Olivia's mind is elsewhere, so the first thing she notices about the transit is her boot landing on soft grass instead of pavement. She doesn't see what she trips on -- thin air is always a possibility -- trips, flails, stands back up, and takes in the surroundings.

The unexpected surroundings.

How? What? Um. UM. There's no sign of the city anywhere, is there? No? Okay. No cell reception either? This is rather more adventure than Olivia was expecting or intending! She still has hold of her bag, thankfully, with her sketchbook and various other sundries, but not much else.

The oft repeated advice for being Lost In The Wilderness is to stay put. She fishes out her (conveniently red) bandana, applies it to the top of her head, and begins to sketch the landscape. The sun is near the horizon, which could mean sunrise or sunset, unfortunately enough. She's hoping for sunrise; nights get cold.

There's no sign of cities, and no cell towers. The sun slowly rises as she sketches, showing that it is, indeed, morning.

A small cow, about as tall as her waist, meanders out of the grass and moos at her contemplatively. If it has any particular opinions on her sketch, it doesn't express them.

A cow? A miniature cow? Oookay. 

"Hello," she says aloud, feeling slightly foolish, but better foolish than trampled because the cow was startled by her. "Are you a cow? I didn't know cows got that small. Even baby cows. I sure hope Mama Cow isn't right behind you. Or worse, right behind me." She can't see a Mama Cow but she's not sure that means much. In fact, she's going to back carefully away from this calf(?), which is much too close for probable wildlife.

Lacking a trail, some of this grass is going to get stomped on (sorry grass!).

The cow is not particularly bothered by her departure. It lowers its head to chew on some of the grass. From a higher vantage point on the hill, she can see two other similarly sized cows in the direction of the sea.

This angle makes the smoke to the north more apparent, along with what might be the top of a wooden roof.

A giant bee — the size of a cow's head — buzzes out of the forest about 100 meters away and starts circling a flower.

That does it. She's officially not in Kansas anymore. (She wasn't in Kansas to begin with, but - she's got to be somewhere like Oz. Giant. Bee.)

The smoke is either a good sign or a very bad one, and Olivia's pretty sure she can't actually tell the difference without getting close. That could be the slope of a roof, or it could be her imagination playing tricks on her, or it could be something bizarrely Oz. Either which way, fire is dangerous.

It's been a couple hours, by this point, and she's going to need water to drink today. She's close enough to the ocean to smell it, and that's the way she'd want to head. To the shore, and then southward, away from the fire. Eyes peeled for any sign of a creek or inlet, or other low place water might gather to flow out into the ocean. 

The hills dwindle down to a gravel beach where the land meets the sea. Kelp waves in the water off of the coast, and the water is remarkably clear; she can see right down to the patches of sand and dirt on the sea floor. Heading south means that the land she is walking along becomes more arid — first just less flowery and with occasional dead bushes, and then suddenly transitioning into actual sandy desert, complete with cacti, in the space of a kilometer. A small outcropping of sandstone juts out some ways inland, and there is a stepped pyramid standing in the shade of it.

The first river she comes to actually flows through that desert, although "flows" may be the wrong word, because this water is perfectly level with the water in the ocean, and doesn't really appear to be moving. There's a definite difference between the river water and the sea-water, though. They're different colors, and the river water doesn't smell of salt at all. An inky black squid jets aimlessly around in the river, chasing after dark red and grey fish the size of her arm.

Freshwater! Olivia is delighted. Lacking a way to purify it, she'll just drink it down until she isn't thirsty anymore. Cross the "horrible waterborne illness" bridge if, no, when, she gets there. 

The river is perfectly level with the ocean, but unmixed? Has she been walking along the water for long enough to observe if the tide is going in or out? If the tide is rising, or near the high tide line, then that could make a certain amount of sense. And would mean she got pretty lucky coming across this river when she did.

There is, now that she mentions it, no sign of tides going either way. The current sand and earlier gravel are both dry, there is no seaweed strewn across the beach, and no little filter feeders in evidence. The water level has not changed, and if she has any particular knowledge of geography, she will see that the coast has not been shaped by tides in the expected ways — dragging sand away from exposed points, or pushing it up into coves.

Weird. No moon, maybe? Unless she can see a moon in the sky now. But she thinks she remembers something about how the moon lining up with the sun makes tides stronger, so even without a moon there should be some tides.

This calls for a List.

Oz Physics:
- Giant Insect (Bee)
- No tidal range
- No mixing between river and ocean.

She thinks that's everything so far?

In which case the next thing she needs for survival is --

-- to sit down and start crying, apparently. She misses, fuck, everything and everyone: her cats, who she's sure will be taken care of but not by her. Her own home. Her crochet, frozen in progress forever. Her moms, who she's not going to be able to tell about this place, who will have to conclude that she just, went for a walk and vanished. Her online friends, likewise, except more so because there won't even be a physical absence to lack any plausible explanation. Just a digital absence with too many explanations and all of them wrong.

She cries herself thirsty, and drinks from the river again.

Okay. Deep breath. 

The fact that the river is in the desert is not ideal, since she needs to stay close to her only source of freshwater, but she also needs to make progress on finding herself food and shelter. The fish are food if she can catch them, but that's a big if.

She squints at the sky. She doesn't think it's past noon yet? She has time to explore upriver.

It's nearing noon, but yes, she has time.

Upriver there is: more sand. Also a drove of jackrabbits dodging around between the cacti.

The stepped pyramid turns out to look over the river as she gets closer, so she has a good view of the structure. There are a pair of short towers on either side of an entrance into the body of the structure. Two swooping ankhs are picked out on the outer faces of the towers in red sandstone. The whole thing is ten meters high.

By the time she's level with the structure, she can just see the far edge of the desert, where it gives away to a flat expanse of dry grass.

Huh, and no signs of people? Other than the structure itself, that is.

She slowly and gingerly walks up to the main entrance, ready to bolt at the first sign of movement.

The inside is spacious, and cool after the heat of the desert sun. The roof is supported by thick pillars, and a geometric design of red sandstone and terracotta covers the floor. There are no people inside, though. The place feels old and abandoned; small amounts of sand have drifted into the corners, although the actual floor itself is clear. A skylight at the top of the pyramid lets in a shaft of the noontime sun to fall directly on the center of the design.

Actually, in the light, it looks sort of like the central blue tile could be levered up from the floor, if she is the sort of person who would do that sort of thing.

Score! This looks like a great place to spend the night. With the thick sandstone above her, it should stay reasonably warm inside all night, and she'll be protected from any wind.

She makes a mental note of the blue tile, but doesn't touch it - she's a guest of this place at least for now, and besides, she has more than enough work on her plate.

Time to try to catch a fish.

The fish don't particularly want to be caught, but they're too big to dart away elegantly. If she's willing to get wet she can do a certain amount of precocious piscosus pugilism.

The sun is hovering around mid-afternoon, sparkling off the water and the sand, by the time she has a dead fish in hand. It is identifiable as sockeye salmon, to someone with a working knowledge of fish.

Olivia doesn't know enough about fish to identify the species when they don't come labeled at the fish counter of a grocery store. 

She needs to either cook this fish or eat it right now, raw. Unfortunately, she has no matches, no other way to start a fire, and, this being the desert, no fuel for it either. Sushi it is. 

After she's eaten, she intends on using the rest of the daylight to explore upriver into the dry grass. Being careful to turn around with a generous margin so she can make it back and settle in before dark.

It's not a tremendously long walk. The dry plains are dotted with the occasional grey-barked umbrella-shaped tree. To the north is a denser forest — perhaps a different side of the same one she saw when she arrived here. To the south, there is more scrubby brush and, quite a distance away, a cluster of light-pink-and-grey buildings. It's hard to make out details from here, though.

Tomorrow she'll hike over to the buildings.

Tonight, she keeps an eye out for a good spot to ford the river. But most of her attention is on making it back to the pyramid campsite and, finally, to sleep. It's been a very long day.

Eventually, the sun dips below the Western sea, sending long shadows reaching across the desert. Opposite it, the moon rises, producing a gentler light, just bright enough to see by.

