More rain began to tap against the muddy ground, and he could hear it splashing into the swamp water nearby.
Jay let out the square plate from his gauntlet. “Handy, Blue, hold this up, quick.” He ordered, pointing at the giant bone plate, and pulled out a beam next.
The other skeletons hadn’t returned, and Jay glanced at the empty molds for the bone beams and the square, then at the skeletons awkwardly holding the square on its side.
If he wanted to stay dry, there wasn’t enough time to make a roof plate.
“Ah, fuck it. It will have to do.” Jay frowned, and attached the very bottom of the beam to the corner of the square plate.
Some melted bone was all it took to connect them, but to add some strength he hastily plucked some femur bones and made triangle supports between the beam and the square plate.
The rain began to sprinkle as Jay attached the second beam, and as he was reinforcing it, more skeletons returned.
“One on each corner, now!” Jay yelled, dumping the two other beams down, each of them slamming onto the dirt.
There’s no time to make a new roof panel. The floor will have to do.
Red’s two sub-skeletons grabbed a beam and helped Dark move it into place, attaching it to another corner of the square bone plate. Under Blue’s supervision and guidance, they copied Jay, and with Dark and Blue’s meager mana reserves they managed to successfully attach one beam, then moved onto the next.
Jay added the support bones, saving what little mana he had left.
Dark ran out of mana, but Handy could still help. Even though it had the champion role, it had a small amount of mana.
Jay helped to attach the last beam and while attaching the support bones he began to feel dizzy, getting closer to the bottom of his mana pool.
“Place it on the bone platform. Move.” He pointed, rubbing his head, and wobbling with a side-step.
Blue noticed that Jay seemed… odd. Master was not walking straight - so it did something odd itself. It stood by his side and held its arm out.
It confused Jay, to see its skeleton holding its arm out like a butler, but as he reached out and grabbed it, he understood what it was trying to do.
“Ah. Thanks, Blue.” Jay smiled.
It was small things like this that made Jay appreciate his skeletons even more. It was the little actions like this that truly showed their loyalty, and it was something that Jay was not used to, so he appreciated it all the more.
Blue held Jay up while the skeletons took the structure and moved it on top of the bone platform. It was an assembly of the bone floor plate with four square beams attached at each corner.
Jay’s efforts had resulted in a 10 by 10 foot square panel placed atop four 13-foot beams, each connecting to a corner, making a roof over a waist-high pile of bones.
As they placed it onto the bone pile, they pushed bones apart to dig the beams down into it.
Jay was a little disappointed, as he had planned to attach the square plate approximately 3-feet up the beams. This way, it would become a floor with enough ground clearance for level one skeletons to dash under, and there would be 10-feet of beams rising above the floor, which he could attach more 10x10 wall panels to, forming a cube room.
Now? The rain ruined his plans - to stay dry, the floor would become the roof.
Before stepping under the new shelter, he stopped and glanced at it for a moment as rain began to tap on his head, admiring his construction.
“This is… shit.” He frowned. “Uneven, weak, slanted, tilting, wobbly shit.”
He shook his head, and crawled onto the bone platform as the rain began.
All the skeletons stood around him, the rain trickling down their skulls and past their jaws as their green eyes faintly glowed, looking at their master’s miserable frown.
A small wind gust blew some rain which tapped against Jay’s feet - even though he was under the roof.
“You’re fucking joking.” His face turned bitter, as he knew that if a little rain could get to his feet, then his boots would be soaked after a while.
For a moment he gave up, looking at his skeletons staring back at him - then he sighed, and while clenching his jaw from a mix of bitter anger and frustration, he got to work again.
Without thinking things through or really caring about possible downsides, Jay began releasing bones around himself, piling them up until they got to his knees. He had Blue come and help him up, stepping foot on new heights and stomping the bone down, then began the process again, and he eventually made it close enough to touch the roof of his new construction.
The bone platform quickly went from a waist-high flat arrangement of bones to a large piled heap, nearly six feet tall.
“Now, I can have a damn rest.”
He added some more bones down to make a flat top, placed his rectangular sleeping spot down and got his sleeping swag out.
Adding his clothes and boots to his inventory, he slipped inside as the rain began to beat down on his skeletal roof.
He was still frowning, but he closed his eyes, he enjoyed the warmth and the soft tapping above. The rancid smell of the swamp and its sticky humid feeling all but disappeared.
He succeeded in making himself a dry place to sleep.
(Return to duties. Blue, stay close.) he ordered, with his eyes still closed.
The skeleton feet tapped away across the wet ground and Jay drifted off to sleep. Lamp and Blue kept him safe, though there wasn’t anything out there that posed a threat.
The fog and the fire lights acted as barriers. Everything that ventured into the fog from the outside world would be injured with un-healing fire, and would need to flee or perish. Whether a high level beast or a curious glade deer, nothing would want a painful, un-healing wound - and certainly not a handful of these wounds.
The rain continued through the night, but Jay was exhausted from the journey and slept through it all, tucked away inside his swag.
***
~Mirror Reality 34~
Norgim nursed a cup of winter tea as he stood with Evelynn, looking out through a pane wood window and watching some students in the stone courtyard below.
“Norgrim, it’s still too soon. The last portal wasn’t even one week ago and you want to go again? The mirror reality can’t handle it.”
“It will need to. He’s out there alone in the wilderness. We need to get to him before something else does, and we can’t afford to let a necromancer, a human necromancer, be lost to some beasts snack - or even worse, if the mage hunters catch him.”
“I want to save Jay as much as you do. I know it’s already costly enough using the warp charges, but can you please at least wait till the clouds stop shuddering, and the color returns to the distant mountains?” she frowned, looking at the students below.
“We will wait as long as we can. Rest assured, I won’t risk the safety of our students or the mirror reality just so we have another weapon on our side.” Norgrim nodded, and placed his empty cup on his desk.
“Hang on a moment.” Evelynn said, and opened the latched window to call out below.
“You two! Stop that immediately!”
Two students looked up as they were caught, and broke their combined spells, causing a rock to explode as it smashed into the ground.
One had made a small portal above another and tossed a rock inside, causing it to pick up speed as it endlessly fell through the portals. The other formed a cylinder around the portals and sucked the air out, which let the rock endlessly speed up in the vacuum.
Evelynn shook her head and gave them a disapproving look, then slowly closed the window.
She sighed, closing the latch, “Our students aren’t weapons. They aren’t kids either. They’re just young people who have had their world turned upside down.”
***
“Lara, we’re going out again. Thanks to William we have his location, much further south than before. It’s an un-ported area, so we will end up somewhere nearby. We’ll be in unknown land, so we’re bringing three orren to find a dungeon we can hijack to get back.”
“Good.” Lara said, her eyes narrowing on a map. She was still angered by her failure last time, a blemish on her perfect record, and this time she was not going to be so trivial about the extraction.
“How long till we leave?”
“The portal will be ready in about a day. I’ve been setting it up since we got back, but Norgrim still hasn’t given the order.”
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