Gearing Up

Now that she had hit a dead end with her inscription work Angela would have to search for more islands. To put it bluntly though, she is weak, extremely weak. Of all her tools only the knife as well as the axe are usable as weapons but she doesn't have enough strength to wield the axe quickly and the knife doesn't have much range, putting her in a precarious position.

In order to circumvent this problem Angela has two options and she is going to use both of them. The first option is to ensure that she has a good supply of anima before beginning to search; in the future she would have to optimise the island's plants to get more anima out of them. The second option she has is to equip herself with traps like the one she used to kill the mice. Angela is fairly certain that different islands would have different creatures defending them but the more traps she has designed the more likely it is that she will have one that helps.

Now that she had access to a variety of plants with a multitude of different uses the possibilities for traps have increased by a huge amount. She already has many ideas in the working but she is unsure of how viable most of them are.

Her first idea is a trapdoor leading to her void, the pitfall from earlier worked well but that was mostly due to the mouse's own mistake, if the platform had been too sturdy the mouse wouldn't have fallen or if the platform had been too weak it would have broken before the mouse put all its weight on to it.

In order to solve this problem Angela would make a strong platform but have a manual release; maybe a latch that she can pull using a vine or perhaps even a strong branch. She starts working on the platform and quickly builds one using the blueprint function. To make the trapdoor fall when not latched, Angela has two halves of the platform attached to a frame using wooden dowels that loosely fit into holes in the frame. This allows gravity to do most of the work for her.

For the latch Angela uses a simple bolt mechanism that can be pulled out easily and adds a loop to the end where she can tie the rope/vine. With thus complete all that is left is to test it, Angela quickly builds a stand so that she can see the effect from all angles and places some miscellaneous items on top. She ties the plant to the loop and, standing back as far as she can, pulls hard.

The latch pulls open and the doors drop instantly, the items fall to the ground and Angela jumps for joy, she had expected that she would have to tweak it a lot more but she tests it a couple more times just to be sure.

With a latch system successful Angela moves on to all sort of different traps, even setting up tripwires to trigger them. Moving on she creates all sorts of traps: swinging logs, falling stakes, rolling logs and all manner of other contraptions.

Her arsenal of traps expanded, Angela now feels much more secure about searching for islands, she deconstructs a bunch of the useless plants (though she is starting to find it a lot harder to find them) and looks at her anima compass.

Though it is called a compass it is actually more like an anima radar with little blips where anima is being used. There are about fifteen blips in the radius of the device (about 500m due to the shoddy materials used) which is a lot more than Angela expected.

Finally! She was ready. It was time to start expanding her platform. Angela moves towards the nearest island and begins to place her dirt flooring. She doesn't go directly for the blip, instead building a 5m wide platform which she has plans to turn into a farming area to both give a supplement her deconstruction menu as well as to complete some of the quests and requests.

Unfortunately the useless plants run out before she reaches enough anima to create a path all the way to the island and Angela has to start using some of the more useful plants, though she is careful not to completely deplete her sources like she did with the useless ones; she wanted to make sure that they would eventually grow back over time.

Eventually Angela reaches the blip and an enormous, metallic boulder materialises, shocking her even more than the previous island. At this point could it even be called an island, it was more like an asteroid.

The next pop up is something familiar and yet different. Making Angela curse how involved she had gotten into the creation. So involved that she had forgotten to hold back some anima.

[mortal rank demon island discovered, will spawn 1 rank one Zhenix drone each hour until assimilated. Assimilation cost: 200 anima]

As it stood, Angela was in trouble, in order to gather 200 anima she would have to almost strip bare the first island, especially given that she currently only had 160 maximum at the moment. It seems that she would have to wait, and hope that the coming storm was not a fatal one.