Not bright enough to prevent monsters from spawning.

As the last of the sunset fades from the sky, and the stars fully come out, Olivia's rest is interrupted by a low groan from outside, and a the sound of bones clattering.

Oh that is not a good sound. Goddamn.

She gets up, grumpily, and walks over to the doorway to see what's up. (Ow. Her feet ache from all the walking the day before.)

Outside, a number of figures now dot the desert. The closest are a greenish festering corpse wearing scraps of blue fabric, and a skeletal archer, both of whom turn to her as she appears in the door. The corpse raises its arms and begins lurching in her direction while the archer nocks an arrow.

Shit! Apparently she should have been a lot more worried about the mysterious noises. She ducks out of view.

Time to set a record for fastest broken camp. The rain shell she was using as a ground cloth goes on and gets zipped up; everything else gets tossed into the bag every which way. She pulls out her umbrella, which is not terribly pointy but is approximately a metal stick, and in her other hand she'll hold her bag in front of her as a makeshift shield. 

Maybe, if she's very very lucky, skeletons can't come inside pyramids, even abandoned pyramids that aren't terribly much like temples. She presses herself to the wall next to the door, and listens as hard as she can.

Alas, it is technically named a desert pyramid, and not a desert temple, although she has no way to know that.

An arrow sails through the door and clatters on the floor. On the other hand, the sound of bones isn't coming any closer, leaving the dragging, shuffling steps of the zombie to advance alone. It makes a low moaning noise, and its hands proceed it into the pyramid.

Oh, she doesn't like that. Stab, replies the umbrella in the general direction of the hands. Shove, says the messenger bag as a follow-up, and then there is a general sprint towards the river.

The zombie stumbles back and lets her run past it. The skeleton sends another arrow in her direction, but she's running more quickly than it can spin and it thocks into the sand. A giant spider, as wide as she is tall, hisses at her as she sprints past.

The river is reassuringly monster-free; it only features a squid and some more fish.

Monster-free has shot to the top of Olivia's preferred qualities in a place.

Unfortunately, the river is lacking a whole bunch of other things she would really rather have, like "shelter" and "dryness". Can she safely stand on the bank of the river or is she going to be chased all the way in?

Well if she's going to stand still, then this skeleton is going to shoot more arrows at her. Just because the monsters aren't in the river doesn't mean that they can't still see her.

Ugh, yes, fiiiiine. She plunges into the water, holding up the bookbag so it doesn't get wet, and also so there's something between her and the More Arrows. 

The whole situation is too surreal, and Olivia too exhausted, to really manage to be afraid. She knows she has to keep moving. 

Upriver or down? Up, she thinks there's a chance she can leave these two behind when she hits the grassland, if they're tied to the desert or to the pyramid. And if she can't, her next best option might actually be to stay underwater as much as possible and hope she doesn't get too cold to stay alive. It's not like the coastline is any likelier to be safe than the scrub, and it's a lot further away.

The zombie shuffles after her, and the spider joins it. Both turn out to be willing to swim ... but not much good at it. They sort of flail and bob ineffectually at the surface, and she can stay out of their reach underwater and outpace them with a few good kicks. Other creatures across the desert have noticed the commotion by this point, and begun shuffling in her direction.

Also, there is now an arrow sticking out of her bookbag, for whatever that's worth. At least the river has no current to fight against.

She hurls the bookbag, plus arrow, at the shore (the shore opposite Worst Arrow Guy), since it won't hold together for much longer anyway. She can come back for it after these assholes give up. If she's still alive.

Thus unencumbered, she sets off swimming upstream, trying to stay close to the far shore and beneath the waters surface as much as possible. Since Worst Arrow Guy doesn't seem to be out of arrows despite shooting several so far.

Indeed, he doesn't seem to be getting them from anywhere, he just has them. Briefly, before he tries to give them to her at high velocity.

The good news is that her swimming is legitimately faster than the monsters, and she does eventually get out of the skeleton archer's range. The bad news is that the monsters are not a desert-only phenomenon, and appear to be hanging out in the scrub brush too. The medium news is that they don't actually notice her until she has to come up for air, but when she does they spin to face her and start heading toward the river.

The monsters include, besides the previously mentioned skeletons, zombies, and spiders, tall green mushrooms that hiss and explode into clouds of spores, and tall black figures with disproportionately long limbs that teleport from place to place and make angry vibrating noises when she looks at them. The black figures don't seem to be teleporting to anywhere, though, just sort of generally around.

Unfortunately, Olivia is among the set of Earth humans who wear corrective glasses. Thus, she can't actually see the new monsters, her glasses being, while still on her face, too wet to usefully correct her vision. 

She can hear the new monsters, and see the fuzzy shape of new foliage, and add two and two together. 

She could run faster, for less cost in exhaustion, than she can swim. But, the monsters are everywhere on land; running from one monster inevitably means running towards another. But swimming just pulls all the monsters towards the river, stringing them behind her.

So she doesn't dare get out of the water, and relatedly doesn't dare turn around. She can already tell this is going to be an all night endurance race, and one she will almost certainly lose. But she's awake, second wind pulling strength that she'll pay for tomorrow, and she's determined to keep moving as long as she can.

Olivia swims onward.

Well, the monsters don't really exhibit any strategy. They're faster on land than she is in the water, but they all move toward where she is, not toward where she will be, so by the time they reach the banks of the river she's past them, and they're slower in the water.

As long as she just keeps moving, she can keep ahead of them, and, occasional sudden arrow not withstanding, she will live.

Above her, the moon has reached its zenith. It's hard to see, with the water and her glasses and the grueling exertion, but there might be some light ahead and off to the right. She can definitely tell when the water around her switches abruptly to saltwater.

Oh. That makes no sense? She's so tired and nothing makes sense anymore.

It's suddenly easier to float, harder to push herself under, and she was relying on "under" to confuse and slow her pursuit. And she's so very, very tired. 

She floats. She tries not to sleep. She stops moving forward, even the fear of monsters unable to motivate her to go further from land. (Right or wrong, she is beyond explicit reasoning, and the ocean has been many things to Olivia but safety was never a one of them.)

The salt water does not prevent the monsters, ranged along the shore, from splashing slowly in her direction. The source of the light, however, might.

Now that she's close enough to see it, the source of the light is a ship, overturned and half-sunken. Someone has stuck a burning torch into the sand near it. If she could duck inside, the monsters might not be able to follow her, given that their swimming seems limited to the surface.

If she can just get under, she'll have both an air pocket and a wall between herself and the slow but unstoppable monster horde. 

She takes a deep breath, and forces herself under the surface for hopefully the last time.

The ship was not really designed to be navigated in this orientation, but she can duck under what used to be the railing and come up in the air pocket formed by the hull. There are holes in the deck, and she can pull herself up through them onto the remainder of the flooring, mostly out of the water.

The monsters splash around the outside of the boat, but don't seem to be able to find a way in. A few rotten holes in the wood bring in shafts of pale moonlight, just enough to see by. A barrel, sealed against seawater and labeled TOMES sits in one corner of her air bubble.

Not only safe from the monsters but nearly all the way out of the water. She mumbles a "thanks," in case there's anyone watching over her, strips off her wet clothes, and leans against the barrel.

The shipwreck is not silent. The groan of aged timbers is joined by the groan of zombies and the clank of skeletons and the hiss of spiders. But they're out there, and she's in here.

Eventually, the moon sets and the sun rises. There's a sudden crackle and the stench of burnt flesh, followed by a dull thudding as the skeletons come apart and the bones thud against the hull. The spiders seem to lose interest in her and wander away. The green mushroom creatures are still splashing around, though.

Huh? Oh, sunlight, nice. Olivia is in favor of sunlight for all the usual reasons and also because it sure sounds like the monsters aren't.

She looks out through one of the gaps, spots the green mushroom monsters, and decides that leaving the shipwreck can wait until after she's slept. 

Zzzzzzzz.

Unless anything bothers her, she'll be asleep until the early afternoon.

Nothing bothers her. The green mushroom monsters eventually either succumb to the sunlight or just wander away. By mid-afternoon, there is nothing here except her, the shipwreck, the beach, and the clear blue water.

