Chapter 16: Home Woodflavored Home

The Hoodlum Gang was grounded by all of their respective parents when he and they returned.

While they did bring back a huge sword made of two splinters that had shattered together in the perfect shape to use as a blade, it was technically property of Sunnymeat, and so they had to return it.

It was either that, or they would need to build an entire stack of houses and collapse them to replace it through Breaking the wood Better enough to turn it into Splinter, the material the foundations were made of.

Peering up at the village’s towering architecture, which must have been easily over a hundred feet tall, he could see why the others decided to simply accept being grounded, instead of constructing a seven-story building and demolishing it by themselves.

As for him, he had other plans. He had a massive sapling, the loggers helped him carry it back, and they promised to place it near his rathole den for his own personal use.

The intent was clear. They wanted him to build not just a hole in the wall, but a home.

He asked about the building’s owner, who might have wanted some say in it, but the general consensus seemed to be ‘screw them’.

He remembered this was a world where your bathroom only stayed standing until the local cabbage merchant decided his morning commute wasn’t fast enough.

The sanctity of Property Rights were played a bit fast and loose here, and the gentlemen’s agreement of “You can break mine if I can break yours” was upheld by the community’s willingness to come together for hasty repairs, and, occasionally, reparations.

Regardless, Rhett felt a bubbling of pride. He had made a whole tiny tree fall down, and now, he was going to figure out a way to shittily graft it to a hole he chewed in someone’s house, now that the village was mostly safe to re-enter.

Logging continued, however. He heard as he left that the tree felling had a goal beyond raw materials, and, in truth, it wasn’t fully worthwhile. In truth, they were trying to cut down trees to clear a path to one of the spots where Bigpig had stepped.

By managing its actions with Orcish efforts, the destruction left behind was apparently exquisitely valuable, and would be used in the village’s most vital constructions.

He kept these strange thoughts in mind, as he made his way through the slowly familiarizing streets.

He waved to the people who waved at him, made faces at the children who pointed and stared.

…Made rude gestures at the teenagers who pointed and stared.

And soon, all too soon, he was there, standing in front of a hole in the wall, with a leather glove full of stale bread and a towel shoved into it.

To the side, his felled sapling was set down where he could easily access it, all thin branches and green leaves.

Rhett cracked his neck.

“Let’s do this. I’ve played Fabricave, I can build a house, no problem,” he concluded quickly. Though, it would be a bit awkward, constructing houses without the familiar wood pyramids to craft with…

’First, however…’ Rhett thought to himself, seeing the dirt scattered everywhere.

He pulled his cleaning rag out, wanting to try something that that one Elf told him about.

He just had to do a Trick, right?

With a clumsy twisting motion, Rhett snapped the rag at the ground, and his eyes boggled as the Cotton Rag’s Anima Maxim triggered.

The rag leapt out of his hand as he snapped it at the dust, and with a sudden vitality, began wiping up the dirt on its own.

It was plant-fiber cloth, so somehow… [Further Plants] had turned into… Animating the rag? Or maybe it wasn’t actually made of plants?

‘I’ll have to ask Cop later,’ he thought to himself. As he did, however, he noticed something unusual.

His grin turned malevolent when he realized the rag was still benefiting from his Chrome-coated Apron’s [Clean] powers… The rag was practically erasing the dirt, somehow still counting as something on his person, despite that.

“Hell yeah!” he beamed, plopping down on the lip of his entrance, crossing his legs and reclining as his rag did the cleaning for him!

A moment later, he barked in alarm as the Cantrip ended, the rag leaping back at him, trying and failing to return to the hands behind his head.

“Mnph!?” he exclaimed through a face-full of rag.

–

After defeating Devil Beast R.A.G, Rhett took a nap, scratched himself in places, enjoyed the fact that he was still clean thanks to a magic apron, and considered the vast treasure trove of raw material he had access to.

He remembered a few little tidbits that would maybe help him out here.

