Chapter 32: 031 Learning Is Fun And Hard

It took me an hour to work through the numbers book. I went through it several times and memorized the numbers. It was neat to make the connection to the things written on the supplies I bought and the things in the book. I put it down and knew that I was going to remember it, even when the potion wore off later.

I was tempted to take a fortifying potion and a strength potion, because I knew I was going to need it. The problem was, I wouldn't be able to make any more until the spring. I only had one strength potion left, thanks to my mistake and the need to boost my strength. If the main ingredient wasn't so hard to get, I would have made a lot more of them.

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You have an important choice to make.

A) Enhance yourself. B) Save it for an emergency. C) Split the difference and get half the result.

No, if I'm going to do it, it's all or nothing. I thought. I'd rather gain a permanent smaller boost once a year than a quick and more powerful short temporary boost, so I'll choose A.

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I sighed and looked at the potions in my stash, then thought it was better to give myself an overall strength enhancement instead of the temporary one I had been benefiting from. My body had recovered from the exertion and would remember the extra strength and what it had done for me, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and took the strength potion and the fortifying potion.

It wasn't intended for living things, so I couldn't use a healing potion to negate the effects. All I could do was wait for it to finish and to bear through the pain as the potion made the strength enhancement permanent. I picked up the next book and it was a basic word book.

It was torture for me to read through.

Three hours later, I was only halfway through the book and my hands and feet shook as the potions settled into my muscles. My breathing was laboured and my mind was as alert as it had been after drinking the number seven potion. I could also feel every twitch and shake as if I was doing it voluntarily. I wasn't; but, my brain was working so quickly that it felt like I was intentionally moving my limbs to cause myself pain.

I kept at it and didn't succumb to the temptation to take a number four potion to stop the process. I would only gain stiffer joints and not the extra strength if I stopped it too soon. I had to let it do its work, so I suffered through another six hours of both the muscle twitching and the book. I hated it, every second, and then it was suddenly over.

I reached the end of the book, read the words 'the end', and my muscles relaxed. I put the book down and stood up. My muscles were no longer stiff and my joints didn't creak as much as they had. I looked at my hands and made fists with them, and I didn't feel my knuckles crack like they had earlier that day. I smiled at the successful integration and resolved to do it again in the spring.

If it could give me that slight edge in strength that I needed when fighting off the creatures in the marsh, then I had no problems with taking a day of aching pain to get it. I might skip the mind enhancing potion next time, though. That was not how I wanted to go through it every time. Not at all.

Of course, now that I had gone through that, my mind was completely unfettered by distractions. I read through the short sentence book again and had no troubles with it. I turned the pages and read the three and four word sentences easily. I read them all again by flipping the pages backwards, just to make sure that I wasn't memorizing them, and closed the book.

I looked at the next book and it had a bunch of numbers on it.

“Mmm-ah-t-huh. Mathuh.” I read. “What's Mathuh?”

I opened it up and it had a straight line, a straight line, and an upside down fishhook. I opened up the numbers book to the first page and nodded. I looked at the second book and there was an apple under the ones. There was two lines between the ones and the fishhook, so I flipped the numbers book and saw that it was a two.

“Oh! It's a counting book!” I exclaimed. “One and one is two! Those lines must mean 'and' and those must mean 'is'.” I said and tapped them. “Okay. I got that.” I flipped the page. “A one and a fishhook and a squiggly line.” I said and flipped the numbers book page. “Ah, three. It's a three. One and two is three.” I flipped the page of the counting book. “Hey, two fishhooks and an upside down chair. The chair is four.”

I picked up both of my hands and counted. “One and two, that's two... and one and two, that's two. If I count them together, that's one, two, three, four.” I wiggled my fingers. “Two and two is four.”

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Montage mode engaged. Speeding up learning. Done.

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I had spent two days learning how to count and using the numbers on the pages. I had been lucky when I used the strength potion and the fortifying potion, because it let me keep the effects of the mind enhancing potion, too. It didn't make me smarter, though. The Hag warned me that it doesn't give you information or teaches you anything. All it did was make it a little easier to learn and I really needed that help.

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I could count with both my fingers and with numbers out loud, so I was happy with that. What I couldn't do was figure out what the other two books were. I could look at the pictures and I read some of the sentences inside; but, I had no idea what they were or what I was supposed to learn from them. The other books were clear on showing me what things were and what I needed to learn.

