Demesne

As it wasn't raining, and therefore people could finally work on putting roofs and doors of the houses she'd built– she left the matter of assigning which families got the houses to Rian, as she didn't care– Lori could finally stay in her nice, cool cave instead of working in the hot, sunny, humid outdoors, and develop her Dungeon.

Step one was putting a binding at the entrance that kept the humidity from getting in. She put in a lot of magic into that so it would last several days. Was there a way to permanently direct power at a binding so it would work in perpetuity? There should be, she remembered there were tools that had bindings placed on them so they only needed wisp beads to function, but it wasn't something they'd studied at her school. Well, she had a dungeon, a way to make as many beads as she needed, and no other means of entertaining herself, so it was something to remember for the future. The sunlight from the entrance was bright enough, and the floor where it shone was reflective enough from her leveling of the stone that she didn't need to bind lightwisps to illuminate the cave, so that was one thing she didn't have to worry about right then.

She started expanding the room by using earthwisps to soften the stone. She'd gotten a lot of experience doing this from working with the shelters, and the stone flowed like honey. She didn't know what she'd do with a large, open space, but she'd probably figure something out when she finally had it. She also decided to finally square up the entrance of her cave so she could put a door on it. Raising a boulder to block it was just asking for some sort of asphyxiation accident in the long run.

The stone flowed across the cave and out the entrance intermittently as she melted off stone from the walls little by little to shape the cave into a proper room. She stacked it up next to her door with her boulder. It wasn’t long before she had a nice, mostly square space with her bed in the corner and the dungeon's core floating off to one side, next to the door.

She took that in for a moment, and then went back outside to drag in some of the excavated rock.

After building a stone wall to hide the core from immediate view of the cave entrance and moving her bed because this had resulted in her bedspace becoming severely cramped, she examined the space again. As rooms went, it was certainly a generously large one, that little awkward alcove with the core notwithstanding. She'd have space for a table, chairs, her own private lavatory (Lori made a note to dig new latrines, it had been enough days for them to fill up again), storage space, maybe her own food storage…

Lori eyed the stone she'd excavated outside.

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When lunch rolled around, Lori was still in her cave forming rocks into furniture.

"Why do you have a sacrificial altar in your cave?" Rian said from the cave entrance.

She gave him an annoyed look. "It's a table."

"It looks like an altar Dungeon worshippers use to sacrifice beasts," Rian asserted.

"Well, it's not, it's simply the best shape when you're making a table out of stone and don't want to risk it collapsing on your legs," Lori said. "Did you come here for something besides judging my furniture-making skills?"

"Lunch is ready," Rian informed her. "I thought you'd like to have the chance to show up, while the food is hot."

" Ah. Thank you, then." Lori stood from where she'd been making sure the table was balanced and grabbed her hat. She pushed back her hair and tucked it under the brim, reminding herself to find someone with scissors. Maybe one of the doctors? Worse comes to worse, she'd try to cut it with a beast claw.

"You're welcome," Rian said. "Also, I think we need to have a community meeting sometime soon."

Lori blinked at him in the middle of dragging her boulder in front of her cave. Now that the entrance had been squared off there were gaps in the upper corners, but not enough for someone to fit in. "Why?" she asked suspiciously.

"Well, for one thing, we don't have a name for our demesne yet–"

"'Lori's'."

Rian blinked. "What?"

"The name is 'Lori's'," Lori repeated. "Lori's Demesne."

"Are you serious? Who names a demesne after herself?"

"Iskandaliya Demesne, capital of the empire of Iskandal the Empire Binder," Lori said authoritatively.

"All right, first off, the woman was a raging egomaniac," Rian replied. Lori reluctantly increased her assessment of his knowledge of history. "Secondly, that was also the new name given to every other demesne she conquered into her empire. Are you going to tell me you're going to be equally unoriginal?"

"'Lori's' is a perfectly original name!"