Stripping the leaves from the sapling, Rhett began by crafting the most ghetto Adam-And-Eve ghillie suit he could manage, binding leaves together by their stems and switching to his normal Pigstone hat, so he could [Eschew Pigpins] to bind them together.

The curly stone needles, probably meant for hair, were still quite good at letting him attach the oversized leaves to one another, by screwing the corkscrews through multiple of them like a weird stitch.

He was no seamstress, but he didn’t need to be, for what he was making.

By the end of it, his job was complete, and before him sat a large flat blanket of leaves and little rock needles, with a big hole in the middle. A poncho of truly Druidic proportions.

Donning it, Rhett immediately noticed that it didn’t get cleaner when he wore it, but it did begin growing phenomenally quickly. Somehow, his apron had lost its power.

Earlier, Cop had told him that a Knight could do more powerful things with clothing, by wearing all the same thing, and she implied that the more of one thing you wore, the more powerful the effect.

The fact that the Poncho of Growies was quickly knitting itself together into something that actually looked halfway decent seemed to indicate he was on the right track.

He also discovered that his pouch no longer let him [Eschew Pig Plates], and his leather boots no longer gave him a [Barrier].

As an aside, Rhett decided to start emphasizing some of the things in his internal monologue, to make the magic feel cooler.

Shaking his head, he returned to the self-examination at hand.

No free cleaning. No free plates. The Poncho of Growies had disabled them. Removing it returned the power to him shortly, and donning it again once more left him powerless.

He hummed, and took off his apron, before wearing it over his poncho.

Sure enough, the leafy mantle quickly shone with a nice little polish, the dirt on it vanished by chrome power.

“So Rangers and Knights only care about what they’re wearing on the outside…” he thought aloud.

He recalled the elf with the tools everywhere. “And Rogues and Magicians need tools that aren’t exposed, so they can build up a charge.”

He was just guessing, but whatever True Mana was, it seemed to be used up immediately on the outside, but built up on the inside.

He knew he’d have to experiment with this more, but for right now, he was a mouse (rat) on a mission.

Taking off his apron, and replacing his Pigrock Hat with one made out of more leaves, Rhett now looked the part of a fancy forest druid, his clothes actively growing and misting with little green sparkles when he moved.

Every single thing he wore was Leaves and Pigrock pins, and with some experimentation, he figured out the power, or rather, powers, of this new outfit.

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He was delighted when his first theory was right. He could take two little pieces of wood, and with some coaxing and shoving, thin roots spread out from both of the sticks, until they were glued together like a single branch.

The Poncho-hat combo, taken together, gave him so much [Further Plants] that it spread out into the world around him. Not only would his clothes mend, but other things as well.

Most of the delight came from the fact that he had managed to predict a power, instead of bumbling around blindly, and nodding vacantly at whatever random crap he ended up obtaining from these clothing bits.

It felt like progress. Like he was touching on something he could do that he wasn’t a horrible failure at.

The thought stuck in his mind until he banished it with well-practiced ease.

Several other effects of his new outfit were a bit more mystifying, and more than enough to distract him.

Firstly, little shoots of green growth were popping up wherever he walked, as if he were some kind of dog-goddess of the sun. Everywhere he walked and touched, he had a chance of sprouting some little plants.

Secondly, on a whim, he fumbled around under the mantle, needing something to test, and his hand returned with…

A giant leaf.

“...I don’t know what I was expecting,” he muttered. The Pigrock pins holding the leaves together had indeed given the cloak the power to conjure things, and this was the result of that.

Examining the leaf, he realized that it wasn’t quite the kind of giant leaf you’d pluck off an oversized tree. Rather, it had a hefty looking seed dangling from the bottom. Unlike the pignuts from his leaf-padded hat, this actually looked to be made of plant matter.

Nibbling at it, he realized it was actually edible. Not very tasty, but edible. It tasted a bit like raw lard, and something not unlike cilantro.

“Huh.”

