To Live and Uplift Underground 3


The size of a “home” passage, the caverns Drow made out of tunnels, varied from spot to spot and from time to time. Because the ability to “seal” these places was honestly the most important factor to consider, and THAT depended on the means that a gang might have at the time.


With the perfect means to insulate more than one entrance, a home tunnel could be as big as you’d like it to be. But Outskirt Drow are Outskirt Drow, and we don’t have perfect anything.


There was a certain calculus to it, I am sure. One that accounted for the number of people in the gang and how much heat we generated. One that accounted for the heat-sapping dangers and put the best tunnel blockage in the worst entrances. One that accounted for safety from other gangs and had the proper defences.


There is no way it wasn’t something like that.


But for the life of me, sometimes it seemed as though what really determined where we set roots was how well any stretch of tunnels could be used to allow cliques to insulate themselves. Privacy, rare as that was, was still sought after.


The raising of kids in my gang, and most Outskirt gangs I suspect, was communal. Males, not being particularly useful for much except being another heat receptor, played a surprisingly big role in nurturing the gang’s children. They bowed their heads to girls a fraction their age, a blooded fighter already outranking them and most men, but they were as stern with their discipline as gang dynamics allowed them to be.


Which admittedly wasn’t very much, but they were the least partial part of any Drow kid’s formative years. Mostly because they were too paranoid to play favorites.


Later on, as we got older, many gang Drow tended to think fondly of them, I think, and it's no accident that the oldest Drow males were those of the caretakers.  But when you were a Drow child, or when getting into Drow adulthood, it wasn’t them who you thought of. 


It was the dozen of eyes glittering with the cast-off heat of their bodies in the dark.


“No way…” one of them whispered as one of Aunt Kan’a’s girls, a girl barely older than me and Jarna’t by the name of Soli, went with me to get my things.


I was no longer part of the gang’s children, now.


I was part of Aunt Kan’a’s crew.


I had not gotten along with any of them for years at that point. Not because I had any real fights with them, but because many thought that I was entirely too lucky. That I did not deserve Jarna’t’s attention. Never mind that many had tried to supplant me in all that time, and that many still had managed to achieve some success with some of the other girls in the gang; the constancy of my relationship with my cousin was a huge source of suspicion. And envy.


But the sheer amount of loathing that I saw in their eyes as I picked up my meager things, my different rags and sleeping mat, would have been enough to keep me awake had I kept sleeping among them.


Of course, one set of eyes was harder to endure than others.


“What is this?” Jarna’t hissed as I gathered all my things in my arms, “What are you doing? Where are you going? That’s Aunt Kana’s gang!”


“Mother Kan’a’s girls, little girl,” Soli corrected her, “I trust you haven’t forgotten that we are all Mother Arie’t’s gang, yes?”


“...yes,” Jarna’t agreed from amid clenched teeth.


But her eyes were still on me, “But why are you taking him? He is mine.”


“Once again wrong; he’s one of Arie’t’s,” Kana’s woman laughed, “And our gang Mother doesn’t care what you do with her sons, so that makes him the property of the gang.”


“And Mother Kan’a can get so much use out of him…” The woman put her arm on my shoulder, and slid it all the way around until she was all but hugging me. It was naked provocation, but not one either me or Jarna’t could answer.


“I…this isn’t over,” Jarna’t assured us.


“Is anything ever?” Soli shrugged again.


“Can’t believe Arione gets to leave before Jarna’t does,” one of the males elbowed another and “whispered” loud enough for everyone in that little cavern to hear.


My cousin’s brow twitched at that.


“Yeah, didn’t Jarna’t get them both blooded? Rather weird that he gets his own spot first,” another one, smiling, replied.


The woman who was with me laughed as I cringed and, my cousin, fumed.


We all knew what they were doing.


But it didn’t matter.


They were, in some form, right.


I was betraying my cousin.


So I pleaded with Jarna’t with my eyes, useless as that was. Drow society, any fraction of it, was not one given to understanding or forgiveness.


But I wanted her to know that I HAD to do this.


That I had started to actually live.


—-----------------------------------------------------


The knife-club that was my first recognized work shattered in the first fight that it was used in.


I wasn’t there, of course, but any worry that the news would have brought me was precluded by the smile of the gang girl that had evidently used it; the stone blade did not fail to penetrate flesh even as the binding failed to hold in the impact of a throw. I had anticipated that it would have been used as, yes, a normal club, but even then, I wasn’t sure how long it would have held there either.


Being broken, the stone blade stayed inside its target, seemingly encumbering it in a way that few other weapons would have. This was enough to make it a success, though it left me with complicated feelings. I honestly thought it would last, well, more than one fight.


I got the “wood” stick that I stole from Jarna’t back, at least.


And an order to make a replacement.


Plus five additional ones.


And all of this to be done before my mother had Aunt Kana’s girls move on.


It wasn’t an impossible order, to be sure. Or, at least not on its face. See, what craftsdrow there were in the gang mostly dealt in clothing and furs. There were a few women who knew more about patching up weapons and what little armor we had than the rest, but that wasn’t saying a lot. Aunt Kan’a didn’t know how long it would take me to make a single stone weapon. Nor did anyone else in the gang.


In retrospect, maybe this was all done so that my “leader” could know what expectations to set for me. Under the most ideal of circumstances, I could have gotten the whole thing done in three or four days. If I were happy to stick to the quality of my first imperfect piece. If I were properly stocked with all that I needed.


I wasn’t.


But I was left to “figure it out.”


I wasted no time in trying to do just that.


Thankfully, the easiest of the hurdles turned out to be the sticks themselves. But that still came with its own headache.


Of all the things that we actually made for ourselves, our fungal wood was perhaps the most time-intensive one. The extremely fluctuating temperature of the underground would have provided enough of its own problems if we didn’t have other Outskirt Drow to worry about. Curing fungus into wood was as simple as letting dead fungal matter near its live counterpart; mushrooms loved recycling the water out of other mushrooms if given the opportunity.  But you either had to assign a watchwoman to make sure these wouldn’t be stolen, or to keep the fungus monsters from making off with them.


Because, yes, that is something that could happen.


And before you say anything, sealing your home tunnels with a fungus groove inside of it is just asking the fungus to kill you while you sleep.


Thus, the most common way to cure the fungus was to simply carry them with us for the months that the moisture needed to diffuse out of the fungus into the air. So what limited the amount of “wood” we had was how much fungus the gang could carry around the tunnels without being overburdened.


Now, you might think that six sticks weren’t much. Objectively, you’d be right. But being a male meant that it would have been idiocy for me to even ask for that much before I’d joined Aunt Kan’a’s clique. A girl could be expected to make good on the investment of such a thing, but a guy who wasn’t even a combatant? Might as well trust us to behave ourselves.


Now, Aunt Kana’ DID provide me with sticks beside the one I’d stolen from Jarna’t.


But…they weren’t the best.


“Do I look like one of those fungus monsters to you?” the woman who’d I had my first sexual experience with said, “Do you want me to pull a stick out of my cunt?”


“No, no, of course not,” I sighed as I rubbed my head, “However, I am not sure these are going to make good knife-clubs.”


“Knife-clubs, is that what you call them?” she sneered.


Being a compromise of just about everything, I would be the first to admit that the weapon I made defied strict classification, so I asked, “What would you call them?”


“Obviously, they are just a cluuu-ummm,” Aunt Kan’a pursed her lips, “They are a throwing stick-no, a stabber? No, no…”


All the weapons that I’d be making would ultimately be more of these “knife-clubs”: All the sticks that I got were all of roughly the same size as the stick that I’d stolen from Jarna’t.  But they were all in rather poor shape, either starting to fray at the edges, or with hyphae lines that made them split easily. Lacking the sturdiness of my cousin’s stick, well, they were going to be a problem.


“...knife-club will do for now, until we find a less childish name,” in the end, she begrudgingly allowed, “But I’ll lay it clear; I don’t have a thing to spare. It’s how you managed to sneak into our gang, you remember?”


“If it resulted in better weapons, what’s wrong with just giving me other, better sticks?” I tried to ply.


“Why not indeed,” she scoffed, “Show me you are worth it then.”


“Prove yourself.”


I will not lie and claim that this wasn’t frustrating.


But then, what single part of life wasn’t?


—------------------------------------


“I am not asking for any of the meat,” I groused to Zinta, one of the gang’s sole dedicated trappers, after, “Just the ligaments and a few bones!”


Cave rat, stone mole, and burrower beetles. These were all the “fresh meat” that the gang could come by and, unlike almost everything else, it was something we had to get on our own. There were not nearly enough catches around to feed everyone, so it was mostly our leaders who became familiar with their taste. But no outskirt gang was big enough for leftovers to fall through the cracks unused, so everyone got some every so often. Very rarely, but we weren’t exactly blessed with ways to preserve food.


Originally, I was just going to ask for the ligaments. But the materials that I had demanded that I go a step further.


As for the trappers themselves, utility was the name of the game and only two did it as their main occupation in our gang. And only because one of them had enough success in the field to apply some enviable nepotism to have her daughter along with her.


I was speaking to the older of the two that day, Zinta the trapper.


“So does any girl that wants to mend clothes or replace a needle,” that old Drow said, dismissing me with a shrug.


“This will help the gang!” I persisted.


“So will mended clothes and needles, little boy,” Zinta said.


Her hair was white in a way that no other Drow was. Rather than being silvery, it simply looked bleached. The distinction was not one I could have made as a human, but I beg you to take my word on it: Age has a way to take even from the Elves.


Since those times, I’ve managed to look upon more than just Outskirt Drow. But Zinta had a feature that only Drow that I could count on the fingers of one hand and still have a few leftover shared.


Zinta had wrinkles.


She looked otherwise fine, with compact breasts bound by, and body covered with a robe of , soft fur.


She was also carrying 8 rats, all still bound to their traps, into our home tunnels.


I was 25 years old and, regardless of how Drow matured, that was enough time to understand how things were done down here.


Nobody had the excess to give away anything.


Still..


“Just a few bones and ligaments,” I begged, “Almost nothing at all!”


“Consigned children,” Zinta clicked her tongue, “Always thinking that they aren’t being burdensome.”


“I know I am being unreasonable,” I said, not for the first time wondering if I should just have taken what I needed like I had done with the first knife-club, “But I-I’ll owe you a favor if you do this for me.”


But…no. Maybe if it were just the tendons and ligaments, I could have gotten away with stealing from another rat or two.


But a missing paw, or even a missing skull, would have been too suspicious for me to feel safe around the gang’s trappers.


I needed to source this “honestly”.


“A favor from a male,” Zinta snorted, “What a wonderful notion. I tell you what-”


The old Drow pushed the robe aside, giving me a glimpse of bleached pubic hair sticking out of her underpants…as well as an honest-to-goodness steel knife sheathed at her hip.


“-I’ll let you fight me for it,” she gestured with her head, her fingernails clicking on the handle of the knife, “To the winner go the spoils.”


“But that means that if I win, you’ll be joining these rats.”


My eyes stared at what she was showing me.


“Little male?” she said, annoyed for a moment before she noticed that her pubic hair was sticking out. I snapped out of it just in time for her to kick her head back and laugh.


“First time getting a peek of a woman?” she said with amusement that crinkled her eyes.


“Um, well,” I licked my lips as my eyes returned to her hips, where my eyes had been so thoroughly captured, “I-I, um-”


“Oh, you must be really young.” Zinta reached out and caressed my head. “To think I was about to gut you for annoying me.”


“Stay out of trouble,” she winked at me before she began to turn around.


But as right as she was, she had it wrong.


“I can change the handle of your knife!” I said before she could leave.


That, apparently, was enough for her to stop and glance at me from the side of her face.


It wasn’t like she didn’t have good reason to believe that I was oogling her: I didn’t like having my life threatened, but there was something to an older woman with authority showing me the goods and establishing her power over my life. Insane as it might sound to you, I was only just beginning to find out why that appealed to me so. That process of discovery was itself an exhilarating thing.


But it was the state of her knife that caught my eye. Because as fine as her blade was, the rest of it wasn’t as well taken care of. It was an open door that I could and had to take.


“Not ‘fix’?” she asked, frowning, “But ‘change’?”


“It looks like it's been fixed a lot,” I replied, “But it's getting to the point that even that isn’t enough, doesn’t it?”


“Supposing that I said ‘yes’,” Zinta allowed, “What could you possibly do?”


“I…am not sure if you know this.” Our gang was big by Outskirt standards, but not in absolute standards. This was a bet I felt sure in making, “But I am the male that recently joined Kan’a’s after making her-”


“-a throwing club made of stone,” Zinta mused, “Yes I heard about that. That was you, then? Well, supposing that you didn’t just steal it from someone else and passed it off as something you made-”


“Who would I even steal it from?” I simply had to ask, a bit of frustration getting the better of me, “No one makes stone…weapons…”


Zinta was giving me a hard, hard look. The firmness of her eyes, the furrowing of her brow.


The anger in her pupils.


“Sorry, sorry,” I immediately backtracked. But being forced to do so was not…unpleasant, “I forgot myself.”


“So I see,” Zinta pertly said.


It made me sweat. For different reasons.


Luckily,  she laughed again, “But I suppose you wouldn’t be a male if you weren’t a whiney little shit.”


“So as I was saying, supposing that you aren’t just putting on appearances,” she winked at me, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try it out.”


“How long will it take?” she asked me.


That was a good question. A fair one, even. This whole thing had been surprisingly fairhanded, all things considered. 


Which is why it shamed me that I had no answers. 


Despite all my knowledge of the sciences, craftswork was new to me at that time.


I honestly had no idea how long this would take me.


However, Zinta was giving me a look of expectation and, without the rats I would not be able to make good on the weapons Aunt Kan’a was expecting from me.


So I had to give her SOME number.


“One-no-two months!” I rushed to say, basing the answer completely on how troublesome it had been to knap that first stone knife.


If I could get the 6 knife-clubs done in good order, if I could make it so that I would have a month to spare to figure out the sort of reduction that I knew a handle would need, I could do this.


Or so I hoped.


“Two months?” Zinta dubiously said.


“When was the last time you changed that handle?” I countered.


The old Drow frowned but didn’t say anything. That was as good as giving me the point, “Alright, I suppose if it's good enough, I’ll give you some rat then-”


“Um-” I cringed as I interrupted her yet again, “I need those bones and ligaments now?”


“...’just a little bit’, you said?” Zinta asked.


“The ligaments from seven rats,” I said as Zinta turned incredulous, “A-and a leg from each? You can take all the meat from them beforehand!”


I expected a response, but Zinta just kept looking at me as if I were a new sort of rat.


“I didn’t expect to be making you a knife handle?” I offered. I honestly came here expecting just a single rat’s worth of material but since I was trading, I was hoping that it wouldn’t hurt to haggle.


Luckily, Zinta didn’t throttle me. Even more luckily, she accepted my proposal in the end.


But there was little privacy to be had near our gang tunnels.


And I didn’t notice the beady eyes of my fellow males following our conversation.


Observing what I did.


—-------------------------------------
 
Mushrooms aside, I knew that the visible parts that grew out of the cave walls, out of the pools of excrement coming out of the city, and out of the odd dead body, were merely the reproductive parts of the fungi. The “body” of the things was actually the roots burrowing deep into whatever they were feeding on. 


As luck would have it, these tended to weaken the surface of the cave walls when they sprouted out of them, so it was possible to rip them out of a wall if you were of a mind to and were very, very careful. Like the mushrooms, the roots had to be cured before they could be used. But these ones took significantly less time.


This was how we got the fiber that we made into clothes,  mats, and the “curtains” that we use to seal our home tunnels.


If you were not careful with the extraction, though, you were left with handfuls of mushroom root mulch mixed with dirt and dust.


Most leave that behind, and this “waste” would be repurposed by the creatures of the underground into something else, given enough time. The circle of underground life.


But if you were desperate and had no other choice, you could filter this uneven mix by sieving it through a woven basket, only to then wash it away with water. Despite its moisture content, if you had some shavings of cured fungus, which I did, you could start a small ember. This would, with good care, dry the useless root clumps and alight them as it did.


If ever you were trapped outside a sealed tunnel when night fell, or when a groove chose to respirate, if you could survive the initial shock and somehow outlast your warmth being stolen, this one was a last means of survival that you could turn to, if you were able.


Me? I just needed to heat and extract the collagen out of the rat bones and to melt their nails.


Gathering all of this fire fodder had taken significantly more time than I had anticipated, so far the most time-consuming step that I’d yet taken. But with the clumps ready to go, and an ember slowly starting to smoke, I was at last ready to make glue.


Having taken a whole week of going over where our gang had harvested what mushrooms grew near our home, I’d opted to set up shop close by our tunnels. Because I had to run the relative risk of being out here to get anything done.


It was somewhat comforting knowledge that the main dangers in the outskirts, that being predators or other Outskirt Drow, would either be met by our skirmishing crews, or be spotted by the women looking out in the entrance. My first raid still being fresh in my mind, though, I started this very early in the morning and resolved not to push my luck and head back long before nighttime. The most likely time for lookouts to fuck up would be then.


But I spared an ear to the walls and looked around me every so often just in case.


Between that and the fungus mulch lighting up, I had enough time to set the rat ligaments that I had harvested and, most importantly, clean them out.


And then I started chewing one to make it pliable enough to work with.


I chipped stone against stone and began making my second stone blade. All the while paying attention to how the embers of my future fire were going.


This one was smaller than the original knife-club had been. Given the size of the hafts that I was working with, I would have simply claimed that I thought it a waste to set a big stone blade upon one. Maybe I’d get a complaint about it from the girl who used the first weapon that I’d made, if she expected the same. But if so, I was pretty sure that I could leverage the fact that she had a weapon at all to dismiss it.


But if I am going to be honest, it was simply a time-saving choice.


The grooves on the stick that I’d originally made were still there, making me think that the knife-club hadn’t broken when thrown so much as shaken apart from the impact. Having done this once, I traced my footsteps and started reducing the thing bit by bit. First, with big hits and then with soft but consistent pressure.


My hands were clumsy, not yet used to a life of making things, but they weren’t literally freezing so the work went smoother this time. I started out in the morning and, halfway to the afternoon, had a serviceable blade in my hand.


It was around that time that I finally had a workable fire, but I spared the time that it would take to finish my second weapon. Binding the blade to the stick with stretchy ligaments, I recreated my first knife-club. My rag bindings were still on the handle, so it was just a matter of putting it aside so the ligaments hardened again, securing stone blade to fungi wood.


And then it was time to cook the glue.


Glue was not some alien technology for elves that lived underground, but Outskirt Drow tended to underutilize fire for a lot of understandable reasons, many of which I had to ignore. Still, glue was useful to just about anyone so I could only guess that the Drow of my gang had their own ways of making it. Unfortunately for me, rendering the collagen out of animal bone and tendons was the only way I knew of getting some.


The flat rock was concave in the middle and so could hold a good helping of water, courtesy of a clay bowl. 


It didn’t take long for the water to start to bubble, and into that I added the crushed bone and tendons of the six rat limbs that I’d gotten.


In a few hours, I’d have rat bone stock in the pot. A few more after that, it would be concentrated enough to sieve through a piece of cloth. If left to dry for a day or two after that, the gel left behind would harden into what, yes, would be my glue.


Ready to melt down whenever I needed it to.


Being that I would be stuck in that spot for a long time, I set about to at least get one more stone blade done. But before I began, I noticed a problem.


I could not find the weapon I had just done.


I looked around me, trying to think of where I could have possibly left it, but there was nothing near me.


Disregarding the fire that I had made, and the contents boiling in it, I walked around the ventilated spot that I’d chosen, casting my eyes into every nook and cranny, just in case I’d accidentally knocked it around.


But I found nothing.


By the time I returned, I will admit that I’d lost a bit of my enthusiasm and that my spirits were low.


But depression, that old friend, would have to visit me another day.


Three female Drow that I recognized were looking over my stuff, before one of them spotted me.


They were from Aunt Talia’s crew.


And they were smiling.