Olivia is thinking of using overlapping small panels to make a stepped arched bridge: aiming for four natural units of height at the peak, and a one-to-one slope, that's eight or nine units across, which will span the river without being excessive.

Small craft will be able to get through just fine and if (if) a tall ship comes through, she can help them portage or something. Honestly a ship coming through would be really good news about the existence of other people and she might want to join them instead of preserving her home here.

In more precision: each step should be one and a half units wide, by two-thirds deep, and the next riser will be a third of a unit higher and a third further, overlaping the previous riser by half its width: that's awkwardly large but not unmanageable steps and a reasonably efficient use of dust. If and when she has the dust to spare, she can consider interleaving more steps to reduce the awkwardness.

So to get up to 4 units will be 11 steps on each side, not counting the bottom step (bare ground) or the top step (part of the span). Then the span is still one and a half wide and two+ long, at two long that makes the whole bridge 10 wide and able to span an 8 wide river without issues. And she can just lengthen the span to accomodate a wider river: civil engineering is a lot less fraught with magic in the mix.

Putting her front door on the top span means she loses the entryway, so she's going to increase one unit in each direction in case she has to squeeze in an entry (inside) later; she's now planning on 3x4 instead of 2x3. She'll leave a gap between the bridge span and the door, that she can cross with the help of a staff or three but hopefully will dump any monsters who get that far into the river. And if she falls - it'll be thoroughly unpleasant but a drop into deep enough water from that height shouldn't be worse than unpleasant, and the river does seem deep enough. 

Okay. She looks for a spot where the river is not at its widest, relatively close to the ocean and without any inconveniently close trees on either side, and then it'll be time to start building. 

It takes a good deal of fiddling and tedious spell-math. There are glyphs for creating numbers, glyphs for creating small vectors, glyphs for scaling the latter by the former ...

It's a pretty repetitive process, creating the iotas for the corners of each step. But by mid afternoon her pouch is approaching three-quarters full, and the mathematically perfect arch and house on top is complete.

House! House that is hers! No more sleeping wet in a shipwreck!

She climbs up the arch, lays down the non-magical staff to crawl across the gap, and flops triumphantly on the bare violet floor (her! house!) to celebrate. 

She's glad she didn't try a more ambitious design, with almost a full quarter of her spell dust already gone. But this is going to be so entirely worth it.

She hauls her various objects into the house and then goes to kill her dinner. She didn't end up making it to the forest for alternative foraging or researching a magic kitchen setup, but she hardly cares, the house is so, so good all on its own.

The monsters that night seem pretty perplexed by her house. They can see her, because it's transparent, but they can't get to her. It turns out that the spiders can jump, but they're too big to fit through her doorway, and the others just stand around on the threshold staring forlornly at the gap between the step and the main span until another monster shoves them off to land in the river.

By morning, the water under her house is full of bobbing monsters, but her rest remains entirely undisturbed.

Successful defense! It's a very good house and a very good threshold gap. 

After the previous long day rushing to get the house up, Olivia thinks she wants a relatively restful day today. 

She's going to lounge about, eat well adequately, maybe find another sheep to comb. (Enough sheep, and she can have a blanket. More than that, and she can maybe have a mattress.)

She hasn't given up on a cooking fire. But having just spent a quarter (!) of her amethyst dust on a house and bridge, knowing that she needs to reserve an unknown quantity for water supplies and mining? She wants to first try non-magical ways of kindling flames.

Well, how's her geology knowledge? There are some pretty big pieces of flint in the gravel that occasionally appears at the river's edge. If she has something hard enough she could strike sparks off of that onto a bit of dry grass. Alternatively, sticks remain abundant.

Although the spell-glyph for igniting a fire requires only a single pinch of amethyst dust ...

Her geology knowledge is pretty good, actually! She's not sure these are flint, but whatever they are looks pretty if not useful.

