldn't be room to stand his 205cm height but it would far easier to heat a smaller space and take less materials which translated to less work and time.
Ulric hadn't eaten for somewhere close to five hours and the activity was starting to tell. He could feel the first twinges of hunger, but at least he didn't yet feel the more pronounced impacts of calorie debt such as heightened exhaustion or lightheadedness. Absent an immediate source of food, conserving calories would have to take precedence over an ideal shelter. The bed he'd make would be a simple affair of 4 crossed poles lashed and edge poles laid to make the side struts of the bed with shorter sticks stacked to make a stick bed with leaves stacked on top of it. Heated rocks could be placed underneath to add heat as he slept without risking a fire too big in the shelter.
An hour of lashing poles, weaving thin branches, and tossing piles of leaves had a somewhat closed in teepee with an open top where the base tripod had been vined together. The fire put out an even column of smoke which vented through the top as intended. He'd left an entry way facing the rock wall which would limit the access of any potential critters trying to get into the shelter to having to circle around and go up against the rock wall.
"Unless they're that monster I heard earlier which would probably tear through the walls like tinfoil and stuff me whole down its gullet. Not like that's worth worrying about anyway." a heavy dose of fatalism had entered his voice at that last. It was entirely possible that a behemoth could attack him, and tear him limb from limb with as little effort as peeling the legs off an ant.
Lurking giga predators aside, the shelter added an enormous degree of psychological comfort.
A quarter hour of striking stones found one with a favorable fracture which produced a hand long oblong shape with razored edges that would serve as a spear tip. Some fire hardening of the slightly too long walking stick he'd been using to slap brushes and check for animals and quick work with more vines saw Ulric armed with a fairly respectable spear.
As this work progressed the light had shifted from a warm golden towards an orange that suggested the fall of the sun towards the horizon. Not that he'd seen the sun since he'd arrived. The canopy was far too thick for that and its angle wrong to see from this gully between the ridges of land. The only glimpse he'd even had of blue sky had occurred from the top of that tallest ridge overlooking the escarpment some kilometers distant.
Major work completed, Ulric sat inside his teepee spear leaning next to his bed and set about attempting to make a kilt out of one of the particularly large sets of leaves off of a violet flowering sapling which reminded him of banana leaves. They were a touch fragile for what he wanted but if he ran a vine through a hole in their centers and layered them in rings he could make a skirt/kilt thing that would at least keep the wind off his bits and legs. Something similar could be done for his chest, a leaf poncho type of thing. It was patient work, which he was good at. It was also boring enough that he destroyed dozens of leaves and had to start over twice from breaking his vine with a too ambitious pull.
Sighing he set the nearly complete skirt aside and put another few sticks on top of the fire. Then he went to the rock pool and drank his fill, relieving himself onto the fallen trunk on his way back to the leafy teepee. Back inside the smell of wood smoke, mellow and reminiscent of hickory, coupled with dim lighting had Ulric relaxing onto his improvised bed. Thoughts of a distant life left behind, of friends parted, of loves lost, and faint sense of mourning washed through Ulric's mind and he let sleep take him, accompanied by the gentle snaps and pops of a campfire.
Sleep was fitful and fleeting. Not helping was that every time he woke, Ulric experienced a variation of sweating heat, or shivering cold. The pseudo-fever was getting worse. He'd been able to mistake it for variations in temperature and effects due to the slightly cool breeze earlier. This last time though, with the only light having come from the remaining embers of the fire Ulric woke to violent shivers. He drug the unfinished leaf kilt on top of himself and stoked the fire to ride out the chill.
Misery. That's what you get from spending a whole night alternating between sweating into your leaf bed and freezing. By the time a dim light began to permeate the smoke vent of his teepee Ulric had begun to fear greatly that he was experiencing backlash from his exposure to whatever the hell mana was. His body had supposedly been built from the ground up to be in tune with it, but it wasn't like he'd been taught what that meant.
Can you be allergic to mana?
Nothing like a predator's roar to light a fire under the ass of a lone, recently reborn, dimensional traveler. Ulric immediately went to the vivid flowers and took a broad leaf in his fingers feeling its waxy texture which was, thankfully, free of oil. He immediately rubbed this leaf vigorously on the inside of his left forearm and then repeated this with the leaves of each flowering shrub and herb he came across, mentally tabulating the time of contact and which plant had touched which spot in a centimeter by centimeter grid. He then repeated this task with the leaves of the flowers themselves on his left bicep. It'd be at least half an hour to be somewhat confident about the lack of sensitivity or potential contact toxins that could be detected before they caused a stroke or fatal arrythmia.
"Digitalis would be a nightmare." Ulric said to the clearing. He had started narrating his actions to nobody in particular as a way to relieve stress and to help his mind catalogue events. It was the first time he'd been anywhere so eerily quiet. Even walking a relatively under traveled track in a fairly remote region back on Earth there'd always been some sort of noise. A distant road, a running stream, crickets chirping, some fucking thing. Here, the forest stretched around him like a living tomb, celebrating the supremacy of the arboreal. It was the kind of silence which ate into the subconscious and chipped away at morale.