Olivia wakes. 

She's alive! It's really excellent, being alive, and she inhales the salt air, savoring it. 

In the corner of her little sanctuary, there's a barrel labeled TOMES, and she itches to find out what's inside. Books? Information? Not-Oz is a deeply strange place and really anything, even fiction, would help a lot. 

She's also ravenously hungry and thirsty, and that has to come first. Especially since she doesn't know exactly how long she has until sunset and, she has to assume, another monster onslaught. With a sigh, she pulls on her clothes and dives back under the hull.

Can she see the shore? Can she see the river she was swimming in last night?

Yes to both. The shipwreck is on a little sand bar only a handful of meters from shore, and the river empties out — if that is the right word for a river that still does not seem to involve flowing — just down the beach from it. The beach itself is fine white sand. To the north, the coast curves, eventually leading to an area with tall, hilly forests. To the south, it continues, beach pressed between ocean and the scrubby umbrella-tree area, until it becomes too far away to see clearly.

Fish and squid dart around in the river, and they have presumably not heard any fishy gossip about her martial prowess, because they seem no more cautious of her than previous fish have been.

The fish are unprepared for Olivia's mighty skills, and one of them is about to become DINNER. Sushi has never been as appealing to her as it is right now; she feels like she could eat an entire fish.

She gets herself from sandbar to shore to the river, gulps down blessed fresh water, and sets to catching herself a fish.

It is still not particularly easy, to catch and kill a fish with one's bare hands, but the only thing making it harder than last time is Olivia's soreness and hunger. Soon enough the fish is dead and as edible as random uncooked fish ever get.

Which is edible enough to almost certainly not poison her, a sufficient threshold for Olivia's current hunger.

She cannot actually eat a whole fish. She can eat until she's pleasantly stuffed. Then: back to the ship, to attempt to open up the TOMES barrel.

The TOMES barrel opens up without hassle. Inside are a set of worn leather journals, a leather bag full of sparkly purple powder, a palm-sized glowing purple crystal, two books that tingle when she touches them, a gold ingot, a lump of coal, and a coil of string.

Possibly whoever labeled this barrel was not super clear on what a TOME was.

Ahuh. Another one for the Oz Facts list, whenever she manages to retrieve her bag with her own journal-sketchbook. 

She's going to look at the journals first. Did whoever put the TOMES barrel together happen to write anything inside, such as a ships log or maybe a description of a TOME or even a shopping list? (Actually a shopping list would be really cool, implying as it does the existence of shops in Ozland.)

No, the author didn't write any of those things. What they did write is:

I seem to have discovered a new method of magical arts, in which one draws patterns strange and wild onto a hexagonal grid. It fascinates me. I've decided to start a journal of my thoughts and findings. The practitioners of this art would cast their so-called Hexes by drawing strange patterns in the air with a Staff -- or craft powerful magical items to do the casting for them. How might I do the same?

Below that are a series of Encyclopedia-style indexed entries covering a variety of topics — a "crafting pattern" for a staff, musings about the nature of "medea" (the energy that powers spells), and a huge number of "glyphs" and their associated meanings. Apparently the big crystal is an amethyst: a chunk of solidified medea, and also the main component in making a staff.

!!! magic !!!

The amethysts Olivia is familiar with are made of quartz, not medea: unless quartz is medea and magic can be cast with ordinary beach sand.

Sounds like she needs a staff to cast any spells. Besides the amethyst, what other materials does the Staff pattern call for, and were all of them packed in the barrel?

Making a staff requires wooden planks and three sticks. Also a crafting table, which the book does not explain how to make, but which is probably just a flat surface large enough to arrange everything on, based on the context. None of these things appear to be in the barrel.

Fortunately, this shipwreck happens to be mostly composed of wooden planks.

Fascinating. Olivia's spatial intuition is not coming up with a way to arrange three planks, three sticks, a large crystal, and no other materials or tools in a way that would remotely resemble a staff. Presumably there's magic involved. 

She thinks she can harvest three planks from the interior of this shipwreck without compromising it as monster protection. Three sticks sounds like she can gather them outside, but might need to visit the forest if the scrub is insufficiently stick-having. Without tides, there's no driftwood to gather, alas.

She's not going to leave the ship now, when it could be sunset any time soon. So that leaves ... the tingling books.

Whoever packed the TOMES barrel seems really very friendly, but there's no reason not to be careful. She runs her hands all over the outside of both books, seeing if anything changes about the tingling or if she can observe anything else odd about them.

The books appear to shimmer faintly, when held in shadow. Other than that, there's nothing immediately odd about them. The books are titled "Mending" and "Bane of Arthropods", and contain hundreds of pages of text written densely and without spaces in an alphabet that she does not know.

Do the characters seem to match up with the dictionary characters in the Hexcasting journals, or is this two separate new alphabets?

Yes, actually. The glyphs detailed in the entries in the Hexcasting journal do look very similar to the letters used to write the tingly books. Although a closer inspection will reveal that perhaps a third of the letters in the books do not appear to be defined in the journals, mostly the more complicated and squiggly glyphs.

Also, it turns out that there are a handful of glyphs that are visually identical, distinguished only by the stroke order with which they're written. The glyphs in the books also appear in all different orientations, not written with one specific side facing upward.

Puzzling all this out can certainly occupy her until the sun kisses the horizon, if she keeps at it.

She doesn't exactly have much else to do, and it's definitively not safe to be outside the ship at night. Nor is she particularly tired yet, after sleeping for most of the day.

She'll spend not just the rest of the afternoon but a good portion of the night trying to puzzle through the glyphs, and the books written in them. For the glyphs that she was able to find in the dictionary, what sorts of things do they mean? Do the complicated squiggly glyphs seem like they're composites of glyphs she already knows, or fully distinct? What are the most complex, and for that matter the simplest, glyphs that she does have in her dictionary?

The glyphs in the dictionary break down into a few different categories. There are "patterns", which seem to be glyphs that are internal to a magical working, manipulating the concepts and structure of the working, and "spells", which are glyphs that cause an actual effect in the world.

Each pattern is named according to a slightly esoteric naming scheme:

Reflections gather information about the world to be incorporated into the spell. The result is referred to as an "iota", and can represent things such as specific beings, items, locations, and more abstract concepts. Purifications transform one kind of iota into another kind of iota. Distillations combine two iotas together. Exaltations combine three or more iotas. Decompositions split iotas in two. Disintegratitons split iotas into three or more pieces. Finally, Gambits seems to be a sort of catch-all category for patterns that do things not easily described by that schema.

Spells don't seem to have a standardized naming scheme, instead being called things like "Explosion" or "Create Water".

The simplest glyph in the book is probably Mind's Reflection, which looks like a diamond, drawn counter-clockwise from one of the pointier corners. It gathers an iota representing the spell's connection to its caster, which can then be used in all sorts of ways to create spells that target things relative to the caster.

The most complicated glyph in the book is ... probably the spell "Flay Mind", on which the author of the journal has this to say:

I cannot make heads or tails of this spell... To be honest, I'm not sure I want to know what it does.

The more complex glyphs are definitely not combinations of smaller glyphs, though. Each glyph is its own stand-alone entity; magical workings are done by chaining glyphs together in sequence, not by actually joining them together. The exception is the infinitely large family of glyphs for representing numbers — each number has its own unique glyph, but it can be broken down into smaller pieces that are still meaningful.

So a spell (a casting?) uses Reflections to collect iotas, various other patterns to change iotas, and then a spell-glyph to turn the iota into something actually happening in the world? 

Do spell-glyphs like Create Water need to have iotas? Presumably it'd be difficult to Create any Water without being specific about how much water or where to put it, but perhaps that's Olivia's failure of imagination. For that matter, is it always one spell-glyph per spell-casting?

Numerals! Olivia is delighted to have something so ordinary and recognizable to work with. Are the numeral glyphs Gambits or maybe Reflections? Has Oz invented the number zero yet, or is this more of a Roman numeral type situation? 