She's going to start by rubbing two dry sticks together, though, because she thinks she remembers that friction and stubbornness ought to be enough? If she doesn't get any amount of flame lit within an hour, she'll try looking through her bag to see if she has anything hard enough to strike against the maybe-flint mystery dark rock.

Friction and stubbornness are theoretically enough to start a fire, but it's actually a lot harder than it looks to start a fire with just two sticks and nothing else. The traditional stick-based method involves using a rock, stick, and bow so that the stick can be held in place and spun rapidly back and forth. Even then it usually takes a noticeable amount of time to get a useful amount of heat.

By the end of the hour, her sticks are definitely warm, but they're not on fire. Her shoulders might be, from the effort, though.

Ooof. Yeah, okay, she has been successfully out-stubborned. By a pair of sticks. Hmph.

So she might have flint, or something close enough, and she might have steel, or something close enough.

Does she have something close enough to steel? She has

- one six inch bookmark, made out of some kind of metal, probably aluminum?

- one shoulder strap buckle, probably but not verifiably plastic 

- one zipper, definitely plastic 

- the rivets holding her wallet together, metallic but tiny

- one pair of silver hoop earrings, currently worn

- one thoroughly waterlogged and extremely dead smartphone, made out of a Mystery Modern Material 

- the lump of gold?!? from the TOMES barrel 

- a dime and six pennies

She will try all of these except the zipper, starting with the bookmark and the coins.

The bookmark proves to be steel-like enough for her purposes, at least. It produces a small scattering of sparks, which can be gently coaxed into settling onto carefully-shredded dry grass. After a few attempts, she has a tiny flame!

Olivia coaxes the flame from dry grass to dry shredded bark, and then to snapped fragments of twig, and then to larger twigs and eventually to whole sticks piled loosely with plenty of room for airflow.

Soon enough (not very soon, but she is both patient and stubborn), there's a small fire burning in the hollow she'd previously dug in the beach sand and lined with river rocks.

The fire isn't much to look at, in the daylight, but it's warm and the smoke is fragrant and so, after ensuring that she had piled up enough sticks to keep it fed, Olivia lies down in the sun-warmed sand and naps.

In the center of her fire, the first sticks render down into coals — and sticks + coals + extra fuel = campfire.

When she wakes up, the fire has transformed into a neatly-stacked pile of small logs, with a larger fire contained in the center. The smoke drifts lazily in the breeze off of the ocean.

What. No. What.

When she drifted off she had a campfire. Now she has this - this - 

It's not actually reasonable to get mad at the laws of physics even when it's Oz physics. But she went to sleep thinking she, maybe, finally, was getting a handle on things -

It's abundantly clear that she does not, in fact, have a handle on things. 

She watches the fire for a while, letting the flickering motion calm her down. Eventually, she'll need to add a(nother) log to the fire, and she can figure out how that works in Oz when she gets there, not right away.

... no? Why would she need to add another log to the fire? She has successfully made a campfire, and things don't just go around spontaneously unmaking themselves. That would be silly.

The campfire continues to burn merrily away, not consuming any visible fuel.

Whatever that is, it's not fire, the combustion of fuel and oxygen that produces heat. This doesn't leave Olivia much of a toehold into understanding what it is.

Maybe she was too hasty, calling this place Oz. The landscape is all Oz, "countries" with nearly sharp borders across which the entire landscape changes, animals with no camouflage and no fear of people, mystery TOMES with magic spells, and so on. 

But when she's tried to interact with reality in more detail? It starts looking a little like Wonderland. Riddles, illogic, abrupt transformations from what she (thought she) knew into something entirely different.

Are the fish actually fish or are they the exposed guts of reality saying EAT ME that just happen to look like fish? If she goes looking in the right wrong places, is she going to find a vorpal sword, or perhaps a well-dressed walrus playing a mean-spirited trick on his supper?

Olivia shakes her head. She isn't cajoling the fish into becoming supper, just hitting them with fists. And as far as she can tell she hasn't stopped needing to eat. 

