"Well... That's kind of life. I'm gonna end up in the pyre some day too, either by some dragonborn abomination or the march of time, so I try to enjoy life while it lasts. Speaking of which, I hope you two arrange some hot baths with your infinite binder magic at some point."

"Oh goodness yes. That's absolutely essential, sooner or later. We've gotta have our hot baths. Most of that will be on Nico as our whisperer, making the baths and the hot water, but now you've got me brainstorming some kind of soap plant that smells really nice. Maybe even see if I can manage to add a relaxation effect, for after a long day of work."

Soap plants and hot baths go into the to-do list.

"There's gonna be tons of challenges... And houses for everyone, and everything else... Honestly, you kind of expect the binders to be lazy and get other people to do most of the work? But whatever other people can do to make your jobs easier, we oughta. It's just efficient."

"I mean, division of labor is good, and people should focus on their comparative advantage, but if I'm not putting in a full day of magic work then I should find something useful to do with my time."

"Well, dungeon binders' comparative advantage is magic, is what I'm saying. 'Comparative'- Sound like I'm back in finishing school*, heh."

*Not a literal translation, but the closest available cultural referent.

"You're not wrong, but I can easily imagine a binder getting lazy about making improvements for their people and instead just resting on their laurels. It's a pattern that's repeated itself in countless societies, and one I really don't want to ever fall into."

Rama yawns, then blushes.

"Okay, my new bedroll is calling me. Don't die please- Nobody wants to worry about the colors getting in."

Sable yawns as well. The things are contagious. "Sleep well, and don't worry. I don't plan to die for a long time. Thanks for the talk."

And then off she goes to find someplace quiet inside the burgeoning dungeon to set up her bedroll.

Candidate places include the damp but empty washing area, the improvised sickbay, the core room, and a little crevice everyone else seems to have passed up for being tiny. Much of the rest of the space has been subdivided with a whole lot of furs and blankets hanging from poles- It turns out, hopeful gossip spreading around goes, most of what was really lost to the dragon was just the heaviest and least valuable things. The actual boats, all the timber and cement and dishware and so on. The strategy thought up by Zeris the smith, of burying anything they couldn't carry to safety in the mud, paid off. Mostly kinda ish.

She's in a nestley-bundley mood, so little crevice it is. She tucks herself in and smiles softly. It's good to hear that they didn't lose as much as they could've. It's really good. She looks over her to-do list, adds a few more things like getting Nico to make a mirror at some point, or figuring out toothpaste and toothbrushes, and starts winding down.

...wait a second. Can she just sterilize all the unhelpful mouth bacteria through force of will?

There sure is some dustlife in her mouth. She can claim it. Killing it... Maybe? She could turn off all its - everything. Her magic instincts are a little confused about what this would cause.

That... sounds like she can't tell harmful bacteria from beneficial bacterial from anything else. Maybe even her cells? That sounds troublesome. She... is going to just swish some water in her mouth to wash it out and then go to sleep, and ask Nico if this world has toothbrushes in the morning.

G'night, demesne.

The sound of running water, cooking, and increasingly loud conversation awakens her.

She stretches, dusts herself off, and rolls up the bedroll. Time to go find Nico and get some work done. She cheerfully greets anyone she passes on the way. "Good morning!"

The mood is much brighter this morning and several people accost her wanting workplaces! This one is a carpenter. This one is a cooper. This one is a smith! This one wants to know where they should be laying out all the cut reeds to rett. This one is a butcher- It's not really very fun or sanitary to butcher beasts outside, you know? And the hunters who went out yesterday totally caught one. That's what breakfast is made of!

Nico is not visible, but there's a new exit to the main cave chamber.

She solicits and notes down what people need in their workspaces. How big should the area be, do you need ventilation, do you have important material constraints, what are the dimensions of a retting tank? And all of this goes into her mental notepad on her way to find Nico, who is likely in that new room.

New hallway, actually, gradually sloping down. He's at the end, excavating more.

"Ah, there you are. So, I had an idea. How about I actually use horotracting today? I can turn closets into dining halls... So long as I remember to keep them imbued. Or someone has wire. I don't want to make too many temporary solutions but it'd be better than 'cave floor for everyone'."

She smiles when she finds Nico. "Ooh. That would mesh well with a request people had. We have a bunch of requests for workspaces: carpenter, cooper, smith, butcher, et cetera. Could dig out some closets and then stretch them into workrooms. Oh. and speaking of secondary skills, I've got a bound to-do list now. Also, I would do an awful lot of favors for a mirror eventually, but it's not urgent."

"So, question is- What the place is gonna look like in a year, right? We'll want to get out ahead of it. Neat streets. Convenient amenities. No loud industries next to where people sleep. And I want to build as much as I can out of stone, fused all the way down the the bedrock. Smooth limestone's pretty. We'll have a white town, if we can find copper ore- Green roofs, like a Mediterranean holiday resort. We're only like ten, fifteen miles up from this bay- They wanted to keep going and not be near other people founding demesnes. The geography does not correspond, by the way. This place isn't earth with magic. I lost track of where I was going with that. I can make big rooms today. They'd be explicitly temporary. What I really want to do is get this hall long enough, make a nice sheer pit, and try figuring out how monsters work- The fifth component of the core. I think they might be made of iridescence? Or - something like that. They devour imbuement and bindings if they touch them, and get stronger, just like the colors do."

"Ooh, smooth limestone is pretty, especially with copper. Do you want to plan things mostly underground or aboveground? And can you make another one of those temporarily goopy slates to draw some village planning on? Stone construction fused all the way down should be really stable, as long as we're not in am earthquake zone."

She drums her fingers on her thigh. "Oh, I authorized Cooper as a 'temporary organizer' until you and I talk about actual roles and people to fill them, with an explicit note that if he does something sufficiently annoying with it I'm busting him down to latrine duty. We need an official cabinet or chain of command or something, people who are officially in charge of different things so we can tap all their expertise and also not have to make every immediate nuts-and-bolts decision. Have some ideas for possible roles depending on what vague shape you want the colony to take: monarchy with cabinet, militaristic, republic-ish, or something else."

"My ideal life... Is one where I wander from town to town, honestly, and it's not like I can never leave here, but- Ugh. I do not want to settle arguments about who owes who what. The usual arrangement and the one people will expect is- Appointing a few 'lords and ladies', like we're all jousting and holding feasts. They get to know the binder, carry out instructions on their behalf, assemble reports, the whole lot. The lords are understood to be operating on behalf of the dungeon binder in a pretty flexible way. I say, 'lord Farkas, what do we need most today?' and he'd say 'I asked people about that earlier, we could really use better ventilation in the dining hall, oh and there's a problem with the seeling and furshing, a kid fell in and now some of the parents are saying to keep kids away from the river'. That make sense? We'd want to both approve probationary lords..."

"So lord of this and lady of that, especially if they're talented at managing something or other? Great. Do noble titles typically come with an area of responsibility, like lord of agriculture or something like that?"

"No idea. Not like I rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous back home. It doesn't sound wrong? Oh, and 'lord' isn't hereditary. It's a hired and fired post. Lords can be and are replaced."

"Well, that's gonna be my instinct unless I hear a reason it's a bad idea. To my understanding it makes things work better. Sort of like ministers in a monarch's cabinet. And I definitely like that they can be fired. I can and will fire a bitch if they fuck things up for our populace."