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Settling In (Charley's Story, Chapter 5)


gregaaz

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I spent the rest of the week fixing up the house and cleaning up the rest of my property. The back yard was an overgrown mess, but after I uprooted some of the wild shrubs and fed them into the Workshop, it was a lot more walkable. I also found the rusted remains of my patio set - which I also fed into that insatiable red machine. Curiously, when I was done I noticed the cloth hopper was a bit more full. Evidently, the machine had managed to extract some useful fibers out of something I stuffed into it.

 

At some point, something big had moved its way through my back yard - there were sections of my picket fence where it was just trampled down into the earth, and big holes ripped in the privet hedge at the back. It made me wonder about the full extent of the animal life out here, and whether or not I needed to build some defenses for the my little homestead. I also found that behind the privet hedge, there was a nice rocky crag overlooking the water. The privet hedge was the property line, but I was pretty sure I no longer needed to worry about the Home Owners' Association pitching a fit, and I made a mental note about the spot - controlling the high ground is always a good idea.

 

Still, I also wanted to plug those holes in the hedge. The hedge itself was by now so dense and overgrown that it was a viable wall in its own right, but anyone could waltz right through the two gaps in it. I found some barriers in the catalogue that seemed almost perfect - even one with a door. But once again I found myself wanting for concrete - and I didn't want to start breaking up the road to get it. Call me sentimental, but even without a car to drive on it, I still liked the feeling of the hard surface under my feet while I walked around the neighborhood. Then a thought struck me - that first day, when Codsworth insisted on searching the town for Shaun, we'd come across a house with the remains of a barricade in it. At some point, some survivor must have tried to hole up there. I was certain that I'd seem stacks of cinderblocks forming a makeshift wall.

 

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Revisiting the house proved my memory correct, and I started hauling out the blocks. As they Workshop ground them up, the concrete storage unit started filling right up. Still, I only had barely enough to fabricate the reinforced doorway. After I built it, though, I realized that any complaint I had about the machine's efficiency was unfounded. Not only did the finished product sink a sturdy foundation into the ground, it also came out thicker and taller than I'd expected. It even came with a spool of barbed wire for the top. That last bit got me thinking, first about barbed wire and then about wire more generally.

 

The second thought was the one I acted on first - I checked the catalogue and found that there were indeed a number of options for chain link fencing. Though not nearly as secure as the concrete gate, it would at least slow down any would-be intruder. Next, I set about looking for more barbed wire. I was really hoping it wasn't limited to these prefabricated barricades, because my concrete supply was already almost exhausted. Unfortunately, after spending the better part of two hours searching, I came up empty. The oddly scatter-shot nature of the catalogue frustrated me sometimes... to say nothing of the fact that there were apparently hidden categories I couldn't even see. Some time soon, I needed to really dedicate some time into going through and sorting out those little marginal notes that were in the notebook.

 

While I was getting my decidedly half-assed defenses installed, I found myself walking through the adjoining yards as well, and they were just as wide open. I was really going to need to put together a more well-thought-out plan of fortifications. I'd also need to clear out some of the adjoining yard space and see if I could transplant some of the wild fruits and vegetables scattered here and there around the neighborhood into a more rational arrangement. How I'd do it though was another question - I'm a lawyer, not a farmer, and even if I fabricated every farm implement in the catalogue, I wouldn't know how to use them. Yet another thing for me to learn.

 

And it wasn't just concrete I was running out of, too. There were parts of my living space that just got too dark at night. Once the sun had set, I really couldn't see anything in the kitchen suite, which more than once sabotaged my plans to turn the melons and gourds I was gathering into a bisque of sorts. I found some track lighting in the catalogue that would have been ideal, but I didn't have enough glass for the Workshop. I ended up making do with a small lamp, but it wasn't ideal. I mentally added sources of glass to specifically look for during my clean-up time. 

