There were only eighty of them.
With eighty plants to water, Tiller had abundant time in his day. If his plan were to progress to fruition then there would be a near future where he simply didn’t have this time. He saw every moment as an opportunity to earn money to pay the price to return to his family. Therefore, every moment not invested in earning money was a moment wasted.
He counted the time, converting it each day. By the morning of the fourth day he reckoned he had spent around seventy hours in this strange place. By his count that meant he had been absent from his family for more than an hour in the real world. His heart ached at each moment, his mind wandering wildly through the possibilities. He had kids: how much would they grow in his absence, how much would he miss? It pained him to imagine. He had no scale yet, but the concept of earning ten million of anything seemed daunting, nearly impossible.
The routine in the early days became simple enough. Rise with the dawn, eat, water, make a high-effort but ultimately doomed attempt to deal with the pipkin, then projects.
On the morning of the fourth day he again gave chase to the pipkin, again tried to use his leap and shovel sigils to dispatch the critter, again a smokescreen of suddenly sprouting grasses ferried the strange little animal to safety.
After watering was finished on the fourth day Tiller exhausted his earth sigil preparing more ground. He was on his way to at least doubling the growing area of the island by levelling the hillocks and spreading the extra earth across the white, but he could see the clear and simple limitation that loomed before him. If he didn’t want to be here for the rest of his life then he would need to scale his production up. He would need a way to make plants go faster, access to more islands, or a way to acquire more earth.
The trees continued to frustrate him.
“This sucks. I’m sleeping on the ground, with no way to make a shelter, those fucking trees are in the way of the landscaping project and you’re telling me there’s nothing I can fucking do about them?”
Pod, lounging drunkenly nearby, said, “You talking to me or to yourself?”
Tiller turned, frustration easily morphing into anger, “Does it matter? Can you help?”
Pod said, “Told you already, takes an edged weapon or tool to cut ’em for usin’. If you get a destroying sigil, like fireballs or hard-striking or the likes, then you can smash ’em up but not use ’em. Now, if you’ve notions about makin’ lumber out of ’em, fancy ideas about shelters, a nice little house to warm your ass in, that’ll mean more tools, and that’ll mean…”
Pod trailed off, eying Tiller. Tiller finished, “spending more money…”
Pod winked at him, closed his eyes, and almost immediately began thundering with strained snores.
On the night of the fourth day Tiller used his shovel sigil to dig pitfall traps for the pipkin. He dug a ring of them, cutting deep holes with straight sheer sides, covering them with mats of long grasses. He looked at his farm before crawling under his blankets. The plants were nearly growing fast enough to watch in real time. The small carrot plants already had tiny orange roots protruding from the earth, the potato plants had branched out with more stems. It was bizarre, and impossible. His mind wrestled with the idea that there was a structured system in place here. The possibility of a system meant the opportunity to exploit it, to get home faster. But the possibility of a system was also so far from a version of reality that his mind could accept, too surreal, too fantastical.
On the morning of the fifth day he rose with excitement, eschewing breakfast so he could inspect his traps. What he found was that three more plants had been destroyed, and that every one of his pitfall traps had been triggered without yielding a pipkin. As he inspected the last of them, wondering if the creature was capable of mocking him by breaking every covering of grass, he saw it, crouched by the verge of the vegetation. It sat, crouched over, chewing noisily on a tiny partly grown carrot, the root as thin as a shoelace. He started to run at it, and the creature tensed to flee, then stopped. He could waste energy repeating the useless cycle of leap, swing and vegetation smokescreen, or he could use his energy for something productive. He growled, “See you tomorrow” and turned to employ himself elsewhere.
On the night of the fifth day, as he worked on his snares, using stocks and odd bits of clothes and string offered by Maeve, he asked, “What’s the point of my farming sigil?”
She looked up from her own project, stitching some filthy rag that belonged to Pod, “What’s that, love?”
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Tiller said, “The other sigils all do things, but I don’t understand what the farming sigil does?”
She peered at him, as if only just remembering that her strange new companion somehow lacked the most basic of knowledge about the most basic things, “Well, love, it makes farming things work better now, doesn’t it?”
Tiller dropped the crude snare he was working on and stared at her, “How’s that? I never see it working! It never glows, everything seems to just come down to working with my body and getting my hands dirty.”
Maeve seemed to struggle to find the words. She paused, as an adult might with a child while trying to find a way to explain something that was too simple to need explaining. After a moment she said, “Well, love, when you do farming things it’ll work better for you than it does for someone without the sigil. When harvest time comes, you’ll get a little more out of the ground than me or Pod would. For that matter, our taters are nearly ready and you might dig them up for us, get the little bonus, you know. But it works for other things too. If you get a composter you’ll get more out of that than we would. Things like that, love.”
