> Hmm I think Quilava is chasing you just for the thrill of the hunt, I mean you beat it once kinda, or it actually is your starter so it's bonded to you in a way. Could we make a raft using the silk and some boards from the building like line some boards together than tie them together with the silk. I mean the silk is strong as steel but light so it should float. Also what are these weird shriveled things we keep finding?
The Weird Shrivelled Things? Hm. You're not sure. You found one in the Poké Mart and one on the dock – you're guessing they have something to do with the fact that those places appear to be feeling the effects of time. Whatever the things are, they're so old and desiccated that you can't make out much of them beyond the fact that they are black and about a foot long. You'd need to find one in better condition to ascertain what it is with any certainty, or perhaps there's another way to find out what they are that you just haven't thought of yet.
Moving on to the silk, it's actually far stronger than steel – it's actually possible to break steel, after all, and this stuff is pretty much indestructible. If only it had some structural integrity, you could make the entire raft out of it.
Hm. Actually... that might not be such a bad idea.
You go outside onto the dock and climb, with a little difficulty, up onto the roof of the ticket office; here, amid a veritable landslide of dislodged roof slates, you find a way into the attic space – where, mostly protected from above by the roof and from below by their sheer height, you find a decent number of mostly-not-rotten planks and beams.
It's difficult to rip them up, but most of them are surrounded by considerably more rotten planks, and you can break those fairly easily, allowing you to lift the unspoiled wood out of the gaps.
Othodox found some Solid Wooden Planks! Othodox put the Solid Wooden Planks in the Construction Materials Pocket.
Othodox found some Sturdy Wooden Beams! Othodox put the Sturdy Wooden Beams in the Construction Materials Pocket.
You climb back down, then retreat back into the ticket office, away from the Quilava, to work out what you're going to do next.
Stretching the Adamantine Spider Silk out as much as you can, you find that the largest single piece – the one that covered most of the Eldritch Spinarak – is about four metres square. It's not much, but it should be enough for you to make the skin of a little coracle out of. It also teaches you that the surface area of a spider is considerably more than it appears to be, presumably because of all those thin twiddly bits on the sides, but frankly you don't want to consider anything that reminds you of the prodigious size of the monster you killed for this silk. If you were capable of having nightmares that didn't revolve around fishmen, you'd probably find that thing haunting your dreams.
You take the wood and begin to test some of the thinner planks, bending them to see how far you can push them – but you quickly realise they aren't going to bend very far without some kind of aid.
That's all right, you think. You know how to deal with this. All the skills you needed to complete your quest – a Trainer's eye for judging a monster, a marine biologist's knowledge of sea creatures, a survivalist's instinct for, well, surviving – they've all been with you, all along. You were made to solve this problem, you realise: you are the player character, and you have all the practical skills you could ever want.
And you know how to bend wood.
There are three main methods, you tell yourself, previously-unknown knowledge unfolding in your mind. You can steam it and reshape it, which would be difficult given your lack of a steam-box and mould; you can cut it into thin strips, adjust the length of each and put them back together to create a laminated curve, which you can't do without better tools – or you can cut notches in one side of the wood, and ease the notches closed to create a tense bend.
This one you might just be able to do.
You set to work with a will, scratching rough coracle designs on the desktop with a Glass Shard, and though you break your Badly Cracked Dangerous Makeshift Knife and all your remaining Glass Shards in the process, after a hard day's work you have the notches in your planks cut to the right size. For a moment, you're stumped as to how to fasten them closed – then you remember something about Dustox scales, about how they work by reacting with the water in your tears and sweat to form a kind of caustic, burning glue, and you smile.
You know how to mix up some glue that should hold the wood together, but first you need a break; you've been working all day, and you haven't had anything to eat or much to drink. Figuring that it can't do you any harm, you drink one of your Potions, which tastes like kerosene and seems to contain about the same amount of energy, and finish off the last of your Delicious Meat Bits. They are no longer Delicious, being a little mouldy, but they are still Meat, as long as you scrape the green bits off.
Right, then. Onwards!
As the sun begins to set once more, you carefully prise open the Sealed Box of Dustox Powder and, scooping a little up with the tip of a piece of leftover wood, pour it into one of the notches you've cut. You are uncomfortably aware that if you screw this part up, you're going to burn the skin off your fingers.
Sometimes, you know, it would be nice not to have all this PC pre-programmed knowledge.
You drip a little bit of the last Potion onto it, and a sudden violent eruption of bubbles tells you the reaction is well underway; a couple of seconds later, a greenish paste has formed where the dust once was, and you press the sides of the notch together before it can harden. You hold it there for a full minute, and then, hands trembling, praying for it to stay, you take your hands away...
It holds.
There is a curve in the end of this piece of wood. It's poisonous, and you'd better never lick your boat, but goddamnit it works!
You punch the air. It seems appropriate.
doing good? asks Vesta. You've already explained to her what you're doing, but it took most of the morning to teach her the concept of a boat; since you've been able to walk pretty much everywhere so far, she really doesn't see why you can't just walk to Cianwood.
