Demesne

Lori thought having to build more houses would be irritating. Thankfully, the heat wasn't that much of a problem. Her demesne wasn't large enough for her to manipulate clouds unless the clouds were really low, but she had more than enough to control the wind, and she'd been having a nice breeze blowing for her as soon as she'd had to step out of her Dungeon.

Wearing her hat to prevent overheating, she started the building project. She'd managed to produce a surplus of stone from her excavating, and from the calculations she'd made she just barely had enough to make at least the new housing, and the rest of the excavation would let her build the bath house. The first thing she had to do was to move the excavated stone up to the building site. She had to do it in batches, since she wasn't sure she could control the whole mass well enough that it wouldn't start to slip on the packed dirt paths they used as main roads, though she was able to move incrementally larger batches as she made more trips back and forth.

It took her most of the morning to drag a sufficient amount of stone to the site that she felt she could get started laying down a foundation properly after lunch. The place was full of holes from all the tree stumps that had been dug out and chopped up for firewood, so she had to fix that first. Then she could pack down the earth and lay down the foundation for the rest of the building…

Should she put in fixtures for internal plumbing? No, that would just be too complicated. And she didn't want to have to maintain a sewer system on top of everything else.

Thankfully, Rian didn't bring up any issues during lunch—either there weren't any or he'd thought it wasn't the time—as she spent it looking at the plank with the proposal drawing and muttering to herself about dimensions. Most would be sleeping on the floor at night, since beds were less of a priority and everyone had bed rolls, but that meant having enough free floor space for a family of ten to sleep on the ground…

Rian had to prompt her to eat three times, then had to ask for his plank back, since he was still using it for notes.

After lunch, Lori got to work. She bound light wisps and placed them over the sticks marking the boundary so she could remove the sticks and start compacting and leveling the soil, leveling out out the variances of elevation. The whole site was on a slight incline, but nothing she couldn't deal with. She'd have to level the floors of each segment individually once the internal walls were up, but that was simpler than trying to get everything perfectly flat.

She finished putting down only a quarter of the stone foundation by the time late afternoon rolled around and she had to stop because it was dark and she was feeling sweaty. It wasn't leveled, compacted or otherwise rendered structurally sound, with no bubbles, just laid down. She'd have to pack it down properly tomorrow…

"How's the house-building coming along?" Rian ask as she lay face-down on the table.

Lori groaned in response.

"You're being dramatic," Rian said, the heartless abomination. "You've done this before, it can't be any worse than a–" he let out a softer groan.

She managed to find it in her to raise her head and glare at him.

"See, you're feeling better already," Rian said cheerfully.

"Get the food or I'm going to kick you," she warned.

"And there we have the violence inherent in the system," Rian said with a nod as he got up. "Relax, the workday is done. You have the rest of the night to sleep or whatever it is you do all alone in your room with no one to hear."

That didn't make Lori feel better. She wasn't looking forward to another fruitless night trying to work out how to do even the basics of Deadspeaking, Mentalism or Horotracting. The bare summaries she remembered from her old books were being very unhelpful in aiding her attempts to access the other forms of magic.

The thought was all immensely frustrating.

Not for the first time, she wished her two corpses had left some kind of texts she could use, but like her, they had no reference books on them. Any books they'd had likely hadn't survived the crossing over the ocean.

She tiredly picked one of the bowls, and started to eat. For a moment, there was nothing but her chewing and the noise of everyone else eating as well.

"Was the day really that bad?" Rian asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Lori said, putting another spoonful into her mouth.

"Hmm…" Rian 'hmm'-ed. "Well, if you're sure."

"Yes, I'm sure," Lori said tersely.

"You don't have another hole in your sock or something, do you?" Rian said.

"If I did, I'll let you know," she said. "Can I eat now?"

Rian sighed for some reason. "Yeah, sorry for keeping you."

They ate in silence again.

"Thank you," Rian said as Lori was finishing her bowl.

She gave him another look. That was strange thing to say, even for him. "For what?"

"For everything. The hot water. The lights. The ice. The shelter," Rian said. "Just… thank you."

"All right…?" she said. She pushed the bowl towards him. "I'm going to sleep. If anyone starts playing music, flog them."

"Yes, your Bindership," he said, taking her bowl to bring it back to be washed.

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When Lori woke up the next day, she was feeling much better. Still irritated, but better. Breakfast was stew and happyfruit, which she had to peel herself. Rian, color him, peeled off the outer skin as if he'd been eating it his whole life and ate the flesh inside almost daintily. She made such a mess of it she had to go back to her rooms to wash off all the juice.

When she got back to the building site, she was finally able to pack down the floors properly, even digging a few holes and sinking a few stone columns to anchor the foundation in case rain softened the dirt below. It shouldn't—she'd packed it hard—but a Whisperer knew better than anyone how insidiously destructive water could be. They'd studied it in class, after all.