Spell-glyphs do need to have iotas, yes. Well, most of them. There's a partially complete glyph labeled "Summon Rain" and its sibling "Dispel Rain" that don't appear to need any input.

On the other hand, it is not always one spell-glyph per spell-casting. It is perfectly cromulent to stack multiple spell-glyphs to achieve a more complicated effect. For example, a single spell-casting could in theory throw the caster up into the air and then summon a temporary platform under them.

The numbers are technically Reflections, yes, because they gather the concept of the number into an iota for subsequent patterns to manipulate. Zero does exist, and there are actually several equivalent ways to write it. The simplest is to draw a diamond starting on one of the obtuse corners and proceeding either clockwise or counter-clockwise, ending with a stroke through the middle of the glyph. That's actually how all numbers begin; the other numbers start from zero and modify it in different ways.

Summon Rain? That seems like a promising place to start experimenting before she tries out one of these iota flowchart thingys, it seems like iotas get complicated fast. She will get wet, but let's be real here, she hasn't been completely dry since her misadventure with camping in the Inadequate Ziggurat.

She ... supposes ... 5 is in fact 0 + 5, it seems like a weird way to do numbers but sure.

Does this helpful journal have, uh, safety warnings in case the casting ends up with too few or too many iotas? Gets the iotas backwards so they end up at the wrong spell glyph, for spell castings with multiple? Or for that matter any other safety warnings?

Yes, actually! There is an extensive list of things that can go wrong, listed under "Mishaps", and with the writing getting progressively more cramped as it tries to squeeze everything onto the available page. Apparently the author kept discovering new ways that things could go wrong.

The different kinds of mishaps cause different deleterious effects to the caster. Some of them sound pretty unpleasant, but none are permanently damaging. There is a warning that the ancients were capable of harming themselves by casting without a source of amethyst present, but the author of the journal was unable to replicate that.

Drawing an invalid glyph will call up a "nonsense" iota that contains no useful information, as does invoking a pattern with too few iotas, as does completely overwhelming the spell-casting with iotas, as does using the wrong type of iota. Trying to affect something that cannot be affected, either because it is immune or because it is too far away, causes whatever is in the caster's hands to violently fly away.

Dividing by zero causes pain, dizziness, nausea, and lingering malaise that recovers slowly. Targeting a thing that exists and can be affected by the spell, but is the wrong kind of thing causes a phantasmal green explosion. Stuffing too many patterns into a single spell-casting causes temporary asphyxiation. Attempting to bind the essence of a sentient being into a magical item causes temporary blindness.

Of course, all of these are only the problems caused by malformed spell-casting attempts. It is perfectly possible to write a well-formed spell that summons an explosion, or teleports the caster into a wall, or destroys whatever one is standing on. Those possibilities aren't explicitly called out in the journal, but perhaps Olivia can read between the lines.

There is another problem with casting "Summon Rain", though — the glyph for that one is incomplete. It has the shape recorded, but not the starting point or stroke direction, so she would have to brute-force possible combinations to try it.

The journal recommends this as the simplest complete spell, which does nothing:

Mind's Reflection, Novice's Gambit

Mind's Reflection brings in an iota representing the caster, and Novice's Gambit silently discards it, bringing the spell to a close.

Indeed, it seems easy to write the spell that explodes oneself, which would be bad in a non mishap sort of way. 

All of those mishaps sound pretty bad! Olivia is motivated to avoid them, so she will of course start with the recommended practice exercise.

Though, if she does the spell correctly, she calls up an iota representing herself, which the Novice's Gambit glyph disperses. If she mis-draws the Mind's Reflection, she calls up a nonsense iota, which Novice's Gambit .. also disperses? How can you tell if you got that part of the spell right? Can you see the iotas somehow while you are casting the spell?

If she mis-draws the Novice's Gambit, she gets a self iota and a nonsense iota and no spell glyph, and what happens? Hopefully her actual self doesn't turn into nonsense, that should really merit a warning! Maybe that's the same thing as dividing by zero?

The book doesn't explicitly answer either of those questions, but re-reading the section on how to actually draw patterns with a staff and on mishaps suggests that yes, the caster can perceive the iotas as they flow through the spell. Although "flow" is maybe the wrong word — the section that explains the Novice's Gambit contains a bunch of patterns that serve to re-arrange the active iotas. So perhaps it's more correct to think of the iotas in a spell as being stacked on top of each other, with patterns and spells accessing the iotas that end up on top.

If she ends up with a self iota and a nonsense iota, nothing actually happens as long as she doesn't try to feed them into a spell-glyph. The casting won't be complete, but she can try drawing the Novice's Gambit again to get rid of the iotas. Once there are no more, the casting ends without any additional effects.

It would be pretty hard to mess up drawing the Novice's Gambit — it's a single sixty-degree angle.

Okay, if it's just "keep drawing Novice's Gambit until she succeeds at it enough" that sounds a lot more doable.

A project for tomorrow after she's made her staff. For now: sleeping.

On this second night, are there once again circling monsters outside of her shipwreck-sanctuary, or has she evaded notice enough by being "inside" since before sunset?

The monsters do reappear — a spider spends a while jumping around on the roof — but since she hasn't dragged a whole horde of them through an entire biome, they're considerably sparser and mostly over on land and not on her ship.

Good enough, really. It's them  not getting inside the ship that matters the most, but the farther away the better, when it comes to monsters.

In that case, she will wake with the sunrise, yawning and considering her plans for the day. 

Magic! Also fishing (again). She badly wants to try to retrieve her bag, abandoned the night before last in that horrible chase, but it would likely be wiser to explore some more and see if she can find another food source, perhaps in the northern forest. Decisions, decisions.

The shipwreck doesn't have any particular comment on which way she should look. There is a handy pile of bones sitting on the keel if she wants to try exploring while holding onto bones for some reason.

Unfortunately, Olivia has but two hands and zero bags, so carrying anything is a bit fraught.

That's actually a pretty good argument for bag today, forest tomorrow. Olivia sets off down? up? Away along the river.

She had abandoned the bag at the start of the night, on the southern shore of the river near the Inadequate Ziggurat.

She had spent most of the night swimming, but accounting for swimming being slower than walking, she thinks she should make it to the bag's location before noon, and so back to the shipwreck before dark. Though perhaps not in time to eat today. (It's okay. Not ideal, but she can plan to have two meals tomorrow.)

Eventually she thinks she's going to want a bucket to hold live fish so she doesn't have to eat them immediately after catching them. And if she's really dreaming, maybe she can even get the magic to start a fire safely, and then she can have cooked fish.

Daydreaming about cooked food will occupy her mind for much of the morning, unless something else catches her attention.

The river turns out not to slope up or down at all, but it does wend side-to-side, so she can actually make reasonable time by cutting off some of the turns. The scrubby grassland area does not seem to have as many ambient animals as the hills she first arrived in, but it does have a small herd of sheep taking turns to watch over each other as they graze.

There are also plenty of occasional bushes from which she might collect sticks, and at one point an opening into a dark cave.

When she eventually tracks down her bag, the arrow that was stuck in it has disappeared, but it otherwise seems intact. Or at least as intact as it was when she left it, given the panicked swimming with it.

Near her turn-around point there is a distant cluster of probable-buildings on the southern horizon, but if she's focused on her bag she might pass them by.

Sticks, excellent. She will pick 'em up and take them with her. 

The bag is not actually too damaged, all things considered! There's a big gash where the arrow punched through, and some of the contents are arrow-damaged as well. But she had tried, and apparently succeeded, at keeping it dry, so her sketchbook is scratched but intact. Also, helpfully, the weather has been dry and sunny the whole time she's been here.

Among the various cruft in this bag is a small roll of duct tape, bright yellow, that Olivia had gotten on a whim and then never used. She doesn't have any kind of knife or scissors, but with sufficient determination she can tear the tape with her teeth and fingernails, rigging up a raggedy but functional patch for the arrow-hole.

The umbrella she was using as a makeshift weapon is nowhere to be seen, and Olivia doesn't clearly remember what she did with it, so it's unlikely she'll be able to find it again. Possibly one of the monsters that night took it? Or it ended up somewhere at the bottom of the river.

