The knife swished through the air, swung with as much force as Henrietta Inq could put behind it, and thunked into the side of a reed. Unfortunately, that simply stuck it in the toughened exterior and forcing her to jostle it slightly to remove it before she could give another pass.

She'd just sharpened the blade before she headed out, and it was already getting dull. Mostly-pure copper, to no particular surprise, did not make a particularly good blade. It was soft enough to work cold, which was good for repairs and sharpening, but less great for actually using it as a harvesting tool.

Eventually, after several attempts, Henrietta finally managed to fell the reed she'd been working on by grabbing it with her ink-flail and pulling the whole thing over. At ten meters tall and about twenty centimeters in diameter, it was about as large as the plants got, and completed the set she was trying to collect.

Normally, Jacob Veeran would harvest reeds for them. His [Frostblade] was the only reliable strong-and-sharp thing they had, easily superior to even basic steel swords let alone copper ones, but he and his skill-sword had been reassigned recently to boat-making duty, meaning that Henrietta's desire for reeds would need to be filled by herself.

Well, she could have also told Alyssa Ride to harvest them, but she was distinctly their best forager and Henrietta had thought it couldn't be too hard. Considering how wrong she had been, it was clear an updated approach was required.

Most likely, that involved determining out a balance of duties for Jacob and his blade that still involved lots of reeds gotten. She was still learning how best to handle task-assignments, and it showed.

But with a large reed, Henrietta felt she'd gotten enough variation in her fresh reeds to carry on a new iteration of her experiments in making... it wasn't paper. Papyrus was the equivalent back home, named after the same plant it was made from, but calling the product she was aiming for reed didn't seem like a good idea. So, she called it papyrus for clarity.

She was trying to make papyrus. The hope there would be that papyrus would be sufficiently Card-like that [Master Inkscribe] could literally work its magic with it, and in so doing unlock subskills for her [Refined Calligraphy]. It had been about three months since the Jump and its corresponding level reset, but her skill had barely grown. Though unlike Oliver Smith, whose System had fully broken as they came to the new world, her stagnation was simply due to lack of opportunity.

Her inklings might have been content with her finger-painting on her arm, but her Class was somewhat pickier.

Ten meters of reed was far too much for her to carry alongside its smaller and more flexible siblings, so Henrietta paused for a moment to carve a notch into it about two, three meters above the base, then leveraged it against a nearby rock and tree to break it into a smaller length.

The trek back to First Tower would have been a nightmare otherwise.

It really was a testament to just how many reeds they went through as only five people, that it was any kind of an appreciable walk between where they lived and where they harvested reeds. When they'd first settled into their second settlement on the otherwise-uninhabited world, a few reeds had lined the banks of Tower Stream. Those had been harvested away almost instantly, and in the intervening time the nearest reeds had gotten further and further away. Though, they grew quickly enough that some 'depleted' areas already had new and young reeds sprouting up, so maybe that wasn't entirely accurate.

At least the trail had been very firmly cleared out by this point, so Henrietta didn't need to deal with any low-hanging branches or clinging vines on her return.

"Commander," Jacob greeted her as she returned to their campsite. He and Clark Haleford were at the riverbank, testing out different configurations for boats - or any kind of floating transportation really - that might be useful for shipping around substantial amounts of material in one way or another.

They were doing well, so Henrietta simply motioned for them to continue and made her way to 'her' workstation.

Unlike Oliver's handful of warded areas, nothing Henrietta was doing was sensitive enough to require manipulating the Tapestry to exclude the omnipresent Nature mana. Once she inevitably started doing alchemy again, that was likely to change, but for something as simple as making papyrus, a conveniently flat rock would suffice.

After dropping off her harvest, Henrietta stopped at the cookpot to sharpen her knife. Alyssa looked up as she sat down, and Henrietta gave the Ranger a brief acknowledgement, "How's he doing?"

