Stepping through the door again felt different. I had been so relieved to go back to earth at first, and still was every time, but the more often I came to the wordworld, the more familiar it felt. In fact, it was getting exponentially more comfortable every time I came back. I wasn’t sure why, but something about me was adapting to this place.
“Wow,” Paul said joyfully. “That’s…nice. You smell that?”
I raised an eyebrow at the knight. “Not really?”
“Exactly,” he grinned. “Nothing but fresh forest air. I’ve never smelled ANYTHING that crisp. Not in the mountains, not at state parks. That’s just…heavenly. I love it here already. Nice camp you have here, by the way,” he looked around with interest. “The trees look plenty sturdy too. I can work with this.”
Paul, apparently, was not JUST a knight. He was also an amateur contractor. He was infamous around the Red Feather Society for his ambitious home builds and was everyone’s go to for any building work. He’d even done renovations around the club, so Alistair knew he could be trusted and had faith in the quality of his work. He’d insisted we stop at Home Depot on the way here and taken me on a tour of the place, pointing out tools and materials before deciding we’d done enough and giving the go ahead for us to take our tour.
“Are you sure we can use these trees?” I asked warily. “I mean, I’m pretty sure you can’t just chop down wood and slap it together into a house.”
“You can’t,” he agreed. “Wood needs to be milled and dried before it can be used in any sort of construction. Luckily, I can BUILD a mill and a drying kiln with materials I showed you at home depot. Once we have those together, I’ll probably buy some pre cut stuff from you now and then if I need a quick board, but for the most part, I’ll cut and prepare my own.”
That sounded complicated, but also made the whole trip to home depot seem a bit pointless. “Why not just take me to see a mill and a kiln then? Why the whole shopping trip?”
“I’m building us a whole base here,” he said simply. “While I can cut my own wood, I can’t prepare my own tile, insulation,drywall, epoxy, or fittings. I can’t make my own wire, or pipes, or roof shingles. Wood is a strong, useful material, but modern construction requires a LOT more than just that. Not to mention the tools I’ll need for this.
“You can make wooden furniture and framing with almost no tools besides a hammer, a chisel, and a plane, and sometimes I do, but joinery is time consuming and complicated,” he gestured to the empty area around us. “More than that, chopping down trees is a lot easier with a chainsaw than it is with a hand axe. A lot of hobbyists enjoy hand tool woodworking, and I tend to prefer it myself, but when you’re doing serious contracting, you should use power tools. They make everything a LOT easier.”
Come to think of it, he had taken me through the tool aisles at length. Still, I was excited to hear about the process of building a house. With a whole group of physically enhanced Knights helping him do the work, I was better it would be faster than most people could manage, and that wasn’t even taking into account the mana body once they started on it.
“So you’re going to just…build a base,” I asked with fascination. “From scratch?”
“Not a chance,” he snorted. “What I’m going to do is experiment. These trees are completely unknown to me as a wood species. Woods aren’t all created equal. Hardwood, softwood, there are different materials that work well for different things. I can build a frame out of most things, with the right construction, but I need to know what kind of tolerances I’m working with. There are ways to make flooring joists incredibly strong, for instance, even if you’re using relatively flimsy wood. Special brackets and bolts and shapes you can use to brace everything. But how much you need depends on the wood.”
That made sense. I paused as I remembered something he said. “Wait, you mentioned wires, are you planning to run electrical here?”
He grinned. “Yup. We’ll start with a generator, but eventually, I plan to set up solar with some batteries. No internet or anything for now, though I’m pretty sure Alistair is looking into launching a satellite. You can get small ones for cheaper than you’d expect, but I have no idea how that works so you’d need to talk to him.
“Anyway, to start, I’ll make a few test buildings. Sheds, single room dwellings. Once we get the wood down and drying, with the right saw and nail gun, I can throw together a small shed that’s livable in a day or two.”
He reached into his pocket, pulling out a small envelope, and passed me a stack of photos. “That was a sort of lounge shed I made for a friend in his back yard. Took me a couple days, though admittedly I was able to buy the lumber. Still, it’ll give you a better idea of what kind of labor you can get done quickly with a solid plan and the right tools.”
I took the pictures from him, flipping through them to see what he meant. After just a few pictures, I found myself completely hooked. He looked over my shoulder as I flipped, narrating the whole thing. “So obviously you have to start with a foundation. There’s a few ways to do it, but mostly they’re concrete. You can do a pad, which is a whole flat bed of concrete, you can do posts sitting IN concrete, or you can do footers, which are tubes of concrete that you put wood beams on top of, usually anchored with a bolt or some kind of fastener.
