Sorry for the delay. Motivation and inspiration dwindled for a little bit. But they are back now and raging!

Day 38

Well... that is interesting...

I woke up at just the right time to watch the new resident changing her clothes. She wears a corset; her assets are even more bountiful than I realized. I was thinking a perky C cup on the smaller end of the scale... she's a solid, saucy D cup, with a soul easing jiggle.

I grin wickedly, thinking about how to free her suffering bounty from the cage... a quick snip of a set of scissors-katar... perhaps borrow the leather straps for crafting? Heheh. Lecherous thoughts in the morning, is there a better time? Watching a half-naked woman. The best part, she isn't as furry as I expected from her head. It only covers her back a little, blending enough with her scalp to resemble a human girl with long hair.

Well I'm not going to treat her like a slave, at the same time, she is the only thing thing I have any sexual attraction to out here. It is damn hard not to take advantage of my position.

Rats simply don't do it for me. I look at the teeth and the row upon row of nipples... egh. They're cute enough in a 'they are family' kind of way. But here I have an attractive young woman completely under my thumb. My instincts are getting quite insistent.

I'd better build up some kind of relationship, so my urges don't get out of hand...

As a side note, Niala's sleeping on me, again. It is kind of sad. Is she trying to provoke my lust? She's still naïve enough to fail to realize the point of intimacy isn't the 'sleeping' part. Still I guess that means my little guy is safe from her, for a while. She is probably getting quite desperate. We are both young adults now. At least by rat development. The other rats our age are already paired up. Some probably have the next generation under development.

We breed, develop and live fast. I wonder. How long do I have? I regret not asking that old bastard his age before I made him fish food. Twelve years? Twenty? Thirty? Hmm. Scientists say that the average speed of the heartbeat of a species (at rest) is directly related to longevity... this heart of mine is fluttering along at quite a pace. So my life span is far shorter than human. Well, no surprise there. Human life-span is exceptional on Earth, only a few mammals and reptiles exceed it.

This woman will probably out-live me greatly. Depressing.

Shifting Niala away I call out to the girl softly. I want to check her pulse.

She startles and tries to cover up. She seems worried, probably because of how delicate her situation is. It seems she does realize just how aroused I am, which is making her cautious. I indicate I'm not going to hurt her.

She relents and stretches out her arm at my insistence, unintentionally flashing me a second time with a view of soft, perky heaven. I realize this is exactly why she was personal slave to a high ranking officer. I suppose he took advantage of her as often as he could, not that I blame him. It is almost painful resisting.

I do eventually check her heartbeat, it is of course faster than my own; because she is terrified of me. God, sometimes I'm such a dumb-ass.

Worse Niala is watching the whole farce.

Dammit. With my sister involved things will probably self-destruct.

I call her over and try to explain what is happening. Instead I end up having to explain why the woman is here at all. Niala calls me stupid. She has a point too. I mean I could have just released her and sent her home with the soldiers. I suspect they would have honored that deal, but we are in a treacherous world; she might have just returned to being slave to the officer once again.

The foreign girl is still very anxious, now that we are clearly arguing over her presence, although I have no clue how much she understands. Probably just enough to make it very uncomfortable.

I settle for appeasing Niala by spending the day foraging with her and mother, leaving our new housekeeper to clean. The haul of high quality food is good, our encounters with monsters, not so much.

I dragged Boney the giant bone golem along as bodyguard and left Skully guarding the gate as usual. We were in a particularly dense area of the forest when we ran into the undead giant's corpse. Not the aggressive undead monster, his shattered remnants. I only knew it was him because his cleaver was there.

Now this has me quite spooked, since my own golems are probably only a little tougher than that undead monster. If I had my gold and steel golem I'd be far less worried. That unfortunately is en route to who knows where.

I can only assume this is the work of the Forest room's boss monster. That is bad news, if it is waking up. It means very soon it will start roaming and killing. I have no clue what did this, except for one gigantic feather, half my height and a trail of massive clawed footprints leading deeper into the forest. Footprints wider than I am tall.

I tell you, I practically shat bricks.

The golem became our emergency escape device, carrying us away at a sprint. Looking back I swear I saw the thing glaring at us, partially hidden in the tree branches. At least I had the presence of mind to have the golem swipe the cleaver first. I'm certainly going to need it in the face of whatever the hell that was.

I'm guesstimating the thing was bigger than the Tyranosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park, half again as tall as the giants. Whatever defenses and golems I can currently muster mean jack shit in front of a monster like that. Not even my old steel golem would be a match. Time to get serious. Forget people being a threat when there are worse things lurking with a mind to eat you.

At this point all thoughts of my slave were out the window. So I was mildly surprised to find her at home.

She was waiting, having cleaned the room quite well considering the substantial mess. She had converted a sturdy branch and a bundle of reeds into a crude broom. The place was nearly spotless, aside from the massive hunk of armor in the rear and the piles of weapons I had scattered about.

Most of the useful materials were still here but really, reeds, twigs and sticks aren't going to cut it.

I need proper supplies and the iron was still a long way off.

I can really only think of two places I can get materials that will be of any use. It is risky though. I have Mother close the main gate and head out with both golems, Skully with the cleaver in hand.

Entering the swamp room I look around carefully, observing the giant turtles. I find a moderate sized one, a little taller than my golems and circle around. When we find the head I have Boney walk up to it slowly as Skully circles around from the left with the cleaver. I'm trying to get a clean shot at the neck as it attacks Boney.

I was taken by surprise by the sheer ferocity and power of the bite. It took off Boney's arm in one snap of it's beaked jaws. The slash from Skully was right on the mark however and the massive heavy sword smashed through the spine of the beast.

