A world with no giants

by TheSexyMenhir

A world with no giants

In a world with no giants
Ch.06 “A world with no giants”

There were two things that occupied Angelo’s mind as he woke up: The first thing that barely registered in the higher echelons of his brain, was the fact that he hadn’t dug a fire pit and that he was lucky that he hadn’t set himself or the tree on fire.
What however was a far more pressing concern to him, was the nature of the red stone. Yesterday, in all his anger and frustration, he had accepted the strange properties of what he had dubbed “fire ruby” with open arms, but sleep had brought with it a clear mind and some insights that had been denied to him before.

The ruby defied almost all physical laws he could think of. It showed no signs of erosion, neither chemical nor environmental. Judging from it’s surface remaining spotless, even after he had hit it with a stone several times, it converted physical energy into either electricity or heat at a rate of almost hundred percent. But even then, that didn’t explain the sparks.

The small embers it had produced looked almost like the ones one could get when playing with a cigarette lighter, but you only got those by chipping heated materials and that would mean that the stone should show obvious signs of abuse.
If the spark would have been caused by electricity, or by igniting the air, their form would have seem different, and he most likely would have hurt himself rather than being able to ignite a fire.

With fear he looked at the innocent looking ruby that was still sitting where he had left it, as his mind slowly formed the only plausible conclusions he could thinks of.

Either the stone itself worked on an unknown physical principle, or this place he had landed in had it’s own physical principles that were similar but different from the ones on earth.

Suddenly he felt faint, his head swimming and his vision blurring. Never before in his life had he felt so helpless, even in the face of the leviathan creatures. He had always defined himself over his knowledge: He was Angelo Gordon- Physicist, and now suddenly all that knowledge that he had earned would be worthless?

“All great men stand on the shoulders of giants.”

He didn’t remember who had spoken this famous words, but the truth of it had always been evident to him. His whole work would’ve never been possible without falling back on the knowledge that generations before him had gathered, and he had always taken pride in the fact that he was the last in a long line of researchers. If this world really ran on other principles than he was used to, he was suddenly alone, not the last in a long line, but the first one.

He wasn’t ready to be a giant.

His breath came quick and pressed, the more reasonable part of his brain told him that he was hyperventilating, but the majority of his thoughts was consumed by panic.

The soft press of a furred body against his hand called him back into reality. Empress was looking up at him, concern clearly visible on her face.

That oh so human expression on the foreign looking hare's face suddenly caused Angelo to burst into laughter.

The white leporid lady now looked at him confused, and maybe even a bit more worried.

“Sorry. Sorry, I’m fine,” he managed to say between to guffaws.

Here he was, sitting in a strange new world, naked, and with a dislocated shoulder, talking to a sapient hare, and he really worried about whether or not the physical laws still applied? Maybe it was time to reassess his priorities.

“What do you say, up for some exploring?” he asked his fluffy companion, now managing a halfway confident smile again.

“Maybe you could show me how to find some fruit.”

Empress looked puzzled at the strange creature that she had chosen to follow, not able to make anything out of his constant mood swings. Shaking her head and letting out a sigh, she followed Angelo, who was making his way out of the burrow.

---

With renewed vigor Angelo rekindled his tool building efforts. Maybe he had just attacked the issue from the wrong angle. Prehistoric people had had generations of trial and error to find out an effective way to produce tools. Since he didn’t share this luxury of time, he had to use every advantage he got; namely science.

Not the tables, and rules he had spent all his life learning, but the mindset that was so important for all scientific work.

“Okay, calm down, look at the situation from all angles. Only trust in the facts, don’t assume anything,” he mumbled to himself, trying to imagine that the sticks and stones he had gathered were instead the tools he had in his lab.

At first he took a length of stick, roughly the size of his thumb.

“Roughly five to six centimeters,” he concluded.

Quickly he produced another longer branch, sturdy and nearly straight. Using the smaller stick he measured the first five centimeters, and then left a mark with a rock (he still hadn’t managed to produce a proper knife, or even a sharp stone, but the bark proved less resistant than expected).
He repeated his actions until the branch was marked to his satisfaction.