“Out here, with a long term structure as the goal, we’re going to do a pad for the final build, but it takes a while, so for the test builds I’m going to use footers,” he pointed to a picture where he was hammering cylinders of cardboard into the ground and filling them with concrete.
He pointed to the next picture. “Once you have the foundation done, you lay out the frame. You measure it all first, obviously, so the footers are in the right place, and then you anchor the posts and frame out the floor. After that you put down foam and maybe some plastic for insulation if its a wet environment, then you put down a subfloor. Next you put up the walls, frame the roof, put in the insulation, do the wiring and pipes if necessary, then put in the drywall and hang the lights and furnishings after you do final touches. Painting, sanding, just general quality polishes.”
It was astonishing. He took a pile of random wood and nonsense and made a small fucking HOUSE. It had a bathroom, a tv, a bedroom, and the whole thing was about the size of a large room. He just threw it together in someone’s yard. “How long did this take?” I asked in disbelief.
“About a week,” he shrugged. “Concrete takes a while to cure, and the insulation isn’t something you want to rush. But that was on my own. Concrete aside, I could get one of those up in a day or two with a full crew and all the materials I need. In fact, I was going to suggest I do just that. I can put one of these together for every member of the crew, and give myself a chance to do some real stress testing and maybe try a few variations of design before we settle on the final build.”
“Really?” I asked in surprise. “Are you sure? That seems like a lot of work.”
He shrugged. “You said we need a workout to get the most out of those fruits, and this will be that. Not to mention it’ll give me some time to train the others, both your guys and mine, before we get to work on the big project. Like the old saying goes, sharpening the axe doesn’t delay cutting the wood.”
“I’ve never cut any wood,” I said wryly. “But I’ll take your word for it. I’ll need to track down a generator and a few solar batteries if you’re planning to use those. Are you sure that’ll be enough?”
“Trust me,” he said bluntly. “Some of those solar batteries can hold a LOT of charge. Unless the sun here isn’t a sun or something. But that’s a weird assumption to make, given it…is.”
I chuckled at that, but mostly I was too excited to respond any other way. He could do WIRING. And he could install a generator and solar panels. Even ignoring Alistair’s apparent plan to launch a SATELLITE, having access to power wasn’t something I had ever considered a possibility over here. I mean, maybe with batteries or something but nothing official like this.
More than guns or cars (which I had been considering buying to make moving around easier), a real house with wiring and things like an air conditioner and a fridge and running water sounded like literal heaven.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be cheap, I could already tell. The materials for the kiln and mill aside (because I didn’t know how to make those), just the stuff like the drywall and insulation was going to add up. I wasn’t sure how much of this process Alistair was covering, either, because some of these were gonna be for my people and not his. For now, Paul was apparently going to be collection some branches from nearby to carve into and run a few tests, so I wouldn’t be spending any of my hard earned cash (or Alistair’s) just yet.
“Wow, this place is awesome!” came an almost giddy voice from behind me. I turned to find, to my shock, Connie, standing just inside the door flanked by a pair of burly knights. She smiled and waved. “Hey Gus!” she chirped. “Thanks for setting this up. Al was going to leave me home, but since he had to bring all the guys he decided it would be more dangerous NOT to have me along.”
Grinning, I shot a look at Alistair, who was examining the campsite and very specifically not looking at his sister. “Is he actually that pissed about this or is he just throwing a fit because it’s expected?” I asked curiously.
She shrugged. “Hard to tell with him. He worries, and I appreciate it, but he takes it too far. It’s easier to cut him slack right now since I’m out and about and not in danger of being kidnapped or murdered. But to be fair, I AM in danger most of the time, so I can’t blame him for being concerned. I just wish he was less controlling about it.”
I nodded sympathetically. “I get that. In the spirit of enjoying your time here, how about I show you around?” I gestured to the camp, and she all but squealed with joy, darting past me and grabbing my hand to drag me along.
Sadly, she didn’t speak the language, or I’d have taken her to Esther’s place for some stew. For the moment, showing her around the camp would have to do.
I had to admit, having other speakers (more than just Alice) here was surprisingly reassuring. I didn’t know what was coming our way, whether the Ten Thousand Doors Society would cause trouble for us or we’d have to deal with suppression from the locals, but whatever came next, it was nice to have backup of the supernatural kind. We’d handle whatever came up, and I had a feeling that this was going to be the beginning of something amazing.