Olivia's in a hurry to get "home" to her ship and start experimenting with magic! No side quests into possible buildings even if she was thinking about them, not today.

Besides, they're probably abandoned, like the ship and the Inadequate Ziggurat. (Olivia hates that Ziggurat so much. She had tried to select a cautious and safe campsite. And it failed her.) Without a guarantee of a place to overnight, Olivia's planning to do her best to avoid getting more than half a days walk from her ship.

She stows the sticks in the bag and starts walking shipwards. Roughly eastward?

Indeed! It is east and very slightly north, and still waiting for her when she gets back to it.

Say — does she have any idea what wild wheat looks like? Because there is some wild wheat growing among the grasses on her walk back. Otherwise she might have to fight another fish. One large raw salmon per day is not really enough after swimming an entire night away.

One large raw salmon is really not enough, especially when you consider that she has to waste any of the parts of the fish that she can't eat in one sitting. 

She doesn't know what wild wheat looks like, but she has been looking out for vaguely edible seeds and berries. She cautiously sniffs and eats one single wheat berry, and tucks another handful loose in her bag, noting a quick sketch of the plants she took them from. (Her bag! She can carry objects! Like mystery seeds! And take down sketches and notes!)

Time to wrestle a salmon. If the one wheat berry doesn't make her sick, she'll soak the rest in water and have them with the salmon for lunch.

The one wheat berry does not make her sick, no. This really isn't the area for anything other than dead bushes and wild grasses, though. There are no berries in evidence.

She could try punching out a sheep instead of a fish, but the fish is probably easier to wrangle. They really aren't getting any better at fisticuffs, so she can at least catch them pretty reliably.

Hurrah! Olivia is getting a good grade in salmon poaching, a thing that is, apparently, possible to achieve. 

Salmon with a little porridge, for lunch, is itself a pleasant variety over salmon without porridge. 

By the time she's done fishing and eating, it's afternoon (the sun is over the land, not sea), but she doesn't know by exactly how much.

Actually, you know what, she collected more than three sticks. She's going to try to jam one of the longest and straightest into the ground, to make a sundial. She scuffs the ground at approximately where the shadow lands; if she keeps doing that, eventually she'll have an arc for the whole day and should be able to make slightly better guesses about the time.

How far away is the forest? Guessing by the size of the trees she can see. If it's close enough, she might try to make it there and back in the rest of the afternoon; otherwise, she has a staff to make.

It's not that far away, perhaps a kilometer or so. Whether she wishes to walk two more kilometers today or attempt a "crafting pattern" is entirely up to her.

For maybe another food source she can walk another three kilometers (to the forest and back; and exploring inside it). Not happily, but Olivia's pretty sure her current tiredness is as much about lack of food as about lack of sleep. 

Maybe in another hour, after she's digested some fish and isn't feeling the lethargy of a large meal.

The time passes peacefully. The sun moves in the sky, the breeze blows over the sea.

The way up the coast to the forest is pretty much the same as the rest of the scrubland, although there is more wild wheat to be found in various states of growth if she pays attention to the grass. Upon getting to the forest, things become greener and lusher. The forest features towering oak trees and not much underbrush, but it does have enough to be worth searching.

Potentially edible things in the forest include: dandelions, brown mushrooms, red spotted mushrooms, cute little foxes, cute little rabbits, a beehive, and ... there, through the trees! A hint of red that turns out to be a small cluster of thorny wild berry bushes. The thorns are wickedly sharp, and it's a bit tedious to get the tiny undomesticated berries off of them, but they are real berries.

Berries! Sweet, sweet berries. It takes most of her willpower not to eat them all at once; but she should still do a poison check with a few and come back tomorrow for the rest.

Mushrooms are, uh. Olivia is not yet desperate enough to eat wild mushrooms she cannot identify. She is sort of keenly aware of that looming yet, though.

She knows dandelion greens are edible, and has several; if she sees any nettles she's going to go for those as well. It's nothing like a filling meal, but does wonders to cure her despair at the prospect of Eternal Fish.

Olivia is, thusly, in a much better mood as she heads back towards camp.

She drops her bag (it's not waterproof), pulls out the sticks, and swims her way back under the hull of her ship. She's planning to make that staff and then punch another fish for dinner. Yawn ... she believes in herself ... yawn ...

She wakes up to moonlight streaming through the gaps in the hull. Not safe to go out now. Damn.

By moonlight, Olivia pries up the three interior planks she can find that are in the best condition. Three sticks she gathered already; one amethyst was in the TOMES barrel. The underside of the deck makes a flat-ish surface, where she's been sleeping.

If that's not enough to qualify as a "crafting table", Olivia is prepared to drag the whole assembly outside and build the world's worst table. She hopes she won't have to, though.

Now that she has the materials, what does the journal have to say about the crafting process?

The journal seems to expect the reader to already be broadly familiar with crafting as a process. All it really lists are the exact relative positions that each of the pieces need to be placed in on the crafting table.

... perhaps such tables normally come with rulers or grid marks on them, because without that she's going to have to get a bit creative to get everything measured and aligned correctly.

Drat. She actually has a six-inch ruler made to be a bookmark, but it's in her bag and she wasn't willing to subject the bag to the underwater entrance without a way to keep it dry.(She's aware that she's very lucky it hasn't rained.)

She uses the hem of her shirt to measure straight line distances, folds it for ratios, and eventually everything comes out correctly when she double checks it.

There's a moment of hesitation, and then the sticks, planks, and charged amethyst crystal all sort of slide into each other with a slightly unsettling pop. Her brand-new oak staff lies on the floor where she laid the components out. It is sized perfectly for her, and the amethyst crystal has gotten smaller and been mounted firmly in one end. There's a little red ribbon tied just below the crystal's attachment point.

Success! She cannot actually do a victory jig in here without banging into something but Olivia waves her hands enthusiastically in celebration.

Now for the second test. Can she cast the beginner spell.

Mind's Reflection.

Novice's Gambit.

With the journal open beside her to reference, it's not difficult. The staff is kind of ... snappy, for want of a better word. Its tip naturally moves along a hex grid, which makes it easy to draw the hex-grid-aligned glyphs.

When she completes the first glyph, a sort of shudder runs through her staff, and the completed glyph (which had previously been outlined in pale purple light) vanishes. Unsettlingly, it feels as though something just tapped against the other side of a wall that she's leaning against, despite the fact that she's not leaning against a wall at all.

The snappiness catches Olivia by surprise, and she's not a fan. Look, she's an artist, she knows perfectly well how to draw lines and corners. And this way she can't add any decorations to glyphs, like curls where she 'lifts' her 'pen' or heart-shaped dots. (This is, perhaps, for the best.)

So that didn't work. She doesn't think she 'perceived' an 'iota', and it didn't match any of the mishaps she can remember. She goes back to the journal to see if it has anything to say about spooky sourceless vibrations in the Mishaps section.

It's not technically in the mishaps section, but it is on one of the facing pages:

I should also be careful to make sure I actually have enough Amethyst on my person-- some old texts say that Nature is happy to use one's own mind as payment instead. They describe the feeling as awful but strangely euphoric, "[...] an effervescent dissolution into light and energy..." Perhaps that's why all the old practitioners of the art went mad. I can't imagine burning pieces of my mind for power is healthy.

 

Maybe something's changed, though. In my experiments, I've never managed to do it; if I run out of media, the spell will simply fail to cast, as if some barrier is blocking it from harming me.

It would be interesting to get to the bottom of that mystery, but for now I suppose it'll keep me safe.

Oh. Oh no. She just came very, very close to screwing up very, very badly.

If it weren't for the fact that she's pretty sure she needs magic to get past the peril of day to day survival, she'd put away the books for a good long while at this point.

As it is, well. She needs the magic. She also has only the one bag of amethyst, and flatly no idea if getting more is even possible, much less how to do so. 

Can she make a guess at how many spellcasts worth of amethyst she has in the bag? Unless it's a lot, she might actually be better off skipping past the novice spell so that she can get the most from every last grain.