While this wasn’t nearly enough to feed one of the tallfolk, his oversized-for-a-rat mana pool, and small size, meant that the little seed (and a few more for good measure) could probably keep him fed if he was in an emergency.

There was something deeply amusing by this fact.

“Dress for the job you want. So if I want to be a hermit living in the woods, I should just wear leaves and rocks,” he giggled.

Setting the Leaf Seed aside, he continued his examining. There was one final thing that was nagging at him, that he could notice through cursory examination.

He wasn’t sure if this was a power, but wearing the full outfit, Rhett also noticed how… Heavy he felt. Like something was missing. Something more than a little important, considering he now felt a lot more… normal.

He realized for the first time since coming here that he was taking something for granted in this new world. A body that didn’t tire. Not really.

As a Rat, he enjoyed a comfortable loftiness and ease of movement that was limited only by his lack of experience and hand-eye-coordination. Some of that was still there, but under the Poncho of Growies, his body felt much heavier, and slower.

He quickly shed the cloak, worried he might have been draining something important, or perhaps overdrawing his pool of Mana, but that worry faded as he quickly felt some of the weight lift, the moment he was free of the all-covering cloak.

“Question is, is it the leaves that are weighing me down, or is it the lack of something else?” he wondered.

He went full fashion, swapping out bits and pieces of clothing, hats in different places, trying to figure out which ones made him feel lighter or heavier.

Finally, he figured it out. The less he wore, the lighter he felt. Stripping down to nothing, he realized just how much lighter his entire body felt. Thankfully, he also realized that underwear didn’t seem to impact it at all.

He scowled. “Oh for fuck’s sake, is it because it’s ‘underwear’, and not ‘outerwear’?” he realized, upon discovering that keeping his modesty covered counted as a free slot for Passives.

He tried hard not to think about the fact that an underpinning of reality here might be puns, and turned his attention to the only thing remaining that could have been causing this.

Pinching a bit of fur on his arm, he watched it drift down like it was on the moon.

“Was I this light when I first came here?” he wondered. He found it hard to remember. His first days were a bit of a blur of panic, napping, and running around.

A lot of running around.

He hated running.

“...Huh,” he realized.

He decided he would keep Conan the Ratbarian in reserve as an emergency outfit. He hadn’t trained his shamelessness enough to maintain such a powerful, barechested form yet.

He had another thought. If there was some kind of magical handicap that said “Okay, you don’t have to dangle anything to get your magic powers”, did that apply to all ‘necessary’ garments?

Would whatever rules of the world that existed care if, for example, he was wearing something else, that was meant to be taken for granted?

He had an idea.

Taking one of his Slime Cores (He refused to call them kidney stones), he made sure it was absolutely clean, before carefully, very carefully, using his teeth to fashion the “eyes” of the Juicebox Gelly into something new.

His original idea was to try and carve the cores into a pair of empty frames, but when his teeth encountered a hard, glassy substance under the layer of calcium, one that refused to bend to the will of his teeth, his stomach dropped as a curious thought caught his attention.

“There is no way,” he muttered.

He chewed until the calcium cracked away, falling off like eggshells.

In its place, he saw a dull, glassy-blue material. A glassy material made out of, if Doctor Frenzy was right, carbon.

Rhett thought about the best way to test his theory.

He started smacking it into the floor over and over, and when it didn’t break or chip, concluded it must have been something at least in the ballpark of a diamond.

He never claimed to be very smart.

“Okay, so no slime lenses. Maybe if I…”

He rummaged around for a spool of copper wire, generously gifted by Cop.

Pulling some of it out, he used his teeth to snip off a length, twisting and bending it into a pair of frames.

Putting both of the Slime Cores into the wire frames, he put them on his snout, and waited.

Unfortunately, he felt the little twitch of pressure, confirming that glasses obscured some of his Fur Passive.

“So either it’s just underwear, or you have to actually need glasses, for them to be a free ‘slot’,” he muttered, the comically bulbous spectacles giving him an inverted view of the room.