She definitely still needs to eat. Luckily, she can now eat cooked fish, if her heart desires.

This river is starting to get a little sparse in the fish department, though, so she probably can't subsist on just fish forever. Not without exploring a bit more.

For this evening meal, cooked fish. For tomorrow, exploration. She still remembers where the clump of nonpoisonous berries in the forest was.

And now that she understands she's in Wonderland, where it's silly to even try predicting which foods are "poisonous", that is, have effects on her she doesn't want, she can go ahead and be more adventurous about trying different possible foods.

Does cooking a fish over the Wonderland campfire have the same problem that cooking over open flame without knowing how has on Earth? That is to say, producing a meal that's both burned and raw at the same time? Or does it, in some mysterious Wonderland fashion, result in a perfectly cooked fish, seasoned to perfection with potatoes on the side?

There are no spontaneous potatoes or seasonings, but the fish does cook uniformly and completely over the course of a few minutes.

Oh my. It's delicious.

If she'd known she'd get a Wonderland fire with Wonderland amounts of safety and its own Wonderland cooking ability entirely separate from her own, she would have spared a few hours to make fire (or rather, not-fire) days ago. 

Warm and well fed, Olivia reluctantly gets up from the not-fire on the beach and ascends the bridge to her new home.

The shimmery purple panels continue to hang fixed in space, exactly the way that monsters don't. The inside is still a bit spartan, but it does give her a lovely view of the simultaneous sunset and moonrise. Her campfire is visible on the beach, sending smoke skyward and setting an unlucky spider on fire when it tries to investigate.

Ha. If the monsters didn't consistently vanish by morning she bets she could eat perfectly cooked spider for breakfast. 

Given the absolute weirdness of both entirely and abruptly vanishing from earth, and the nightly chorus of violence, it's possible she should have realized earlier just how many of her assumptions didn't apply here. But she's been busy and stressed with immediate survival and everything that entails. 

So far none of the Wonderland-isms have actually been tricky, actually? Dangerous, yes, not exactly matching her initial assumptions, yes, but everything (by daylight) has been at worst neutral, she thinks. None of it has been hiding its nature, just, existing in the presence of her still Earth-based assumptions.

Even the nightly monster chorus could easily have snuck up on her, that first night, if they had tried at all; possibly everyone who survives their first week here ends up thinking about the monsters as a nuisance, the way the journal author wrote about ways to keep them out of their pantry. 

She is still using books as a pillow and her rain jacket as her only sheet or blanket, yes. She's confident she'll be able to improve on that situation soon, what with the wild sheep letting her comb them and the masses of available straw. Soon. Not tomorrow, since she needs more and different food sources first, but soon.

The new day dawns cold and clear. There's a sprinkling of dew across the grass. The sheep seem unbothered by this, bundled up as they are in their thick wool coats.

It's a peaceful place, really. Not much happens that she doesn't cause herself.

Brrr. Olivia wakes up cold, which is not unusual (see: sandbar, half rotten ship, etc) but feels a lot more unpleasant when she has a little breathing room past the immediate survival crisis.

Did her strange Wonderland campfire last the night? If so, she's going to warm herself up at it before tackling the day.

Yup! The campfire is still burning merrily, despite the spider's best efforts. Actually, speaking of the spider — there is a little coil of string lying a little way down the beach. It is slightly singed, but might still be useful for something.

String? Olivia is grabbing that string. There's lots of things string is useful for.

She brushes off the soot, sniffs cautiously - it might be silk? Mostly it doesn't smell anything but wet. 

If monsters sometimes leave behind objects - maybe only when they die - that opens up a whole new avenue of potential gathering options. Not, unfortunately, ones she's particularly well suited to taking advantage of at the moment, but options nonetheless.

Warmed and cheered, Olivia picks herself up from the campfire and heads north in search of trees and breakfast.