The journal lists approximate costs per pattern in terms of grains. Some patterns use a single grain. Some glyphs, especially powerful spell-glyphs, use a large amount — so, to some extent, the answer will depend on what she uses the spells to do. There are spell-glyphs for mining, so she could potentially go caving or mining for amethyst crystals, if she were so inclined.

That said, the pouch is about the size of a fist, and full of amethyst powder, so she should have enough for a while. The beginning example spell would have cost her two grains of amethyst.

So - it's probably not a cost she'd really regret. But "probably" does not exactly cut it, not with margins this slim.

Olivia is not very good at the "measure twice cut once" approach to problems, but that doesn't make it bad advice, just advice she's bad at following.

Okay. What does she actually need? Time to peruse the spell-glyph section and price out a list of essential spells.

She is keenly feeling the need for:

- A water bottle, or some other way to carry fresh water long distances. Relatedly, a way to purify the water and render it safe to drink.

- A cooking fire.

- Cooking implements: a pot, spoon, and so on.

- Refrigeration. Its maybe not "essential" but ye gods does Olivia miss having a fridge with food she can eat whenever she wants.

- A knife, for both harvesting and cooking. A chisel or adze, for woodworking. (She has this great source of planks, if and when she doesn't need it for shelter.)

- A monster shelter that doesn't have its door underwater, and is weatherproof for when the season inevitably changes. This could mean "a cave with a trapdoor" or "a floating platform with a rope ladder" or something else entirely; she's hopeful the book has advice about trade-offs and approaches to both monsters and weather.

- A clock, so she has a better way of guessing time to nightfall. Something to make her less appealing to monsters, so if she is caught out after dark it isn't a complete disaster.

- A change of clothes. Maybe best approached as cloth and needle and thread? Worst comes to worst she can probably kill a mini-sheep and make some kind of felted monstrosity out of the wool.

- Mapping she can do herself if she needs to but a compass would make it a lot easier.

- A way to locate and then mine for more amethyst.

What catches her eye, perusing the spell glyphs with these goals in mind?

The journal doesn't distinguish fresh and salt water anywhere. It does have a spell-glyph for summoning up to a cubic meter of water at the cost of one pinch of amethyst dust, and it seems reasonably likely that it would come out fresh.

Likewise, there is a spell-glyph for setting things on fire (including both animate and inanimate objects). It doesn't mention any way to make cooking pots, spoons, etc., but there are other crafting patterns for some things, including a jeweler's hammer, so there might be a way to do it that isn't explained in this one wizard's journal. It might also be possible to just experiment, although the alignment of the constituent items has to be pretty precise.

There is no spell that creates a ready-made monster shelter, but there is a spell-glyph that can be used to conjure transparent purple walls and floors in whatever layout seems likely to shelter one from monsters. A variant glyph conjures heatless, smokeless lights and a scrawled comment in the margin remarks that it is "much better for keeping the dead out of my pantry than torches are".

There are pattern glyphs that will determine her position, speed, and time; from that she may be able to build a clock, map, or compass. Monsters might be avoidant of her if she could reliably make them explode and/or catch fire.

There doesn't appear to be a good way to locate amethyst. There are no reflections that determine what substance something is made of, without which it's hard to locate amethyst specifically. Once she does find some, she could easily mine it with a spell-glyph, or perhaps make herself the aforementioned jeweler's hammer.

The journal does not contain any knitting patterns, or other ruminations on the subject of clothing.

Other crafting patterns?

Olivia likes the idea of crafting patterns; what-all does the book have that it looks like she could make out of materials that she has or could gather in places she's already been? Anything she can make without drawing on her precious store of amethyst, she should at least strongly consider doing that way; and she can do crafting of objects that would be too speculative to design and make out of spells.

It sounds like Olivia will be living in a transparent purple house for the foreseeable future! Nifty. She will hold off on detailed plans until she can draw out architecture ideas. She assumes the purple transparent material is permanent? Does it have a known cost per unit area, and if so can she work out what the units are or will she have to experiment?

If her best way to make safe freshwater is a cubic meter at a time, she might actually be best off constructing cisterns of it in places she goes often; certainly she can include one such in her house. Then she can top up the cistern only when she needs to, and not every time she wants a glass of water.

One pinch of amethyst dust will get her thirty two square cubits of permanent transparent purple wall and/or roof. Whether she will need to experiment depends on whether she knows the definition of a cubit.

If she's willing to use some of her amethyst dust in a crafting recipe along with a source of dye, she can also apparently dye her own magic, and then she can make the walls different colors, if she prefers. Other items that the journal details how to make include:

Staves made with different woods; a lens that lets her see hidden properties of objects and pack more detail into her spells, if she can figure out how to make sand into glass; a type of knotwork that can store iotas, if she can coerce silk out of a spider; an abacus; decorative wall hangings with glyphs drawn on them, if she can make paper; the same, but for decorative stone tiles if she can dig up some slate; empty artifacts that can be enchanted to cast a spell, if she can mine for and refine various metallic ores; glass phials to contain amethyst dust in; magic dyes, if she can find a source of mundane dye; various decorative items made out of an extinct kind of tree that can be recreated with magic; decorative paper and paper lanterns; and, if she can find and smelt some copper, little magical sconces that emit light and make occasional chiming noises.

Olivia doesn't remember the precise definition of a cubit but she has a vague recollection that's it's fairly large. Is it possible to get less than 32 square cubits in a casting (spending less amethyst dust)? Less than one square cubit? Is there a (simpler, less costly) spell she can use to measure some object in terms of cubits?

Hmm. She doesn't have a way to make paper but she does have paper, from her sketchbook. She'd be willing to sacrifice a single sheet to make a hanging with a glyph on it, she thinks. (Though, of course, her sketchbook is on land right now, so that too will have to wait until morning.)

The abacus could have potential? It sounds like most of the rest of what she could make will require some kind of mining or at least rock-finding: is there any kind of general advice for that?

Wait wait wait - an artifact that can cast a spell. That opens up whole new vistas of options. What does she need for that, exactly? Does the artifact still need her to, like, push a button, or can it cast a spell every hour or if there's a nearby monster? Does the artifact need a source of amethyst, and if so how does that work?

In the section on the Stadiometer's Purification, which measures a living thing's height, there is a note that magic seems to deal in a "natural unit" that is very slightly over two cubits. There's a long digression about how convenient it would be if the scholastic world would convert over to using the same units that nature itself uses, but of course nobody can agree on anything. One academic rival wants to switch to using eighths of a cubit as a base unit, on the basis that this is the smallest distance that can be reliably distinguished by a certain class of physical experiments.

She could measure her own height with Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit for a cost of 3 grains and work it out that way. The floor-and-wall-making glyph bottoms out at an area of four square cubits. You can make areas smaller than that, it just doesn't cost less.

The journal declines to comment on matters of mining, except a note that spell-glyphs can be used to mine through material of pretty much any hardness.

Spell-casting artifacts come in three flavors, but all three flavors have to be charged with amethyst during creation, and can eventually run out. The cheapest kind, made with four copper ingots and a pinch of amethyst dust, cannot be recharged. A kind made with four iron ingots and an intact amethyst crystal can be recharged. The best kind, made with three pieces of gold, a glowing amethyst crystal such as the one in her staff, and a vinyl record, can cast using amethyst that is sufficiently nearby once its internal battery runs out.

All of the spell-casting artifacts work sort of like her staff. Has she noticed that her staff only leaves glowing purple lines in the air when she wants it to? She can move it around without doing that. The same thing applies to spell-casting artifacts: they trigger when someone holds them and intends to. Maybe there's a different way to do it that could work on a timer, though.

A vinyl record? That's, uh, okay maybe that's not weirder than having Fists of Death towards specifically fish but it's pretty weird, okay. 

Olivia thinks her first spell should be Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit: it's only barely more complex than the recommended first spell and she's going to need the information to design her house.

And thus, visions of purple architecture in her minds eye, she drifts back off to sleep.

Stadiometer's Purification is drawn like a sort of slanted table, counterclockwise from one of the legs. But it won't disturb her sleep.