I packed the books up and put them away. I had learned what I could, or so I thought. When I reached for the wooden blocks to put them in the bag, I noticed that they made a neat little pile and it made the back of my mind tingle for some reason.

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You have a choice to make.

A) Follow through. B) Ignore it. C) Gather ingredients. D) Prep for winter. E) Eat. F) Sleep.

Okay, that's a clear warning to keep going. I'm choosing A.

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I realized something as I looked at it. I picked up a couple of the scattered blocks and put them up on top of the others. It was then that I saw it. Not the words it made, those I ignored. It was the blocks themselves. They made a wall. My eyes went over to the side of the hut where I had left the four foot long stone block that I had made.

Then it clicked.

I can make it out of blocks! I thought with excitement. I don't need to know how to build a house, I just need to know how to build with blocks!

I knew that I didn't need them that big to make the first layout, since I only needed to make the very outside of the walls, then I thought about what I needed to make. I needed a floor and I needed somewhere to put the walls. I also didn't know how big I wanted it or in what shape. I looked at the wooden blocks and smiled. I had twenty-six of them to play with, so I had plenty of them to move around and to decide on what I wanted to make.

The only problem I had was the size of the dry area, that I didn't know the size of, and that the hut was right in the middle of it. I needed to measure it somehow. I didn't know stuff like that and I was about to give up when I saw the burlap bag with my new clothes in it. I remembered the boat plans that Michelle had thrown at me and I ran over to the bag and dug through the clothes.

I pulled out the papers that were tucked inside and sat down on the floor. I straightened them out as best as I could and looked them over. The main one that she showed me didn't have any real markings on it, so I moved it to the bottom and looked at the next one. It looked like the side of the boat and it had numbers on it.

“Yes!” I said and took it over to the bed and laid it out. I read the numbers on it. “Three fuh-ee-tuh. Feet. Three feet.” It said and had lines going up and down from it. “High, maybe? It's the side of the boat, so it has to be three feet high.” I looked along the bottom. “It's still flat and it has a two and a five together. That's ten.” I said and then frowned. “That can't be right. That part on the back is three, and three of them is almost ten.”

I put my thumb by the back of the boat drawing and it was the height of my knuckle to the tip of my thumb. I turned it and started counting how many thumbs the bottom was. It was just over eight of them, so I had to count up eight threes on my fingers.

“Twenty four.” I said and looked at the two and the five. “I don't understand. Is the two actually a twenty and the five is a five? How does that work?”

I stood there confused for quite some time. I had to assume that a two spread out or in front of another number was twenty. Then I had another problem. I didn't know how big a feet was. I moved that paper aside and the paper under it was a big rectangle. It had marks and numbers all over it. I found the two five on the side, so I slid the other paper over and matched them up.

“Oh! It's the top of the boat!” I said and pulled out the sketch from underneath. “Okay, yes. I see it. Those are the poles to hold the canvas and that's the front and that's the back.”

I looked over the whole thing and I found a bunch of numbers and didn't find anything useful until I looked at the bottom of the page. In very small print was a one with the 'is' symbol and then a one and a two together with 'inches' written after it, with a marking beside it. It took me a minute to find the same distance using my fingers and it was the same distance of my knuckle to the tip of my pointing finger.

I didn't know what the one in front of the two meant, then looked at the side drawing. The middle pole supports were one and two high. I looked at the three at the back of the boat and used my thumb to measure the pole. There were four of them. I counted out four threes on my fingers and got twelve, which was ten and two.

The one in front of another number is ten. I thought, catching on. Then, a three would be... I counted on my fingers. “Yes! Thirty! It fits!” I said out loud. I looked back at the top down boat picture and at the 'one is twelve' markings. I used my pointy finger this time and walked along twelve times with it, which just so happened to be the length of the page. “That's a one! One feet! The page is one feet! HA HA!” I said, happily.

Now I knew what to use for measuring. The boat was three feet, or three pages high. I had three pages and put them end to end to see how high the boat would be. It would be twenty five pages long, and I didn't have enough room to make it on the bed that was only five pages wide. I knew I couldn't use the pages outside, because that would ruin them, so I went to the fire and picked up a piece of firewood from the pile.

With a bit of cutting and cleaning to make them flat, I made a whole bunch of sticks that were one page long. I now had a way to measure things and I couldn't have been happier.

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