There were some things, Clark felt, that truly needed to be experienced to be properly appreciated.

Such as, he was learning, the satisfaction of sending up a load of bricks on a platform, knowing that on the far end, a wizard was building his tower thanks to your efforts.

It felt like something straight out of a story, and that was just so awesome.

Of course, the stories didn't talk about how annoying it was to balance bricks on a crane platform suspended by ropes in such a way that didn't cause it to all fall off dramatically, breaking half the bricks and wasting half the pile.

That hadn't been fun. But nobody had been hurt! So that was a good day as far as Clark was concerned.

What was fun, though, was watching a pile of bricks slowly get pulled into the air with nothing but the power of a wheel submerged in water. Not, of course, that he would ever doubt the power of water, but seeing it harnessed in such a simple and elegant way was just really neat.

It didn't go up very fast, but that didn't make it any less cool in Clark's opinion. He just needed to remember to not pull out the water wheel connector until after the thing had reached the top and the stopper was in place. Both, he had learned, were very important, so he would make sure to remember them both.

This was the first load going up since Commander Henrietta had woken up, and because Jacob was still sleeping, Clark was doing it all on his own. He absolutely refused to let himself mess it up, either, so he made sure he was doing everything correctly.

Wait until Henrietta waved that the platform was at the top, then slip in the little thing that kept the rope-spool from moving at all, and then really quickly disconnect the water wheel before anything could break.

There weren't any panicked yells that Clark could hear, so he thought he'd done everything right, but he still craned his neck to see Henrietta's inkling tendrils snake out and snag the bricks from the platform one at a time, placing them out of his view on the red cliffs.

It made for quite the stunning picture, really. A small line of ink-black streaming off the stunningly red cliff to reach something on the dull-green reed platform, all framed by the vivid blue sky.

Oh! And there was the signal wave.

Clark carefully removed the reel-stopping pin, and the platform immediately started to drop. To keep it from smashing into the ground, Clark grabbed the brake-stick and pushed it against the rope's reel. It slowed it down with friction some, but mostly what was responsible for slowing down the descent was simply the way the stick kept catching onto the reel. It gave the descent a jumpy, stuttering descent in contrast to how smoothly the platform could be raised.

Once the platform was back on the ground, Clark started reloading it, one brick at a time. They were really big bricks, but that's just what Oliver would need. Each lift strained Clark's grip strength just a little bit more than was really comfortable, the ceramic edges cutting slightly into his hands as he did so.

One of the bricks fell apart as he picked it up, a crack revealing itself and spreading rapidly through the brick before the back half dropped out of his grip and very nearly onto his toes. Whew. That was close. But the broken brick wasn't going to be useful to them, so Clark tossed the half still in his hands over to the side, onto the 'broken brick' pile that was a fair bit larger than the 'whole brick' pile. Then, before he forgot, he also tossed the brick half that had fallen to the ground into that pile as well.

That caused a small avalanche in the pile, as brick fragments settled and shifted, which was cool to watch, but then Clark went back to his actual job before the Commander would get mad at him for slacking off. Oh, his hands were covered in the red brick-dust, so he quickly [Unblemish]ed them before actually getting back to work, brushing off the cloying coloration with his fingers to reveal a cut along the side of his hand. He healed it, of course, and then went back to reloading the platform.

A few minutes later, the platform was full again, and he activated the winch to pull it to the top once again, seeing how it swayed in the breeze as it rose up. It was so cool to watch.

Over the course of the day, the pile of actually whole bricks shrank pretty quickly. While Oliver was sleeping, a new batch of bricks came out of the kiln that helped refill it, but there was only so much it could really do when most of the stuff just went straight into the broken-brick pile.

Watching the inkling at work was always a delight though. Foreign magic just had such neat patterns, and powers that they got from a Jump usually had a trace of Heroism in them, something he could actually see as a [Prince of Shining Streams], and that was neat too! But the magic in the inkling was so sinuous-y and properly magical-y, acting in ways that made sense rather than ways you needed math to predict.

Clark eventually stopped to make food for dinner not long after the brick delivery ended, but made sure to stop and re-[Unblemish] their water supply on the way, that way he had lots of clean water to make food with. Soups were pretty common at this point, because Alyssa had found some kind of leaf that did a pretty good job of absorbing water and becoming pretty hardy with a good texture, though still not very flavorful, and that made for such a good mouth-feel when he did it.

