Chapter 587: Hammers, Nails, and Shovels

Everywoman: You’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything. From sewing like a tailor to enchanting fields, from studying biomancy to being a Ranger, from chopping down trees to telling stories, from meditating as a monk to running missives as a courier, growing gardens and tilling fields, working as a carpenter and casting spells as a wizard, healing people and fighting monsters, you’ve touched upon a thousand professions. Now go forth, and touch ten thousand more. Improved abilities per level. -16,376 mana regeneration.

[Everywoman] was the closest thing to an omni-skill I’d ever seen, and I had to wonder if [The Elaine] had been a prerequisite for it. It was like a merged skill of every professional general skill that existed, like my long-gone [Medicine]. It helped me with almost literally everything, a subtle nudge to nearly every activity.

Nearly everything could be a job, in the end. [Couriers] ran, [Heralds] talked, [Porters] carried things, [Tasters] checked for poison, and [Courtesans] -

Well, they made Iona a very happy woman.

Time went by. I brought back the logs, and as a community, we de-barked them and prepared them, and Skye figured out the optimal distribution. Naturally, nobody was happy about the distribution, but there wasn’t a happy solution anywhere. We all spent a day in a flurry of hammers, nails, and saws, taking the logs and building what would eventually become a guard’s barracks, but for now was more like a large communal living space. Iona, Auri, and I probably could’ve done it by ourselves in a fraction of the time, but I was coming around more and more to the idea that as a powerful Immortal and Classer, I shouldn’t be doing everything for everyone. What was the point? Some places, some cultures, made it work - most notably the necrocracy of Penujuman, but that wasn’t for me.

We were out of the bunker at last, and everyone who wanted it had a spare, spartan room for their family. A number of our neighbors went back to their farmstead and discovered everything was still standing, shrugged, and continued on with their life. I didn’t blame them - but they were also outside of our protective aegis. A couple of canny groups decided to take over the now-spacious bunker, and Skye was also sticking around there - mostly to prevent shenanigans with our stored food. There was what I had stored in [Tower], so it wasn’t as critical, but nobody wanted a problem.

It was incredible. The moment things started to fall apart, it was all about food.

[The World Around Me] felt like a curse at times. Perfect knowledge combined with heightened senses let me fairly trivially know everything going on around me, no matter how much I didn’t want to know. I had to know how the seeds and the carrots were doing and check for any lurking threats or problems in the soil - or, goddess forbid, Vorler eggs - so it wasn’t a surprise to me when the first shoots pushed through the dirt, unfurling their leaves to a sun that only distantly shone on them.

I’d managed to keep a lid on it from Iona and Auri though, and the looks on their faces made it all worth it.

“We did it!” Iona dropped down to her knees, gently trying to half-cradle the delicate shoots. “They’re growing!”

“Brrpt! Brrrpt!” Auri was practically nuzzling the shoots, then straightened up. “Brpt!”

A flaming fence sprang up around our field, and the little phoenix fluttered up on top of it. She critically eyed her work, and the fence morphed.

I facepalmed and Iona started to laugh herself sick.

Auri had changed a standard fence to thin castle walls twenty feet high, complete with crenellations and regular guard towers. She used her [I am the Brrrettiest] clone skill to man the walls with dozens of guards, each one of them carefully ‘patrolling’ the top.

“You’re missing a portcullis.” I pointed out.

“Brpt.” Auri retorted. She was not missing one, nobody got in. Iona looked less than impressed.

“Alright then, have it your way.” She then promptly walked right through the wall of fire.

“BRRRPT!” Auri shrieked in outrage. How dare we simply circumvent her defenses!

“Good work [Castellan] Auri!” I decided to be a hair less offensive and simply [Teleported] through the wall. Dark mutterings came from above as Auri Plotted revenge.

“Don’t bother trying to hide something under my pillow. I can see it, remember?” I told her.

The mutterings grew darker, and Auri turned the burning castle walls black.

“I feel like a two bit villain in some play.” Iona said as we walked hand in hand over to the plot where we were going to build our house. It sucked that we were going to rebuild a cottage not where our house was, but the mountain wasn’t a good spot to grow carrots and be in the town. I occasionally darted over to one of the runestones I’d placed down, recharging them with a quick pulse of mana. Goddess, I already hated the chore.

“Does that make me the evil queen, or the kidnapped princess?” I mused.