Equipped with his impromptu measuring stick, he went outside of the burrow, and proceeded to mark a straight grown tree, until he had roughly three meters of markings. He would have liked to make it even higher, but with only one usable arm, he didn’t want to risk climbing.

He took two stones of the same size and weight, and held them both as high as he could, taking note just where on his scales he had reached.

He dropped the stones.

Then he picked them up and dropped them again.

...and again.

...and again.

It took him nearly ten minutes until he was satisfied with his sample size.

“Hmm, I guess that at least air resistance and gravity work similar around here,” he mumbled.

At some point Empress had come to watch the spectacle. She shot him a questioning look as he finally took notice of her.

“I’m trying to figure out how this world works,” he told the slightly bewildered looking hare lady. He picked up a stick and began to scribble some simple equations into the ground. He found it rather worrisome, how long some simple division took him without a calculator.

“About one-point-two G, ignoring air resistance, but I guess without precise equipment it won’t make any difference anyway,” he continued to elaborate, although only the blankly staring hare was around to listen to him.

He gathered up another set of stones, both roughly weighing the same, but one nearly twice the size of the other. He resumed his test on his new stoney victims.

The difference between the stones falling times was immense. If the stones didn’t follow some other weird rule altogether, the air density had to be considerably higher than on earth.

“No, that would have caused countless other side effects...” he mouthed his thoughts. He wasn’t clear on the details, but he knew that an air density high enough to cause a visible difference in the falling of rocks, would at the very least would have caused some mild euphoria from the excess oxygen, not to speak of the breathing problems that compressed air brought with it.

“Interesting...”

He patted himself on the back, that he wasn’t panicking again, but instead could view this as a scientific challenge. As long as he didn’t remember that his life possibly depended on understanding this phenomena, he would be fine...

“Damnit...”

He immediately took up his work again, trying to banish the morbid thoughts.

As interesting as it was to analyze gravity and air resistance, both weren’t of immediate importance and he had only done so as a kind of warm up.

Next up was material science and kinetics.

He was glad that he had been too exhausted to clear out the rubble yesterday, since this meant, that he didn’t have to bust up another load of stones. With interest he looked at the remains of his tool making attempts.

The first thing he found out, was that he had no idea about the material he was looking at. Due to a flight of fancy, he roughly knew about sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks, but the material before him showed signs of all those origins.

It grained structure hinted towards sedimentary or metamorphic origins, but the structure seemed to be only skin deep, since even with it’s varying colour, the rocks seemed strangely homogenous. Quickly he realized where his craftsmanship had gone wrong; he had tried to chip away small bits of stone, to sharpen the edges of the stone, but the rock seemed to lack any form of natural structure causing it to act brittle.

Allready new idea’s formed in his head, telling him how to manipulate the stone.

He took one of the smaller stone, and kneeled down in front of one of the larger boulders. Carefully he dragged the small stone over the rough surface, watching as a trail of stone dust formed, while stone rubbed against stone.

It was a slow and arduous work, but eventually he stared down at something that could be called an primitive edge.

He walked over to his collection of branches and began to test the limits of his new tool.

It soon turned out, that his new cutting tool left some things to be desired. It wasn’t particularly sharp, and the edge wore down quicker than he liked, but nonetheless he had managed to turn make some clean cuts before the knife broke.

With a smile he stood up to gather some stones.

---

When he awoke, he immediately could see one of the improvements, his new cutting tools had brought into his life, his calendar.

Maybe calling a stick, with markings for every day that had passed, a calendar was a bit silly, but it provided him with a way to keep track of himself. Just another way to remind himself that although naked and freezing, he was still a civilized being.

His eyes wandered to Empress, who was still sleeping, one leg twitching in the air as she dreamed about god-knows-what. He looked at his calendar again.

In the end he left yet another mark, although maybe not with as much conviction as before.

Counting this one, it was the fourteenth day after crossing the portal, and he was itching to return to his chosen task of crafting some tools, after he had spent the last two days gathering enough supplies to feed him long enough.

Today he wanted to put the “knives” to the test.

After actually thinking about it logically for a while, he had realized just how much work went into crafting rope, and without any conveniently placed lianas around, he had given up on binding materials for now.

Instead he had found something else.

