thequietyear | Adobe Log

As the group finishes eating breakfast one day, Bruno motions to some wooden frames and short half-logs off to one side. The Blank Men stand ready nearby.

"I'm going to take some of them today to that place I told you about, near the river, with the good soil - if, ah... any of you up for helping with the adobe? I can show you how to mix it and shape it; and once the sun's dried them enough, how to fire the bricks and roof tiles."

He side-eyes the Blank Men as he continues. "...I think they're up to the task themselves... but they won't work unless at least one of us is working alongside them. And there's several steps: gathering the soil and water, and some dry grass; mixing the adobe; shaping the adobe with the frames..." (he counts these off on his fingers, fidgeting as he talks) "...it'll go faster the more of that we can have happening simultaneously. ...And, um. I'll be honest: I'm not sure I trust them to get the mix consistency right. The bricks won't hold up if the mix is too far off."

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"It sounds straight-forward enough," Larkin says, "I can haul, certainly. And mix, though you'll have to tell me the consistency."

He hasn't made bricks before, but he remembers watching people make them, when he was a child. One of his neighbors, growing up, had built an outdoor stove by himself. It had taken most of a summer, but it had looked fairly simple.

Bruno thinks for a moment on how to best describe what they're aiming for. "It's a thick sticky consistency... a bit like dough? It's malleable, wants to form into clumps, but incidental clumping is broken up, we want to shape it..." He trails off briefly, then huffs at his own lack of clarity in explanation. "...It's something you get a feel for, while you're mixing it. I'll show you as we mix the first batch."

Most of what Bruno knows about making adobe he'd actually learned not long ago. His family had just finished rebuilding their house by hand before he'd woken up in the icy cave here.

"We'll either need some hoes from the tools we were given - at least, I think there were hoes? ...Or, we can knead it barefoot. The foot method is actually easier, physically, but of course it also gets you dirtier, heh..."

"I think there's hoes. There's everything else, practically, there should be hoes." He tries to pictures a consistency like that. "I'll follow your example, then. Since you know more than me."

Bruno nods thoughtfully. "Ideally we'd have straw to mix in, but... dry-ish grass should work. It probably doesn't need to be all that dry either, since we'll be mixing it into the mud anyway... It's not strictly necessary to have, but it helps with getting the consistency right."

He motions back towards the frames again. "Once we've gotten the mix going, we'll shape it into bricks and tiles with those - I'll, ah, show you that too - and leave them to dry as we mix more adobe. So... as long as the weather stays decent for a bit, we should be able to get a lot made. Outside of the firing, mixing the adobe itself is the most time-consuming part; shaping the bricks and tiles is pretty fast, once you've done a few."

"That sounds basic enough. Should I start digging up mud?" He stretches and looks around for a shovel. If he digs over there, by the river, he'd probably get some good stuff.

In the tool pile are two shovels and two hoes. He gathers them up and brings them to Bruno.

Bruno accepts a shovel and hoe, standing up. "Yes, yes - come, I'll show you where the good soil is. There's a patch that will make for a better mix than the rest - ah, right, these..." He hastily moves to also grab the frames he'd put together earlier. "Heh, we'll need these soon enough too."

"Might as well bring everything," he says, taking a couple of the frames. It's odd, gathering equipment that's not for the next battle. A nice kind of odd, though. He could get used to this.

As they walk, he tries some small talk. "Where were you from, originally?"

Bruno motions for some of the Blank Men to come with them, and they follow after the two men. He looks up when Hlaine addresses him. "Ah, Colombia - a small village in a mountain valley, more specifically. Pretty isolated from the world. Our Encanto, heh... How about you?"

Bruno sort of recalls Hlaine being from some far away place, but he still doesn't know anything about said place.

Hlaine looks sideways at the Blank Men, but they're just following them, so he ignores them. For now.

"Tanith. But it isn't there anymore. Chaos destroyed it." He thinks for a moment. "And Tanith's a planet. I don't know if you'd know it. No one else here seems to."

Bruno blinks at Hlaine, surprised. "'Planet'? You're from space?" Then he lights up. "Oh, that's - in that case, I suppose I should say I'm from Earth, Colombia's just a country, not the whole planet. You're from space! That's so -" ah, oops, right...

Bruno manages to temper his enthusiasm. "I'm sorry your home was destroyed." (Bruno isn't sure who or what Hlaine means by 'chaos' here, but Tanith's still destroyed, so it's probably irrelevant.) He gives Hlaine a sympathetic smaile. "Mama's village was destroyed by soldiers the day my sisters and I were born... it's hard to lose your home. Not that she said - well, there was later, but... well, I mean, that doesn't matter here..." He trails off into a mumble as he loses track of where he'd meant to go with that particular line of thought.

He can't help but start to perk up again after though. "Have you been to many other planets? Are there a lot of them?" It's not something he'd ever put much thought into before, travelling between planets - but just think, space travel! Amazing!

"It is. I suppose I've gotten used to it." He shrugs. It's been almost a decade since the Founding, when the Ghosts were born and Tanith died. It's just a fact of life, these days. "I've been to... nearly twenty. I think. There's tens, even hundreds of thousands of planets. It's a very big galaxy."

"Sure," says Jackie. Not like he's ever done anything with soil and clay before, but hey, it's not like he's doing anything else that isn't chopping and hauling wood, and he wants to be more useful than he's been. He still feels like the least useful person around, but that's never been new to him. Always dragging behind.

At least here, maybe he can prove himself without killing.

"Hopefully the sun stays out. I mean, if it rains, the bricks are gonna fall apart, right?"

"If they're caught in the rain too long before we can fire them, yes." Bruno grimaces just thinking about the possibility.

"Hm. We might be able to shift them over to the hut or some other sort of shelter... unless it starts raining hard very quickly... Ah, if Pepa were here, she could keep them dry..."

He sounds rueful, since he's torn between thinking it's a shame Pepa isn't here instead (her gift would be so much more useful here) and being ashamed of himself for thinking anything at all like that. It's easiest on the family if it's only Bruno who's gone, right? They got along without him for ten years. Sure, they were sad about it, but they could function perfectly well...

Adobe Log

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