Also, soups were hard to mess up. He could leave a pot over the fire-pit for ages and so long as it wasn't too full, it would never make a mess or boil over or anything like that, it would just simmer and cook and he could keep putting things into it as they were ready and that meant there was always food ready to be eaten for people.

It was good to always have food ready for people, because if you didn't get food when your body wanted it, you'd start suffering for it. Your body would get really uncomfortable and then your stomach might hurt and eventually you'd start getting weaker if your body didn't get enough food to keep itself going. So that meant Clark needed to keep people from getting hungry, because they were already so weak that getting weak from hunger would just be that much worse.

He had a bowl of soup himself for dinner, which was unfortunately quite bland but there really wasn't a whole lot he could do about that at this point. But the miserable food really was one of the worst parts of the Jump, Clark thought. Other worlds and even just other continents were supposed to have all kinds of exotic and cool foods to be eaten, but they hadn't had any of those! It really was weird.

The next day was, unsurprisingly, more brick-loading. Clark's muscles hurt so much from all of the moving, and his lower back was really sore as well, and [Unblemish] didn't seem to be fixing it. Clark still took over from Jacob though, but the brick pile was running really low.

"That's the last of it!" he ended up calling up a couple hours later.

"What?" Henrietta yelled back down.

"No more bricks!" he explained. "It's all broken now!"

A few moments later, the Commander was swooping down to the ground on her awesome ink wings, "Did you say we're out of bricks?"

"Yeah," Clark repeated. Had he not been making enough food? Henrietta seemed agitated, which being hungry could do to you.

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"Why didn't you say anything?" she asked, somewhat exasperated.

"I did?" he clarified, "I yelled it at you, but I guess you didn't hear me?"

"Not now," she sighed, "I meant as warning."

"Oh. I thought you knew," Clark shrugged, "Can't you see down here?"

"Well yes, but that looks like a big pile of bricks, not a big pile of broken bricks." She sighed, "I guess we'll need to improve our brick throughput."

"There's a lot of broken bricks," Clark helpfully pointed out, "Maybe try to fix that? If none of them broke, we'd easily have double, triple, something way more than what we do now. Well, it wouldn't fix the ones that are already broken. Now I am curious as to whether I can [Unblemish] them whole once more?"

"Save your mana," Henrietta advised him, "We'll try to improve the success rate, that's been something we've been meaning to do for a while now. Seems like it's actually going to be something that we need to prioritize now."

A sudden swirl of magic around the reed sleeping hut drew Clark's eye, and a moment later the entire construction started glowing so brightly that it hurt his eyes to look at. Henrietta also shielded her eyes, so he knew that it wasn't just bright with mana.

At almost the same time, a startled cry emanated from the hut, and Jacob leaped out with his sword in hand, and took a defensive stance as he clearly adjusted to suddenly being woken up.

Henrietta sighed. "I spoke too soon, I guess. That's going to need to be the priority, isn't it?"

Jacob had relaxed somewhat, and was looking around the area warily. Clark gave him a cheery wave.

Much to everyone's relief, the issue with the huts wasn't the mattresses inside. Those were still working normally, but they obviously needed to be moved out of the place glowing absurdly brightly and into somewhere that they could actually sleep.

Clark made sure he helped Alyssa to make a sleeping nook, which they did by making a tent of sorts out of reeds. There weren't any poles in the middle, but that wasn't needed because they could just stick reeds in some of the softer ground away from the river at an angle, creating a kind of triangle shape where they met in the middle.

It was so much harder than Clark had expected, getting the reeds to all stay at the same angle as each other, and even harder getting them to meet in the middle! Alyssa was also surprised by how hard it was, which he could tell because of how annoyed she kept getting with him when making small mistakes. She was like that, he'd noticed. She got really defensive any time something seemed harder than she was expecting, or whenever someone threatened to be better than her at something.

Oliver took a lot of her annoyance, he'd noticed. But Clark thought that if he just kept her focused on him, instead of their archmage, they'd all be better off. And it wasn't like he wasn't sorry about messing up, but there was some idea on the corner of his mind about improving their cooking that he knew she'd really like that kept distracting him.

"No! Hold still!" Alyssa vented at the reeds she was holding. "Don't you dare, I swear, if you..."

The end of the reed, which had been shifting ominously, finally revealed itself to be insufficiently planted in the ground and tore itself out of the soil, bringing with it a clump of dirt that arced gracefully through the air a few feet before returning to join its kind once again.