Silently he followed Empress through the woods, the small white hare guiding him around patches of harmless looking flowers and dangerous pitfalls. He swallowed as he remembered the days he had traipsed around the forest without her, congratulating himself on his luck, that had prevented him from running into anything dangerous.
It took them nearly two hours until they reached their destination.

The remains of a young tree were lying on the ground. It wasn’t directly apparent what natural disaster had felled it, but whatever it was, it had been quite recent, and the wood hadn’t had a chance to rot yet. Angelo hoped that whatever had caused the tree to tumble wasn’t around anymore, be it natural disaster or, what he feared more, a large beast, but the chance to get his hand on fresh wood just was too good to pass it up.

With some effort he dragged the small trunk back to the hollow. Empress meanwhile made herself comfortable on the log.

Then he sat down and stared at the piece of wood.

Unlike with rocks from before, he only had a limited supply of wood. He was surrounded by trees yet wood was a rare commodity, the thought almost caused him to break into laughter again. But the reality of the situation remained the same, he couldn’t effort to muck this one up, with how much effort it would cost him to get another piece of wood that was big enough to carve anything from it.

Carefully he started to rip apart a small piece of the tree, until he had a collection of samples, some bark, some fibres, and a solid piece of wood, before him.
He wiped away the sweat that was running into his brows, causing his eyes to sting. The wood itself had proven far more resilient than he had expected, and having to work with a brittle stone knife had only made things worse. With some worry he looked at his hands, which were covered with red welts where the stones had almost cut into his flesh.
After taking a few minutes to let his tortured hands calm down, he resumed his inspection of the materials before him.

He prodded the bark a few times, and then went on to bend it. Much to his dismay the tree kin broke almost immediately as he put some pressure onto it, only a small piece stayed unharmed. He turned the piece around in his hand, but couldn’t discover what made this piece more durable, and so he sat it aside for the time being.

Next up was the wood fibre, something he had placed a lot of hope into. It had taken him some tries to find a way, to loosen some long strands from the trunk, but he hoped that his work would pay off.

It didn’t.

The wood had probably lain in the forest for some weeks by now and since he hadn’t seen it rain once in all this time, the wood was dry, and the fibres broke whenever he tried to spin several of them into a rope.

That left only the solid block.

Thankfully the wood had acted just like normal wood so far, given him good hope that he could carve some simple things from the trunk... at least if he actually managed to carve something and didn’t just turn the wood into splinters.

Angelo shook his head.

“No use, getting depressed before even trying,” he said to himself, and started to carve away at the wood.

Having learned from his experience at stone carving, he didn’t immediately try to form something, but took his time trying to understand his material. Only when he felt confident, that he somewhat understood, the way the timber reacted, he started trying to give it a form.

...

With an unsteady smile Angelo looked at what he had intended to be a bowl of sorts.

“... I guess, I could always use a plate...” he tried to reason, not sure who he wanted to convince, since he wasn’t even fooling himself.

But then he smiled to himself. It might have taken him the better part of a day, and might haven’t turned out the way he originally had intended it too, but it was a proof of concept.
And as every scientist knew, a working proof of concept could take you a long way.

“I tell you Empress, before long we’ll be living like kings,” he joked towards his fluffy companion.

The white leporid lady didn’t understand what had caused this sudden urge of happiness in her companion, but she had long ago given up on understanding the strange being, and just accepted the occasion as it came. Another berry found the way into her mouth, hiding the fact that the corners of her mouth were drawn upwards ever so slightly.

Comments

[AnormalUnicornPony]

Definitely liking it so far. I think I may have missed something though. When did his arm get relocated in his shoulder socket? Was this something that happened in his sleep?

[Tome Turner]

2463401
I'm pretty sure it's still dislocated.

[_Z_]

Ohhhh. A world with no Giants. Very clever!

[Teikan]

Here he was, sitting in a strange new world, naked, and with a dislocated shoulder, talking to a sapient hare, and he really worried about whether or not the physical laws still applied? Maybe it was time to reassess his priorities

this is much more important! at least not to accidentally shatter into atoms.
you still have science. in our history, all the knowledge and representation about the world has already disappeared, and we were able to learn new ones.

[Teikan]

Since he didn’t share this luxury of time, he had to use every advantage he got; namely science.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes