Final preparations

The bright warm afternoon sun found me again on the crater rim, but not alone. My Munchie was finally free from its stony prison!

My plan had been successful at last, even if it’d taken longer than I thought. My first suggestion had been to fill the lava cave with magically created sunlight, so the solar panels could start charging the batteries. Unfortunately that idea was firmly rejected, since both Illyára and Al’Reeza had both their hands full battling the dragons.

My second suggestion was accepted, but only after the majority of the flying monsters were slain (which took one more hour) and Illyára could return to the crater rim. There she cloaked my Munchie, and Lily and I could drive it finally out of the cave and up to the rim. It was an exhilarating feeling driving under the open sky again, even if it was just for a short distance.

The slope was gentle, but the ground very uneven and rocky and we had to drive very slowly and carefully. Pedaling uphill I felt the higher gravity again very strong, despite Lily's efforts.

When I unfolded the solar panels it became immediately clear that Liyúra's sun was much weaker than earth's sun. Despite the clear sky the panels charged with just a little bit over one kilowatt. Even taking the high latitude, the low sun and the thick atmosphere into account the radiation could only be about half of that on earth. Well, at least we’d have constant sunlight! Further good weather provided it would take seven to eight hours to fully charge the batteries.

Enough time to finally catch some sleep, right? My nightmare filled nap earlier wasn’t nearly enough to fill my depleted batteries, and a cursory look at my watch showed it was around 2 am Icelandic time. Isekai-jetlag is a nasty thing, I’m telling you!

Unfortunately there was still work to do. Lily had gone back into the woods to fetch her hunted “overgrown chicken” as she called them, to prepare them for our journey.

“What about the dead dragons?” I had asked, thinking just one of them could provide us with enough meat to last at least for a week, maybe even more.

Lily had looked at me with open disgust and shaken vigorously her head, mane flying and all.

“Have you ever tried dragon meat?”

Of course that was a rhetorical question, so I just looked at her expectantly.

“Nobody even in the direst situation would come up with this idea! It’s inedible and so tough you can’t even eat it after days of cooking!”

Well, that was out of the question then…

The plan now was to roast all the meat of Lily’s hunted birds, since we couldn’t do it on our journey to the south. Lily had told me, their whole adventurer group had prepared supply storages hidden along the route in advance, roughly one every thousand miles or so. The next storage depot was also around a thousand miles away, so that was the distance we had to cover first.

Since Al’Reeza and Illyára still were on lookout and on the hunt, the preparation was completely on Lily’s and my hands. My small electric stove and my pan were much too small for the enormous quantities of raw meat the beast girl brought into the lava cave, so I came up with something different. We used the solid crust on some parts at the edge of the lava lake as a giant oven plate as it was still several hundreds of degrees hot. This way we actually managed to fry all the pounds of “oversized chicken meat” in record time. Illyára had provided us with cloth that Al’Reeza’d made to wrap it in.

I must confess that I felt very conflicted being confronted with all that carnage. Thankfully Lily had already processed the birds, so I didn’t have to see their corpses, but of course she’d used her claws and teeth for that! And still I had to use my knife to cut the big chunks of flesh the beastess threw before me in something manageable.

But when the meat was ready and wrapped up, even I as a vegetarian couldn’t deny the wonderful odor our roasted “chicken” now exuded. Involuntarily I found my mouth watering, and I cut myself some smaller pieces to eat them immediately. Lily didn’t stick back, so we had together a small feast, for me the first meat I had eaten in six years.

As I said, I felt conflicted, but under these circumstances I had to be flexible. In a world with seemingly endless supplies you can be picky and select the food of your choosing, but here, where supplies are scarce, you have to take what is available.

Fortunately I also had some plastic tarps we could use to double wrap our stored meat, so no odor would betray our location. After that I again used my rice cooker to prepare some portions in advance, so we wouldn’t need to cook on the ice plains. In the coming days we'd eat cold pre-prepared rice and oversized chicken meat.

Lily helped me the best she could. Unfortunately there wasn't much for her to do, since we just had to wait half an hour until the next portion was ready (and we needed many portions!). I was dead tired but endured it ‘till the end, since it was the best strategy to deal with jetlag (and isekai-jetlag is just as nasty as any other jetlag!).

What helped were the agitated conversations with Lily, whose demeanor had completely flipped. For her the Munchie was an unbelievable technical marvel, and even more unbelievable to her was the fact that I’d built it all by myself. I pointed out how many parts I had to custom order and just put them together, but that detail was lost to her.

“Our best tinkerers and crafters are not able to create anything remotely close!” she exclaimed. “Even magicians would have a hard time to reach this level of precision and detail.”

Her confidence that we’d make it out of here alive had gotten a huge boost, since she now trusted me (and my work) nearly as much as Illyára and Al’Reeza. The two girls later joined us and proclaimed they had tracked down and killed all the remaining dragons in the caldera and the surrounding area. Very few surviving beasts were seen fleeing to the west.

I wanted to ask about the aggressive behaviour of our attackers that didn’t make all too much sense to me, but I was too tired for another conversation. So I excused myself after cooking about half of all my rice (my watch showed 5 am!), crawled into my Munchie, snuggled into the hammock and finally closed my eyes.

It was still broad daylight outside, but that didn't matter anymore. I just dearly hoped that all would go smoothly and we could leave the caldera in the morning.