The other end of the reed, the one Alyssa had been trying to drag into alignment with the ones next to it, spontaneously fell as its support gave way, causing Alyssa to stumble. That, in turn, caused her to trip into the wall of sloped reeds. Though to Clark's marginal dissatisfaction it didn't all collapse like a giant train of dominoes, it did cause a few more reeds to pull free of the ground and likewise clatter down to the dirt below.

"You'll get it next time?" Clark tried in encouragement, only to get an annoyed glare in response. "Well, okay. But what about using more flexible reeds? Then you don't risk breaking the ground when you're pulling them around, and it might be easier to get in place?"

"No," Alyssa snapped, "If the reeds are flexible, then they'll droop down too much and they won't be able to hold the mud coating."

"And that's important because..." Clark prompted, deftly fishing for information.

"Because, unless you forgot that too, we're making this as a place to sleep in, and that means we need to make sure that it's dark inside. With Ollie so busy, we can't get a magic solution, so we need to physically block out the light. And that means we need to put mud," she pointed at the ground, "On the walls," she pointed at the set of angled reeds just as another one came loose and fell to the ground, "To cover for the fact that it never gets dark here," she pointed at the sky.

"But what about the feng shui of-"

"And that's why this is a temporary situation. So that we have a place to sleep for a couple of days while Oliver fixes our actual bedhouse, getting the Shadow enchantment working again to improve our sleep quality. Because I don't know about you, but I need sleep. Or is that another commoner thing that you don't know about, except I know you do because I've heard you snoring."

"I apologize?"

"But that's why we can't use more flexible reeds. Because anything that isn't stiff enough to hold enough mud to block out eternal daylight isn't going to work, because look at how much a flexible reed," she darted over to their pile of reeds and came back with one that flopped around in her hand as she ran back. That wasn't exactly what Clark had meant, but now that she brought it over, it did give him an idea. But Alyssa needed to vent, so he let her continue.

"Like just look how flexible this thing is! Trying to make it be a support is absolutely pointless, it's so bendy that when you stick it in the ground, the other side will..." Alyssa paused and let out a resigned sigh as she bent her reed such that the top was touching the ground a couple of feet away from where she'd stuck it in the dirt.

Oh hey, she'd realized the same thing as him. No need to get fancy with knots if you could just bend it over into an arc. He'd woven a fair share of baskets, and he knew just how strong it could be. Oh, that was actually an idea. He could make a small basket out of thin reeds to utilize as a strainer or slotted spoon, so he could temporarily submerge things in boiling water without risking overcooking it.

"Fine. Whatever. I guess that'll work. Are you happy now?"

It took Clark a moment to realize Alyssa wasn't talking about his great cooking-utensil idea, but had instead finally said something after a very long pause about the reeds.

"How could I be anything but happy?" Clark asked. Sure, it was annoying losing so much of his magic, but it helped him figure out new and interesting ways to go about doing things. Yeah, the Jump had its ups and downs, but everything here was just so incredible that he couldn't feel anything but joyous.

Alyssa's tired sigh meant she didn't agree with him, but that was alright. He'd figure out some way to cheer her up eventually. "Do you want me to get some more reeds while you restrategize?"

"I don't think that's a word," She grumbled her agreement. Clark took his temporary leave, but while she didn't seem any more cheerful by the time he returned, she did seem a lot more focused, which was good.

With their new technique of simply taking the more flexible reeds and bending them to make an arc, planting each end into the ground, it was way less tricky to do, and far faster to work with. That only got faster when they started weaving more reeds cross-section, like a basket. That did unfortunately make Clark realize exactly what he'd been imagining for his cooking wouldn't quite work, but he also figured out how to make it work, so it was still pretty great.

Then, once the structure was done, they set large leaves over it, then plastered mud and clay all over the leaves, then let it all dry. The end shape was like an elevated tunnel, with one end ending in an arc into the ground, and the other end open. It wasn't really spacious, and there wasn't enough room to sit up in them, but there was enough room to put the mattress tablets in it, and that's what mattered.

The bottom open area was covered by a sort of woven reed structure stuffed with leaves, and while it let in some light it wasn't so much that it offset just how dark the head was.

It almost felt claustrophobic, and Clark was glad that it wouldn't be their permanent setup.

It didn't help that it kept drawing in small adventurous critters looking for somewhere dark to sleep, because for as much as he didn't mind the things generally, waking up to a fuzzy thing in his face was not something that Clark felt like repeating any time soon.

That had not been fun. But hey, hopefully, the sleeping hut would be fixed soon and everything would be great once again.

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