Promptly after deciding to finish all this later, Tuck pushed his materials out of the way and fell into a deep sleep, much heavier than the nap he’d had earlier. He didn’t dream, and by the time he woke up again, the lights in the Cave were dim, which meant it was nighttime. He yawned at sat up, rubbing his eyes with his little hands. His headache had dulled some, but it was still there, and his stomach growled in hunger. It seemed he had most definitely overworked himself… He needed to clean up his space and have some dinner!

Words: 100

Tuck got to work cleaning up any of the extra supplies he’d brought with him, scattering the excess moss all over the spot where he’d found it, leaving the extra pieces of bark around the trunk of the tree he’d peeled them from, throwing the vines he didn’t need into the underbrush. Thank goodness he’d brought extra vines, considering one of them had exploded on him earlier! Gods, he hoped that never happened again! It had scared the daylights out of him! He still needed to do some work on the bag before it was ready to be taken out of Eridanus with him, so he carefully picked it up, as well as the vine he still needed to wrap around it vertically, and carried them over to his hiding spot where he’d also hidden the kunzite orb.

It was a little spot beneath the roots of a tree. It seemed an obvious place to hide things, but the roots made it difficult for anyone trying to dig their way to his things, and he was so small he could go really far underneath the roots until nothing could possibly reach him without somehow knocking over the tree. He gingerly laid the near-finished bag beside the kunzite orb, which he stared at lovingly, and then he left his hiding spot to go drink up some more tree sap for dinner.

Words: 231

Later, after he’d had his dinner, he went back down to his little hidey hole and went to sleep for the night. Generally, he slept up in the crook of a tree branch but tonight he was too excited to finish his backpack in the morning to go all the way up into the tree. He was so excited, in fact, that he could hardly sleep. He tossed and turned, waiting for the lights of Origin Cave to return to their usual bright glow, and for the sounds of insects and Lesser Gembounds to wake him, but a few hours into his ‘sleep,’ he was so restless he just decided to get up again. He would finish it tonight or he would pass out trying!

Words: 125

OOC: Swear-heavy-ish!

Aaand his Magic hated him. He grumbled under his breath as it once again refused to work. It was like it was taunting him! Sometimes it would work perfectly, other times not at all! And yet other times it would work just enough for him to think he was getting somewhere, and then stop so that he grew increasingly more frustrated! All he wanted to do was preserve his other backpack strap so that it wouldn’t decay over time! Uggghhh! But no! His Magic decided to say, “FUCK YOU!” and just refuse to do anything! Man, he was too tired for this shit!

Words: 103

Tuck stared with bulging eyes at the vine he was trying to Preserve, but after a full minute, he realized it wasn’t gonna work again. He groaned loudly and slumped forward onto his face, lying on the cool ground under the tree roots and continuing to groan. Whyyyy? He made a few attempts at crying, but found he didn’t have the stomach for such a thing. He was too busy groaning in irritation. He wanted to just pick up the backpack and SMASH IT INTO A MILLION PIECES but he couldn’t! He’d worked on it for hours! All he needed were three more things, but in order for those things to work, he needed his Magic to work! And it wasn’t! It wasn’t working!

He pounded a paw into the ground for a few minutes to let off some steam.

Words: 140

Eventually he sat up and tried again, staring at the vine for a few seconds. He almost thought it wasn’t going to work again but right before he cut off the Magic flow, he felt a trickle of it flow from his collarbone into the vine. It wasn’t much, honestly, but it was better than nothing, and he would take anything at this point! Why was his Magic so fickle? It’s like it had some kind of weird love-hate relationship with him at all times. He thought he’d had better luck before trying to make this stupid bag, but the last day had proved that his luck was just as shit as everyone else’s, and that just made him feel… like shit.

Words: 123

He gave himself another break before trying the next part, thinking quietly about all the cool stuff he could carry around once this bag was done! Besides, he’d created it all by himself, through his own Magic, sweat, and tears! He even had a headache and the fatigue to prove it. He was barely awake at this point, but still too restless to sleep. He needed to do this until either it was finished, or he had no Magic reserves left. It would be scary running on empty like that, but he was sort of curious to know what it felt like…

Words: 102

After a small break, Tuck continued Preserving pieces of his backpack. He was almost done with the whole thing. He just needed to Preserve the vines wrapped around it horizontally so they wouldn’t decay and fall off over time; then he needed to rub a light coating of resin all over everything and let it harden before he continued; afterwards, he would use Plantcharm to wrap a vine around the container vertically, to give it extra strength, to make sure the bottom didn’t call out, and to give the container a kind of lid. He would make sure the vertically wrapped vine had enough give so that he could push the coils out of the way to place things in the bag, or push them back into place over the opening to make sure nothing came out.

His Magic decided it agreed with him and worked immediately when he thought to Preserve the horizontal vine. He smiled wanly, knowing that his Magic could give out on him at any moment, so he would take its cooperation when he received it.

Words: 180

Now for the resin, which he didn’t have access to in here. He felt nervous climbing around Eridanus with the lights low like this, because he knew that many predators hunted during the dimlight*… In fact, he felt a little better about this whole thing since his last cast had gone so well, and for the first time that night, he actually felt tired. With another wan smile, he fell forward and passed out all the way until newlight**…

When he awoke, he was starving again, which seemed about right considering all the work — Magical and otherwise — that he’d been doing over the past day and night. He decided to postpone more work on the bag until he’d had breakfast, so he crawled out of his hidey hole under the roots of a very large tree — the tree he usually slept in — and then made his way up the trunk to find a good spot to get some sap.

He knew well enough not to take too much sap from the same tree, or it could die, since sap was a tree’s lifeblood, so he was very choosy about when and where he drank sap. He’d actually avoided taking too much sap from this particular tree because he liked it so much. It provided a space to hide all his treasures and it was large and overbearing compared to all the other trees around. But this newlight, he was just too tired to go hunting for a different tree.

He scratched and bit a nice hole into his tree about halfway up the trunk and licked at the sap greedily for a while until it refused to produce more and he was full. Then he took a few minutes to stretch his limbs and groom himself. He smiled around at the world, and then scaled the trunk back down to the ground for another day or work with the bag. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too much longer…

Words: 327
*Dimlight = nighttime, when the lights in the Cave dim
**Newlight = morning, when the lights in the Cave brighten again

Tuck carefully picked up his mostly-finished bag and carried it out into the open, overlooked by his tree. Then he went back and got the vines he’d brought into the hidey hole last dimlight. He spread them out beside the bag and then he scaled the tree and went to collect some resin from it. He climbed back down and began rubbing the sticky residue onto all the parts of his bag. Resin wasn’t the same as tree sap. It was similar, but not quite the same. When it hardened after he was done putting it on, it would act as a kind of shield, protecting the bag from moisture like a sealant.

It took him a few trips up and down the tree to get enough resin to get it all over the bag, and he wasn’t done yet. Now he had to wait for it to dry and then put the last vine over the bag, vertically. He sat down for a while, waiting for the resin to harden.

Words: 172