The monsters might, if she's not yet used to the splashing and groaning and — when the sun comes up — bursting into flames on her roof.

Bleh, monsters. She's pretty used to the splashing and groaning - it was going on all through her midnight research binge - but the bursting into flames right on her roof will wake her, yes.

Today Olivia is going to build a house with magic. She's extremely excited. First, however, she's going to punch a fish for breakfast.

Honestly, Olivia is so extremely normal for that. Apparently, at some point, wrestling with fish becomes routine. Does she care to try setting anything on fire to cook her fish with, or is she going to get right to house building?

No, raw fish is still pretty adequate if, by this point, pretty boring. 

She finishes up with breakfast and walks back out the sandbar. The safest way to get the precious amethyst and journals (and other supplies) out, she thinks, is to pull off some planks and make a hole in the hull.

This is pretty nerve wracking - if she runs into trouble making a house she can't retreat back to the shipwreck - but getting the journals wet would be just as much of a disaster.

And the TOMES barrel is not easily re-sealable. It's okay, she can make a small hole and pass things out without too much fuss.

As small a hole as possible, that's the idea.

She ferries her TOMES objects to land and tucks them in her bag (it's a fairly large bag and it didn't start out full). 

Then, she flips her sketchbook to a new page, and makes a plain ink drawing of the measure-yourself spell: three glyphs, now collected on one page. 

In American units, Olivia is 5'8" tall. Time to see how tall that is in Oz cubits.

She extracts the precious drawstring bag of amethyst dust, and holding the reference in one hand and staff in the other, casts: Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit.

When she finishes the first glyph, there is a sudden presence inside of her, in a space that she has always had but has never previously noticed, because it has always been empty. The presence feels like herself.

After drawing the second glyph, the presence transforms into something that feels more like a platonic ideal. The number 1.7272, just hanging there in her inner space. That makes her about 3.5 cubits.

Upon drawing the third glyph, the number disperses, her staff gives a happy little chime, and all three glyphs, which had previously been drifting in the air around her, vanish.

She writes down 1.7272 natural units, and then after double checking the Stadiometer's Purification description, ~3.5 cubits.

5 foot 8 is 68 inches is 63 + 5 inches. 63 / 3.5 = 9*2 = 18. And 5 / 3.5 is about four thirds probably? 

Then: 1 cubit ~ 19.3in ~ 1.5 - 1.75 ft. Hopefully she didn't make a mistake in the math there, she's really used to having a calculator for this part.

Okay, so a minimum area of ten or so square feet. That's actually a lot smaller than she was expecting! Does the spell run at exactly minimum cost require the sheet of metaphorical purple plywood to be all in one piece? Any particular shape? Can she move it after it's been created?

According to the journal, she can make stationary, permanent, immovable, rectangular, contiguous, transparent panels in any orientation and size she pleases. It doesn't say anything about how thick they are, but probably if they were literally two dimensional the journal would mention being careful of the edges, and it does not. The panels can be gotten rid of with another spell for negligible amethyst cost, or with sufficient amounts of brute force.

But they are strong enough to, for example, hold the author of the journal's full weight as they jump up and down. The author mentions in passing, but does not describe the exact composition of, a spell that launches one into the air and then places a panel to land on, in order to ascend vertically.

Okay! Immovable, rectangular, and contiguous are all limitations, but it could certainly be worse. And it's good to know that if she accidentally misplaces one, she can get rid of it. 

She's thinking of building a one-room dwelling, with a very slightly peaked roof for both rain and ventilation. She can't make a door out of immovable panels, so maybe a little bit of a squiggle entryway so she doesn't have a complete gap anywhere? She was initially going to put the house high enough in the air to deter monsters that way, but with those restrictions she can't easily make a staircase or ladder.

The fire pit is for sure going outside, so heat is going to be an issue, and that means a smaller dwelling is a better idea. Unfortunately. But she still needs it big enough to fit herself and her stuff (as she accumulates stuff). 

So ... two "natural units" wide by three long and two high, with an entrance hall and cistern extending the length by another natural unit. And the entry can wrap around the corner to offer more protection, but she'll mostly be dependent on the light-source spell variant to discourage monsters from walking in the door.

She can put her bed against the back wall. That gives her 60sqft of floor space in her room and another 30 in her entryway - certainly a microstudio by any measure. But she thinks it's probably the right trade-off, here, if she finds a huge source of amethyst (or finds that she doesn't ongoingly need her initial seed fund) she can expand the house in a couple of months. And if she doesn't -- she'll be glad to have saved the dust for more important things.

Besides, she doesn't know enough about the seasons here and she might have to rebuild in a few months just from that.

First things first, she's going to have to clear an area for her house, generously large compared to what she actually needs, next to the river and not far from the ocean. 

This open scrubland doesn't have too many trees and bushes for that, does it? She's going to harvest and uproot any grain growing in that area.

No, there's plenty of space between the trees. She can clear an area big enough for her house and then some just by finding a good spot and pulling up grass. In the process she turns up some more wild wheat, and also a tiny root vegetable — maybe a beet, based on color?

She sets aside the grass: she has plans for it for later. 

Olivia eats the wheat and the beet (mmm, sweet!) and thinks over her plans some more. Because, honestly, as much as only building the bare minimum appeals, she really won't feel safe relying on just the light spell as monster (bug) repellant. 

The problem is, any obstacle that Olivia can traverse easily (she will be entering and leaving her house several times a day, sometimes carrying heavy or unwieldy objects) she thinks the monsters can too. And the magic building material is fixed in place; she cannot make anything temporary or moveable with it.

Nor can she rig up a bearbox away from her main living area, because the thing the monsters are after isn't food, it's herself. (Shudder.)

While she thinks, she fiddles with the grass. 

If she takes a few of the longest and sturdiest strands, and tries variously laying them side by side, end by end, gently twisting or braiding or knotting them together: can she get them to "craft" into something from the twine or rope genre?

... no, that doesn't seem to be a thing. Maybe the individual blades of grass are just really hard to arrange in the right pattern by accident?

If she knows traditional rope-making techniques she might be able to make twine or rope by hand, but not just by putting grass blades near each other.

There are the sheep that she saw a while ago; she might have more luck with wool?

Mmmpf.

Yes, that's reasonable, and she can spare an hour to go track down one of the sheep. The animals here have been very unafraid so far, but Olivia is still only planning to run her hands through the wool and harvest loose hairs, and she will back away at any sign the sheep is feeling uncomfortable or crowded.

The sheep, which are the same size as the cows were, baaaaaaah at her peacefully. They don't seem to have any particular objection to letting her card their coats. They do sniff around her pockets in case she has something interesting in there.

Eventually she can have a big clump of miscellaneous, dirty wool fiber. Also, incredibly moisturized hands, because lanolin is great for the skin.

Her hands could really use it! She hasn't been dwelling on it, but she has been subjecting them to a lot of underwater lately, between the shipwreck and the daily fishing. 

She'll gently rinse the fiber and pull out the larger flecks of dirt and bark, then see if she can pinch and twist it into a yarn single. If she does this on a flat surface, does it at some point magically "craft"?

No, this doesn't result in "crafting" either, unfortunately. On the other hand it's not that difficult to hand-spin wool; it's a noticeably clingy fiber.

Spin or felt; she expects she's going to be spending much of the next few weeks as an ad-hoc sort of shepherd, in order to gather enough wool for her cloth needs. 

One more experiment with "crafting" to try, before she gets back to work. If she gathers three sticks and three planks, laying them out as if to craft a magic staff but without the crystal, can she make a nonmagical staff? What if she replaced the crystal in the pattern with a similar sized rock from the riverbank?

The sticks, planks and stone hesitate for a long moment — almost long enough for her to declare a failure and move on — before shivering and merging together into a non-magical staff very similar to her magical one, except tipped with dull grey stone. There's a distant, source-less tinkling sound.

Jackpot!

These staffs are sturdy; with an easy way to make them Olivia expects to be able to construct (small, at least) moveable lattice doors and rafters and suchlike.

The message popping into her mind is more unexpected; did the crafting recipe section of the hex journal just get magically longer??