Their Passive was neat, however. He felt some aches and pains fade, and after some pinching, prodding, and finally, a single experimental cut on his forearm, he managed to figure out that diamond, or whatever this material was, helped him heal faster.

Copper, of course, seemed to also have an effect. This one he knew about, however. It was extremely subtle, but Rhett had quickly learned that Time, either here, or just in general, wasn’t perfectly smooth. Tiny, undetectable hiccups that he never would have noticed in his day to day felt smoothed over.

On some level, copper seemed to either protect him from time, or empower him with it. It was too subtle for him to tell, even when he tried covering himself in copper foil at her shop.

As he peered through the glasses, trying to see if he got any cool vision powers through them, he realized what he was doing in the middle of an open street with a sapling waiting for processing.

“Crap, I keep getting distracted by cool magic clothes,” he shook his head frantically. “Focus Rhett! Fabricave! House!” he barked, glaring at his pile of clothes accusingly.

Quickly rearranging himself into the cloak, he stopped experimenting, and began building.

His teeth were his primary tool of choice, letting him gnaw and whittle down the sapling into small, but sturdy pieces.

Once he had stripped the plant down to raw materials, he began assembly. Around his hole, he began constructing a box. First, a framework of sticks went down, his Cloak’s Passive letting him [Greatly Further Plants] in order to grow the sticks together.

They would only grow where they had been damaged, but it was enough to get a foundation.

Next, he began chewing little holes in some of the sticks, using the holes as sticking points to glue them together with fresh growth, grafting branches together into one thin wall, then another, and another.

Finally, he started the arduous task of finishing. Something about the clean cut wood of everything else here made him not want to leave his house in the log-cabin stage, a kind of social pressure that made him feel uncomfortable with the idea of breaking the town’s consistent aesthetic.

For a moment, Rhett couldn’t help but twig onto that thought. “It is a bit weird that everyone here lives in the same kind of house… This world is so crazy, and there’s so much crazy stuff in it… Where’s the brickwork? The sheet metal?” he mused.

Ultimately, he guessed it was just civil momentum. A kind of Memetic HOA that infested the mind… infested the soul…

“...Meh, I mean, it looks nice. I’d like my home to look nice,” he admitted. Under normal circumstances, the problem with that was how difficult it felt to get any progress. Here, in this body, however, progress came quickly.

So once more, his teeth went to work, chewing off bark and piling it off to the side for later.

The end result looked pretty-awful, in the sense that it was both pretty and awful.

An upper deck on the ‘roof’ caught the errant sunbeam that graced his bed most of the day, complete with a tiny bench up there, in case he had a psychotic break and decided to sunbathe.

A small porch out front for himself led into the tiny mousehole, and for the sake of the tallfolk, he made sure that his front wall was also a primitive door, letting it hinge out so people could access the inside fully.

They’d have to bring their own chairs, but at least he could entertain guests in his dollhouse this way.

The second floor, which was mostly added to make sure it was as tall as a person for guest-entertainment, was empty for now, but he had vague plans to pack it with outfits, trinkets, and garbage. To that end, he made sure little crossways sticks lined the room from wall to wall.

To access it, Rhett simply planted a little staircase, lining it with bark for grip, and including little handrails that he didn’t need. He didn’t want to find out how murdery the hypothetical Paladins of OSHA were. Or would that be Knights, if they worked for the government?

He shook his head. He had a hyperfixation right now, and hypothetical safety-killers were not a part of it.

The remainder of the bark was chopped and glued together into little rat-sized furniture. A bed-frame that took up half the first floor, (naturally), a bunch of shelves for knickknacks, a table and chair.

All rough, all druid-looking in the way they seemed to come to life with fresh greenery and woven roots.

He finally concluded that it was… Kind of cozy.

It was also dark as sin, owing to the utter lack of windows. All he needed was some artificial light, and it would be just like home.

As he continued fortifying and improving his rathole into a rathome, he very distinctly did not feel the smug vindication of a God of War.