"An auto-what?" "An autoclave," I said out loud as if it was the most basic appliance in the world. "It's gonna be a device that would kill anything that might cause diseases on anything. Metal, containers, glass, you name it." Staring at the design, the main factor of the whole thing was the craftsmanship of the one that would build it. Not that I'm tooting my own horn, but I think I can make an airtight seal without rubber trees through some clever Runecrafting. "And I'm gonna help with it, why?" "Cause I don't wanna do it by myself." Well, maybe we should actually try to find some rubber trees soon. It would give us a huge advantage in forwarding our tech more. "Say that I'm going to help," Lace posited, standing up and approaching me in front of the board. "A

A short series of murmurs echoed across the table as I waited patiently for the people in front of me to give me something to work with. I worked best as an all-arounder stopgap measure, improving upon work, and shoring up weaknesses that might go by the idea maker's head.What can I say, I was good at criticizing other people's work but shit with making up my own ones."We can do some farming?" Bart offered out on a half-conviction. "We just plant some of the fruits we foraged and wait it out."I nodded my head. Pretty valid, all things considered. It'll be a main proponent for self-sustainability. If we even manage to get some generic farm animals, maybe some of the wild boar and chickens out in the forest and breed them, we'd be set for the foreseeable future. Problem is..."Care to elaborate?" I gestured towards the large man. "How do we go about this?"Saying that we're gonna farm was very different from actually doing it.

It's been over a day since that very productive town hall meeting had come to pass. We all had a lot of fun coming up with stuff to improve after everything had been over and done with, and even now, I could see the beginnings of the various sectors of our small town developing into their own subsections on our isolated civilization. A few wooden planks were being erected at the outskirts of the settlement, and a ways away from that, what seemed to be the start of a watchtower was also starting to take shape. It might still all be wooden, but as soon as we got the resources, it'll all be turned into the sturdier and more reliable stone in which we'd also carve in some runes to make it more impenetrable.Which was why I now found myself at the same clearing as last time, in front of my makeshift chalkboard brainstorming with Lace as to how we'd get our materials."Why me again, Leader?" the older woman asked, still skeptical as to why I chose her to help with th

It was probably a few hours later when my... uhmmm... partner... finally woke up from her deep slumber. The fire keeping us warm had been reduced to a small flame even before I got pleasured earlier, but the warmth of daytime clearly permeated through the rock above and provided us some semblance of comfortable warmth deep inside the damp cave. "Ughh..." "Rise and shine, sleepyhead," I blatantly remarked, my patience kind of wearing thin due to the lack of stretching that was caused by the older woman's hold. "C'mon, Lace. It's probably close to noon at this point." Gently rising from my awkward position, I lifted Lace's head from my chest as I sat up straight towards the small flame. The older woman was grumbling on my lap, but I wasn't going to let her off that easy. We still had to get back to the settlement. "C'mon.

"If I was Sister, where would I put it..." The first few marks had been located etched into the wall; the 'x's evenly spaced approximately a few paces away from each other. Barring the other marks that denoted ores and other stuff that she didn't really know about, the next mark should be somewhere in the center of the cavern. Sister was particularly obsessive with uniformity sometimes, and if the pattern held, then it was a step towards following the trail that would lead her to the missing pair. With a raised eyebrow, Olivia paced back towards where she stuck her first torch, her eyes peeled just beyond her feet for the supposed mark that she so desperately needed. If she could just find it, then it would strengthen her idea that the marks were indeed spaced evenly, and from there, she could extrapolate the distance of the next mark and narrow down the possible answers from