Alyssa wrinkled her nose, "The fact we have no way to get him water without risking drowning him is still not great. If only our Water specialist healer wasn't completely incompetent. But he might be getting closer to waking up? How long do those sorts of things last anyway? Clark is... unhelpful. Of course."

"Smith took an enormous amount of Technology, Significance, and Dragon mana directly to his soul," Henrietta mused, inspecting her blade after hammering it slightly sharper with a rock. "So long as he wakes up within the next few days, even for a moment, he'll recover."

"I'm getting worried," Alyssa confessed, which Henrietta took as a good sign. Their Ranger wasn't exactly callous, but she could be just as oblivious as Oliver in her own ways. "I just hope that if he does only wake up for a few moments, he'll notice and drink the water by him."

"We'll figure something out, if it comes down to it," Henrietta reassured her. "Smith will be fine."

"He better be," Alyssa grumbled.

Henrietta nearly brought up a comparable time from her other Expedition, wherein their Bastion - their Warrior, Halvor Ecoo, had taken a potent spell to the face and spent nearly two weeks trapped in nightmares... though that would likely be more discouraging than hope-inducing. Halvor had far more physical stats than Oliver did, and had the benefits of a more comprehensive form of medical care to keep him in good shape.

For neither the first nor the last time, Henrietta mildly bemoaned her decision to prioritize her Sketchbook over her alchemy with her Class selection. The benefit [Master Inkscribe] provided, easy use of the magic she'd obtained as part of her prior Expedition, often felt insignificant compared to the power which she had at her fingertips as a [Catalytic Alchemist]... but, she was certain that she would have regretted keeping it just as surely. Sometimes, there were no right answers.

Alyssa seemed to take Henrietta's silence as intentional, and polished off her food before standing up, "Well. It's my bedtime. I'll let you know if Oliver wakes up."

Henrietta gave a nod to the Ranger. With this world's lack of a sun or anything resembling a normal day/night cycle, their sleeping schedules had drifted into something almost completely disconnected to one another. Long-term, Henrietta wanted them all to get more unified, but for now it was more convenient this way. Oliver had only made two of his 'mattresses,' after all. As a result, time with the magical artifacts which could keep a person hovering just a few centimeters above their surface in a very comfortable way was hoarded jealously.

In due time, he would either be able to make more or they could find an alternative... and they'd get a more secure location for their soup-pot, such that they wouldn't need to personally chase away every curious critter that wanted to get into their food. While the benefits of being the very first humans on the world were strong, most relevantly that hunting was incredibly easy due to the complete lack of a fear response... that also meant that the native critters had no idea that they should stay away from the weird, featherless and furless creatures that had assembled a tall wall around their territory.

Henrietta even needed to chase one of those overly-curious creatures away, the little petalfur that kept hanging around. It was possible that it was magical, but the fox-like creature could have simply been blending into the shadows it liked to lurk in through entirely mundane means. The black, satiny 'petals' which Alyssa had named it for easily played tricks on the eye.

It didn't even want to flee when Henrietta tossed a couple of smaller rocks at it, requiring her to actually get up and shoo it away before it could get any bright ideas about the ceramic cauldron suspended over the kiln's exhaust.

She took a quick detour on her way back to her workshop, checking in on some of her other ongoing experiments. Many of them had taken something of a backburner as of late, as everyone's attentions had been oriented towards helping Oliver make his System node, but her attempts to create lye seemed to be bearing some fruit?

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Conceptually, it wasn't hard. Just mix wood ash with water and let it sit, but she'd been learning all kinds of delightful snags in her attempts, both from her comparative inexperience with the process and the extreme lack of practically every tool which might otherwise be helpful to her... it was fine. She'd gotten it working in fits and starts, and it had been a fairly core component in the tanning of the scalewolf hides they all were wearing for clothing, but she'd never managed to get it to work consistently.

That was the hidden trap, really. She had full confidence in every one of her team to be exceptionally competent in their areas of expertise. But none of them, even Ranger Alyssa, had 'bare nothing survivalism' as one of their specialties. Their pre-Expedition directed training had mostly concerned itself with politics and battle strategy, not how to make soap from scratch. Because they were supposed to arrive in a world that had people in it, people whose help they could enlist as a matter of basic specialization.