Tiller’s shoulders sagged, “So it’s doing nothing for me right now?”
Maeve smiled pitifully at him, as if pained by his lack of understanding.
It rained on the night of the fifth day. Tiller was without shelter and existed in a state of misery. In the morning he rose to wet blankets, sore joints, and fields that did not need watering. He also discovered that each snare had been destroyed, but that only two more plants had been destroyed. It seemed they had grown larger and more satisfying to the pipkin.
Locking eyes with the creature from where it crouched watching him, he hissed at it, “Two is still too many.” He did the maths: the creature had taken three seedlings on the first day of growth, only two the next morning when Tiller had interrupted and given chase, three the next and this morning two more. His voice broke with emotion as he gasped, “That’s ten fucking plants… that’s ten percent of everything…”
The pipkin tilted its head to the side and, if he didn’t know better, he could have sworn there was apology there.
Wet, poorly rested, and defeated once more, Tiller set about trying to build a shelter.
He went to the space near the field where he usually slept and dragged his drenched blankets to a tree, draping them over a branch to dry. Then he turned his attention to the empty space they had vacated. He looked around. He didn’t want Pod watching and mocking him for trying something. The little drunkard seemed to scorn anything that had a hint of innovation, anything that strayed from conventional logic.
Seemingly alone, Tiller raised a hand and the earth sigil glowed on his band. He didn’t know if it would work. He’d had some practice with the sigil by now and capably been able to direct the earth to form more fields on the white. There was no lack of excitement in him as four straight walls trembled their way from the ground, square-edged and perfectly formed, a space for a doorway presenting itself in the wall facing him.
“Wow…” he breathed. This was something with real possibilities. As he looked on his new creation, laughter filled the air behind him.
Pod’s voice came, slurred with drink, “What good’ll that do ya? Rain comes from up there, ’cause you hadn’t noticed!”
Tiller didn’t answer him. It was shelter of some kind. If he had an axe then he’d have a roof in no time. And it gave him another idea.
Tiller slept very early that night. He was already tired from the broken sleep he’d had in the rain, and with no watering to do that day he’d found himself at a loose end. Besides, he had a new idea and if it was going to work then he needed to be awake before dawn.
“Jesus, but this would be easier with an alarm clock.”
Tiller did indeed wake before the dawn on the morning of the seventh day. He crept out of the doorway in his roofless hut with excitement. There was burgeoning possibility he could solve the persistent problem of the pipkin this morning. The very idea of a win, even one so basic, made his heart stir. It made him forget the longing he had to return home. It focused him.
There, in the pale light of the early morning, grey light spilling over the horizon, he saw the pipkin, rooting up an onion plant. The creature turned with a start, as though feeling his gaze on it. Its overly large eyes widened even further with fright and it turned to streak toward the refuge of the vegetation.
Tiller raised his arm and tracked the creature, as though he was aiming a gun. He waited for the pipkin to enter the open space, where there were no vulnerable crop plants in the firing line.
His earth sigil glowed and the earth snapped up, exploding around the pipkin, like a venus flytrap formed from soil.
“Holy fucking shit, it worked!”
The pipkin was trapped, its body entombed, only its head protruding from the bulb of earth.
He wasted no time, he had no notion how quickly the little animal might break free, and including this morning its toll on his project probably amounted to twelve plants. He grabbed his shovel and found himself standing over the animal.
With a heavy heart he raised the tool, the edge of the shovel gleaming as his shovel sigil glowed. The huge dark eyes looked up at him, the little mouth of the animal hanging open in an expression of fear that was all too human.
“Sorry little guy… I… I don’t want to do this, but you’re standing between me and my family.”
He started to swing and then arrested, narrowing his eyes at the pipkin. He could have sworn…
“Do you… can you understand me?”
The huge eyes and the tiny face only stared at him for a few moments, a discernible expression of dread painted there. Then the tiny head nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Tiller dropped the shovel and staggered back. He said, “You can! You’re fucking intelligent.” He looked from the pipkin to his shovel and back again. He picked up the shovel. “Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t believe I’m doing this. But I can’t have you around. I need to get home, and you’re robbing me every day. Shit, why do you have to be intelligent…
He raised the shovel again, the slack-jawed fear in the cute little face making the action no easier. Again the shovel rose into the air, again the sigil glowed and the edge of the blade gleamed.