 

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The next day, I took another walk around the perimeter of the neighborhood. This time, I focused on the holes in the privet hedges and, in particular, on the terrain behind them. I couldn't shake the feeling that I really needed a better understanding of where threats would come from. The lake and the streams that drained from it provided a natural barrier of sorts, but on the west side of town it was really more of a brook - easily forded. To the east, the only easy approach looked like it was over the bridge - which made that side a little more defensible. Still, I had a feeling in my gut that I was missing something. 

 

With all that said, I made a very interesting discovery during that walk. I mentioned earlier that one of my neighbors had been running a drug cooking operations out of their house. Behind their hedge, however, I found what must have once been their equipment. Clearly someone else had tried to repair or augment it, but the rusted over still and other chemistry equipment looked surprisingly intact, considering the circumstances. I didn't have any desire for recreational drugs, but I understood that there were plenty of other applications for this sort of apparatus. Even just the still, if I could get it working, could make relatively pure alcohol - something that would be very valuable for a number of applications.

 

The butcher-block table the whole thing was set up on was too much for me to move on my own, but with patience and some heavy lifting by Codsworth, we gradually moved it piece by piece and then reassembled it in my carport. I'd already partially walled it up, so weather intrusion should be much less of a problem, but on the other hand it had good enough ventilation to keep fumes from building up. As I took stock of the reassembled laboratory, I wondered if where the closest public school or college was. A set of chemistry textbooks would go a long way to getting the most value out of this discovery.

 

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While I was thinking about chemistry, I got an idea that set me on a little day trip. Returning to the service station, I did my best not to gag as I picked up one of the decaying mole rat carcasses and carried it back to the Workshop. Stuffing the squishy remains into the hopper, the Workshop whirred and crunched and then I was the "leather" counter tick over. The fertilizer count also increased fairly significantly, and a new, previously absent readout appeared: bone. More and more interesting. Finally, the output hopper spat out a handful of bloody chunks that vaguely resembled cuts of meat.

 

So that filled in an important missing piece of the puzzle - I could break down more things than just trash and debris. The Workshop seemed to have taken apart the mole rate in a fairly comprehensive, intelligent way, and that raised some questions for me. Specifically, just what were the limits on what the Workshop could ingest? I needed to figure out a way to test the machine's boundaries - another thing to add to my list of backlogged jobs, though, since I never quite got to the space where I could really take a day off for reading or experimenting. 

 

As for the meat, I was suddenly very glad that I'd replaced all the kitchen appliances. Incidentally, I did finally find enough glass to fabricate those track lights - between the headlights on some of the rusted out hulks of cars and the bulbs I pulled out of a few fallen street lamps, I was able to fill the gap and get that job running. But I digress - I had a working stove, I had some meat, and it was easy enough to fabricate a variety of kitchen wares. I trimmed off some excess fat and gristle while the oven heated up, then laid out the steaks on a baking sheet. Before the war, I don't think I would have ever considered eating rat steaks, but now... I was just happy for the protein. 

 

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The meat was... acceptable. Though I realized as I ate it that I'd need to find some spices and other foundational ingredients like lard, salt, and sugar. I knew I'd need to find local equivalents, since unlike the preservative-laced processed food that was edible ("edible") more or less forever, these staples would have spoiled not long after the war. More experimenting to do, I suppose, and while I was at it I needed to find more coolant so I could get the refrigerator running. Not much sense cooking food just for it to spoil before I could eat it all. 

 

And then Saturday rolled around with a surprise, to remind me that things weren't going to stay the same forever.

 

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Behind The Scenes

I messed around a little more with those ceiling panels, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I had a hunch that I could work around the limitation, and it was right: with careful placement of some vanilla pieces, I was able to attach the panels to those, then remove vanilla pieces to just leave the properly snapped ceiling panels behind. You can see in some of the screen shots that I also placed some 2x1 metal roofing segments in such a way that only the wooden bracing part's visible, filling in some gaps that would be been visible otherwise. 

 

The "no junk items" challenge is definitely making me think about my building strategy a bit more than usual - especially in terms of access to electrical power. That's good, though, because it forces me to come up with new solutions rather than just reiterating earlier work.

Edited by gregaaz

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