Nope!

There are exactly the same number of recipes as before.

Then where, and more importantly what, is her recipe book? 

She doesn't know about any such thing (and she no longer has so many possessions that she could have it without knowing). She would very much like to read her recipe book, universe?

Absent the unlikely event of the universe listening, Olivia has realized that she could put her house over the river, instead of land, and is contemplating the various merits of doing so. 

On the one hand, she hasn't explored the south side of the river at all, and is sure to want a bridge once she can. Building her entryway as a bridge would make both structures more amethyst efficient, and offers new angles for monster defense. On the other hand, there's always the risk of another tall-masted ship like the wreck coming through the river/canal, and if so she'd rather lose just a bridge than her house. How wide is the waterway here? And for that matter, how deep?

The water is about ten natural units across, at its widest, and perhaps five at its narrowest. There's one deep pool that is about twenty natural units deep, but the average bits of riverbed are only four or five natural units.

It looks like it would probably be a bit tricky to navigate a tall-masted ship through the river's twists and turns, but it could potentially be done.

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.

The forest remains where she left it. One of the sheep decides to follow her for reasons of its own, and bleats softly behind her at odd intervals.

The forest itself is mostly oak trees; as long as the trees she's hoping for are oak, then the forest has her covered. Other kinds of tree are in shorter supply, at least around here.

The berry bushes are completely covered in berries again, including the ones that she denuded earlier.

What a good sheep. She absently finger-combs the sheep as she walks.

Olivia munches on berries, has an idea, and trails a few of them off her fingers and into the dirt. She's curious if they'll sprout.

She scoops up a handful of acorns, with the vague notion of planting them later, or maybe trying to grind them into flour. 

With a full belly and a slightly fuller bag - acorns and wool-fluff - it's time to keep walking. The coastline is her best landmark, and she follows it further north as the sun climbs the sky (assuming, that is, that it doesn't bend around). How far to the far edge of the forest, and what new mystery lies beyond? 

As a matter of fact it does bend around a little, leading her northwest. The forest continues unchanged for about half a kilometer before giving way to a much richer grassland, more like where she initially appeared than her current house location.

The grass here is lush and green, dotted with flower bushes. If she has a particularly keen eye, she might recognize wild carrots. Without the obstruction of the trees, she is able to see much farther. To the north lies a tall, stony mountain. To the northeast the plains get hilly. To the east there is just more forest, of the same kind she has been walking through.

And right in front of her feet, coming upon her suddenly in the grass, is a great ravine. It neatly bisects the plains, going deep, deep into the earth. Visible at the bottom are pools of water and of lava, separated by expanses of black stone. The wall of the ravine is pierced at one point by a set of wooden mining supports that end abruptly, as though some intrepid miner came upon the unexpected geology and decided to give up and go back the other way.

Yikes? Yikes.

On the other hand, this does seem like a place one could try mining. A future, better equipped, more capable Olivia might try mining here; she's going to evince a sense of self preservation and not do that.

What does the outlet of the ravine look like, does it meet the ocean at roughly sea level or is there no longer a walkable beach on this stretch?

The beach here is gravely but passable. The ravine stops about five meters short of the water ... and in contravention of all Earthly hydrogeologic principles, the ocean seems fine with this, and has not seeped through the ground to fill the ravine. That end of the ravine is pretty steep and ends abruptly, but if she goes to check the other end, that one gets shallow enough that she could scramble down into it and then walk along the bottom of the ravine if she pleased. And probably climb back out again, even.

Does she want to check the other end of the ravine? It's an interesting question. On the one hand, her plan today was to explore up the coast, and she's filled with the desire to move and keep moving despite any obstacles and distractions. On the other hand, the ravine is the sort of thing she really should be exploring around and mapping, as a landmark and perhaps as a resource.

It is while considering this dilemma that she spots her first carrot. Carrots! That's perfect. Food that she can store, carry, and eat without much equipment is exactly what she needs to ease up pressure on the fish stock.

She's going to spend as long as it takes to fill her bag and pockets with carrots. If her meandering gathering takes her generally up the near edge of the ravine towards its source, so much the better, but the carrots have to be the focus right now.

There are not that many random carrots growing wild, but there are enough to fill her bag. By the time she's exhausted the local carrot-growing resources, the sun is starting its daily descent toward the horizon and her bag is heavy with root vegetables.

And so she heads home, heavily loaded with carrots and empty, or at least emptier, of worries.

Dinner today is more wheat porridge, this time with a little carrot added, and she's tucked away in her house before the night chorus begins.

The monsters really aren't particularly creative or adaptive. It's easy to see how one might start to find them more annoying than threatening once one has some static defenses.

At one point a skeleton riding on top of a giant spider scuttles by outside, but that's the most novel thing to occur all night.

Alas, Olivia entirely misses the mounted skeleton, because she is asleep.

She wakes up stiff, still lacking a bed and blanket, and regretfully concludes that she'll have to postpone more exploration today in favor of felt-making. Ow. The amethyst glass is not soft.

Felt isn't her only option. The ancient Egyptians carved pillows out of wood! Admittedly, it was a simpler time. And they wrapped them in linen, but still.

Does she have any particular approach to felting, here, other than "repeatedly poke collected wool with a tool of some variety"?

Unlike the Ancient Egyptians, she has neither the tools needed to carve wood, nor the time and knowledge to process flax; a linen-wrapped wooden pillow must wait until she's climbed at least few more rungs of the tech tree.

She's planning to soak the wool in the river, very gently heat it over the fire, and then poke it (with a small stick). Her recollection is that warm water is involved in felting, and it's easier to heat the water after it's in the wool than beforehand.

That process proves to work pretty much as intended. The fish watch curiously as she soaks the wool. Wool is naturally flame-retardant, and especially so when soaking wet, so she doesn't even singe any bits.

Eventually, she has a small (hot, wet) solid lump of felted wool in the rough shape of her choosing.

The shape of her desires is flat, thin, and vaguely rectangular. She leaves it to dry on one of the steps of her staircase and goes to comb another sheep.

"Baaaaah."

The sheep don't mind being combed. They're not obviously in favor of it, either, occasionally wandering off mid-combing to bite at some grass, but they allow her to accumulate plenty more wool.

Combing, felting, more combing, more felting. For lunch she ambles over to the forest berry patches, as much to give herself a rest break as to be gentle on her food supplies.

When (if) she finds a way back to Earth she is blacklisting every single homesteading blog in existence. Or at least the ones that start with machine-woven fabric. Come to think of it, she could really go for some soothing background video of sheep-wrangling. Her sheep are very silly but, not knowing anything about sheep really, she guesses they're friendlier than Earth sheep; all the other animals here seem to be.

Will she still feel that way when it turns out that the forest is Full of Wolves?

... well, probably. They only come up to a bit above her knees, and they seem to be mostly concerned with chasing a rabbit, which is deftly avoiding them by the expedient of running around and around a tree in circles.

Awwwww. Cute dogs. They seem to be enjoying themselves but she'll duck back out of the forest to grab a stick in case one of them wants to play, sure. With her, not with the rabbit that is about to become lunch and is presumably a lot more fun to chase in the meantime.

She is vindicated in her choice of scenic lunch picnic area.

Once they're done tearing apart the rabbit, they are indeed interested in her and her stick. The three of them trot over and sniff at her, reading the tale of her travel in her scent.

She has sure been so many places in these clothes since she last had the option of halfway decent laundry and soap. Including Earth, if they can sniff out the Earth city underneath everything that's happened since.

If these dogs don't mind her being in their space she will offer pets (cautiously, watching for signs of un-welcome).

They mostly find her puzzling, but they seem friendly enough. They do not wish to be touched at this time. One of them snoofles very hard at any places where she has touched fish.

Another of them is interested in the stick, but, being undomesticated, does not seem to understand the "bring the stick back" part once she throws it.

Oops, that figures. She goes to retrieve the stick herself, laughing.

If she wiggles the stick, can she entice and-or trick the interested one into playing tug-o-war? (Rope would be better for this, but she hasn't got any, alas.)