"Thirdly, I refuse to be a lord in such an unoriginally named place," Rian continued as if she hadn't spoken. "If you call it that, I'll quit."

"You're already quitting," Lori pointed out. "You're quitting today, right?"

"I'll quit even sooner."

They reached the kitchen-turned-dining-hall, and Lori headed for the line for the midday stew, Rian following after her.

"Anyway, forget the name–"

"Never."

"– we need to talk about supplies," he persisted. "We're running out."

"We have plenty of food," Lori said.

"Yes, so we're unlikely to go hungry," Rian nodded. "It's everything else that's running out. We need nails, metals, medicines, new clothes–"

"Haven't we been treating all the skins and furs?" Lori interrupted.

"Are you willing to wear leather underwear?" Rian asked pointedly.

"All right, continue," Lori regretfully conceded.

"Basically, every product of civilization we left behind, we need," Rian continued. "Right now, only Covehold Demesne will have them. They're the oldest demesne in this continent that we know of, so they–"

"Wait, 'that we know of'?" Lori said, turning to look at him.

He shrugged. "I think it's arrogant to assume no one lived on this continent until we arrived. Have we looked?"

"You're not one of those people who think that our ancestors actually did cross an ocean of stars to some kind of promised demesne, do you?" Lori said. "I'm pretty sure that was proven to be a metaphor for the development of tools for navigating by the stars."

"We know the world is round," Rian argued. "Maybe people arrived on this continent from the other side. And we still need to have a community meeting. We need supplies only Covehold has, unless you've managed to find iron inside the hill. Even copper will do."

"I haven't exactly had time to go digging," Lori said evasively. "I've been busy."

"We all have," Rian said. "And if we want to keep being busy, we'll need those supplies."

"Fine, I'll start beading money, we can–"

"Won't work," Rian said. "I don't know if you asked, but Covehold accepts only old continent beads or Covehold-issued beads, though they hadn't made those yet when we'd left."

"What?" Lori demanded, rounding on him. "That's ridiculous! Beads are a universal standard! Everybody uses beads!"

"I'm not sure of the exact, technical reason," Rian said, backing away, hands raised placatingly. "But apparently it's to prevent anyone with a dungeon just beading out a bunch of beads, slapping a '100' or a '1,000' or a '100,000' on it, and buying out all of Covehold's goods. If we want to trade, it has to be in tangible goods."

"They're worried about inflation? Why? Taniar Demesne is in charge of regulating currencies to stop that from happening and they wouldn't let…" Lori trailed off. "Oh. Taniar doesn't have a presence on this continent."

"It's sort of part of the appeal of living here," Rian pointed out.

"How did you even know this?" Lori said.

"I asked when we were there," Rian said. "Didn't you?"

She had not. "Okay, fine," she grumbled. "Set a meeting for tomorrow."

"Why tomorrow?" Rian said.

"So that everyone has time to take a bath, and I have time to build a bath," Lori said. She thought about it. "Make it the day after tomorrow."

So much for her nice, sunny day off.

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After doing it so many times, Lolilyuri had gotten good at raising buildings. She could practically do it while seated next to where the building was to rise.

So that was what she did, sitting on a slightly compressed block of dirt while beside her, earthwisps made dirt and rock flow, compressing into walls and an arcing roof. In the basic shape it wasn't that different from her initial shelters. The difference was the long troughs of water high along the walls that fed down to basins inside individual alcoves. On the floor were holes that acted as drains, full of bound waterwisps that would serve to carry the water out against the flow of gravity and out into the field outside, which would likely get very muddy. It didn't seem smart to bring that water directly to the river. Give the land a chance to filter it out a little. If she had time she'd find a way to make the water pass through sand.

Rian was in charge of making sure everyone had soap. She figured that was only fair. She had to make two more buildings, after all. With internal plumbing, this time. It would be good practice for making her own private bathroom and lavatory.

If things went according to plan, at least the community meeting would have everyone smelling clean.