Henrietta let out a frustrated sigh she didn't even realize she'd been holding. There was no use in bemoaning their situation, only trying to learn what they could as they could.

So, she was glad to see that her attempts were finally working. It was something she wanted to try in her attempts to make papyrus, if none of her active trials worked out, and she also wanted to make soap with it, lessening their reliance on Clark [Unblemish]ing everything that needed to be clean.

The lye wasn't the only thing she was working on, of course. A good number of reeds soaked in a series of excavated pits, each with slightly different conditions as she tried to find something that was flexible enough for cloth, or that would properly stick together for papyrus.

Real papyrus simply stuck together once the outermost skin was removed and the inner fibers were soaked for a few weeks... to simplify the process slightly. Their reeds weren't quite so obliging, but Henrietta had found that they did become capable of sticking to one another fairly well when she'd first made rope out of them, they just didn't stick together to form papyrus.

Actually... she paused as she checked on one of her batches. That... looked pretty good, actually? It was definitely a bit rough, but it looked like papyrus paper. A sort of pale green-brown in color, but as she touched it it easily flexed under her grip and seemed like it would hold together even under a bit of usage?

It definitely wasn't the strongest, but it might well work? It definitely was her best attempt so far. It took her a bit of time to figure out what had made this attempt work, and she wasn't entirely certain if she was right about which batch this was from. But if she was, then the overall process wasn't too bad.

She moved over to her newly harvested reeds to try and replicate her new discovery. Step one was to select a somewhat younger reed, one young enough to be bent fully in half with just a bit of effort. Any older, and it would be too coarse and fibrous. Good for rope-weaving, less good for papyrus.

From there, she needed to peel off the outermost green layer, leaving her with a cylinder of white-green stalk that felt slightly spongy to the the touch. That she then took and cut from top to bottom on one side, relying on the way even young reeds were slightly hollow inside.

From there, she needed to flatten it. First, she did so by hitting it with a hammer to do a bit of initial break-down, then she squeezed as much else out as she could with a rolling pin. Doing so drove out the water and left her with a slightly-curling but flattened strip of fibers that was surprisingly tough to tear. That in turn was tossed into a pit filled with water. She'd leave it there for a few days, then pull it out. Then, she'd take several of the flattened strips and loosely weave them together, and stick it between some of their flatter but still quite roughshod bricks, regularly produced by their kiln. Then, she'd put something heavy on it - in this case, rocks, and leave it be for a day or two.

And now... this certainly did seem like papyrus.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem like paper. At the very least, she barely could smell any Card mana interacting with or being produced with it, but she'd be remiss if she didn't at least try to use it.

Her stylus, made out of the notched tip of a different reed, readily accepted the ink conjured by [Refined Calligraphy] and allowed her ink to flow onto the surface of the papyrus. Some nudging of the skill, however, proved that there was almost no resonance with the Elemental Card infused with her soul and making up one-third of her [Master Inkscribe] Class. It was like writing on her arm or a rock wall - something that the skill could absolutely be used for, but not something it could do well.

Now, there was a subskill for that. ⟨Universal Canvas⟩ had been a useful part of her toolkit, back when her [Refined Calligraphy] level had been substantially higher. However, she'd gotten the subskill with the aid of a full-featured System node, and didn't know how she might be able to form it naturally.

Well, that was only kind of true. She did have ideas for how she might unlock the skill, they just required a heavily enchanted pen or brush to utilize as a focus, something that she simply didn't have available to her. She didn't know how to unlock it without that, to effectively the same conclusion.

In any case, while it was disappointing that her papyrus wouldn't work, Henrietta retained a bit of optimism. Even if it didn't work for her purposes of skill and subskill unlocks, the papyrus she'd managed to make was rather strong and durable, especially given how crude and unrefined the production process had been... it was a bit stiff, sure, but this could work as a basic fabric. They could finally stop wearing poorly-cured leathers, which was excellent. They could also utilize it for standard 'paper' type things, like writing things down. Oliver could use it to make scrolls, Clark and Jacob might find it quite useful for boat-making....