“Sinister witch.” Iona promptly replied. “Need to get you a cauldron and herbs, you can stir all shifty-like. You betray me in the middle of the third act.”

“I’m too good looking to be the sinister witch.” I said. “I don’t think there are enough prosthetic warts in the world to stop me looking like this.” I let go of Iona’s hand and did a graceful twirl over the carrot field, making sure not to step on a single leaf.

Actually… I could step on a leaf, and not have it bend at all. Fuck, dexterity got weird at the higher numbers. I could also stomp down so hard that I drove my leg up to my knee in the dirt, all by a flex of will. Even with all my years, all my experience, the idea of the world being so ‘malleable’ to my will was odd. It wasn’t just what I did with my body that impacted things, it’s what I wanted to happen that impacted them. Dexterity, the poor, ignored step-child of the physical stats proved it was subtly one of the strongest ones once the numbers got high enough.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Now I was getting the urge to do some silly things. Maybe I’d try running on snowflakes this winter… it was shaping up to be a boring one.

We stopped by the little plot of land that was going to be our cabin. While I’d donated generously to the communal wood fund, I’d also kept a solid number of logs for our use, one of the few points that didn’t have everyone grumpy or unhappy with the distribution.

“Do we really want to annoy the person who made it all happen, and four Classers over level 1000?” Skye had very reasonably pointed out, and just like that, Iona and I were slated to build the first home.

I grabbed my crude drawing once again out of my [Library], unfurling it.

“Last chance, do we like this blueprint?” I asked Iona.

It wasn’t quite as simple as possible, mostly because shovels and physical stats let us add in a basement with minimal effort. Enchantments would keep it dry and the water out, which was the main issue with basements. A frankly excessive number of support beams would hopefully keep the whole thing from collapsing - neither of us were engineers. There was a lot of ‘I assume’ and ‘I think’ and ‘this should work’, combined with ‘let’s add a few inches to the floor’. We had four rooms on the main level. Two sleeping rooms - one for us, one for Titania - a kitchen, and a general living room. Auri was happy bouncing between the rafters, our bedroom, and the fireplace. Fenrir was going to continue living in the mountains, it was basically impossible to build a wyvern-house. An outhouse was planned for sanitation, and the eternal tension between ‘smell it in the summer’ fought with ‘got to walk to it in the winter’ made it difficult to decide the proper distance. I was resigned to smelling it no matter where it ended up, and I could cheat terribly with [Teleportation], and Iona was willing to defer to Titania. She didn’t want to smell the outhouse over breakfast, so away from the house it went!

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I do want a door to the basement.” Iona said. My face fell - the plan had been to use it as one gigantic storage room, and liberally apply [Teleportation] to the problem. She held up a hand.

“No, I’m completely convinced by your argument about interior vs exterior doors, along with stripping the need to access everything by a person. However, let’s throw in a trapdoor, say, here, then if you’re on a long trip I can still use [Telekinesis] to grab everything and sort it out. Plus, trapdoors are just plain cool.”

Iona’s last argument was her most persuasive. Titania had a skill to acquire whatever she needed - both she and Iona were quiet on exactly what it was - and the extra storage was only helpful for her.

I pointed to a different spot on the blueprint.

“The kitchen’s constantly going to have a lot of weight on it, and I’m reluctant to weaken the floorboards without knowing what I’m doing engineering-wise. This part of the living room, while well-traveled, shouldn’t get too much weight on it. It’s right over one of the current planned supports.”

She nodded.

“Works for me, alright. Let’s get going! Rockfoe, to me!”

Iona held out her hand and snapped her trusty, slightly dented shovel into it. She’d named it Rockfoe as a joke, and the joke had stuck. The shovel was totally going to end up legendary, however the System judged such a thing. She was going to forget about it in a decade or three, some kid was going to pick it up, and suddenly get offered a light green class for digging holes or something silly.

Auri was keeping a watchful eye on us from her fiery castle. Iona got to work, digging up massive clods and flinging them at the phoenix. Auri burned them up, leaving nothing but smoke behind. Easy removal… and I decided not to think about Auri simply burning the perfect hole for us, which would work better.

I popped into my [Tower] and got to work myself.