Lori had to wonder how many of the nameless unimportant nobodies she'd shared that class with had ever needed to use that knowledge.

She finished laying out the foundation that day, all six paces by forty, compressed so tight it was almost part of the ground. It was all between the marks where the sticks had been, anyway, and she used her stone-shaping tool to keep the edges more or less straight.

…

She was going to need to spend tomorrow morning checking the measurements, wasn't she? Ugh.

Still, it was with some relief that she sat down for dinner, more satisfied after a good day's work that was actually done properly, even if it was incomplete.

"You're looking better," Rian noted.

"What are you talking about?" she said, leisurely eating her dinner.

"Yesterday you threatened to kick me," Rian said.

Had she? "You probably deserved it at the time," she said.

"If you say so," he said. "So, while they're waiting for a house to build a roof on, some of the former militia and the hunters want to go into the Iridescence to hunt beasts. We've been catching less and less with the baiting towers, and it seems the beasts have caught on to that."

She blinked in shock. "Is that safe?"

"Probably not, but they all say they've done it before," Rian said. "And quite frankly it's a much more proactive approach then leaving someone high up and hoping something tries to eat him. We need the meat. And the leather. And the bones. And the teeth. And the claws. And we need to get it now before the beasts migrate for the winter."

"They do what for the winter?" Lori blinked.

"Migrate. Move to warmer climes," Rian said. "I mean, they'll hardly be able to survive the winter cold, right? So they'll probably go somewhere else. The same for the seels, actually. We might have to see about trapping some and growing them in the Dungeon so we'll have fresh meat for the winter." At her look, he shrugged. "How do you think they survived outside of a demesne in winter?"

"I never thought about it," Lori shrugged.

"Well, we'll have to, that's our primary source of meat we're talking about," Rian said.

Lori sighed. "It's one thing after another."

Rian shrugged. "It's living. Would you rather be back in the old continent, living in some apartment the size of this table, doing… whatever jobs there are for wizards when they get out of school, balancing your pay, your taxes, your rent and your food money?"

Lori stared at him. Then she looked around at her Dungeon.

"You make an excellent point," she said. "Fine, they may go, but tell them that they are to prioritize conserving irreplaceable resources, like metal and rope."

"And their lives?" Rian said.

"I suppose, but only after they make sure they don't lose any metal."

"I'll find a better way to phrase that," Rian said, though he chuckled for some reason. "So, how long do you think it'll take you to finish the walls of the houses?"

Lori made a contemplative sound. "A week? Perhaps less, if I fall into a rhythm. The most time consuming will be making the doors and windows."

"Maybe we can get you assistance for that," Rian said thoughtfully. "Knock out the hole and have someone else evenly cut it all? We have stonemasons, after all. They can do it when they do the roof."

"I suppose…" Lori said. "But doing it that way might compromise the structure…"

"Well, tell me if you want me to set it up," Rian said. "I'm sure they'll be glad to have something to do."

"I'll remember," she said, going back to her stew. He did as well.

Lori finished her stew and reached into her pocket for a happyfruit that Karina had offered her earlier. Giving the fruit a determined look, she started trying to peel it. Carefully, she peeled the skin back to expose the juicy fruit and took a careful bite.

This time the juice didn't go everywhere.

"You realize I can just cut that up for you, right?" Rian said. "Most of us cut it up to eat it Lori. Only the children don't because they eat it near water so they can wash up."

She stopped and gave him a level, annoyed look. Then she took another bite. "Tomorrow. I'm enjoying this."

"You're just stubborn," he said, sounding amused.

"You eat it like this," she said.

"My knife was dirty and I was hungry," he said, shrugging.

Lori ignored him and focused eating her happyfruit. She would manage to eat this cleanly.

"Thank you," Rian said as Lori took another bite if the sweet, juicy, mushy happyfruit.

She chewed and swallowed. "For what?" she said absently as started to peel more of the fruit for the next bite.

"For everything. The hot water. The lights. The ice. The shelter," Rian said. "Thank you, Lori."

She frowned at him. "Didn't you say that already? I'm fairly sure you said that already."

"Yes," he said. "But you deserved to hear it more. Don't you think so?"

"You want to thank me, pay your taxes," Lori said.

"We don't have taxes. We don't even have money. We barely have a favor-based barter economy, mostly so people don't waste each other's time" Rian said. "The children are the ones pulling in raw resources often enough to actually be pretty rich, but they're good children who've all been taught to share, so they're basically giving it all away."

Lori opened her mouth.

"Do you really want to deal with all the paperwork having a tax scheme will cause right now?" Rian said.

Lori closed her mouth, and went back to focusing on her happyfruit. She took another bite.

Bliss.