Day 2
It was a very normal number of hours of daylight, and then night fell. Just like home. Just like he was used to.
The night was cold for Tiller. He was simply too large to fit in the little tunnel that the leprechauns lived in. He had to sleep outside. Maeve brought him blankets but little could change the fact that he dressed in nothing but swimming trunks.
He shivered his way through the night, his mind racing in the moments before sleep mercifully took him away from the madness of his new reality. His thoughts were a whirl. He thought of his family, missing them already. If the Shopkeeper was correct, then he had been missing for all of a quarter of an hour. He couldn’t remember where he was in the moment he was taken from them. Maybe he’d been asleep and it was the middle of the night. If that was the case then it would be days in this reality before they woke to find him gone.
But maybe they had been at dinner and he had simply winked out of existence. His heart throbbed painfully as he imagined their distress.
Maybe he had gone to work, or on an errand, and they were only now beginning to wonder where he was.
It was a strange, cruel kind of torture, to be facing months or years in this place, while his family continued without him.
But, as he drifted to sleep, he steeled himself. He had a plan. That’s what every good course of action needed. He had a problem, he had a solution and he had options to employ it.
In the morning Maeve produced little crispy pan-fried cakes. They seemed to be composed of potatoes and cornmeal. They were exquisite to Tiller’s sudden blooming hunger. But for all the crunch and softness and golden-brown flavor, they lacked salt.
With breakfast consumed and a virgin day stretching before them, Tiller began to outline his thoughts. He was surprised at how quick they were to let him take charge. Pod was disgruntled and maybe a little slighted that this stranger was taking control of their situation, but Maeve was strangely eager and excited. Where Maeve went, it seemed her husband followed.
“Okay. There’s so much to get through here. It broadly falls into three categories. Category one is shit I don’t know, which is basically everything in this place. I wouldn’t mind getting some of that out of the way before we get to work, but most of it will have to wait because category two is time sensitive. Category two is the business plan, growing shit and making money. Lots of money. Category three is kind of the baby of category one and category two, which is other ways for me to get the fuck home.”
They sat, watching him, Maeve with rapt interest and Pod with half-lidded eyes.
Tiller went on, “I’ll do two first, one second, if that makes sense, categories, that is. I’ve got a farming path and sigils that I have no idea how to use, which apparently will be helpful. I’ve also got these seed packets. Maeve, you are on the crafting path, if I understand this right. And you’ve got cooking and sewing sigils?”
“That’s right, love.”
“So, if the name of the game is to make money, then I presume I’m not crazy in assuming you can take raw materials and turn them into things that are worth more money. Is that right?”
“That you are, love. It’s how we make ends meet here as it is. But I don’t have much to make with, which is my problem.”
Tiller said, “We’ll need to do something about that. So immediately we have the beginnings of a plan: we can grow stuff and sell it. But we can also take some of the stuff we grow and you can turn it into food and clothes that we can sell for more money, right?”
Maeve nodded. Pod seemed to be watching a butterfly.
Tiller eyed Pod with no small trace of frustration on his face. “And you, Pod. You’re a wayfarer. You can carry a lot of shit and do it fast, right? It’s not going to take rocket science to figure out how we can put those skills to use.”
Maeve said, “What's rocket science, love?”
Pod said, “Know what a rocket is, but fuck is science?”
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Tiller ignored the questions, and held the seed packets up to them. “Guys, I have the impression that farming here doesn’t work like it does in my world. In my world it takes weeks and months to go from seed to food most of the time. But some of these packets say you can harvest in as little as ten days.”
Pod guffawed, “Months? Shit, sounds like your world caught the shit end of the shit stick. Imagine that, Maeve, planting taters and having to wait months to eat ’em. Sure, if that was the way we’d all be starved, from me and Maeve to Lord Dread himself.”
Tiller said, “A problem I see here is that some of these say ten days, others fifteen days, some twenty. How does it work here? If I plant crops and harvest them at ten days, but still want to gather more before making the trip to Medley, will the first ones go bad? Can I leave them in the ground until I’m ready and harvest more?”
Maeve said, “Don’t rightly know, love. You don’t have to pull ’em up right away, I know that. But we never have enough to wait around and see how long they’ll last either.”
