[X] Nets are cool, but you need to find some way to take care of the surplus fish. Just throwing them to the dirt seems... Wasteful, disrespectful even.
-->[X] Rotten fish turn to icky, slushy muck. But perhaps if there wasn't any liquid in them, they couldn't do that?
Rolled: 21 - 5 + 5 = 21: Failure
[X] See what OTHER uses this "net" can do!
- - [X] Like smaller ones to carry things by two or more people!
Rolled: 1 + 2 + 0 = 3: Critical failure
- - [X] Or sleeping on while strung up between two or more trees!
Rolled: 55 - 6 + 1 = 50: Minor success
Turn 3: Autumn
From the idea of big nets holding fish, it's not too difficult to conceive of smaller nets carrying different things. Still, people question whether or not it will actually work. Something designed to catch fish, after all, might not work so well at catching other things, as it were. There's much discussion about it, but no one actually tries to implement it.
Finally, one particularly enterprising young man takes it upon herself to make a demonstration, making a middling-sized net big enough for two or more people to carry quite a bit of things between them. Everyone is suitably impressed until the the net snaps during the middle of his demonstration, dumping the collections of smooth river rocks that he and his assistant were carrying onto their feet. People are... less impressed afterwards, and after he admits that actually carrying things over a long distance with this probably wouldn't be too comfortable, everyone decides to let the idea drop.
Surprisingly, though, the young man keeps at it, depite the complete lack of support. One day, you return to the campsite to find that he's made another net, a larger one this time, stringing it up between two middling-sized trees that grow near the campsite. He invites you to try lying on the thing, and you quickly find that it's surprisingly comfortable.
While it certainly feels better than sleeping on the ground, everyone still remembers the incident from before, and while it's nice for resting in the middle of the day, people are reluctant to actually
sleep in them, for fear that the net will snap and dump them on the ground. Combined with the fact that no one really has the time to tie a net that large by hand just so they can sleep a bit more comfortably, adoption of the "hammock," as he calls it, is slow, and it doesn't really catch on.
-----
With your newly-developed food surplus, you quickly find yourself running into problems that you've never had before. Namely, the problem of all the half-eaten fish slowly collecting on the refuse pile. To put it bluntly, they stink. The rotting corpses let out an awful stench, one that's strong enough that it draws scavengers from all around. Not to mention, of course, that it feels a bit... wrong, for lack of a better explanation, to let all of that potential food go to waste.
Maybe if you dried the fish out, they might last longer?
The few attempts you make don't succeed at all. All immersing pieces of fish in an open flame does is cause it to burn on the outside withouth drying the inside, and the end result is that you waste quite a bit of perfectly good, edible fish. Sticking them near the fire, on the other hand, has its own set of issues. Too close, and you run into the same problems as simply sticking the fish into the fire had. Too far away, and the fish doesn't really dry out at all. There
is a middle ground that seems to yield decent results, all things told, but the error inherent in the process, on top of the fact that the fire is only really big enough to dry out one fish's worth of food at once means that the entire process is hideously inefficient, both in terms of food preserved to food used, and in terms of effort required to properly preserve the stuff.
Still, the small successes point to the existence of some way you can potentially make this work. The only problem, of course, is that you don't actually know what that is.
Until then, you decide to simply avoid the problem by covering the discarded material with soil, to prevent the smell from getting out. It's only partially effective, but, you suppose, something is better than nothing.
The long days of summer gradually draw to a close, and the turning of the leaves and the first chilly morning herald the arrival of a new season. The groves of trees you marked earlier have finally borne fruit, yielding dozens of small, green-and-red, sour fruit. Dozens of other plants have ripened as well, and the yellows and reds of the forest some distance away from your campsite make for a beautiful sight.
It brings with it a sense of urgency, as well. You have some time to make preparations, but unless you can store enough food for the winter or find a food source that will survive the snows, you'll need to lead your tribe south again, as usual.
Not that that seems particularly palatable, either. This last campsite has been almost perfect, and it would be a shame to have to start over somewhere else next year. You can try to find your way back here, of course, but there's no guarantees on that count.
[ ] What do you do?
