• Published 20th Oct 2020
  • 1,055 Views, 91 Comments

The Little Wooden God - Apophis797



You wake up in an unfamiliar place. It is a warm and cheerful place. It is a place filled with friends. Something feels empty. Something feels wrong.

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10. I Am Working.

No luck on a lumber merchant so far but I've managed to get okay at making little trinkets from crate lids. They don't *look* any good yet but I think I'm making pretty good progress. Currently I'm mostly making little people and, while I think they'll work as good as anything in the short term, getting good at them is key to my mid-term strategy. If rich assholes are the same in this world as in mine, and based on what I've seen they basically are, they'll go absolutely apeshit for charms and other "cultural artifacts" from weird places. A whole different dimension is a pretty weird place. Once I learn a little of the language (although I'll want to keep whatever a human accent is for this part) and make a little money I can make some stupid outfit, carve some people in other weird outfits, and make up a story of their power or importance to sell them for way too much. At this point I'm debating just taking characters from movies and tv shows but I think that might be a bit cruel.

In the meantime I've managed to make a whole three additional coins by selling my current little wooden men. I think all of my customers were pity-based, like a homeless man selling little bracelets instead of begging, but it's better than no customers at all. More importantly I think they're called <bits> so as soon as I figure out how to write that I can make a proper price sign. My current one is just a piece of scrap wood with a single coin shape on it and a loose outline of a person. I don't have paint yet but I made the outlines with a lot of little holes thanks to my hammer and a crate nail. I should get paint at some point. I need a lot of things now that I think about it. Running a business is hard, even when that business is you selling bits of wood on a blanket.

At least I managed to get some proper food for once. Some nice carrots from a stall selling little bunches for one coin each and a couple other vegetables. Still no word on where to buy meat though. It might be a bit of a specialty product in a world populated primarily by horses. I'm not desperate enough to go after the rats yet but I have considered it.

Moving forwards something I've been considering is opening some of the crates in the possibly abandoned warehouse I'm staying in. I can't read any of the labels but there are enough cobwebs that I know nobody's checked them in a while and they probably won't be missed. It'll take a while to get them open, most are pretty big and I'd be either hacking them open with my hatchet or pulling nails with my hammer, but there's a decent chance whatever's inside is at least usable for raw materials. If I go ahead with it, though, it'll probably be a much bigger crime than anything I've done so far. Certainly more severe than swiping a couple tools and some food. I'll have to think it over before I go ahead.

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Well, I ended up doing the crime. Not sure if it was worth it though. I spent some time looking around and there's a pretty wide variety of different crates and labels in here. Some look just like the normal shipping crates being moved outside but some are way bigger or smaller and I think I saw at least one or two scripts beyond the normal pony one. I decided to go with one of the more recent looking ones and, after quite a bit of work, found a statue. It's a very nice statue, carved from white marble and depicting what looked like a pony crossed with a bird, but it was just a statue. The body plan was almost identical to the pegasus ponies outside but it was covered in beautifully carved feathers and had claws and a beak, as well as an extremely ornate headdress filled with feathers totally unlike the ones which covered it. Not sure what use I'll have for it though. Maybe the warehouse is some rich pony's secret art collection or something. I'll have to crack another one open later to see. At least it was wrapped in cloth so I've got a whole bunch of white fabric available to use as material.

I'll put opening more of them off until I'm in a slightly better situation, every hour spent hacking open crates is an hour not spent whittling or exploring, so for now that just leaves the problem of supplies. The food situation is workable and most other things I want I would need to buy so I think my next priority is going to be heat. Winter's going to come eventually and, in the shorter term, a lot of the cheapest food sources like grains and potatoes need heat to prepare. Unfortunately my current options regarding where to set a fire up are in the middle of a bunch of dry wooden crates, in a cramped office with no ventilation, or outside where I'll definitely be caught and probably be arrested. Of those the first honestly seems the most promising. I just need to work out some way to contain the fire and keep the smoke from filling up the room. Maybe some kind of primitive oven? It's a simple concept and there are only really two parts I need. A box to keep the fire in while letting me use heat from it and some kind of tubing going outside that the smoke rises towards, known in the industry as a stove and a chimney. The stove is easy enough, I just need a decent quantity of any fireproof material, but finding or making the piping for a chimney is going to be annoying.

Author's Note:

Forgot the song but hopefully y'all didn't read the story yet. Here's One Foot On The Gas, One Foot In The Grave by Streetlight Manifesto.

https://youtu.be/NsGaY-Wv5Sc