Pod said, “If you harvest ’em and leave ’em out, they won’t last long. Birds and bugs’ll get ’em. They’ll last a right long time in a shed, but as you can see, we’re all out of sheds.”
Tiller touched his chin and thought for a moment. More to himself than to them, he said, “Would it be worth building sheds… probably…”
He looked up at them and said, “What are things really worth? If I plant twenty potato plants, and they take fifteen days to grow, how much can I sell them for?”
Pod said, “Depends on how well they grow… but I s’pose you’d probably get two gold worth of taters from a plant.”
Tiller seemed neither excited nor deflated by the information. “Two gold per plant… how much do the seeds cost?”
Maeve said, “Taters are ten gold for a packet of fifteen seeds. Normally. Price changes a little here and there, but thereabouts.”
Tiller immediately started trying to perform the mental math, but quickly concluded that he needed to get hands-on to have a sense of the scale of the project he was starting.
Maeve showed surprise and Pod disdain when Tiller revealed he couldn’t use his sigils. Their reactions were akin to him having told them he didn’t know how to wiggle his toe. They brought him to the site where they tended their own crops.
The entire island of earth was maybe half an acre in size, something like half the size of a football field. Most of it was not usable for planting. There were ungainly hillocks, trees, the little pool at the centre. The leprechauns subsisted on a small plot of reasonably flat ground.
Maeve said, “The first thing you can do is put your Earth sigil to work.”
Tiller shook his head. “I don’t know how.”
Pod said, “The fuck could you not? Queerest shit walking around with a stone band and a cinder sigil and not bein’ able to do dick with it.”
Maeve said, “It’s alright, love. It’ll come right back to you. Just try, it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
Feeling stupid, both for not being able to use his sigil and for being about to attempt to essentially use magic, Tiller faced the rough hillock alongside the small patch of potatoes and corn. He raised his hand and imagined the earth flattening out.
The insane thing is that it just worked.
He felt a swell in his arm, a warmth from his band and then an extension of himself. It was as though he had a new muscle outside himself, a huge appendage that could feel the earth and move it like soft putty. He could feel the tactile sense of the hillock as it shifted like water and flowed away, moving under his command. The experience was jarring, frightening and yet utterly exhilarating.
As the earth and stone spread out, the Earth sigil on his band glowed. He also saw a line of dullness quickly begin to descend down the face of the sigil, darkening it quickly as he exerted this new and incredible power.
When the hillock had flattened out, the material spilling from the margin of their island to cover a new portion of the blank whiteness, the dimness had spread to cover about half of the Earth sigil.
Tiller looked at it, then back to the leprechauns. He was trembling with surreal excitement at what had just happened. “That’s… very cool. Does it have a cool-down or something?”
Maeve said, “What do you mean, love?”
He showed her the half-darkened face of the sigil and she nodded, smiling at him with no small hint of condescension. “Oh, aye, love. A sigil like that has its limits, you’ve used half of what it can do today.”
“So it resets every day?”
She seemed slightly perturbed by his wording, but nodded in agreement.
Feeling foolish, but determined to expand his understanding of this world, he said, “Is there any way to, like, reset it faster? Are there potions? That sort of thing?”
Pod answered him with a scornful laugh. “Potions for a sigil? Fucking save me…”
Maeve saw his uncertainty and expanded. “Yes, love. You can do things like that, but not for folk like us. Some folks have sigils that refresh exhausted ones. It takes up a spot where another sigil could go, but lets ’em use a strong sigil for longer. Folks like that’d be specialists, giving up other options. That make sense to you, love?”
Tiller immediately went on, “I didn’t notice that happening when I used my shovel on the dinosaur.”
Maeve said, “Shovel is a passive sigil. I can sew and cook all day and my sigils won’t run out. Active ones that affect the world directly, like elemental sigils, they’ve got their limits.”
Tiller nodded. He felt overwhelmed, but at the same time he was encouraged. He was still existing in a state of suspended disbelief. Everything here was too fantastical, too alien, too impossible. If this world was a drug-induced haze or a mental episode, then he would come out of it or he wouldn’t. If it was reality, then the only way he would see his family again would be by rolling up his sleeve and getting to work. Not that he had sleeves yet, but the concept still applied.
So that’s exactly what he did.