First was selecting a number of less-preferred logs, ones with gnarly knots or other imperfections, problems that could let in the rain, wind, and cold. I pulled the logs with me up to the 35th floor, where I simply [Teleported] them into the right configuration. Then I continued drifting up to the 40’s, where I’d stored eight floors of nothing but building materials.

I’d known about them in theory, and there was something practical about going out and gathering the supplies myself - sustainability and all that - but as I stared at the floors upon floors of stone, bricks, planks, nails, and more, I tried to find a better time, a better place to use them than here and now. Not just for us, but for all our neighbors.

With the supplies sitting there, staring at me in the face, all my objections and philosophy evaporated like a snowflake in an inferno. There was no reason to leave them here, there was no argument to letting people live in suboptimal conditions. The supplies were for people to rebuild after a war, and this was the exact situation I’d stored them for.

When I reframed the supplies I was looking at into ‘how many houses can we build’, eight floors packed tight no longer seemed like nearly enough. Dozens of poorly made houses versus several well done places, the decision wasn’t obvious. Probably a good time to remind everyone that democracy was a thing, and vote on which option we should use. Decisions for another hour, another day. I grabbed what I came here for - hinges and nails were a bear to make out of wood, and not nearly as good as the metal versions I’d stored - and stuck them into my bag, then floated back down to the 35th floor.

[The Rays of the First Dawn] let me turn a number of the logs into planks with minimal effort, and I got to feel [Everywoman]

at work for the first time. It didn’t help my hands be as steady as [Handy] had, yet I didn’t need that - I had more than enough dexterity in the first place. Instead, it ‘nudged’ me with barely-remembered knowledge about carpentry, helping me measure twice and cut once. It pointed out the ends of the log weren’t exactly the same length, and helped identify a nice section of wood that would work perfectly as a door. I’d saved a number of branches, and [Everywoman] helped me pick out a few that could act as bedsprings if I properly bent them and put tension on them just right. I debated making the bed super comfortable versus the odds of us breaking it, and decided we didn’t need a springy bed.

Everything sliced enough - we were leaving the walls as proper logs, all the better to store heat - I drifted down to the tool section, finding sandpaper and a can of varnish.

I pulled a face.

Past-past-me had stored enough varnish for one house - barely - but past-me had merrily used it for various projects inside of [Tower], leaving not enough to fully seal up all the wood.

Damn past-me. She used up half the varnish and ate all the mangos. I’d wish a pox on her, but either she’d heal it, or I’d have to deal with it. I was pretty sure I had a potion to… ahha!

I measured, I cut, I hammered in nails and generally worked my pretty ass off.

[*ding!* [Everywoman] leveled up! 500 -> 501]

I started off with the thick, heavy logs, half-dropping them on Iona’s head.

“Incoming!” I yelled, a terrified vision of the log crushing my wife’s skull briefly flashing through my mind.

“Got it!” She yelled, smoothly reaching up and catching it one-handed. The plot of land was now a hole, with corners perfectly squared off.

With a quick kiss I went back into my [Tower] and my impossible-to-disturb workshop, and kept going.

“Our home.” Iona beamed at our little cottage. Even with all our advantages, and me being able to [Teleport] things instantly into position, it had taken us all day to make the place.

… perhaps my standards were getting a little too high to complain over building a two-story house - basement one, main level two - in one day with two people. Iona’s mention of our home had a wave of sadness hit me, as I briefly grieved over our previous home.

We’d built a whole life for ourselves there. Decades upon decades of memories. Adventures and experiences, crazy dreams shared under warm blankets, stories told before a crackling fireplace. Iona reading me a story I’d never heard while I massaged her feet, the sound of crashing metal as we sparred. The smell of Auri’s baking filling the halls and the pitter-patter of Nina running on the tiles.

The home had been a member of the family in all but name, and the loss was hitting me unexpectedly hard. It wasn’t so easy to replace a home, and I found myself tearing up. Iona wiped one of the tears away.

“Hey,” She said softly. “It’s not the old home, it never will be. But it’s our home now. I love you.”

“I love you too.” I sniffed out.

“Want to carry me over the threshold this time?” She suggested. I laughed at the absurdity of the thought, my wonderful wife always knowing how to cheer me up. I swooped her up, then eyed the door.

“I dunno…” I teased. “I’ve never had to use a battering ram before…”

She laughed at my joke like it was truly funny, the sound of her thunderous raucous humor chasing away my stormclouds.

Then I hit the door with her head.