Whatever I've got on hand - nuts and fruit, I guess. Maybe it will make me a nice salad, or fried bananas. I'll look around for things to cook - perhaps palm heart, root vegetables, coconuts, beans. I won't go hunting just now - I don't want to offend anything.
Yeah, not many options for what to make of nuts and fruit without gelatin or bread or cream or something. But we'll manage.
You open it to find a thick fruit puree with chopped nuts. It's chilled, with no signs of peels or shells.
--M. J. Young
Hey, that's pretty good! I'm still reluctant to hunt considering how intelligently the cat reacted to me. Sure, it brought back a bird but it probably knows how things work in the jungle. I know that some native American and African cultures used to ask the animals (or the spirits representing the animals) to give themselves up to be eaten - so maybe I should investigate that.
But right now I'll spend a few days sorting out my shelter. I'll use my failed cooking stone to heat it (since it seems not to be a fire hazard!). I'll grow/carve some furniture and collect some bedding (leaves, moss). Then I'll go out with Pixie and Heph on some local forays to see what is around.
You probably don't need heat in the interior of the house, and it's probably not safe to keep the heating stone in it. As I recall, the floor is concave, and reaches a width of about five feet perhaps a foot above the center point. At the same time, the jungle is never what you'd call "cold", and the house is rather stuffy and hot most of the time as it has only one vent (albeit a large one), the door.
How far are you planning to range from home, are you leaving equipment in the tree when you do so, and what are your time parameters? Will you take short excursions an hour out and back, or do a wide circumference over several days?
--M. J. Young
You're right about the house. I'll spend some time cutting some ventilation windows in the shelter as well. If I can find some of those shelf mushrooms that grow on trees in North America, maybe I can get them to grow large over the windows and doors as a type of awning.
I will leave most of my junk in the treehouse when we go on our treks. For the time being we'll just go out for day trips, intending to be home by dark. I'll try to become familiar with the immediate surroundings. Since pens and pencils don't work well here I won't bother trying to draw a map, but I want to be aware of local resources and topography. I'll also pay close attention to any tracks or spoor left by animals of the jungle.
Speaking of being home by dark, I never did work out a light spell. I'll try one now:
I'm going to attempt to create light using the mirror from my flashlight as a spell component but I want the spell to work with any object that reflects light similar to a mirror. I hold the mirror in one hand and wave the other over top and say "Illuminate" in latin. The spell takes 6 seconds to perform and I expect the duration to be 1 hour. The surface of the mirror will shine with full spectrum light. The mirror is not consumed.
There is evidence of a great variety of animals in the jungle, including cats like the one that visited you, birds of many types, snakes and lizards, assorted mammals including some kind of primate--animals indigenous to South or Central America. (I don't happen to know what those are in detail, but if you do you can make a more specific identification of your location on a successful ed level check.) There are also many streams and pools providing water for the animals, much vegetation including trees and vines and the heavy undergrowth in some areas, rich soil, occasional rocks mostly at watercourses.
I'm assuming that "full spectrum light" means electromagnetic radiation in the full range of what is visible to human eyes. (Some animals see higher frequencies, and it is possible that some see lower frequencies, but when we say "visible light" we usually mean "visible to us".) I think it makes no difference to the performance of the spell, but it might make a difference in use someday. Other assumptions I am making, which you may contradict:
- The light is radiant, that is, it moves outward from the point of origin and casts shadows; if it were non-radiant, it would illuminate the area affected even inside and behind objects, as the light would effectively "originate" within those areas.
- The light is non-directional, that is, the mirror functions as a lightbulb, not a flashlight.
- A thirty-foot radius from the center point is adequately illuminated; beyond that is not significantly affected.
- The light is non-damaging; specifically, it is not "sunlight" in any sense that would injure creatures who cannot endure sunlight because it is sunlight (and not because it is light, or because it contains particular frequencies of light).
- The material component must be a highly polished silvery surface. It may be made of silvered plastic, silver, silvered glass, tin, steel, mercury, or other highly-polished material, but it must be silver in color and it must be highly polished. It need not have the image-reflective properties of a mirror if due to shape it does not reflect images, but it must reflect eighty percent of more of the light that hits it, with very little variation in color.
- It does not matter which hand holds the mirror and which hand is waved over it.
--M. J. Young