Yes. This was a tremendous success, even if it wasn't the one she was trying for.

It must have to do with the regular structure of the fibers, Henrietta determined. Elements didn't always act intuitively based on human understanding. The common names for elements did their best to inform both what the element interacted with, but also how it acted on its own, and did remarkably well at that job. But, those names still tended to run parallel to what the element actually was, resulting in occasional mismatches in expectation and reality.

One of the easiest examples was Dark and Shadow. Though they practically corresponded to the exact same physical thing, they were close to entirely opposite elementally. Dark was about the truly unknown, things which had never been seen or discovered, while Shadow pertained more to that which had been specifically covered or hidden.

One of the key aspects of an element was known as its Center. Though researchers liked to overcomplicate it at times, it was the 'thing' which the threads of a particular element interacted with the most, the purest form of the element that could exist, and what it resonated the most with. For Fire, that was obviously flames - traditionally wood flames - Water was chemically pure dihydrogen monoxide in motion at its critical point, Shadow was the darkness cast by an object interposed in front of a light source, Dark was darkness that had never seen light, and so forth.

The Center for elemental Card was a stiff, rectangular piece of paper, with patterns on it, which could be utilized in a game of chance and had been utilized directly to win one of those games of chance. In other words, a playing card - and the 'stronger' the card, the better.

Of course, elements stretched well beyond their Centers. Card magic was far more frequently utilized for its general Association - interactions - with paper than its 'purer' form of playing cards only. But paper wasn't the Center, and that was the issue she was running into now.

Though she was certain any actual elementalist would scoff at it, her understanding of elemental Card was that had to do with finite-state randomness. True chaos was no good, but so too was rigid structure. If something had a discrete number of potential outcomes, that aligned it with elemental Card. If something had a process of randomization followed by a period of definite order, that aligned it with elemental Card. If something possessed many possible outcomes, only one of which would actually come to pass... and so on and so forth.

That was why paper worked so well with the element. It was a ton of individual plant fibers, all ground up and intermixed randomly, then set into a definite and permanent order... which was itself a literal blank canvas, which could become any number of possible things. Dice also worked well with the element, but were less immediately useful. Tiles, such as those used in various games, were also a good bet but still not great.

Perhaps she could form playing cards out of the papyrus, and they could play some kind of basic card game, in order to increase its resonance with Elemental Card? The problem there then arose that trying to physically make the papyrus more cardlike meant making it less like the large canvas she really needed for ⟨Epizeuxis⟩ practice. The physical requirements she'd need in order to get the subskill clashed with the magical rituals needed to make it even eligible in the first place.

Unless she could skew it in some way that she was duplicating her drawings across multiple different cards simultaneously? The issue was mostly a matter of space, but echoing the same pattern on multiple objects was the primary use for the subskill.

That might work. She'd have to give it a go. Though it might be easier to just make paper, now that she knew that papyrus wouldn't work? But to make paper, she'd need to get some cloth. But maybe she could use the papyrus as a kind of cloth, she'd just need to poke a bunch of holes in it because right now it was far too impermeable to let out the amount of moisture that she'd need to in order to make paper.

But she could work to create paper by grinding up reeds and branches and other forms of biomass with water to create a kind of pulp, then squish it between brick and fabric to help drain out the water. There were more steps involved, she was fairly certain, but that could be used to make a basic kind of paper. That it would require a new grindstone was why she wanted to try the papyrus method first, but making another waterwheel-powered production line would be useful practice for creating the much more complicated Iron Foundry they were currently aiming for.

That would have to wait a bit though, as Alyssa stumbled out of the sleeping hut and meandered towards Henrietta. Henrietta set aside her half-prepared set of reeds to hear what the Ranger had to say, and was quite happy with what she heard.

"Oliver's awake."

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