"Yep," you say happily, pouring out another tiny measure of Dustox powder. "We're doing real good, Vesta."
good, she says. we go soon?
She sounds bored; while the fact that she has the capacity for boredom is great – it implies she's gaining intelligence – you don't think this boat's going to be ready for quite some time yet.
"I don't know, Vesta," you say, sitting back for a moment and rubbing your shoulder. "This is going to take me a while."
vesta help?
"It's sweet of you to offer, but there's not a lot you can do unless you have hands," you reply. "Also, I think you'd set this on fire if you touched it. Sorry."
hum. vesta sleep now, she announces, sounding vaguely offended, and burns down low to cinders. You leave her be, and continue work on the boat in a Potion-fuelled creative outpouring. What do they put in those things, anyway? You're sure something that keeps you this awake and gives you this much energy can't be legal. It's like having some toxic cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline injected straight into your heart.
By midnight, you have a series of curved wooden planks arrayed in the moonlight; you take them onto the dock, where it's flatter, so you can lay them out. The light is also better out here; the moon is full tonight. You're pretty sure it was new only a few nights ago, and wonder if the Dreaming has screwed up the lunar phases as well. It seems a pretty fair bet; it messed with pretty much everything else.
You glance over at the shore, but the Quilava is nowhere to be seen, and Olivine is dark and quiet. That seems kind of ominous, but you don't dwell on it; you have a boat to build and a world to save.
Now, you begin to assemble the skeleton of the coracle, gluing strut after strut into the ring, and soon you have something that resembles an upturned turtle shell; you flip it over (with some difficulty – it's bigger than you thought it would be) and start attaching the Adamantine Spider Silk to the underside, stretching it taut across the rods and securing each join with the last of the Dustox powder.
Man, are you lucky – there was just enough of that stuff to glue the whole lot together. It's almost like this whole thing was planned out for you.
Spooky, eh?
As the first light of dawn approaches, you step back to admire your work. Before you, on the dock, is a gleaming white silken coracle – a dangerous, unstable craft, to be sure, but it's your dangerous, unstable craft, and you made it with your own two hands. It's light, strong and, well, mostly designed for navigating rivers, but as long as you can sail it competently it'll take you to Cianwood and back. You could even carry it on your back, if you needed to.
Othodox crafted one Silken Coracle! Othodox put the Silken Coracle in the ticket office.
You drag it indoors and set it in your safe haven behind the ticket desk. You don't want it being carried off in a strong wind while you sleep – and sleep you definitely need, because you've been up for a long, long time now. You curl up near your coracle and let your exhaustion wash you away into a dark and surprisingly dreamless sleep.
> You need to find something seaworthy. However, if you're ever going to survive an ocean of Eldritch Tentacool, Tentacruel, Staryu, and the possible Mantine, you need a more powerful weapon. I suggest combining some of your bag items with Horribly Dangerous Stabby Thing to make a better weapon.
No sense in going to sea unprepared. From the general trend of 'bigger and meaner' that the Eldritch Pokémon have thus far shown, you imagine encountering an Eldritch Tentacruel would be something akin to meeting the kraken. A better weapon is a must.
This thought passes through your head soon after waking, and you immediately head out onto the dock to the space where you assembled your Silken Coracle the day before. Here, you spread out your Bag items on the planks and ponder.
Hm.
Now, if you just take this apart...
And put a couple of wheels from this here...
Perhaps this could go on there?
And ram the TMs in here...
Four hours later, you have disassembled the Machine for Guessing the Number of Pips in an Unopened Orange, the My First Tri-Beam Laser GunTM and the Powerless Tablet Computer, crammed all the parts together inside the Machine's elegant casing, attached the trigger and butt from the Laser Gun and stuffed the Shiny Stone and TM23s in the middle.
What happens next is probably due to the Shiny Stone.
You raise it experimentally at the sky and pull the trigger. The LEDs from the Laser Gun light up, the TMs begin whirring manically on an axle inside, and the Shiny Stone, just visible through the exhaust grille of the Machine's casing, glows brightly as the wires around it heat up.
Light. Heat. Steel-type energy.
All combine, and a moment later a searing column of silvery light rises high into the sky, the recoil knocking you off your feet and almost into the sea.
Othodox used Flash Cannon! But there was no target...
Wait.
Seriously?
You actually managed to put those clues together, despite the way the Narrator scattered them across the entire story to date?
Damn it. He'll make sure to hide his superweapons better in future.
Whatever the Narrator thinks of the matter, you would appear to have inadvertently invented a method of synthesising a Pokémon move.
You let out a mighty whoop and are about to start blasting everything in sight for the sheer hell of it when you realise that Flash Cannon only has 10 PP, and you have no way of recharging the thing. You're going to have to be economical with your shots here.
Othodox crafted one Highly Persuasive Handgun! Othodox put the Highly Persuasive Handgun in the Weapons Pocket!
Othodox's Hunger and Thirst have risen substantially.