The creature thrashed as it died, slamming into Skully hard enough to knock it down causing a small decrease in durability. I had no way of repairing Boney either, who was far worse off with durability cut to sixty percent.

However my salvage run was just what I needed. The shell of this massive turtle had an equally massive thirty four points of modification available. That was only the start of my harvesting. The bones were decent as well and beyond that the tendons and fat had uses as well.

Using the golems I was able to dismantle the beast quickly with the cleaver. I set aside the choice cuts of meat, the skin, fat and tendons and had the golems dump the shell into the river. The plan to use the fish to clean the shell was quite effective, as in less than an hour I had a massive pile of bones and a high quality shell, picked clean. The skull of the turtle met the same fate.

Hmm. Like this I could replenish my stock of bone golem components. I have almost enough to make a second spare golem although it certainly won't be like these two giant based ones. After all I'm taking the shell off it and that includes the spine of the turtle which is fused with the armor. I'll need to think of replacement components.

Using the empty shell like a shopping trolley to hold the other materials and Boney's severed arm I return. I immediately begin setting up my new defenses because time is not on my side at the moment. I split the shell of the turtle into three pieces and using bones and tendons construct a pair of heavy ballistas, one facing the river entrance one the main gate. The arms of the bow are composite turtle-shell and bone fused together and strengthened by the turtle leather as a binding, the string of the weapon naturally tendon. I understand some early siege weapons were made from the knotted sinews of cattle, so this should give it quite a punch, using one whole monster tendon.

The quarrels for this mighty crossbow are made from the femurs of the tortoise with a triangular shard of the shell as the head. I make a second set of quarrels from the humerus bones of the turtle, however I don't see this weapon as being anything more than a single-shot win/lose scenario. If I miss there is no time to reload. That is why there are two of them side by side. They are on a swivel.

Using the golems I can aim them both in the correct direction and take a shot in moments. If the monster is faster than I can run, I probably won't get to the second ballista in time. However I don't intend for the beast to get a clean run at me. First of all I have the golems as meat shields (ironic). As a second line of defense I start crafting pitfall traps with thin spikes of leftover turtle shell. The pitfalls are wide and the covers strong. Anything rat sized isn't going to trigger them. I figure the beast (probably a bird) is at least as heavy as my golems, so I used their weight to calibrate the allowances.

I marked the traps with the scent of turtle blood so the rats know they are dangerous. I yell out to the staring rats, that line the doorways watching that the forest monster is awake and how to spot my traps.

The few older rats that recognize what I'm talking about look visibly stunned.

A few inspect the traps and ballistas. None of them dare to touch them though, thanks to my scapegoat, Old Rat (deceased). My devices are currently taboo, which suits me just fine. Less risk of them wasting our ballista ammo or stupidly opening the gates.

I station Skully at the ballistas, just to be sure they aren't tampered with. Boney follows me with the remnants of my hunting trip, including the massive turtle skull.

Sister tries to greet me but I blow her off, settling in to craft myself some better weapons for this kind of fight. I don't know IF the bird monster is going to kick in our gate, nor do I want to be unprepared IF it does.

Since the ballista seems to be handy I knock together an arbalest. A double sided, four armed variant to allow me to immediately fire again after firing, without the need to reload. Essentially it is just a heavier, high powered version of a crossbow. I test fire it, using a steel bolt I crafted from the dwindling remains of the giant dagger.

My target is the iron breastplate. Not only does the bolt fly straight, which was the first modification I added to the weapon; the result of the strike was that the head and shaft of the bolt is embedded in the metal, by two inches. I nearly choked when I saw that. The reason I was so surprised is the crossbow I made has the added effect of having 'reduced recoil'. It barely jerked when I fired. Usually there would be a considerable kick to the weapon. With the lack of any grief I half-expected there was little power behind it, but to drill that deep in solid iron... it is going to cause one bird quite a headache.

I make half a dozen bolts and prep the weapon for immediate use.

I look at the girl who seems fascinated by my work. I wink at her before supplying her with dinner in the form of fresh water and an apple-sized strawberry. She looks hungry still, after that. Well I can't blame her. One meal a day is harsh. I bring her attention to my fresh meat.

She looks ravenous.

Using a set of twigs and a simple bow I manage after an effort to make a small fire. It worries Mother and Niala significantly. Animal instincts, no doubt. The smell of grilling meat quickly overcomes their apprehensions. I form a set of plates from turtle-shell (I imagined them as blunt chakrams) and simple knives and forks (since they technically count as weapons I was able to form them from some of the silver in the back room). From the iron breastplate I formed a frying-pan which funnily enough counted as a weapon.

Thus we all sat down and ate a civilized meal of (turtle) steak.

The meat was tough, as I expected but the flavor was not unpleasant; added to that it was the first time either Niala or I had eaten meat and the first time Mother had eaten cooked meat. As a result there were happy faces all around, not least of all the slave girl, who seemed rapt by the food. Her smile as she savored it was wide and she seemed to have forgotten we were in the room.

Niala and Mother gave up on the knife and only used the fork and their fingers, while I and the slave girl casually used our implements. She seemed impressed I was using them skillfully. Her own movements as she used the knife were elegant.

I guess table manners aren't expected of rats.

I add the finishing touches to one more fearsome new weapon before I start nodding off. I set the golem as an alarm, to warn us of danger by stomping.

Later we settled in for the night. For some reason the girl offered me her wrist... it took me a while to realize she wanted me to take her pulse again. It is still strangely high. Her species must live like and die like mayflies...

What we learned:

Big Bird of doom incoming! (He's second highest tier!)

The only reason Niala and Mother rat even use the fork is because they envy the table manners of the other two...

Turtles really aren't that dangerous. Provided you don't get close.