While he waited for the sensitivity test to yield results Ulric harvested a few meters of vine and found it wondrously pliable while also strong enough to withstand a good hard pull between his hands. He could break it with an effort but three or four loops and it would resist whatever he did using the strength of his upper body alone. Most of the next half hour consisted of Ulric pulling vines, skinning the leaves off of them, and then looping them around his arms to make a roughly meter diameter coil. All told he'd probably managed to gather a solid three hundred meters of viney cordage. Enough to get a solid shelter in place. Enough to secure a sharp rock to a pole/branch and improvise a spear. And enough to make a tripod over which he could hang items once he'd made a hook stick.
Inspecting the skin in the test regions found only one patch of irritation, a section where the forearm skin had formed a few distinct blisters and which matched the area on his biceps where he'd rubbed the flower of the same plant.
"Stay the hell away from the yellow ones with the red stripes. Got it." he said, as he brought his vine coils and a heaping armful of broad sturdy shrub leaves that had a shape and color similar to large magnolia leaves to the pocket of stone he was already starting to think of as camp.
Stirring the coals and putting another bundle of broken sticks onto the fire Ulric set about figuring out how he wanted to construct his shelter. Wishing he had a folding saw, he grabbed the longest, thickest branches he had and made a tripod out of sturdy poles about five meters long. Lashing them together he then spread the poles centered over his campfire and had a conical space about 2 meters high with a diameter of around 8 meters. There wouldn't be room to stand his 205cm height but it would far easier to heat a smaller space and take less materials which translated to less work and time.
Ulric hadn't eaten for somewhere close to five hours and the activity was starting to tell. He could feel the first twinges of hunger, but at least he didn't yet feel the more pronounced impacts of calorie debt such as heightened exhaustion or lightheadedness. Absent an immediate source of food, conserving calories would have to take precedence over an ideal shelter. The bed he'd make would be a simple affair of 4 crossed poles lashed and edge poles laid to make the side struts of the bed with shorter sticks stacked to make a stick bed with leaves stacked on top of it. Heated rocks could be placed underneath to add heat as he slept without risking a fire too big in the shelter.
An hour of lashing poles, weaving thin branches, and tossing piles of leaves had a somewhat closed in teepee with an open top where the base tripod had been vined together. The fire put out an even column of smoke which vented through the top as intended. He'd left an entry way facing the rock wall which would limit the access of any potential critters trying to get into the shelter to having to circle around and go up against the rock wall.
"Unless they're that monster I heard earlier which would probably tear through the walls like tinfoil and stuff me whole down its gullet. Not like that's worth worrying about anyway." a heavy dose of fatalism had entered his voice at that last. It was entirely possible that a behemoth could attack him, and tear him limb from limb with as little effort as peeling the legs off an ant.
Lurking giga predators aside, the shelter added an enormous degree of psychological comfort.
A quarter hour of striking stones found one with a favorable fracture which produced a hand long oblong shape with razored edges that would serve as a spear tip. Some fire hardening of the slightly too long walking stick he'd been using to slap brushes and check for animals and quick work with more vines saw Ulric armed with a fairly respectable spear.
As this work progressed the light had shifted from a warm golden towards an orange that suggested the fall of the sun towards the horizon. Not that he'd seen the sun since he'd arrived. The canopy was far too thick for that and its angle wrong to see from this gully between the ridges of land. The only glimpse he'd even had of blue sky had occurred from the top of that tallest ridge overlooking the escarpment some kilometers distant.
Major work completed, Ulric sat inside his teepee spear leaning next to his bed and set about attempting to make a kilt out of one of the particularly large sets of leaves off of a violet flowering sapling which reminded him of banana leaves. They were a touch fragile for what he wanted but if he ran a vine through a hole in their centers and layered them in rings he could make a skirt/kilt thing that would at least keep the wind off his bits and legs. Something similar could be done for his chest, a leaf poncho type of thing. It was patient work, which he was good at. It was also boring enough that he destroyed dozens of leaves and had to start over twice from breaking his vine with a too ambitious pull.
Sighing he set the nearly complete skirt aside and put another few sticks on top of the fire. Then he went to the rock pool and drank his fill, relieving himself onto the fallen trunk on his way back to the leafy teepee. Back inside the smell of wood smoke, mellow and reminiscent of hickory, coupled with dim lighting had Ulric relaxing onto his improvised bed. Thoughts of a distant life left behind, of friends parted, of loves lost, and faint sense of mourning washed through Ulric's mind and he let sleep take him, accompanied by the gentle snaps and pops of a campfire.
Sleep was fitful and fleeting. Not helping was that every time he woke, Ulric experienced a variation of sweating heat, or shivering cold. The pseudo-fever was getting worse. He'd been able to mistake it for variations in temperature and effects due to the slightly cool breeze earlier. This last time though, with the only light having come from the remaining embers of the fire Ulric woke to violent shivers. He drug the unfinished leaf kilt on top of himself and stoked the fire to ride out the chill.
Misery. That's what you get from spending a whole night alternating between sweating into your leaf bed and freezing. By the time a dim light began to permeate the smoke vent of his teepee Ulric had begun to fear greatly that he was experiencing backlash from his exposure to whatever the hell mana was. His body had supposedly been built from the ground up to be in tune with it, but it wasn't like he'd been taught what that meant.
Can you be allergic to mana?
